Daniel sent us this one, and it's the kind of prompt that starts with a personal itch and ends up pulling on a thread that unravels half of modern social science. He grew up comfortable in the US — comfortable being, as he puts it, a euphemism for middle to upper middle class — then moved to Israel a decade ago and realized that by local standards his lifestyle and income probably land him in working-class territory. And he finds the whole class-labeling enterprise off-putting, which it is. So the questions are: where did this three-tier ranking come from, what's it actually based on, how does it vary by country, and what are the general characteristics of each group? There's a lot to unpack here.
The thing that makes this prompt so good is that it captures exactly why class feels both inevitable and wrong at the same time. You can't quite escape the categories, but the moment you try to pin them down they dissolve. I want to start with something that might surprise people: the three-class model is not an official government classification anywhere. It's what anthropologists call a folk taxonomy. It's the social equivalent of classifying animals into things you eat, things that eat you, and things you ignore. Useful in conversation, but nobody would build a zoology department around it.
The social equivalent of the food chain, but make it awkward at dinner parties.
And the actual official measures look completely different. The US Census Bureau doesn't ask anyone what class they belong to. They use a socioeconomic status index that combines income, education, and occupation into a composite score. Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics uses income deciles — they literally slice the population into ten equal groups by income and that's their primary lens. Nobody in any government statistical agency sits around sorting citizens into working, middle, and upper.
Which makes the persistence of the three-part model even weirder. It's like we all agreed to use a map that nobody drew.
Yet everyone uses it. Pew Research did a study in twenty twenty-two that found sixty-two percent of American adults self-identify as middle class. Sixty-two percent. But the income range within that self-identified group spans a factor of four. You have people earning forty thousand dollars and people earning a hundred and sixty thousand dollars both saying "I'm middle class." That's not a category, that's an aspiration with a parking spot.
The core paradox is right there: the system is ubiquitous and imprecise at the same time. Everyone uses it, nobody agrees on the boundaries, and it somehow still dominates how we talk about each other. So where does this actually come from? Let's start with a quick history lesson that might surprise you.
The three-class model traces back to eighteenth-century European political economy, and the key figure is Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations in seventeen seventy-six, he distinguished three great orders: landlords who live by rent, capitalists who live by profit, and laborers who live by wages. That's the original tripartite division, and it was descriptive, not prescriptive. Smith was observing what he saw in the emerging industrial economy.
It starts as economic analysis, not social ranking.
Right, and it stays that way for a while. But then the Victorians get hold of it and turn it into something much more judgmental. Henry Mayhew, the social commentator who wrote London Labour and the London Poor in the eighteen fifties, popularized this idea that you could read someone's class off their clothing, their speech, their habits. And then in nineteen eleven, the UK's Registrar General created the first official classification scheme for census data, and it was explicitly hierarchical: professional class, intermediate class, skilled manual workers, semi-skilled, unskilled. Five tiers, but the three-part logic was baked in.
Marx is in the mix here too, right? He's the one who really weaponizes the framework.
Marx simplifies it even further. He collapses everything into two classes: the bourgeoisie who own the means of production, and the proletariat who sell their labor. Two classes, not three, and the point was political. He wanted the analysis to be sharp enough to organize around. The middle class, in Marx's framework, was a temporary annoyance — the petty bourgeoisie, shopkeepers and small farmers who would eventually get squeezed into the proletariat as capitalism concentrated wealth.
Which didn't exactly happen.
No, the middle class exploded instead of disappearing, which is one of the great predictive failures of classical Marxism. But the person who really matters for understanding why class feels so personal and slippery today is Max Weber. In nineteen twenty-two, in Economy and Society, Weber introduces a three-component theory of stratification: class, status, and party. Class is your economic position — your market situation, what you can buy. Status is your social prestige — how much honor or respect you command, independent of your income. And party is your political power — your ability to influence collective decisions.
A priest might have high status and low income, a drug dealer might have high income and low status, and a local city council member might have modest income and modest prestige but real political power. Three different ladders that don't necessarily align.
That's exactly the insight, and it's the insight most people miss when they talk about class today. We collapse all three dimensions into one label and then wonder why it doesn't fit. A public school teacher with a master's degree earns fifty-five thousand dollars a year. Is she working class because of the income, or middle class because of the education and occupational prestige? The three-class model has no way to answer that question because it's trying to compress three dimensions into one.
Which brings us to the American twist, because the US never had formal estates or an aristocracy, so class had to mean something different here.
The United States was founded on the explicit rejection of hereditary class. No titles of nobility, no established aristocracy. So class became about consumption patterns and lifestyle rather than birth. The myth of the classless society was incredibly powerful — the idea that anyone could rise, that your origins didn't determine your destiny. But sociologists eventually punctured that myth, and the key figure is W. In the nineteen forties, he conducted the Yankee City studies in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and what he found was a six-class system.
