x-post from "Bad Politics Posters":
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nichlemn
Anyone who cares a lot about the definition of classes deserves a mention. It's an amorphous concept, there are a wide range of plausible answers, depending on context. The only political implications are to attempt to reframe who is or who isn't deserving on purely semantic grounds.
Though to the extent that we are going to attempt to agree on definitions, I think percentiles are a pretty silly way of doing it. If we were really serious about percentiles, we'd use worldwide incomes and probably end up with a majority of Americans as "rich". What matters is what peoples' perceptions are. No-one's mental image of who is "upper middle class" or "rich" is some kind of robotic definition like "the middle class is 25%ile<x<75%ile, upper middle class is defined as the top half of that distribution".
The best approach is not care so much about categorising. A family who makes 120k is a family who makes 120k. They are decidedly different from a family who makes 60k or 240k. Why do we need to shove everyone into three or four neat boxes? The only legitimate reason I can see for doing this is if you're e.g. publishing a study and need a manageable number of categories to make it understandable. For the rest of us, the only purpose is attempting to create a false impression of homogeneity among the categories for political or self-image reasons.