Thursday, January 29, 2015

About Social Class

Comes along an article for Vox asking how to define what "middle class" is. Forty years ago sociologists had developed sophisticated typologies of social class.

The common three class model of upper, middle, and lower classes simply does not capture the richness of how we experience life in these United States. I prefer a model with 6 or 7 levels, for instance upper-upper, lower-upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, working, and lower class.

The Vox piece tries to assign income levels to classes, a fool's exercise. Social class has more to do with values and education than with income. There is, of course, a modest positive correlation between class level and income.