2639 SOCI 1311 Chapter 09 Reading

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

2009 University of Texas at Arlington of 26

Chapter 9: Inequalities of Social Class

Measuring Social Class

Think about it Critically

In order to measure social inequality in a class-based society, it is, of course, necessary to beable to measure social class. Unfortunately, this has not proved an easy task. There continue

many debates in sociology about the best way to measure a person’s class standing. However,for the sake of convention and convenience, many researchers settle for mathematically(although by many different means) combining measures of a person’s annual income,occupational prestige, and level of education. Sometimes, they also try to measure wealth andnot just income. At other times lifestyle variables may also be examined as part of anassessment attempt.

Wealth , we noted in an earlier chapter, includes not just your income, but also all economic ormaterial resources. For example, you may have inherited great wealth even though you mighthave no income.

Because precise measurement of the social class standing of individuals is so difficult andfraught with controversy, typically today social scientists who wish to study social inequalitysettle for examining only the effects of income .

Measuring Inequality by Using Income

A common method of studying inequality in a large population (such as a society) is to dividethe whole into fifths (or quintiles ) based on relative income. The researcher begins at the lowestlevel of income reported in the relevant sample and includes individuals in an aggregate untilone-fifth of the total population or sample has been included in the bottom quintiles. Then theresearcher figures out the average income within each quintile. By comparing the five averages,researchers and policy makers can examine these figures over time to see if inequality seemsto be growing or decreasing and also how far apart each quintile is from the others at any onepoint in time.

If you had performed such a procedure yourself for the U.S. population whereby you compared

the quintile averages each year from 1947 to the present, you would see a dramatic shift inincome distribution among those living in the United States. You would see that during a so-called “golden ages of social mobility” lasting from World War II to about the early 1970s, theincomes of all the U. S. quintiles were increasing at abut the same rate (Kornblum, 1997). Inother words, even though social class differences were remaining about the same for thoseyears, all the social strata were becoming better off (at between about 2 percent to 3 percentper year).





In Recent Years, However, the Situation Has Been Very Different

If one examines the years from 1979 until near the present, it is easily seen that the differencesbetween the social classes in the United States have been increasing sharply. In the figurebelow, people have been divided into three social strata instead of five. The red bars indicatenegative growth, while the fuchsia and purple bars indicate increased income. Which group had

a decrease in income? Which group had the largest increase in income?

Data from U.S. Census Bureau, 1995

Another way of making this difference fairly dramatic is with the chart below.

Data from U.S. Census Bureau, 1995

What has happened to the amount of income taken home by the upper 5 percent of thewealthiest members of the United States? Has their share increased or decreased? By aboutwhat percentage?

The Wealthiest Members of the United States—Has Their Share Increased or Decreased?

Correct, the difference has increased dramatically. Indeed, the United States has now replaced

Great Britain as the Western industrialized nation with the biggest gap between the rich and thepoor (Wolff, 1995), and while the wealth of the top 1 percent of Great Britain is dropping, thecorresponding figure of the United States is rising rapidly





Nasar, 1992

Examining the Social Classes

Several studies by sociologists this century in the United States have created many of ourimages of the various social classes in developed, industrial society (although we will see that

some of these images are beginning to be in need of revision).

One of these studies was carried out by Helen and Robert Lynd in a famous case known as thestudy of “Middletown” (1929). Although the Lynds didn’t come right out and say so, it is now wellknown that “Middletown” was Muncie, Indiana. Industrialization after about 1880 hadtransformed Muncie from a small agricultural trade center to a city of over 30,000 people. Whenthe Depression struck Muncie in the 1930s, much more hostility between the workers and thebusiness owners and managers was observed than when the Lynds had done their study there.The difference between the classes was becoming obvious.

A few years later, William Lloyd Warner (1949) studied a seaside New England town that hecalled “Yankee City” (actually Newburyport, Massachusetts). Once a small seafaring port,Yankee City had become a small industrialized city with its own distinct social classes. Warner

classified them into six categories, and even today much of his terminology is still used often(e.g., “lower-middle class”).

Also in the late 1940s another study was done by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Only thistime, the focus was on the African American community in Chicago.

Many of our images of the social classes can be traced to these three sociological studies ofclass stratification.

Subjective vs. Objective Social Class

As we discussed in the previous chapter, sociologists have often found it necessary todistinguish between the objective social class of those they study and what is commonly termedsubjective social class.

Objective social class is assessed by factors not affected by respondents’ opinions aboutthemselves (such as assigning their occupations a “prestige score”). In contrast, subjectivesocial class refers to the class standing that respondents emotionally “identify” with.

We shall see later in this chapter that one reaches different conclusions in studying social classstratification in the United States depending on which definition is used.

See How U. S. Population is Stratified

The following pie chart will show you the proportions of U. S. citizens occupying a number ofsocial strata.





