Inequality and Class

Sociology Fundamentals

Course 1 · Chapter 7 · Inequality and Class: How Society Ranks People

Chapter 6 described the structure of a society as a set of positions, roles and institutions. This chapter asks the question that structure raises next: are those positions equal? In every society studied, resources such as money, power and prestige are spread unevenly, and sociologists want to know how the unevenness is arranged, who gets which share, whether people can move between shares, and how it can be measured. Chapter 6 also promised a look at how structure ranks people, what class means, how people move between ranks, and what the evidence says about poverty; the sections below follow that order. Two terms from Chapter 6 return here: ascribed and achieved status.

Inequality and Stratification

Wikipedia's Social inequality article says it "occurs when resources within a society are unevenly distributed". It names religion, kinship, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation and class as possible bases, and says it is closely tied to economic inequality in income and wealth. The same article defines social stratification as "the hierarchical arrangement of society about social class, wealth, political influence". The article does not set the two terms against each other, so the following contrast is my own reading: inequality is about how unevenly resources are spread, and stratification is about the layered, ranked structure that results (check).

Wikipedia's Social stratification article describes it as "a society's hierarchical categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors", with wealth, income, occupation and power among the factors. Western societies, it says, are usually divided into upper, middle and working classes, and each of these can be subdivided further.

System	What the Social stratification page says	Link to Chapter 6
Caste	A closed system: "all aspects of social status are ascribed, such that one's social position at birth persists throughout one's lifetime"	Pure ascribed status
Class	An open system in which mobility is possible, typically based on achieved status; societies with high intragenerational mobility are considered the most open	Mostly achieved status
Slavery	Described in the article's discussion of race as a form of oppression in which "the majority refuses to grant basic rights to a minority"	Not covered further here

Open does not mean equal An "open" class system is one in which moving between classes is possible. That does not say how easy it is, or how unequal the classes are. The mobility figures later in this chapter show how far real class systems can be from the ideal of open competition. Also, the Social stratification page lists estates only in passing: the part of it that I read mentions feudal societies, based on relations between nobility and peasants, but does not treat estates as a system, so this chapter does not either.

Class: Three Ways to Define It

Wikipedia's Social class article defines a class as "a set of hierarchical social categories", most commonly working, middle and upper class. It separates social class, described as a relatively stable cultural background, from socioeconomic status, which describes a person's current situation and can change more easily. The three founders from Chapter 1 gave different accounts of what makes a class.

Marx

Class is determined by one's relationship to the means of production. Under capitalism, per the Social class page, the proletariat work but do not own the means of production, and the bourgeoisie live off the surplus workers generate. The Social stratification page adds that Marx saw conflict between owners and workers as central.

Weber

Three separate sources of hierarchy: class (economic position), status (prestige and honour) and power (the ability to get one's way despite resistance). The Social stratification page says Weber rejected the view that economic ownership is the only basis of stratification, and describes four classes: upper class, white-collar workers, petite bourgeoisie and manual working class.

Bourdieu

The Social class page lists his kinds of capital: economic capital (assets convertible to money), and three cultural forms: personal (formal education and knowledge), objective (physical goods such as books and art) and institutionalised (formal recognition such as "honours and titles").

Two pages, two phrasings of Weber The Social class page, as the fetch summary gave it, quotes Weber's class position as "determined by a person's relationship to the means of production", which is the same wording used for Marx. The Social stratification page says Weber rejected Marx's view that ownership is the only basis. The two pages therefore seem to disagree, or the summary of one of them is imprecise. I cannot tell which from what I read. Weber's three-part scheme of class, status and power is stated consistently by both pages, so that is the part used above.

Modern attempts to measure class

The Social class page describes the Great British Class Survey, published by BBC Lab UK on 2 April 2013 and developed with academic experts. It covered 160,000 UK residents, mostly in England, who described themselves as white. It measured class through three kinds of resource: economic capital (income and assets), cultural capital (interests and activities) and social capital (the status of one's contacts). The sample was therefore a self-selected group, not a random one; that reading of "who described themselves as white" and a volunteer survey is my own inference (check).

Two functionalist and conflict-style readings The Social stratification page presents the Davis-Moore hypothesis as a structural-functionalist argument: high income reflects functional importance and scarce talent, and inequality serves a motivating role in society. Against this it sets C. Wright Mills's argument (the same Mills as in Chapter 1) that a "power elite" in politics, the military and corporations holds power, with elite education and social networks reinforcing its position. The pairing echoes Chapter 2's functionalist and conflict lenses, though the pages do not use those labels in this passage (my own mapping) (check).

