How important is the Middle Class for strong market economies and democracy ?

[Rashak_Mani]

[ Disclosure: All this OP might be totally biased due to the fact that I am middle class myself. ]

Discussing with a student of mine some time ago I defended the point of view that the US was very strong in part due to a pretty beefed up middle class. Not only did the US have a strong and numerous middle class but the middle class also has very heavy participation thru shares in companies compared to other countries. 

Europeans thou they have a big middle class ... these seem to have less economic power in comparison. South America has a small middle class and Asia tends to create more big money millionaires than middle class members.

 Middle Class fuels the economy by consuming way more overall than the Rich Class. They all provide the specialized workforce and government bureaucracy. 

 So is the Middle Class the main stalwart of US economic success ? Or are the Upper classes the true job creators by investing and creating factories ?

 Since then the Tech Bubble and other stocks have "robbed" billions from middle class shareholders... Bush has pushed Big Business interests pretty strongly. Are we seeing an ever diminishing power, usually moderates, of the Suburbans and city people ? What are the effects of a even more "weakened" US middle class ? 

 Electorally speaking the middle class is becoming less relevant ? Having neither the numbers (therefore votes) of the lower classes or the financial power of the upper class is the middle class losing ground in the political arena ?

[adaher]

Businesses are just an economic tool for getting things done, not a “class”. And business interests and the interests of the people who run them, work for them, and buy from them are more often than not one and the same. So helping Big Business usually means helping everyone associated with that business, from the workers to the consumers to the management and stockholders. Such a policy is generally beneficial to the middle class.

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by adaher:

Businesses are just an economic tool for getting things done, not a “class”.

That is not entirely true, adaher. “Businesses” as such are indeed merely an economic tool. On the other hand, there is a clearly identifiable “business class” in the United States.

The most compelling analysis of the class system in America I’ve read in the past ten years comes from The Next American Nation by Michael Lind (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 141-145:

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. . . . 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.

. . . 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 clebrity 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 ar lef 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).

[BrainGlutton]

Another interesting analysis is from Class: A Guide to the American Status System, by Paul Fussell (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 27-50:

[/QUOTE]
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. The 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.
[/QUOTE]

In the concluding chapter, Fussell identifies a tenth class, a “Category X” of declassed bohemians and intellectuals.

[Rashak_Mani]

Darn… only managed to get back now. Won’t have time to read everything… but took a quick glance. Seems very interesting. I read a good part of the Lind book. Interesting.

 Basically my underlying idea is that the middle class is under assault in many ways. Electorally ignorable (like I said before little votes and not enough cash). Tax wise heavily hit since they don't have accountants and cooked books. Crime and unemployement hit them stronger too than the "business class".

  I am basing myself more on the US and Brazil examples which I follow closely. Overhere the Middle Class is paying more taxes than companies do percent wise and total. Government here is totally overtaken by business interests that manipulate at will.... good business and competition suffer since its easier to buy political influence. Something the US should be wary of.

  Adaher you are wrong in the fact that if a company can gain a lot by stepping all over employees rights and salaries... it will. It might even be justified by competitive pressures... or greed pressures. It's easier paying lobbies than seeking efficiency sometimes... Big Business doesn't need government protection as much as the middle class. The rich can fend for themselves way better than the middle class during crisis.... (Business is necessary... I am not a power to the proletariat wacko). 

  Still its like killing the golden goose... middle class is the source of heavy consuming, savings and specialized labor. They carry an industrial economy onwards. By sucking them dry you creat an oligarchy tended political environment ?

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by Rashak Mani:

I am basing myself more on the US and Brazil examples which I follow closely. Overhere the Middle Class is paying more taxes than companies do percent wise and total. Government here is totally overtaken by business interests that manipulate at will… good business and competition suffer since its easier to buy political influence. Something the US should be wary of.

Rashak, could you please tell us a bit more about the class structure in Brazil? I always thought the middle class there was negligible; perhaps I was wrong. But in the same book I quoted above, The Next American Nation, Michael Lind uses Brazil as an exemplar for what the U.S. must avoid becoming. From p. 216:

The chief danger confronting the twenty-first century United States is not [geographical or ethnic] 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.

[milroyj]

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 ar lef 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.

Wow, color me confused. I am of German but also Polish descent, Catholic, with a graduate degree but from a state university, have traveled to Paris and plan to visit London, but I have also visited Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Orlando, and I like Velveeta and drink beer. So am I a member of the white overclass? If saving money for a trip to London is all it takes, I am, but the Velveeta-eating might give me away.

OTOH, your “cites” are hogwash. And you might want to read the FAQ and/or consult with a moderator about what constitutes fair use on the SDMB. Your quotes of other people’s works, even attributed, are kinda long.

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by milroyj:

Wow, color me confused. I am of German but also Polish descent, Catholic, with a graduate degree but from a state university, have traveled to Paris and plan to visit London, but I have also visited Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Orlando, and I like Velveeta and drink beer. So am I a member of the white overclass? If saving money for a trip to London is all it takes, I am, but the Velveeta-eating might give me away.

Well, that’s why Lind uses words like “probably.” Class distinctions cannot be hard and sharp in a society like ours, with no history of a caste system, except for the systematic exclusion and degradation of nonwhites. But that’s not important. The American white overclass might be a bit blurry around the edges, but it does exist. It is a social class just as real as the British gentry, and almost as self-conscious.

Posted by milroyj:

OTOH, your “cites” are hogwash.

Could you please be more specific? Do you think I’m making this stuff up? Or do you mean that Lind and Fussell are fundamentally wrong in their analyses? If the latter, you really ought to provide some better-reasoned criticism than the word “hogwash.”

