Under Class, Lower Class, Working Class,Middle Class

[The Falling Reverend]

I've been perusing the threads on UHC here over the last couple of days & I keep seeing these terms being thrown around. Now I'm sure people may have different views on the exact definition of each term but some people seem to have a skewed outlook on this type of thing.

The following is just my opinion.

Under class-people not willing to work. Drug dealers,welfare scammers, people able to work but claiming disability(I suppose this could be lumped in with welfare scammers), petty criminals and the like.

Lower class-People willing to work or already working but can't really get ahead. People that bust ass but still can't seem to get that slightly better place to live, or build up any kind of savings.

Working class-People who work hard but don't really have any desire to climb the social-economic ladder. They like where they are and what they do & seem to be proud of earning what they have.

Middle class-People who work, but live comfortably. Generally they are home owners, have a bit of a savings built up, & don't really have to worry if they have enough money left in the bank to buy groceries after they pay the utility bills.

Now I'm just generalizing here & saying what I think based on experience and observation. I'm sure someone with more knowledge on the subject could break it down even more.

So what say you?

[Malthus]

To my mind, at the bottom are those who choose or are forced by circumstances to live lives on the margins of society.

Above them is the great mass of people who live within the bounds of society but are required to earn a living. These used to be divided into a multiplicity of shades and gradations (along the lines of "lower middle class' etc.), but increasingly only two really matter:

A- those who provide services which are in effect interchangable with the services of other people, and so ideally require job security from their employer (through unions and the like);

B- those who either own thier own means of employment or who provide professional-type services which are unique and so do not ideally require job security from their employer.

Above them are people who live within the bounds of society but do not need to personally earn a living (and are not living on a pension or the like): in short, the very wealthy.

To my mind at least the difficult question in Western society at least is that group B above is increasing in wealth and power, whereas group A above is tending to lose the job security that it needs and so is decreasing in wealth and power. In short, society appears to be stratifying in what used to be described as the middle class.

[BrainGlutton]

From Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, (http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253) by Paul Fussell: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell)

My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
------------------------
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
------------------------
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it's not riches alone that define these clases. . . . "Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor," says George Orwell, "but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but -- this is the essential point -- generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born." When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, "The guy has no class," he was not talking about money.

* * * *

Not that the three classes at the top don't have money. The point is that money alone doesn't define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. . . . The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pres, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely. . . .

"When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. . . .

* * * *

The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. . . . And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. . . . When you pass a house with a would-be impressive facade visible from the street or highway, you know it's occupied by a member of the upper class. . . .

* * * *

We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited "things" (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.

Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of "overnight guests" are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most "role-reversed" of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family's middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you'll have inferred already, that it's in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others' Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.

* * * *

. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .

"Status panic": that's the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles' need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .

If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that's the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They're also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they're in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the "marketing" (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. "The training makes our men interchangeable," an IBM executive was once heard to say.

* * * *

. . . Oddity, introversion, and love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of the values of the secure upper orders. Among the middles there's a convention that erecting a fence or even a tall hedge is an affront. And there's also a convention that you may drop in on neighbors and friends without a telephone inquiry first. . . .

* * * *

. . . Proceeding downward, we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn't exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What's the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head "the masses," and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage -- to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to "saving" and "planning" maintained it in a position -- often precarious, to be sure -- above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.

The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. The high proles are the skilled workers, crafstmen, like printers. The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you're proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you're probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.

* * * *

But high proles are quite smart, or at least shrewd. Because often their work is not closely supervised, they have pride and a conviction of independence, and they feel some contempt for those who have not made it as far as they have. They are, as the sociologist E. E. LeMasters calls them and titles his book, Blue-Collar Aristocrats (1975), and their disdain for the middle class is like the aristocrat's from the other direction. . . . Like other aristocrats, says LeMasters, these "have gone to the top of their social world and need not expend time or energy on 'social climbing.'" . . .

Since they're not consumed with worry about choosing the correct status emblems, these people can be remarkably relaxed and unself-conscious. They can do, say, wear, and look like pretty much anything they want without undue feelings of shame, which belong to their betters, the middle class, shame being largely a bourgeois feeling. . . .

* * * *

High proles are nice. It's down among the mid- and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show themselves. These are people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children. . . . Andrew Levinson, author of The Working-Class Majority (1974), invites us to imagine what it would be like to be under the constant eye of a foreman, "a figure who has absolutely no counterpart in middle-class society. Salaried professionals often do have people above them, but it is impossible to imagine professors or executives being required to bring a doctor's note if they are absent a day or having to justify the number of trips they take to the bathroom." . . .

The degree of supervision, indeed, is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. . . . One is a mid- or low prole if one's servitude is constantly emphasized. Occupational class depends largely on doing work for which the consquences of error or failure are distant or remote, or better, invisible, rather than immediately apparent to a superior and thus instantly humiliating to the performer.

Constantly demeaned at work, the lower sorts of proles suffer from poor morale. As one woman worker says, "Most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirits."

* * * *

At the bottom of the working class, the low prole is identifiable by the gross uncertainty of his employment. This class would include illegal aliens like Mexican fruit pickers as well as other migrant workers. Social isolation is the norm here, and what Hoggart says of the lower working class in Britain applies elsewhere as well: "Socially . . . each day and each week is almost unplanned. There is no diary, no book of engagements, and few letters are sent or received." Remoteness and isolation, as in the valleys of Appalachia, are characteristics, and down here we find people who, trained for nothing, are likely out of sheer despair to join the Army.

Still, they're better off than the destitute, who never have even seasonal work and who live wholly on welfare. They differ from the bottom-out-of-sights less because they're much better off than because they're more visible, in the form of Bowery bums, bag ladies, people who stand in public places lecturing and delivering harangues about their grievances, people who drink out of paper bags, people whose need for some recognition impels them to "act" in front of audiences in the street. When delinquency and distress grow desperate, you sink into the bottom-out-of-sight class, staying all day in your welfare room or contriving to get taken into an institution, whether charitable or correctional doesn't matter much.

In the last chapter, Fussell identifies a tenth class, a "Class X" of declassed intellectuals and bohemians.

[Lemur866]

BG, I can't believe that book you constantly cite was published in 1992. It seems like something out of the 50s. Or the 1850s.

[BrainGlutton]

BG, I can't believe that book you constantly cite was published in 1992. It seems like something out of the 50s. Or the 1850s.

1983, republished in 1992; I don't know if any revisions were made to the 1992 edition. In any case, 1983 is not that long ago in sociological terms; something, say, from any year earlier than 1970 would be a long time ago in sociological terms, as there were so many socioeconomic as well as political and cultural changes in the '60s and '70s (one of which, as Fussell notes, was the destruction of the lower middle class).

[Superfluous Parentheses]

BG, I can't believe that book you constantly cite was published in 1992. It seems like something out of the 50s. Or the 1850s.

It does, and at the same time I'm pretty shocked that it actually seems to describe things fairly accurately.

[ZPG Zealot]

Under class-people not willing to work. Drug dealer?

Major disagreement here. Drug dealing may not be legal work, but it's very hard, time-consuming and dangerous work, and at the entry level doesn't pay more than the typical unskilled, minimum-wage job. A drug dealer that makes money real money at it puts as much time and effort into their business as a CEO.

[BrainGlutton]

Major disagreement here. Drug dealing may not be legal work, but it's very hard, time-consuming and dangerous work, and at the entry level doesn't pay more than the typical unskilled, minimum-wage job. A drug dealer that makes money real money at it puts as much time and effort into their business as a CEO.

"Hey, you guys got dental in Jersey?"

"No, man, we might have to go on strike in October!"

-- Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

[Der Trihs]

Under class-people not willing to work. Drug dealers,welfare scammers, people able to work but claiming disability(I suppose this could be lumped in with welfare scammers), petty criminals and the like.
And what about people who actually can't work? Either because they are disabled or because the jobs just aren't there? Your "underclass" definition looks a lot like classic right wing blame-the-victims to me. Or simply denial that such people actually exist.

[The Falling Reverend]

Major disagreement here. Drug dealing may not be legal work, but it's very hard, time-consuming and dangerous work, and at the entry level doesn't pay more than the typical unskilled, minimum-wage job. A drug dealer that makes money real money at it puts as much time and effort into their business as a CEO.

Maybe drug dealer was too broad of a term. How about about street vendor as a substitute.

You are correct though. A real dealer is an entrepreneur. Maybe not a legal or moral entrepreneur, but one none the less.

[The Falling Reverend]

And what about people who actually can't work? Either because they are disabled or because the jobs just aren't there? Your "underclass" definition looks a lot like classic right wing blame-the-victims to me. Or simply denial that such people actually exist.

I thought it was clear in the OP "people able to work but claiming disability". I'm talking about the people making fraudulent disability claims, Not someone with a legitimate medical condition that prevents them from working.

[PatriotGrrrl]

They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, ....
Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too

This guy sure as hell doesn't know many programmers or engineers!

[wmfellows]

The OP's classification seems problematic, as does the rather ideological framing that Brainglutton quotes.

Desirous of work or unwilling is subjective and difficult to measure. One man's subjectively unwilling maybe another's legitimately unable.

The stratification based on ambition (or the entire set of rather dated and extremely subjective and ideological categories provided by Brainglutton) strikes me as leading to zero clarity overall, although either way the subjective definitions at least tell you what the other mate is thinking even if the parameters are bollocks.

I'd suggest that non-subjectively one could set a matrix by income level and possibly type of employment (relative stability and social rating, by some survey standard, to get beyond one professor's subjectivity to benchmark against wider social perception).

