The emergence of a 'new middle class' in Indonesia under Suharto’s 32-year dictatorship (1965-98) was taken by the international economic community as proof of increasing prosperity under a successful capitalist transition. Whilst critical scholarship has provided a rich understanding of economic transformation at a national level and changing cultures of consumption and aspiration, less is known about the more microeconomic material foundations on which this prosperity was supposed to stand, and thus the translation of economic growth into the everyday experiences of ordinary people. By reading an intellectual history of changing measures of poverty and class amongst international development institutions against annual household labour force surveys, this paper examines changes in the working lives of middle-income and white-collar employees, calling attention to the insecurity of their comparative prosperity and vulnerability to poverty. The paper resists taking as given the alignment of global capital, the national economy and individual lives, as pre-determined a particular hierarchical relation between them, or reverting to a ‘flat ontology’ (Brenner & Marston 2000-2005). Ultimately, the Indonesian middle class highlights the centrality of attention to scales and the ‘frictions’ produced between them (Tsing 2004) for understanding experiences of economic transformation and developing ‘global histories’ of capitalism.