Ch 7 - Stratification

Pareto's view on the ideal governing elite

- Along these lines, the ideal governing elite for Pareto is a combination of foxes and lions—that is, individuals who are cunning, unscrupulous, and innovative along with individuals who are purposeful and decisive, using action and force. - This applies not only to the political realm but also to the economic realm, and the masses will be better off for it. - The whole system works over time, in Pareto's view, when there is enough opportunity and social mobility to ensure that the most talented individuals end up in the elite and that it does not become a rusty aristocracy.

Occupational Status and status hierarchy system

- Although a status group can be defined by something other than occupation, such as a claim to a specific lifestyle of leisure (skate punks) or membership in an exclusive organization that defines one's identity (the Daughters of the American Revolution), much work by sociologists has been related to occupational status. - After all, work is one of the most centrally defining aspects of our lifestyle. - In the 1960s, for example, Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967) created the Index of Occupational Status by polling the general public about the prestige of certain occupations (an abbreviated version based on more recent data appears in Table 7.1, next page). - Many folks have since refined this rank ordering, but the story is much the same. - What is particularly interesting is that the hierarchy is largely stable over time and across place. - Occasionally, new jobs need to be slotted in (there were no web designers in the 1960s), but they generally are slotted in fairly predictable ways based on the status of similar occupations and do not create much upheaval within the overall rank ordering. - The scores on the Duncan scale (as it is known) range from 0 to 96, with 0 being the least prestigious and 96 the most prestigious.

What is a bourgeois society and how does it relate to equality of opportunity?

- Although the word bourgeois is often used pejoratively, here I mean it as a neutral description—a society of commerce in which the maximization of profit is the primary business incentive. - Almost all modern capitalist societies purport to follow an ideology of equal opportunity. - The equal opportunity ideology was adopted by civil rights activists in the 1960s, who argued that the rules were unfair. - For instance, the segregation of public spaces and other Jim Crow laws (a rigid set of antiblack statutes that relegated African Americans to the status of second-class citizens through educational, economic, and political exclusion) were seen as incompatible with the bourgeois notion of fairness or equality of opportunity. - The rallying cry for equality of opportunity resonates with our overall capitalist ideology. - Unequal opportunity clearly stifles meritocracy, a system in which advancement is based on individual achievement or ability.

Why is it challenging for sociologists to study social mobility?

- Although there is increasing consensus on what aspects of class background matter (and how much they do), there is relatively little understanding of the multiple mechanisms by which class is reproduced (or how mobility happens). - For instance, families with a higher socioeconomic status are likely to have more success in preparing their children for school, entry exams, and ultimately the job market because they have greater access to resources that promote and support their children's development. - These might include educational toys when the children are very young, tutors in grade school, and expensive test-preparation courses for exams such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT. - Once again, let us compare the CEO of a large, profitable US corporation with a single mother working as a waitress at the local diner. - The status of the CEO's occupation and his disproportionate income and wealth in relation to the waitress's easily put his socioeconomic status leaps and bounds ahead of hers. - Because of this disparity, he can send his children to the top private schools, where they will be funneled toward highly paid positions. - In contrast, assuming that the single mother has no other source of income, her children are likely to get a public education without all the extras. - This by no means mandates that they are destined for lower-level occupations, but it certainly suggests that if this were a race, the CEO's children started several miles ahead.

What is one unique fact of caste systems?

- Although there is little-to-no individual mobility in caste systems, one unique fact of the system is that an entire caste could obtain a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting practices and behaviors of the upper castes. - This process is called sanskritization. - Typically practices that are adopted are those that pertain to a higher degree of religious purity (vegetarianism or fasting, for example). - At the same time a caste will eschew aspects of its own traditions that are considered impure (animal sacrifice or the consumption of alcohol). - In this way, an entire group of people can rise in social status in one to two generations. Sometimes such an attempt works, and sometimes it doesn't. - During the colonial period, when the British governed South Asia, the Vaishya, the second-lowest caste in Pakistan, adopted Christianity, the religion of the British, in an attempt to jump ahead in the hierarchy. - Their attempt was not successful. - However, by becoming Christian, the Vaishya caste did enjoy a unique fate after the partition of Pakistan from India. Pakistan became a Muslim state in which Islamic law (the shar'ia) was enforced. - One of the rules of the shar'ia is that Muslims are forbidden from imbibing or serving alcohol (or any mind-altering substances). - So who got the jobs serving foreigners in the hotel bars? The Vaishya, who were now Christian. - Their efforts to jump ahead in the caste system may have failed, but they ended up with fairly decentjobs in a relatively impoverished country by capitalizing on westernization.

Consumption and Lifestyle and status hierarchy system

- Although we have emphasized that status may have its basis in occupation, it can also be formed through consumption and lifestyle, though these factors are often closely linked. - This means that there should be a tendency for status differences between groups to be finely gradated and not relational: - Fundamentally antagonistic status groups such as capitalists and laborers or owners and renters do not exist. - Rather, people exist along a status ladder, so to speak, on which there is a lot of social mobility. - Often, individuals seek to assert their status or increase their status not just through their occupation but also through their consumption, memberships, and other aspects of how they live. - They might try to generate social prestige by driving a fancy car, living in a gated community, wearing stylish clothes, or using a certain kind of language.

