What is Middle Class about the Middle Classes around the World?

We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society. In a second, perhaps more conventional view, the middle class is primarily a source of vital inputs for the entrepreneurial class: it is their “middle class values”—their emphasis on the accumulation of human capital and savings—that makes them central to the process of capitalist accumulation. The third view, a staple of the business press, emphasizes the middle class…