Word: richness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to any reasonable usage of the English language, those households in the top 5 percent must be thought of as upper-income or rich, not middle income. Surely no one would describe a ballplayer in the top 5 percent of hitters as a "middling" player! How much money must a family have to be in this magic top 5 percent? $1 million? $250,000? Not a bit of it! In 1987, the cut-off point was $86,300. Today, it is slightly more...
...have just voted themselves. Indeed, pretty much everyone you are likely to know, in the circles in which you travel, is in that magic 5 percent. That is why you think of it as middle class. But it isn't. The top 5 percent of any society are the rich, not the middle class...
What about the other 95 percent. Well, since people you think of as middling turn out to be rich, it follows that people you think of as working class are going to be middle class. Imagine a construction worker making the national average wage for his trade of $12.15/hour [still 1987 figures]. His wife works as a waitress in a diner, averaging $6/hour in wages and tips. If he gets two Saturdays of weekend overtime during the year at time and a half [i.e., 16 hours of extra work in the year], then the two of them...
Well, enough. The function of Harvard College is to guarantee NOT that you get into the upper-middle class, BUT that you do not run the risk of falling as low as the low end of the rich! The next time Martin Feldstein tells you the good news that unemployment has risen, you might ask him that what his Harvard salary is. [By the way, as anyone can discover by coming to the Umps campus and inquiring at the library, my salary at the moment-and for a long time to come, judging by what is going...
...more as a town cultural center, school and governmental center than as a church most of the year. Nobody lived in Chartres. I do not see our cities as ghost towns so much as a congeries of ghettos -- the city is already becoming a place where only the very rich, the very young and the very poor live. The middle class works in the city but doesn't live there. Those enormous central offices we have built in the post-World War II period are, I think, very largely going to be counterproductive. The clerical work will move...