Chapter 7

What happens to those born in the top quintile?

30% of those born in the top quintile stay in the top quintile as adults.

What did Alexander and Entwisle learn about poverty by age 28 in terms of education?

45% of kids with higher socioeconomic status, or SES, had gotten a college degree by age 28 - only 4% of low SES kids had. Those born better off were also more likely to be middle class at age 28.And these unequal outcomes were heightened for African American kids.

What is absolute mobility?

Absolute mobility is when you move up or down in absolute terms - are you better or worse than before? Like, if you make $50,000 a year now and made $40,000 10 years ago, you experienced upward mobility in an absolute sense.

How do political views vary across social class?

Americans being more likely to be fiscally conservative and socially progressive, and lower class Americans being more likely to be the opposite.

What are closed systems of stratification?

Closed systems tend to be extremely rigid and allow for little social mobility.In these systems, social position is based on ascribed status, or the social position you inherit at birth.

How does social class come into play when we talk about education (particularly inequality in education)?

First, where do you live?Income segregation, or the tendency for families of similar income levels to live in the same neighborhoods, is incredibly common in the United States. an area with low crime, good schools, and better quality housing,costs way more than a home where crime and pollution are higher and education and job access is inconsistent. One reason that access to education varies by class is that public schools in the US are funded mainly at the local level,so kids who grow up in affluent neighborhoods tend to have access to better schools, because those communities provide more funding.

According to Dahrendorf, why did Marx's prediction of a revolution in capitalist society not occur?

Greater legal protections for workers, like workers' compensation, unemployment insurance,and Social Security have also worked to prevent the revolution that Marx predicted.

What did Lareau learn about parenting styles and social class?

In doing this, she realized that parents had very different approaches to how they educated and disciplined their kids. She found that upper-middle class parents tend to be very involved in their kid's social and academic lives. By contrast, working class parents - who were more likely to have less time and money to devote to these activities -were more likely to be hands off in structuring their kid's free time.

What is social stratification?

It's a system by which society categorizes people, and ranks them in a hierarchy. Everything from social status and prestige, to the kind of job you can hold, to your chances of living in poverty, are affected by social stratification.

What did Alexander and Entwisle learn about poverty by age 28 in terms of race?

Low SES White men were more likely to use hard drugs, smoke, and binge drink than low SES Black men

What did Alexander and Entwisle learn about poverty by age 28 in terms of class?

Low SES white kids ended up better off than low SES Black kids.89% of white high school dropouts were working at age 22 compared to only 40% of black high school dropouts.

What does this unequal growth in incomes mean?

Meanwhile, family incomes have been pretty flat for the rest of the population.This unequal growth in incomes has meant less absolute mobility for Americans.

How does social class affect health?

Social class affects how you live - but it also affects how you die. Mortality and disease rates vary by social class, with upper class Americans living longer and healthier lives. A man in the 80th percentile, or top of the income distribution, lives an average of 84 years,while a man at the bottom, in the 20th percentile, lives an average of 78 years.Women live longer than men typically. Why the huge gap?Some reasons might seem obvious - if you have more money, you can probably afford better health care.Or for that matter, afford any health care.

How does the policy of preferential admittance of legacy students increase inequality in college access?

Some of this inequality in college access is helped along by the policy of preferential admittance for so-called "legacy" students,whose parents or other family members attended the college. Policies like this entrench class inequalities across generations by making it less likely that those from lower socioeconomic classes will move up the ladder.

What was Weber's criticism of Marx's ideas of stratification?

Specifically, Weber argued that Marx's focus on economic stratification was too simplistic: Weber pointed out that there are other kinds of conflict to consider. Weber argued that stratification actually occurs along three dimensions:economic class, social status, and social power, or what sociologists refer to as socioeconomic status.

How is meritocracy a justification for inequality?

The American dream is that anyone, no matter how poor, can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps"and become upwardly class mobile, through nothing but hard work and gumption. The American system is certainly more meritocratic than feudal Europe or traditional India;but the idea of meritocracy is as much a justification for inequality as it is an actual principle of stratification. In an open, class-based system of stratification, it's easy to believe that anyone who's not upwardly mobile deserves their poverty. Because a meritocratic class system is supposed to be open, it's easy to ignore the structural factors that influence class standing.

What has happened to social mobility with in a single generation?

The other bad news is that within a single generation social mobility is stagnant. While people generally improve their income over time by gaining education and skills, most people stay on the same rung of the social ladder that they started on.

What is conspicuous consumption?

Your tastes are shaped by your social position, and you use them to define yourself just as others read your tastes to judge you and your position.

What is "said" to be the great equalizer (when it comes to social class)?

education

What is intragenerational mobility?

how a person moves up or down the social ladder during their lifetime.

What is relative mobility?

how you move up or down in social position compared to the rest of society.

