SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

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 be able 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 persons class standing. However, for the sake of convention and convenience, many researchers settle for mathematically (although by many different means) combining measures of a persons annual income, occupational prestige, and level of education. Sometimes, they also try to measure wealth and not just income. At other times lifestyle variables may also be examined as part of an assessment attempt. Wealth, we noted in an earlier chapter, includes not just your income, but also all economic or material resources. For example, you may have inherited great wealth even though you might have no income. Because precise measurement of the social class standing of individuals is so difficult and fraught with controversy, typically today social scientists who wish to study social inequality settle 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 divide the whole into fifths (or quintiles) based on relative income. The researcher begins at the lowest level of income reported in the relevant sample and includes individuals in an aggregate until one-fifth of the total population or sample has been included in the bottom quintiles. Then the researcher 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 seems to be growing or decreasing and also how far apart each quintile is from the others at any one point 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 in income distribution among those living in the United States. You would see that during a socalled golden ages of social mobility lasting from World War II to about the early 1970s, the incomes of all the U. S. quintiles were increasing at abut the same rate (Kornblum, 1997). In other words, even though social class differences were remaining about the same for those years, all the social strata were becoming better off (at between about 2 percent to 3 percent per year).

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology 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 differences between the social classes in the United States have been increasing sharply. In the figure below, people have been divided into three social strata instead of five. The red bars indicate negative 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 the wealthiest members of the United States? Has their share increased or decreased? By about what percentage? The Wealthiest Members of the United StatesHas 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 the poor (Wolff, 1995), and while the wealth of the top 1 percent of Great Britain is dropping, the corresponding figure of the United States is rising rapidly

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

Nasar, 1992

Examining the Social Classes

Several studies by sociologists this century in the United States have created many of our images 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 the study of Middletown (1929). Although the Lynds didnt come right out and say so, it is now well known that Middletown was Muncie, Indiana. Industrialization after about 1880 had transformed Muncie from a small agricultural trade center to a city of over 30,000 people. When the Depression struck Muncie in the 1930s, much more hostility between the workers and the business 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 he called 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 this time, 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 of class stratification. Subjective vs. Objective Social Class As we discussed in the previous chapter, sociologists have often found it necessary to distinguish between the objective social class of those they study and what is commonly termed subjective social class. Objective social class is assessed by factors not affected by respondents opinions about themselves (such as assigning their occupations a prestige score). In contrast, subjective social 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 class stratification 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 of social strata.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

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 pie chart shows the percentage of U. S. households in 1989 that were experiencing some change in their 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 Bureaus web pages (at www.census.gov/ftp/pub/socdemo/www/povarea.html). You can go there yourself with your web browser to get a vast amount of information on inequality in the United States. If you want, you can go instead to: www.census.gov/apsd/www/statbrief/ to receive Adobe Acrobat versions of much of this data. (Adobe Acrobat is a reader for certain web files. It is readily downloaded for free from many sites, including one listed at the U.S. Census web pages. Adobe allows you to

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology view text and images, print them out, and perform similar manipulations that turn the data into a more 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 social class as their standard measurement, they found that only about 1 percent of a random sample of the U. S. identified themselves as upper class. In Warners study of Yankee City, he estimated that about 3 percent of his respondents were of the upper class. In the General Social Survey data it is found that for about the past 10 years approximately 4 percent of the members of 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 with our roughly 4 percent of U. S. citizens. In nations that are older than the United States, being upper class used to require that one have a title of either royalty or nobility. This often equated with being a member of either the landed gentry (big land holders) or the royal family. Such elites often thought of those who had made their money in commerce or industry as well below them in social standing.

A Continuing Debate
Even today, sociologists debate the identifiability and solidarity of the U. S. upper class. One view 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 of scholars sees the upper class as a power elite that is cohesive and dominates every nook and cranny of social economic life in the United States.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology 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 and aggregates within the upper class as often competing with each other instead of cooperating in putting up a united front. Upper Class Competition It would be interesting for example to compare such a view with Marxs view of the elite. It appears, for example, that the well known environmental social movement organization called the 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 cleaner industries depend on. Such a situation would bode poorly for a view of the upper class as a united front of power elites.