Upper-upper, lower-upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, upper-lower, and lower-lower. And the distinctions between them were granular. Upper-upper meant old money, inherited wealth, the right schools. Lower-upper meant new money, people who had earned their wealth but lacked the social connections and cultural polish of the old-money families. Upper-middle were professionals and successful business owners. Lower-middle were white-collar workers, clerks, small shopkeepers. Upper-lower were skilled manual workers. Lower-lower were unskilled laborers and the persistently unemployed.
Warner's six-class system is basically admitting that the three-class model is a lossy compression algorithm. You're throwing away information to get a simpler picture.
That's exactly the right metaphor. And the information you're throwing away is precisely the stuff that determines people's actual life experiences. The difference between old money and new money might seem trivial if you're looking at income, but it determines who gets invited to which parties, whose children marry whom, who gets the board seat.
That's the history. Now let's get into what the delineation is actually based on, because this is where it gets messy. Most people assume class is about income. How much do you make? Pick a number, find your bucket. But that turns out to be only moderately correlated with class identity.
Income is the most common proxy because it's the easiest to measure, but it's a weak predictor of how people actually experience class. Education is much stronger, and not just years of education — the type of degree and the prestige of the institution matter enormously. A bachelor's from a state university and a bachelor's from Harvard both count as "college educated," but they function as completely different class signals. And then there's occupation, which Weber identified as the key variable. The distinction between manual and non-manual work, the level of autonomy you have on the job, whether you have a service relationship with your employer — salaried, with benefits and a career ladder — or a labor contract — hourly, supervised, no advancement path.
The UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification, the NS-SEC, is built entirely around that distinction. It doesn't ask about income at all.
It asks about employment relations. Do you have a service relationship or a labor contract? If you're salaried with autonomy and career progression, you're in the professional or managerial class. If you're hourly with direct supervision and no career ladder, you're in the working class. The income might be similar — a skilled tradesperson can out-earn a junior academic — but the employment relationship is fundamentally different.
Then there's Pierre Bourdieu, who in nineteen eighty-four published Distinction, which is basically a twelve-hundred-page argument that taste is a class weapon.
Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital is essential here. He studied French society and found that preferences in music, art, food, leisure activities, even interior decoration function as class markers that are independent of income. Knowing which fork to use, which wine to order, which books to have on your shelf — these aren't just personal preferences, they're signals of belonging. And they're inherited. You absorb them from your family, your schooling, your social circle. You can't just buy cultural capital the way you buy a car.
Which is why the phrase "new money" exists in every language. You can acquire the income overnight, but the cultural capital takes a generation.
This is where class starts to feel so personal and off-putting, which the prompt directly names. It's not just about money. It's about whether you belong. Whether you know the unspoken rules. Whether your instincts are right. Bourdieu showed that these taste distinctions are incredibly fine-grained and they function as gatekeeping mechanisms. You might have the income to eat at the fancy restaurant, but if you don't know what a amuse-bouche is or you hold the wrong fork, you've marked yourself.
The glockenspiel of social exclusion.
That's actually a perfect way to put it. It's the little signals that most people don't even consciously notice but that everyone who's inside the circle recognizes instantly.
To summarize what we've got so far: the three-class model is a folk taxonomy with roots in Adam Smith, weaponized by Marx, complicated by Weber, and patched and repatched by sociologists ever since. The actual criteria people use to assign class are a messy mix of income, education, occupation, and cultural capital, and they don't align neatly. Now let's talk about how this plays out in different countries, because the prompt's experience moving from the US to Israel is a perfect case study.
Let's ground this in some numbers. The OECD defines middle class as households earning between seventy-five and two hundred percent of the median national income. That's the standard definition used in cross-national comparisons. Using that definition, the median disposable income in the United States is about forty-five thousand dollars per year in purchasing power parity terms. In Israel, it's about thirty-two thousand dollars PPP. So right away, the same absolute standard of living places you in different classes in different countries.
The cost of living in Israel makes that gap feel even wider. Tel Aviv was ranked the world's most expensive city by the Economist Intelligence Unit in twenty twenty-three. Israel's cost of living index runs about twenty percent above the OECD average. So you're earning less and everything costs more.
The housing situation is the real squeeze. In the United States, middle class typically implies homeownership. It's part of the cultural definition — the house with the yard, the mortgage, the equity building over time. In Israel, homeownership rates are actually comparable to the US, around sixty-seven percent, but the path to getting there is completely different. You need a much larger down payment relative to income, you're competing in a market where Tel Aviv apartments can cost over a million dollars for a three-bedroom, and the mortgage terms are less favorable. A couple with two professional salaries might still be renting into their forties.
