Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [141]
Middle-class status is not an unrealistic expectation for rural arrivals: It has been the historic norm. It is what occurred in the cities of Europe and North America throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As we have seen, it is widely attainable in the more successful Western arrival cities today. And it can be observed in the arrival cities of the developing world. Turkish gecekondu neighborhoods have cultivated a new, internal middle class that now dominates the nation; former shack-town favelas, like Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha district, have evolved into desirable middle-income enclaves, and their São Paulo cousins have spawned a consumer and industrial boom and a new form of national politics. The more established slums of Mumbai, like Dharavi, now have internal economies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and within their labyrinthine walls I have encountered slum-based factories employing 40 or 50 people and financing computer-science educations for extended families.
Jardim Angela today is a good example of just such a middle-class arrival city. According to the five-band Brazilian measure of household wealth and consumption, in which band A are the country’s wealthiest 20 percent and band E the poorest fifth, at least 14 percent of people living in the favela district encompassing Jardim Angela now fall into the comfortably middle-class B band, and only 31 percent into the second-poorest D band, with more than half the favela’s population living within band C, the lower bounds of the middle class, a massive change from the 1990s.‡ It is a pattern repeated across the arrival-city favelas of São Paulo.8 You can see it in the colorful array of shops, services, and small businesses that fill the streets.
Still, these places remain the global exception rather than the rule. Many arrival cities are failing to give members of their second generation, no matter how hard they work or school themselves, the chance to enter the middle class. And that is jeopardizing economic growth and political stability in many countries. David Rothkopf, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described this neglect as a large-scale mistake: “With the notable exceptions of India and China and a few others, which show some heartening middle-class growth, we are doing a very bad job of building the middle classes, which are the foundation of stability and the antidote to the boom-bust cycles that bedevil much of the emerging world.”9
To explain the nature of this challenge, it is important to understand what we mean—and what rural-to-urban migrants mean—by “middle class.” One way to define a middle class is by identifying the middle-income range: you pick out those families that earn between 75 percent and 150 percent of a country’s median income. The economist Branko Milanovic did this for the entire world, dividing all 6.7 billion people into a “lower class”—which turned out to be those whose annual family incomes were below $4,000 annually, the median income of Brazil—and an “upper class,” those families with more than $17,000 a year, the median income of Italy. The lower class made up 78 percent of the world’s population, the upper class 11 percent, and the worldwide middle class, those families living on between $4,000 and $17,000 a year, another 11 percent.10
The middle class can also be identified by their role and self-identification. Even if much of the “middle class” today are better-paid factory workers and computer operators rather than the traditional bourgeoisie, an important identifying characteristic is their ability to deploy savings and investments to alter their future status. The middle class, by almost universal consensus, are those who can easily take care of all their food, housing, and transportation needs in a sustainable way across generations and who also have a consistent ability and willingness to borrow (and repay) money for investments in future growth, to accumulate savings and capital, to put their children through any