Euripides reminds me that values and behaviors are more important than productivity alone.

Over the past four decades there have been periodic panic attacks among the chattering class about the disappearing middle class.  These almost always take the form of a weak encomium of the middle class and the accusation that the evil rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle class is squeezed out.

And if that were what was happening it might be concerning.  But what has actually been happening is that people in the middle three quintiles keep advancing up the income ladder.  The middle class has shrunk, but not because they became poorer.  They shrank because they grew richer, moving into the top quintile.  

Most of these panic attacks are experienced by comfortable middle class pen-pushing pundits who ideologically despise the market economy which secures their own livelihoods.  They are poorly disguised ideological attacks rather than a credible empirical argument.  Attacks by sophomoric dilettantes with Che Guevara tee shirts in their chest of drawers which serve as a reassuring reminder to them that they are indeed brave thinkers who challenge the status quo.  

I have had little patience with these peddlers of anarchy because everyone was getting more productive and thereby richer.  Or at least that is what I have long considered.  It was enough that the pedants were wrong about people getting poorer.  

However, a description by Euripides in The Suppliants makes me reconsider my position.  Keep in mind that this is from 420 BC.

There are three classes of citizens. The first are the rich, who are indolent and yet always crave more. The second are the poor, who have nothing, are full of envy, hate the rich, and are easily led by demagogues. Between the two extremes lie those who make the state secure and uphold the laws.

Forget quintiles and forget about all boats rising with the same prosperous flood.  In Euripides' model, there needs to be a middle and it needs to be populated as the ballast for the ship of state.  And the middle class are that ballast.  The poor are natural born anarchists and the rich are inattentive.  You need a well populated middle class as a category of those who are serious and actually tend to the communal well-being by supporting the laws and defending the state.  The often maligned middle class, the bourgeoisie.  

Paul Johnson touches on this in one of his early books, Enemies of Society.  He lists a series of ten pillars of civilization, number six of which addresses the middle class.

The sixth of our rules is that there is nothing morally unhealthy about the existence of a middle class in society. No one need feel ashamed of being bourgeois, of pursuing a bourgeois way of life, or of adhering to bourgeois cultural and moral standards. That it should be necessary to assert such a proposition is a curious commentary on our age, and in particular its mania for the lowest common denominator of social uniformity. Throughout history all intelligent observers of society have welcomed the emergence of a flourishing middle-class, which they have rightly associated with economic prosperity, political stability, the growth of individual freedom and the raising of moral and cultural standards. The middle class, stretching from the self-employed skilled craftsman to the leaders of the learned professions, has produced the overwhelming majority of the painters, architects, writers, and musicians, as well as the administrators, technologists and scientists, on which the quality and strength of a culture principally rest. The health of the middle class is probably the best index of the health of a society as a whole; and any political system which persecutes its middle class systematically is unlikely to remain either free or prosperous for long.

We have seen that there is a close connection between the rise of the middle class, and the growth of political and economic freedom.

Bth Euripides and Johnson are reminding me that the middle class is about more than income levels.  They are a package of behavioral and cultural attributes.  These behavioral and cultural attributes do, in general, ensure their continuing and growing prosperity.  But the important thing is the behavioral and cultural attributes themselves.  The productivity and income follow from the attributes.

Dierdre McCloskey tackles these attributes in her magisterial trilogy, Bourgeoise Virtues, Bourgeoise Dignity, and Bourgeoise Equality.   

Euripides is reminding me that the middle class perform a societal role above and beyond that of production.  They provide the moral and ethical grounding of society.  

Were everyone to become unimaginably rich, we would be at risk of dissolution through indolence, pettiness, and petulant bigotry.  We need the grounding of the values and behaviors of the middle class, regardless of income levels.  The middle class are an estimable functional category, not just an income category.