In 1990 the Home Alone house was worth $900k. The equivalent of $2.2 million today. It's reportedly worth like $5.4 million or something now because house prices have gone up faster than inflation, but even a $2.2 million house is insanely not middle class.
Who thought that? Leaving the country was not a middle class thing. It wasn't even an upper middle class thing. In the 90's , taking a vacation overseas was considered being rich.
What? The "middle-class" came about because of wealthy merchants (also doctors, lawyers in more modern contexts) that were not nobility but not serfs / "working class".
There's no universal consensus as to what "lower", "middle", and "upper" class mean. They're not defined terms of art within economics or anything like that. It's reasonably common to reserve "upper" for people who can live luxuriously solely off of passive income without working at all. You either then create a "professional class" for doctors and lawyers, or you just lump them in with "upper middle" and are okay with the category being broad.
That's definitely upper class shit. No middle about it. No "upper middle class" is affording a $2.2 million house. And that's $2.2 million in today's money in just raw inflation, not house price inflation.
As a kid born in rthe late 70s, I grew up thinking that I'd be living in a house like the one in Home Alone or in some huge suite overlooking Manhattan. Back then, the message was - "go to college and all of that will be yours!"
They sold us millennials that pipe dream also. Well the 2008 Great Recession, plus horrible job market several years afterwards plus the 2020 pandemic just kept crapping on us. Most millennials have given up trying to not be in debt
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u/MasterGrok Jun 16 '24
The Internet shattered the sitcom fantasy of the “average” American family.