Social Stratification, Welfare, and Social Policy Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Daniel Oesch from University of Lausanne presents "The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980-2020".

This is an in-person only event.

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Abstract

The public debate depicts the middle class as the great losers of the last decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of job and income growth. This narrative is mistaken both conceptually and empirically. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980-2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK and US that employment of the middle class strongly expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also made consistently larger income gains than the working class. Finally, our cohort analysis shows that the promise of doing better than one’s parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class. The real losers of the last few decades were the working class.