[BrainGlutton]

I'd suggest that non-subjectively one could set a matrix by income level and possibly type of employment (relative stability and social rating, by some survey standard, to get beyond one professor's subjectivity to benchmark against wider social perception).

For that, check out Social Stratification in the United States: The American Profile Poster, (http://www.amazon.com/Social-Stratification-United-States-American/dp/1565840216) by Stephen J. Rose. It ignores the sociocultural aspects of class identity on which Fussell focuses, and simply lays out a clear graphic picture of who lies where in America in terms of income, assets, ethnic/racial group, and occupational category. This poster should hang on the wall of every social studies or American history classroom in every high school in America.

[Ruminator]

This poster should hang on the wall of every social studies or American history classroom in every high school in America.

I see no reason for this suggestion other than to contaminate young minds with "victimhood"

The Jew and Asian minorities were marginalized and at the bottom of the income stratification. They didn't need to stare at Stephen Rose's poster everyday and yet they succeeded and moved up the income ladder. Why?

Therefore, what constructive use is this poster for?

It seems that ignorance of Stephen Roses' poster is better for America.

[BrainGlutton]

Therefore, what constructive use is this poster for?

:rolleyes: An educational use with respect the actual form and shape of American society, of course. We assume, and I hope you will agree, that teenagers should take social studies and American history in school; therefore, anything that will help them take away an accurate picture rather than a confused one of how-things-are is worth doing. What, if anything, they do with that knowledge is for them to decide. But how can plain facts be ideological propaganda?! (Telling the kids, plainly or subliminally (TV does a lot of the "subliminally"), that they are higher-placed in the socioeconomic hierarchy than they really are would be propaganda.)

[Ruminator]

But how can plain facts be ideological propaganda?!

Because it's not just "plain facts". It's incomplete. Stephen Rose's poster shows a snapshot of stratification but leaves out how the aggregation of consumer preferences leads to the stratification.

His poster encourages the average person to assume this inequality is driven from the "top down" and that the govt should do more and/or the wealthy should be taxed more etc and/or wealth is a zero-sum game. In reality, it is "bottom up" and people have to take responsibility for it.

The more interesting and accurate visual diagram is something that shows how the priority of preferences of human brains manifests itself as a social stratification. That type of picture would be more complete and would be more appropriate for the classroom.

[wmfellows]

For that, check out Social Stratification in the United States: The American Profile Poster, (http://www.amazon.com/Social-Stratification-United-States-American/dp/1565840216) by Stephen J. Rose.

Well, relative to this conversation the Amazon link is not terribly helpful insofar as I have no intention of ordering up on US Amazon such a thing for the dubious pleasure of a msg board conversation about the US (notably as I was not specific to America as such).

It ignores the sociocultural aspects of class identity on which Fussell focuses,

Class identity? My you are a marxist aren't you? I am not for "ignoring" the social culture aspects of social class (never mind the dubious concept of 'class identity'), but rather that the socio-culture not be simply asserted by some ad hoc and subjective standards, whether a professor of history is asserting them or a poster here. I rather think such things end up being pointless subjective tossing.


But how can plain facts be ideological propaganda?! (Telling the kids, plainly or subliminally (TV does a lot of the "subliminally"), that they are higher-placed in the socioeconomic hierarchy than they really are would be propaganda.)

I have no idea with respect to this poster, but "plain facts" may be spun or presented in an ideological fashion such as to convey a subjective point. That's nothing new at all, the expression Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics captures the idea - if somewhat abusively. Given your general ideological penchants....

[BrainGlutton]

Because it's not just "plain facts". It's incomplete. Stephen Rose's poster shows a snapshot of stratification but leaves out how the aggregation of consumer preferences leads to the stratification.

:dubious: And how, exactly, does "the aggregation of consumer preferences" lead to stratification? And how would you represent that graphically?

[Malthus]

I submit that my classification is more useful, as it does not, as far as I know, internalize any preconceived theories on the ideal nature of our society ...

I certainly enjoyed the Fussell extracts, but I think his analysis is somewhat arbitrary, subjective and dated: going on about what makes a whole class of people 'ashamed" or what they tend to name their cats strikes me at least as gossipy and anecdotal.

[BrainGlutton]

Class identity? My you are a marxist aren't you?

Not at all; I believe Marx' theories are fundamentally flawed and pseudoscientific. But, you don't have to be a Marxist to be a socialist; nor to be a non-socialist progressive (as I define "progessive" in this thread, (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=496350&highlight=progressive) as something well to the right of "socialist" and well to the left of "liberal"); nor simply to acknowledge the plain and obvious facts that different social classes exist (as something socioculturally distinct from mere income levels or occupational categories), and that different classes' interests are in some respects convergent but in other respects in conflict.

From The Next American Nation, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684825031/sr=8-1/qid=1151677963/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-8508178-8162241?ie=UTF8) by Michael Lind (http://www.newamerica.net/people/michael_lind) (no leftist radical, BTW, he was once a National Review editor):

Understanding the white overclass requires revising the most common misconceptions about class. The discussion of social class has been confused for generations by Marxist thinkers, who made the mistake of completely identifying class with economic function. Like the Marxists, old-fashioned American liberal pluralists tend to misunderstand class. What they refer to as class is typically not a social class at all, but a mere occupational or income category, such as service-sector workers or millionaires. Meanwhile, the New Left which came to prominence in the sixties has tended to drop the idea of class altogether, in favor of race and gender. . . . In recent years, conservative ideologues have added further confusion by defining political factions and lifestyle subcultures as classes. . . .

In order to think about class in twenty-first century America, we must first clear our minds of these Marxist, liberal, New Left, and conservative definitions of class, and return to the older notion of class found in classical and European political thought from Aristotle to Montesquieu.

A class is a group of families, united by intermarriage and a common subculture, whose members tend to predominate in certain professions and political offices, generation after generation. Note that the class -- the group of similar families -- has an existence independent of the offices which its members tend to hold. Indeed, we cannot talk intelligently about class unless we make a distinction between a social class and a mere institutional elite. Those who talk about "the political class" or, with C. Wright Mills, about "the power elite," are confusing two very different things. Every modern society, even the most perfectly egalitarian, will have an institutional elite -- top civilian politicians, military officers, judges, diplomats, financial and industrial executives, publishers, editors and leading intellectuals, clerical leaders, and so on. The subject of class is raised only when you examine the social origins of the particular individuals who hold office in the institutional elite or elites. Learning the organization of judicial offices in a country tells you nothing about class. However, if you find out that most of the judges tend to come from old-money families in a particular region of that country, and that most attended one of half a dozen schools, then you have learned something important about that country's class system.

The United States at the end of the twentieth century has both an institutional elite and a dominant social class. The institutional elite is composed of upper-level officials in the federal and state governments, plus executives and professionals in the concentrated private sector and foundation and university executives (low-level government officials and small business owners are not part of the institutional elite). Almost all of the members of the American institutional elite also happen to be members of a single social class: the white overclass. To put it another way, the labor pool from which most elite positions are filled is the white overclass. The overlap is not complete. Though most members of the institutional elite belong to the white overclass, most members of the white overclass are not part of the institutional elite (since the overclass greatly outnumbers the elite); and -- though this is uncommon -- a person can become a high-ranking politician, military officer, judge, CEO, foundation president, or university president in the United States without having been born into the white overclass. It is possible to imagine a United States in which most members of the institutional elite did not have similar class origins. But that is not the country in which we live.

[Lemur866]

There's a lot of confusion about social class, namely that your economic status determines your social class.

But that of course doesn't make any sense. It didn't matter how much money a tradesman or industrialist made, he would never be an aristocrat. And while some aristocrats were rich, others were so poor they could barely afford servants. But a poor aristocrat is still an aristocrat.

In the aristocratic view, wealth was land. You controlled the land, and the people attached to that land provided a stream of income for you. Making things, or building things, or trading things, were for peasants. An aristocrat didn't WORK. His proper occupation was warfare, or forms of entertainment that were training for warfare--hunting, riding, and so on. Many highwaymen were impoverished aristocrats. It was honorable for an aristocrat to steal for a living, but ignoble to work. A true aristocrat lives off the labor of others, only a peasant trades.

Even in America this was true until the civil war destroyed the plantation system. A plantation owner imagined himself an aristocrat, and an impoverished planter was still a better man than a tradesman, no matter how rich. And so Nathan Bedford Forrest the wealthy slave-trader was looked down on by the planters. And of course, one of the purposes of the slave system was that every white person was a lord or lady, no matter their economic status, and entitled to social deference from every black person.

Then we get into the industrial era, when there was a social difference between "working class"--people who worked with their hands such as farmers and miners and artisans and soldiers and sailors, "middle class"--people who worked with their minds such as teachers and shopkeepers and doctors and lawyers and bookkeepers and managers and officers, and "upper class", people who didn't work but rather owned. And you'd be able to tell what social class someone was by the way they spoke, the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the job they did, the schools they sent their children to, and the church they belonged to. Middle class meant you hired servants and knew what fork to use and were taught to dance a certain way.

But when we look at 2009 America, I don't know what we can say about "social class". What social class is Barack Obama or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet? Heck, take a look at, say, the Kennedys. Here was a fabulously wealthy family, who were heavily involved in the levers of power, and yet they certainly weren't aristocrats of the old sort. Where do Jews fit into all this? I suppose we don't think about such things nowadays in America, but a Jew could never be a member of the upper class, no matter how wealthy.

I suppose living where I do I don't get the same social class markers as other people. Here the person cleaning your house could be the wife of your lawyer. It's not that there aren't social groupings--hippies and techies and so on--just that no one is going to suddenly discover that you aren't the right sort after all when you find out what school they went to, or what church they attend.

