Mr Murray starts by lamenting the isolation of a new upper class, which he defines as the most successful 5% of adults (plus their spouses) working in managerial positions, the professions or the senior media.

ECONOMIST: Lexington

Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one in the district, which includes the Hamptons, the New York upper class's version of Disneyland, as well as several retirement communities.

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The prevalence of wide-screen televisions, fancy stereos and home-karaoke machines in Shanghai apartments suggests that this new upper-middle class has more money than it admits to.

ECONOMIST: Not quite a billion

In emerging countries never have new middle and upper class households grown so fast, even though the average household similarly cannot remotely afford to buy a house in a major city like Shanghai.

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My parents are both professors and they now live in a brand new four-bedroom house in an upper-middle-class suburb in Philadelphia.

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The Mahindra E2O is a four-seater hatchback targeted at upper-middle-class families in need of a second car in congested cities like Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore, where it expected to first go on sale.

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Less populist, Tim Clark, president of Emirates, which has ordered 45 planes to fulfil its ambitions of establishing Dubai as a new global hub, says that business and first-class passengers will enter through separate doors to an exclusive upper deck.

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And so what you end up with in New York City, is a very small number of very good schools that serve largely middle, and upper middle class kids - and then a large number of not-so-good schools that serve mostly poor kids.

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