Proportions of U. S. citizens Occupying Different Social Strata (1986). Data from U.S. Census Bureau

Would you like to see how many people are getting better off these days? If so, the following piechart shows the percentage of U. S. households in 1989 that were experiencing some change intheir well-being.

Percentage of U. S. Households’ Income (1989)

Now see how changes in life circumstances often affect people in ways that increase or

decrease inequality. The chart below was taken from the U.S. Census Bureau’s web pages (atwww.census.gov/ftp/pub/socdemo/www/povarea.html ). You can go there yourself with your webbrowser to get a vast amount of information on inequality in the United States. If you want, youcan go instead to: www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/ to receive Adobe Acrobat versions ofmuch of this data. (Adobe Acrobat is a “reader” for certain web files. It is readily downloaded forfree from many sites, including one listed at the U.S. Census web pages. Adobe allows you to

http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/socdemo/www/povarea.html


http://www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/









view text and images, print them out, and perform similar manipulations that turn the data into amore “user-friendly” form.)

Changes in Circumstances Affect Income Too

The Upper Classes

We mentioned earlier in this chapter that one may use “objective” social class or “subjective”social class measures to divide a population into social strata.

In a study conducted by Mary and Robert Jackman (1983) in which they used subjective socialclass as their standard measurement, they found that only about 1 percent of a random sampleof the U. S. identified themselves as “upper class.” In Warner’s study of “Yankee City,” heestimated that about 3 percent of his respondents were of the upper class. In the General SocialSurvey data it is found that for about the past 10 years approximately 4 percent of the membersof the United States classified themselves as upper class.

Who Are the Upper Class?

Those calling themselves “upper class” in the major European nations might well disagree withour roughly 4 percent of U. S. citizens. In nations that are older than the United States, beingupper class used to require that one have a title of either royalty or nobility. This often equatedwith being a member of either the “landed gentry” (big land holders) or the royal family. Suchelites often thought of those who had made their money in “commerce” or “industry” as wellbelow them in social standing.

A Continuing Debate

Even today, sociologists debate the identifiability and solidarity of the U. S. upper class. Oneview can be represented by writings of authors such as William Dornhoff and C. Wright Mills(the latter being the author of a relevant book entitled The Power Elite , 1956). This camp ofscholars sees the upper class as a “power elite” that is cohesive and dominates every nook andcranny of social economic life in the United States.





A second group of scholars has argued instead that the upper class is characterized by“pluralism” (Keller, 1963; Parsons, 1965; and Polsby, 1980). They see members andaggregates within the upper class as often competing with each other instead of cooperating inputting up a united front.

Upper Class Competition

It would be interesting for example to compare such a view with Marx’s view of the elite. Itappears, for example, that the well known environmental social movement organization calledthe Sierra Club is composed largely of well-educated, high-income persons.

Examination of this might well reveal that those members of the elite who depend on “clean”industries resent the activities of other elites that may pollute the water on air that cleanerindustries depend on. Such a situation would bode poorly for a view of the upper class as aunited front of power elites.

The Middle Classes

Compared with the upper class, the middle class is far more diverse and includes highlyeducated professional and those who own, and sometimes work in, small businesses. (Thislatter group is often referred to as the petite bourgeoisie —petite means “small” in French.)

The dominant image of the middle class from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s was asuburban population living in relatively new homes (Kornblum, 1997). However, since that timeresearch by a number of sociologists has shown that members of the middle class in general,and the suburb population in particular, are not as homogeneous as earlier stereotypessuggested.

Today, probably about all one can say safely about what unites the members of the middleclass is that they work in nonmanual occupations and seemingly have to work long hours toavoid sliding into a lower stratum. Those who clearly fit this description include: teachers, middleand lower-level office managers and clerical employees, and government bureaucrats.

Effects of Economic Insecurity

In the more secure segments of the middle class are highly skilled, highly educatedprofessionals and managers who are doing quite well today. However, even most of thesepersons find it necessary to work longer hours to maintain their current standard of living. Theforces of stagnant incomes and inflation threaten to slowly erode their current situation.

However, below this aggregate is a somewhat larger substratum of people who are downwardlymobile. The “relative deprivation” that comes from “having had it and lost it” that comes from“having had it and lost it” tends to be more intensely felt than even absolute deprivation, Thus,this group is an angry political force in today’s society, and all major political parties spend agood deal of time trying to channel its discontent into support.





The Savings and Loan Bailout

Starting during the presidency of Ronald Regan, conservatives were able to convince the U. S.public to support what President Reagan’s chief financial adviser, David Stockman, called“supply-side” economics. It was a contention of conservatives that if taxes were reduced for thewealthy, they would reinvest their profits in businesses and that increased prosperity for all

social classes would “trickle down” the social structure. In retrospect, supply-side economicswas a disaster. The money trickled down only partway and then recalculated. Instead ofinvesting in enormous profits in U.S. business, many economic elites found that because of theglobalization of the economic system it was more attractive to invest in multinationalcorporations that have little loyalty to any country. Other money was put into foreign bankaccounts, such as in Switzerland, to earn interest—thereby taking it, too, out of circulation.