Social Mobility

Wikipedia's Social mobility article opens: "Social mobility is the movement of people within or between social strata in a society." It is a change in social status relative to one's starting point and can be upward or downward. It separates two kinds: intragenerational mobility, within one generation, and intergenerational mobility, between generations, such as children's status compared with their parents'. The page calls intergenerational mobility central to the "American Dream". The page I read does not define absolute and relative mobility, so this chapter does not use those terms for mobility.

Figure on the Social mobility page	What it says
Quintile odds	A child of parents in the lowest income quintile is more than 10 times as likely to end up in the lowest quintile as an adult as a child of parents in the highest quintile; a child of the highest quintile is five times more likely to stay there than to fall to the lowest
Brookings (2013)	The gap in school test scores between high- and low-income students grew by almost 40% over thirty years; college graduation among the poorest rose about 4 percentage points for those born in the early 1960s versus the early 1980s, compared with almost 20 points for the wealthiest
Top-tier US colleges	75% of entering freshmen come from the uppermost socioeconomic quartile
Education spending (2013)	High-income families spent seven times as much on education as low-income families
Cross-country (2006)	Denmark, Norway, Finland and Canada had the highest mobility, with under 20% of a high-income parent's advantage passed to children; the Spirit Level (2009) comparison of eight countries found the US had the highest economic inequality and the lowest economic mobility

The percentages in the Brookings row are easy to misread. A rise of about 4 percentage points for the poorest against almost 20 for the wealthiest gives a gap of roughly 16 points between the groups (20 minus 4, my arithmetic). The 40% growth in the test-score gap is a relative growth of a gap, not a 40-point change (the interpretation is mine) (check). The 2013 Brookings date and the 2012 study of Chile and Brazil (low mobility) are the page's own dates, and I did not check the underlying studies.

Belief versus evidence The same page reports that in 2008 Americans had the highest belief in meritocracy among middle- and high-income countries. Michael Young, the Social inequality page says, coined "meritocracy" in 1958 as a critique, arguing that it could entrench elites and injustice. The gap from 1958 to the 2013 Brookings report is 55 years (computed in Python). The page's mobility figures sit awkwardly beside the belief, which is exactly the kind of gap between what people think and what the data show that the sociological imagination from Chapter 1 invites you to question.

Poverty: Absolute and Relative

Wikipedia's Poverty article separates two ideas. Absolute poverty, also called extreme or abject poverty, uses a fixed standard that stays the same over time and across countries; the page describes it as "severe deprivation of basic human needs", covering food, water, sanitation, health, shelter and education. Relative poverty is "socially defined and dependent on social context", usually measured as income below a fixed share of the median. The OECD and the EU use "a level of income set at 60% of the median household income".

World Bank international poverty line, per day (PPP)	Value
1993 to 2005	$1.08
2009	$1.25
2015	$1.90

The page notes that the $1.90 line is controversial, and cites the UN rapporteur Philip Alston as arguing that nearly half the global population, about 3.4 billion people, lives on less than $5.50 a day. From 2009 to 2015 the line rose by $0.65 (1.90 minus 1.25, computed in Python), about 1.52 times the 2009 value. The Social stratification page adds World Bank data for 2012: 21% of people worldwide, around 1.5 billion, lived in extreme poverty at or below $1.25 a day. Dividing 1.5 billion by 0.21 implies a world population of about 7.14 billion (my arithmetic, rounded) (check).

Why both measures are needed A fixed line tracks whether people can afford basic needs. A relative line tracks whether people fall far behind their neighbours. If a country's median income doubled, a fixed line would show no change while a 60%-of-median line would move with it. Hypothetical example, mine: with a median of 30,000, 60% is 18,000; if the median rises to 36,000, the line becomes 21,600 (computed in Python), so a person on 20,000 whose income did not change is now below the relative line (check). The Poverty page also mentions "secondary poverty", where spending on alcohol, tobacco, gambling or drugs can push people below the line even if they earn enough to avoid it. It also says social forces such as gender, disability and race "can exacerbate issues of poverty". The page's own Causes section was not in the text I read.

