Reply #126: According to the media, as you say, the middle class is now 120 or 250 and up [View All]

[Leopolds Ghost]

Which means the vast majority of Americans have been socially relegated to what Michael Lind, former Republican turned Democrat think tanker, called the American underclass, those of us who cannot and never will send their kids to "leadership track" schools.

As for 2nd world, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the term has been slowly redefined over the years to refer to the actual developing nations (as opposed to the euphemism) -- China, India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, etc. Countries with that sort of early-industrial two-tiered class structure with a middle class not much bigger than (and directly dependent on) the wealthy elite. Everyone else is expected to remain cheap labor and be "enterprising" in hopes of one day bettering their condition. Entry into the professional class is very tightly regulated by qualifying access to professional education, while the rich have their own schools. The objective is to either raise a child to be smart enough to get into a magnet school on scholarship or strike it rich somehow, although someone (Atlantic?) recently reported that the number of people who actually do substantially better than their parents is vanishingly small, and there is less class mobility in the US than in a bunch of other countries.