However, the situation was not really desperate until theReagan administration allowed savings and loans to offerextremely high rates of interest to depositors and easy creditterms with little inspection of risk to prospective businesspeople. In effect, wealthy people were allowed to lend eachother large amounts of money with little justification. Because

the United States historically has been a nation very hard onstreet crime but very soft on white-collar and corporate crime,little was feared in the way of criminal sanctions. The resultwas the widespread failure of the savings and loanassociations. Some people have been cynical enough to saythat the failure was predictable and that “the best way to roba bank is to own it.” In any case, U. S. taxpayers were askedto cover the enormous shortfall.

Where Did the Money Go?

The shortfall in the savings and loan industry has been the worst thing to happen to theAmerican banking system since the Great Depression. As an indication of how severe the

problem is, government estimates of the cost of bailing out bankrupt savings and loans, whichwere initially $30 billion, rose first to $60 billion, then to $160 billion. Even today, the cost seemsto continue to rise as the government has failed to recover even 5 percent of the debt created.(And, indeed, virtually no one was sentenced to prison no matter how obvious was his or hernegligence.)

When this is combined with the Reagan administration’s massive “Star Wars” military buildup,the results were disastrous for the middle class. The tax burden rose dramatically for membersof the middle class while falling sharply for the very wealthy.

Among other effects, this meant that few families could save enough for their children’s collegeeducations. Little wonder that the average college student today must work 20 to 40 hours aweek to attend college (unlike his or her predecessors).





The Two-Wage-Earner Household

Today, even in middle-class households it has become the norm for both the man and thewoman to work. Astonishingly, this is still not enough extra income to make up for thedifferences since about 1940. In other words, a middle-class male head-of-household wageearner around the end of World War II made more income compared to the cost of living at the

time than a middle class family today does compared to today’s cost of living, even when bothparents work.

Today’s Cost of Living

Department of Labor figures show that those in the current middle-income quintile spend nearlyhalf of their income of three basic necessities of life. Only a generation ago, the samenecessities required only about one-third of corresponding income.

Current Percent of Middle Class Income (for Three Basic Necessities). Data from Department of Labor Statistics





Increase in Living Costs, 1975-1995. Data from Cassidy, 1995

The Working Classes

The Jackman survey (op.cit.) found that 37 percent of those in the United States self-identifiedas “working class.” The General Social Survey, also based on subjective social class, has foundthe comparable number to be a little over 40 percent of the population (NORC, 1994).

It is the working class in the United States that is facing the most social change and the mostuncertainty for the future. The so-called “working class” (you probably are wondering if no one inany other class works, based on the term!) consists of those employed in skilled, semiskilled,and unskilled manual labor categories.

Globalization of the economy (see previous chapter) has resulted in widespread closing offactories and many other businesses in the United States. Especially hard hit, we noticedbefore, are the “heavy manufacturing” industries (such as steel mills and auto plants). Becausethe best working-class jobs were centered in precisely those industries, it is not hard to see thethreat they face today.

Members of the working class have historically been particularly like to belong to unions.However, the disappearance of the large factories, among other factors, has actually led todecreased union membership even in the face of increased economic threat. In one study byRichard Freeman (1994), the author finds that this decrease in union membership is responsiblefor as much as half of recent increases in income inequality.





Conservative Social Movement Backlash

One grim implication of the new threat to the working class can be found in an article by MartinTrow (1958) called “Small Businessmen, Political Tolerance and Support for McCarthy.” In thatarticle, Trow found that support for Joseph McCarthy during the “big red witch-hunts” for allegedcommunists in the United States was particularly strong among skilled small business owners.

Trow points out that the same group was disproportionately involved in support for Hitler. Thereason is clear upon reflection. It is to be expected that small businessmen and other membersof the petite bourgeoisie will not like labor unions because they hope to keep wages down inorder to stay in business. However, it turns out they also will fear “big business” because chainstores have “economies of scale” with which smallbusinessmen, artisans, and independent craftsmen cannotcompete. As a result, al those in such occupations have atendency to be drawn to “outsider” political parties. Forexample, Hitler rose to power in Germany largely bybypassing the normal political parties and appealing insteadto the “marginal” members of German society who looked asif they might be left out altogether by the mainstream

parties. From such marginalized persons he recruited thecore of the Nazi party, the SS, and so on.

Hitler at Nuremberg Rally, Hulton Deutsche Collection/Corbis

Similarly, research since that time tends to show those threatened with the elimination of their jobs or the destruction of their way of life overrepresented in right-wing political socialmovements and organizations.

