Social Class: A Sociological Concept, Impact on Quality of Life, and Potential Policy Consequences
A Paper for Sociology 606: Inequality and Social Policy taught by Dr. Marina Adler | March 6, 2022
In a social experiment, Americans extrapolated the social class of individuals based on their physical characteristics. The experiment revealed there are prominent stereotypes of how individuals in the lower, middle, or upper middle class look. Most shocking, many Americans identified some people as upper class, when in reality they were middle class; and upper-middle-class persons claimed they were not upper class, despite inheriting generational wealth and being able to afford adequate healthcare, education, and housing (PBS). The difficulty in identifying people’s social class is because social class cannot be measured by economic indicators. For instance, even though the median household income in the United States approximates $52,000, such a household could either be a 25-year-old person with a decent job burdened by student loans or a married couple where one individual is the main source of income while the other is a stay-at-home parent (Yglesias).
Thus, social class is a sociological concept that cannot be merely measured by economic indicators, such as household income, or quantitative indicators, such as the number of vacations or jobs worked. Rather, social class must be assessed holistically because class is structured in every aspect of life — health, education, economic opportunity, transportation, and so forth. Karl Marx saw social class and other dynamics of society as originating from economic activity, whereby the ways in which people organize to fulfill needs (habitation, clothing, drinking, eating) determine all aspects of social life (Marger, 28). Marx observed societies create rules on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus goods that meet such needs (Adler 2022). This control of productive resources results in inequality. One portion of the population owns the basic resources to make material needs, and the other portion has no productive property but can offer human labor in exchange for material needs. Even though the working class is responsible for the production of economic wealth, the owning class controls the majority of society’s wealth produced from their labor (Marger, 29). Hence, inequality inherently produces conflict in capitalism, where there is a conflict between producers and the controllers of surplus, as well as between controllers and distributors of surplus (Adler 2022). This is well demonstrated in 2014 with the rise of monopolies like Walmart and Amazon, where mom-and-pop shops have been replaced by monolithic big box stores. Even though there is the prosecution of the most violent antitrust abuses, monopolies are still present, creating a centralization of the distribution of resources, sourcing of labor, control of the pricing of goods, poor pay for the extraction of resources through labor, and low wages for workers (McElwee).
While Karl Marx founded class and social inequality on economic criteria, Weber framed class and inequality in a multidimensional model — people’s class positions are based on not only their relation to means of production, but also through class, status, and power (Marger, 38). First, Weber saw people with similar economic rewards (opportunities for income, skills, or expertise) forming a class (Marger 39). Second, status is defined as the set of differences in prestige coming from lifestyle and social relationships (Adler 2022). Third, a party denotes one’s standing in an organization whose action is focused on the acquisition of influence on communal action (Marger 40). Ultimately, Weber defined power as one’s ability to impose one’s will upon another person’s behavior (Marger, 41). Weber predicted that the modernization of society, government leaders, and executives of large firms would rely more on specialists and experts, or otherwise bureaucracy. The greater reliance on specialists and experts, the greater polarization between those with and without power, and the greater bureaucratization would lead to more class divides and inequality (Marger, 43).
Pierre Bourdieu went further in defining social class and inequality: class is constructed through shared life chances, and one’s class depends on three types of capital: economic capital (material resources), cultural capital (knowledge, language, values), and social capital (networks and contacts) (Adler 2022). The “habitus” or the environment in which a person grounds their identity and existence, is founded on these material conditions and internalizations of beliefs, living conditions, and limitations of opportunity. For example, a nursing tech and physician assistant (PA) share similar skills and knowledge and can be a part of the same social class. However, their education, certification, and media’s portrayal of PAs as smarter and more hard-working create a class system that rewards economic, cultural, and social capital for the physician assistant but excludes the nursing tech. The class system pushes physicians’ interests and encourages them to resist change of the social class system, allowing social class and inequality to continue across generations and occur beyond economic conditions.
