Those who are employed in lower class occupations are often colloquially referred to as the working poor. Those who do not participate in the labor force, and who rely on public assistance, such as food stamps and welfare checks, as their main source of income, are commonly identified as members of the underclass, or, colloquially, the poor.
Generally, lower class individuals work easily-filled employment positions that have little prestige or economic compensation. These individuals often lack a high school education. A number of things can cause an individual to become unemployed. Two of the most common causes are low educational attainment and disabilities, the latter of which includes both physical and mental ailments that preclude educational or occupational success.
The poverty line is defined as the income level at which an individual becomes eligible for public assistance. Many such households waver above and below the line throughout a single year. Lower class households are at the greatest risk of falling below this poverty line, particularly if a job holder becomes unemployed.
For all of these reasons, lower class households are the most economically vulnerable in the United States. Gilbert Model : This is a model of the socio-economic stratification of American society, as outlined by Dennis Gilbert. The United States has a high level of income inequality, with a wide gap between the top and bottom brackets of earners. Income Distribution by Education : This graph illustrates the unequal distribution of income between groups with different levels of educational attainment.
Education is an indicator of class position, meaning that unequal distribution of income by education points to inequality between the classes. Unequal distribution of income between genders, races, and the population, in general, in the United States has been the frequent subject of study by scholars and institutions.
A number of studies by the U. The Great Divergence differs in some ways from the pre-Depression era inequality observed in the early s the last period of great inequality. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.
Stratification, Inequality, and Social Class in the U. Search for:. The Class Structure in the U. Class Structure in the U. High income earners likely are substantially educated, have high- status occupations, and maintain powerful social networks. The American Dream : The belief that with hard work, courage, and determination, anyone can prosper and achieve success. Corporate Elite : A class of high-salaried stockholders, such as corporate CEOs, who do not necessarily have inherited privilege but have achieved high status through their careers.
Learning Objectives Discuss the most important characteristics of the upper class in the U. Key Takeaways Key Points Members of the upper class accumulate wealth through investments and capital gains, rather than through annual salaries.
Key Terms investment : The expenditure of capital in expectation of deriving income or profit from its use. The Upper Middle Class The upper-middle class refers to people within the middle class that have high educational attainment, high salaries, and high status jobs. Learning Objectives Identify the central characteristics of the upper-middle class in the U.
Tim, Leicester, UK By the way you pronounce the "a" in class. Elaine Hutton, Edinburgh There only can be one class, the class of humanity. We are all different but equal of worth as living human beings. It's time you Brits get that in your head! Which would put us all in the same class, probably. Paul Tracy, Hull UK If you can walk into work in the morning and be told your labour will no longer be paid for, so you are out of a job AND have no other meaningful way to get money to live off then you are working class.
You may have been under the impression you are middle class, because of education, participation on managing institutions and systems, because you have disposable income, liking classical music, etc. But the bottom line is no means of survival but the job you are employed to do, then you are functionally working class!!! Val Knight, Brighton East Sussex 10 minutes ago, I watched my mom serve up tuscan bean soup to my dad.
He got up from the table and made himself a jam sandwich. There's a clue in that somewhere? It has everything to do with children and tattoos. What class am I? Top Class. Human race is pathetic with its class systems. Society is a house of cards and we are all just animals on an insignificant rock. A common approach is to divide the population up into fifths by income to produce quintiles. The middle class can then be defined as some combination of these quintiles.
Note that this is nearly identical to the income range for households between 75 and percent of median income. A broader and commonly used definition of the middle class includes the middle three quintiles , encompassing 60 percent of all households.
Perotti goes in the opposite direction, choosing the third and fourth quintiles. Defining the middle class based on income quintiles is particularly appealing because the income statistics released by the Congressional Budget Office, arguably the premier source of estimates on income inequality and tax burdens in the U.
Still, some economists depart from the quintile approach to define their own percentile ranges. Under a percentile-based definition, the share of households in the middle class is fixed over time. This means that for every household that moves into the middle class, another must move out—either rising into a higher class or falling into a lower one. The benefits of this approach include its simplicity and its consistency over time, but these are also its major drawbacks: because the share of the population in the middle class is fixed, shifts in the shape of the income distribution itself tend be lost.
The third income-based approach defines middle-class status in terms of distance from poverty. Sawhill and Haskins set the bar at percent of the FPL for entry into the middle class. However, the selection of a multiple is far from an exact science. Atkinson and Brandolini document that some authors have used an upper threshold of nine or ten times the poverty line, which maps to approximately percent of median income.
The guidelines are simplifications of the thresholds and are primarily used for administrative purposes, such as determining eligibility for financial assistance programs. We use the Census Bureau thresholds based on the Official Poverty Measure, which sets the poverty threshold as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in , adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index.
Alternatively, the Supplemental Poverty Measure preferred by many scholars takes into account current spending on food, housing, and other necessities, as well as geographic differences in the cost of living and the effects of taxes and in-kind benefits on household resources. The intuition of all of these approaches is to define the minimum income necessary to achieve a certain standard of living; and for the middle class standard of living to be seen in terms of a certain distance from poverty.