Among the younger members of U. S. society, one result in recent years has been the rise ofthe “skinhead” movement and other racial purity or neo-Nazi organizations. Most people lookupon such youths as young criminals, but they (sadly) look upon themselves as heroes willing toput it all on the line to protect their traditional communities and a way of life that is rapidly beingreplaced in the United States.

Unfortunately, under such circumstances, the endangeredare seldom well enough educated to have an accurateunderstanding of the macro-level sociological, economic,and political forces that threaten to overwhelm them.Instead, they tend to pick highly symbolic targets for theirire. In Germany, it was Jewish bankers who were“obviously” the cause of the troubles in Germany created bythe aftereffects of World War I. What symbolic targets forright-wing hate in the United States today can you identify?

Neo-Nazis at a rally, Owen Franken/Corbis





The Poor and the Underclass

It is difficult to estimate the exact number of those who belong to “the poor.” Much of thedifficulty stems from a not-unreasonable tendency of those in this stratum to think of themselvesas people who are underpaid or just temporarily “down on their luck” (Kornblum, 1997).

Nonetheless, the size of the stratum is quite impressive. Currently

about 14.5 percent of the U.S. population (equal to nearly 37million people) live in official poverty. In the United States, officialpoverty is indicated by a family of four who receives less thanabout $14,000 in annual income.

It should be noted, but with some sensitivity, that poverty has longbeen recognized as a relative phenomenon. Although it isimportant not to minimize the troubles of those in the UnitedStates living in poverty (poor nutrition, poor health care, pooraccess to education, etc.), the poor are generally much better offthan the poor in much of the rest of the world. The poor in theUnited States usually (although not always) have permanentshelter. The same can seldom be said of those in many less-developed nations, who often live in tents or worse (side-by-sidewith great affluence in many cases) and often go hungry and haveno access to education.

Poverty and Affluence Side by Side, © Peter Menzel/Stock Boston

Surprisingly, ad in spite of public stereotypes to the contrary,most of the poor in the United States are working. Of suchfamilies, 44 percent have one member at least working fulltime (Ellwood, 1988). What actually causes their poverty is

jobs that pay wages so low that one cannot live adequately.Also, contrary to stereotypes, most do not live in urban areas(only about 7 percent do). Instead, 29 percent live in rural andsmall-town areas, and fully 19 percent live in the affluentsuburbs of large cities (Ellwood, op.cit.). The reason for thissurprising statistic is that the poor are actually much morediverse than is commonly understood. They include the agedliving on fixed incomes, displaced and/or marginally employedrural workers, obsolete manual workers from urban areas,divorced women with little education and dependent children,and victims of catastrophes.

Flood victims in Dacca, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann

Poverty among the Elderly

The perception of “elderly” and “poor” as practically synonymous has changed in recent years toa view that the noninstitutionalized elderly are better off than other Americas. Both views aresimplistic. There is actually great variation among elderly subgroups. For example, in 1992 thepoverty rate, 15 percent for those under age 65, rose with age among the elderly, from 11percent for 65- to 74-year-olds to 16 percent for those aged 75 or older.

Elderly women (16 percent) had a higher poverty rate than elderly men (9 percent).





The rate was higher for elderly Blacks (33 percent) and Hispanics (22 percent) than for Whites(11 percent). Poverty became less prevalent during the 1980s for every elderly sex/race/ethnicgroup. In addition, within each race/ethnic group, poverty was more common for women than formen at both the decade’s beginning and end.

A Social Movement Backlash among Small Farmers

As noted in the previous section, a large proportion (contrary to public stereotypes) of the poorlive in rural areas. Because of the growth of “mega-agriculture” (huge farms, highly mechanizedand run as or by major corporations), the traditional family farm (which Thomas Jeffersonbelieved to be the future of the United States) has been rapidly disappearing in recent years.

A recent survey by Robbins (1985) of 1,700 U. S. farmers found that 36 percent of the samplesaid they owed over 40 percent of their total assets Sadly, these figures strongly suggest thatmost of these farms will “go under” in the near future.

The call for welfare reform often heard today has some irony about it if one looks at federal farmsubsidies not to grow certain crops (to avoid glutting the market and subsequently driving pricesdown to disastrous levels). Farm subsidy dollars tend to be of a magnitude comparable to thewelfare budget for the poor. The irony is that a very high proportion of these subsidy dollars are

paid to the huge, and highly profitable, mega-agriculture farms.

Recent studies have shown that communities dominated by such large farms actually tend tosuffer increased poverty and a decrease in local businesses and civic organizations. Manypeople are displaced from the land by such farms and often must search for marginalemployment in a new location (Goldschmidt, 1978; MacCannell, n.d.; Office of TechnologyAssessment, 1986). The pattern has been particularly inclined to produce poverty in the South.The South was always a relatively poor region of the United States, and recent trends have notreversed the fact.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau





On the Farm

The forces associated with the fate of small and medium farms have spurred pockets of severeconservative backlash. Some “marginalized” farmers have begun to see themselves as culturaltraditionalists beset with the worst symptoms of modernism, in the specific symptoms ofmodernism, in the specific forms of federal government

control and multinational farming conglomerates.At times their anger boils over into violent resistance. Itseems clear that a number of the white separatist and whitesupremacist groups in the United States have found ready

joiners in the ranks of the rurally displaced. The samewould appear to be true of the various “militia” groups thathave gained visibility in recent years. Such organizationsalso appear to draw on the marginal members of theworking class—see previous discuss—such as the militiaapparently are responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.

