by I recently came across a World Bank paper with the provocative question: is there such a thing as middle class values? It reminded me of some work earlier in my career where we often talked, and occasionally argued, about this very question. My view then, and now, is that the idea of middle-class values looks appealing but misses the large scale pattern of values changes now captured in ConsumerShift.
So, I was eager to see what this World Bank paper had to say on the topic. The authors surveyed six Latin American countries looking for evidence of an relationship between between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations. Overall, they found “no strong evidence of any ‘middle class particularism.’…The analysis also finds changes in values across countries to be of much larger magnitude than the ones dictated by income, education, and individual characteristics.” In other words, there is a larger pattern at work, which we’ve noted before as the shift from traditional to modern to postmodern to integral values. There is, however, a relationship between economic growth and values changes. Economic growth, by providing greater levels of economic security, enables people to test out new values orientations. The main point here is that it is not a middle-class phenomenon. So, to answer the question directly, let’s say it’s a myth, but like most myths has some basis of truth. Andy Hines
Leave a Reply