Some years ago a study was done by a gentleman who asked X amount of poor kids in Harlem when they were eight what they wanted to be when they grew up. The answers were doctor and lawyer and such…ten years later he went back to ask them the same question; he could only find something like 1/4 of them, whose responses were along the lines of nothing.

Racism has essentially been institutionalized in the US so that the “lower-classes” are divided, thus expediting their “conquering” and, speaking of Chicago, literary theorist Walter Ben Michaels is from there: “Race…has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones.”

The US has little social mobility – it’s among the least mobile first-world countries. In America you are born rich, and grow up to be rich. You stand a better chance of making top-quartile income if you were born in the top quartile and didn’t go to college than if you were born in the bottom quartile and did go to college.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/2017137,mayor-daley-trade-shows-012810.article

But even among mathematicians, the opportunities are pretty limited for people who did not go to top-tier universities. If you graduate from Columbia, you can almost certainly get a job in finance. If you graduate from CUNY, it’s not so certain.

At any rate, this is not how the middle class is usually defined. The focus on transferable skills is important in today’s globalized upper middle class, but not the ordinary middle class. Traditionally, the skilled middle class would be limited to one skill or narrow set of skills. Before mass education, it was based on apprenticeships. Today, it’s based on either union affiliation or a degree.

On the other hand, there’s a trend for deskilling a college degree. In the earlier days of mass education, which in the US corresponded to the middle of the 20th century, a high school education was generic, providing general background for an industrial job; a college degree provided specific skills. Today, a college degree provides the same general skills. As a corollary of their generalness, the labor market is large and wages are not guaranteed to be high; this is especially true in the humanities, where a large labor surplus is driving down income to working class levels. However, even then, social status isn’t too low, because of the effects of education on social networks. A college graduate, especially one from a high-tier college, is likely to know people in such professions as law and medicine, making finding a lawyer and a doctor significantly easier than for other people making the same amount of money.

Something else the six questions of “middle-classness” attempts to find out is how much of the middle class is the result of agency and how much is a consequence of factors beyond individual control.

What happens to a person who would fall into the middle class by income and/or education, and their livelihood disappears or is not available? They don’t lose skill sets, but they are shut out of the who, when, where and how of the exchange through no choice of their own.

A yes to the six questions signifies a class privilege, rather than an income or educational one. The privilege in this case is agency.

As you’ve said, Alon, you can say yes to all but the who and the where in your academic capacity. You would be at the top of your educational cohort, but not necessarily in the top income cohort. As you’ve said, you face stiff competition from the field of candidates.

However, do you have ways of turning those nos into yeses? For instance, do you have a degree in a field that would allow you to teach as a consultant or in a nonacademic setting? Also, is your field one that is portable to a range of disciplines or in demand outside of where you live?

These have varying degrees on your economic standing, but significantly boost your social standing. A yes is a confidence in making opportunities.

This middle class includes skilled tradesmen without college education, such as autoworkers and electricians. Politically, they are similar to the middle class in that their voting pattern is one of economically secure individuals, seeking to preserve security. Leftists rail the established unions’ emphasis on health and pension benefits for their own members rather than for everyone, which is essentially bourgeois politics.

I believe that today leftists classify as lumpen those working class people who support conservative causes. It comes from third-hand discussions, but I don’t think social theorists regard prostitution and drug dealing as lumpen anymore.

Getting back to more mainstream sociology, my understanding of middle class definitions is that they’re negative. A person is middle class if he’s neither upper class nor lower class. Income has to be a major part of this; while cost of living differences are significant, they can be corrected for, and at any rate, the highest costs are often in the economic core, living in which is an indicator of greater social position.

The same is true for education – it’s not necessary, but in practice the upper middle class is defined by it and the jobs it gives. The middle class is defined by it, too, away from the skilled and unionized trades. Here the upper middle class is distinct from the middle class in its economic attitudes and politics, even if the income ranges overlap.

The six questions attempt to correct for the exceptions to the rule. The questions are biased to individual agency.

That’s partly why question 1, along with question 6, are the bookends. They are the extremes because a single “no” answer to either one puts people into a dire classification. A “no” to 1, “Do I have a talent or asset that I can leverage for upward economic or social mobility?”, is a serfdom trap.

Think of patriarchal societies, caste systems, apartheid or states where minorities or indigenous groups are held in economic or political subjection.

Question 6 was a late addition. I would have stopped at 5, as a “yes” to all signifies a middle class standing. However, legality is important. You can still answer “yes” to all 5, but if you answer “no” to No. 6, “Is my talent or asset legal?”, you fall into the lumpenproletariat trap.

Yes, Marx is toxic waste in American social science, but the lumpen problem manifests itself in other fields, namely criminology and sociology, without ever mentioning just who introduced the concept.

The lumpen class also draws its ranks from the most desperate among society, yet the distinction is that the lumpen are able to create a parallel society in the darkest corners of civilization.

The lumpen pose a problem because they pose a threat to the socially accepted realm, and they are an even bigger nightmare to deactivate.

Lumpen activities are illegal economic enterprises. Think of smugglers, bandits, drug dealers, pimps, poachers, fraudsters and mercenaries (any person who agrees to commit bodily harm for pay).

Most of society would not want these activities made socially acceptable or even legal. However, members of the lumpen enjoy a higher social position that they don’t want to give up for the sake of legitimacy. Doing so means resignation to socially accepted serfdom, because their illegal functions lose value.

Although if you or anyone here is willing or able to test them out, feel free.

The origins of middle class, though, did come out of a text from an political methodology course from college.

I’m also familiar with the contemporary classifications of what constitutes the middle class by education and income, as you’ve said. The problem, though, is that the term is debased by overuse.

The social sciences may have a generally agreed upon definition of who falls into the middle class, but there’s no clear agreement among disciplines and worse — it hasn’t been able to police the use in the political sphere, where those in power can make up definitions or solutions to cater to what they perceive as the middle class.

The income definition produces a mathematical cohort, but that alone is of little value. With standard deviations, 98% of everyone can be middle class. :>

This is the problem. Income isn’t a good definition for class because of the disparities in metropolitan costs of living. Also, income is part of net worth, which is a crude measurement as well because — as the recession has showed us — a lot of net worth could be illiquid or misallocated.

Education as an indicator of class status has the drawback of “more exceptions to the rule than the rule itself.” There’s no disputing that higher levels of education generally translates to higher incomes and improved employment prospects. The exceptions:
1. What about high-paying jobs that do not require a college degree, particularly in the trades?
2. What about college degrees that do not confer any advantages in the field?
3. Why don’t we acknowledge the “quiet revolution” in higher education in the 20th century? Before the GI Bill, higher education was a pursuit primarily for the elite. There was no need for college to enhance a financial position, as the students came in to the college “made” and left that way. After the GI Bill, the mission of education changed completely. Professional apprenticeship had been “outsourced” to higher education. The university now provided the role of trainer and gatekeeper for what is now called “entry-level” (journey) work.

Because higher education assumed the apprenticeship role, colleges and universities must devote institutional time and money for credentialing along with scholarly study.

With these variations in income and education, there are too many differences in the middle to be a class.

Continued in another post …