The report found that nearly nine in 10 metro areas across the country saw their percentage of middle-class adults recede.
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According to the report, middle class adults live in households with incomes two-thirds to double the national median size-adjusted household income. Most areas saw declines in the number of adults living in middle-class households. It found a ton of troubling information about America’s withering middle class.
The Pew study found that the gap is especially in major cities such as Boston, where middle class adults now make up less than half of the population.
Yet the continuation of that trend into the 2000s has been compounded by two recessions, a slow recovery from the last downturn and a decline in median earnings, said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the center.
Christian Kaylor, an economist at the Oregon Employment Department, said the term “median income” becomes deceptive when more people are on the lower and higher end of the spectrum and fewer people are actually in the middle. In Austin, it dropped to $75,481 from $80,948, a 6.7 percent fall.
“The growth in the higher income reflects those who have the education and experience and ability to adapt to a changing economy”, he said. “The macroeconomy has played out sort of decisively in a lot of metro areas”. In many of these metros, that decline was much higher than the 4 percentage point drop nationwide.
For almost two decades, Goldsboro has endured some of the nation’s steepest declines in economic status, according to a new Pew Research Center study.
Recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas showed that Texas has grown middle-wage jobs faster than the rest of the country.
“I don’t think there is a middle class anymore”. At the other poles of society, the share of adults in the upper-income tier increased from 17 percent to 20 percent, and the share of adults in the lower-income tier increased from 28 percent to 29 percent. The middle class in Springfield, Ohio, suffered the largest decline, plunging from $73,895 in 1999 to $53,957 in 2014.
The shrinking of the middle class at the national level, to the point where it may no longer be the economic majority in the US, was documented in an earlier analysis by the Pew Research Center.
No. 3: Sheboygan, 63 percent. Academic research has found that compared with children in more economically mixed communities, children raised in predominantly lower-income neighbourhoods are less likely to move into the middle class.
“America is becoming a more class-stratified society, contrary to the nation’s self-image as a socially dynamic meritocracy”, he writes for Real Clear Markets.
Regardless of party affiliation, income inequality and the strength of the middle class should be a consideration among those exercising their right to vote sixth months from now.
The comparatively good showing in Texas was propped up in part by timing, as the data in 2014 reflected what was still a booming energy sector at the time.
In 2014, 52. 8 percent of the St. Louis area population fell in the middle class; that’s down from 57.7 percent in 2000. At the same time, blue-collar jobs tended to pay higher wages here than they did nationally.
Darren Lubotsky, associate professor of economics at the University of IL at Chicago, said a changing economy – from machinery and technology replacing unskilled labor to a decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage – have played a role. “We see this happening in Japan”.
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In addition, both cities now have larger proportions of lower-income residents and smaller proportions of upper-income households.
