When children have no concept of standing on their own feet because they are forced to live with mummy, we are fostering a middle-class culture of dependency.
Half a world away, sub-Saharan Africa has also flashed onto the radar screen, with an average 5 percent growth rate that many hope will improve in the coming decade as investment deepens, perhaps finally fostering a new middle class.
An earlier wave of Western consultants — businessmen, foreign service types, engineers and architects — poured into the Middle East in the 1950s and '60s, selling a cold war brand of modernity that would uplift Arab societies, in particular by fostering a thriving middle class.
Raising the minimum wage was just one piece in the president's theme of fostering a thriving middle class.
Decades of political repression have not fostered a political class that can easily step into the vacuum.
It was clear, when the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994, that fostering a new black business class would be as difficult as it was desirable.On the face of it, black business has blossomed.
However, the Arab Revolt had ruined many Arab merchants and importers, and British war activities, although bringing new levels of prosperity, further weakened the traditional social institutions the family and village by fostering a large urban Arab working class.
Eric Lott's fascinating Love & Theft contends that the form, rather than blossoming from hatred, reflected a white working-class attempt at fostering a transracial union through ironic miming, even if this desire rarely, if ever, transcended the realm of "theft," A.K.A. the white appropriation of black expressive forms.
The corporate life of the nobility did not develop as well as expected, however, and the nobility never became the class it was in Prussia or England, but the charter did foster a sense of class consciousness and afforded legal security to the members and their property.
And this greater dispersal of wealth fostered a strong middle class.
