The middle class is just very wide. Essentially anybody who doesn't starve when they're out of work for a couple of months is middle class. Upper class is distinguished from middle class whether you have to work at all. Very few people have enough passive income to afford a ~median lifestyle. Agatha Christie might not fit into middle class, but today a lot of people do.
Since she was English, I suspect Christie would have considered herself middle-class on the basis of her parents, and not believed that her wealth had much to do with what class she fit into. Equating income levels with class levels is more of a US thing, AIUI. (Though wikipedia suggests her family was definitely pretty wealthy: she said her father "was a gentleman of substance, and never did a handsturn in his life", and the family could afford to send her to a boarding school in Paris. So definitely the upper reaches of upper-middle-class.)
I've seen an updated definition that kicks in at the time you can take one or more yearly vacations, so basically just doctors, highly paid laywers, highly paid SWEs, and executives.
Maybe this is my naive European view, but taking a yearly vacation doesn't seem like a "rich person" thing here. You don't need to be earning vast amounts to afford a weeks package holiday in Spain.
It sounds strange to me, too. I grew up pretty poor in the US, and we always took at least one family vacation per year. Often, it was a camping trip or the like. Sometimes, it was a visit to a city or national park. My parents were very, very frugal. We almost never had new clothes. I guess it was just a matter of what they prioritized. Looking back on it all, I’d say they got just about everything right.
That's extremely US-centric. Nearly everyone in Europe gets 20+ paid days a year, including minimum wage workers and it's common to use at least two of those weeks to go somewhere that's not in the region that you live in.
They usually never take those yearly vacations since it would mean lost of practice and connections.
By this definition, the only people who are rich are young professionals in Western countries who actually take those vacations and go on year-long travel through South America, for example.
That would mean that Russia is a country of very rich people, since even the blue collar workers here can afford a family vacation per year, going to e.g. Turkey or Egypt - these tours come pre-packaged therefore really cheap. Middle-class youth routinely have 2-3 of these, going to more exclusive destinations. A lot of these will never buy a car, especially a new one, since a new car costs 10 years worth of vacations.
I agree with you, I think it is a very US centric point of view.
BTW I think they where referring to middle class: you are middle class if you can go on vacation. (IMHO it doesn't make sense to be considered rich if you can go on vacation)
In Europe we are used to having a lot of vacation time, it (almost) doesn't matter which is your job, in the US it is not like this.