The Middle Classes

Compared with the upper class, the middle class is far more diverse and includes highly educated professional and those who own, and sometimes work in, small businesses. (This latter group is often referred to as the petite bourgeoisiepetite means small in French.) The dominant image of the middle class from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s was a suburban population living in relatively new homes (Kornblum, 1997). However, since that time research 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 stereotypes suggested. Today, probably about all one can say safely about what unites the members of the middle class is that they work in nonmanual occupations and seemingly have to work long hours to avoid sliding into a lower stratum. Those who clearly fit this description include: teachers, middle and 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 educated professionals and managers who are doing quite well today. However, even most of these persons find it necessary to work longer hours to maintain their current standard of living. The forces 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 downwardly mobile. 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 todays society, and all major political parties spend a good deal of time trying to channel its discontent into support.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

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 Reagans chief financial adviser, David Stockman, called supply-side economics. It was a contention of conservatives that if taxes were reduced for the wealthy, 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 economics was a disaster. The money trickled down only partway and then recalculated. Instead of investing in enormous profits in U.S. business, many economic elites found that because of the globalization of the economic system it was more attractive to invest in multinational corporations that have little loyalty to any country. Other money was put into foreign bank accounts, such as in Switzerland, to earn interestthereby taking it, too, out of circulation. However, the situation was not really desperate until the Reagan administration allowed savings and loans to offer extremely high rates of interest to depositors and easy credit terms with little inspection of risk to prospective business people. In effect, wealthy people were allowed to lend each other large amounts of money with little justification. Because the United States historically has been a nation very hard on street crime but very soft on white-collar and corporate crime, little was feared in the way of criminal sanctions. The result was the widespread failure of the savings and loan associations. Some people have been cynical enough to say that the failure was predictable and that the best way to rob a bank is to own it. In any case, U. S. taxpayers were asked to 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 the American 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, which were initially $30 billion, rose first to $60 billion, then to $160 billion. Even today, the cost seems to 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 her negligence.) When this is combined with the Reagan administrations massive Star Wars military buildup, the results were disastrous for the middle class. The tax burden rose dramatically for members of the middle class while falling sharply for the very wealthy. Among other effects, this meant that few families could save enough for their childrens college educations. Little wonder that the average college student today must work 20 to 40 hours a week to attend college (unlike his or her predecessors).

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

The Two-Wage-Earner Household

Today, even in middle-class households it has become the norm for both the man and the woman to work. Astonishingly, this is still not enough extra income to make up for the differences since about 1940. In other words, a middle-class male head-of-household wage earner 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 todays cost of living, even when both parents work. Todays Cost of Living Department of Labor figures show that those in the current middle-income quintile spend nearly half of their income of three basic necessities of life. Only a generation ago, the same necessities required only about one-third of corresponding income.

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

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

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-identified as working class. The General Social Survey, also based on subjective social class, has found the 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 most uncertainty for the future. The so-called working class (you probably are wondering if no one in any 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 of factories and many other businesses in the United States. Especially hard hit, we noticed before, are the heavy manufacturing industries (such as steel mills and auto plants). Because the best working-class jobs were centered in precisely those industries, it is not hard to see the threat 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 to decreased union membership even in the face of increased economic threat. In one study by Richard Freeman (1994), the author finds that this decrease in union membership is responsible for as much as half of recent increases in income inequality.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

Conservative Social Movement Backlash

One grim implication of the new threat to the working class can be found in an article by Martin Trow (1958) called Small Businessmen, Political Tolerance and Support for McCarthy. In that article, Trow found that support for Joseph McCarthy during the big red witch-hunts for alleged communists 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. The reason is clear upon reflection. It is to be expected that small businessmen and other members of the petite bourgeoisie will not like labor unions because they hope to keep wages down in order to stay in business. However, it turns out they also will fear big business because chain stores have economies of scale with which small businessmen, artisans, and independent craftsmen cannot compete. As a result, al those in such occupations have a tendency to be drawn to outsider political parties. For example, Hitler rose to power in Germany largely by bypassing the normal political parties and appealing instead to the marginal members of German society who looked as if they might be left out altogether by the mainstream parties. From such marginalized persons he recruited the core 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 social movements and organizations. Among the younger members of U. S. society, one result in recent years has been the rise of the skinhead movement and other racial purity or neo-Nazi organizations. Most people look upon such youths as young criminals, but they (sadly) look upon themselves as heroes willing to put it all on the line to protect their traditional communities and a way of life that is rapidly being replaced in the United States. Unfortunately, under such circumstances, the endangered are seldom well enough educated to have an accurate understanding of the macro-level sociological, economic, and political forces that threaten to overwhelm them. Instead, they tend to pick highly symbolic targets for their ire. In Germany, it was Jewish bankers who were obviously the cause of the troubles in Germany created by the aftereffects of World War I. What symbolic targets for right-wing hate in the United States today can you identify?
Neo-Nazis at a rally, Owen Franken/Corbis

