Like all right-thinking, left-leaning people during this festive season, my mind turns to pie: how to bake it, how to eat it, but mostly, how to divide it up. That’s really the hard problem. We are a wealthy country but that wealth is not distributed to each according to their need. It’s not distributed nearly enough; it pools towards the top, like the blood in a person who’s hanging upside down going to their head and causing dizziness.
Inequality is as American as, well, apple pie. We are a country founded on colonialism and slavery and we continue to intergenerationally segregate the haves from the have-nots through a caste system whose existence we would prefer to overlook. These colonial origins, as well as the ubiquitous sexism of the time, lead to strong ties between identity groups and wealth distribution, but there is a political faction trying to shift our focus away from this.
The socialist populists—from Bernie Sanders to AOC—take a Marxist, class-reductionist view of issues. They rail against the 1%, insist that only they truly speak for the working class, and tell us not to pay attention to race or other identity groups, which they consider to be distractions from class warfare’s goal of eating the rich (by which they mean the older).
This has brought the topic of economic class back into the public eye, so while I reject their exclusivist framing and socialist overcommitment to economic determinism, it benefits us to understand what’s being discussed. The first thing to understand about class is what it’s not.
Class is not income, although they’re related. Sure, a poor person has low income, by definition, but your paycheck doesn’t directly determine your class. An experienced plumber might make more per hour than a school teacher, but he’s blue-collar and she’s white-collar; two distinct classes. She has steady work in a safe, quiet office while he gets paid only when he’s on the clock, and his work involves such tasks as sticking his hands into raw sewage at a noisy, dangerous construction site.
Class is also not wealth. The youth of any class have more relative debt (meaning a higher debt-to-asset ratio) and less overall wealth than the older members of their own class. They often lack assets—no house, no car, no financial investments—and have taken on significant debt—not only college loans but credit cards and other arrangements. The elder may well have debt, but that mortgage is offset by the house it’s on, they actually own their car instead of leasing it, and have accumulated IRA’s, 401(k) plans, and other investments. The age-related wealth differences within a class often exceed the differences between adjacent classes.
Still, class is more closely associated with wealth than income, because wealth can accumulate through generations and give higher-class people a safe base to retreat to if their own efforts fail. When your dad owns a huge company, you have the luxury of working as an unpaid intern to get experience, or “borrowing” some money from him to start up your own company, content that you’ll have a place to live even if it fails and won’t ever have to pay that “loan” back, regardless. And, of course, daddy can also give you a job, which directly grants you income.
Ultimately, class is defined in terms of education, employment, and wealth accumulation. While there is mobility in both directions, classes vary in terms of resilience and opportunity, where resilience is the ability to avoid falling into a lower class when things get bad, and opportunity is the ability to improve your situation; to move on up and finally get your piece of the pie.
Finally, class is familial, not personal. A stay-at-home mom could be rich or poor, depending on the rest of her family. The working members of a family often have jobs that are typical of different classes, but the family as a whole is of a single class, usually rounded upwards. Young children’s class is determined solely by their parents’. And two people with an identical income from identical jobs could be of very different classes because one of them comes from wealth and can live off their trust fund indefinitely.
A typical sociological model of the basic class structure of America is broken up into four categories, each with lower and upper subdivisions. Really, it’s three classes and an underclass:
- Lower class (15% to 20%)
- Working class (30% to 40%)
- Middle class (40% to 50%)
- Upper class (1% to 3%)
The lower class consists of the truly poor. They typically lack a high school education, stable employment, a reliable food supply, or secure housing. This is a bad place to be, yet tens of millions are stuck here. It is a category that should not exist in the richest country in the world, and could go away tomorrow if we decided to make it so, saving us money in the process. We simply lack the political will to get rid of poverty, as that would require admitting that it’s undeserved.
The lower lower class is destitute: effectively, if not always literally, homeless and cashless. Even the upper lower class is dirt poor and just one bad week away from hitting rock bottom. They make money for a while, but not much, and not for long, and never enough to get them out of the hole. They may share cramped public housing with extended family or camp out in their beat-up old car, but are forced to move around often, and they’re rarely comfortable and safe.
Wealth does not accumulate because there’s little income, which is immediately spent on needs, and family structure can be quite unstable. One contributing factor to this is the risk of incarceration; the poor are over-policed. They cannot defend themselves from prosecution for crimes of desperation, and are particularly vulnerable to over-prosecution and over-sentencing for victimless drug-related offenses. Lack of access to medical services, including birth control, is also a factor.
The working class consists of families whose jobs typically require no more than a high school degree and involve unglamorous manual labor. Their income is from wages; it is paid by the hour, hence limited by how many hours they can get. They’re the ones who clock in and clock out, and fight for overtime hours.
