Of the Middle Class and the Quasi-Middle Class : A Note

This note, addressing the often ambiguous definition of "middle classness," offers the concept of "quasi-middle classness" to the end of helping clarify the issue. What distinguishes quasi-middle classness from middle classness in this analysis is that quasi-middle classness is more narrowly a matter of consumption levels than middle classness, which tends to be a broader concept (a middle class person, for example, expected to enjoy a measure of security in their socioeconomic position, and opportunity to "rise," that someone merely engaged in material consumption at a "middle class" level does not possess). On the basis of this concept the note argues that what the advanced industrial countries produced in the post-war boom was not a generalization of middle classness, but of quasi-middle classness, and that the "decline of the middle class" much remarked since is more usefully comprehended as the quasi-middle class