Federal Building in Oklahoma City after the bomb, Corbis-Bettmann

Etiology of Inequality of Poverty

Etiology is a word often used in medicine to describe the origin and course of a disease. Herewe will look at the etiology of social inequality in general and of poverty in particular.

The World Scene

Many of the people of the world are extremely poor. In the less-developed countries, poverty isthe rule rather than the exception. Although it should be noted that such countries typically havea very small elite population, these well-to-do people often in effect run their nation for thebenefit of individuals or corporations in the developed world. As such, they are often “rewarded”for their cooperation. They often send their children to school in Paris, London, or the UnitedStates. They travel frequently to the great commercial centers of the developed world forshopping, recreation, and entertainment. Their consumption patterns are much like those of thewell-to-do in the developed nations and little like most of their own countrymen. (Exampleswould be Batista in Cuba before Castro, the Samoza family in Nicaragua, the Marcos family inthe Philippines, and the Duvalier family in Haiti. Can you think of others?)

The labor force is largely rural in such countries, and often rural laborers are little better off thanslaves. Most of the profit from the food they grow goes to the wealthy. Often, they don’t evenown the land they work. During the years of the Cold War, this meant that often socialistorganizers would try to convince the people to carry out a revolution against elites. Thepeasants hoped by this means to come to own the land they worked and to be able to keepmore of their income. However, because open resistance against the elite (who typicallyfinanced the domestic army) would be useless, the best they could hope for was to engage in

guerrilla warfare. In this they were often aided by military advisers from Cuba or the SovietUnion. In turn, the United States typically supported the elite (with whom it could do business; itis quite difficult to engage in successful capitalism with dedicated socialists).





Therefore, the United States would often send its own military advisers (and sometimes evenmilitary equipment) to prop up the threatened governments. This has repeatedly led to muchembarrassment for the United States. Officially, the United States has wanted to “make theworld safe for democracy,” but business arrangements have often led to taking the side of right-wing dictators or right-wing military juntas who were the very opposite of democracy in everyway.

There are, of course, other sources of inequality in the world. In Africa, for example, there arestill influences from the days of tribalism and slavery. Nonetheless much of the poverty andinequality in the world today is no accident. It is created and maintained by a global economicand political system. Even when starvation is occurring, the problem is not usually that food iscompletely unavailable. Rather, the problem usually arises from political factors that preventfood from reaching those who need it.

Whether such stratification is evil depends a great deal on whether you believe that people willnot be motivated to work without such differences.

Etiology of Inequality in the United States

Most members of U. S. society say that they believe that “all men are crated equal.” However, it

is not altogether clear what they mean when they agree with this proposition. Are they referringto equality of opportunity or equality of results? Most of us believe that the rules should be thesame for everyone, but many of us are not so sure we’re ready to guarantee equal outcomes.For one thing, most of us believe in what Max Weber called the protestant ethic. The Protestantethic maintains that hard work and self-denial are necessary for success and are virtues thatshould be rewarded. Similarly, most of us have been taught to believe that laziness andincompetence should not be rewarded, and perhaps even be punished. The result is that manyof us look down on the poor as deserving their fate. This is true in some cases. However, it isgood to bear in mind the effects of the social psychological concept often called “the just-worldhypothesis.” We al want to feel that we live in a world that is logical, reasonable, and fair (“just”).Considerable research shows that sometimes we are willing, either consciously orsubconsciously, to “rebuild” our world psychologically so that it appears as a just one. (For

example, if a woman is raped for no discernable reason, it is surprisingly easy for the attacker’sattorney to convince some jury members that she must have done something to encourage theattack. She herself is accused of “enticement.” Why do people want to believe this? Because if itdidn’t happen that way, the world is not a just place!)

The Protestant Ethic: Is It Weakening?

There is evidence that the Protestant ethic may be weakening in U. S. society. When we were anation of “smokestack” industries, the Protestant ethic made a lot of sense. However, now thatour economy increasingly depends on selling people entertainments, goods for conspicuousconsumption, and luxury items (how many “presets” does your portable phone have on it?), it isnot at all clear that these things can be readily sold to strong believers in the Protestant ethic(which also emphasizes thrift and efficiency.)

Advertisers spend billions of dollars per year trying to convince people that self-fulfillment andimmediate gratification are essential. Nike’s ad slogan is, “Just do it!” Or a well-know beercommercial exhorted people to “grab for all the gusto you can get today” (which, of course, isreally “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”).

