They're doing the same thing as you John, except they know they're doing it. It being what we used to refer to "forcing the distribution". Let me set you on the right path instead of just grabbing numbers and trying to make them fit. What you need to do to compare today's middle class with back in the day is to compare lifestyles, as in what its really like out there. You may be too young to remember but there are people here who can verify that back in the day a middle class family could afford a modest house, two cars, and could save enough for two kids college tuition in 20 years. And they could do it on one income.
When I talk about the middle class I'm not "forcing the distribution" at all. I'm using the convention of looking at the middle 68% of the population. In just about any distribution it's common for people to talk about "average, above average, and below average" with the convention being that the "average range" is +/- one standard deviation from the mean, "above average" is any value more than one standard deviation above the mean, and below average is any value more than one standard deviation below the mean. And in a normal distribution that translates to 16 percent being below average, 68 percent being average, and 16 percent being above average. Middle class if referring to a fixed proportion of the population in the middle. So when you compare the middle class of 2014 to the middle class of 1971 you're comparing the middle 68 percent of the population in 2014 to the middle 68 percent of the population in 1971. Nothing deceptive about that. Very straightforward.
Since I was born during the 1950s and my Dad worked in an oil refinery I'm plenty old enough to remember what it was like living in a middle class family back then among other middle class families. And, as I've written before, anybody who thinks the middle class was materially better off back then is nuts. Middle class people have way more stuff than they did back then. Bigger houses, better cars, lots more toys. Lots more in terms of material things, recreational opportunities, entertainment. I grew up in a house with a black and white TV such that every time you changed between one of the four channels available you had to walk outside and point the antenna toward where the station was. We never bought a new car because we couldn't afford to. And mind you people who worked as operators at petrochemical refineries as my Dad did made good money relative to other blue collar workers at that time. We didn't have air conditioning when I was very little. Attic fan. There were no cell phones. No computers. We lived in what was originally a two bedroom house that I'd guess was about 1200 square feet with one room intended as something else converted to a bed room so that my parents could have one bedroom, my three sisters could share another, and me and my two brothers could share a third. We had one bathroom for 8 people. No shower. Just a bath tub.
It was not unusual for us to have stuff like canned tuna mixed with macaroni and cheese or canned tuna mixed with cream of mushroom soup poured over toast for supper because my parents had to make things stretch. We never went hungry but we sure as heck didn't eat fancy either. Except for the oldest sister and oldest brother we wore hand me downs. And even with that we frequently went to school with pants with those iron on patches to close knee holes and make them last as long as possible.
And no it wasn't because my parents were wasting money or playing. They were "nose to the grindstone" people who didn't spend much on themselves at all. They didn't go out. Once in a while they might go to a high school reunion or a retirement party or something like that but that's it.
If you took a kid from the "typical" middle class family of today and sent them back in time to live under the conditions of a "typical" middle class family in the 1960s or 1970s they'd think they'd been sent to hell because they're so spoiled to all the stuff they have nowadays.
To me, having lived in the middle class back then, people who say the middle class is worse off now either didn't live back then or they've forgotten what it was like.