Example of equality of condition

- An example of this ideology is affirmative action, which involves preferential selection to increase the representation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and/or people from less privileged social classes in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have historically been excluded (see the policy discussion at the end of this chapter). - Affirmative action is when a person or group in a gatekeeper position, such as a college admissions office or the human resources department in charge of hiring new workers, actively selects some applicants who have faced the steep slope of an uneven playing field, often due to racism or sexism in society. - Sometimes these policies can enhance efficiency if they result in fairer competition; other times they may result in a trade-off between efficiency and equality in favor of the latter. - We may accept that certain groups with slightly lower SAT scores are admitted to colleges because they faced much greater obstacles to attain those SAT scores than other groups of test takers who enjoyed more advantages. - Such "social engineering" may be based on race, class, gender, or any other social sorting category, as long as the proponents can make a justifiable claim that the existing playing field is tilted against them.

Ascending vertical social mobility

- An individual who experiences ascending vertical mobility either rises from a lower stratum into a higher one or creates an entirely new group that exists at a higher stratum. - Ugo's promotion to regional manager at Sears is an example of rising from a lower stratum to a higher one. - By becoming a manager, he has changed his class position, a change that confers both a higher salary and more prestige. - Conversely, imagine that for some reason there was an immediate need for translators of Igbo (or Ibo, the language spoken by the Igbo people based in southeast Nigeria) in the United States. - Ugo, who speaks Igbo, along with many other Nigerians who speak the language, would then find better jobs and thereby enjoy higher social status. - This would be an example of a new group, Igbo translators, existing in a higher stratum.

How do structural mobility and exchange mobility differ from one another?

- Changes in the distribution of jobs lead to what sociologists call structural mobility, mobility that is inevitable from changes in the economy. - With the decline of farmwork because of technology, the sons and daughters of farmers are by definition going to have to find other kinds of work. - This type of mobility stands in contrast to exchange mobility, in which, if we hold fixed the changing distribution of jobs, individuals trade jobs such that if one person is upwardly mobile it necessarily entails someone else being downwardly mobile.

Why has a class system been difficult for sociologists to define?

- Class means different things to different people, and there is no consensus among sociologists as to the term's precise definition. - For instance, some might define class primarily in terms of money, whereas others see it as a function of culture or taste. - Some people barely even notice it (consciously at least), whereas others feel its powerful effects in their daily lives. - So what is class? Is it related to lifestyle? Consumption patterns? Interests? Attitudes? Or is it just another pecking order similar to the caste system? - Some controversy has existed about whether class is a real category or a category that exists in name only. - As in the caste and estate systems, the lines that separate class categories in theory should be clearly demarcated, but there have been problems in drawing boundaries around class categories—for instance, upper class, middle class, and so on. - Some scholars have even argued that class should be abandoned as a sociological concept altogether.

class based affirmative action

- Class-based admissions policies, then, offer a way to redress unequal access to selective institutions of higher education while also indirectly tackling racial disparities. - In addition, class-based policies, if well designed, can help address some of the criticisms of traditional, race-based affirmative action.

American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (1998)

- Dennis Gilbert states in The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (1998), The members of the tiny capitalist class at the top of the hierarchy have an influence on economy and society far beyond their numbers. - They make investment decisions that open or close employment opportunities for millions of others. - They contribute money to political parties, and they often own media enterprises that allow them influence over the thinking of other classes.

Descending vertical mobility

- Descending vertical mobility can similarly take either of two forms: individual or group. - One way to think of these forms is as the distinction between a particular person falling overboard from a ship and the whole ship sinking. - Sorokin (1959) asserted that "channels of vertical circulation necessarily exist in any stratified society and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body."

Jeffrey Sachs on Africa's Geography in Regards to Africa's Economic Development

- Economist Jeffrey Sachs explains that Africa's geography made it much more difficult for an agricultural revolution to occur. - He prods us to understand the complexity of the constraints on Africa's development before pointing fingers: - Africa is a continent largely of that rain-fed agriculture, whereas the Green Revolution was based first and foremost on irrigation agriculture. - Now is that bad governance that Africa does not have vast river systems? Or is that a matter of the Himalayan Tibetan plateau, which creates the Indus, the Punjab (meaning five rivers, after all), the Ganges, the Yangtze, and so forth? - These are functions of physical geography. Africa has a savannah region, which means a long dry season together with a single wet season typically.

Ferguson and Miller on Private Property

- For Ferguson and Millar, such social developments resulting from the establishment of private property represent a huge improvement in society, because private property leads to higher degrees of social organization and efficiency: If an individual can preserve and accumulate resources and become more powerful by storing up assets (private property), he or she will have much more incentive to work. - Thanks to personal incentives, people won't just slack off after they have accumulated what they need for the day's survival, but will instead work to build up society, and as a by-product they will improve civilization. - For the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, inequality was a prerequisite for social progress, and social progress was a prerequisite for the development of civilization—the greatest goal toward which humankind could strive.

According to Rousseau, what was the significance of private property in regard to social problems in society?

- For Rousseau, it is only through the process of building society and repressing this pure natural character that social problems develop. - Specifically, Rousseau sees the emergence of private property, the idea that a person has the right to own something, as the primary source of social ills. - If we were to strip away the elements of society that result from the institution of private property— the competition, isolation, aggression, and hierarchical organization—only social equality would remain

How has the definition of the middle class changed since World War II?

- From the post-World War II era of the late 1940s through the oil crisis of 1973, this middle class was a large and fairly stable group, maintained by corporate social norms emphasizing equality in pay and salary increases. - From 1947 through 1979, the average salary increase was fairly stable across all household income levels—in fact, the lowest-earning 20 percent of households showed the highest average earnings increase, 116 percent.

