W.hat is the German middle class doing? She is allegedly under pressure, she is losing weight, she lives in fear of status or at least in worry. She has been doing this for years, hardly one goes by in which the largest income group is not told that she is generally worse off than before. “The German middle class is shrinking,” reports ZDF in this regard. Word is the editorial network Germany. “More and more people are losing touch with the middle class,” says Zeit-Online. “The middle class is shrinking – what should be done?” Asks Deutschlandradio Kultur. “Little advancement possible: The broken promise of the market economy”, states the Spiegel, while the ARD sticks to the title of the study, to which everyone refers: “The middle class in Germany is crumbling”.
In fact, the study recently published by the Bertelsmann Foundation and the OECD, which is supposed to contain this dramatic description, initially puts a question mark on its disintegration diagnosis: “Is the middle class crumbling?” Perhaps because its findings do not reveal any recent shrinkage. In 1995, it is said, 70 percent of German households belonged to the middle class. Middle-class households are understood to mean those who receive between three quarters and double the median net income (for single people: 2000 euros, for couples with two children: 4000 euros) in Germany. In 2018 that was only 64 percent.
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