This, of course, gives rise to the question, what does ‘middle-class’ mean in Pakistan? It is a natural if lopsided desire, and one that can be seen quite clearly in Pakistan, where the term ‘middle-class upbringing’ is thrown around casually and with great confidence. Why would people shy away from their backgrounds? Largely because they want to portray the outcome of their lives as “more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious”. Similarly, a report published in The Guardian last year based on a survey of nearly 200 professionals found that people “”tend to downplay their own fairly privileged upbringings and instead frame their lives as upwards struggle against the odds deflecting attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy.”

The average person that gets an education, gets a degree, and builds a career by working their way up in a profession like to think that they got theirs as a result of their hard work and because they deserved it.Ī 2013 study published in the American Sociological Review found what it christened the ‘’grandparents effect’ - a phenomenon that showed that a child would be two and a half times more likely to find themselves in a professional-managerial role if just one of their grandparents had held a similar job in their career. But for most people that grew up upper and upper-middle class, acknowledging their status is a hard pill to swallow. The only time someone is happily inclined towards accepting the advantages that their birth afforded them is because the privilege comes with a sense of grandiosity. Most people have a strange relationship with their own privilege. And for a lot more, they will be an exaggeration. For a few of the people telling these stories, it will be true. They will involve recollections of difficult times, of working-class struggle, and of upward social mobility grounded in hard-work and ability. There will be tales of land-owning great-grandfathers and enterprising grandfathers that used the wealth from that land to set-up industries.īut for many others, the story will be very different. For a select few, that origin story will be steeped in privilege.

Ask a person for their background and they will delve into an origin story. It begins with a fetishisation of meritocracy.

Define upper middle class