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

The Poor and the Underclass

It is difficult to estimate the exact number of those who belong to the poor. Much of the difficulty stems from a not-unreasonable tendency of those in this stratum to think of themselves as 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 37 million people) live in official poverty. In the United States, official poverty is indicated by a family of four who receives less than about $14,000 in annual income. It should be noted, but with some sensitivity, that poverty has long been recognized as a relative phenomenon. Although it is important not to minimize the troubles of those in the United States living in poverty (poor nutrition, poor health care, poor access to education, etc.), the poor are generally much better off than the poor in much of the rest of the world. The poor in the United States usually (although not always) have permanent shelter. The same can seldom be said of those in many lessdeveloped nations, who often live in tents or worse (side-by-side with great affluence in many cases) and often go hungry and have no 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 such families, 44 percent have one member at least working full time (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 and small-town areas, and fully 19 percent live in the affluent suburbs of large cities (Ellwood, op.cit.). The reason for this surprising statistic is that the poor are actually much more diverse than is commonly understood. They include the aged living on fixed incomes, displaced and/or marginally employed rural 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 to a view that the noninstitutionalized elderly are better off than other Americas. Both views are simplistic. There is actually great variation among elderly subgroups. For example, in 1992 the poverty rate, 15 percent for those under age 65, rose with age among the elderly, from 11 percent 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).

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology 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/ethnic group. In addition, within each race/ethnic group, poverty was more common for women than for men at both the decades 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 poor live in rural areas. Because of the growth of mega-agriculture (huge farms, highly mechanized and run as or by major corporations), the traditional family farm (which Thomas Jefferson believed 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 sample said they owed over 40 percent of their total assets Sadly, these figures strongly suggest that most 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 farm subsidies not to grow certain crops (to avoid glutting the market and subsequently driving prices down to disastrous levels). Farm subsidy dollars tend to be of a magnitude comparable to the welfare 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 to suffer increased poverty and a decrease in local businesses and civic organizations. Many people are displaced from the land by such farms and often must search for marginal employment in a new location (Goldschmidt, 1978; MacCannell, n.d.; Office of Technology Assessment, 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 not reversed the fact.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

On the Farm
The forces associated with the fate of small and medium farms have spurred pockets of severe conservative backlash. Some marginalized farmers have begun to see themselves as cultural traditionalists beset with the worst symptoms of modernism, in the specific symptoms of modernism, in the specific forms of federal government control and multinational farming conglomerates. At times their anger boils over into violent resistance. It seems clear that a number of the white separatist and white supremacist groups in the United States have found ready joiners in the ranks of the rurally displaced. The same would appear to be true of the various militia groups that have gained visibility in recent years. Such organizations also appear to draw on the marginal members of the working classsee previous discusssuch as the militia apparently 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. Here we 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 is the rule rather than the exception. Although it should be noted that such countries typically have a very small elite population, these well-to-do people often in effect run their nation for the benefit 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 United States. They travel frequently to the great commercial centers of the developed world for shopping, recreation, and entertainment. Their consumption patterns are much like those of the well-to-do in the developed nations and little like most of their own countrymen. (Examples would be Batista in Cuba before Castro, the Samoza family in Nicaragua, the Marcos family in the 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 than slaves. Most of the profit from the food they grow goes to the wealthy. Often, they dont even own the land they work. During the years of the Cold War, this meant that often socialist organizers would try to convince the people to carry out a revolution against elites. The peasants hoped by this means to come to own the land they worked and to be able to keep more of their income. However, because open resistance against the elite (who typically financed 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 Soviet Union. In turn, the United States typically supported the elite (with whom it could do business; it is quite difficult to engage in successful capitalism with dedicated socialists).