[BrainGlutton]

I submit that my classification is more useful, as it does not, as far as I know, internalize any preconceived theories on the ideal nature of our society ...

If you want to classify people by occupational function, a finer scheme might be that used by Robert Reich in The Work of Nations (review here (http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/reich.html)):

1. "Symbolic analysts." -- most professionals.

2. Routine production workers.

3. "In-person service" providers. Including waiters and retail clerks, but also doctors and nurses. These jobs are so classed because, unlike routine production work, they cannot be outsourced to another country.

I certainly enjoyed the Fussell extracts, but I think his analysis is somewhat arbitrary, subjective and dated: going on about what makes a whole class of people 'ashamed" or what they tend to name their cats strikes me at least as gossipy and anecdotal.

Well, of course, Fussell is simply an essayist/humorist/academic, and makes no pretense of being a social scientist in any rigorous sense.

[Ruminator]

And how, exactly, does "the aggregation of consumer preferences" lead to stratification?

A human (such as you) prefer people with attribute X over attribute Y. Multiply this preference (aggregate it) a hundred million times over and people with attributes X inevitably move higher up in stratification.

For example, let's consider that society likes to pay lip service to the fact that teachers are "more valuable" and should be "paid more" than football players. Let's put that inequality to the "human preferences" test: Let's imagine that we have 2 public events for consumers to choose to attend. One event is a football game. The other event is a teacher teaching calculus or world history. The tickets to both events cost $10. Which event would people voluntarily prefer to pay to attend? Which event would collect the most money (the aggregate of consumer preferences)? It should be no mystery why football players make more than teachers.

If we want teachers to make more than football players, then there has to be a genuine desire deeply embedded in the human brain to PREFER the calculus class over the football game.

People want income equality but they don't realize that it starts with human preference equality. Since human preferences are skewed, society ends up skewed.


And how would you represent that graphically?

My first attempt at visualizing it would something something dynamic (a picture that changes with respect to time) such as cellular automata simulations.

It would be more clever to summarize that into a static poster. I don't have any ideas for that.

[Lemur866]

The problem with Lind's "White Overclass" is that it is so general it doesn't explain anything. All it does is define the guys that run the country as a social class. But where are the correlations he imagines? Do these guys all attend the same schools, go to the same vacation spots, eat the same sorts of foods, know how to use the right silverware, and so on?

If his point is simply that if your parents are wealthy and educated and influential you've got a big leg up, and if you grow up on welfare in the projects there will be more than a few rungs missing on the ladder, well, duh.

The very fact that we can't agree on who is a member of what social class seems to indicate that in 2009 America these social classes are in flux. As recently as the 1960s the Ivy League schools weren't academically elite schools, they were socially elite schools, and a custardhead like George W. Bush could attend Yale simply because he belonged to the correct social class. But that is no longer the case, and the change is so dramatic that it is hard for us to remember that "attended Yale" meant something completely different just a few years ago.

[wmfellows]

Not at all; I believe Marx' theories are fundamentally flawed and pseudoscientific. But, you don't have to be a Marxist to be a socialist; .... nor simply to acknowledge the plain and obvious facts that different social classes exist (as something socioculturally distinct from mere income levels or occupational categories), and that different classes' interests are in some respects convergent but in other respects in conflict.

Same difference as the expression goes. So you disavow marxism, but I have a hard time seeing sunlight between you and general marxist (if not capital M Marxist) thinking.

Notably, confusing or mixing the concept of "class identity" (which implies something well beyond common socio-economic or socio-cultural & economic shared interests), or the idea there is a "class interest" within the context of your "something more than mere income levels or occupational categories." That's marxist enough for me, again if not Marxist...

[wmfellows]

The very fact that we can't agree on who is a member of what social class seems to indicate that in 2009 America these social classes are in flux. .... But that is no longer the case, and the change is so dramatic that it is hard for us to remember that "attended Yale" meant something completely different just a few years ago.

Fair observations (I have no idea with respect to the elite schools, but similar things have happened in other Anglo countries, so I give it credence), however I don't know how much one can conclude about the conversation so far re social class. It seems to me that so far everything's been quite muddle headed and confusing personal preference with some agreed on objective standard.

Of course maybe there is not precise objective standard, but I wager a more precise - even if subjective - conversation can be had.

[BrainGlutton]

The problem with Lind's "White Overclass" is that it is so general it doesn't explain anything. All it does is define the guys that run the country as a social class. But where are the correlations he imagines? Do these guys all attend the same schools, go to the same vacation spots, eat the same sorts of foods, know how to use the right silverware, and so on?

From the same chapter of the same book:

. . . The white overclass is the child of the former Northeastern Protestant establishment, produced by marriage (not only figurative but literal) with the upwardly mobile descendants of turn-of-the-century European immigrants and white Southerners and Westerners. Unlike the Northeastern establishment . . . this relatively new and still evolving political and social oligarchy is not identified with any particular region of the country (though it is concentrated in East and West Coast metropolitan regions). Nor does the white overclass dominate other sections through local, surrogate establishments, as the Northeastern establishment once did. Rather, overclass Americans are found in the higher suburbs of every major metropolitan area, North and South, coastal and inland. Unlike the sectional elites of the past, members of the white overclass are not even identified with the regions in which they happen (temporarily) to live. The white overclass, homogeneous and nomadic, is the first truly national upper class in American history.

The white overclass is the product, not merely of the amalgamation of Anglo- and Euro-Americans, but of the fusion of the rentier and managerial-professional classes. This blurring of the upper and upper-middle strata is a relatively new development in the United States. In earlier generations, there were distinct landowning and rentier classes, with their own lifestyles and institutions -- cotillions, seasons spent in the country, and the like. The elaborate rituals that governed upper-class life, such as dressing for dinner, were designed to conspicuously display wealth, including a wealth of leisure time. That was a long time ago. There is a class, or rather a category, of the celebrity rich, and there are still pockets of old-fashioned rentiers in the U.S. -- in Virginia, there are still planters who do not work and who hunt foxes with hounds -- but these subcultures are detached from the summits of power. Members of the upper class who want to make a mark in the world tend to adopt the style of life and dress and speech of the managerial-professional elite. Even though they do not have to, most members of the small hereditary upper class go to college and get executive or professional jobs, and work, or at least pretend to. Instead of serving as a model for well-to-do executives and lawyers and investment bankers, the hereditary segment of the American overclass conforms to the segment immediately below it, the credentialed upper middle class.

. . . The composition of student bodies at Ivy League schools is a good surrogate for the composition of the white overclass. If you factor out black and Hispanic students admitted under affirmative action programs, you are left with a student body that is disproportionately of British or German-Scandinavian Protestant and European Jewish descent. There are relatively few evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the overclass, despite their significant numbers in the general population. If you are Episcopalian or Jewish, have a graduate or professional degree from an expensive university, work in a large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis, watch MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS, and are saving for a vacation in London or Paris, you are a card-carrying member of the white overclass, even if your salary is not very impressive. If you are Methodist, Baptist or Catholic, have a B.A. from a state university, work in or for a small business or for a career government service, watch the Nashville Network on cable, and are saving for a vacation in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Branson, Missouri, or Orlando, Florida (Disneyworld), you are probably not a member of the white overclass -- no matter how much money you make.

Although there are residual religious and ethnic differences among members of the white overclass, these are minor compared to what they have in common. There is, for example, a common white overclass accent, which is more or less identical in corporate boardrooms from one end of the continent to another -- the "NBC standard," which is the equivalent of BBC English or Britain's Received Pronunciation (RP). As formerly distinct local elites have fused into a single national ruling class equally at home in New York and Texas and California, this accent has become the badge of elite status. In order to advance in overclass circles in America, a white American has to suppress any regional or ethnic dialect, whether it be a Southern drawl or a Boston honk or Brooklynese, and learn to speak this flat, clipped, rather nasal version of English. . . .

. . . The overclass eats pate and imported cheeses; the middle class eats peanut butter and Velveeta. The overclass sips wine; the middle class drinks beer. The overclass plays squash and tennis; the middle class plays pool and bowls (both golf, but the middle class does so at second-tier country clubs and public courses). The overclass jogs; the middle class does not. . . . These are cliches, but they are a better guide to the real class structure in the United States than income categories in the census or pseudoscientific sociological measures like the SES (socioeconomic survey).

Also from the same book and also relevant:

The chief danger confronting the twenty-first century United States is not Balkanization but what might be called Brazilianization. By Brazilianization I mean not the separation of cultures by race, but the separation of races by class. As in Brazil, a common American culture could be indefinitely compatible with a blurry, informal caste system in which most of those at the top of the social hierarchy are white, and most brown and black Americans are on the bottom -- forever. Behind all the boosterish talk about the wonders of the new American rainbow is the reality of enduring racial division by class, something that multicultural education initiatives and racial preference policies do not begin to address.

In the absence of sustained popular pressure from below or concern about America's international status, the white overclass has no incentive to combat Brazilianization in the United States. For one thing, any serious effort to reduce racial separation by class would inevitably mean higher taxes on the affluent -- not just the rich, but the politically powerful upper-middle class. What is more, the dominance of the white oligarchy in American politics is strengthened by the emergent dynamics of a polarized society. In a more homogeneous society, the increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top might produce a populist reaction by the majority. But in a society like that of present-day America where a small, homogeneous oligarchy confronts a diverse population that shares a common national culture but remains divided along racial lines, the position of the outnumbered elite can be very secure. This is because the resentments caused by economic decline are likely to be expressed as hostility between the groups at the bottom, rather than as a rebellion against the top. In the Los Angeles riot, black, Hispanic, and white rioters turned on Korean middlemen, rather than march on Beverly Hills.

