&gt; Anyone able to offer an explaination of why having a large middle class is viewed as positive?<p>In the traditional view espoused by many advocates of capitalism, the <i>traditional</i> &quot;middle class&quot; (those living by a mix of capital and labor, either applying their own labor to their own capital as small business owners or yeoman farmers, or by having both capital to which other&#x27;s rented labor is applied and labor which they rent to others -- i.e, an upper-income wage laborer with some personal real estate and financial investments) is idealized; I&#x27;m not sure if there is a substantive reason for this so much as a PR one, though -- its something that the working class can somewhat understandably (even if not always <i>plausibly</i>) aspire to and the existing middle class can identify with. But, if you look at most of the criticisms of capitalism, they mostly focus on the problems that exist in the relationship between the <i>capitalist</i> class and the <i>working</i> class, so the more of the population that is in the <i>middle</i> class -- which is both less subject to exploitation than the working class and less capable of it than the capitalist class -- the less the problems associated with capitalism are.<p>Note, however, while this idealization of the &quot;middle class&quot; remains in the US, the definition of middle class in many media uses (including this article and the supporting research) has drifted to refer to a range around the &quot;middle income&quot;, which is very different from the traditional concept of middle class; most of the people in this band are firmly in the <i>working</i> class, with only the top-end of most median-income-centered definitions of &quot;middle class&quot; containing people that are plausibly in the <i>traditional</i> middle class.