11/14/2023 0 Comments Lower middle class houseThe idea of using income alone, to classify people, doesn’t always go hand in hand with other measures of wellness like wealth, asset ownership, type of employment and all the other social denominators.Īnd in Pakistan, it is even murkier than usual. And that is where the complexity lies in many ways, what determines your class? Is it cash, credentials, or culture?įiguring out class is a complex exercise. Meanwhile, the same 50,000 will never render a similar privilege to, say, a self-employed electrician. ![]() 50,000 as a 16th grade government officer in a ministry, and your social connections and access to power alone would be enough to take you out of the middle class. Or are they at the intersection of the two mentioned above, namely the different types of middle class. Are they the labor for the means? These are the lower classes. Do they own or control the means? These are the CEOs, Landlords, and people in power. What that means is that someone’s class is judged better in terms of their relation with the means to produce wealth. Durr-e-Nayab of the Pakistan Institute for Developmental Economics (PIDE), “the concept of class can be traced back to Karl Marx with his classification based on the relationship to the means of production.”. That is because the concept of ‘class’ itself is a confusing one. According to different economists, determining what ‘class’ a person belongs to can be based on income, wealth, consumption, demographics, and even aspirations. Except this is not how it works anywhere. In terms of wealth and income, one would think that figuring out where ‘middle-class’ falls would simply be a question of calculating the middle point between the richest and poorest person in a country. And there isn’t a better point to begin talking about it than with the term itself. Besides, is the picture painted solely by incomes a good metric of classifying people? And who defines what those income levels are? It is worth taking a closer look at what the term ‘middle-class’ means in Pakistan in conversation and in numbers. But then there are also certain global measures of class that come into the picture. Declared annual incomes, for example, can give a fairly good picture of how the populace of Pakistan can be classified according to their incomes. There are more than a few ways to answer that question, and depending on who you ask the conclusion you reach will be different too. This, of course, gives rise to the question, what does ‘middle-class’ mean in Pakistan? It is a natural if lopsided desire, and one that can be seen quite clearly in Pakistan, where the term ‘middle-class upbringing’ is thrown around casually and with great confidence. Why would people shy away from their backgrounds? Largely because they want to portray the outcome of their lives as “more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious”. Similarly, a report published in The Guardian last year based on a survey of nearly 200 professionals found that people “”tend to downplay their own fairly privileged upbringings and instead frame their lives as upwards struggle against the odds deflecting attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy.” The average person that gets an education, gets a degree, and builds a career by working their way up in a profession like to think that they got theirs as a result of their hard work and because they deserved it.Ī 2013 study published in the American Sociological Review found what it christened the ‘’grandparents effect’ - a phenomenon that showed that a child would be two and a half times more likely to find themselves in a professional-managerial role if just one of their grandparents had held a similar job in their career. But for most people that grew up upper and upper-middle class, acknowledging their status is a hard pill to swallow. The only time someone is happily inclined towards accepting the advantages that their birth afforded them is because the privilege comes with a sense of grandiosity. Most people have a strange relationship with their own privilege. And for a lot more, they will be an exaggeration. For a few of the people telling these stories, it will be true. ![]() They will involve recollections of difficult times, of working-class struggle, and of upward social mobility grounded in hard-work and ability. There will be tales of land-owning great-grandfathers and enterprising grandfathers that used the wealth from that land to set-up industries.īut for many others, the story will be very different. For a select few, that origin story will be steeped in privilege. Ask a person for their background and they will delve into an origin story. It begins with a fetishisation of meritocracy.
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