[BrainGlutton]

Same difference as the expression goes. So you disavow marxism, but I have a hard time seeing sunlight between you and general marxist (if not capital M Marxist) thinking.

Notably, confusing or mixing the concept of "class identity" (which implies something well beyond common socio-economic or socio-cultural & economic shared interests), or the idea there is a "class interest" within the context of your "something more than mere income levels or occupational categories." That's marxist enough for me, again if not Marxist...

But it is not Marxist, it is a concept from Western political theory far older than Marx and very different from Marx'; re-read the above excerpt from Lind in post #21.

[BrainGlutton]

It didn't matter how much money a tradesman or industrialist made, he would never be an aristocrat.

But, he could -- or, at least, his children could. As George Orwell noted in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941), "Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus."

[Malthus]

Fair observations (I have no idea with respect to the elite schools, but similar things have happened in other Anglo countries, so I give it credence), however I don't know how much one can conclude about the conversation so far re social class. It seems to me that so far everything's been quite muddle headed and confusing personal preference with some agreed on objective standard.

Of course maybe there is not precise objective standard, but I wager a more precise - even if subjective - conversation can be had.

To my mind, the single most important criterion of class is whether a person, objectively speaking, ought reasonably to be in favour of some sort of collective job security for themself. Those who would do better with such security are of lower social class than those who would not.

Pretty well everyone can agree on the underclass and on the truly rich; what causes confusion is those in the great mass who exist inbetween. I think this can logically be divided into two, as outlined.

[Lemur866]

Nice that if you exclude the blacks and hispanics and asians, then the attendees of Ivy League Schools are all members of the white overclass. :rolleyes:

The one thing I agree with is the fusion of "upper middle class" and "upper class" in social mores, with the upper class aping the manners of the upper middle professional class.

It just seems silly to insist that race plays a large part in the definition of the overclass. Yeah, most of the members of the merged upper/professional class turn out to be white, but whiteness isn't important to these people. Barack Obama and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Bill Richardson and Bobby Jindal and Gary Locke and so on don't count? Come on.

And it's kind of weird that Lind thinks that listening to NPR and drinking wine are some sort of uber-elite status markers. You think people who attended state universities don't listen to NPR or jog or play tennis? Really? He's confusing blue collar with middle class. But the blue collar guys who don't jog or drink wine or listen to NPR also didn't go to college. There still exists a working class/blue collar identity, but that's distinct from "middle class" in my mind.

[msmith537]

Certainly there are elements of truth in BrainGlutton's links, just as there are with any form of stereotyping. But personally I think a more important distinction of class is the real social and economic barriers that keep people from advancing to the next higher class. Access to education and social networks are a more significant indicator than whether someone has lots of rare leatherbound books or listens to NPR.

[CalMeacham]

In the last chapter, Fussell identifies a tenth class, a "Class X" of declassed intellectuals and bohemians.

...to which Fussell himself, conveniently, belongs.


Various things in Fussell's book (especially the illustrations) make it very hard for me to take him seriously (Upper-Middles slangily call sex "hiding the salam'", he claims, suggesting not only that it's something lower classes wouldn't come up with, but that dropping that final "i" is significant. Makes me wonder who he's having sex with.)

[Brainiac]

So what say you?Why you talk funny? In church you?

[Tamerlane]

Why you talk funny? In church you?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=what%20say%20you%3F

You ignorance of this noble construction doth display your lower class standing, sirrah (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sirrah).

;)

[BrainGlutton]

To my mind, the single most important criterion of class is whether a person, objectively speaking, ought reasonably to be in favour of some sort of collective job security for themself.

That reduces "class" to a pure question of economic status/function/interests (as Marx assumed). It is that, certainly, but it's a lot more than that. For instance, are working-poor African-Americans and working-poor white Americans really in the same "class," if they speak different dialects, and mostly marry within their own racial groups, and go to different churches, and live in different neighborhoods, and move in different social circles, and never associate outside of work?

[Malthus]

That reduces "class" to a pure question of economic status/function/interests (as Marx assumed). It is that, certainly, but it's a lot more than that.

The word has more than one meaning. Certainly saying something is "classy' or someone or something "has class' means one thing; the connection between that meaning (with its connotations of education, taste and elegance) and one's actual social position, it seems to me, has been steadily eroding over the last half-century or so. This has lead I believe to a relative fall in status for those in certain occupations, and the relative rise for others.

Take for example academics. My father was a professor. In my father's day, a "professor" had an automatic high status, irrespective of how much he (and it was mostly "he") was paid or what field of study he was in. Moreover, most people who were not academics themselves did not distinguish between the various ranks and degrees of academic (i.e., lecturer, associate professor, tenured full professor, etc.).

Nowadays, becomming an academic is no garantee of relative high status. Certain academics clearly have high status - namely, those who, because of their specialized knowledge and/or prominence (or public fame), can "write their own ticket" and get tenured positions. Others, those who have to worry about job security - your associate professor in some soft humanities subject like sociology - are not of particularly high social status.

[Malthus]

For instance, are working-poor African-Americans and working-poor white Americans really in the same "class," if they speak different dialects, and mostly marry within their own racial groups, and go to different churches, and live in different neighborhoods, and move in different social circles, and never associate outside of work?

I missed your edit.

It's a good question, and I will answer it as follows: "class' is in my opinion a measure of relative social status - one class being "higher" than another. There may in some cases be a difference of opinion as to who is 'higher", but in general, that's what I think it measures.

Now, what you are describing is I think something different - namely, a division of society by ethnic community. It may well be the case that two ethnic communities, largely of the same "class", choose for historic reasons of emnity or otherwise not to mingle in any meaningful way. It may also be the case (but not necessarily) that one ethnic community, in spite of being functionally identical to another, will be considered en mass as "higher class" than another because of racism or other forms of ethno-centrism.

In my opinion, this latter difference, while it still exists in some places, is rapidly disappearing. I offer as an example my own city of Toronto. Here, there are many ethnic groups who live lives in what amounts to ethnic enclaves; but in terms of class, there is little stratification between them. Thus, an Italian shopkeeper may live a life almost entirely distinct from a Chinese shopkeeper, but both are considered of the same "class".

[adhay]

:rolleyes: An educational use with respect the actual form and shape of American society, of course. We assume, and I hope you will agree, that teenagers should take social studies and American history in school; therefore, anything that will help them take away an accurate picture rather than a confused one of how-things-are is worth doing. What, if anything, they do with that knowledge is for them to decide. But how can plain facts be ideological propaganda?! (Telling the kids, plainly or subliminally (TV does a lot of the "subliminally"), that they are higher-placed in the socioeconomic hierarchy than they really are would be propaganda.)
[color added]

It says so right here in the Neo-Conservative Thesaurus. In the same work, truth is equated with government lies and corporation is a synonym for person.

[msmith537]

To my mind, the single most important criterion of class is whether a person, objectively speaking, ought reasonably to be in favour of some sort of collective job security for themself. Those who would do better with such security are of lower social class than those who would not.


I would expand that to say that a person's class is primarily defined by their attitudes towards and relationships with work, education, authority and wealth. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book Outliers (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017922/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001MKFONU&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0HKE6KA744KEY7YWWFM2). He cites several examples of how people's behavior and attitudes are shaped early on in childhood by the culture they grew up in. In particular, he cites an example of two brilliant students. One who grew up in a relatively affluent environment and another who grew up in a poor broken family. The poor student never acheived success because the attitudes of contempt and distrust for the "system" led to a series of misteps that eventually caused him to lose financial aid, drop out of college and never return. The other student was J. Robert Oppenheimer who graduated from Harvard and Cambridge in spite of attempting to poison his teacher and went on to invent the atomic bomb.

[Malthus]

I would expand that to say that a person's class is primarily defined by their attitudes towards and relationships with work, education, authority and wealth. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book Outliers (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017922/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001MKFONU&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0HKE6KA744KEY7YWWFM2). He cites several examples of how people's behavior and attitudes are shaped early on in childhood by the culture they grew up in. In particular, he cites an example of two brilliant students. One who grew up in a relatively affluent environment and another who grew up in a poor broken family. The poor student never acheived success because the attitudes of contempt and distrust for the "system" led to a series of misteps that eventually caused him to lose financial aid, drop out of college and never return. The other student was J. Robert Oppenheimer who graduated from Harvard and Cambridge in spite of attempting to poison his teacher and went on to invent the atomic bomb.

Attempting to poision your teacher displays an attitute of hostility towards authorities ... :D

But sure, culture and attitude matter for success. Only problem is that it is by no means determinative what culture or attitude you will acquire. I grew up the son of a professor; my wife, the daughter of Ukranian peasants who spent their childhood being shuttled around Europe by Stalin, came to this country without a penny and speaking no English - yet we are now both the same "class".

[adhay]

Attempting to poision your teacher displays an attitute of hostility towards authorities ... :D

But sure, culture and attitude matter for success. Only problem is that it is by no means determinative what culture or attitude you will acquire. I grew up the son of a professor; my wife, the daughter of Ukranian peasants who spent their childhood being shuttled around Europe by Stalin, came to this country without a penny and speaking no English - yet we are now both the same "class".

Congratulations. No irony.

Times have changed. Imagine coming to this country today, penniless, no contacts. Imagine even legally getting in.

[Lemur866]

Congratulations. No irony.

Times have changed. Imagine coming to this country today, penniless, no contacts. Imagine even legally getting in.

