What Is Considered Middle Class? Hint: It’s Not Your Income

What does it mean to be a middle-class American? Is it an income threshold? A series of checkmarks: home-ownership, a car? Is A two-parent working household? Or, is it, as Hadas Weiss, an anthropologist at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study, argues in We Have Never Been Middle Class: How Social Mobility Misleads Us, simply an ideology that many of us have organized our lives around, by making investments in education, property, and the stock market as a way to gain wealth? It very well may be — after all, some 70 percent of Americans self-identify as middle class, but far less than that actually meet the monetary guidelines to be considered as such.