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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Volume One -- Alphabetical List of Entries -- Introduction: The American Dream and the Middle Class -- Prologue: A Portrait of the Middle Class -- Essays -- What Is Middle Class in America? Examining Income and Occupation -- How Americans View Themselves: The Dilemma of Class Identity -- The Origins of the Middle Class -- The Future of the American Middle Class -- The Critical Role of Race in Defining the Middle Class -- Portraits -- The American Indian Middle Class -- The Asian American Middle Class -- The Black Middle Class -- The Rise of a New Black Middle Class -- The Hispanic Middle Class -- The LGBT Middle Class -- The White Middle Class -- Part 1: Economic Uncertainty and the American Middle Class -- Overview Essay -- What Happened to the American Dream? -- Entries -- Affordable Care Act and the Labor Market -- American Capitalism in the 21st Century -- Antitrust Policy -- Automobiles and the American Way of Life -- Banks and the U.S. Economy -- Behavioral Economics -- Buchanan, James M. (1919-2013) -- Business Cycles in the United States -- Child Care in the United States -- Climate Change, Economics of -- Consumer Price Index -- Consumer Protection Movement -- Consumerism -- Crony Capitalism -- Deindustrialization -- Earned Income Tax Credit -- Economic Growth, Conflicting Visions of -- Economic Growth, Sustainability of -- Economic Growth Theory and Actual Growth -- Efficient Market Hypothesis -- Environmental and Natural Resource Economics -- Estate and Gift Taxes -- Executive Compensation -- Fast Food -- Federal Reserve System and Monetary Policy -- Financial Derivatives -- Financialization -- Fiscal Policy -- Forbes 400 -- Friedman, Milton (1912-2006) -- Gender Wage Gap -- General Assistance Programs -- George, Henry, and the 99 Percent -- Globalization

AbstractMumbai forms the décor to an interesting set of relationships among economic liberalization, globalization, class restructuring and an unprecedented housing construction boom. The much talked about new Indian middle class is primarily an urban phenomenon and seems nowhere more salient than in India's commercial capital and largest city. This article seeks to undo some of the mysteries that surround the new middle class: how it can be empirically defined, whether and how it is growing, how class restructuring in Mumbai conforms (or not) to Western arguments about social polarization, and how any such class restructuring can best be explained. The empirical analysis employs existing data from various sources on income and consumption in Mumbai (and India at large) and reports on selected findings from a recent survey by the author on housing, class and upward mobility among households in newly constructed homes in Greater Mumbai. Data on the distribution of household incomes show that the upper‐middle income classes have grown relative to the total, that the lower‐middle income classes have shrunk, and that the ranks of the poor have expanded slightly. Survey data among new home buyers in Mumbai suggest little upward mobility. Discourse about the 'new middle class' tends to focus on consumption rather than income and additional findings indicate that much of the growth in consumption is credit‐based.

The black middle class received little scholarly attention from the 1960s through the 1980s, when the emphasis was on studying the black urban poor. Recently, however, there has been an increase in attention to this group and their residential environs. This review covers the topics of racial and class segregation, the comparative well-being of black middle-class neighborhoods, and residential preferences, with some attention to black suburbanization and black gentrification. Research findings clearly show that middle-class blacks in the United States have more favorable residential outcomes than poor blacks but still live in poorer neighborhoods than the majority of whites on all measures. Ethnographic studies explore this marginal position in more depth. I argue that if racial integration is the remedy to various racial disparities, then the more fruitful endeavor may be to study the ideologies, practices, and cultures of white neighborhoods, rather than black ones.

The Middle class as a concept has evolved over time, taking on various meanings at various points throughout history, becoming an object to aspire to for poor people, an object of desire for a strong government, a buzzword for politicians the world over, and the source of new customers for firms, and the global economy more broadly. This special issue of Poverty in Focus, exclusively devoted to the exploration of themes related to the middle class is part of a larger endeavour initiated by The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), in collaboration with the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs of the Office of the Brazilian Presidency, to explore the middle class within a development context at national, regional and international levels. Contributions to this middle-class-themed issue have come from leading scholars and development practitioners from across the globe who have addressed the phenomenon of the middle class from several different ideological, academic and regional perspectives to explore a variety of issues in relation to the significance of a growing middle class and overall development achievements. [.]

Most criminal justice research on African Americans focuses on poor Blacks living in poor Black communities. Hassett-Walker expands this focus to middle class Blacks and empirically tests an assertion from Pattillo-McCoy (1999)'s Black Picket Fences--that little difference in delinquency exists between poor versus middle class Black youth. Variables included class status, parent-child interaction, and neighborhood poverty. Parenting behavior and marital disruption were both predictive of delinquency. Having delinquent peers predicted future arrest, suggesting support for differential associati

Latino educational gains over time and income mobility portend a burgeoning Latino middle class. In this article, we critically review scholarship on the Latino middle class, from theoretical perspectives aiming to explain Latino experiences to empirical research investigating mechanisms that promote, and barriers that thwart, upward mobility. Studies suggest that the Latino middle class is distinctive for many reasons—from structural barriers to asset accumulation, legal status precarity for self or family, financial responsibility for class-disadvantaged kin, and negative controlling images that bog down class ascension. Scholars' recent efforts to decouple middle-class status from Whiteness is an important contribution that undercuts the notion that melding into Whiteness is the desired outcome of middle-class integration. In addition to the utility of education to upward mobility, we contend that studies of middle-class pathways should expand to recognize that Latinos are engaging in workarounds—career paths not requiring a bachelor's degree, such as business ownership or credentialed professions. Workarounds are an intervention that accounts for routes to mobility that are eclipsed by conventional conceptions of mobility. Ultimately, we argue that Latinos are attaining middle-class status even as they are racialized, thereby expanding the minoritized middle class.

In A Political Economy of Modernism, Ronald Schleifer examines the political economy of what he calls 'the culture of modernism' by focusing on literature and the arts; intellectual disciplines of post-classical economics; and institutional structures of corporate capitalism and the lower middle-class. In its wide ranging study focused on modernist writers (Dreiser, Hardy, Joyce, Stevens, Woolf, Wells, Wharton, Yeats), modernist artists (Cézanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Schoenberg), economists (Jevons, Marshall, Veblen), and philosophers (Benjamin, Jakobson, Russell), this book presents an institutional history of cultural modernism in relation to the intellectual history of Enlightenment ethos and the social history of the second Industrial Revolution. It articulates a new method of analysis of the early twentieth century - configuration and modeling - that reveals close connections among its arts, understandings, and social organizations

This book is a sociological study of a societal grouping that has the popular title 'middle class'. It argues that it is more precise to describe the middle classes as dominant groupings, and the book draws upon a wide range of characters from such groupings. In a detailed analysis of cultural practices, those making an appearance include omnivores, carnivores, herbivores, the middle-brow, traditional culture vultures, middle class plunderers, the urban arts eclectic and the English gentleman. There is a particular focus on those expressing the 'silver disposition'; predominantly affluent, middle-aged and white, with a taste for conspicuous consumption and established cultural forms. The book brings together a range of disparate sources on the middle classes and offers a sustained engagement with the concept of 'culture'. It illustrates the extent to which social groups utilize the various assets at their disposal and seek to maintain the legitimacy of their cultural practices. The findings emphasise the continuing link between class and taste. Culture and the Middle Classes will be of interest to those working in the fields of class and culture across a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, social theory, media studies and cultural anthropology.