Except millions of people still come to this country today, penniless, and with no contacts. Not that it's a basket of roses to be an undocumented worker, but millions of people come here to do just that. And while it doesn't look like there's much social mobility for those workers, the early 20th century European immigrants didn't find the streets paved with gold either, and neither did their children. Their children's children did OK.

[Malthus]

Congratulations. No irony.

Times have changed. Imagine coming to this country today, penniless, no contacts. Imagine even legally getting in.

Wasn't any cakewalk for my wife's parents. They were most definitely "working class" - her father was lucky and got a good union job loading nuclear fuel pellets, shades of Homer Simpson; her mother worked as a check-out girl in a supermarket, before getting married and having three kids ... all of whom went to university and got more "middle class" type occupations (my wife works as the editor of financial statements; her brother, a computer engineer; her sister, environmental consultant).

Her parents are also very sincerely religious in a manner that is very 'folk" (for example, they give money to nuns who they believe have stigmata). They are more or less what one would expect if one transplanted a Ukranian peasant to Canada, mid 20th century. My wife is very different, to say the least ...

All of which leads me to conclude that one's ancestry is not necessarily in any straightforward deterministic manner one's fate in terms of social class.

[rhubarbarin]

This whole discussion is baffling me. I don't know if there any way to separate Americans this way - unless you are willing to have 200 'classes'.

My whole extended family is pretty much a SWPL sterotype: WASPS, all college-educated, snobby about most things, obsessed with psychoanalyzing each other, buy organic and cooks elaborate gourmet meals, listen to NPR, garden as a hobby, drink expensive imported tea and coffee, worship Martha Stewart, love classical music, etc. Mom has BA, dad Ph.D. He taught college but never got tenure, so we were always 'poor' compared to who we socialized with - they owned houses, but we never had more than one car, went on vacation, or bought new clothes, and everything was budgeted to the last penny.

Then there's me. I'm the only one who didn't attend college - in fact I dropped out of high school - but I consider myself self-educated. I work odd jobs (office work, waitressing) and am pretty poor. However, I speak and dress just like my family and like most of the same things. What the hell 'class' am I in?

[msmith537]

Attempting to poision your teacher displays an attitute of hostility towards authorities ... :D

But sure, culture and attitude matter for success. Only problem is that it is by no means determinative what culture or attitude you will acquire. I grew up the son of a professor; my wife, the daughter of Ukranian peasants who spent their childhood being shuttled around Europe by Stalin, came to this country without a penny and speaking no English - yet we are now both the same "class".

But Opppenhimer had the charm and saavy to work with the system to avoid getting expelled (or tossed in jail). He was identified as someone who was part of the group and others worked to keep him in. The other student (I forget his name) described in Outliers was basically viewed as an "outsider" because of his family background. The administration was less willing to work with him when he screwed up his financial aid forms and he eventually dropped out in frustration, even though in terms of IQ he was one of the smartest people in the world.

It is subtle things like this that separate classes and why social classes aren't just about how much money you have.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

1983, republished in 1992; I don't know if any revisions were made to the 1992 edition. In any case, 1983 is not that long ago in sociological terms; something, say, from any year earlier than 1970 would be a long time ago in sociological terms, as there were so many socioeconomic as well as political and cultural changes in the '60s and '70s (one of which, as Fussell notes, was the destruction of the lower middle class).I love the book and have read my copy to pieces, but it does have a strong bias toward the northeastern metropolitan US, not only in the author's disdain for newer population centers, but also in terms of the accuracy of the class markers themselves. I don't think the notion of super rich people driving scuzzy clunkers because they don't need to impress other people ever applied to Southern California.

[msmith537]

I love the book and have read my copy to pieces, but it does have a strong bias toward the northeastern metropolitan US, not only in the author's disdain for newer population centers, but also in terms of the accuracy of the class markers themselves. I don't think the notion of super rich people driving scuzzy clunkers because they don't need to impress other people ever applied to Southern California.

The author seems to have a lot of disdain for everyone.

Basically all classes can be defined as follows. Anyone who has achieved beyond what you can expect to achieve in your lifetime is a rich douchebag snob. Anyone who significantly poorer than you can ever expect to be is a pathetic loser. And that defines the boundaries of your social class. People in lower or higher classes than you might as well be from another country or another planet.




If you are Episcopalian or Jewish, have a graduate or professional degree from an expensive university, work in a large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis, watch MacNeil/Lehrer on PBS, and are saving for a vacation in London or Paris, you are a card-carrying member of the white overclass, even if your salary is not very impressive.

Ok, so I am apparently part of the White Overclass. What sort of benefits does my card get me and when should I expect to receive it?

[BrainGlutton]

Lind revisited the "overclass" in Up from Conservatism (http://www.tomsmithonline.com/lyrics/500_hats.htm) (1996):

Though "overclass" is widely used, there is no consensus on its definition. Sometimes the word is used to refer to the affluent, sometimes to the skilled. I use the word "overclass" to refer not to the rich in general or the educated in general, but to a specific social group that is at once an elite and a quasi-hereditary social class. The overclass is the credentialed managerial--professional elite, consisting of Americans with advanced degrees (MBAs, JDs, PhDs, MDs) and their spouses and children. How big a group is it? Less than 10 percent of the U.S. population holds an advanced degree (and this includes advanced degree holders from third- and fourth-rate universities). If we eliminate the holders of advanced degrees from diploma mills, and limit ourselves to graduates of professional or graduate programs at prestigious private schools or first-rate state universities, we discover that the overclass is very small indeed, no more than 5 or 10 percent of the American people (inclidng children and spouses makes the number higher).

Tiny though this corps of highly educated managers, lawyers, professors, and doctors is, its members provide the overwhelming majority of leaders in the highest reaches of American business, politics, education, and journalism. There are differences among particular institutional elites -- CEOs and federal judges tend to be more highly educated on average than members of Congress -- but compared to the majority of Americans whose education ends with teh acquisition of a high school diploma, these differences are minor.

The overclass is, if I am correct -- or is in the process of becoming -- not merely an institutional elite, but a quasi-hereditary social elite. Whether the overclass is a genuine social class, othat is, a hereditary or quasi-hereditary elite, can be debated. If the overclass consists of random individuals from different backgrounds who just happen to acquire good degrees and good jobs, then the overclass is not a class at all, but a meritocratic elite, which can be expected to reconstitute itself with every generation. If, on the other hand, the members of the overclass tend to be born to overclass parents, then the overclass, in addition to being an elite, is a quasi-hereditary social class. Since the expansion of higher education since World War II, there has only been time for one generation to be born to a large stratum of college-educated parents. The question cannot be finally resolved, therefore, unitl 2025 or 2030.

In the meantime, the smart money should be on the overclass turning itself into a self-perpetuating social stratum, instead of a completely open -- and therefore completely unstable -- meritocracy. The reason is what anthropologists call "assortative mating," that is, marriage between people of similar backgrounds. Now that coeducation has become the norm, college-educated members of the professional class increasingly marry other members of the college-educated professional class -- often, the boyfriend or girlfriend they ment in their first year of law school or business school. It is not a daring prediction that the children of two lawyers, or two MBAs, will be more likely to get a JD or an MBA than the children of parents whose education ended with the twelfth grade, or a BA.

Conservatives attacked my account of the American overclass in two ways. Some have dismissed the overclass theory as "Marxism" (in fact, it owes its inspiration to non-Marxist sociological accounts of class, like those of Max Weber and Digby Baltzell). The conservative party line with respect to the subject of class in the United States holds that America is a classless society, or a two-class society, divided between the middle class (the 95 percent of the populations that includes everyone from the working poor to the hereditary rich) and the underclass (the 5 percent or so made up of the nonworking hereditary poor). The absurdity of either view is self-evident, as is the utility, to the political faction that represents the wealthy, of a theory that persuades blue-collar workers that they really belong to the same class as Malcolm Forbes, Jr. or Pierre DuPont or William F. Buckley, Jr. and share the same economic interests.

Another argument that conservatives use in their effort to prove that the United States is a classless, or two-class, society is the existence of a substantial degree of social mobility in America (as in other industrial democracies). The point is well taken -- and irrelevant. The fact that there is a degree of mobility between social classes does not mean classes does not mean that classes do not exist. For a thousand years, commoners have been joining the English aristocracy, while younger sons have been falling out of it. This turnover does not mean that there is no English aristocracy.

It is not my contention that the overclass is exclusively conservative. Most conservative politicians and intellectuals belong to the overclass. So do most left-liberal politicians and intellectuals. So do most neoliberal politicians and intellectuals. With the sole exception of their political views, overclass conservatives have more in common with overclass left-liberals and overclass neoliberals than they do with middle-class conservatives. They go to the same Ivy League schools and leading state universities, and send their children to the same private schools or good public schools; they have similar tastes in dress and dining and recreation; they have similar patterns of marriage and child rearing.

The latter is particularly significant. Consider this portrait of a typical overclass family. The parents of both the husband and wife were college-educated. Both husband and wife went to private schools or good public schools. Both husband and wife have advanced degrees and professional careers. Their children are raised by a live-in servant, whom they need, because they are a two-professional family, and whom they can afford, because they are a two-professional family. The archetypal family pattern of the overclass is the "three-parent family" -- husband, wife, and Latin American nanny.

Here, then, is a simple test of overclass status. Americans who do not have advanced degrees and cannot afford maids or nannies are middle class. Americans who have advanced degrees and can afford maids or nannies are overclass. It's as simple as that.

[Malthus]

The problem with the "overclass" analysis is that, to the extent it is true, it is merely stating the obvious: that a small minority of people have advanced degrees and can afford a nanny; that this minority has the most power and influence; and that your chances are better of ending up in this minority if your parents could afford the best education etc. for you (i.e., were part of this minority themselves).

