5 takeaways about the American middle class
The middle class has long been the country’s economic majority, but our new analysis finds that’s no longer true.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The middle class has long been the country’s economic majority, but our new analysis finds that’s no longer true.
The urgency expressed by Pope Francis on global poverty and inequality is grounded in harsh reality. 4.4 billion people – 71% of the global population of 6.2 billion – lived on $10 or less per day in 2011, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the most recently available data.
What exactly does it mean to live on $2 per day? And how does that compare with the notion of poverty in richer countries?
China and India both succeeded in slashing poverty from 2001 to 2011. But while that contributed to a rapidly growing middle class in China, it did little to increase the number of Indians who could be considered middle income.
On a global scale, the vast majority of Americans are either upper-middle income or high income. And many Americans who are classified as “poor” by the U.S. government would be middle income globally.
During the first decade of this century, the world experienced a dramatic drop in the number of people living in poverty and a significant rise in the number who could be considered middle income, but the majority of the global population remains low income.
The first decade of this century witnessed an historic reduction in global poverty and a near doubling of the number of people who could be considered middle income. But the emergence of a truly global middle class is still far from fruition.
The share of Americans who live in middle-income households has held steady since 2010 – a flat trend that might actually be good news.
The median wealth of white households was 13 times the wealth of black households and 10 times that of Hispanic households in 2013, compared with eight and nine times, respectively, in 2010.
The earnings gap in the nation’s workforce has widened in recent years as the pay of high-wage workers has risen and the pay of low-wage workers has fallen, but Hispanics may be feeling the impact more acutely than others.
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