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The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly between cultures. In urban India, for example,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] a family is considered middle class if it resides in an owner-occupied property. In the United States, many families where the primary income-earner is employed in a blue collar job consider themselves middle class, when in fact they are working class by the classic Weberian definition.
In the United Kingdom, the term middle class implies those people who typically have had a good education, own a family house, and hold a managerial or professional post. Those holding a senior role in a profession or ownership/directorship of a corporation may be regarded as upper middle class, but in England this is as much dependent on background and education. The upper class is generally regarded as the aristocracy and landed gentry; very rich financiers buy country estates in order to qualify. It was commonly held that to join the landed gentry required a distance of least three generations from the time at which money was made (especially if through trade) and that those entering into its rank acquired the manners and mores of those already established. [1]
A persistent source of confusion surrounding the term "middle class" derives predominantly from there being no set criteria for such a definition.[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] From an economic perspective, for example, members of the middle class do not necessarily fall in the middle of a society's income distribution. Instead, middle class salaries tend to be determined by middle class occupations,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which in turn are attained by means of middle class values. Thus, individuals who might fall in the middle ground on a societal hierarchy as defined by sociologists do not necessarily fall into a middle ground on an economic hierarchy as defined by economists. As a result, intuitive colloquial and journalistic usage of the term casts a wide net and does not necessarily coincide with an academic sociological or economic definition.
In February 2009, The Economist announced that over half the world's population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand to mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter.[link widoczny dla zalogowanych] This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children's education.