This definition is very loose. It is not, to my mind at least, sufficiently cohesive to form a "class system" similar to that of England over the past few centuries. He appears at one point in this extract to *predict* that at some indefinite point in the future it will, due to "associative mating". The problem for his theory is that the rapidity of social mobility in N. America appears to militate against this, exactly because the differences in manners, accent, clothing, etc. between the successful and unsucessful - in short all the markers of class identity - are missing here; a student in anthropology who doesn't get an academic position and ends up working as a waitress or potter's assistant (as I did) is essentially indistinguishable from the same person getting a law degree and entering the nanny-employing overclass later in life (as I also did).

The author dismisses social mobility as irrelevant to the question of whether classes exist. I disagree; that changes the definition of "class' from a proscriptive one, to a mere observation - that only a small percentage of people are at 'the top". Which, absent some radical change in the nature of human society, will *always* be true.

[msmith537]

The author dismisses social mobility as irrelevant to the question of whether classes exist. I disagree; that changes the definition of "class' from a proscriptive one, to a mere observation - that only a small percentage of people are at 'the top". Which, absent some radical change in the nature of human society, will *always* be true.

Social mobility is the key. As you say, there will always be an elite consisting of the most educated and capable leaders. Whether or not they are the result of a class system or a meritocracy is dependent on social mobility.

[Malthus]

I would further argue that this is why the use of "class" terminology is appropriate for the so-called "underclass" in America - in that, in this case, there appears to be a frightening degree of lack of social mobility and a great degree of common social markers in terms of language, dress, etc., all as a result in large part of the history of race relations in that country.

A waitress or potter's assistant not of the "underclass" can save up, go to law school etc. and join the "overclass". The same person can marry a person who does that - it is hardly unusual. Both are unlikely for members of the "underclass". A major social problem in America is that, to a great extent, this whole group is excluded from participating in the meritocracy - not by racism today so much as by class identity created by racism in the past.

[BrainGlutton]

The problem with the "overclass" analysis is that, to the extent it is true, it is merely stating the obvious: that a small minority of people have advanced degrees and can afford a nanny; that this minority has the most power and influence; and that your chances are better of ending up in this minority if your parents could afford the best education etc. for you (i.e., were part of this minority themselves).

What is important and what you are missing is that the defining marks of today's overclass are in several respects new. There has always been an elite of wealth and power, but it was not as large proportionally as a percentage of the population as it is now (it is still a small minority, but an elite class encompassing 5 percent of the generation is potentially much more powerful than an elite class of 1 percent). Nor was the overclass always predominated by professionals; nor was it always true that the hereditary top-crust rich tried to ape the professionals rather than the other way about. Nor was it always a national rather than a sectional elite. The "assortative mating" is also new, or at least more pervasive than in the past. There was a time when a doctor might marry his nurse, a lawyer might marry his secretary, providing at least a social promotion for the woman, and by extension her family; now professionals mostly marry other professionals. That is the makings of a hereditary class.

Still more important is what is not new: That the overclass in American society tends to provide most of the institutional elite. If your parents were working-class or even middle-class, you probably will never be a federal judge or a corporate CEO; you might, but the odds are much longer than if you had a more fortunate birth. And if your parents were working-poor or underclass, your chances of rising to the institutional elite are practically nil and so are your grandchildren's.

[Malthus]

What is important and what you are missing is that the defining marks of today's overclass are in several respects new. There has always been an elite of wealth and power, but it was not as large proportionally as a percentage of the population as it is now (it is still a small minority, but an elite class encompassing 5 percent of the generation is potentially much more powerful than an elite class of 1 percent). Nor was the overclass always predominated by professionals; nor was it always true that the hereditary top-crust rich tried to ape the professionals rather than the other way about. Nor was it always a national rather than a sectional elite. The "assortative mating" is also new, or at least more pervasive than in the past. There was a time when a doctor might marry his nurse, a lawyer might marry his secretary, providing at least a social promotion for the woman, and by extension her family; now professionals mostly marry other professionals. That is the makings of a hereditary class.

Still more important is what is not new: That the overclass in American society tends to provide most of the institutional elite. If your parents were working-class or even middle-class, you probably will never be a federal judge or a corporate CEO; you might, but the odds are much longer than if you had a more fortunate birth. And if your parents were working-poor or underclass, your chances of rising to the institutional elite are practically nil and so are your grandchildren's.

Heh I recognize that anecdote is not statistical data, and I'm Canadian not American, but my own life violates in detail almost every one of your assertions. :D

I take it from your second paragraph that you agree with me and disagree with the author you have cited that social mobility is an important factor in determining whether a "class" exists.

Certainly, no-one denies that your chances of being a "judge or CEO" are enhanced if you are born to professional parents. The problem with the thesis is that the definition of "professional' is now cast too wide.

Think of your average student with a university degree. Are they part of the "overclass"? Perhaps "potential overclass"? If so, the "overclass" expands to something like half the population.

I have seen no data on the issue of 'associative mating", but again it has been my experience that people very often marry people they meet in university - at least their *first* spouse - well prior to choosing a career, and certainly prior to making a successful bid to being a member of the "overclass" (unless one posits that merely by going to university they already *are* members of the "overclass", which has its own problems - namely, casting the net too widely). The stereotype (with I fear some roots in reality) is that those, particularly men, who later succeed in joining the "overclass" later divorce these "first wives" and marry another, "trophy' wife, generally younger.

To my mind at least, there is some validity to the notion that there is a threat of decreased social mobility these days, caused (among many factors) by an increase in credential inflation which requires a great deal of support in order to obtain a professional type career. What there is not, certainly not yet, is an established "class" system.

[msmith537]

What is important and what you are missing is that the defining marks of today's overclass are in several respects new. There has always been an elite of wealth and power, but it was not as large proportionally as a percentage of the population as it is now (it is still a small minority, but an elite class encompassing 5 percent of the generation is potentially much more powerful than an elite class of 1 percent). Nor was the overclass always predominated by professionals; nor was it always true that the hereditary top-crust rich tried to ape the professionals rather than the other way about. Nor was it always a national rather than a sectional elite. The "assortative mating" is also new, or at least more pervasive than in the past. There was a time when a doctor might marry his nurse, a lawyer might marry his secretary, providing at least a social promotion for the woman, and by extension her family; now professionals mostly marry other professionals. That is the makings of a hereditary class.

Still more important is what is not new: That the overclass in American society tends to provide most of the institutional elite. If your parents were working-class or even middle-class, you probably will never be a federal judge or a corporate CEO; you might, but the odds are much longer than if you had a more fortunate birth. And if your parents were working-poor or underclass, your chances of rising to the institutional elite are practically nil and so are your grandchildren's.

A couple of points. First of all, your chances of becoming a judge or CEO are pretty small regardless of what class you come from. Although CEOs come from a wide range of backgrounds while judges have to follow a specific legal career track.

I disagree with an elite class of 5% being more powerful thant 1%. Nor do I see how an economic system that creates more elites rather than less is necessarily bad.

I think it's a positive thing that women do not have to depend on marying a man for social promotion (well...I would if I wasn't a misogynist:)). They are fully capable of having their own careers now and establishing themselves.

I also believe the top-crust rich do not "ape the professionals". Many of them ARE professionals who achieved great wealth by being at the top of their profession. The Mike Bloombergs, Bill Gates, and all the other businessmen, investment bankers, lawyers, Silicon Valley startup kings and others who became wealthy through their work. The Kardashians and Paris Hiltons and others whose wealth come from inheritance and the entertainment industry do not emulate the professional class. They live in their own bizarre world of fashion and excess.

Then again that might just be more of an East Coast vs West Coast LA vs NYC cultural thing. West Coast money tends to be neuvo riche Gucci bag Hollywood money while East Coast tends to be more old money summer in the Hamptons Wall Street money.

[Lemur866]

And I seriously disagree that it was common for a middle class professional man to marry a working class woman who worked under him. A lawyer didn't marry his secretary, he married the daughter of his boss.

And the reason for the old saw of the secretary who really ran the business, was that women weren't allowed to run the business. Nowadays a hypercompetent secretary doesn't exist, because if she's hypercompetent she's not working as a secretary, she's working as a manager.

Businessmen rarely married secretaries in the old days, because they didn't marry out of their class. And they don't marry the secretary nowadays because they don't have secretaries any more. I worked for years at Microsoft and never met one secretary. I suppose Steve Ballmer and that ilk might have had secretaries, I wouldn't know. But in the old days, everyone who got the title of "manager" had a secretary. Nowadays, at least in the technology sector that I'm familiar with, nobody does.

There are still working class people around--the guys who do the landscaping, the cleaning staff, and so on. But they don't mingle intimately with the managers the way secretaries and valets and butlers used to. The modern overclass household doesn't have live-in servants, they hire a housekeeper who comes in once a week, and a gardener who comes in once a week, they eat at restaurants instead of a live-in cook. The only exception is the nanny might be live-in, because who wants to get up in the middle of the night to change a wet diaper? But while the overclass husband might have an affair with the Venezeulan nanny, he sure isn't going to marry her.

[BrainGlutton]

There are still working class people around--the guys who do the landscaping, the cleaning staff, and so on. But they don't mingle intimately with the managers the way secretaries and valets and butlers used to. . . . But while the overclass husband might have an affair with the Venezeulan nanny, he sure isn't going to marry her.

Well, that makes "assortative mating" among the overclass all the likelier, doesn't it?

[BrainGlutton]

I disagree with an elite class of 5% being more powerful thant 1%. Nor do I see how an economic system that creates more elites rather than less is necessarily bad.

