Stephen Rose and Scott Winship puncture a popular myth about the disappearing American middle class.
Populists on both the political left and right routinely claim that the middle class has been hollowed out. These claims, to the extent they are based on evidence, rely on a relative definition of the middle class, such that if income doubles for every family, the middle class does not grow. Using an absolute definition of the middle class, we find that the “core” middle class has shrunk, but only because more families have become upper-middle class over time. The upper-middle class boomed from 10 percent of families in 1979 to 31 percent in 2024, and its share of income doubled. The share of families whose income left them short of the core middle class fell from 54 percent to 35 percent. Claims of a hollowed-out middle class wrongly reinterpret widespread (if unequal) gains across the income distribution as rising insecurity and declining living standards. …
… By our definitions, using contemporary benchmarks, 36 percent of American families composed the core middle class in 1979, while just over half (54 percent) fell short of core middle-class status and only 11 percent received income that placed them above the core middle class. By 2024, the core middle class had indeed shrunk—to 31 percent of American families. But the better-off set had tripled in size, while the worse-off group had shrunk dramatically. For the first time in American history, more families in 2024 were above the core middle class threshold (35 percent) than below it (34 percent). If we combine the lower-, core, and upper-middle classes, their share of families has risen from 70 percent to 78 percent since 1979.
If we ignore the very richest Americans, the upper-middle class alone now includes nearly one-third of the nation’s families (31 percent)—a group as sizable as the core middle class.
