Moawad Jad, Oesch Daniel
Institute for New Economic Thinking & Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Centre LIVES, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Comp Polit Stud. 2025 Jul;58(8):1636-1669. doi: 10.1177/00104140241271166. Epub 2024 Aug 8.
The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980-2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one's parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class.
公众辩论将中产阶级描绘成近几十年来的大输家，而处于中产阶级之上和之下的人群在就业和收入增长方面似乎境遇更好。这种说法在概念和实证上都存在缺陷。基于卢森堡收入研究（1980 - 2020年），我们针对法国、德国、波兰、西班牙、英国和美国的情况表明，中产阶级就业有所扩大，而工人阶级规模缩小。在过去四十年里，中产阶级的收入增长也一直高于工人阶级。法国、德国或美国工人阶级家庭的可支配实际收入每年增长不到0.5%，而中产阶级的这一增长率为1%或更高。队列分析还表明，比父母过得更好的前景对中产阶级来说是存在的，但对工人阶级而言却已消失。
