Cannon Fodder

Or: If there were a 23-and-Me for socioeconomic class, you'd be in for a big surprise.

It ain’t easy being upper middle class. You’re not rich, not really, but you’re comfortable—at least for now. You worked hard. You made the right choices. You got the degree, landed the job, saved what you could. You’re in the tier where the tax hikes land, where the tuition bills sting, where every new policy for fairness and equality seems to be paid for by you.

Look, I’m a hard worker who’s well compensated with no kids and enough discretionary income to do it all: see the world, support my local dog rescue, and live past my sell-by date. If you’ve read anything I’ve written here over the past couple months, you already know I’m as pro-economic justice as the next pinko commie—but I’m not so anxious to climb Mount Good Samaritan that I’m handing out $20 bills to everyone I meet. I’m tired of paying for fairness, too.

We don’t get the benefits. We don’t qualify for help. The safety nets aren’t for us; they’re for the people below us, the ones we’ve been told didn’t plan as well, work as hard, or make the same sacrifices. Meanwhile, the truly rich—the ones with generational wealth, the ones with private islands and lobbyists on speed dial—skate right past the tax codes and write the rules to benefit themselves.

I don’t blame any of my fellow upper middlers who flinch when there’s talk of raising taxes on the wealthy to fund government programs to fill the gap between working two minimum wage jobs and a dignified human existence. You know what’s coming. Somehow, it always lands on your desk.

And you’re right to be frustrated. You’re right to feel squeezed. You’re just wrong about who’s doing the squeezing.

---

---

No purchase necessary to win. Some restrictions may apply.

Who is the “upper middle class” anyway? When you read about wealth inequality, the shares of total wealth are typically broken down into the top 1% , the next 9%, the middle 40%, and the bottom 50%. This is what most people mean when they say things like rich, upper middle class, middle class, and lower class—whether they know it or not.

This calls for a chart! I loves me some charts.

These brackets are useful to illustrate distributive shares because they make it clear just how few households—a little over 1 million as of 2023—control just over 40% of the total wealth in the US. Their average household wealth is $33.4 million, with a median of around $15-20 million due to the skew in the average caused by the extra super mega rich billionaires—of which there were approximately 748 of in 2023 (up from only 66 over the past 30 years. just in case you’re curious).

What these brackets aren’t good for is figuring out whose side you’re on. This fine slicing of the “not rich” to create class identity is a trick of the rich. If you’re like me, you probably think of yourself as upper middle class. That’s what most people in the next 9% do. You don’t see yourself as part of the working class, because “working class” is a term reserved for people who struggle to get by, people who live paycheck to paycheck. That’s not you, right?

But let’s talk about who created these class divisions. A hundred years ago, there were only two groups that mattered: the people who worked for a living and the people who owned everything. The ultra-rich realized that as long as workers saw themselves as one united class, they were a threat. So they did what powerful people always do: they divided and conquered. They broke the working class into subcategories. In the mid-20th century, economic thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith started talking about a “technostructure”—an emerging managerial class that wasn’t quite capitalist, but wasn’t quite labor either.

Middle class. Upper middle class. White collar. Knowledge worker. Anything to keep us from seeing the truth: if you have to work to live, you are working class.

The illusion of the “upper middle class” is particularly effective. It makes us feel like we’re part of the club, like we have something in common with the ultra-wealthy. We don’t. We don’t have their generational wealth. We don’t have their safety nets. We don’t have their power. What we have is an invitation to stand between them and the rest of the working class, to act as their human shield. We get just enough comfort to make us fear losing it, just enough privilege to make us feel different from the people below us, just enough proximity to wealth to make us believe we’re almost there.

The strength of the wolf is the pack.

So why should we see ourselves as working class? Because the moment we stop working, we fall. We’re taxed like workers, while the truly rich are taxed like investors. We pay full freight on our incomes, while the billionaire class parks their wealth in stocks, real estate, and offshore accounts—earning money without lifting a finger and paying a lower tax rate than a surgeon or an engineer. The upper middle class has nine times as many households as the rich (because math) but share about 10% less of the total wealth between them. A household at the top of the upper middle class would need to triple their wealth just to reach the average ranks of the rich.

Look at what’s happened to wealth distribution in this country over the last century. A hundred years ago, robber barons hoarded the majority of the wealth. Then, from 1945 to 1980, we saw the fairest distribution of wealth in U.S. history. The middle 40% and the next 9%—us—shared in that prosperity. Then, starting in the 1980s, the billionaire class consolidated power again. And our economic trajectory has mirrored that of the middle class ever since.

We feel richer than we are because we’re encouraged to compare ourselves to the people below us instead of the ones above us. But here’s the real comparison: the 1% have captured nearly all new wealth over the last 40 years, while the rest of us have flatlined. We haven’t fallen behind as badly as the middle class, but we sure as hell haven’t been climbing toward the billionaire tier. And we never will. The rules aren’t made for that. They’re made to keep us exactly where we are: close enough to taste wealth, but not close enough to touch it.

The people at the top don’t fear the middle class, and they don’t fear the poor. They fear us. If our 12 million upper middle class households made common cause with the other 121 million working class families, we’d have both the means and the motivation to upset the system. Let’s put our upper middle class advantages to good use. We’re educated enough to see through their propaganda. We have the resources to fund candidates who actually represent the 99%. And we’ve probably experienced enough world culture to see through the bullshit identity politics divisions that keep the working class fighting against itself.

The elite use identity as a wedge because it works. If they can keep segments of the working class at war with each other—over race, over gender, over immigration, over anything—they can keep us from realizing who’s actually screwing us over. They’ve spent 50 years convincing us that economic fairness and political equality are opposing forces. They aren’t. The 1965-1980 era proves that we can have both.

But to get there, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as junior members of the elite. We are not part of their club. We never were. We never will be. We are workers. And it’s time we started acting like it.

---

Author’s Notes

• Jul 27, 2025: Dick Dowdell, a fellow technologist and political commentator, just published this piece on Medium that zooms in on the post-1950 transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super-rich. His analysis is focused on the current favorite incarnation of the identity wedge used to fracture the working class: blame the immigrant.

Creative Process Transparency: This article was collaboratively written using generative AI. The thematic framing, argumentation, and structure were developed by me, while ChatGPT assisted in drafting and expanding key sections. The final edits and rhetorical elements were shaped by me. Based on our established attribution model, this article reflects an approximately 80/20 division of contributions. You can read the whole transcript here.