Middle What?
July 18th, 2007
From time to time I entertain the idea of becoming a freelance writer, though I know I don’t deal with income uncertainty very well. After a few days of thinking about it, I usually turn my mind to grad school.
So, today was one of those days, where I sat in the cube farm and did a little daydreaming. I happened upon a link at LifeHacker that was supposedly about choosing a place to live as a freelancer. It took me here to a Forbes article.
Now, in this article they say that it’s relatively easy to get $100,000 as a skilled and dedicated freelancer. Fair enough, I don’t really know these things. But then they say that earning the second $100,000, so you can be middle class in California or New York. *blink* *blink* One quick trip to a Wikipedia article (of course) set me aright on the facts. Now, lets say this guy is right, and you need at least $150,000 to be middle class in one of these areas. If you look at the graph in the wikipedia article, the one about a fifth of the way down, that tracks income distribution, a little over 5% of our nation would qualify as middle class, if they lived in New York City or somewhere in California. At that point, I have to question the metric by which middle class is defined.
Note: The Forbes article is from 2005, so be sure to adjust up about 6% for cost of living inflation.
July 19th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Well, the middle class is sort of a new phenomenon, historically, right? At least, in any significant size it is. So given the way things are going now it might not be too much of a surprise that it’s shrinking down to levels like that.
That said, if the term is useful then it’s probably not relative to such specific geographic areas. New York (state)’s median income is around 57 thousand a year, for a four person family. So it’s hard to believe that what is being talked about is anything approximating a middle class, so much as ‘what most of the people the author knows makes’.