WI: 19th century middle class

Suppose that rather than the famed American middle class emerging in the mid-20th century, it emerges in the mid-19th century? Suppose there had been earlier unionization to put a stop to large-scale exploitation of laborers, along with earlier regulations such as workplace safety standards and the minimum wage, combined with the massive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution? Say the OTL 1950s middle class expansion happens in the 1850s.
 
Rather unlikely. No accumulation of Capital as yet. Half or more of the population were subsistence farmers.
err... the 19th century did have the american middle class rise. Throughought both the first and second industrial revolutions the middle class as we know it was established. Most of america by the 1880s was not subsistence farming, it was mainly manufacuring and commerce that dominated the 19th century american economy.
 
This is implausible, for two reasons.

First, the postwar US middle class society was not just about income distribution, but also about high overall levels of wealth. To wit, income inequality in the US today is about the same as before the Great Depression. Today, the US is clearly a middle class society. In the 1920s, it wasn't. There was a growing urban middle class, but most urban Americans were working class, and the country was still 40-50% rural - actually rural, centered on farming, and not the exurban life today that people call rural. How do you build a 19c middle class recognizable to today's Americans, when electricity hasn't yet been invented, cities do not have running water, cars have not been invented yet, and of course there's no such thing as household appliances?

Second, even getting the income distribution in the 19c to be the same as today is hard. Inequality was high all over the developed world then - the Gini indices were in the 45-50 range. It took the physical destruction of capital associated with the world wars to bring that down - Piketty's r > g vs. r < g and all that.
 
You could make the argument that farmers who owned their own land, plus tradesmen and merchants, constituted a middle class by any pre-20th century metric. In medieval times such farmers would have been considered "yeomen" or "freeholders" and would have made up the small middle portion of society.

Rather unlikely. No accumulation of Capital as yet. Half or more of the population were subsistence farmers.

The vast majority of 19th century farmers in the US were not subsistence farmers.
 
err... the 19th century did have the american middle class rise. Throughought both the first and second industrial revolutions the middle class as we know it was established. Most of america by the 1880s was not subsistence farming, it was mainly manufacuring and commerce that dominated the 19th century american economy.

Yep, although the proportions of Americans still farming the land was still huge by 1900.

Suppose that rather than the famed American middle class emerging in the mid-20th century, it emerges in the mid-19th century? Suppose there had been earlier unionization to put a stop to large-scale exploitation of laborers, along with earlier regulations such as workplace safety standards and the minimum wage, combined with the massive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution? Say the OTL 1950s middle class expansion happens in the 1850s.

I'm a little confused by the question.

As FIIB points out above, the middle-class was already emerging in the 19th century. Do you mean a time where the majority of Americans see themselves as middle-class as happened in the late 20th century? That is much harder to achieve without huge changes to production processes - as long as primary and secondary economic sectors need masses of bodies (factory workers, farm labourers, etc) you will have the majority of the population engaged in employment considered generally as "working-class".

But this is the bit that really confuses me:

Suppose there had been earlier unionization to put a stop to large-scale exploitation of laborers, along with earlier regulations such as workplace safety standards and the minimum wage, combined with the massive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution?

Are you seeing this as a reason why the middle-class might have emerged or as a consequence of a bigger middle-class?

Unionisation doesn't create middle-class men out of working-class employees - in fact most studies show that even those men who climbed up Union hierarchies or were recipients of higher wages and better conditions because of industrial action still considered themselves working-class.
 
You could make the argument that farmers who owned their own land, plus tradesmen and merchants, constituted a middle class by any pre-20th century metric. In medieval times such farmers would have been considered "yeomen" or "freeholders" and would have made up the small middle portion of society.



The vast majority of 19th century farmers in the US were not subsistence farmers.

Of course they were. What they produced and used at home had far more effect on their well being that what they produced, sold for money and then used the money in town.
 
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