--The point is pretty simple. Elementary actually. 1) Who is making 70K? A mother or father of 4 kids? Single parent? Living in Los Angeles? San Jose? Washington DC? A single person with no children living in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama? The Oprah 'categories' tell us nothing about what it means to be "upper class".
2) Dockworkers make sometimes over a 100k, ditto machine factory workers, etc. They tend to self-identify as working class, regardless of the arbitrary income measurements of class in Oprah's little table.
3) And, here's the confusing part, it is a measurement of individuals, not households. I make 50k, my wife makes slightly more than that...are we 'upper class' or 'middle class'? if 'upper class' are we in the same 'upper class' as the billionaire Oprah? I mean seriously, the measurements she offers her viewers are meaningless and confusing to the core.
Stephen Philion
Any way you define "upper class" is going to have an element of arbitrariness about it. It isn't like defining the atomic weight of Cadmium. Oprah more than likely hired a few sociologists who decided for the sake of simplicity to break down the three catagories "lower", "middle", and "upper" by income. Each category representing approximately 33% of US household incomes.
You can argue that defining it differently is preferable to you and come up with a different methodology but regardless of your methodology there are arbitrary decisions made along the way.
Oprah is running a TV show, not a graduate level sociology class so by necessity it is kept simple. You can hardly fault a TV show for being exactly what it claims to be, no more, no less.
If one of your beefs with Oprahs table is that it defines by individual income rather than households and neither you nor your SO's income exceeds $70,000 why did you claim her methodology defines you as:
"Wow, that's rich, and I mean that literally. I'm RICH!!! I'm a member of the "upper class"!!?
Her methodology defines you as middle class, apparently just where you define yourself. Maybe her chart isn't so far off after all?
John Thornton