The emerging upper middle class

If you drive through the right neighbourhoods in Pakistan, you could almost forget how poor the country is. Cars that cost more than the median home in the country, restaurant bills higher than the median individual income, imported luxury items at specialty grocery stores that will make your local Marxist academic go into an apoplectic fit of rage.

If you are a recent graduate of an elite local university – or suffering from post-Fulbright depression, or its cheaper knockoff, post-Chevening depression – you might be tempted to view these as yet one more sign of Pakistan’s dysfunction. After all, these are clear signs of inequality, and inequality, you have been assured by your intellectual mentors, is bad. Throw in a barely relevant Gramsci quote and the intellectual superiority and self-righteousness cocktail is complete.

But while the righteous indignation may make some feel morally superior, it is not a useful framework to understand the phenomenon you are beholding.

Because what is unmistakably visible across urban Pakistan is not a handful of rich people continuing to get richer at the expense of everyone else, but rather the number of high-income individuals and households is expanding, and therefore the market that serves their consumption patterns is both expanding and diversifying.

In last week’s cover story, we talked about the rise of luxury retail through things like Yves Saint-Laurent, Armani, and Porsche operating retail outlets in Lahore as a signal of rising affluence among a small segment of Pakistani society. In this story, we will dive deeper into the characteristics of that affluent segment, the emerging upper middle class in Pakistan, and examine their place in broader Pakistani society.