Thread by @jbenton

The @nytimes is a glorious and critical institution.

But how ABSOLUTELY INSANE is it that its vision of the struggling middle class is someone making $200-400K in a Pennsylvania small town?

nytimes.com/2019/07/05/opi…

This particular person makes that sum in the town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, where the median household income is $54K. So she is at 4x to 8x her typical neighbor.

Or take this couple making $200-400K in Austin, Minnesota (median household income: $33K), where they spend "$91,000 on day care and household help," including a nanny

The "middle class"
"everyday Americans" the @nytimes chose to highlight here have household incomes of:

$120-200K
$120-200K
$200-400K
$200-400K
$75-100K
$120-200K
$120-200K

The median US household income is $61,000.

Just imagine, for a moment, if we had an elite journalism institution of the Times' caliber that saw the US income distribution as it really is.

Update: One of the people profiled in the story, @fletchermac, has written a thoughtful response rationalpessimism.com/2019/07/reacti…

Update: The @nytimes has noticed people talking about this story and written a response. Give it a read: nytimes.com/2019/07/09/rea…

Let me know if you find it satisfying. I do not!

The headline: "Can a Middle-Class Family Earn $200,000? Yes, Our Editor Explains"

No one is saying it's *impossible* for someone who makes $200K to be middle class!

What I'm saying is that people who make that much money ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.

The NYT piece notes there is not one universally accepted definition of "middle class." That's true! We can probably agree that neither Jeff Bezos nor the homeless are middle class, but there'll be arguments in between. Let's look at some definitions!

The good folks at @pewresearch use this definition: everyone between 2/3 and 2x the median national income, adjusted for household size.

By that measure, 52% of Americans are middle class. 19% are above that and 29% are below.

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018…

Using that measure, the median lower-class household makes $26K a year, the median middle-class household makes $78K, and the median upper-class household makes $187K.

For a three-person household, that means the income cutoffs for the middle class are $45,200 and $135,600.

Other definitions, here gathered by Brookings, find different numbers but the same general ballpark. The economist Alan Krueger (who sadly died earlier this year) used the broader $35K-$104K. MIT's Lester Thurow liked the narrower $52K-$87K. brookings.edu/research/defin…

And of course there are people who prefer definitions that are either radically different (say, that only the idle rich are truly "upper class") or that are completely divorced from income (say, a college degree, a managerial or professional job, home ownership, etc.).

So I'm completely open to arguments that any one of the people in this story might be "middle class" by some definition — or that they feel "middle class" themselves, which is of course their right.

But it was the @nytimes that decided how to frame this story — to declare this selection of people "middle-class families" and "everyday Americans."

Even if these people are all middle class, they are still not *representative* of the American middle class.

A reminder, again, that these are the income ranges of the 7 people profiled.

$120-200K
$120-200K
$200-400K
$200-400K
$75-100K
$120-200K
$120-200K

And that the middle-class ranges reached by smart economists are $45-135K, $35-104K, and $52-87K.

The Times says more than 500 people submitted their info for this story, "with widely varied incomes."

But when they went to pick who would represent "being middle class in America," "everyday Americans," they picked people a lot closer to "everyday New York Times subscribers."

One last thought: This is the sort of moment we really miss having a public editor at the Times. A public editor could listen to the Twitter cranks like me, listen to the Times’ explanation, and then try to evaluate both sides critically.