AI Summary
5 min readThe term “working class” is so elastic that when Gallup asks Americans to self-identify, plenty of people earning over $100,000 a year check the box. Labor economist Catherine Ann Edwards, host of The Optimist Economy podcast, tells Brittany Loose that the definition has been stretched so far it’s nearly meaningless — and that this ambiguity serves politicians better than it serves the people who actually need help.
Where the term comes from — and how it broke
The origins are concrete. “Working class” emerged during the Industrial Revolution in early 1800s England to describe people who labored but owned nothing — factory hands as opposed to subsistence farmers who worked land they held. That core idea of “working but not owning” carried through the 19th century. In the 20th-century U.S., however, the definition shifted to a proxy: education. “We tend to think of it as someone who is high school educated but not college educated,” Edwards says, and as someone who makes lower wages. But those proxies have never been stable, and today they are actively misleading.
The political shortcut that distorts everything
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:32) **The Core Feeling of Being Working Class** - Host Brittany Loose introduces the episode’s central question: what does “working class” really mean, and who are politicians talking to?
- 2 (01:56) **No Textbook Definition: The Historical Origin** - Labor economist Catherine Ann Edwards explains that “working class” has always been a fungible term, rooted in the Industrial Revolution.
- 3 (04:36) **Self-Identification vs. Economic Reality** - Even people earning over $100,000 now call themselves working class, complicating the definition.
- 4 (05:08) **The Political Elephant: White Men Without College Degrees** - The political focus on “working class” is actually a focus on white men who shifted from Democrats to Republicans over the past 50 years.
- 5 (08:34) **The Distraction of Nostalgia for Manufacturing** - The political conversation is stuck on bringing back 1950s manufacturing jobs, which is not a viable economic future.
- 6 (14:22) **The Shift from Liberal to Conservative Economic Eras** - The U.S. has been in a conservative economic era for about 50 years, with both parties deferring to markets over regulation.
- 7 (18:28) **Market Failures That Hit the Working Class Hardest** - Edwards uses healthcare and child care as clear examples of markets that fail without government intervention.
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Show Notes
It’s a term that we hear often (especially around election time), but more specifically, who are we actually talking about? According to labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, host of the Optimist Economy podcast (@optimist_economy), the working class is a group of people who have the least amount of pay, benefits, and protections in the labor market. In this week’s episode of It’s Been a Minute, host Brittany Luse chats with Kathryn about what economists, politicians, and everyday people get wrong about the working class.
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