Egypt's TWO middle classes

I often joke that Egypt is one of the very few countries where you may see, at a busy traffic light, a Porsche Cayenne angrily honking at a donkey cart that stubbornly won’t budge.
Yet my story isn’t about the driver of the Porsche, nor of the donkey cart: it’s about all those in between.

Much ink has been spilt depicting the erosion of Egypt’s middle class. While the poverty statistics are indeed increasing, with recent numbers putting 40% of the Egyptian society below the poverty line, this ‘erosion’ is impossible by construct - there will always be, by design, a “middle class”.

Egypt doesn’t have one - it has two. I postulate that there are two parallel ‘middle classes’, that meet at times, with unclear boundaries and a reasonably crowded seam, but overall maintain distinct lives, activities, jobs, social lives and street hangouts.

The middle class is usually considered to be the productive motor of growth in a society.
In Egypt however, only half of that middle class is productive, integrated in the world economy, a necessary step in the transformation of the economy.

The socio-economic continuum is broken. To be more precise, the economic continuum is broken on social distinctions.

In case I didn't make sense in text, perhaps the graph makes it a little clearer?

Class, family background and prestige, social demeanor, socio-professional categories (that is, jobs), and even foreign languages; all contribute to drawing the social chasm.

Individual, but also cross-generational inertia, is a large part of it. Despite the convergence of incomes, inherited social order remains strong. In what I believe to be typical Arab fashion, who you are - to others, especially - is in no negligible part defined by what your parents do and are. ‘Ebn nas’ (‘son of good people’, roughly) is a simple but potent popular euphemism for what we will call “Sub-class A”. The other group will be “Sub-class B”.

You know which group we both belong to, right?

Interestingly, their perception of each other is primarily, and erroneously viewed through an economic lens: those are considered poorer, those are viewed as richer, and that’s enough to explain the differences. That incomes are roughly similar, that they both complain equally of inflation, that they are, too, a middle class - is a scenario neither group has considered, and they choose to generally ignore each other’s existence.

Let me put it up-front: perhaps one sub-class may indeed be marginally wealthier than the other. Don't take that for granted: after all, as I argued in a older post, that a large part of the money on the Egyptian market today came from the 'blue collar' underclass.

Either way, the difference cannot be fully explained by finances. The behavioural leap and lifestyle difference cannot be explained by a raise - proof is, most people from either class who experience and income shock (upwards or downwards) will maintain most of their lifestyle determinants, following a ‘more (or less) of the same’ rather than ‘as much of something else’.

How different are they?

They will meet sometimes. Because they both take public transportation. Because they both vacation inside Egypt rather than abroad, they both go to the same cinemas.

But they won’t watch the same films. Those will watch the Dustin Hoffman film, these the latest Heneidy flick.
Some will vacation in Alexandria, Hurghada or perhaps even Aswan - the others will consider the Sinai, the Oases, and of course Sharm. And they won't be buying in the same North coast villages either.

Their jobs, too, are often different.

Sub-category B will include blue collar professions. I know for a fact that my plumber or mechanic make more money than I do; but as an marketing exec for a frozen meats company told me, ‘in Cairo, the job category often takes precedence over income category’ - as such, I would be targeted by his advertisement campaign, but my plumber wouldn’t.
Middle and upper government officials, as well as the military and police higher ranks, could be in this category, despite their relatively good salaries.

Sub-category A will include most freelance and independent professionals - engineers, doctors, etc - as well as professors, journalists, etc. Few public sector workers overall here.

They send their children to different schools; one sub-class - let’s call it sub-class A - heavily favours private, though not too onerous schools with a partial or full curriculum in a foreign language, generally English and sometimes French or German. For the second group, different schools, probably still private, may be favoured.

Those kids will go to different places to play. Though driving the same cars, Group A will probably drop their kids in the social clubs they have inherited membership in (but couldn’t afford it on their own today) - Heliopolis, Gezeera, etc; while Group B might drop their children at the neighbourhood club, the mosque/church club, or to a cheaper private club they bought membership in - says, El-Shams.

They will probably both go to state university - but again, Group A is more likely to join the English department (if there is one), a little more expensive and guaranteeing a notch of selectivity.

They might both hold their weddings in the same hotels, or perhaps in the same Airforce club ballroom; the continuum break will only be more visible, as Extended Family A will include some elements of the higher classes, while Extended Family B of the lower ones.

While looking to invest in real estate, Group A’s kids will opt for a flat in El-Rehab, Madinati, and such other new sanitized neighbourhoods; Group B’s might tend to buy in a place like the 6th of October or in El-Obour - or buy the apartment their parents have rented for the past 30 years.

And so on.

Future prospects

Adherence to either of those sub-classes greatly determines the chances of social mobility. If you belong to class A, your chances or moving upwards are greater than if you belonged to class B; and you’d be less likely to fall in poverty than the latter.

More importantly, if starting from class B, an income increase won’t take you to class A - since you started being roughly their equal - and it won’t take you to the upper class, which is not on your segment of the continuum. Rather, you’ll still be in class B - only with a higher income. You may be an economic class above, but not a social one.


Not convinced yet? Here’s an extra exercise for you.

As you watch television, notice the advertisements (and with the Ramadan scheduling, you get on average 20 minutes per hour of ads - time it!) you’ll realise that a large part, if not most of those ads cater exclusively to one of the middle classes.

‘Madinati’ selling its 150,000 USD condos. A new private college in the suburbs of Cairo. Goldi's new 32'' flat screen. And so on.

Financial differentiation, you say? I beg to differ. Let’s look at cheap consumer goods too: even those adverts are geared towards the same sub-class. Coca-Cola ads I watched this week (the ones featuring Karim Abdel-Aziz) take place in a magnificent beachfront villa garden which is largely above the means of most Egyptians (and everyone they know).
The ultra-slick lobby of the bank advertising its credit cards isn’t the bank Group B gets its salary transferred to (assuming their workplace actually offers bank transfers).

And those two fancily dressed kids playing football mess up an ultra-modern kitchen which is then cleaned by their slim and fair-skinned mother, in an advert for a detergent.

All this is a far cry from the life of most Egyptians. To be more precise, it neither represents what group B lives, nor aspires to; for group A, it probably looks vaguely like the house of their rich uncle (but one they’ll probably never own themselves).

As long as we keep ignoring group B, as an important and potentially productive segment of society, we’re marginalizing a huge societal asset, for no good reason.

What we need is a national, inter-class reconciliation process, where both segments acknowledge each other and maybe, just maybe, start considering one-another for their individual worth rather than through a strict social order.