As police chief Martin Brody famously said in 1975’s Jaws, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That may be the best way to describe the current state of the upper middle class in the United States, a class that is both larger and wealthier than what was previously thought or expected.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute discovered in new research that the country’s upper middle class has grown from about 12 percent of the population in 1979 to a record share of nearly 30 percent in 2014.
While there is no standard definition for what the upper middle class is, Rose defined it as any household earning between $100,000 and $350,000 for a family of three. When using this definition and adjusting for inflation back to 1979, Rose found the share of the population earning this much money has never been as large as it currently is.
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