What three things make up socioeconomic status?

income, education, and occupational prestige.

What is the Davis-Moore thesis?

it argues that society assigns greater economic and social rewards to those jobs that are more important to society. This guarantees that difficult jobs will be filled, the thinking goes, and will draw people away from easier and less important work. So, the more important a job is for the proper functioning of society, the more a society rewards it,which promotes the effective functioning of that society - and also a system of social stratification.

What is anticipatory socialization?

learning to fit into a group you'll someday be a part of, like a gender or a race.

What is intergenerational mobility?

movement in social position across generations.

What are food deserts?

neighborhoods without easy access to fresh foods, like fruits and vegetables.

What is structural social mobility?

when a large number of people move around the hierarchy because of larger societal changes.

What is class socialization?

where parents convey to their children the values that go along with being upper class or middle class or working class.

What is horizontal social mobility?

where they work in a different occupation than their parents, but remain in a similar social position.

What are the problems with the Davis-Moore thesis?

Davis and Moore don't talk about how their thesis actually works in society: They only talk about why inequality might be functionally useful. Not all jobs that are important are necessarily hard to learn, or come with high pay.

What is ideology?

a set of cultural beliefs and values that justify a particular way of organizing society.

From a Conflict perspective, why does social stratification exist?

Now, while Davis and Moore don't really deal with the impact of inequality, social-conflict theory very much does. For Karl Marx, stratification is based on different relations to the means of production. At the simplest level, one class controls the means of production, which allows them to extract labor from the other class, which controls only their own labor.

How is education the "great barrier"?

Of the ten presidents who have held office in the last 50 years, 6 attended an Ivy League school for either their undergrad or postgrad studies. Every single one had at least a bachelor's degree. So education can seem less like the great equalizer in this case than the great barrier. Without a college degree, there are jobs that are pretty much impossible to get.The jobs that you can get without a college degree tend to come with lower prestige, lower pay, and a greater risk of occupational dangers.

In terms of social mobility, what happens to those born in the bottom quintile (bottom 20%)?

Of those born in the bottom income quintile, 36% remain in the bottom quintile as adults.Only 10% of those born at the bottom end up in the top quintile as adults.

How does social mobility vary by gender?

Over the last half century, women as a whole have experienced absolute mobility -85% of women earn higher wages than their mothers did. And the income gap between men and women has narrowed significantly.In 1980, the average income for a woman was 60% that of men, whereas by 2015 that gap was 8%. Women born at the bottom of the social class ladder are more likely to remain there than men -about half of women born in the bottom quintile are still there at age 40 compared to only about one-third of men. Also, women born at the bottom experience more downward mobility than men,with more women than men having family incomes lower than that of their parents.Some of these differences by gender may be because women are much more likely to head up single parent homes than men are.Being married is a huge plus for social mobility, because two incomes are better than one.People who marry tend to accumulate wealth much faster than those who are single, making it easier to ascend the social ladder.

How does religion vary across social class?

Upper income Americans are more heavily represented in liberal Protestant groups like Episcopalians and Presbyterians, as well as Judaism, Hinduism and Atheism,whereas lower income Americans are more likely to identify as Evangelical Protestants or Catholics.

From a Structural Functionalist perspective, why does social stratification exist?

We have stratification because it's functional for society.

From a Symbolic Interactionist perspective, why does social stratification exist?

When we first defined social stratification, we said that it involved putting people into categories. Symbolic-interactionism lets us understand how this actually works because, sure, what class you're in might come down to how much money you make.

What is meritocratic?

a society in which everyone can work hard and get ahead.

What is social mobility?

changes in position within the social hierarchy.

Since the 1970s, where has much of the economic growth in income occurred (in what social class)?

at the top of the income distribution.

What is horizontal mobility?

changing positions without changing your standing in the social hierarchy.

What are sign vehicles?

carrying meaning just like a written word.

What are the four principles of social stratification?

it's universal, but variable. It shows up in every society on the planet, but what exactly it looks like -how it divides and categorizes people, and the advantages or disadvantages that come with that division - vary from society to society. stratification is a characteristic of society, and not a matter of individual differences. People are obviously all different from each other, so we might assume that stratification is just a kind of natural outcome of those differences, but it's not. It persists across generations. So, stratification serves to categorize and rank members of society, resulting in different life chances. It isn't just about economic and social inequalities; it's also about beliefs. A society's cultural beliefs tell us how to categorize people, and they also define the inequalities of a stratification system as being normal, even fair.

What did Lareau (1990s) research focus on?

observing families of elementary school students from upper-middle class and working class backgrounds.

What did working class parents emphasize compared to their middle class counterparts?

on obedience and discipline

What are open systems of stratification?

open systems of stratification allow for much more social mobility, both upward and downward.Social position tends to be achieved, not ascribed.