The Upper Class

- Generally, the upper class refers to the group of individuals at the top of the socioeconomic food chain. - In practice, however, the term is used to describe diverse and complex concepts. - Historically, the upper class was often distinguished by not having to work. (The economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen dubbed this group "the leisure class.") - Its members were able to maintain their lifestyle by collecting rent and/or other investment returns. - They were the aristocracy, the wealthy, the elite, the landowners. - The only way to join this sphere was by birth or (occasionally) marriage. - The upper class was the basis for Marx's capitalist class.

How did Max Weber's view of social class differ than Marx's view?

- He argues that a class is a group that has as its basis the common life chances or opportunities available to it in the marketplace. - In other words, what distinguishes members of a class is that they have similar value in the commercial marketplace in terms of selling their own property and labor. - Thus, for Weber, property and lack of property are the basic categories for all class situations. - If you have just graduated from law school, you may have no current income or wealth, but you enjoy a great deal of "human capital" (skills and certification) to sell in the labor market, so you would clearly be in a different class from someone with little education but a similar current economic profile. - But if you owned a company that you inherited, for instance, you would belong to yet another (higher) class. - Weber's paradigm is distinct from the Marxist class framework, where the basic framework is antagonistic and exploitative; rather, for Weber, class is gradated, not relational. - Put another way, your class as a newly minted attorney does not affect or determine my class as an accountant, computer programmer, or day laborer.

Ultimately, how did Hegel view history and its effects on society?

- Hegel views history as marching steadily forward from a situation of few masters and many servants or slaves—such as monarchies and empires, not to mention the entire feudal system—to a society with more and more free men and women, a situation of democracy and equality. - His was an optimistic view of history, to say the least. - According to Hegel, notions of inequality are constantly evolving in a larger historical arc. He saw this as a trajectory that would eventually lead to equality for all (or very nearly all).

Horatio Algers

- Horatio Alger Jr. (1832-1899) was an American author of dime novels that told rags-to-riches stories. - The narratives typically depicted a plucky young downtrodden boy who eventually achieved the American dream of success and fortune through tenacious hard work while maintaining a genuine concern for the well-being of others. - Alger wrote more than 130 novels with titles such as Sink or Swim (1870), Up the Ladder (1873), From Boy to President (1881), Making His Way (1901), A New Path to Fortune (1903), and Finding a Fortune (1904). - Works like these contributed to the national ideology that all Americans could make it if they only pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. - Although more than 100 years old, Alger's novels still resonate with a faith in mobility that is woven into the national fabric and self-image of Americans. - Today the majority of Americans are no longer positive about the possibility of upward mobility. A 2013 poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that only 37 percent of Americans thought that their children would be better off than they were (Stokes, 2017), and in 2017 only 36 percent of Americans believed that they themselves have achieved the American dream (Pew Research Center, 2017b). - What is so striking is that more and more Americans are buying into the Alger myth—more Americans than 20 years ago believe it possible to start at the bottom and work your way to the top. - People generally believe that hard work and education are more important than social connections or a wealthy background.

Horizontal Social Mobility

- Horizontal social mobility means a group or individual transitioning from one social status to another situated more or less on the same rung of the ladder. - Examples of this might be a secretary who changes firms but retains her occupational status, a Methodist person who converts to Lutheranism, a family that migrates to one city from another, or an ethnic group that shifts its typical job category from one form of unskilled labor to another.

Effect of colonialism in Africa

- Important impacts of colonialism would be easy to overlook if we focused only on geography and infectious disease transmission, he says. - Let's talk more about Africa. Racism. Absolutely pervasive. - The slave era, the treatment of white people in the rich north Atlantic vis-à-vis the black people. - Let's face it: We want to pretend that's not part of our society, part of our history, part of our view of the hopelessness of regions, part of the way that they were treated unfairly. - If you look through the colonial-era memos in Africa about the repression of education levels and so forth by colonial powers, that's also part of the history. - Then you come to infrastructure, you come to physical geography, you come to history, and you come to an odd historical context.

What did Hegel mean by the master-slave dialectic?

- In Hegel's master-slave dialectic, the slave is dependent on the master because the master provides food, shelter, and protection. - In this way, the slave is akin to a child raised by the master. - However, as Hegel observed, the master is also dependent on the slave, who performs the basic duties of survival until the master can no longer function on his own. - He doesn't remember how to grow his own food, prepare meals, or even get dressed without help. - Basically, the master would not be able to function if left to fend for himself. - Thus the master-slave nexus becomes a relationship of mutual dependency.

The Upper Class in The US

- In the United States, "upper class" is associated with income, wealth, power, and prestige. - According to some sources, the primary distinguishing characteristic of upper-class individuals is their source of income—generally more from returns on investments rather than wages. - Although estimates vary, approximately 1 percent of the US population is considered to fall in this stratum. - From 1980 to 2014, the average income in the bottom half of earnings remained $16,000 (adjusted for inflation). - Over the same period, the average earnings of the 1 percent tripled—from $420,000 to $1.3 million (Piketty et al., 2018). - By 2012, the top 0.1 percent owned 22 percent of the total wealth in the United States, up from 7 percent in the late 1970s (Saez & Zucman, 2016). - In 2016 the CEOs of America's largest companies made 271 times that of the typical worker, compared to 59 times the average in 1989. - In the period between 2009 and 2012, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by 31.4 percent, but the income of all other Americans barely grew at all, increasing just 0.4 percent. - Over and above income levels, the upper class is also distinguished by prestige and power, which can be used to promote personal agendas and influence everything from political decisions to consumer trends. - This is of particular importance because, as noted earlier, members of the upper class often wear many hats.