The lower working class is unskilled labor, also known as the working poor. This includes minimum-wage service jobs such as cashier or waitress or janitor, with low pay and little opportunity for advancement. They might do grunt labor or stay on their feet all day, fetching and carrying. This hard work gets them just enough money to avoid being lower class, but they’re still poor in any reasonable sense of the word. In particular, they have little ability to accumulate savings and are therefore vulnerable to becoming fully poor after any crisis.
The upper working class is skilled labor, known as blue collar jobs. This includes typical construction work, like plumbing and carpentry, as well as factory jobs. While they can pay moderately well, they’re physically taxing and somewhat dangerous. As alluded to above, people in this category may well have more income than those in the lower middle class; an example of class not being just money.
Note that “white working class” literally means whites who lack a college degree. Politically, they’re white trash who lean towards ignorant racism. These are Trump’s people and the left cannot appeal to them unless we throw Black folks and other oppressed groups under the bus, which is precisely what the populists hope to do with their anti-anti-racism. But, despite the rhetoric, socialist-populist demands, such as blanket college loan forgiveness, do not actually focus on the working class, for whom higher education is not a high concern.
The middle class consists of families of educated workers with white collar jobs. Their employment typically requires a college degree, or even advanced degrees. They get paid a salary, and while that can entail unpaid overtime, it also means greater stability and flexibility, as well as the opportunity for bonuses.
The lower middle class includes typical office jobs, like secretaries, line managers, and small business owners. The pay can be good but probably not great, yet it’s reliable and safe, and there is some room for advancement. They’re not rich, but definitely not poor, and not all that likely to become poor, even when things go badly. The money is enough to provide for their family and send their kids to a cheap college, which they’ll need in order to remain in the middle class.
The upper middle class consists of professionals, like doctors and C-level executives. Their advanced degrees and valuable skills grant them a high income, although often paired with strict requirements. A lawyer, for example, has a fiduciary duty to their clients and can be disbarred for violating the code of ethics. While the work is less likely to be literally backbreaking, the hours can still be daunting and the pressure is high. That lawyer’s career lives or dies on billable hours worked. There is also the mountain of debt accumulated in the process of attaining that career, and it needs to be paid down.
The upper middle class is, if not quite rich, pretty close to it in any conventional sense. They make lots of money, quickly accumulate wealth, and have excellent opportunities for advancement. They still have to work, and work hard, to maintain their standard of living, so they’re not the idle rich by any means. Still, it’s a pretty high standard of living, and while they can’t spend all day lounging at a beachfront resort, they do get to vacation at a nice one every winter. And when they talk to their kids about college plans, the topic is “which”, not “whether”.
The middle class is, by any measure, the largest class. There are more middle class people than working class; almost as many as the working and lower classes combined. They form the societal baseline of the country, the norm against which others are compared, and none of them can be reasonably described as poor.
The upper class is just plain rich. They control about a quarter of the total wealth and don’t actually need to work; a defining characteristic of their class. When they do work, it’s in positions of influence and power, whether as captains of industry or political leadership. The bulk of their income is in the form of equity; options, dividends, and share value growth. These are often obtained as a bonus, and some take only a token salary. Aside from what their optional job provides, they have relatively passive income from investments, including the ownership of businesses and real estate.
The lower upper class is new money; they actually earned it, more or less. The upper upper class is inherited wealth; it was accumulated by their ancestors and passed down to them, however undeserving or even disappointing they might be. Jeff Bezos is lower-upper; George W. Bush is upper-upper (and very much undeserving and disappointing). The latter group has more prestige and power, especially politically, even though the former can have more wealth.
I’m tempted to add more commentary and analysis, especially on the interplay between class and immutable identity categories, such as gender, race, and ethnicity. It should be clear that employment is gendered, with women often taking jobs from a class lower than comparable men, leading to the pattern of families with a husband in an upper middle class job while the wife works in a lower middle class one. It should also be clear that low class correlates strongly with distance from whiteness in an intersectional way.
It should be clear, so I don’t think I need to rant about it, at least not here and now. I believe that this blog entry works better as a monograph on what class is than as a failed attempt at something more exhaustive. I should also mention that there are various other ways to divide society up, and the summary I offer is a typical one from sociology.
The big problem is that class and identity are inextricably bound up, and trying to isolate one from the other serves neither. The white working class bigots reliably vote against their economic interests because racism promises to increase the gap between them and the “undeserving” minorities, even though the same policies impoverish them both.
So while we should understand class and be able to speak in terms of it, we should also understand that there’s more to it than that. The path to economic equality cannot ignore bigotry.