Yair Lapid, Israel's finance minister, created an imaginary person who he thinks embodies the country's middle class.

I went to a private Montessori school in Atlanta from preschool through the third grade that my middle-class parents were able to pay for with a scholarship that I got for doing extremely well on little-kid-level standardized tests. The majority of the families that sent their children there were very well-off.

What is Middle Class in Manhattan?" asked this New York Times real estate section story this weekend that was widely passed around.

Middle Class Snack Kids were raised without some of the finer things, but with a mindset that life was taken care of in all the important ways. We may not have had that new Walkman, but damnit if there weren’t cookies made by Grandma every day.

I grew up in some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the nation thanks to my dad's position as a prep school teacher and coach. My brother, sister and I rode our bikes up and down hallways carpeted with Saarinen rugs, and spent our summers on a prep school campus that educated the bluest of blue bloods, including several U.S. presidents, prominent businessmen and authors. We settled for a few years on Long Island, where my dad was a teacher and my mom was a school librarian at the exclusive day school we attended, and my siblings and I were granted a ticket into an elite world that was far from our birthright.