Campus Conversation: Why Does Everyone Think They Are Middle Class? | News

Click here to subscribe.

To send a letter to the editor, click here.

To pitch a “My Turn” guest column, email [email protected].

Would you like to buy today’s print edition? Here’s a map of single-copy locations.

Sign up here for our daily newsletter

On Monday, senior beat writer Luke Taylor goes one-on-one with a faculty member from the University of Illinois. Today: KEVIN LEICHT, professor and former head of the Department of Sociology. His research interests include the sociology of work and social inequality.

The pandemic has given rise to the concept of the “essential worker,” spotlighting people who often work low-wage jobs and don’t see that kind of attention. Do you think this will have a lasting impact on the way we view these roles?

I hope so, but I have my doubts. Historically, we have treated very few members of the “essential worker” class very well.

And there’s no correlation between the amount of attention a job gets and how well incumbents are treated — think military veterans.

We honor them, thank them for their service, etc. But many are destitute, homeless, drug addicted and in need of serious help that they are not getting.

Foreigners pick up on this and in some quarters mock us with it: “If you are so patriotic, why do you treat your brave warriors so badly?”

It is widely said that the American middle class is disappearing, but your research describes it as large but struggling. With more and more people considering themselves “stable” but still a few bad days away from serious instability, how do you draw the line between the middle class and the lower class?

This is a very good question. As your next question suggests, there is a strong tendency in the United States to identify as the “middle class,” even if your wallet would say otherwise.

To some extent, people identify with a set of values ​​that they think fit the label (kind of like claiming, “I’m respectable.”). There is nothing wrong with that, but it does make studying the middle class more difficult.

In our work, we tend to focus on people near the median income for families of four and adjust for the number of household members. This makes the middle definitively “middle” in terms of money. Then we usually add home ownership. The lower class has difficulty achieving these marks.

Some research has shown that Americans tend to identify as middle class, even though they might be better described as upper or lower class, which seems interesting to me from a sociological perspective. Do you have any idea why people tend to see themselves this way?

Besides what I said above (middle class is synonymous with “respectable”), there are a few other reasons.

The wealthy tend to compare themselves to others like them, and then (wrongly) assume that they are in the “middle” of a certain wealth or consumption distribution. That’s right, but they are among a very select group of people.

More generally, identifying as middle class is a way of saying, “I belong to the mainstream….” In the past (I would say until the mid-1960s/1970s), conspicuous displays of wealth were frowned upon. It was fine to be rich, but quite another to rub it in people’s faces. This is still the case among the rich.

So the poor and working class want to be part of the mainstream for fear of being ‘left out’. The rich don’t want to appear too extravagant.

One topic in your and Mary Fennell’s book “Crisis in the Professions: The New Dark Age” is the “cultural devaluation of expertise.” Is this a recent trend? What seems to be the cause?

We think there are three factors driving the devaluation of expertise.

First, Google makes everyone think they know what experts know. This is a dangerous illusion, but we admit that the average person (if used properly) can know more about different fields than the average person could have known in the 1980s.

We wouldn’t necessarily argue that more information is a bad thing, but the environment now requires a keen eye to distinguish truth from untruth.

Second, many of the problems experts face today do not lend themselves to easy solutions. Many solutions have tradeoffs.

A good (and obvious) example of this is the problems of aging. As older people acquire more comorbidities (in fact, there are multiple things wrong with them), there are compromises in how to treat the whole person that go beyond just treating six different problems (or eight, etc.).

The same could be said of (say) the science of global warming. There is quite a bit of consensus that it is happening and that people have something to do with it. But that doesn’t mean solutions are easy or simple.

Third, there are simply bad actors who can sow distrust and profit from cultural fragmentation. If you want to do

There is another point that is difficult to understand for the aspiring university student, I think. The experts of the world are becoming more and more like the people of the world.

The oncologist who tells you you have cancer may be from India or China. The economist telling you that your tax cut will only add to the federal budget deficit could be from the EU.

Opportunists can make a lot of political gains by saying, “See? These people are not like us…they are foreigners and immigrants! What do they know!”

Is there a possibility that expertise will be lost in the long term due to this devaluation?

Yes, although the effects will not be uniform.

One thing that comes from the globalization of expertise is that experts don’t have to be in the United States if it’s not attractive to be here.

Someone else will appreciate what he knows and pay him. Devaluing expertise can ultimately undermine a country’s international competitiveness.

In the past, experts wanted to work in the United States and for many this was the only viable option. In the 21st century, this is simply not true.

You’ve been studying labor for a while. What are some of the changes you’ve seen in society’s views on corporate jobs versus menial labor, for example?

I am 65 years old. When I was growing up in the 1960s, parents of all kinds depicted all forms of labor as dignified and worthy of respect.

This started to change in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1990s, people who worked with their hands were “bastards.”

We had students who were in college and whose parents told them, “If you don’t get a college degree, you’re a nobody and you’re on welfare.” Students flocked to business schools in search of the most lucrative entry-level jobs they could get.

The worst part of this was the appearance, if not the reality, that if you weren’t making $100,000 annually, there was something wrong with you and you were less than human. There were tens of millions of people in this “lesser” category, but that didn’t seem to matter.

No one in their right mind would have argued in the early parts of the 20th century that money and wealth were related to your worth as a person, and yet here we are!