"...his home country, where the middle class is burgeoning but almost half the population still lives in poverty."
This is a naive claim, it may appear so because people here in Mexico (specially in urban areas) spend a lot on bars, restaurants, vacations, gadgets and even cars.
What the author oversees is that this same people have not enough savings in the bank to survive even a couple of months without a job, owe lots of money to the bank and are unable to acquire more relevant goods like a home.
What the author calls middle class are in fact poor people with lots of toys and lots of credit cards.
Some people define it via income characteristics. So a college graduate, with no house or car, can be middle class if they land a good job.
Some people define it via wealth, so a retiree with no income can be middle class if they own their own home, and have a decent amount of savings.
Some people use the 'classical' (ala Marx) definition, in which the middle class are the socio-economic group that can buy the labour of working class, but typically work along-side them. For example, a mom-and-pop shop would have middle class owners, and working class employees.
However, for a lot of people including myself, "middle class" means people who own at least a little bit of wealth in the form of savings, enough to be able to survive for six months or a year without a job while not needing to cut costs on anything.
This of course is not the reality for maybe 95% of Mexican Citizens who live in perpetual debt with the banks and would go completely bankrupt if they ever stop working for as little as one month or maybe two.
I live here and believe me, there is not such a thing as a "burgeoning middle class" in Mexico; in fact, such claims sound like the typical BS politicians try to sell to the people.
Please lead with better material.
the dynastic nature of Slims wealth is relevant to Americans in that he's a major financial backer of the most respected media institution in our country
if that doesn't interest you, I guess that's your prerogative
If you want to read highbrow material, do not click on hacker news submissions with such impish titles :)
(what lead me to post it was this HN submission: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/business/media/reporter...)
Using HN titles to editorialize is something we specifically ask people not to do, so please don't do that.
That assumes a normal distribution of wealth. In an authoritarian aristocracy or another similar government structure, you'd see pareto distribution wherein the leadership has 99% of the wealth and the average person is sharing 1%.
Therein by the 'average', there is no middle class.
I think... economically, this is quite true: there is no middle class. Yet we still call people who look like the classical middle class of yesteryear, middle class: professionals, white-collar workers, freelancers, small business owners. It's more of a social class now, than an economic one.