Fwd: [FedUp] RE: seattletimes.com: On the surface, lines have blurred, but Americans still divided by class

Sun May 15 17:27:43 EDT 2005

Interesting.
Frances

Dan Thibodeau <djthibodeau at comcast.net> wrote:
To: <bveltman at hotmail.com>,
<fed_up_with_status_quo at yahoogroups.com>,
"'Michael Wolf'" <mwolf10 at austin.rr.com>
From: "Dan Thibodeau" <djthibodeau at comcast.net>
Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 14:03:08 -0400
Subject: [FedUp] RE: seattletimes.com: On the surface, lines have blurred, but Americans still divided by class

This is a good article and has some interesting angles and information, but
it seems like the authors are bending over backwards to blunt the idea that
"class is still an issue", avoiding some obvious issues in favor of a "he
said, she said" format that the press seems to hide behind these days.  

Based on other things I've read recently, I think they underestimate the
extent to which economic class lines continue and if anything are stronger -
certainly stronger than in the post-WWII eras - cultural blurring
notwithstanding (which the authors seem to think is as important as economic
stratification).  

If you ever have time, check out Kevin Phillips book "Wealth and Democracy".
Among his observations:

"Elaborate trusts, well-staffed family offices, and professional financial
management had combined into the U.S. equivalent of the entail and
primogeniture that kept landed wealth intact and concentrated in eighteenth
and nineteenth-century Britain."

This from the former Republican who developed Nixon's southern strategy.
It's interesting that they omit input from Phillips, who is widely
considered the principal authority on this issue.

Also, economic equality has increased over the last 60 years.  The best
chart I can find quickly is on my website:
http://www.danthibodeau.com/posters/markettheism/people/polarization.htm

According to Phillips, the fact that the richest 400 are mostly newbies to
the billionaire club masks the fact that the vast majority of inherited
wealth, intermarried and overlapping in its economic interests, lays just
below the surface, and is purposely difficult to see.

Also absent is the vast increase in hours families, often two-income, are
working just to hang on, or the increasing levels of debt, or the changing
realities of what is necessary to function (try to live without a car and
phone - luxuries?).  And as usual, the very poor don't exist in this article
- everyone has a cell phone.  

"There's room at the top they are telling you still..." - John Lennon

Dan Thibodeau
54 Larkspur Drive
Amherst, MA 01002
413-256-0340
djthibodeau at comcast.net

-----Original Message-----
From: bveltman at hotmail.com [mailto:bveltman at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:27 AM
To: djthibodeau at comcast.net
Subject: seattletimes.com: On the surface, lines have blurred, but Americans
still divided by class

This message was sent to you by bveltman at hotmail.com, 
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On the surface, lines have blurred, but Americans still divided by class
Full story:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002275576_class15.html

By Janny Scott and David Leonhardt
The New York Times

There was a time Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust
vacationed in Europe and worshipped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove
Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men.
The working class belonged to unions, voted Democratic and did not take
Caribbean cruises.

Today, the United States has gone a long way toward an appearance of
classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have
dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old
markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they
wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the
color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have
disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in U.S. life, playing a greater, not
lesser, role in important ways. Success in school remains linked tightly to
class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the
rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary
advances in medicine, class differences in health and life span are wide and
appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the
economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought
and less than most people believe. In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the
working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has
flattened out lately or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

The promise of mobility Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of
the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening
gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in
the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can
become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of
opportunity, differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are
opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a Supreme Court justice
or a chief executive, and there are more and more self-made billionaires.
Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans,
inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980s.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the
summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one
economic class to another. Americans arguably are more likely than they were
30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, but merit is at
least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections
cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When
their children then succeed, that success is seen as earned.

The scramble to scoop up a house in the best school district, channel a
child into the right preschool program or land the best medical specialist
are all part of a quiet contest among social groups that the affluent and
educated are winning in a rout.

"The old system of hereditary barriers and clubby barriers has pretty much
vanished," said Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, a New
York social-science research group that recently published a series of
studies on the social effects of economic inequality. In place of the old
system, Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that
are beginning to assert themselves."

Most Americans remain upbeat about their prospects for getting ahead. A
recent New York Times poll on class found that 40 percent of Americans
believed that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen in
the past 30 years, a period in which the new research shows that it has not.
Thirty-five percent said it had not changed, and only 23 percent said it had
dropped.

More Americans than 20 years ago believe it possible to start out poor,
work hard and become rich. Most say their standard of living is better than
their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still.

