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

[megpie71]

Warning: this is long.

As bitterlawngnome points out, the original writers on the subject, Marx and Engels, were writing about 19th century England, and as such things there stratified into about five or six different groups based largely on how income was generated.

At the top of the social "tree" there were the aristocracy and gentry. They largely derived their income from rents, and the proceeds of agricultural estates which they owned and leased out, and which were largely passed around within the select group of the gentry via either patrilineage, or through marriages, gambling, and occasional sales. If you had a title, you were an aristocrat. If not, you were a member of the gentry. Largely, the majority of the land in the United Kingdom was owned by the aristocracy (headed, of course, by the Crown).

Next group down in the social hierarchy were the capitalists - the people who derived their income through the proceeds of industry. They owned factories, businesses, and so on, and often obtained more actual money from these than many aristocrats did through their estates. By the 19th century, the daughters of rich industrialists were considered a good catch for the sons of poor titled estates, and the daughters of poor aristocrats would marry either self-made or inherited millionaires, using their husband's wealth to augment their connections and provide political and social power to their children.

The social system we're seeing in places like the USA, Canada and Australia (as well as the UK to a certain degree) is built out of these two "ownership" classes intermarrying and essentially treating the estates of the gentry as another asset in the portfolios of the industrialists. In the USA, it gives you the political dynasty families (where their inherited wealth gives them the springboard into the electoral process, which is very much along the lines of "he with the most money wins" a lot of the time). In the UK, it gave the children of the industrialists the access to the schooling and the social world of the aristocracy (this is where the "old school tie" came in - connections formed through educational institutions were exploited to obtain access to the political and bureaucratic spheres). In the UK, I suspect access to the corridors of power is still largely predicated on "who you know" rather than what you can do. In Australia, it gives us the Murdochs, the Reinharts, the Packers and the Fairfaxes - the powerful children and grandchildren of economically successful men (Sir Keith Murdoch, Lang Hancock, Sir Frank Packer, Sir Warwick Oswald Fairfax) controlling key resources, mostly media-related, and manipulating the parliamentarians (who are largely of the university-educated upper middle classes) thus.

(Yes, Virginia, the USA does have an aristocracy. It's just they don't have any titles to their names. But if you look at the very old, moneyed families, who basically treat the political system in the USA as though it's their personal playground, you're looking at the aristocracy. These days, they own a mixture of land and capital assets, but they're still aristocrats at heart).

So, on to the next bunch of people - the salaried and/or university educated professionals. Now, in the UK in the 19th century (and indeed right up until about the middle of the 20th century) access to a university education was generally one of those class markers. You could only afford a university education if your family had an income capable of supporting you while you were getting it (living in Oxford, boarding at one of the colleges), which largely limited it to the aristocracy and gentry, or if you had a patron who was willing to sponsor you (the Anglican church was probably the major patron, and until about the middle of the 19th century, becoming an academic involved effectively becoming a member of the clergy; this was a hangover from the Catholic days, and it was the main source of new clergy for the church). This meant, effectively, that someone who was receiving a university education could be regarded as having an estate to draw upon, and thus didn't require a huge salary. Again, the Anglican clergy fit in here as well, because a parish generally came with accommodation and a "living" attached (rural parishes tended to have a smallish estate, urban parishes were dependent on what you could collect from your parishioners). These days, these people are the upper middle classes. They were the lowest of the "dilettante" classes, in many ways - if they lost a position, they could usually find something to sustain them through family connections, although the money might be a bit tight at times.

Next rung down the social class ladder were the office workers, the shop workers, the nurses, and the teachers. This used to include lawyers (even during the early 20th century, lawyers in the UK at least were largely trained up on an apprenticeship system - read Sir Joseph Porter's first patter song in "HMS Pinafore" to see how this worked) and doctors. Educational level was generally high school completion/matriculation, with any post-secondary education being either on-the-job, through mentoring, or via professional institutions. People who were paid an annual salary, but who didn't have an estate to depend upon. These "white collar" jobs were largely indoor work with very little heavy lifting, paid a dependable salary each year, and may have allowed the people doing them to employ a couple of servants. Upper servants, such as butlers, housekeepers, ladies' maids and valets also fitted into this class. This is what would now be called the middle classes, and they're really the lowest class available which would have regularly employed at least one servant (the minimum was usually a cook-housekeeper and a maid-of-all-work). So effectively they're the lowest of the "employer" classes, but also the first of the "working" classes - if they wound up out-of-work, they didn't have resources which could sustain them through the period between jobs if it lasted longer than about three months, and their material comforts suffered.

Then come the tradesmen and the workers at industrial sites (factories, mines, docks, shipyards, etc), who are the first class to be paid an hourly wage, which means their income depends largely on how many hours they can work. Also in this class are the cook-housekeepers, the maids, the footmen, and the vast majority of domestic servants who actually did the hard physical work involved in keeping a house clean prior to the domestic revolutions of the early part of the 20th century. This is what was labelled the "working class" and the "blue collar" workers. Effectively, if your permanent job involved doing physical work, you were part of this class. Property ownership was generally limited to a single residence, if that, and this class, by and large, did not habitually employ servants. Education levels tended to be limited to completing the compulsory schooling, and maybe getting qualified through a trade school, but the majority of the training was through apprenticeships.

Finally, down at the bottom of the heap are the untrained labourers - the people who used to dig ditches, tend farms, carry loads, sweep crossings, and so on. Employment was largely casual (as and when needed), wages were hourly and lower than those for the trades or industry, and accommodation was usually rented rather than owned. Unemployment was a regular thing, as was poverty.

Those six categories of income generation (land investment, capital investment, investment plus salary, annual salary only, permanent waged, and casual waged) may actually provide a better framework for figuring out class positioning in the USA, the UK, the Canada and the Australia of today. Basically, the way the economic landscape has been altering is this: the top two groups have commingled, the third and fourth groups are still present, the fifth group has been shrinking drastically, and the sixth group has grown sight out of mind.

[tagryn]

I appreciated reading that & the work put in to write it up.

[firecat]

This is GREAT, thanks!

[flarenut]

Thanks! That's awfully good. just one caveat: in the US at least, the "annual salary" grouping isn't necessarily a good classifier for status because of the ways that companies and other employers exploit loopholes in employment law. There are plenty of "exempt" employees and consultants/contractors who get paid on a nominally annual basis but have the same kind of job security problems as those who get nominally hourly wages.

[necturus]

I disagree that we have an aristocracy in the European sense here in America. The European aristocrats were in origin lords of manors in a feudal system that America has never seen; the closest analogue to it here were perhaps the plantations of the old South. Aristocrats enjoyed a degree of privilege, enforced by law, tradition, and immemorial custom, far beyond anything we've seen in this country's history. Aristocracy was determined strictly by birth in a society where God was held to have put everyone, from the king down to the lowest serf, in the place where he or she belonged. The notion of a divinely ordained social pecking order was beloved by eighteenth century conservatives but anathema to the founders of the American republic.

The empowered class in America is based on capital; it may be inherited, even for many generations, but there is nothing about the scion of wealth that empowers him or her but the wealth itself; by contrast, the privileges of a marquis under the Ancient Regime were conveyed by birth alone.

The class to which the vast majority of Europeans belonged in feudal times, whose labor made the rise of the aristocracy possible and who are represented by the sickle, as opposed to the workers' hammer, in the classic Communist emblem, is the peasantry. We have no peasantry today; in today's mechanized agriculture, farm workers have much the same status and interests as the rest of the working class.