“If a $100,000-a-year household thinks itself to be middle class,” the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol once wrote, “then it is middle class.” This sentiment is widely held, but it makes no mathematical sense. Any family whose income exceeds that of 90 percent of all other families cannot sensibly be called anything but rich. To believe otherwise would oblige you to judge your child mediocre when his teacher gives him an A.

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• money