According to a new report by Pew, growing up middle class is no guarantee you'll remain middle class. In fact, 28 percent of people in the study who grew up middle class fell below that level in adulthood. The
Washington Post describes how middle class was measured:
The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.
People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. The findings do not cover the difficult times that the nation has endured since 2007.
This is actually, as the Pew report (PDF) explains, a broader definition of the middle class than is often used. Beyond the percentage of people to fall below the 30th percentile, Pew found that "28 percent of adults also fell 20 percentiles or more below their parents' rank" and "19 percent of adults had income at least 20 percent lower than that of their parents at a similar age." That means there were two measures of how people did relative to their peers and one absolute measure comparing their actual income to that of their parents.
Further findings:
- Unmarried or divorced women are much more likely to be downwardly mobile than married women; unmarried and divorced men lose less ground in comparison with married men.
- Education levels make a difference in exactly the ways you'd expect. Also hard drug use.
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White, black and Hispanic women are equally likely to experience downward mobility out of the middle class, but 38 percent of black men fall out, compared with 21 percent of white men. Hispanic men also appear more likely than white men to fall from the middle as adults, but the difference is not statistically significant.
- White men are least likely to be downwardly mobile. I'm sure this comes as a surprise to all of you.
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Differences in average test scores are the most important observable racial difference in accounting for the large downward mobility gap between black men and white men, but none of the factors examined in the report sheds light on the gap between white men and white women.
Because this report focuses most on percentiles—how people are doing relative to their peers—it doesn't speak to growing income inequality and middle-class wage stagnation. Rather, it gives us another angle onto how factors like race, gender and marital status contribute to downward mobility, or protect people from it.