The same occupation can land you in different classes depending on which side of the ocean you're standing on. Take a teacher. In the US, median teacher salary is around sixty-five thousand dollars. That's solidly middle class by most definitions — you can afford a mortgage in many parts of the country, you have a pension, you have summers off. In Israel, a teacher earns the equivalent of about forty-five thousand dollars in purchasing power terms, and that's often considered working class or at best lower middle class despite requiring the same degree and the same professional certification.
Same occupation, same education level, completely different class assignment. And that's not because the teacher is doing anything different — it's because the surrounding economic context is different. Israel's Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, was zero point three four six in twenty twenty-one, compared to zero point three nine three in the US. So Israel is actually slightly more equal on paper. But the median is lower, so equality means more people clustered around a lower baseline.
Which creates a situation where having a graduate degree and a professional job doesn't necessarily lift you out of financial precarity. In the US, the graduate degree is the golden ticket — it correlates strongly with higher lifetime earnings. In Israel, the wage premium for education is smaller, and the cost of living eats a larger share of whatever premium you do get.
This is where the meaning of middle class really varies by what a society considers a baseline. In the US, middle class means homeownership, a car or two, college education for the children, a retirement account, maybe a vacation once a year. In Israel, middle class might mean renting a decent apartment, owning one small car, having a graduate degree but still struggling to save, and relying on family help for major expenses. The lifestyle looks different but the self-perception — "I'm not rich, I'm not poor, I'm in the middle" — is similar.
The data bears out the squeeze. Pew Research found that in twenty twenty-one, fifty percent of American adults lived in middle-income households, down from sixty-one percent in nineteen seventy-one. The middle class is shrinking, and it's not because people are getting rich. Most of those who left the middle class fell into the lower-income tier. So the anxiety people feel about class status is grounded in real economic trends.
The prompt mentions finding the whole system off-putting and seeing how it breeds elitism and resentment. That's not just a personal reaction — it's a structural feature of how class categories work. They're not neutral descriptors. They carry moral weight.
Working class gets coded as "hardworking but unrefined." Middle class as "aspirational but anxious." Upper class as "privileged but out of touch." Every category comes with a built-in insult wrapped in a compliment.
The moral loading creates what Alain de Botton called status anxiety in his two thousand four book. You're constantly measuring yourself against others, constantly worried about whether you've been classified correctly, constantly aware that the classification carries a judgment about your worth as a person. The prompt says "I find the whole definition system extremely off-putting," and that's the status anxiety talking. It's the feeling that someone is ranking you and you didn't agree to the rules of the game.
The resentment flows in both directions. Working-class people resent being condescended to by middle-class professionals who think their degree makes them superior. Middle-class people resent the upper class for having advantages they didn't earn. Upper-class people resent being vilified for their success. Everyone feels like they're the ones being judged unfairly.
The political implications here are massive. A lot of populist movements, both left and right, draw their energy from class resentment. When people feel that the system has misclassified them or that the labels are being used to dismiss their concerns, they look for leaders who will blow up the taxonomy entirely.
Which brings us to the question: if the system is this broken, why do we still use it? And are there alternatives?
There are several alternative frameworks that sociologists have proposed. Guy Standing, a British economist, introduced the concept of the precariat in twenty eleven. It's not a class in the traditional sense — it's a growing group of people who have no stable employment relationship, no occupational identity, no career narrative. They move from gig to gig, contract to contract, with no benefits, no security, no ladder to climb. Standing argues that the old three-class model can't capture this experience because the precariat isn't "working class" in the traditional sense — they don't have a stable working-class identity or community.
The gig economy as class solvent. It dissolves the old categories.
When your employment relationship doesn't fit the service contract versus labor contract binary, the whole classification scheme breaks down. An Uber driver with a college degree — is that working class or middle class? The old model has no answer.
Another alternative is multidimensional stratification indices. Instead of collapsing everything into one label, you track income, wealth, education, occupation, and social network as separate axes. You might be in the eighth income decile, the fifth wealth decile, the ninth education decile, and the fourth occupational prestige decile. That paints a much richer picture than "upper middle class.
The UK's NS-SEC does something like this by focusing entirely on employment relations and ignoring income. And the Great British Class Survey, conducted by the BBC in twenty thirteen, used Bourdieu's framework to identify seven classes based on economic, cultural, and social capital. They found an elite, an established middle class, a technical middle class, new affluent workers, a traditional working class, emergent service workers, and a precariat. Seven classes, not three, and they're defined by combinations of capital types, not just income.