For one thing, a larger overclass can occupy even more of the institutional-elite positions -- not only the highest, but the second and third tiers down -- than a smaller one can; including in the media and political organizations that shape public opinion. For another, members of a very large overclass can more readily delude themselves -- and, more importantly, delude others -- that they are not an overclass at all, but simply the normal people. Which would, indeed, be a very fine thing if it were true. (For my part, I like the idea of a classless society -- but the point of it should be to make everybody bourgeois, not to make everybody proletarian; Marxists seem to have that bassackwards.)

also believe the top-crust rich do not "ape the professionals". Many of them ARE professionals who achieved great wealth by being at the top of their profession.

By "top-crust" I meant not the richest of the rich, but the hereditary rich, the old money, the rentiers. Lind's thesis is that, since WWII, these have been increasingly intermarrying with the rising managerial-professional class -- much the same way the British aristocracy, in the early 19th-Century, intermarried with new-rich merchants and industrialists; except that, in Britain's case, the parvenus turned themselves into accurate copies of the aristos, while in America it has worked the other way around. Which does have a dangerous character of its own. A class of mere "owners" is less useful to society than fleas to a dog, and deep down most of them probably know it. Managers and professionals, OTOH, are unmistakeably useful; and old-money people who acquire professional degrees and embark on professional careers (even though they don't have to) can fool themselves, and even with some little justice, that they are useful too. It makes them all the more comfortable, therefore more secure, in their status.

[msmith537]

For one thing, a larger overclass can occupy even more of the institutional-elite positions -- not only the highest, but the second and third tiers down -- than a smaller one can; including in the media and political organizations that shape public opinion.

There is a bit of confusion over what the "overclass" is supposed to be and their relationship to the "institutional elites". There is a larger "overclass" because there are more jobs that require highly educated and talented people than there were in the past. These are jobs in accounting, law, finance, marketing, PR, advertising, engineering, medicine, media, technology and so on. These are the so called jobs in "large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis" requiring a "graduate or professional degree from an expensive university". The "overclass" doesn't occupy just the top few tiers in these jobs. They occupy EVERY tier. As a general rule, don't get a first year law associate, banking analyst, Big 4 CPA accountant or Silicon Valley start up job unless you have the right background, education and experience.

There was a thread some time ago about working in a Big-4 and people were saying how stupid these kids were for putting in 70 hour weeks for $45 k a year. Well I have worked in the Big-4 and similar types of firms. The reason kids do this is because out of college they make $45 k as an "Analyst". A couple of years later they are making $75 k as an "Associate". $150 k as a manager, $200 as a senior manager or director and $300 k and up as a partner. And even if you don't stay with the firm until partner, it opens up other opportunities.

So IOW what makes the "overclass" different from some dude working in some company is that they are in a pool of people who are on a track to eventually becoming an "institutional elite" whether it is a partner in a law/consulting/accounting firm, managing director of an investment bank, or a vice president of some division in a large company.



For another, members of a very large overclass can more readily delude themselves -- and, more importantly, delude others -- that they are not an overclass at all, but simply the normal people. Which would, indeed, be a very fine thing if it were true.

Ah the old theory that the poor and working classes are somehow more "real" or "normal". The overclass are "normal" people but they are people who benefited from enough talent and hard work to either graduate from the elite schools or start their own small businesses. While the jerkoffs in highschool spent their time getting drunk and skipping class and went off to the Army or community college (IOW "more highschool"), the "nerds" studied, earned scholarships to quality schools and landed desirable jobs in lucrative career paths.



(For my part, I like the idea of a classless society -- but the point of it should be to make everybody bourgeois, not to make everybody proletarian; Marxists seem to have that bassackwards.)

I do not. I don't see why stupid, lazy people who make horrible life decisions based on poor impulse control should enjoy the same standard of living as people who are highly skilled and highly motivated. People should be able to rise or settle into what social strata they feel comfortible with. You may not want to work an 80 hour week or deal with difficult clients and tight deadlines. But don't expect to make $150000 a year.

[Malthus]

There is a bit of confusion over what the "overclass" is supposed to be and their relationship to the "institutional elites". There is a larger "overclass" because there are more jobs that require highly educated and talented people than there were in the past. These are jobs in accounting, law, finance, marketing, PR, advertising, engineering, medicine, media, technology and so on. These are the so called jobs in "large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis" requiring a "graduate or professional degree from an expensive university". The "overclass" doesn't occupy just the top few tiers in these jobs. They occupy EVERY tier. As a general rule, don't get a first year law associate, banking analyst, Big 4 CPA accountant or Silicon Valley start up job unless you have the right background, education and experience.


I would agree with this, but point out that the "right" background is these days available to a very large percentage of the population.

While I'll not argue that having rich, well-connected and educated parents isn't a very great advantage, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for obtaining the necessary experience and education. Certainly there are barriers to entry - for example, the ability to fund a law school education - but these are not insurmountable by the ambitious.

For this reason, the "overclass" lacks sustained coherence. It is not a heriditary status, as social mobility both upwards and, just as important, downwards is a very real possibility - I just have to think of all my friends who scorned their parents' careers in law and medicine, went to university to pursue "film studies" or vague "english lit" degrees, and ended up working as well educated waiters or taxi drivers ...

Becomming a member of the "overclass' ain't easy, and it involves as you note considerable sacrifices - like a willingness to devote oneself to possibly grinding work rather than more enjoyable artistic or literary pursuits (or, more commonly, partying a lot). Those who grow up with "overclass' parents have an advantage it is true, but only if they *choose* to pursue it - and in many cases they lack the ambition to do so.

[BrainGlutton]

I do not. I don't see why stupid, lazy people who make horrible life decisions based on poor impulse control should enjoy the same standard of living as people who are highly skilled and highly motivated. People should be able to rise or settle into what social strata they feel comfortible with. You may not want to work an 80 hour week or deal with difficult clients and tight deadlines. But don't expect to make $150000 a year.

Yes, of course there will always be gods and clods; but, in a rich society, why do the clods have to be so damned poor? Anyway, a classless society does not necessarily require absolute equality of wealth or income. George Orwell addressed this in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941):

I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:

1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest taxfree income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.

3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.

4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over.

5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented.

6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers.

<snip>

2. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the world’s history to suggest that all human beings should have EXACTLY equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot.

See also Pacific Edge, (http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/pacificedge.htm) by Kim Stanley Robinson, a utopian novel which is surprisingly persuasive as utopian novels go. It is set in Orange County, CA, in a future America after a Green revolution (apparently a nonviolent revolution, but the details are never discussed). The system is not state socialism, the economy is practically all in private hands; the government merely (1) breaks up any business enterprise that has grown too large for all persons involved in it to know each other personally, on "small is beautiful" grounds, and (2) provides a basic unearned income of $10,000 a year to everybody, while forbidding or taxing away any income above $100,000. In the book, this works as intended: In the post-revolution economy, you can live on $10,000 a year, at a very basic level, if you're disinclined to work, or unable to work, or want to spend your time working on non-remunerative intellectual or artistic occupations; but there's still plenty of room for enterprise and ambition -- "Everybody wants to be a Hundred." (Whether it would work IRL is of course another question.) Obviously, such a society would be for all practical purposes classless, and it would be by no means unusual for a child of a Ten family and a child of a Hundred family to marry.

[msmith537]

BrainGlutton, most of those ideas are terrible. I just don't even know where to begin tearing them apart. They are completely contrary to anything I have ever learned in economics. They sound great if you want to create a world just like Orwells more famous book - 1984. Are you sure he wasn't being ironic?

Suffice to say, wealth is not created by the government giving everyone an allowance to live off of and it's not redistributed by forbidding people from earning a significant income.

And why are small businesses better than large ones? Have you ever heard of a thing called "economies of scale"? And some businesses can't be small. What is the fewest number of workers you need to run an automobile plant? Or a shipyard? Or a telecom network?

[Lemur866]

And of course, plenty of small companies rely on large companies to exist. How many small businesses would go belly-up without UPS and FedEx? And how can you run a national package delivery system without a national organization?

[Lemur866]

BrainGlutton, most of those ideas are terrible. I just don't even know where to begin tearing them apart. They are completely contrary to anything I have ever learned in economics. They sound great if you want to create a world just like Orwells more famous book - 1984. Are you sure he wasn't being ironic?
Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist, he honestly believed that the government should nationalize all industry. He was even against private ownership of land, and thought the government should nationalize all farms and turn the farmers into state employees. In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war. Nice guy, but a bit of a dolt.

[Voyager]

And I seriously disagree that it was common for a middle class professional man to marry a working class woman who worked under him. A lawyer didn't marry his secretary, he married the daughter of his boss.

That was a dream, but there are relatively few bosses daughters to go around. Especially ones who would meet and want to marry junior execs.

And the reason for the old saw of the secretary who really ran the business, was that women weren't allowed to run the business. Nowadays a hypercompetent secretary doesn't exist, because if she's hypercompetent she's not working as a secretary, she's working as a manager.

I know of a couple of hypercompetent admins, all working for at least VPs, and all older. It wasn't a myth. When a friend of mine wanted to stop being a math major at MIT, he negotiated the deal with the department secretary.
I had a director at Bell Labs who made it a point, when going to a new location, to introducing himself to the secretaries first. He said that it got him access to the people he wanted to talk to. When he took over a factory, I followed his advice when visiting him, and it kept me from having to sleep on a bench at Stapledon Airport during a blizzard.
Today you are correct - women like this go into higher prestige jobs as a rule. Then businessmen married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Today businessmen marry businesswomen and doctors marry other doctors.

