{"id":17,"date":"2026-05-12T16:46:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worcestermovingreport.com\/?p=17"},"modified":"2026-05-12T16:46:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:46:04","slug":"the-historic-tightrope-of-middle-class-life-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worcestermovingreport.com\/?p=17","title":{"rendered":"The historic tightrope of middle-class life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

WHAT DEFINES THE<\/mark><\/strong> middle class has long been a moving target. But it is often marked by an enduring sense of precarity. <\/p>\n

Read more It\u2019s hard work making it in the middle class<\/a><\/p>\n

This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon<\/em> reporter Jennifer Smith talks with historian Andrew Seal, who teaches in the economics department at the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Seal\u2019s research is focused on how members of the middle class think about their cultural and economic place in society.<\/p>\n

The middle class as an extension of the post-World War II \u201cAmerican dream\u201d was associated with certain types of consumption, like a single-family home or a car, he noted. The association between having a house in a desirable area has been tied to middle-class identity since the industrial revolution. But class boundaries are malleable, and change as societal conditions change. <\/p>\n

There is a similar dynamic with the idea of the Midwest, said Seal \u2014 a Midwest native. <\/p>\n

\u201cBoth of those concepts are really fuzzy at the edges,\u201d he said, \u201cbut they play a necessary role in kind of locking in place our concepts of the other regions \u2014 in the case of the Midwest \u2014 or other classes, in the case of the middle class. And people from either the middle class or the Midwest often kind of struggle to identify what makes them belong to that.\u201d <\/p>\n

They are as much defined by what they are not \u2014 not working or upper class, and not the Northeast or the South or the Western mountain regions \u2014 as by a collective sense of identity and cultural signifiers. <\/p>\n

Read more Mass. voters might face 11 ballot questions this fall. Here\u2019s where each measure stands.<\/a><\/p>\n

Seal points to four ways that people tend to estimate their own class and their neighbors\u2019: income, which is hard to compare with others; consumption patterns, like a detached single-family home in a suburb; occupation, which is tricky because there may be a distinction between blue- and white-collar work, but no clear cutoff between middle-class white collar and upper-class white collar; and the increasingly salient marker of higher education, which has become quite expensive and often necessary to get those coveted white-collar jobs. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe see the fact that you have these four different dimensions \u2014 and that you can be middle class on one of them, or on two of them, or on three of them, but not on all four of them \u2014 makes the middle class inherently unstable as an identity,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re always maybe slipping a little bit \u2026 that makes it really difficult to maintain a kind of sense of stability and security.\u201d <\/p>\n

At the same time, a more recent focus on economic inequality has sharpened some of the conversations around class security, Seal said. <\/p>\n

One way to define the middle class is a lack of generational wealth, he noted, \u201cwhere your parents being middle class doesn\u2019t mean that you can coast, and stay in the middle class. You have to re-achieve those markers on your own.\u201d <\/p>\n

On the episode, Smith and Seal explore what a new poll tells us about middle class anxiety today (5:00), where \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d iconography collides with the idea of a middle class (10:00), and how that intersects with media portrayals, demographic differences, and political promises.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Lawmakers complete bid to kill legislative stipend reforms<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defining the middle class is harder than it might seem \u2013 it might mean owning a home, having steady work, keeping a pot of savings, or the kids and white picket fence vision of the \u201cAmerican Dream.\u201d Historian Andrew Seal, whose research and writings focus on how the middle class thinks of itself, joins CommonWealth Beacon senior reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast to interpret recent Bay State polling and dive into how a middle-class identity intersects with race, media portrayals, and American individualism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-codcast"],"yoast_head":"\nThe historic tightrope of middle-class life - Worcester Moving Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worcestermovingreport.com\/?p=17\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The historic tightrope of middle-class life - 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