For the middle class in particular, why has there been a debate on how to identify members of the middle class?

- In the United States, the middle class has historically been composed of white-collar workers (office workers), and the working class composed of those individuals who work manually (using their hands or bodies). - However, this distinction eroded with two trends. - First, the post-World War II boom led to the enrichment of many manual workers. - In those days, most working-class whites, ranging from factory workers to firemen to plumbers, were able to buy their own homes, afford college for their children, and retire comfortably. - The working class became the newly expanded middle class. - A second, countervailing trend has also eroded the traditional manual- nonmanual distinction between the working and middle classes: the rise of the low-wage service sector. - Since 1973, manufacturing has steadily declined in the United States, and the service jobs replacing factory work have generally been either very high skilled (and rewarded) or relatively low skilled (and therefore not paid very well). - This new and expanding group of low-wage service workers challenges the notion that working-class status arises from physical labor. - Data-entry clerks, cashiers, paralegals, and similar occupations are technically white-collar jobs yet pull in working-class wages.

What does it mean when Conley states "Class is a relational concept"?

- In this sense, class is a relational concept. That is, one can't gain information about a person's class by simply looking at his or her income (as in, "That person made only $13,000 last year; therefore, she is working class"). - Class identity, in fact, does not correspond to an individual at all but rather corresponds to a role. -A person may pull in a six-figure salary, but as long as he owns no capital (i.e., stock or other forms of firm ownership) and earns his salary by selling his labor to someone else, he finds himself in the same category as the lowest-paid wage laborer and antagonistic to "owners," who may net a lot less income than he does. - And an individual may, over the course of her career, change class positions as she changes jobs. - Class positions of jobs themselves—that is, the roles with respect to the production process—do not change, however.

How is income different than wealth?

- Income is money received by a person for work, from transfers (gifts, inheritances, or government assistance), or from returns on investments. - Wealth is a family's or individual's net worth (i.e., total assets minus total debts).

Particularly with Thomas Malthus, what is his view of inequality as regulating the human population?

- Malthus also had a positive view of inequality, but for a different reason. In 1798, Malthus published an anonymous treatise titled "An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society," arguing that human populations grow geometrically (multiplicatively, like rabbits), while our ability to produce food increases only arithmetically (much more slowly). - Simply put, his theory suggests that a rising number of people on the planet will eventually use up all the available resources and bring about mass starvation and conflict. - Humankind, Malthus believed, was similarly destined to live in a state of constant near-death misery, as population growth always pushed society to the limits of food availability. - Because of these dire trends, Malthus believed inequality was good, or at least necessary, for avoiding the problem of massive overpopulation and hence starvation. - Inequality, from his perspective, kept the population in check.

What three (3) institutions make up the power elite?

- Mills argues in The Power Elite (2000) that there are three major institutional forces in modern American society where the power of decision making has become centralized: - economic institutions (with a few hundred giant corporations holding the keys to economic decisions), - the political order (the increasing concentration of power in the federal government and away from the states and localities, leading to a centralized executive establishment that affects every cranny of society), and - the military order (the largest and most expensive feature of government). - According to Mills, "families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends."

Mills view on the ideal governing elite

- Mills takes a much more negative view of the elite-mass dichotomy, arguing that it is neither natural nor beneficial for society. - In Mills's view, the elite do not govern the way Pareto claims they do.

How have sociologists typically studied an individual's social mobility?

- Most sociologists concerned with studying mobility focus on the process of individual mobility. - These studies generally fall into two types: mobility tables (or matrices) and status attainment models. - Constructing a mobility table is easy, although making sense of it is much more difficult. - Along the left-most column of a grid, list a number of occupations for people's fathers (it was traditionally done for males only). - Across the top, list the same occupational categories for the sons (the respondents). - There can be as many or as few categories as you see fit, so long as they are consistent for the parental and child generations. - For example, a five-category analysis might include upper nonmanual occupations (managers and professionals), lower nonmanual occupations (administrative and clerical workers, low-level entrepreneurs, and retail salespeople), upper manual occupations (skilled workers who primarily use physical labor, such as plumbers and electricians), lower manual (unskilled physical laborers), and farmworkers. - The number of categories can be expanded, and it is not uncommon to see seven-, nine-, or even fourteen-category tables. - The key is filling in the boxes. - Probably not many people fall into the cell where the father is upper nonmanual and the son is a farmer. - However, because of the decline in the agricultural workforce over the course of the twentieth century, you are likely to observe (at least in the United States) a fair bit of movement from farmwork in the parental generation to other occupations in the children's generation.

How and why has this differential income growth happened?

- One factor may be the changing nature of available employment. - As the technological sector expands, the majority of jobs are being created either at very high skill levels with correspondingly high salaries (engineers and hedge fund managers) or at very low levels with little room for upward mobility (baristas at Starbucks who serve lattes to those hedge fund managers). - And the fastest-growing job category for those with no more than a high-school education is food preparation and service. - Furthermore, this bifurcated job growth is reflected in the change in educational expectations of potential employers. - Whereas for much of the post-World War II period, a high-school diploma could earn a person (a white man, specifically) enough to support a family, a college degree is now often a minimum requirement for decent employment. - But although the number of high-school graduates going to college has increased (to roughly 70 percent in 2016), bachelor's degree completion rates still stand at approximately 59 percent nationally. - If a college education is the gateway to becoming middle class and only about a third of the American population has at least a four-year degree, we can expect the percentage of middle-class Americans to shrink.

How does globalization influence global inequality?

