We have never been middle class. How social mobility misleads us

Although the ongoing contraction of the middle class in one part of the planet and its expansion in another captures our attention, we rarely question the category of "middle class" itself. In this book, anthropologist Hadas Weiss argues that the middle class represents a kind of ideology. Tracing it from its origins to the era of financialization, the author demonstrates the fallacy of the belief that our position in society can improve or deteriorate solely due to our ambitious and prudent investments in property and education. Ethnographic data from Germany, Israel, the USA, and other countries show how, in private life and politics, this belief drives us to pursue goals that contribute to accumulation but are ultimately self-destructive.