[jacksen9]

I watched this interview on cspan several weeks ago. The writer makes the interesting point that the exporting of free market democracy has resulted in creating a wealthy minority class that ends up being hated and targeted.

Drawing on examples from around the world–from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America–Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies. Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats–individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group–Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia–these “market-dominant minorities” have become targets of violent hatred.

link

[BrainGlutton]

Posted by jacksen9:

I watched this interview on cspan several weeks ago. The writer makes the interesting point that the exporting of free market democracy has resulted in creating a wealthy minority class that ends up being hated and targeted.

So how does that relate to the OP? Which is, whether the middle class or the business class is more important in creating a nation’s wealth. Does this “wealthy minority” you’re talking about create wealth in their countries where there is no middle class to speak of?

[jacksen9]

I think the situation results in widening the gap between rich and poor. The upper class creates wealth but the benefits of this wealth is not enjoyed by the lower classes. I would suppose the underclass sees little opportunity for themselves, focuses on the increasing wealth of this upper class minority, and begins to hate them more and more. So no, I would think this situation would cause unrest, instability, etc and lead to limited economic growth or perhaps no growth at all.

[milroyj]

*Originally posted by BrainGlutton *
**Could you please be more specific? Do you think I’m making this stuff up? Or do you mean that Lind and Fussell are fundamentally wrong in their analyses? If the latter, you really ought to provide some better-reasoned criticism than the word “hogwash.” **

Specifically, I think Lind is a Loony Left nutbag. Yeah, let’s divide California into 8 states, and Florida into 4, including one called, of all things, Epcot. :rolleyes: And you take this person seriously?

Someone is off their meds, and for once it ain’t me.

And the whole business about the “white overclass” comes dangerously close to outright racism, IMHO.

[Rashak_Mani]

*Originally posted by BrainGlutton *
** Rashak, could you please tell us a bit more about the class structure in Brazil? I always thought the middle class there was negligible; perhaps I was wrong. But in the same book I quoted above, The Next American Nation, Michael Lind uses Brazil as an exemplar for what the U.S. must avoid becoming. From p. 216: **

 I will be generalizing a lot... but nothing "incorrect" to my knowledge. I agree with Lind that Brazil is an example not to be followed.

In Brazil a rich black is a RICH person first... race isnt as much an issue as it might seem in the US. The fact thou is that most blacks and indian are poor. When they do acheive good education racism does become an issue and they tend to be less contracted than whites thou.

Its not a rigid thing… but in the end the results are rigid. Blacks do end remaining mainly in the lower classes. When I see dopers talking so smugly of US social darwinism I see that its not working in the US anymore. A smart intelligent black will go up… but most won’t. Most won’t because they don’t have the same educational and health opportunities. This creates a tendency to view whites as the upper class and “Brazilianization” sets in.

Racial tension barely exists in Brazil too... slavery was pretty "sucessful" here and the culture reflects this view that blacks are inferior. Most brazilians have black blood and are mixed... even the elite to a point... but its common to view a badly done job as a "black's job" for example. The status quo is hardly challenged as Brazil has a history of "appeasement" as far as social and political problems go. (No Civil war or no major revolts last century) Also there are many shades of black here. In the US your either white or black... here there are more "browns". We don't have as much US style polarization in the race issue.

Since Linds book was written thou Brazil passed thru some economic reforms and stability that gave a chance of a widening and more "black" middle class. The poor got some economic clout and were starting to invest in education and consumer goods boomed. This stimulated the economy and promised an increase in jobs and more growth. The world recession and internal economics stopped all that. Ever increasing taxes and unemployement checked and now is strangling the middle class. The bigger than ever lower middle class where many mixed blood were going up was hit pretty bad too since they tended to be less qualified... 

The Brazilian middle class is based heavily on government jobs and small companies. There are many areas where Brazil is strong and the workers are highly educated.... but numbers wise the middle class is much smaller as compared to the US. Economically too. Still economic hardships and governments tendency to get taxes from those who cant "escape" is strangling the middle class badly. My parents are government employees and havent had a raise in roughly 8 years. Inflation in this period was small compared to the past... but still 5-7% a year.

Like a student of mine said... we don't practice "real" capitalism here. Its a half capitalism with lots of oligarchy mixed with a heavy informal economy. Corporativism is a major reason why we are dead in the water economically and why political power remains a big business exclusive. Historically speaking Brazil was close to the US in economic development until the 1700's. Socially we fell behind long before. We were richer in fact than the future US during export booms of sugar, then gold and then rubber. Colonial and hierarchical mindset never left us completely. American colonists were intent on leaving behind the structures of the past.... this allowed a more balanced society.

 Does the US have a major risk of falling in the same errors of Brazilian past ? I think so. Not in the same scale... but with similar problems.

[Rashak_Mani]

*Originally posted by milroyj *
** And the whole business about the “white overclass” comes dangerously close to outright racism, IMHO. **

DO you really think the "white overclass" doesn't exist ? If it does exist even in a limited way... talking about it is not racism... just analysis. The US is melting pot with the white staying on top ? I think so... doesnt make me racist. Pretending it is not so might be more dangerous. So don't dismiss it as left loneybag but tell us why you think its not so.

[Rashak_Mani]

*Originally posted by jacksen9 *
**I watched this interview on cspan several weeks ago. The writer makes the interesting point that the exporting of free market democracy has resulted in creating a wealthy minority class that ends up being hated and targeted.

link **

Free Market economy has had centuries to develop in Europe and some of the colonies in America (the continent). In Asia and the thirld world you see distorted economic models based on foreign investment and government corruption. Growth was rapid... but not enough time for a more balanced economy or social structure.