Brookings report – Half the world is now middle class or wealthier: “…Our “middle class” classification was first developed in 2010 and has been used by many researchers. While acknowledging that the middle class does not have a precise definition that can be globally applied, the threshold we use in this work has the following characteristics: those in the middle class have some discretionary income that can be used to buy consumer durables like motorcycles, refrigerators, or washing machines. They can afford to go to movies or indulge in other forms of entertainment. They may take vacations. And they are reasonably confident that they and their family can weather an economic shock—like illness or a spell of unemployment—without falling back into extreme poverty. By classifying all households in the world into one of these four groups, using income and expenditure surveys from 188 countries, we are able to derive measures of the global distribution of income. Our social enterprise World Data Lab—the maker of World Poverty Clock—has refined these estimates and created a new interactive data model to estimate all income brackets for almost every country for every point in time until 2030 by combining demographic and economic data. A lot has been written about the world’s progress in reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty, as highlighted in the recent Goalkeepers report put out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We believe that another story relates to the rapid emergence of the global middle class. This middle class story is probably bigger in terms of the number of people affected. In the world today, about one person escapes extreme poverty every second; but five people a second are entering the middle class. The rich are growing too, but at a far smaller rate (1 person every 2 seconds)…”