About one in three Americans making six-figure salaries are worried about paying their bills, according to a new survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
Yeah, but like, isn't that where the majority of people live?
So when talking about "most places" it makes sense for it to be "places most likely for people to live". If it was literally "most places" America is pretty fucking empty.
I googled it, the average price for an acre in Kansas is like 3.5k.
In "most places" it's cheap as hell. But no one lives there so why talk about it?
And "flyover" states 100k a year is like a millionaire...
So if going by "most places" you'd be using like 25k or even lower.
I get what you're saying semantically, it's just that if we're being that semantic it's meaningless, so clearly the other interpretation is what was meant.
Like, when someone uses "literally" you can tell what was intended.
You didn't notice the forrest because all the trees were in the way homie.
That assumes a normal distribution. Wealth/income is not.
An excellent resource is:
Social Stratification in the United States: The American Profile Poster of Who Owns What, Who Makes How Much, and Who Works Where https://a.co/d/09LVTyYi
I don't think your definition of middle class is what most people use when they talk about it.
This is really obvious if you think about people remarking on the death of the middle class. They're not saying that the mean or the median doesn't exist. They are saying that families like the Simpsons are much less common than they used to be.
Expanding lower bound to 50k does indeed appear to cover the "middle class" but income above 100k is hardly "barely middle class" from statistical point of view.
I remember the New Yorker posting cartoon families and their stories of struggle with a single mom of 2 kids only making 230k or a family of 5 getting by on a combined 400k+ and thinking the New Yorker is a giant pile of shit rag.