WHAT DEFINES THE middle class has long been a moving target. But it is often marked by an enduring sense of precarity.

This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith talks with historian Andrew Seal, who teaches in the economics department at the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Seal’s research is focused on how members of the middle class think about their cultural and economic place in society.

The middle class as an extension of the post-World War II “American dream” was associated with certain types of consumption, like a single-family home or a car, he noted. The association between having a house in a desirable area has been tied to middle-class identity since the industrial revolution. But class boundaries are malleable, and change as societal conditions change.

There is a similar dynamic with the idea of the Midwest, said Seal — a Midwest native.

“Both of those concepts are really fuzzy at the edges,” he said, “but they play a necessary role in kind of locking in place our concepts of the other regions — in the case of the Midwest — or other classes, in the case of the middle class. And people from either the middle class or the Midwest often kind of struggle to identify what makes them belong to that.”

They are as much defined by what they are not — not working or upper class, and not the Northeast or the South or the Western mountain regions — as by a collective sense of identity and cultural signifiers.

Seal points to four ways that people tend to estimate their own class and their neighbors’: income, which is hard to compare with others; consumption patterns, like a detached single-family home in a suburb; occupation, which is tricky because there may be a distinction between blue- and white-collar work, but no clear cutoff between middle-class white collar and upper-class white collar; and the increasingly salient marker of higher education, which has become quite expensive and often necessary to get those coveted white-collar jobs.

“We see the fact that you have these four different dimensions — and that you can be middle class on one of them, or on two of them, or on three of them, but not on all four of them — makes the middle class inherently unstable as an identity,” he said. “You’re always maybe slipping a little bit … that makes it really difficult to maintain a kind of sense of stability and security.”

At the same time, a more recent focus on economic inequality has sharpened some of the conversations around class security, Seal said.

One way to define the middle class is a lack of generational wealth, he noted, “where your parents being middle class doesn’t mean that you can coast, and stay in the middle class. You have to re-achieve those markers on your own.”

On the episode, Smith and Seal explore what a new poll tells us about middle class anxiety today (5:00), where “American Dream” iconography collides with the idea of a middle class (10:00), and how that intersects with media portrayals, demographic differences, and political promises.