Visiting fellow Andy Sumner was quoted in a Globe and Mail article on the Middle Class.
From the Article
As you fly into Istanbul, what you see below is a vivid illustration of our era’s great economic rebalancing: Expanding across endless rolling hills like frost crystals on a pane of glass are hundreds of thousands of houses and apartments, most of them owned by the more than 10 million new residents of this city who just a generation or two ago were shack-dwelling peasants in the country’s Asian east.
Similar tableaux will strike you, with equally dramatic force, as you enter Sao Paulo, Shanghai or Cairo. Never before in history have so many people escaped the most extreme forms of poverty. Never have so many been able to own homes and cars, to borrow money, to have a shot at education.
Yet, the view from 10,000 metres is misleading. When you get down on the ground and enter these new neighbourhoods, there’s a palpable sense of tension and frustration. These people are rather misleadingly classified as “middle class” – so called because they’re neither very poor nor very rich, and because they own things – but they’re barely getting by.
The staggering economic growth that has transformed Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America in recent years hasn’t raised all ships with equal speed. The rich (typically less than 5 per cent of the population) have gained extraordinarily. The very poor (typically at least 40 per cent) have gained, too, but not as much. But the middle class, though growing, hasn’t gained a larger share of the economic pie, or a higher standard of living.