“If you are holding a position that is non-managerial, non-executive level, doesn’t have a lot of decision power, you would have been classified in our study as working class,” Addo says [here].
In February 2022 there were 128.2 million total private employees. 104.4 million of them were "production and nonsupervisory".
That's a ratio of workers to supervisors of about 4.4:1 in the private sector. In the federal government, the ratio's much worse, somewhere between 7-10:1. That's probably closer to the truth also for the entire government sector, which is 22.2 million strong.
The supervisors are the elite minority, hello.
The best proxy for middle class has always been homeownership: house, condo, whatever. It's one of the most basic things which has defined us and more importantly united us for generations. There was a time when everyone said, rich and poor alike, that they were middle class, it was that strong of an American ideal.
Now we're stuck with a bunch of eggheads trying to divide us by overthrowing definitions.
Total households in 2020 numbered about 128.5 million in the United States. Roughly 84 million were owner occupied at the time, 42 million renter occupied, a ratio of 2:1.
The average size of a household in 2020 was about 2.53: (84 + 42) 2.53 = 319 million (a relatively small additional number of Americans lives in subsidized housing, military housing, and institutionalized housing).
A broad swath of Americans, 66%, lives in an owned home, with about a third distributed at the top and the bottom renting out of either convenience or necessity.
And most of them are by definition nonsupervisory employees.
