The No Middle Class Thesis - Essay Example

The No Middle Class ThesisIntroduction The no middle class thesis can be explained as a theory, which basically states that the proportion of population that can be categorized as a middle class group is falling. In certain circumstances, people in the middle class section of the society may start earning more money and enjoy better standards of life. That way, they would not remain middle class anymore and become an upper class population. But this is not the case always; another possible reason behind depletion of middle class population can be their lowering incomes and deteriorating standards of life.

In such a state of affair, the phenomena of socio-economic mobility across social classes are downward and the overall situation is that of economic derogation.Evaluation of Perrucci and Wysong’s theory that America has no middle class Perrucci and Wysong hold that their approach of analyzing class differs from both the production and functional models. According to the authors, downward mobility takes place due to the events like loss of jobs, overproduction, etc., which shifts the “workers and their families deeper into the depths of contingent or excluded class segments of the new working class.

” (Perrucci and Wysong, 63) Therefore, the deductions of Perrucci and Wysong are neither optimistic nor comfortable from an institutional point of view. It is somewhat critical toward the American way of life.Evidential analysis of the theory During the 1980s, several countries in the developing world began to allow inflow of foreign capital. Consequently, the manufacturing industry of USA underwent a radical change. Since larger number of workers in the foreign countries like China were willing to work for lower wages, American manufacturing firms started to shift their manufacturing centers towards the developing countries.

In the 1990s, when countries like India and Philippines began to improve their IT educated manpower, multinational giants like AT&T, IBM, General Electric, etc. started to open their subsidiaries there. This initiated outsourcing of even the white collar American jobs. Based on the distribution of wealth across the different social strata of USA, it cannot be denied that the gulf between rich and poor has widened since then. Contextually, Perrucci and Wysong have shown that discourses on class in USA are a taboo subject.

Agreement with the no middle class thesis According to the no middle class thesis, the growing disparities between rich and poor are indicating that the falling number of middle income group families is not a good sign for a recessive economy given that the overall buying power of the people is falling. Rates of inflation and unemployment have soared up too.A possible alternative interpretation of the evidences: Now the question is: Can we interpret the evidences furnished by Perrucci and Wysong in support of their thesis in a much different way?

The answer is simple. Albeit we try to interpret the evidences differently, we will not be able to cancel out the no middle class thesis at all. Rather, we are too late in diagnosing and accepting the problem.Work CitedPerrucci, Robert, and Earl Wysong. The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? 3rd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Print.