According to a Vienna-based think tank, the World Data Lab, a remarkable milestone was reached this week – for the first time, half the world’s population can be classified as middle class. Obviously, there is wide room for interpretation as to what constitutes membership of the middle classes – the World Data Lab defines it as the ability to afford a washing machine and to be able to go on holiday. But it is nevertheless an indicator which deserves far more attention than it gets paid. After all, it is not so very long ago that economists would have described the middle classes as constituting a small proportion of the population even in the developed world. Go back 60 years and far less than half the UK population would have fitted the World Data Lab’s definition of middle class.
Yet ask a good many people in Britain how they would describe the majority of the world’s population and they almost certainly give the answer that they are living in ‘poverty’.
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