Measuring Inequality: the Gini Coefficient

Wikipedia's Gini coefficient article calls it a measure of statistical dispersion "intended to represent the income inequality" (or wealth or consumption inequality) within a nation or social group. "A Gini coefficient of 0 reflects perfect equality", and 1 (or 100%) reflects maximal inequality. It is usually defined from the Lorenz curve, which plots the cumulative share of total income against the cumulative share of the population; the Gini equals the area between the line of perfect equality and the Lorenz curve, divided by the total area under that line.

A small worked example, using a formula I applied myself (the sum of absolute differences between every ordered pair, divided by two times the number of people squared times the mean; I did not take this formula from the page) (check). For five incomes of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 100, the total is 200, the mean is 40, and the result is 0.4 (computed in Python). For five identical incomes of 40 the sum of differences is 0, so the Gini is 0, matching the page's description of perfect equality.

Relative, not absolute

The page says it measures relative dispersion, so it can rise even as absolute poverty falls.

Not additive

"It is not additive and different sets of people cannot be averaged" to get the overall coefficient.

Hides levels

It "does not contain information about absolute national or personal incomes", and income measures can hide large wealth inequality.

Wealth at the top The Social stratification page reports a January 2014 Oxfam finding that the 85 wealthiest individuals held wealth equal to that of the bottom 50% of the world's population, about 3.5 billion people. Dividing 3.5 billion by 85 gives about 41.2 million (my arithmetic), so each of those people had on average as much wealth as 41 million of the poorest group put together, if the figures are accurate (check). I did not look at the Oxfam report itself.

Where to Read More

Pages used. Six Wikipedia pages: Social stratification, Social class, Social mobility, Poverty, Gini coefficient and Social inequality. All six were cut off by the fetch tool at 100,000 characters.
How much was read. Social stratification 100,000 of 139,818 (71.5 percent); Social class 100,000 of 162,319 (61.6 percent); Social mobility 100,000 of 105,871 (94.5 percent); Poverty 100,000 of 265,432 (37.7 percent); Gini coefficient 100,000 of 221,475 (45.2 percent); Social inequality 100,000 of 172,114 (58.1 percent). All percentages were computed in Python. The Poverty page was read least, so its missing 62.3 percent, including its Causes and poverty reduction sections, could contain material that qualifies what is said here.
Summaries. The fetch tool returns a summary by a small model, not raw page text, so quotations are only as exact as that summary.
Primary sources. I have not read Marx, Weber, Bourdieu, Mills, Davis and Moore, Oxfam or Brookings directly.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Using the stratification table and the mobility definitions, say for each case whether it describes a caste-like or class-like system, and whether any movement is intragenerational or intergenerational: (a) a shop assistant becomes a manager after ten years; (b) the daughter of a miner becomes a surgeon; (c) a person whose position is fixed at birth for life; (d) a surgeon's son becomes a surgeon. Then say which two of (a) to (d) show the least evidence of mobility and why.

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Exercise 2

Two villages each have five households. Village A has incomes 10, 20, 30, 40 and 100; Village B has incomes 0, 0, 0, 0 and 100. Using the formula given in the chapter, work out the Gini coefficient for each in Python or by hand, then say which village is more unequal, what a Gini of 0 would mean, and one thing the Gini cannot tell you about either village.

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Exercise 3

A country has a median household income of 24,000. (a) Work out the 60%-of-median relative poverty line. (b) Suppose the median rises to 30,000 and a household stays on 16,000: is it below the line before and after? (c) Explain why this household could be described as poorer in relative terms yet no worse off in absolute terms, and use the chapter's reading figures to say how much of the Poverty page was read.

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Quick Reference

Social inequality: resources unevenly distributed in a society (Wikipedia, Social inequality)
Stratification: hierarchical categorisation of people into groups based on socioeconomic factors; caste (closed, ascribed) and class (open, mostly achieved)
Class: Marx (relationship to the means of production); Weber (class, status and power); Bourdieu (economic and cultural capital)
Social mobility: movement within or between strata; intragenerational or intergenerational
Poverty: absolute (fixed standard) or relative (e.g. 60% of median income, OECD and EU)
Gini coefficient: 0 is perfect equality, 1 is maximal inequality; relative, not additive
Reading limits: all six pages cut at 100,000 characters; the Poverty page was read least (37.7 percent)
Check: the inequality-versus-stratification contrast, the survey-sample inference, the mapping to Chapter 2's lenses, the percentage-point interpretation, the implied population, the median-line example, the Gini formula and the Oxfam ratio

Coming next Chapter 8, Race, Ethnicity and Gender, looks at social construction, discrimination and how these categories intersect with each other and with the class divisions seen here.