Diana Farrell, once Deputy Director of America’s National Economic Council, told The Economist she thinks a middle class income begins at the point where a person (or family) has one-third of their income left over for discretionary purposes after they’ve provided themselves with food and shelter. In other words, someone who earns $3,000 per month would have $1,000 left after they’ve paid their mortgage or rent, utilities, and grocery bills.
You can see how the middle class would head r, if that was the determinate. Excess resources means a mind shifts from coping with adversities like unpaid bills and hunger, to seeking hedonistic pleasures to buy with that excess income. That trained mindset will drift into other areas, like deporting refugees, or welcoming them with parties.
And yet despite that definition of the middle class, we are going K. The rest of the article lays out interesting numbers on various stimuli which drive K-selection:
Discretionary income is not so easy to find. We’ve created a list of ten things the middle class can no longer really afford…
1. Vacations
… In 2014, Americans failed to use a total of 429 million days of paid leave. In fact, 40% of American workers cite the heavy workload awaiting their return as the top reason for not leaving the office, while 22% don’t want others to see them as “replaceable…”
2. New vehicles
…Out of the nation’s 25 largest cities, Washington D.C. is the only place where families can truly afford a brand new car…
3. Student loans
… Over the past decade, total college debt in America has surged 84% to over $1.2 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve… More than 11% of college debt is officially at least 90 days past due. However, due to deferment, grace periods, and forbearance, the Federal Reserve admits the true delinquency rate on student loans is roughly twice as high. In comparison, credit cards have a delinquency rate of 8.2%.
4. Emergency savings
Nearly half of Americans are placing almost nothing aside for the future…
5. Retirement savings
Out of all working age American households, the median retirement account balance totals only $2,500. Households near retirement age have a median balance of $14,500 — not even enough to replace one year’s worth of expenses for most older adults…
Only one in five workers plan to immediately stop working and fully retire when they reach a certain age or savings goal.
6. Medical care
A report by Feeding America found that a shocking 66% of households say they’ve had to choose between paying for food and paying for medical care — 31% say they have to make that choice each and every month.
7. Dental work
… According to the CDC, nearly one in four adults between the ages of 20 and 64 have untreated dental issues (like cavities or infections).
8. Skipped paychecks
Nearly one-third of households making $75,000 or more a year live paycheck-to-paycheck at least sometimes…
In 2014, 41% of Americans are most financially concerned with paying bills, up from 36% in 2013 and 32% in 2012.
9. Child care
… The WSJ finds child care expenses are rising nearly twice as fast as overall prices…
10. Going to the movies
All of this is shifting amygdalae from computers designed to look for pleasure and pursue it regardless of consequences, to computers that meet adversity head on and endure hardship to defeat it.
That generalized programming will affect how the brain processes all sot of other problems it encounters. That is the psychological shift toward K-selection.
What remains to be seen is what these numbers will look like after 8 years of Donald Trump.
If it takes you seven years to pay off a car loan you are not middle class. If it takes you thirty years to pay off a mortgage you are not middle class. If you care about the grocery bill, let alone watch for inflation, you are NOT middle class. These are all traits of the WORKING CLASS. Living well via massive amounts of debt does not move you up in class ranking.
In 1960 my grandfather bought a four bedroom tract house in Livermore, California for $19,000 and had it paid off in less time than a new car loan goes today.
Whenever one of these articles hits it ALWAYS ignores the true rate of inflation which has a PROFOUND effect on the landscape. To do what my grandfather did I simply would have to make $150K a year, at least, while my wife works an office job, too.
While we’re at it, what does it mean to be rich these days? Being rich means being able to pay cash for things that most people can’t afford to finance. Even a million a year requires financing certain things.
Daycare seems like something an r-strategist woman with low rearing urge would do by offloading responsibility of parenting to 3rd parties to fulfil for them. Whilst the K-strategist would consider childcare too important a responsibility to leave to others and invest heavily in them themselves.
And of course disposable income never occurs until one is truly rich, the goalposts move. If pay increases a move to a more expensive home in a ‘better’ zip code with less diverse / ‘better’ schools occurs. Notes on two new cars (i.e. reliable) becomes baseline to permit commuting. Two hundred dollar cable bill atop another two hun plus family plan cell contract becomes a ‘requirement’, shopping at whole foods because you ‘discovered’ everyone in the house is ‘gluten intolerant’ and such new age piffle requires a 50% increase in food expense. Football / cheer camp simply ‘must’ go into the family budget in the name of keeping up appearances.
It takes massive income, beyond what almost anyone can earn as payroll vs investment income, to break out into that level where you can’t spend it as fast as it comes in. And most people spend everything plus a little more… and the household debt creeps ever upward.