We have never been middle class. How social mobility misleads us

Although the shrinking of the middle class in one part of the world and its expansion in another capture our attention, we rarely question the category of 'middle class' itself. In this book, anthropologist Hadas Weiss argues that the middle class represents a kind of ideology. Tracing it from its origins to the era of financialization, the author demonstrates the fallacy of believing that our social position can only improve or worsen through our ambitious and prudent investments in property and education. Ethnographic data from Germany, Israel, the United States, and other countries show how this belief in private life and politics compels us to strive for goals that contribute to accumulation but ultimately prove self-destructive.
The book is aimed at sociologists, political scientists, and economists.
2nd edition.