Doug Henwood wrote:
> Brett Knowlton wrote:
>
> >[snip]
> >The graph itself started out as a line which sloped gradually upwards as
> >you moved along the x-axis, with a roughly constant slope. However, there
> >was a drastic change around 98-99% on the x-axis, where the graph turned up
> >virtually instantaneously and shot up vertically.
>
> Check out <http://www.davidchandler.com/lcurve> for a graphic on this.
I quote the following paragraph from this web page:
**** Most doctors and lawyers and professional people, with incomes as high as a few hundred thousand dollars may feel "rich". They may have nicer homes and cars, and they may have attitudes that separate them from the masses. But they still must work for a living and are primarily consumers of their earnings. Whether they recognize it or not, they actually have more in common with the people at the bottom than they do with the people in the top 1/2%.****
This expresses exactly the point I tried to make in my initial post on this thread.
Now I think that between the 90th and (say) the 98th percentile one can distinguish the core of a third class, *some* of whom take their income mostly in the form of salaries. The class would also include however a sprinkling of persons whose place on the income scale may be far down. more on that later. *Not* a "middle* class (or any qualified version, such as upper middle etc.) -- because there is no class in modern society that is in any material sense BETWEEN other classes. The core of this class (I would call it petty bourgeoisie except that that term has been killed by overuse so it is nearly as uninformative as middle class) is made up of traditional *independent* professionals -- physcicians, lawyers, accountants, independent craftsmen (plumbers, truckers, appliance repairmen), and small (how small is small?) capitalists. A very thin margin of employed professionals (e.g., tenured faculty at a dozen or less elite universities) might fit here or might be considered honorary members of the capitalist class proper. Demographically this class is of no importance. Politically, they seem to make up the bulk of ruling-class stooges leading social democratic or liberal parties. But their chief political importance, I think, is that they provide an "image" on which the myth of the middle class is raised, to the confusion of workers striving for that "status" and of left intellectuals who bemuse each other by throwing the term around.
Carrol