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology Therefore, the United States would often send its own military advisers (and sometimes even military equipment) to prop up the threatened governments. This has repeatedly led to much embarrassment for the United States. Officially, the United States has wanted to make the world safe for democracy, but business arrangements have often led to taking the side of rightwing dictators or right-wing military juntas who were the very opposite of democracy in every way. There are, of course, other sources of inequality in the world. In Africa, for example, there are still influences from the days of tribalism and slavery. Nonetheless much of the poverty and inequality in the world today is no accident. It is created and maintained by a global economic and political system. Even when starvation is occurring, the problem is not usually that food is completely unavailable. Rather, the problem usually arises from political factors that prevent food from reaching those who need it. Whether such stratification is evil depends a great deal on whether you believe that people will not 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 referring to equality of opportunity or equality of results? Most of us believe that the rules should be the same for everyone, but many of us are not so sure were ready to guarantee equal outcomes. For one thing, most of us believe in what Max Weber called the protestant ethic. The Protestant ethic maintains that hard work and self-denial are necessary for success and are virtues that should be rewarded. Similarly, most of us have been taught to believe that laziness and incompetence should not be rewarded, and perhaps even be punished. The result is that many of us look down on the poor as deserving their fate. This is true in some cases. However, it is good to bear in mind the effects of the social psychological concept often called the just-world hypothesis. 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 or subconsciously, 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 attackers attorney to convince some jury members that she must have done something to encourage the attack. She herself is accused of enticement. Why do people want to believe this? Because if it didnt 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 a nation of smokestack industries, the Protestant ethic made a lot of sense. However, now that our economy increasingly depends on selling people entertainments, goods for conspicuous consumption, and luxury items (how many presets does your portable phone have on it?), it is not 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 and immediate gratification are essential. Nikes ad slogan is, Just do it! Or a well-know beer commercial exhorted people to grab for all the gusto you can get today (which, of course, is really eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!). Public opinion polls show we may be shifting away from the Protestant ethic.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology Once you mistreat people, or even allow them to be mistreated by others, you have a decision to make. Either youre a bad person because you let it happen, or they deserved whatever happened to them. Which do you think most people will choose? This is, of course, another instance of Ryans concept of blaming the victim in many cases. What do you think of all men (and women!) are created equal?

The Land of Opportunity

Weve seen for much of this chapter that social inequality in the United States has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Weve also seen that the increase is due to vast and inertialaden sociological, political, and economic forces. In the face of all this, do members of United States society still believe in psychologistic explanations for success and failure? In other words, do they still see the United States as a land of opportunity, if only one is willing to work hard enoughlike The Little Engine Who Couldto get ahead? Examine the table below. (The data come from a nationally representative random sample of 2,212 U. S. citizens and were collected in the fall of 1980.) Do you conclude that citizens of the United States favor elimination of inequality or not?

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

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The Chances of Getting Ahead In the United States

Well, fairly obviously, U. S. citizens dont favor a near total elimination of inequality. Who do they think 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 didnt tell us why the person would get ahead. The answers might reflect just the belief that some groups have better chances than others no matter how motivated they might be. So lets look at anther table, in which the respondents were asked to assess life chances assuming that everyone was working hard to get ahead.

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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 United States. Look at the table below to see how a random sample of U. S. respondents felt about affirmative action in 1980. The data are split into white respondents and African American respondents. How differently if at all, will they answer?

Affirmative Action. Adapted from Kluegel and Smith, 1986.

Now lets look at the 51 percent minority and U.S. attitudes toward equality of opportunity.

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Gender and Inequality

Do you think the U. S. public feels the same way about whether opportunities to get ahead should 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 of opinion about whether females should have equal opportunities to eliminate inequality? Examine the following two tables to see the actual results.

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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 inequality for others should be dealt with. Do you wonder how they felt about their own future? If so, look at the next section to see what they expected lay in store for themselves.

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Subjective Perceptions of Opportunity

Unfortunately, we dont have the data to see if optimism has increased or decreased since 1980, when the data in the table were collected. However, even though the sample reliability and validity would probably have to be viewed with suspicion, maybe you could survey a small number 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 and life outcomes is weakening somewhat, the chart to the right is strongly suggestive that the relationship remains a healthy one for now. It turns out that one of the problems in trying to equalize people in modern society is that they have very uneven access to high-quality educational facilities. Those in higher strata get teachers who are paid more, better lab facilities, and a host of other resources typically denied to students in lower strata.
Medical Student in Laboratory, Philip Gould/Corbis

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology Is Education the Answer? In the last twenty years, the educational attainment and level of training in the population in the U. S. has grown dramatically. As a result, has the distribution of income become less equal, more unequal, or stayed just about the same?

Income by Educations Attainment, United States

Critical Response

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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 of poverty 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

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology

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 the poor. The modern welfare system replaces the individual gift with entitlements or payments to poor people who qualify.