- One of the main reasons cited for rising income and wealth inequality in the United States is globalization—the rise in the trade of goods and services across national boundaries, as well as the increased mobility of multinational businesses and migrant labor.

Race-based affirmative action

- One of the most common criticisms of race-based affirmative action is that as currently designed, such admissions policies typically help those minorities who least need it. - Whereas before the 1970s race was seen to trump class in determining the life chances for success for the vast majority of African Americans, today it is the reverse pattern that predominates. - Back in 1967, Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan described the process of stratification in the United States in their landmark book The American Occupational Structure. - In this study, they found that class background mattered little for African Americans compared with whites. - Instead, they described a dynamic called "perverse equality": No matter what the occupation of the father of a black man (this was a period of low labor-force participation for women overall, even if black women did work at significant rates), he himself was most likely to end up in the lower, manual sector of the labor market. - Meanwhile, in each generation a small, new cadre of professional blacks would emerge seemingly randomly through a dynamic they described as "tokenism"—that is, family background mattered little in predicting who emerged into the small, black professional class.

The Income Gap Changes in The US

- Over the past three decades, the income gap between a corporate CEO and a single-mother waitress has grown exponentially, and the relatively stable middle class of previous decades has become increasingly stratified. - For example, a CEO who makes at least $200,000 is in the top 5 percent of households, and his or her average expected salary increase since 1979 (adjusted for inflation) is about 50 percent. - On the other end of the scale, a waitress who makes only $22,000 is in the bottom 20 percent of households, and her income will have increased by 27 percent over the same period. - And if we consider an average family—say, a two-parent household with two kids and a middle-range annual income of $52,000—then this family would probably have experienced an income increase of only 14 percent since 1979, a sign of what some call the shrinking middle class.

Why did Europe develop first?

- Scholars have long been trying to figure out why Europe developed first. - Early explanations, dating back to the French essayist Montesquieu (1748/1750), focused on geographic differences between the peoples of Europe and the global south (as the less developed regions of the world are sometimes called). - Perhaps because of the south's heat or humidity, Montesquieu associated virtue and rationality with the north; the south he associated with vice and passion. - Montesquieu's views are now discarded as a racist account of uneven development, but more recent versions of the geographical explanation focus on differences in the length of growing seasons, the higher variability of water supply (because of more frequent droughts), the types of cereal crops that can grow in temperate zones compared with tropical and subtropical regions, the lack of coal deposits (the first fuel that drove industrialization, long before oil), and perhaps most important, the disease burden in warmer climates

Examples of master-slave dialectic for today's society?

- Sex Workers - Some Domestic Workers In Developed Countries such as field workers and construction workers

Social Institutions vs. Geography

- Some argue that geography doesn't matter as much as social institutions do. - In one version of this line of reasoning, it is a strong foundation of property rights, incorruptible judiciaries, and the rule of law in general that predict economic development. - These, in turn, were institutions "native" to Europe and were transferred to the areas where European colonists settled and lived in significant numbers, spurring later development in areas such as India and Latin America (compared with much of Africa, where Europeans did not settle, which has lagged in development). - Other scholars argue that the types of relationships different colonized regions had with the European powers largely determined their fate today: - For example, under the rule of the British Raj, India was endowed with a huge network of railways to move cotton, tea, and other products to market. - This network, in turn, helped spur economic growth once India got over the rocky transition to self-government after gaining its independence. - By contrast, because of the disease burden in most sub-Saharan African countries, Europeans didn't stay and invest but rather focused on extractive industries, building railways that ran just to and from mines instead of extensive networks of roads and train tracks.

What does it mean that a society is stratified?

- Stratified societies are those where human groups within them are ranked hierarchically into strata, along one or more social dimensions. - Many sociologists and philosophers believe that there are four ideal types of social stratification—estate system, caste system, class system, and status hierarchy system—although all societies have some combinations of these forms and no type ever occurs in its pure form. - In addition to these, some sociologists propose a fifth ideal type, an elite-mass dichotomy. - Each system has its own ideology that attempts to legitimate the inequality within it.

If the effect of globalization in the United States has been to bifurcate labor into high-skilled and low-skilled jobs, what has been the effect on worldwide inequality?

- The answer to that question depends on how you frame the analysis. - In the long view, there is no question that global income inequality has been steadily rising over the last few centuries. - At the start of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, almost the entire population of the world lived in poverty and misery - Birthrates were high, but so was mortality. - Most people barely survived, no matter where they lived. -But then, thanks to technological innovations, food production started to increase dramatically in some areas of Europe. - Soon after—during the Industrial Revolution—large-scale factory production took the place of small cottage industries, resulting in the creation of vast, unequally distributed wealth. - Simultaneously, European powers began to explore, conquer, and extract resources from other areas of the globe. - Fast-forward a few hundred years to the mid-twentieth century, when the world and most of its wealth were carved up and ruled by major Western powers. - Enormous global inequalities had emerged through the combination of colonialism and unequal development. - Since around 1950, many of these former colonies have gained political independence, but they have lagged well behind the West in terms of income per capita.

How do Mills and Pareto view the elite?

- The elite for Mills are simply those who have most of what there is to possess: money, power, and prestige. - But they would not have the most were it not for their positions within society's great institutions. - Whereas Pareto views elite status as the reward for the talent that helped certain individuals rise through the ranks of society, Mills sees the unequal power and rewards as determining the positions. - And whereas Pareto sees a benefit in having power centralized in a large, otherwise ungovernable society, Mills warns of the dangers. - For Mills, such a system hurts democracy by consolidating the power to make major decisions into the hands (and interests) of the few.