With these three frameworks in mind, social class has prominent impacts on everyday meanings and quality of life in the contemporary United States. Kimberlee Crenshaw observed that class and race are intersectional, where the quality of life can vastly differ between a White and Black household within a social class (Steinmetz). One of the driving forces of inequality among social classes is the caste system in the United States. After slavery was abolished, the Jim Crow system created the segregation of Black and White people in the United States, providing poor housing, terrible work conditions, poor education, inequitable healthcare, transportation, and segregation leisure and religion. Beyond the laws in the system, the Jim Crow system established social attitudes that banned interracial marriage and treated Black people as inferior. After the Jim Crow system and segregation at large were abolished, the effects of Jim Crow are still systematically present, where Black workers face higher unemployment rates than white workers, less access to jobs than white workers, and Black people are incarcerated at nearly 5 times the rate of white people (Weller 2019; Rezal 2021). The treatment of Black people less than white people is an example of social class with an intersection of race and class, where class, status, and power are at play, as described by Weber. People of lower social class can face higher levels of unemployment, higher risk of health issues, and higher rates of incarceration, but these rates are exacerbated if a person is of a lower social class and Black.
We not only see the intersection of race and class, but we also see the gap between the lower and upper class: the middle class. Being middle class in the United States can be defined as having a steady job, the ability to raise a family if one chooses to, a home to call home, and an annual vacation. But what it takes to achieve these middle-class dreams has become more challenging over the years: the pressure on the middle class has been rising since the 1970s, where the chance of a sharp drop in income increased from 4% in 1970 to at least 8% in the 2010s. In other words, the decline in income tends to be greater than in previous years (Bernard & Russell).
Furthermore, extreme variation in the quality of life in varying social classes has led to 1/3 deaths being attributed to a high level of inequality (Holland). And in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, poor health outcomes are exacerbated among social class. For instance, the upper-middle quintile ($90-$180K income) and top quintile ($180K+ income) avoided going to public spaces 67% and 71% of the time (in respective order,) where has middle quintile had a significant drop of avoiding public places, 59% of the time. (Reeves and Rothwell, 2020). While the affluent had more ability to stock on medicine, PPE, food, and other necessities, the lowest quintile had the least ability and had the highest risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) or other chronic lung diseases (Reeves and Rothwell, 2020).
Social class has severe policy consequences: the uneven distribution of income results in the rich not consuming their income and the poor not having sufficient income to meet consumption needs. This in turn produces an under-consumption economy; and the lowering of taxes, fiscal austerity, and deregulation creates cycles of booming profits followed by busts, resulting in vast economic insecurity with less social security (Blau, 2014). Equitable policies may not be possible due to social class essentialism, or the belief that if an individual is doing well, success comes to those who deserve it, concluding that lower social class individuals do not deserve it. Considering how congresspeople are paid with a median income of $966,000, congresspeople could engage in essentialist processes and enact laws to maintain inequality (Hutson). Reducing economic insecurity and strengthening social security is seen as public assistance for the poor; entitlements and tax expenditures for the middle classes; and loopholes, tax breaks, and bailout (corporate welfare) for the upper classes (Marger, 268–271). When public assistance programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, peaked in the 1960s, the programs took a small portion of the federal budget. However, since then, many of these programs have been either abolished or reduced in size (Marger, 268).
Social essentialism can drive the means-testing required of public assistance programs, which is not present in entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, for working, lower middle class, and many upper middle class persons. Along with unemployment benefits, these programs aim to support working people who are dependent on wages and salaries. Unlike lower classes, middle- and upper-class persons can receive “hidden” benefits or tax expenditures: deductions in interest paid on home mortgages allows homeowners to achieve equity and homeownership. The loss of tax dollars not collected due to these tax expenditures can lead to cuts in social welfare programs, burdening lower-class persons (Marger, 269). Lastly, corporations or upper-class persons can benefit from policies that enable tax loopholes or tax breaks, allowing them to save millions or billions of dollars (Marger, 271).
Reference List
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