Some 29 million people entered the middle class between 2003 and 2009, and the upper classes grew, too.
In California, even as 22 of the 26 metropolitan areas experienced a thinning middle class between 2000 and 2014, most of those same areas saw a net gain in distribution of income, meaning the share of the upper-income tier increased more than the lower-income group.
It divides the population in five groups: (i) the extreme poor, with income below $2.5; (ii) the moderate poor, between $2.5 and 4; (iii) the vulnerable, between $4 and 10; (iv) the middle class, between $10 and 50 [as in López-Calva and Ortiz-Juárez (2011)]; and (v) the high-income class, above $50.
James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, estimates that of Kenya's population of approximately 37 million, about four million are in the middle class, making between $2,500 and $40,000 a year.
Tyrone later asked me, gently, "What difference does it make?" My parents, who were middle class, alternated between bullying me and isolating me about his race.
That is what has happened in Thailand, where, after a year-long political impasse, the middle class split between the urban groups of Bangkok, many of which allied themselves with the royalist elite, and their peers in the smaller cities and the countryside, who linked up with farmers and with the political groupings of Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister.
Although there is little truth to the long-held stereotype of Mexico as a slow-paced land of subsistence farmers, Mexican society is characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, with a limited middle class wedged between an elite cadre of landowners and investors on the one hand and masses of rural and urban poor on the other.
In 1967, the income range for the middle class was between $28,000 and $39,500 a year.
In the city of Modiin, a bastion of Israel's beleaguered middle class, sandwiched between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I spoke to satirical cartoonist Amir Schiby.
Further, an additional "middle" class (FCR between percentiles 0.40 and 0.60) was included to enrich the discretized data.
Across the various categories that comprise the middle class, white families possess "between three and five times as much wealth as equally achieving black middle class families".
