Property. Historically, this meant land. Today, it means assets. Savings of any kind. The poor live pay check to pay check; the middle class could survive a bad harvest.
The safety buffer it provides lets you take more risk, personally, civically and societally. That lets you access rewards someone fighting for sustenance can’t countenance. Consider the years we, as a society, spend educating our youth when they could be working a field to produce food.
It also means leverage. If a harvest failed, the poor in the army got fed. The others didn’t. The middle class, on the other hand, wasn’t forced into that choice simply to survive. (We use the term “survive” nowadays to mean maintain some arbitrary quality of life, but I’m speaking literally.)
From an economic standpoint, the Wikipedia definition is correct. From a sociopolitical angle, especially a cultural one, it’s quite different.
Broadly, what constitutes a middle class depends on the society we are observing. Every society has its elites. Some had slaves, some have destitutes. In between is gradation defined, variously, by income, assets, education and lineage. (See the history section; modern/British middle class was originally defined by education.)
In America, discretionary income is a good definition because most people have a reasonable expectation of lifelong economic stability. (We gripe when it isn’t improving.) In Europe (and most of the world), the asset test is far more sturdy. And even within America, you see this vary.
I fully disagree because if that was the case, it would be highlighted in the wikipedia article. Go ahead and add it, let it go through the rounds of thousands of people trying to be on the same page about it - then I will believe you. I'd rather trust that source that backhanded comments here.
> it would be highlighted in the wikipedia article
Did you read the history and evolution of the term section?
“Friedrich Engels saw the category as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry in late-feudalist society. While the nobility owned much of the countryside, and the peasantry worked it, a new bourgeoisie (literally "town-dwellers") arose around mercantile functions in the city.” In the French Revolution, “the new ruling class or bourgeoisie in the new capitalist-dominated societies.” Capital, it’s there in the term. The Stevenson definition, which follows in the next paragraph, cites the “chief defining characteristic of membership in the middle-class [as] control of significant human capital.” This British education-and-skill-derived definition is the basis of the top-of-the-article summary definition, since that human capital produces excess income.
Would note that the article appears poorly cited (as many notes on it claim), despite a cursory review of the bibliography shows they’ve covered the basics.
> there are plenty of middle class living pay check to pay check and do not own things
And there are plenty of the very rich who go bankrupt and die penniless.
Someone relying solely on income from labour to sustain their standard of living may live as the middle class do, just as a poor person accumulating debt may sustain a middle-class lifestyle, but that doesn’t change their fundamental economic situation.
Also: When middle class folk talk about living paycheck to paycheck, they’re usually ignoring retirement assets. But I don’t deny that plenty of people consume their economic security because they, and many times rightly, don’t believe they need it.
Property. Historically, this meant land. Today, it means assets. Savings of any kind. The poor live pay check to pay check; the middle class could survive a bad harvest.