All those studies that analyze whether some variable or other affects income? They’d all be much more interesting if they analyzed the effect on class instead. For example, there’s a surprisingly low correlation between your parents’ income and your own income, which sounds like it means there’s high social mobility. But I grew up in a Gentry class family; I became a doctor, my brother became a musician, and my cousin got a law degree but eventually decided to work very irregularly and mostly stay home raising her children. I make more money than my brother, and we both make more money than my cousin, but this is not a victory for social mobility and family non-determinism; it’s no coincidence none of us ended up as farmers or factory workers. We all ended up Gentry class, but I chose something closer to the maximize-income part of the Gentry class tradeoff space, my brother chose something closer to the maximize-creativity part, and my cousin chose to raise the next generation. Any studies that interpret our income difference as an outcome difference and tries to analyze what factors gave me a leg up over my relatives (better schools? more breastfeeding as a child?) are stupid and will come up with random noise. We all got approximately the same level of success/opportunity, and those things just happen to be very poorly measured by money. If we could somehow collapse the entirety of tradeoffspace into a single variable, I bet it would have a far greater parent-child correlation than income does. This is part of why I don’t follow the people who take the modest effect of IQ on income as a sign that IQ doesn’t change your opportunities much; maybe everyone in my family has similar IQs but wildly different income levels, and there’s your merely modest IQ/income relationship right there. I think some studies (especially in Britain) have tried analyzing class and gotten some gains over analyzing income, but I don’t know much about this.
My thoughts:
1. I agree that income is a noisy measure of something that is more fundamental and more highly heritable. I take Gregory Clark’s The Son Also Rises as strong evidence for that. Re-read my review.
Clark and his researchers looked at multi-generational outcomes on a variety of measures in several countries. They concluded that under many different institutional arrangements and across many time periods, the true correlation across generations in social status is somewhere between .7 and.8, which is much higher than most conventional estimates. In short, persistence of social class is much higher than most researchers believe it to be, based on single-generation correlations that are biased downward by measurement error.
2. Alexander describes a number of impressionistic descriptions of social class. I prefer the data-based approach used by sociologists and market researchers. See, for example, The Clustering of America, which uses cluster analysis.
3. People are much more tightly grouped around social class than around income or political beliefs. That is why so many of us feel totally isolated from the Trump phenomenon. Remember Charles Murray’s bubble test?
4. Speaking of Trump, Alexander writes,
Donald Trump appeals to a lot of people because despite his immense wealth he practically glows with signs of being Labor class. This isn’t surprising; his grandfather was a barber and his father clawed his way up to the top by getting his hands dirty. He himself went to a medium-tier college and is probably closer in spirit to the small-business owners of the upper Labor class than to the Stanford MBA-holding executives of the Elite. Trump loves and participates in professional wrestling and reality television; those definitely aren’t Gentry or Elites pastimes! When liberals shake their heads wondering why Joe Sixpack feels like Trump is a kindred soul even though Trump’s been a billionaire his whole life, they’re falling into the liberal habit of sorting people by wealth instead of by class. To Joe Sixpack, Trump is “local boy made good”.
I find that insightful.
Yes, class/status and income are not the same, and that does help explain Trump’s appeal. But the those on the left cannot concede this, because if it class isn’t ultimately a single-dimensional variable determined by income, then that weakens the cases for redistribution. I’m reminded of the ‘Great Chain of Status’ debate between Will Wilkinson and Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber:
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2006/10/31/the-great-chain-of-status/
I’m some one who grew up in a blue-collar home fortunate enough to have moved up in life. The amount of class based prejudice I encounter from my liberal colleagues, and especially how invisible it is to them, a group so sensitive to other types of bigotry, astounds me.
Perhaps the way to defeat a demagogue like Trump is to not ooze hatred towards his supporters, not tell them their concerns are all racist, not treat them like children who don’t really know what’s good for them. Maybe you should take their interests and objections seriously. But the out-group can never be have legitimate concerns or arguments, just bad motivations.
Do poor white voters get tired of constantly being called stupid by the left for not voting “in their own self-interest” (as if that’s how we should vote)?
*we being people in general, not just poor whites; not sure why anyone would hold up voting in one’s self-interest as a principle to adhere to
And is it? For example, all I’ve seen from Obamacare is less money and my “personnel department” taking a heavy interest in making sure anyone borderline part-time definitely gets bucket ed as such. Seems pretty arrogant (and stupid to be honest) to say this would be on my own interest AND that I can’t even tell.
I don’t know what else they are talking about, but considering Europe makes about half, redistribution isn’t beyond debate either.
Because voting D isn’t in their self interest. If you have a job, even if it doesn’t make a ton, you don’t qualify for a lot of their welfare programs and your marginal tax rate is sky high. Immigration is also destroying these people’s lives, but Ds want more. In addition, D programs like section 8 hurt them a lot.
Class is as difficult to assess as anything. I never know how to identify myself, much anyone else.
It just depends what questions you ask. Ask yourself questions like:
*How many friends do you have who work blue collar jobs?
*Have you attended university?
*What is the educational level of your parents?
*What is the educational level of your grandparents/extended family?
*What are your hobbies and interests? Compare these to your peers and then to a blue collar worker.
Do you call knaves jacks? That’s the Charles Dickens question. Did you have a piano growing up? Alan Bennett did. Do you say house or home? Nancy Mitford said house.
This is in keeping with my observation that people hit by bad financial events, even things that end in personal bankruptcy, seemed to not push them out of the middle class life style.
Can someone explain what I’m missing by thinking I “get” Trump? Obama thinks being American means bringing Ebola patients and Syrian men into our country. That’s not American, that is gambling. Trump is just pointing out how that kind of thing is kind of dumb (depending on your assumptions)…with gusto. Sure, Trump is as loony as a Canadian dollar, but I don’t get not getting the appeal of someone to fill the emperor-has-no-clothes spot. Sure, Trump is reckless, but are we closer or further from World War with Islam (and Russia?) than before Obama (Clinton?). I could almost be convinced Obama wants a terrorist attack on our soil to reinvigorate the domestic spying and foreign adventuring. I don’t actually think that, but WE CAN’T TELL! So, what am I not getting? Megan McArdle makes an attempt to explain it today (basically, “don’t worry, because it is hopeless”), but that didn’t really convince me. What is this revealed knowledge I’d get from membership in a higher social class?
You misspelled “Scott” as “Scptt”.
Chan and Goldthorpe (American Sociological Review, 2007): “Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and its Empirical Relevance”, are relevant here.
They argue that class and status are related but different forms of social stratification. Economic security and prospects are stratified more by class than by status, while the opposite is true for outcomes in the domain of cultural consumption. In politics, class rather than status predicts Conservative versus Labour Party voting in British general elections and also Left–Right political attitudes. But it is status rather than class that predicts Libertarian–Authoritarian attitudes.
Thanks. Interesting notion of distinguishing between class and status. Are there clear examples of celebrities who differ in class and status? What is Trump’s class vs. status, for example?
Weber very carefully made the distinction between Stand (position in the status system) and Klasse (position in the market system), and one of his main points about Marx is that he missed this or at least didn’t care very much about it. Left/right politics is usually aligns those doing relatively better in the status system (the left) against those doing relatively better in the market system (the right). The Kochs have a lot of status, but they have even more money. Hollywood actors have a lot of money, but they have even more status. Hard to think of exceptions.