A narrative indicating that the top one percent of Americans are doing well, but everyone else is struggling has developed over the course of time. However, recent data suggest that the situation is not quite so stark.
As indicated by writer Josh Zumbrun, a growing body of evidence indicates that the economic expansion that has taken place since the financial crisis has enriched a much larger swath of the upper middle class.
This evidence suggests that there is a deeper income divide developing between the top quarter of the population and everyone else. Stephen Rose, an economist at the Urban Institute, finds in new research that the upper middle class is larger and richer in America than it has ever been.
By twenty fourteen, the upper middle class represented a record twenty nine percent of the population, up from thirteen percent in nineteen seventy nine. Rose defines the upper middle class earning between one hundred thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand for a family of three or at least double America’s median household income and about five times its poverty level.
Many of the members of the upper middle class are middle managers or professionals in business, law or medicine, often with advanced degrees.
