ArticleComparative political studies2025
The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980-2020.
Article in Comparative political studies, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980-2020.Comparative political studies · 2025Article
- Polarised upgrading: the changing occupational structure of large cities in Germany and the UK, 1991-2021.Journal for labour market research · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.