The term middle-class values is used by various writers and politicians to include such qualities as hard work, self-discipline, thrift, honesty, aspiration and ambition.
Contemporary politicians in Western countries frequently refer to such values, and to the middle-class families that uphold them, as worthy of political support.
[1] Middle-class values can be contrasted with other values that may be held by other people belonging to other classes and historical time periods, such as: British economic historian Gregory Clark has controversially claimed, in his book A Farewell to Alms, on the basis of extensive research, that Britain may have been where the Industrial Revolution began because the British people had a head start in "evolving" – through a combination of cultural and possibly even genetic changes – a critical mass of people with middle-class values.
That is, those living within the bounds of western modernity must conform to middle-class expectations in order to gain access to wealth or cultural legibility.
According to Gregory Clark, it is possible that there is also a substantial genetic component, and this is why social mobility is so low across societies and across history, as he establishes in his book The Son Also Rises.