Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.
When I recently spent a night at a homeless shelter, I was dismayed that members of the middle class had moved in and that earning above the minimum wage did not protect adults from having to share a room with dozens of others.
It's much easier for a middle class Indian entrepreneur to start up a computer company than it is for an Indian company to build roads and transportation systems suitable for a population that is getting wealthier and demanding more basic services.
Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
I've already begun to put pilot programs in place that give CUNY grads opportunities to get good tech jobs. We should expand on that so that New Yorkers are getting those jobs, because those jobs are probably one of the biggest 21st Century pathways ...
The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Am...
Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest th...
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a sol...
For most of the 20th century, we didn't just enjoy economic success in Michigan, we defined it. Our innovators and entrepreneurs created the world's most productive companies, and our unions made sure that productivity led to broad middle class prosp...
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
Post-military service can be a period of anxiety and uncertainty. So many men and women return and ask themselves: what now? The Labor Department is here to help answer that question with an array of programs designed to clear pathways into the middl...
In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American colle...
'Fowl Space' was a lovechild of boredom. While in class, two of the developers started passing designs back and forth. Somewhere in the middle of all that ink and crumpled paper, a chicken in a space helmet was born and thus we have 'Fowl Space.'
There were no examples of girls like myself becoming successful actresses. To be an actress in England was a serious, upper-middle class girl's profession. I just thought I would never be accepted unless I pretended to become somebody I wasn't.
My generation's parents told their children, 'Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.' But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that...
Do you realize that a middle-class couple, one archaeologist, one dolls' expert, can't move from their house because ancient spirits are blocking them in? It's a reasonable sort of day's experience, isn't it?
I'm tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.
First, I was so dazzled and besotted by India. People said the poverty was biblical, and I'm afraid that was my attitude, too. It's terribly easy to get used to someone else's poverty if you're living a middle-class life in it. But after a while, I s...
It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was...
