A comprehensive report on the situation of the American middle class: Yesterday Once More, Say You Say Me, I Just Called To Say I Love You, etc. are their voices and the heart songs of everyone; "The Graduate", "American Beauty", "Desperate Housewives"

They are their images, and they are also stories popular in other countries; The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic are their reading materials, and they are also models that influence the world; Windows, Google, and Word are their tools.

It is a popular way of working in the world; even their restaurants such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, etc. have become a global fashion life.

A class formed based on the Mayflower Compact of 1620 is not only the main body of their country, but also the most influential group of people in the world. Why?

The Past of the Middle Class In the beginning, Virginia Americans during the Colonial Period could each be granted 300 acres of land (blacks had 180 acres).

In this regard, historian Tang Degang said: "Yanks are born middle class." The 19th century poet Whitman said: "The middle class is the most valuable class in any community." Starting with freedom, they are the American

A product of the historic changes in the liberal economy of the 19th century.

This historic change transformed rural and urban life, reformed old production methods, and alienated the middle class from the old world.

As Max Weber pointed out, in rural Europe the producer preceded the market.

There, farmers own land and tie themselves to the land according to ancient traditions. Even the power of the law cannot turn them into rural entrepreneurs in the American sense.

In the United States, markets preceded rural producers.

The middle class arose before and outside cities.

One of the most fundamental and historical differences between the social structures of Europe and the United States is the group of farmers who work together on small plots of land and the scattered, independent, free farmers who operate on a large scale.

This difference is important for understanding the characteristics of the American middle class.

In Europe, the middle class formed in urban centers, while in the United States, free farmers scattered in open rural spaces formed a huge independent old middle class - they were never farmers and aristocrats in the European sense.

American farmers do not have any historical burdens or traditional shackles.

Their way of life is absolutely individualistic.

Since they do not have European-style feudal ties, they are the social group most enthusiastic about promoting the capitalist mode of production and lifestyle.

In the early 19th century, about four-fifths of people engaged in professional activities in American cities and towns were private small business owners.

They engaged in a variety of economic activities: commerce, lending, speculation, transportation, home construction, and manual labor.

Between the two poles of society—the prosperous wealthy merchants of Boston's manufacturing companies, for example, and the hired hands who sold their labor on the docks, factory floors, and carriage houses—there existed a large group of small craftsmen and small businessmen who lived in the cracks and created a niche for the farmers.

A larger market, and expanded its own market in rural areas, and thus prospered, becoming a hotbed for the development of the old middle class in the United States, and entrusted the ideals and expectations of the old middle class on them.

They form a self-balancing middle-class capitalist society.

In this social center, there is no authority, and its members are entirely concerned with formulating a series of regulations and systems to protect property.

From the transformation of losing security to the late 19th century, the United States developed into a major industrial country and a major exporter of agricultural products (from 1869 to 1899, the national population increased almost three times, agricultural production doubled, and the total value of manufacturing production increased six times)

, American society has gradually grown into an urban industrial society characterized by large-scale production and high consumption.

These data show that most small business owners in the United States had lost their assets by the middle of the 20th century and went to work for only 2% or 3% of the population and owned 40% or 50% of the United States.

Among these people emerged the (new) middle class, that is, the white-collar class that lives on salary and provides services with knowledge and technology.

America became an employee nation.

For most people, it is no longer possible to possess assets; in the labor market, they are recognized not by possession of assets, but by income, power, and prestige.

The concentration of assets has deprived the old middle class of the basis of personal freedom and the means to rely on themselves, which has changed their life plans and psychology.

The mechanism of industrialization created many white-collar occupations on which the new middle class relied for survival.

The U.S. economic boom after World War II (from 1945 to 1960, the U.S. gross domestic product doubled) led to the rapid expansion of the white-collar class.

As Daniel Bell said in the introduction to "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society", "The development of a service economy focused on office work, education, and management work naturally shifted the labor force to white-collar occupations. By 1956, the American occupational structure

For the first time in the history of industrial civilization, the number of white-collar workers exceeded that of blue-collar workers. Since then, the ratio has been steadily expanding, and by 1970, the ratio of white-collar workers to blue-collar workers exceeded 5:4.