American Upper Middle Class
For more details on this topic, see Upper middle class in the United States.- See American Professional/Managerial middle class for a complete overview of the American middle classes.
In the United States the term middle class and its subdivisions are an extremely vague concept as neither economists nor sociologists have precisely defined the term. There are several perceptions of the upper middle class and what the term means. In academic models the term applies to highly educated salaried professionals whose work is largely self-directed. Many have graduate degrees with educational attainment serving as the main distinguishing feature of this class. Household incomes commonly may exceed $100,000, with some smaller one-income earners earning incomes in the high 5-figure range. Typical professions for this class include lawyers, physicians, optometrists, dentists, engineers, professors, architects, economists, political scientists, pharmacists, school principals, civil service executives and civilian contractors.
| “ |
"The upper middle class has grown...and its composition has changed. Increasingly salaried managers and professionals have replaced individual business owners and independent professionals. The key to the success of the upper middle class is the growing importance of educational certification... its lifestyles and opinions are becoming increasingly normative for the whole society. It is in fact a porous class, open to people... who earn the right credentials."- Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure, 1998. |
” |
In addition to having autonomy in their work, above-average incomes, and advanced educations, the upper middle class also tends to be influential, setting trends and largely shaping public opinion. Overall, members of this class are also secure from economic down-turns and, unlike their counterparts in the statistical middle class, do not need to fear downsizing, corporate cost-cutting, or outsourcing—an economic benefit largely attributable to their graduate degrees and comfortable incomes, likely in the top income quintile or top third.
Read more about this topic: Upper Middle Class
Famous quotes containing the words middle class, american, upper, middle and/or class:
“For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application—why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.”
—Howard Nemerov (1920–1991)
“Indeed, I believe that in the future, when we shall have seized again, as we will seize if we are true to ourselves, our own fair part of commerce upon the sea, and when we shall have again our appropriate share of South American trade, that these railroads from St. Louis, touching deep harbors on the gulf, and communicating there with lines of steamships, shall touch the ports of South America and bring their tribute to you.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now’s an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)