When the Baby Boomers, who were born between 1943 and 1964, were in their twenties, some 68% were in middle-income households. Only 60% of Millennials, who were born between 1983 and 2002, could say the same at a similar time in their lives.
The OECD defines the middle class as people earning between 75% and 200% of the national median annual income. Its data is an average of results from Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. [...]
Housing costs are squeezing the middle class the hardest; this now consumes a third of disposable income for middle-class households, up from a quarter in the 1990s. Housing and higher education expenses have been rising faster than middle incomes, the OECD said. [...]
Still, there are differences between countries. The OECD data show that the US middle class has shrunk as a result of both the lower and upper classes expanding, although the latter has grown by almost twice as much. In Spain, the decline of the middle class is entirely due to people falling into the lower class. In the UK, the lower class has gotten smaller, while the upper class has grown, but within the middle class, the lower-middle has grown while the mid-middle and upper-middle are in decline.
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