It's so hard to think about class in the United States

[firecat]

snippy posted about an interactive feature on CNN.com that attempts to determine whether you, a person residing in the US, can correctly identify whether you count as "middle-class."

Here is the gist of the comment I left over at snippy's post:

Income is not a great gauge of class by itself. Net worth matters a LOT.

Have you read The Millionaire Next Door? One of the main themes is that some professionals with high incomes believe that appearing wealthy is an important part of their professional reputation. So they have big houses, expensive cars and clothes, and are deep in debt. Some rich people think it's important to save money, so they have lots of assets but they don't live in fancy houses, drive beat-up cars, etc. (The book is rather simplistic in its judgements but I agree that those patterns exist.)

Those rich folks and professionals might have similar gross incomes. But are they the same class?

They are defining "middle class" where I live as a household income of $68,420—$107,815.

They're counting it as the middle fifth of income, which means they're assuming five classes. One wonders what the results would be like if they took the middle third of income (I suspect the results would be more boring, although I'm sure some people would define themselves as middle class when they aren't in the middle third of income).

Comments

[firecat]

I'm confused -- if people whose income is based on investments are middle class, how is upper class defined? By titles?

People who get money via work have a completely different set of priorities from people whose income relies on ownership of assets.

Good way to put it.

[bitterlawngnome]

Yup. Upper class / aristocracy, is inherited power, granted by birthright or through a ruling monarch - viz the House of Lords http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords for instance. Not a matter of income, which is why you can have penniless aristocracy, and why people will pay to buy a title even if they already have a great deal of property.

This is all classical Marxist theory, BTW. None of it my own idea.

I think it's very important to distinguish class (workers, bourgeoisie, aristocracy) in this sense from income (lower, middle, upper), for the functional reasons I described. The bourgeoisie (aka the 10% or 1% or 0.01% as you prefer) in America has succeeded in turning working people against each other largely based on misinformation about what class is. Teachers and coal miners and trash truck drivers and walmart greeters really ought to be on the same side politically, but by dint of relatively small income disparities (compared to the 1%) they've been trained to fight each other.

[johnpalmer]

I've heard it said that in the UK (and maybe other parts of England Europe - damned E confuses me all the time!) a professor is "upper class" but might have a pauper's income. Not sure if I have it right.

I do know that there's a concept of "working class" which most of "middle class" America belongs to.

[spiralsheep]

In England a professor would be socially upper/lower middle class from their job, regardless of income, but might have come from a working class or upper class background and might retain some social "class" or "status" markers from that background in addition to their employment markers (Oxbridge or redbrick university?). Some social markers are generally more influential than others while some markers are situation specific. Which partly explains why class in England is such a minefield and causes social tensions in many ways, personal and societal.

[johnpalmer]

Fair enough; I'd heard (as I said) that a professorship was (and maybe "was" as in, past tense!) a higher status/"upper class" job.

But that's an interesting point - that there are so many conflicting class markers.

I mean, they exist here, too... but I think since they're not admitted to, they're even trickier to spot.

[jae]

The "upper class" is different in each society (i.e. what makes for it would be quite different in the UK than in the U.S.), but however you stack things they are a rather marginal (though often quite powerful) phenomenon, and not generally studied or even referred to very much in the social sciences. They tend to be not just people who can live and thrive without doing traditional work, but whose families have lived that way for generations.

What the Bitter Lawn Gnome is saying is very much along the lines of why I'm balking at equating social class with income bracket, by the way, though he phrased it better.

-J

[bitterlawngnome]

What I said up there is pure Marx, btw. IMO it works well for this, but doesn't work well when you're looking at for instance the Clintons and Bushes and Kennedys. Part of their power is capital ownership, but a big part of it derives purely from being part of those families, so they are a hybrid sort of thing.

[bibliofile]

I agree that it's certainly not about net income: Marxist theory is quite limited, in so many ways I think. I'm glad that social sciences have long since moved beyond Marx. So much to look at, and so much to think about!

Note: SOme of my own, very inexpert opinion derives from exposure to the Working Class Studies Association here in the US. It strikes me as much as a set of cultural differences as anything, though not just anthropological if that makes any sense. Also, I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb which means I actually encountered the occasional upper-class person. No, they are Not Like just about anybody else.

[firecat]

All of this exactly.