What is the difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?

- The proletariat sells its labor to the bourgeoisie in order to receive wages and thereby survive. - But, according to Marx, the bourgeoisie extract surplus value from the proletariat, even when a few of the proletarians make high incomes. - As this is a fixed-pie or zero-sum view of economic production, an exploitative and hence inherently conflict-ridden relationship exists between the two classes. - The central aspect of Marxist class analysis is this exploitation—capitalists taking more of the value of the work of laborers than they repay in wages.

How did the social philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Ferguson & Millar) and Thomas Malthus view inequality?

- Thinkers of the later Enlightenment, including Adam Ferguson and John Millar of Scotland and Thomas Malthus of England, saw inequality as good, or at least necessary.

What does the legacy of unequal starting places and economic potentials mean?

- Today that legacy of unequal starting places and economic potentials means that the latest spurt of globalization has engendered an even greater level of income inequality across the north-south divide while creating huge differences within developing countries. - Indeed, some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe, have become poorer over the last 25 years, whereas in some previously poor regions, such as South and East Asia, income levels have risen. - Considering the net change, economist Xavier Salai-i-Martin estimates that there were around half a billion fewer poor people in the world by the turn of the twenty-first century than there were in the 1970s. - Likewise, he claims, "all indexes show a reduction in global income inequality between 1980 and 1998." - There have indeed been global reductions in population-weighted between-country differences, which can largely be attributed to the rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies over this period. - Within individual countries, however, inequality has generally risen over the same time frame. - The story of globalization and inequality is thus a complex and constantly changing one.

Examples of Caste Systems

- Today the caste system is primarily found in South Asia, particularly in India. - The historical legacy of the caste system still dominates rural India despite it having been constitutionally abolished for almost 70 years and despite affirmative action policies to help those of lower caste origins. - Although contradictory opinions exist, origins of the caste system are rooted in Hinduism and a division of labor predetermined by birth. - Social hierarchy was further entrenched by preferential treatment of upper caste members during British colonialism. - The result was rigid social stratification of four main castes or varnas: Brahman (priests and scholars), Kshatriya (soldiers), Vaishya (merchants and farmers), and Shudra (servants class). - Excluded completely from the caste system are both Adivasi (India's indigenous people) and Dalit or "Untouchables" who are considered the least pure of all class distinctions. - Over time, the caste system in India has evolved into a complex matrix of thousands of subcastes. - Each of the major castes is allowed to engage in certain ritual practices from which the others are excluded. - For instance, the Shudra caste is not permitted to study ancient Hindu texts while Dalits are prohibited from entering temples or the performance of any rituals that confer purity. - This places them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and typically leaves them with occupations seen as impure, such as the cremation of corpses or disposal of sewage, reinforcing their "untouchable" social status.

How might the free rider problem relate to the equality of outcome?

- Unless an oppressive rule emanated from some central agency, collective endeavors would be doomed to failure on account of the free rider problem, the notion that when more than one person is responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for each individual to shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight. (You might have encountered this sort of situation while collaborating on group projects for school.) - Critics of this system argue that even when there is a relatively strong central planning agency to assign each worker a task and enforce productivity, such an administrative mechanism cannot make decisions and allocate resources as efficiently as a more free-market approach does.

Class System and Karl Marx and Max Weber

- Unlike other systems, a class system implies an economic basis for the fundamental cleavages in society. - That is, class is related to position in the economic market. - Notions of class in sociological analysis are heavily influenced by two theorists, Karl Marx and Max Weber. - In Marxist sociological analyses, every mode of production— from subsistence farming to small-scale cottage industries to modern factory production to the open-source information economy—has its own unique social relations of production, basically the rules of the game for various players in the process. - To talk about class in this Marxist language is to place an individual into a particular group that has a particular set of interests that often stand opposite to those of another group. - For example, workers want higher wages; employers (specifically, capitalists) wish to depress wages, which come largely out of profits.

How does the federal government determine who is considered poor in the United States?

- Unlike the fuzzy definitions of other classes, poverty has an official, government definition. - In 2018, the poverty line for a family of four was $25,100 (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2018). - The poor are, ironically, often said to resemble the rich in being more oriented toward the present and therefore less worried about the future than their middle-class and working-class counterparts (although this is highly debated). - Day-to-day survival keeps the poor clearly planted in the present. - Of course, like any class, the poor are not a unified group. - In fact, one distinction often made in political speeches is that between the "working poor" (those who deserve our assistance) and the "nonworking poor" (those who can work but don't and therefore have a weaker moral claim on assistance). - This latter group is sometimes called the "underclass." - Of course, even these two categories obscure huge distinctions within either group; in fact, poverty is a state that families usually shift in and out of throughout their history, and often a clear distinction does not exist between the working class and the poor.

How does C. Wright Mills's view of this system differ from that of Vilfredo Pareto's ideas about the elite-mass dichotomy system?

