On Monday Professor Rosenberg brought up a quote that appeared in Nancy Foner’s famous book From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s two great waves of immigration: New York City is increasingly becoming “hollow in the middle”. I found this quote to be quite interesting, because it clearly contradicts with what I’ve previously learned. New York City’s middle class was gradually becoming smaller and smaller as the economy was recovering.
The middle class first made its appearance during the Industrial Revolution, which was a transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, and manufacturing processes were facilitated by technology and machines. As a result of this Revolution America’s economy was increasingly expanding and becoming better. The middle class included people that had “white-collar” jobs, such as lawyers, doctors, bank clerks and shopkeepers. Some middle-class individuals even contributed to the expansion of the economy by buying and constructing factories for manufacturing goods/products.
It’s really interesting how the things are so different in the two eras. I’ve learned that during the Industrial Revolution, as the economy was improving and more and more jobs were created thanks to the advancement of technologies; the middle class was unrelentingly thriving. Yet, in the 20th century when the economy was recovering and improving, the same middle class was becoming more and more “hollow”. Many jobs were also created thanks to the advancement of technology in the 20th century. For instance, Foner claimed that many jobs that had never existed before were created, such as computer programming. Both epochs certainly share many similarities, notably the economic improvement and technological advancement, yet the middle class of the industrial era was thriving and the middle class of the contemporary era is dwindling.
A thought that came up while reading Ban’s post was the ambiguity of the term “middle class.” I think the phrase middle class is a very ambiguous term that many people will have their own definitions for. For example, for one person garnering if someone is in the middle class may be based on yearly income level while for another it might be the value of assets such as investments and properties. Overall, I think most people would also assume that they’re middle class themselves without really verifying through statistical measures. The term middle class can be very different for someone during the industrial revolution versus today as well. It would be interesting to see what made someone a part of the middle class during the industrial revolution versus what makes someone a part of the middle class today.
Hi Ban,
I agree that it is very interesting to see the difference between how the middle class responds to economic growth in contemporary times, in contrast with what we saw during the Industrial Revolution. It is an issue that is especially relevant in today’s society where we see virtually no middle class at all. What I also found very interesting in the quote that you mentioned by Foner, was that the “hollowness” of the middle class as she described, pertained to only New York City itself. During the 20th century, the middle-class populations were moving out of New York and into the surrounding suburbs, leaving only the very wealthy and very poor populations in the big city. If you were to look only at New York City at that time you may have found a very similar landscape to what we see now – an immense and growing gap between society’s economic classes. In contrast, though, if you were to look beyond the border of the city during the 20th century, you would find a growing middle class while today that is becoming less true. Middle-class suburban homes still exist, but they are dwindling in number and living costs of suburbs surrounding New York City are also spiking. The way I see it, this “hollowness” which dominated New York in the 20th century is now expanding to include the suburbs around the city, but rather than pushing middle classes out to some other area, it is slowly eliminating it.