middle class Archives

The Mystery of the Missing Middle Class

Called the middle class, the middle income population is actually the group that is shrinking when it moves up or down the income ladder.

Economic History

How Your Lawn is About More Than Grass

Nothing but grass, lawns began as conspicuous consumption from the English and French aristocracy and now are a middle class manicured status symbol.

What's Trending

Where Prada is Called Ordinary

Purchasing less expensive luxury goods like Prada and Louis Vuitton, China’s growing middle class displays Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption.

Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup: 6 Mysteries

Our everyday economic stories involve participation rates, human capital, signaling, ROI, money, price, austerity, personal income, monopoly and bubbles.

Our Weekly Economic News Roundup and shrinking middle class

Economic Ideas

A Mystery: Trying to Find the Middle Class

While everyone refers to the middle class and most of us say we are in the middle class, few know the characteristics of the group to which they refer.

Economic Geography British Coastline Mandelbrot

Economic History

Seeing economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty’s favorite graph of the year at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, I thought of Benoit Mandelbrot. The father of fractal geometry, Dr. Mandelbrot told us that the closer you look, the more you see. From a…