- Vilfredo Pareto, in The Mind and Society (1983), took a positive view of elite-mass dichotomies, whereas C. Wright Mills saw much to dislike in such systems. - For Pareto, when a select few elite leaders hold power—as long as the elites are the most able individuals and know what they are doing—the masses are all the better for it. - This imbalance, where a small number of people (say 20 percent) cause a disproportionately large effect (more like 80 percent), has come to be known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. - The basis for Pareto's argument is that individuals are unequal physically, intellectually, and morally. - He suggests that those who are the most capable in particular groups and societies should lead. - In this way, Pareto believes in a meritocracy. - Pareto opposed caste systems of stratification that create systematic inequality on the basis of birth into a specific group. - He criticized societies based on strict military, religious, and aristocratic stratification, arguing that these systems naturally tend to collapse. - Concerning such systems, he argues that aristocracies do not last, and that, in fact, history is a "graveyard of aristocracies"

Surplus on inequality

- When individuals or groups in society become more efficient and productive, they can gather, hunt, or grow more than they themselves can consume at a given time. - They can then conserve such a surplus, whether that means turning milk into cheese, making berries into preserves, or putting their money into a hedge fund. - In whatever way they choose, they can preserve current resources and transform them into assets, a form of wealth that can be stored for the future. (In fact, the word asset comes from the French legal expression aver assetz, meaning "to have enough.") - Whereas previously the incentive might have been to share the wealth when you couldn't store it—to generate reciprocal goodwill for the rainy day when you don't have enough to eat and your neighbor does—now when property can be preserved, the incentive is for individuals to hoard all of it, so that when a rainy day comes along, personal savings are available. - Alternatively, if a resource-rich individual decides to distribute surplus wealth, he or she might decide to extract power, promises, and rewards in return for what he or she provides.

Is there evidence of a power elite currently in U.S. society?

- Yes, for example, after serving as President Barack Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag took a top management position at Citigroup, a firm that benefited substantially from the government bailout after the 2008 financial crisis. - Who replaced him in the White House? Jacob Lew, who was budget director under President Bill Clinton and later worked for Citigroup himself. - Likewise, back in 1961, Robert McNamara left the presidency of Ford Motor Company to serve as secretary of defense under President John F. Kennedy. - Today, of course, business elites like Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are running our political affairs. - Likewise, we have at least three military generals serving in elite political positions: at the time of this writing, John Kelly is White House chief of staff, John Bolton is national security adviser, and James Mattis is secretary of defense. - Such exchange across domains is of central importance to Mills, because as the elite increasingly assume positions in one another's domains, the coordination among the elite becomes more and more entrenched. - The inner core also includes the professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs. - These include individuals at powerful legal firms and financial institutions, such as corporate lawyers and investment bankers. - The outer fringes of the power elite, which change more readily than the core, are individuals who count in the decisions that affect all of us but who don't actually make those decisions.

According to Rousseau, what are the 2 forms of inequality?

According to Rousseau (2004), there are two forms of inequality: - physical (or natural), which "consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul," - social (or political) which depends on a kind of conventional inequality and is established or at least authorized by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as that of being more rich, more honored, more powerful, or even in a position to exact obedience.

What is the status attainment model and how does this model attempt to study social mobility?

Another common methodology for studying social mobility is the status-attainment model. - This approach ranks individuals by socioeconomic status, including income and educational attainment, and seeks to specify the attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations. - The occupational status research of Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967), who ranked occupations into a status hierarchy to study social attainment processes, is generally seen as the paradigmatic work in this tradition. - Unlike mobility tables, the status-attainment model allows sociologists to study some of the intervening processes. - For example, how important is education in facilitating upward occupational shifts in status? How critical is the prestige of a person's first job out of school? How does IQ relate to the chances for upward or downward mobility? - The status-attainment model is an elastic one that allows researchers to throw in new factors as they arise and see how they affect the relationships between existing ones, generally ordered chronologically over a typical life course. - Generally, it is thought that education is the primary mediating variable between parents' and children's occupational prestige. - That said, research shows that parental education and net worth, not occupation or income, best predict children's educational and other outcomes. - Blau and Duncan didn't measure net worth, but by now it has become a fairly standard factor in many socioeconomic surveys.

What does it mean to "have an equal starting point"?

Going back to our Monopoly analogy, imagine if at the beginning of the game, two players started out with an extra $5,000 and already owned hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, and Pennsylvania and North Carolina Avenues, respectively, while the other two players started out with a $5,000 deficit and owned no property. Some would argue that the rules of the game need to be altered in order to compensate for inequalities in the relative starting positions. This is the ideology behind equality of condition.

The Business Sector Elite Networks in America

Let's take, for example, the business sector in America. - More than 80 percent of the 1,000 largest corporations shared at least one director with another large company, and on average any two of the corporations were connected by fewer than four degrees of separation. - Wall Street is particularly densely connected. - Most troubling is the fact that many US Treasury secretaries, including the current one, Steven Mnuchin, have worked at a single firm: the investment bank Goldman Sachs. - As a result of these networks, which Mills both saw and predicted, decisions by various companies become increasingly similar. - Many studies have suggested that these elite networks share practices, principles, and information that account for some of the surprising conformity in approaches to corporate governance and ethics. - For example, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was evidently mapped out in a room with a dozen or so top bankers and the president of the New York Federal Reserve, Tim Geithner, who later became Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

What do sociologists mean by socioeconomic status?

Socioeconomic status means an individual's position in a stratified social order.

What did Mills mean by the power elite?

The power elite is further stratified for Mills; at the inner core of the power elite are those individuals who interchange commanding roles at the top of one dominant institutional order with those in another. In Mills's view, as the interactions among the big three power elites increase, so does the interchange of personnel among them.

How did they view private property?

These three agreed that inequality arises when private property emerges and that private property emerges when resources can be preserved, because it is only through surpluses that some people are able to conserve and increase their bounty.

Vertical social mobility

Vertical social mobility, in contrast, refers to the rise or fall of an individual (or group) from one social stratum to another. We can further distinguish two types of vertical mobility: ascending and descending social mobility (more commonly termed upward and downward).

social equality

a condition in which no differences in wealth, power, prestige, or status based on nonnatural conventions exist.