The fourth income-based approach to defining the middle class is to set boundaries based on absolute purchasing power. In the U. Their lower bound is based on vulnerability to poverty, mentioned below. Wealth, or net worth, provides a different measure of resources available to a household to a pure income measure. Greater wealth may provide greater economic security, as a buffer against economic shocks, especially in later life. For example, some retirees may report very little annual income but place toward the top of the wealth distribution given the value of their homes, pension assets, and bank accounts.
Wealth-based definitions appear to resonate with the general public. Wolff defines the middle class as the middle three quintiles of the wealth distribution. His analysis also reveals differences in the ways that the middle and upper classes store wealth. The wealth of the top quintile is highly concentrated in investment assets, including real estate, business equity, stocks, and bonds. By contrast, housing makes up more than three-fifths of the assets of the middle three quintiles, though mortgage debt amounts to almost half of middle-class home values.
Homeownership might indeed be a defining feature of the middle class—but according to Wolff, so is mortgage debt. While income is the most common cash-based measure of class, followed by wealth, some scholars point to other approaches, including consumption-based definitions, or those which capture financial vulnerability or risk. On this basis, what matters most is not what we bring home, but what we can buy.
Other studies focus on some measure of vulnerability to poverty , or on income volatility , or on economic progress for specific individuals or families over time. We will return to these specific issues of volatility, risk, and vulnerability in a later paper.
What unites all of these approaches is that they share the same basic currency for class determination, money—whether in earnings, income, wealth, spending, or over time.
The middle class, here, is an economic category. Of course, for most people, their economic position is strongly related to their credentials, of either the educational or the occupational kind.
Or they may be the way in which class is more usefully defined; and we turn to those next. But most people see class as being about more than money.
Status is defined not just by cash, but by particular credentials, especially in terms of occupation and education. We may intuitively rank a museum curator with a PhD differently from an HVAC engineer with a certificate from a community college, even if their incomes are identical; and perhaps even if we knew their lifetime incomes would be the same. There is an international divide here: occupational classifications are more popular among European scholars than U.
Most contemporary occupational class schemes are based on the work of British sociologist John H. Goldthorpe and colleagues. These include, for instance, human resources specialists, K teachers, and physical therapists. Murray also divides the population into the top 20, middle 50, and bottom 30 percent of socioeconomic status, based on the cognitive requirements of their occupations.
Here he is drawing on a literature on occupational status , in which particular occupations are placed on a distribution of status scores, somewhat like an income distribution.
As always, however, the selection of specific dimensions, or the weight placed on those selected, can generate very different rankings. Hauser and Warren show that some occupations, like elementary school teachers, have low wages relative to occupations with similar education levels, but high prestige ratings relative to their education and earnings.
Other occupations, like truck drivers, have high earnings relative to their education, but low prestige relative their education and earnings. So: are truck drives and elementary teachers in the same class? One problem with occupation-based definitions is that while occupations are held by individuals, class is typically applied to families or households.
But what if, say, a husband and wife have occupations with quite different statuses? Perhaps one is a professor and the other is a firefighter. Class categories may then be skewed towards male occupations. Equally, the use of simple occupational categories may obscure important differences between the position of men and women within occupations.
Members of the middle class are thus able to afford a college education at state, private, or professional colleges and have 4-year Bachelor degrees. They are usually owners of a home and can move up the ladder to afford a nicer and more comfortable house.
They can control their lives, even the number of hours they must work in a week. At their workplaces, they have positions that involve supervising many other workers. As far as financial freedom and economic security are concerned, they have substantial economic security, which adds comfort to their lives. Individuals and families belonging to the middle class represent various values, religions, cultures, and political inclinations. In the United States, the middle class is disproportionately white.
The upper strata of the middle class, commonly referred to as the upper middle class, can usually afford such luxuries as travel for leisure and luxurious products and services.
The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University was the first academic and interdisciplinary center in the United States that embraced the task of understanding and showing the working-class culture to the world. The center does not agree with broad based definitions, claiming instead that the working class cannot be stereotyped as solely industrial blue color workers and their families. According to the center, the working class is a lot more diverse and has traditionally been so.
Whether regarding race, religion, occupation, or geographic location, the center states on its website that the working class does not fit into any of these boxes neatly. Class divisions, according to the CWCS, depend on economies. The amount earned by an individual and the nature of their work primarily govern the inclusion into any class.
As such, anyone whose work is based on an hourly wage and who is supervised by someone else is a part of the working class. Both blue-collar industrial workers, the clerical workers at offices and restaurants etc. As opposed to them, anyone who earns a salary and has a supervisory role at a workplace would be the in the middle class. Thus, we can conclude that many middle-level workers working for small, medium, or large organizations, retail store managers, teachers, and many professionals working in the medical profession would be classified as belonging to the middle class.
Owners and entrepreneurs would be a class further up, i. Classes have political connotations as well. They can create divisions among people and allegiances between groups. The managerial interests at a workplace are sometimes at odds with those of the workers.
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