linguoboy wrote:vijayjohn wrote:I find it hard to accept someone with a four-year college degree as "lower-class" barring extraordinary circumstances (e.g. joining the ranks of the long-term homeless due to mental disability).
Why? You've never heard of poor people with PhDs?
Of course I have. A friend who used to be a full professor just got accepted to public housing. But poverty in old age isn't an unusual challenge for members of the middle class.
Well, it's not limited to old age, either. People who just graduated with a PhD often have trouble finding jobs these days, and a lot of grad students are poor.
vijayjohn wrote:Others seem to perceive me as having nothing.
And how do you judge this? Do you find that people treat you badly in stores because they think you can't afford to buy anything and are just there to look around and/or shoplift?
No, because I rarely go to stores in the first place, and when I do, it's almost always with my dad who dresses like someone going to work in India in the seventies (i.e. he dresses pretty formally).

But okay, maybe they don't perceive me as having
nothing; they (depending on who "they" are, at least) may even be jealous that I still get to live with my parents. They also tell me I could easily be getting a better job than I have, though I've never found that to be the case. Some people say I let people take advantage of me too easily (at work, so I suppose they don't think I'll make much money or anything). Some people who I worked with don't understand how I could possibly like my job (I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with social class at all, but who knows. Having a job you like is probably a luxury in some sense, right? Yet if your job doesn't appear desirable, does that mean people also think you're working there because you can't afford anything better? Or is it just completely unrelated to class?).
I'm just curious as to whether my class has changed over time or something. Maybe it hasn't, but I don't really understand how that works.
what site was this?
Well, I found this on two: both
here and
here. The second one was even more puzzling to me because they give plenty of information on how to interpret their figures yet don't specify "annual."