While households that make anywhere from $48,000 to $250,000 can call themselves middle class, to group such a wide range of incomes under one label, as politicians love to do, is to confuse the term entirely.

There are schoolteachers around the country that work second jobs after their teaching duties are done: one woman in North Dakota I spoke to was heading off to clean houses after the final bell in order to pay her rent.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.

Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.

Going in and out of a proverbial 'poor door' - a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing - of your city every day has its costs, even if the 'poor door' woman would be considered affluent in another location.

Essentially, if you are surrounded by those who 'outrank' you, it is likely to affect your identity in insidious ways.

Brand loyalty starts in the cradle and ends in the grave, as I wrote in my first book, 'Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.'

The increasingly progressive messages in marketing campaigns are clearly a mercenary attempt to entice millennials: they are trying to be 'woke.'

To be sure, many cultural elite pastimes are easily mocked and annoying.

If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.

Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.

The effect of robotization would be profoundly different if, say, truckers possessed their own autonomous vehicles rather than a corporation controlling them all.

Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.

If we don't at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.

In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.

The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.

In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.

Actors and writers and adjuncts are always looking for their next job: they find common cause with the female Uber drivers on contracts who have also been unprotected victims of sexual harassment.

Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

I grew up in New York City and in London.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

Social networks matter greatly, and our class calibrations are often around what college one attended, leading to gruesome institutional divisions between those who attend, say, community colleges and those who attend top-tier universities.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.

Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

To be 'squeezed' is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one's finances, one's social status, and one's self-image.

The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.

'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.

There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.

When I was growing up, my parents thought there could be nothing better than being a writer. And at that time, society afforded that impracticality.

I love the show 'Billions.' But the main character is basically a hedge fund scumbag, and he's the hero.

Kids don't come cheap.

Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.

Parents who press their children to succeed do so in hopes of preparing them for an adulthood of high achievement.

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

When I was 13, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground made more sense to me than anything else.

An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.

The Southern California arena rock, hair metal, laidback hippie garden culture - for many growing up in the '70s and '80s, none of it made us who we were like Lou Reed did.

On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.

The list of costly services that supplement some children's public education is growing longer and now includes consultants, tutors, and test prep. That's in addition to the homework help some stay-at-home parents can afford to provide.

Teaching has always been a poorly paid profession, particularly considering its educational requirements and responsibilities.

Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.

There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

As the world of independent feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialized by the mid-1990s, there was also a parallel, much more positive development: a resurgence in documentary filmmaking, thanks in part to the advent of the cheaper, lighter digital format that helped to offset the daunting costs of pursuing political aims through film.

I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, 'Do what you love.' On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.

There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.

Motherhood gives you access to a range of different intellectual experiences and ways of seeing the world, which, in a way, makes you more flexible in the workplace. But our employers, our colleagues, don't necessarily understand.