re: What do you consider "middle class"?

Here in the SF Bay Area:

Lower Class: Up to $30K
Lower/Middle: $30K - $70K
Middle: $70K - $200K
Upper/Middle: $200K - $500K
Upper: $500K and above

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0-50 Lower Class 50-75 Lower Middle Class 75-125 Middle Class 125-175 Upper Middle Class 175 and up Upper Class

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I would take about 10K off each of your numbers. But that's close to my opinion.

For most people middle class is wherever they think they're at.

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lower class - blue collar workers

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Wow. That made my head hurt.

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It's really a bell curve. The majority of households are in a small distribution...somewhere like 50K-70K. Individual income even lower.

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No its not. Link to back this up.

I'm definitely not upper class.

I repeat - class has nothing to do with income.

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Yet, you scoff at it as lower class because you want to think of yourself as that much better than anyone who would work with their hands and actually build something.

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yes, I look down on proles. That's what people who are in middle and upper classes do.

And you said that exactly like a prole would.

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What makes you upper class? What sort of special traits do you have? To simply state that anyone who doesn't work in an office is lower class is mind-blowing. Granted, labor is much cheaper now than it was in the 60's, but this isn't the 1910's either.

My mother and I are accountants and my father is an engineer. My brother makes a better living as a specialty welder, mostly working in New Jersey/NYC/SF Bay area.

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Upper class = don't work

But, you're right about one thing. Colonel IS the resident snob here.

I remember making you were a tye dye tshirt when you were like 5, and putting your hair in a pony tail. It was too short for it, but you looked hysterical.

Those neighbor kids sure did beat the shite out of you. Good times. Good times.

typically the person who makes the allegation is the one who is responsible for proof. Just my experience, but since you are old and probably not good at math I will be happy to oblige.

A normal distribution would suggest that about 2.5% of the population is more than 2 standard deviations from the mean.

Well per the US census bureau, the upper 2.7% roughly make 200k and above. This would mean that the two standard deviations from the mean would fit in there. We know the average income from that same census bureua (44k). This would mean that the standard deviation is at least 78k, probably higher since 2.5% is the cutoff, not 2.7%.

So based on this, on incomes lower than 44k, one standard deviation out would be roughly -34k in income. See the problem now? Sure some people take negative income but I don't think there are many that are more than one standard deviations out.

For the ease of this, let's say the standard deviation is 25k, which would allow for some negative incomes but not that large of a negative income. Your two standard deviations out from the top would put it at 95k. About 18% of the population makes more than 95k (per the census). Again it doesn't work.

There are a bunch of tests you can run to see if a dataset is normally distributable. Unfortunately I would need the full data set to run them and I don't have them. Nor would I take the time to compile this.

Its pretty hard to have normal distributions with one side of the distribution is bound. Also the commoness of normal distributions occurring in nature/society has been debunked.