

How much money you need to make to be ‘middle class’ in every big city - pecanpie
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/23/middle-class-varies-from-30000-in-detroit-to-100000-in-san-francisco/

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andrewla
This discussion was held on the underlying Planet Money article [1] [2]

The problem then, and the problem now, is that this is arbitrarily defining
middle class. Can't we just call this a boxplot[3] of income in major cities,
and not make this into a discussion of what "middle class means"?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9237345)
[2] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/19/394057221/how-
much...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/19/394057221/how-much-or-
little-the-middle-class-makes-in-30-u-s-cities) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot)

~~~
saturdaysaint
Exactly - in a well connected world/economy, local measurements of income
don't mean much. As someone that's lived in and near Detroit, the incomes
listed there have no relation to my idea of what's lower/middle/upper class.
Most people in the area would probably peg those closer to what you see on
Dallas or San Diego's charts. Detroit proper (as opposed to the sprawling
Detroit area, which mostly looks like any suburban metro area) is simply a
very poor city - I doubt it's much comfort to anyone making $30,000 there that
they happen to fall in the middle, and I doubt that an employer would have any
luck trying to pay an engineer a $60,000 "upper class" salary.

~~~
Kalium
> I doubt that an employer would have any luck trying to pay an engineer a
> $60,000 "upper class" salary.

If they've graduated from Michigan within the past three months and have no
other prospects. Maybe.

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chomp
From the title: "...in every big city"

Houston, TX is the 4th largest city by population in the US (9th by area), but
they put El Paso on there instead.