Public opinion polls show we may be shifting away from the Protestant ethic.





Once you mistreat people, or even allow them to be mistreated by others, you have a decisionto make. Either you’re a bad person because you let it happen, or they deserved whateverhappened to them. Which do you think most people will choose? This is, of course, anotherinstance of Ryan’s concept of “blaming the victim” in many cases. What do you think of “all men(and women!) are created equal”?

The Land of OpportunityWe’ve seen for much of this chapter that social inequality in the United States has beenincreasing rapidly in recent years. We’ve also seen that the increase is due to vast and inertia-laden sociological, political, and economic forces. In the face of all this, do members of UnitedStates society still believe in “psychologistic” explanations for success and failure? In otherwords, do they still see the United States as a land of opportunity, if only one is willing to workhard enough—like The Little Engine Who Could —to get ahead?

Examine the table below. (The data come from a nationally representative random sample of2,212 U. S. citizens and were collected in the fall of 1980.) Do you conclude that citizens of theUnited States favor elimination of inequality or not?

Do U. S. Citizens Favor Elimination of Income Inequality? Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.





The Chances of Getting Ahead In the United States

Well, fairly obviously, U. S. citizens don’t favor a near total elimination of inequality. Who do theythink is most likely to actually get ahead in U. S. Society?

Chances of Getting Ahead. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Of course, this last table didn’t tell us why the person would get ahead. The answers mightreflect just the belief that some groups have better chances than others no matter howmotivated they might be. So let’s look at anther table, in which the respondents were asked toassess life chances assuming that everyone was working hard to get ahead.





Chances of Getting Ahead if Everyone Works Hard. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Recently the federal affirmation action program has been the subject of intense debate.Affirmative action was originally intended to equalize opportunities for minorities in the UnitedStates. Look at the table below to see how a random sample of U. S. respondents felt aboutaffirmative action in 1980. The data are split into white respondents and African Americanrespondents. How differently if at all, will they answer?

Affirmative Action. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Now let’s look at the “51 percent minority” and U.S. attitudes toward equality of opportunity.





Gender and Inequality

Do you think the U. S. public feels the same way about whether opportunities to get aheadshould be equal for both men and women? Examine the table below to see the answers.

Women should stay at Home. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Do you think that male and female respondents in the national sample might have differences ofopinion about whether females should have equal opportunities to eliminate inequality?Examine the following two tables to see the actual results.





Chances for Women to Get Ahead In the Last 10-20 Years. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Chances for Women to Get Ahead In the Workforce Compared to Men. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Finally, so far we have been dealing with only how a sample of respondents felt that inequalityfor others should be dealt with. Do you wonder how they felt about their own future? If so, lookat the next section to see what they expected lay in store for themselves.





Subjective Perceptions of Opportunity

Unfortunately, we don’t have the data to see if optimism has increased or decreased since1980, when the data in the table were collected. However, even though the sample reliabilityand validity would probably have to be viewed with suspicion, maybe you could survey a smallnumber of your friends using the same questions to see if you can come up with a tentative

hypothesis about whether expectations have gone up or down since 1990.

Your Chance of Getting Ahead. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

The Role of Education in “Equalizing” Life Chances

It has long been a truism in the United States that more education will help you get ahead some

day. Although some sociologists think that the relationship between educational attainment andlife outcomes is weakening somewhat, the chart to theright is strongly suggestive that the relationship remains ahealthy one for now.

It turns out that one of the problems in trying to equalizepeople in modern society is that they have very unevenaccess to high-quality educational facilities. Those inhigher strata get teachers who are paid more, better labfacilities, and a host of other resources typically denied tostudents in lower strata.

Medical Student in Laboratory, Philip Gould/Corbis





Is Education the Answer?

In the last twenty years, the educational attainment and level of training in the population in theU. S. has grown dramatically.

As a result, has the distribution of income become less equal, more unequal, or stayed justabout the same?

Income by Educations Attainment, United States

Critical Response





Mapping Social Change: Poor Counties in the U.S.

This map reveals a great deal about the places where poor people live, though the mix ofpoverty and wealth within a county is not apparent.

Sources:

Field Hands, © Nathan Benn/Woodfin Camp & Associates

Elderly Woman by Boxes, Raymond Gehman/Corbis

Children Sitting, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann

Woman Standing, UPI/Corbis-Bettmann





Then and Now: From Food Baskets to Food Stamps

In the late nineteenth-century the rich often thought it their responsibility to bring food to thepoor. The modern welfare system replaces the individual gift with “entitlements” or payments topoor people who qualify.

Sources:

Woman Aiding the Poor, L’Illustration ca. 1850/Corbis-Bettmann

Woman at Drop-off Center, © Michelle Bridwell/PhotoEdit

Woman at Welfare Office, © A. Ramey/Woodfin Camp & Associates, Inc.