But most do not see a level playing field. They say the very rich have too
much power, and they favor the idea of class-based affirmative action to
help those at the bottom.

End of the "class" era? A few sociologists say that social complexity has
made the concept of class meaningless. Conventional big classes have become
so diverse -- in income, lifestyle, political views -- that they have ceased
to be classes at all, said Paul Kingston, a professor of sociology at the
University of Virginia. To him, U.S. society is a "ladder with lots and lots
of rungs."

"There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have
this common experience," Kingston said. "Each step is equal-sized. Sure, for
the people higher up this ladder, their kids are more apt to get more
education, better health insurance. But that doesn't mean there are
classes."

Other researchers disagree. "Class awareness and the class language is
receding at the very moment that class has reorganized American society,"
said Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at the University of California,
Berkeley. "I find these 'end of class' discussions naive and ironic, because
we are at a time of booming inequality and this massive reorganization of
where we live and how we feel, even in the dynamics of our politics. Yet
people say, 'Well, the era of class is over.' "

The new studies of mobility, which methodically track people's earnings
over decades, have found little movement. The economic advantage once
believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last
closer to five. Mobility happens, just not as rapidly as was once thought.
But such studies probably will not be conclusive for years.

Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better
early-education and anti-poverty programs to try to redress an imbalance in
opportunities. Conservatives tend to assert that mobility remains quite
high, even if it has tailed off a little.

Jumbling of class markers Why does it appear that class is fading as a
force in U.S. life?

For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Picture-taking
cellphones and other luxuries are affordable to almost everyone.
Deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone
calls. Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to
low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer
evidence that someone is middle class.

"The level of material comfort in this country is numbing," said Paul
Bellew, executive director for market and industry analysis at General
Motors. "You can make a case that the upper half lives as well as the upper
5 percent did 50 years ago."

Like consumption patterns, class alignments in politics have become
jumbled. In the 1950s, professionals were reliably Republican; today they
lean Democratic. Meanwhile, skilled labor has gone from being heavily
Democratic to almost evenly split.

People in both parties have attributed the shift to the rise of social
issues, such as gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many
working-class voters rightward and upper-income voters toward the left.

Religious affiliation, too, is no longer the reliable class marker it once
was. The growing economic power of the South has helped lift evangelical
Christians into the middle and upper-middle classes.

The once-tight connection between race and class has weakened, too, as many
African Americans have moved into the middle and upper-middle classes.
Diversity of all sorts -- racial, ethnic and gender -- has complicated the
class picture. And high rates of immigration and immigrant success stories
seem to hammer home the point: The rules of advancement have changed.

The nation's elite, too, is more diverse than it was. The number of
corporate chief executives who went to Ivy League colleges has dropped over
the past 15 years. There are many more Catholics, Jews and Mormons in the
Senate than there were a generation or two ago. Because of the economic
earthquakes of the past few decades, a small but growing number of people
have shot to the top.

"Anything that creates turbulence creates the opportunity for people to get
rich," said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard.
"But that isn't necessarily a big influence on the 99 percent of people who
are not entrepreneurs."

Divisions deepening But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the
same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class. Globalization and
technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once
stepping-stones to the middle class. That manual labor now can be done in
developing countries for $2 a day, so skills and education have become more
essential than ever.

This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The
after-tax income of the top 1 percent of U.S. households jumped 139 percent,
to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional
Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The
income of the middle fifth rose by 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of
the poorest fifth rose 9 percent.

Clearly, a degree from a four-year college makes even more difference than
it once did. More people are getting those degrees than did a generation
ago, but class still plays a big role in determining who does or does not.
At 250 of the most selective colleges, the proportion of students from
upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.

Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows. Life
expectancy has increased overall; but upper-middle-class Americans live
longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and
in better health than those at the bottom.

Class plays an increased role, too, in determining where and with whom
affluent Americans live. More than in the past, they tend to live apart from
everyone else, cocooned in their exurban chateaus, researchers say.

Family structure, too, differs increasingly along class lines. The educated
and affluent are more likely than others to have their children while
married. They have fewer children and have them later, when their earning
power is high. Those widening differences have left the educated and
affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their
children.

The benefits of the new meritocracy do come at a price. It once seemed that
people worked hard and got rich in order to relax, but a new class marker in
upper-income families is having at least one parent who works extremely long
hours (and often boasts about it). In 1973, one study found, the
highest-paid tenth of the country worked fewer hours than the bottom tenth.
Today, those at the top work more. 

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