HOW THE MIDDLE CLASS LIVES ON $2 TO $10 A DAY. I posted here and here on an article describing how the very poor live on $1 a day and here on some young people in India who have moved up to earning $5 a day. The Economist for February 2 has an article on a paper by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo about the lives of people spending $2 to $10 a day (in current dollars, roughly between 1000 and $5000 a year). The paper can be found here. Banerjee and Duflo refer to these people as “the middle class.” (Take note that 88% if the people in rural India live on less than the $1000 a year which marks the boundary for the middle class.) One of their major conclusions is that the middle class is not strikingly entrepreneurial. Many of the middle classes have tiny businesses–but just as high a percentage of the poor have tiny businesses. Banerjee and Duflo think that, “The key distinction between the middle class and the poor is who they are working for and on what terms.” They conclude that: “Nothing seems more middle class than the fact of having a steady, well-paying job.”
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Americans and the English have such different views of class, I wonder if the English had any sort of influence in that department as a holdover from the colonial days. Then again, I’m not sure how much of that would have been rejected once the colonial days ended, and I’m not sure how much of it would have reached rural India anyways.
Apparently the plague is still an issue there.
You’re right that their views of class are different. It has taken the reading of many novels for me to get an understanding of the complications of class in England. In America, “class” often means simply an income grouping. In fact, this article takes income groupings as a starting point, working off a definition of “middle class” as “those living between the 20th and 80th percentile on the consumption distribution” of a country.
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