Woman Using Food Stamps at Supermarket, © Tony Freeman/PhotoEdit

Woman Using Food Stamps at Convenience Store, © Tony Freeman/Photo Edit

Sociological Methods: Measuring Poverty in the U.S.

The official method for measuring poverty in the United States was established in the mid-1960sby Social Security Administration statistician Mollie Orshansky. Orshansky rejected the practice

of choosing an arbitrary level of income, such as $3,000 a year (a figure that was commonlyselected at the time), to calculate how many American were poor. Instead, she argued, oneshould calculate simple but nutritionally adequate food budgets for families of different sizes.She assumed that food accounts for about one third of total family expenditures, basing thisassumption on a food consumption survey done in 1955 (Orshansky, 1965). By this reasoning,“and family whose income was less than three times the cost of the minimum food budgets ofthe Department of Agriculture was classified as poor” (Ruggles, 1992).

This measure is still used today with minor changes, such as multiplying by 4 instead of 3 on thebasis of data showing that food accounts for close to one fourth of average family income. Themeasure is also adjusted for inflation. The calculations allow government agencies, especiallythe Social Security Administration and the department of Agriculture, to establish povertythresholds for households of different sizes; the official poverty threshold for a family of four in1993 was $14,763. (Thresholds are somewhat lower for farm families because they can growsome of their own food.) Note that the official thresholds do not include noncash forms ofincome like food stamps and Medicaid.





Patricia Ruggles, one of the nation’s leading experts on the measurement of poverty, claims thatcurrent poverty thresholds, based on the Orshansky formula corrected for inflation,underestimate the number of people living in poverty in the United States. Today, she argues,the average family spends only one sixth of its annual income on food. This means that the costof a family’s basic “market basket” should be multiplied by 6 rather than by 4 to establish apoverty threshold. Ruggles also observes that it is necessary to continually recalculate the basic

food requirements of an average family because as new foods come to the market, there arechanges in the public’s definitions of what is required for an adequate diet. According toRuggles’s revised formula, the poverty threshold for a family of four would be about $23,000instead of approximately $14,000. This would place almost 27 percent of the U.S. populationbelow the poverty threshold.

Ruggles realizes that her estimates are higher than those most politicians and policy makerswould care to accept. She believes that relative measures that include items in the “marketbasket” that people consider essential are subject to criticism by policy markers who wish tominimize the official poverty rate. “Not all needs or desires are generally considered equal in

judging whether or not some should be counted as poor,” she notes. “The need to eat regularlyand to have some place warm and dry to sleep is widely recognized; the need to own aparticular brand of sneakers or jeans, while deeply felt by many teenagers, is rarely consideredof equal importance by policy makers” (Ruggles, 1990,. p. 9).

Ruggles’ updated estimates modify the original Orshansky calculations to account for the lowershare of an average family’s budget spent on food. Her calculations do not actually considersuch items as decent clothing and were they to do so, her estimates of the proportion of thepopulation living in poverty would be even higher than the estimates given here.

Using the Sociological Imagination: Social Classes in Middletown

Muncie, Indiana, or “Middletown,” is the most famous community in American sociology. In 1924and 1925, and again in 1935, Helen and Robert Lynd studied this small Midwestern industrialcity. They selected Muncie because it “was not extraordinary in any way and so could be takenas a good specimen of American culture, at last of its Midwestern variant” (Caplow et. al., 1983,

p. 3). Their books, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), were “the first todescribe the total culture of an American community with scientific detachment. They were alsothe first to replicate a community study in order to trace the velocity and direction of socialchange” (Caplow et al., 1983, p. vii).

When the Lynds first studied Middletown, they became convinced that social-class divisions,especially those between the working class and the owners of local firms, were reaching a stateof crisis. When they returned during the Great Depression, they continued to find evidence thatthe business class dominated the city’s social institutions. In one famous passage, a localfactory worker described the influence of the “X family”: “If I’m out of work I go to the X plant; if Ineed money I go to the X bank; and if they don’t like me I don’t get it; my children go to the Xcollege; when I get sick I go to the X hospital” (Lynd & Lynd, 1937, p. 74).

The X family (actually the Ball family) owned the large glass works in Middletown. The Ballbrothers had built a fortune in glass jar making and then had expanded into real estate,railways, banking, and retail stores. They worked so hard that they had little time to enjoy theleisure their wealth could obtain.

But their children appeared to be creating a distinctive upper class with exclusive country clubs,farms where their horses could be maintained, and private planes.





In the late 1970s Theodore Caplow, Howard Bahr, Bruce Chadwick, and their collaboratorsreturned to Middletown to see how the community had changed over more than 40 years. Theyfound that the city’s stratification system had changed a great deal since the Depression. Thepopulation had increased from about 40,000 to more than 80,000. This size increase broughtnew patterns of mobility.