What is an estate system?

a politically based system of stratification characterized by limited social mobility. - Primarily found in feudal Europe from the medieval era through the eighteenth century, and in the American South before the Civil War, social stratification in estate systems has a political basis. - That is, laws are written in a language in which rights and duties separate individuals and distribute power unequally. - For example, in the antebellum American South, many states required landownership for voting privileges. - Europe also historically restricted voting rights to landowners. - Before reforms, political participation depended on the social group (the estate) to which you belonged. - There was limited mobility among the three general estates—the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners (the commoners were typically further divided into peasants and city dwellers)—and each group enjoyed certain rights, privileges, and duties. - In certain eras, it was possible for a rich commoner to buy a title and become a member of the nobility. - And often, one son or daughter of a noble family would join the clergy and become part of that estate. - Therefore, there was some mobility, but social reproduction—you are what your parents were and what your children will be—generally prevailed.

What is a caste system?

a religion-based system of stratification characterized by no social mobility.

What are the different ways in which a society can be stratified?

a society can be stratified based on age. - In many tribes, for instance, age determines the social prestige and honor that the group accords an individual. (By contrast, some argue that in the youth-obsessed culture of the United States, age is a source of dishonor.) - Those younger than you would place great weight on your words and in some cases treat them as commands. - Furthermore, birth order can be the basis of inequality. - Such a system was prevalent as late as the nineteenth century in European society, where the firstborn male typically inherited the family estate; however, in certain parts of the world, birth order still plays a role in resource distribution. - Gender or race and ethnicity also can be the predominant forms social stratification takes. - Ultimately, many dimensions exist within which inequality can emerge, and often these dimensions overlap significantly.

What is the importance of the concept of meritocracy for the elite-mass dichotomy system?

a society where status and mobility are based on individual attributes, ability, and achievement.

What is the status hierarchy system of stratification?

a system of stratification based on social prestige. - For Weber, status groups are communities united by either a positive or negative social estimation of their honor. - Put more simply, status is determined by what society as a whole thinks of the particular lifestyle of the community to which you belong. - In this sense, those with and without property can belong to the same status group if they are seen to live the same lifestyle. - Let's use the example of professors. - There are certain things that professors typically do in common: - They attend conferences to discuss scholarly issues, they teach college courses, and they tend to read a lot. - This leads society as a whole to confer a certain status on professors, without placing the sole focus on income, which can vary widely among professors.

What is the elite-mass dichotomy system?

a system of stratification that has a governing elite, a few leaders who broadly hold power in society.

Middle Class

a term commonly used to describe those individuals with nonmanual jobs that pay significantly more than the poverty line— though this is a highly debated and expansive category, particularly in the United States, where broad swaths of the population consider themselves middle class. - There is no consensus on what the term middle class really means. - Sociologists, economists, policy makers, think tank analysts, and even the public at large all work with different operating assumptions about the term. - The categories become particularly blurry when we attempt to separate the middle class from the working class (or "working families," to use the political campaign euphemism). - So what is middle class? - If you look up the term in various dictionaries, you'll encounter lots of definitions. - Some refer explicitly to position (i.e., below upper class, above lower class); others speak to shared vocational characteristics and values. - Still others mention principles. - One of the most interesting comes from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which indicates that the middle class is "characterized by a high material standard of living, sexual morality, and respect for property."

dialectic

a two-directional relationship, following a pattern in which an original statement or thesis is countered with an antithesis, leading to a conclusion that unites the strengths of the original position and the counterarguments.

What is a class system?

an economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive, oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility.

Stratification

the hierarchical organization of a society into groups with differing levels of power, social prestige, or status and economic resources.

How does Conley describe equality of outcome?

the idea that each player must end up with the same amount regardless of the fairness of the "game." - This standard is concerned less with the rules of the game than with the distribution of resources; it is essentially a Marxist (or Communist) ideology. - Like Rousseau's idea that there will always be physical inequalities—some will be better at math, others will be better at physical work, and so on—equality of outcome is the idea is that everyone contributes to society and to the economy according to what they do best. - For instance, someone who is naturally gifted at math might become an engineer or a mathematician, whereas someone better at physical work might build infrastructure such as roads and bridges. - A centrally organized society calls on its citizens to contribute to the best of their ability, yet everyone receives the same rewards. - The median income is everyone's income regardless of occupation or position.

What is equality of opportunity?

the idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak, are the same for everyone

What is equality of condition?

the idea that everyone should have an equal starting point.

What is the meaning of the concept contradictory class location

the idea that people can occupy locations in the class structure that fall between the two "pure" classes. - For instance, managers might be perceived as both working class and capitalist class: - They are part of the working class insofar as they sell their labor to capitalists in order to live (and don't own the means of production), yet they are in the capitalist class insofar as they control (or dominate) workers within the production process. - Conversely, the petit bourgeoisie, a group including professionals, craftsmen, and other self-employed individuals or small-business owners, according to Wright, occupy a capitalist position in that they own capital in the form of businesses, but they aren't fully capitalist because they don't control other people's labor. - The issue of class definition could also be further complicated by multiple class locations (multiple jobs), mediated class locations (the impact of relationships with family members, such as spouses, who are in different class locations), and temporally distinct class locations (for instance, many corporations require that all their managers spend a couple of years as a shop floor worker before becoming a manager). - Marxists use these distinctions to analyze how various classes rise and fall under the capitalist system.

What is social mobility?

the movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society.