Sources: Woman Aiding the Poor, LIllustration 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-1960s by 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 commonly selected at the time), to calculate how many American were poor. Instead, she argued, one should 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 this assumption 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 of the 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 the basis of data showing that food accounts for close to one fourth of average family income. The measure is also adjusted for inflation. The calculations allow government agencies, especially the Social Security Administration and the department of Agriculture, to establish poverty thresholds for households of different sizes; the official poverty threshold for a family of four in 1993 was $14,763. (Thresholds are somewhat lower for farm families because they can grow some of their own food.) Note that the official thresholds do not include noncash forms of income like food stamps and Medicaid.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology Patricia Ruggles, one of the nations leading experts on the measurement of poverty, claims that current 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 cost of a familys basic market basket should be multiplied by 6 rather than by 4 to establish a poverty 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 are changes in the publics definitions of what is required for an adequate diet. According to Ruggless revised formula, the poverty threshold for a family of four would be about $23,000 instead of approximately $14,000. This would place almost 27 percent of the U.S. population below the poverty threshold. Ruggles realizes that her estimates are higher than those most politicians and policy makers would care to accept. She believes that relative measures that include items in the market basket that people consider essential are subject to criticism by policy markers who wish to minimize 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 regularly and to have some place warm and dry to sleep is widely recognized; the need to own a particular brand of sneakers or jeans, while deeply felt by many teenagers, is rarely considered of equal importance by policy makers (Ruggles, 1990,. p. 9). Ruggles updated estimates modify the original Orshansky calculations to account for the lower share of an average familys budget spent on food. Her calculations do not actually consider such items as decent clothing and were they to do so, her estimates of the proportion of the population 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 1924 and 1925, and again in 1935, Helen and Robert Lynd studied this small Midwestern industrial city. They selected Muncie because it was not extraordinary in any way and so could be taken as 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 to describe the total culture of an American community with scientific detachment. They were also the first to replicate a community study in order to trace the velocity and direction of social change (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 state of crisis. When they returned during the Great Depression, they continued to find evidence that the business class dominated the citys social institutions. In one famous passage, a local factory worker described the influence of the X family: If Im out of work I go to the X plant; if I need money I go to the X bank; and if they dont like me I dont get it; my children go to the X college; 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 Ball brothers 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 the leisure 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.

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SOCI 1311 Introduction to Sociology In the late 1970s Theodore Caplow, Howard Bahr, Bruce Chadwick, and their collaborators returned to Middletown to see how the community had changed over more than 40 years. They found that the citys stratification system had changed a great deal since the Depression. The population had increased from about 40,000 to more than 80,000. This size increase brought new patterns of mobility. The local dominance of a handful of rich families that looked so threatening in 1935 quietly faded away during the decades of prosperity that followed World War II. Hundreds of fortunes were made in the old ways and newbuilding subdivisions and shopping centers; trading in real estate; selling insurance, advertising, farm machinery, building materials, fuel oil trucks and automobiles, furniture. Middletowns new richlived much less ostentatiously than their industrial predecessors, and much of their money was spent away from Middletown (for yachts in Florida, condominiums in Colorado, boarding schools for their children, and luxury tours to everywhere for themselves) The handful of families whose wealth antedated World War II adopted the same style. The imitation castles of the X, Y, and Z families were torn down or converted for institutional uses. (1983, p. 12) The distinct upper class that the Lynds saw emerging in Middletown in the 1930s had vanished by the 1970s. Meanwhile, at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, life-styles were becoming more homogeneous. The residential building boom that began after World War II continued, year after year, to submerge the flat, rich farmlands at the edge of town under curved subdivision streets bordered by neat subdivision houses with various exteriors but nearly identical interiors. They all had central heating, indoor plumbing, telephones, automatic stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines. (pp. 12-13) By the 1970s the factory workers of Middletown were much better off than they had been in 1935. They enjoyed job security, health insurance, and paid vacations, and their average incomes were higher than those of many white-collar workers. These changes had come about largely as a result of the activities of labor unions, which had been excluded from Middletowns factories 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 of the twentieth century. It is subject to the influence of outside forces such as the shift of manufacturing jobs to other regions and even to other countries. Members of all social classes are more dependent on impersonal institutions such as corporations, national labor unions, and international markets. As a result, the old upper class has less influence, and the class structure is 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.

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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 is lost. 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: Harcourt Brace 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 of California, Davis. Mills, C.W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Nasar, S. (1992, April 21). Fed gives new evidence of 80s 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 the changing 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: Yale University Press. Ruggles, P. (1992). Measuring Poverty. Focus (University of Wisconsin Madison, Institute for Research 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. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.

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