The local dominance of a handful of rich families that looked so threatening in 1935 quietlyfaded away during the decades of prosperity that followed World War II. Hundreds of fortuneswere made in the old ways and new—building subdivisions and shopping centers; trading in realestate; selling insurance, advertising, farm machinery, building materials, fuel oil trucks andautomobiles, furniture. Middletown’s new rich…lived much less ostentatiously than theirindustrial predecessors, and much of their money was spent away from Middletown (for yachtsin Florida, condominiums in Colorado, boarding schools for their children, and luxury tours toeverywhere for themselves)… The handful of families whose wealth antedated World War IIadopted the same style. The imitation castles of the X, Y, and Z families were torn down orconverted for institutional uses. (1983, p. 12)

The distinct upper class that the Lynds saw emerging in Middletown in the 1930s had vanishedby the 1970s.

Meanwhile, at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, life-styles were becoming morehomogeneous. The residential building boom that began after World War II continued, year afteryear, to submerge the flat, rich farmlands at the edge of town under curved subdivision streetsbordered by neat subdivision houses with various exteriors but nearly identical interiors. They allhad central heating, indoor plumbing, telephones, automatic stoves, refrigerators, and washingmachines. (pp. 12-13)

By the 1970s the factory workers of Middletown were much better off than they had been in1935. They enjoyed job security, health insurance, and paid vacations, and their averageincomes were higher than those of many white-collar workers. These changes had come aboutlargely as a result of the activities of labor unions, which had been excluded from Middletown’sfactories in 1935 but were accepted soon afterward (Caplow et.al., 1983). But in the 1980s the

tide turned again, and Middletown, like many other industrial cities, began losing manufacturing jobs and gaining more low-paying service jobs.

Today the community of Middletown is far less self-contained than it was in the early decades ofthe twentieth century. It is subject to the influence of outside forces such as the shift ofmanufacturing jobs to other regions and even to other countries. Members of all social classesare more dependent on impersonal institutions such as corporations, national labor unions, andinternational markets. As a result, the old upper class has less influence, and the class structureis less cohesive and much less clear-cut than it was in the 1930s.

Resources

Caplow, T., Bahr, H.M., Chadwick, B.A., Hill, R., & Williamson, M.H. (1983). Middletown families: Fifty years of change and continuity. New York: Bantam.

Cassidy, J. (1995, October 16). Who killed the middle class? New Yorker , pp. 113-124.

Drake, S.C., & Cayton, H. (1970/1945). Black metropolis: Vo. 1. A study of Negro Life in a northern city (Rev. ed.). Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.



SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology Ellwood, D. (1988). Poor support: Poverty in the American family. New York: Basic Books.

Robbins, W. (1985, February 10). Despair wrenches farmers’ lives as debts mount and land islost. New York Times, pp. 1, 30.

Freeman, R. (1994). Working under different rules. New York: Russell Sage.

Goldschmidt, W. (1978). As you sow: Three studies in the social consequences of agribusiness.Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun.

Jackman, M.R., & Jackman, R.W. (1983). Class awareness in the United States. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Keller, S. (1963). Beyond the ruling class: Strategic elites in modern society. New York:Random House.

Kluegel, J., & Smith, E. (1986). Beliefs about inequality. New York: Aldine.

Lynd, R.S., & Lynd, H.M. (1929). Middletown: A study in American culture. Orlando: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich.

Lynd, R.S., & Lynd, H.M. (1937). Middletown in transition: A study in cultural conflicts. Orlando:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

MacCannell, D. (n.d.). Agribusiness and the small community (Manuscript). University ofCalifornia, Davis.

Mills, C.W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nasar, S. (1992, April 21). Fed gives new evidence of 80’s gains by richest. New York Times, pp. A1, A17.

NORC (National Opinion Research Center). General social survey, cumulative codebook (1994). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress. (1986). Technology, public policy, and thechanging structure of agriculture: Vol. 2. Background papers: Part D. Rural communities.Washington, DC.

Orshansky, M. (1965, January). Counting the poor: Another look at the poverty profiles. Social Security Bulletin, pp. 3-26.

Parsons, T. (1965). The concept of political power . In S.M. Lipset & R. Bendix (Eds.), Class,status, and power (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press.

Polsby, N. (1980). Community power and political theory . (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Ruggles, P. (1992). Measuring Poverty. Focus (University of Wisconsin Madison, Institute forResearch on Poverty), 14, 2.

Ruggles, P. (1990). Drawing the line: Alternative poverty measures and their implications for public policy. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Trow, M. (1958). Small business men, political tolerance and support for McCarthy. American Journal of Sociology, 64, 270-281.

Warner, W.L., Meeker, M., & Calls, K. (1949). Social class in America: A manual of procedure for the measurement of social status. Chicago: Science Research Associates.

Wolff, E.N. (1995). Top heavy: A study of the increasing inequality of wealth in America. NewYork: Twentieth Century Fund.

2639 SOCI 1311 Chapter 09 Reading

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