Seven classes feels like it's getting closer to capturing actual social reality, but it also loses the simplicity that makes the three-class model sticky. Nobody at a dinner party says "as a member of the emergent service worker class, I find that interesting.
That's the trade-off. The three-class model persists because it's simple enough to use in conversation. You can deploy it without thinking. The moment you add nuance, you lose the usability. It's like the QWERTY keyboard — not optimal, but good enough and too embedded to replace.
Given all this messiness — the historical baggage, the cross-national variation, the moral loading — what can we actually do with this information? Here are three practical takeaways.
First, when someone says "middle class," ask "by what measure?" Income, education, occupation, lifestyle, or self-identification? The answer reveals more about the speaker's assumptions than about the person being described. If they mean income, ask which threshold. If they mean lifestyle, ask which markers. The label is a Rorschach test.
Second, for listeners who feel misclassified, and the prompt author is clearly in this camp, the solution isn't to find the correct class label. There isn't one. The solution is to recognize that class is a heuristic, not a fact. Separate your income bracket from your education level from your social network from your cultural tastes. You might be in the fourth income decile, the eighth education decile, and the sixth occupational prestige decile. That's not a contradiction — it's just a person who can't be reduced to a single word.
That multidimensional thinking is genuinely liberating. Once you stop trying to cram yourself into a box that doesn't fit, you can see the different resources you actually have. Maybe your income is modest but your education gives you options. Maybe your social network opens doors that your job title doesn't. The class label obscures all of that.
Third, if you're designing policy or products that target a class, use objective measures. Income decile, education level, occupation code. Don't use subjective class labels. The latter introduces bias and imprecision. If you're trying to figure out who needs housing assistance, "working class" is a terrible criterion — it's too fuzzy, too loaded, too variable across regions. Use income thresholds and household composition. Let the numbers do the work.
These are practical because they apply whether you're a policymaker, a marketer, a journalist, or just someone trying to understand your own position. The class labels are shortcuts, and shortcuts are useful until they're not. When precision matters, you need the long way around.
Where does this leave us? If the three-class system is broken, what comes next?
I don't think we're going to abandon the labels. They're too embedded in everyday language, and they serve a real social function — they let us talk about inequality without getting into the weeds every time. But I think we're going to see them become less useful over the next decade. The gig economy and remote work are blurring traditional occupational categories. Wealth inequality is growing — the top ten percent now own seventy-six percent of global wealth, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report from twenty twenty-three. The old labels can't capture a world where a software engineer with stock options is technically a wage worker but has more wealth than a small business owner.
The top ten percent owning seventy-six percent of global wealth is the kind of statistic that makes the three-class model feel almost quaint. Like using a sundial to measure nanoseconds.
As the precariat grows — people with no stable employment, no career narrative, no class identity in the traditional sense — the working class label becomes less descriptive. What do you call someone who drives for three different gig platforms, rents out a spare room on Airbnb, and has a side hustle selling vintage clothes online? That's not working class in the nineteenth-century sense, and it's certainly not middle class. It's something new.
The discomfort the prompt author feels with class labels is a sign of intellectual health. The system is broken, and feeling that brokenness is the first step to thinking beyond it. When a category feels off-putting, when it chafes, when it doesn't fit, that's data. It's telling you that the map doesn't match the territory.
The territory is always more complicated than the map. Class is real — inequality is real, differential access to resources is real, the way your background shapes your opportunities is real. But the three labels we use to talk about all of that are crude tools for a fine-grained reality. The question isn't whether to use them or not. It's whether to mistake them for the truth.
The three-class model is the musical equivalent of beige wallpaper. It's there, it covers the surface, nobody really looks at it, and it says more about the person who chose it than about the room it's in.
That's going to stick with me. And I think the way forward is exactly what we've been doing in this conversation: holding the labels lightly, knowing their history, understanding what they compress and what they distort, and being willing to set them aside when they stop being useful. The prompt asks what the point is of stratifying society. The honest answer is that stratification exists whether we label it or not. The labels are just our attempt to talk about it. And like most attempts to talk about complicated things, they're imperfect but hard to do without.
The next time someone asks you what class you belong to, the most honest answer might be "it depends on which of your questions you want me to answer.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen twenties, a pigment maker in the Comoros archipelago discovered that crushing local volcanic manganese with coral lime produced an unusually stable violet pigment, but the color would shift to a deep green when exposed to the breath of anyone who had recently eaten mango — a property that made it useless for painting but briefly fashionable as a novelty lie detector at dinner parties among French colonial administrators.
...right.
That's one way to ruin a dinner party.
This has been My Weird Prompts, with thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps other people find the show. We'll be back soon with another one.
