Here is the Google Form for this lesson.
From PEW, Are you in the American middle class?
Middle Class?
All of the elements that we have been exploring combine to form a rough picture of social class. There is not a universally accepted model for social class but income, wealth, education, location, prestige/power all can arguably play a part in determining class.
- What are the different classes in the US?
- Is there a middle class, and if so, what is it?
wealthincomeeducationlocationprestige
Sociologists have used different models of social class to explain how social class disaggregates in the United States. The table below is based on Hamilton College professor Dennis Gilbert's 1992 model of social class. Look at the table and notice how Gilbert uses multiple measures (job, income, education) to parse out the classes.
The "poor" class
- the bottom 30%
- making less than 40K
- median income of $22K
- the middle 55%
- approx. $41K - $131K
- median of $75K
- the top 14% on earners and at least one college degree in household
- earns more than $131K per year
- median of $173,000
- Here is a 2 minute explanation by the author on Youtube.
- Here is a 4 minute interview with the author on Fox News.
- And Williams started a project to address the education divide called Diploma Divide.
- (Extra) For more about her work, see these:
- Review from Harvard Magazine here.
- Review from Financial Times.
- Review from Medium here.
- Powerpoint slides here.
Pride and Prejudice in JD Vance Country; I spent years investigating the story of Vance’s ancestral region. It’s not what “Hillbilly Elegy” would have you believe, published in Mother Jones (2024), sociologist Arlie Hochschild explains,“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
“And our place in the material economy is often linked to that in the pride economy. If we become poor, we have two problems. First, we are poor (a material matter), and second, we are made to feel ashamed of being poor (a matter of pride). If we lose our job, we are jobless (a material loss) and then ashamed of being jobless (an emotional loss). Many also feel shame at receiving government help to compensate that loss. If we live in a once-proud region that has fallen on hard times, we first suffer loss, then shame at the loss—and, as we shall see, often anger at the real or imagined shamers.”
In her 2016 book, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains the deep story behind the Tea Party support and the rise of Trump which stems from growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality which leaves many White Americans feeling like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."
What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel. It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not. What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real. Dr. Hochschild's idea is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain,
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.
Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters. Summary from Scientific American is here.
Janesville, An American Story
The author explains that Janesville is "a microcosm of what was happening in many places in the country and with many kinds of work, because that’s what’s been happening out of the Great Recession. The unemployment level has fallen, but income levels have stayed quite depressed since before the Great Recession..."
New Yorker review here.
NPR review here.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, sociologist Jennifer Silva conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a struggling coal town in Pennsylvania. Many of the people she spoke with were nonvoters in 2016 and before. Their politics, she writes in her new book We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, were often a hodgepodge of left and right. Their views could appear “incoherent or irrational” on the surface: Many of them trusted Donald Trump because of his wealth, for example, even as they supported higher taxes on the rich.
Many of the people Silva interviewed were profoundly cynical about social institutions, government, marriage, and family ties. They had often suffered trauma, such as domestic violence or military-related PTSD, and were in near-constant physical and/or psychological pain. Instead of placing their hope in systems that have failed them repeatedly, Silva finds, they worked to recast their own stories of pain into opportunities for individual self-improvement. Organized into groups of brief profiles from the town she anonymized as “Coal Brook, Pennsylvania,” the book is an unsparing and empathetic portrait of a diverse corner of blue-collar America.
Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, was raised in a working-class family in Massachusetts. Her father dropped out of high school to join the military, and she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. When we spoke on the phone last month, we talked about working-class white people’s affinity for Trump, the rise of conspiracy theories, Hillbilly Elegy, and the lessons that 2020 presidential candidates can take from her research. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.
Kohn and Lareau
- Upper middle-class families encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority and it can give the children a sense of entitlement.
- Working-class and lower-income families encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and these parents do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method teaches the children to respect people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.
Lareau explains these differences in her research. Her book, Unequal Childhoods is explained in the Atlantic here. And there is an excerpt available here.
Lareau identifies these two styles:
Concerted Cultivation: The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.
Accomplishment of Natural Growth: The parenting style, favored by working-class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in "working" class jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.Student discussion:
Why do you think each social class shapes kids these ways? Brainstorm your own hypothesis here.
Analyze either your family or a family you know - which style do you think they are and why? Can you give a specific example?