Businessmen rarely married secretaries in the old days, because they didn't marry out of their class. And they don't marry the secretary nowadays because they don't have secretaries any more. I worked for years at Microsoft and never met one secretary. I suppose Steve Ballmer and that ilk might have had secretaries, I wouldn't know. But in the old days, everyone who got the title of "manager" had a secretary. Nowadays, at least in the technology sector that I'm familiar with, nobody does.

Ever see "How to Succeed at Business Without Really Trying"? Marrying a secretary was not considered to be marrying outside your class (assuming you weren't a millionaire) since there was no room for women in your class to work at jobs other than secretary. I think you may be underestimating the respect secretaries were (and still are) given.
When I first became a manager I got half a secretary for about 14 people. Today in my company (which is roughly equivalent to Microsoft in the tech sense) there is one secretary for my VP, covering well over 100 people. When my VP doubled his group size he got no more support. Part of that is cost cutting, but a lot is the fact that in the old days a man typing was considered demeaning, while today a male programmer who can't use Office really well is considered a boob. Look at the fact that it was news that Obama was going to have a laptop on his desk.
Much of the workload a secretary used to have has gone away. When I became a manager, a vacation request of a snow day generated a piece of paper which my secretary prepared and I signed. Today it is all done on-line. Travel arrangements involved a call to our in-house travel agent, which I was happy to have my secretary do, but today I can log into our travel portal and do it myself.

There are still working class people around--the guys who do the landscaping, the cleaning staff, and so on. But they don't mingle intimately with the managers the way secretaries and valets and butlers used to. The modern overclass household doesn't have live-in servants, they hire a housekeeper who comes in once a week, and a gardener who comes in once a week, they eat at restaurants instead of a live-in cook. The only exception is the nanny might be live-in, because who wants to get up in the middle of the night to change a wet diaper? But while the overclass husband might have an affair with the Venezeulan nanny, he sure isn't going to marry her.
Unless your name is Robin Williams. :D

[BrainGlutton]

Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist . . .

To the end of his life. It's amazing how many conservatives who give him iconic status for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four don't seem to know that. He never even, at any point, grew "disillusioned" with Stalinism -- if you read his accounts of the Spanish Civil War you'll find he had no illusions to begin with. It was simply that his idea of socialism was different, more democratic.

[BrainGlutton]

And why are small businesses better than large ones? Have you ever heard of a thing called "economies of scale"? And some businesses can't be small. What is the fewest number of workers you need to run an automobile plant? Or a shipyard? Or a telecom network?

Well, it's just a novel and Robinson makes no pretense of being an economist. The basic idea seems to be that small enterprise is less cold and impersonal, more human-scale, and if management gets to the point where it has to consider layoffs, the employees are more to them than names on a list, and, in any case, the distinction between "labor" and "management" is not so very sharp in a small business. Perhaps the scale problem could be solved by associative or contractual relationships between independent companies with the same size and the same functions as a big company's various departments.

[BrainGlutton]

In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war.

Which they did, kindasorta, but it was emergency "war socialism," abandoned after victory.

[BrainGlutton]

To the end of his life. It's amazing how many conservatives who give him iconic status for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four don't seem to know that. He never even, at any point, grew "disillusioned" with Stalinism -- if you read his accounts of the Spanish Civil War you'll find he had no illusions to begin with. It was simply that his idea of socialism was different, more democratic.

As explained here, also from The Lion and the Unicorn:

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddlesteamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

If this sounds incredibly naive in hindsight, as we can look back on the history of Communist systems' economic performance in the 20th Century, measure against it a much more recent analysis by Lester Thurow, who is an economist. In Economics Explained, (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Explained-Everything-About-Economy/dp/0684846411) having carefully analyzed the incredible practical problems of an economy based on centralized planning without the constant corrective feedback provided by the law of supply and demand, he concludes that, nevertheless, Stalinism works -- for limited but nevertheless very important purposes, such as heavy-capital formation. And look at the evidence: Stalin took over a country that had never been heavily industrialized to begin with, and that limited industrial infrastructure devastated by World War I and the subsequent Russian Civil War. By means incredibly brutal and incredibly wasteful, he spurred the USSR to develop at breakneck speed to the point where, scarcely more than a decade later, it was an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler's Germany. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period. (And Hitler likewise, as Orwell observed, had put Germany on a war footing unprecedented in history by drafting industry to the purpose -- not in as thoroughgoing a way as the Stalin had, but with exactly as much state control over private enterprise as seemed good to the Nazis at any given moment; and it worked.)

From Economics Explained:

The reason it [the Soviet system] did last [as long as it did] is that in the beginning the system very much resembled a military operation. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin confronted an almost totally disorganized society, and tried at first to build a "socialism" that was partly capitalist -- private farming and private small enterprise -- and partly socialist, in the form of state-owned banks and large centers of production. Russia staggered along under this mixed system for a few years, without either great success or great failure, but after Lenin's death in 1927, Stalin took command and rapidly instituted the highly centralized system we have sketched in.

Stalin's methods were ferocious and bloody, but they were successful in bringing about an immense accumulation of wealth, much as did the ruthless ways of the ancient pharoahs of Egypt and emperors of Rome or China. The difference was that whereas the latter built palaces and cities, Stalin built factories, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, and railway systems -- the ingredients of an industrial economy. The fact that Stalin's Russia was strong enough to resist Hitler's armies -- and efficient enough, after its reconstruction following World War II, to impress the world with its industrial and military capabilities -- shows that Soviet central planning was by no means a failure in its initial years. That is why "military socialism" may yet be a model for development efforts in the future. China is today a semi-military socialism which appears to be successfully negotiating the early stages of industrialization, much aided by a carefully supervised free market sector attached to the planned core. Hence the collapse of the Soviet system should not lead us to the snap judgment that centralized socialism is no longer on the agenda of the coming century. That is indeed likely to be the case with the North, but it is not a foregone conclusion in the troubled countries of the South.

THE COLLAPSE

But we are ahead of ourselves. After so successful a beginning, why did Soviet socialism finally break down? The answer is that it is a great deal easier to design and build the skeleton of a mighty economy than to run it. Building a steel plant requires good industrial draftsmanship, but running a steel plant requires good industrial management. Management, in turn, depends on the ability to adapt flows of production to ever-changing conditions -- the unforeseen contingencies, mistakes, mismatches, shortages, and overruns that are inescapable in any complex undertaking.

In a market system, these mistakes are repaired and remedied as soon as possible because they cost the factory or store money. Hence suppliers are told to hurry up, or to hold back on shipments, unprofitable items are canceled and profitable ones run overtime, the Yellow Pages are searched for last-minute necessities. None of this can happen in a society planned from top to bottom. When mistakes are made, they bring about a kind of gridlock in the flow of production, so that the pace of Soviet economic production was a never-ending sequence of feast or famine, too much or too little, with no way of remedying the errors other than recasting next year's plan or seeking the semi-illegal channels of "tolkachi" -- fixers.

[msmith537]

Nope, Orwell was a full-on socialist, he honestly believed that the government should nationalize all industry. He was even against private ownership of land, and thought the government should nationalize all farms and turn the farmers into state employees. In WWII he was convinced that unless Britain turned socialist there was no way they could win the war. Nice guy, but a bit of a dolt.

Maybe 1984 was the ironic book?





Well, it's just a novel and Robinson makes no pretense of being an economist. The basic idea seems to be that small enterprise is less cold and impersonal, more human-scale, and if management gets to the point where it has to consider layoffs, the employees are more to them than names on a list, and, in any case, the distinction between "labor" and "management" is not so very sharp in a small business.


Companies lay people off because there is an economic reason to do so.



Perhaps the scale problem could be solved by associative or contractual relationships between independent companies with the same size and the same functions as a big company's various departments.


So your cure is collusion? Economies of scale are not a "problem". Companies large and small have a size that is naturally most efficient. For example, it's more efficient to have a modern autmotive factory that can crank out tens of thousands of cars instead of a couple hundred. The only time a company's size is problematic is when it is so large it either prevents comeptition or it's failure would have too much of an effect on the economy.


Personally I think creating all this beurocracy and regulation creates more of a class society, not less.

[Animastryfe]

This guy sure as hell doesn't know many programmers or engineers!

I agree. At least, the Silicon Valley-esque programmers and engineers are definitely not like that.

[BrainGlutton]

Maybe 1984 was the ironic book?

Not in any respect.

Companies lay people off because there is an economic reason to do so.

:dubious: Very reassuring to the laid-off, I'm sure.

[msmith537]

:dubious: Very reassuring to the laid-off, I'm sure.

So what? What is your alternative? Pay people to do work that isn't necessary?

[BrainGlutton]

So what? What is your alternative? Pay people to do work that isn't necessary?

Sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- that is the best alternative; Keynes knew it very well.

But the real problem is that the layoff decision in a big company is usually being made from on high by an exec whose own job is not threatened, saying, "I have decided that you are not necessary to this company." And the laid-off have no say in that decision at all. Or, as the labor organizer in the film Matewan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan) put it, "You're not men to the Company. You're equipment."

[msmith537]

Sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- that is the best alternative; Keynes knew it very well.

I don't think that's exactly what Keynes had in mind.



But the real problem is that the layoff decision in a big company is usually being made from on high by an exec whose own job is not threatened, saying, "I have decided that you are not necessary to this company." And the laid-off have no say in that decision at all. Or, as the labor organizer in the film Matewan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan) put it, "You're not men to the Company. You're equipment."


Actually your point of view is pretty one-sided. Often those exec's jobs ARE threatened. They may need to cut costs in their department. Their entire department may face elimination. Often layoffs are necessary to keep the company in business.