The term middle-class values is used by various writers and politicians to include such qualities as hard work, self-discipline, thrift, honesty, aspiration and ambition.[1][2] Thus, people in lower or upper classes can also possess middle-class values, they are not exclusive to people who are actually middle-class. Contemporary politicians in Western countries frequently refer to such values, and to the middle-class families that uphold them, as worthy of political support.[1]
Middle-class values can be contrasted with other values that may be held by other people belonging to other classes and historical time periods, such as:
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This section needs expansion with: more mainstream views. You can help by adding to it. (May 2015)
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British economic historian Gregory Clark has controversially claimed, in his book A Farewell to Alms, on the basis of extensive research, that Britain may have been where the Industrial Revolution began because the British people had a head start in "evolving" – through a combination of cultural and possibly even genetic changes – acritical mass of people with middle-class values.
Others have claimed, by contrast, that the "natural inclination" of workers at the early stages of the Industrial Revolution was to work as few hours as needed to earn a subsistence living, and workers had to be brainwashed into working long hours. Some have claimed that compulsory education and advertising played a part in this brainwashing - compulsory education instilling obedience and hard work at an early age, and advertising instilling desire for consumer goods that had to be paid for with more work.
InA Farewell to Alms Clark disputes such explanations, citing persistent large differences in labour productivity in India and Britain, even when British managers and identical machines to those used in Britain were used, and even though both countries have compulsory education for children.
Since the middle class is the dominant class in western modernity (specifically after the industrial revolution), middle-class values hold cultural capital and hegemony over western modernial cultures. Middle class values are thus imposed upon an entire population through economic and cultural means. That is, those living within the bounds of western modernity must conform to middle-class expectations in order to gain access to wealth or cultural legibility. Middle-class values, or the lack thereof, are transmitted from parents to children, by schools, by employers, and by mainstream media, such as the quintessentially middle-class newspaper The Daily Mail.
According to Gregory Clark, it is possible that there is also a substantial genetic component, and this is why social mobility is so low across societies and across history, as he establishes in his book The Son Also Rises.
