Intro to Soc Text Andersen 9th E, these essays are in reference to chapter 8 and 3 articles attached

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2 Essays (500)words each

Moving Up Within the Social Class System in the U.S.

Essay #1) According to the text, functionalists and conflict theorists understand the social class system differently. Their respective analyses of class differences, justification for the class system and degree of mobility possible within the system are sharply divergent. How can we understand their radically different assessments of the social class system in the U.S.? What seems to be in the center of the dispute?

Essay #2 When you consider how far apart the conflict and functionalist views of the social class system is, your eyes must surely be drawn to the evidence each uses to support the divergent assessments. What about that evidence? What would count for evidence? What if anything might settle the disagreement among sociologists about the nature, the desirability, and the composition of our social class system? How can we tell whether there is sufficient upward social mobility in the U.S.?

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From: The New York Times May 15, 2005 Shadowy Lines That Still Divide By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean. Today, the country 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 American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, 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 lifespan 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. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say. 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, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers. Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht. The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost. The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 1 of 8 certain class lines; the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their relative places. Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a C.E.O., 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-1980's. 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 are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born. A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, 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, their 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 social science research group in New York City that recently published a series of studies on the social effects of economic inequality. In place of the old system, Dr. Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that are beginning to assert themselves." Faith in the System 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 over the last 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. They say hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background. "I think the system is as fair as you can make it," Ernie Frazier, a 65-year-old real estate investor in Houston, said in an interview after participating in the poll. "I don't think life is necessarily fair. But if you persevere, you can overcome adversity. It has to do with a person's willingness to work hard, and I think it's always been that way." Most say their standard of living is better than their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still. Even families making less than $30,000 a year subscribe to the American dream; more than half say they have achieved it or will do so. 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. Even so, most say “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 2 of 8 they oppose the government's taxing the assets a person leaves at death. broken down into dozens of microclasses, defined by occupations or lifestyles. "They call it the land of opportunity, and I don't think that's changed much," said Diana Lackey, a 60-year-old homemaker and wife of a retired contractor in Fulton, N.Y., near Syracuse. "Times are much, much harder with all the downsizing, but we're still a wonderful country." A few sociologists go so far as to 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 W. Kingston, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. To him, American society is a "ladder with lots and lots of rungs." The Attributes of Class One difficulty in talking about class is that the word means different things to different people. Class is rank, it is tribe, it is culture and taste. It is attitudes and assumptions, a source of identity, a system of exclusion. To some, it is just money. It is an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life. Some Americans barely notice it; others feel its weight in powerful ways. At its most basic, class is one way societies sort themselves out. Even societies built on the idea of eliminating class have had stark differences in rank. Classes are groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who, for that reason, may share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities to get ahead. Put 10 people in a room and a pecking order soon emerges. When societies were simpler, the class landscape was easier to read. Marx divided 19th-century societies into just two classes; Max Weber added a few more. As societies grew increasingly complex, the old classes became more heterogeneous. As some sociologists and marketing consultants see it, the commonly accepted big three - the upper, middle and working classes - have "There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have this common experience," Professor 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." Many 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 naïve 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.' " One way to think of a person's position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. [Click here to see where you fit in the American population.] Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person's class is his parents' class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always. “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 3 of 8 Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards. Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces. Many Americans say that they too have moved up the nation's class ladder. In the Times poll, 45 percent of respondents said they were in a higher class than when they grew up, while just 16 percent said they were in a lower one. Over all, 1 percent described themselves as upper class, 15 percent as upper middle class, 42 percent as middle, 35 percent as working and 7 percent as lower. "I grew up very poor and so did my husband," said Wanda Brown, the 58-year-old wife of a retired planner for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard who lives in Puyallup, Wash., near Tacoma. "We're not rich but we are comfortable and we are middle class and our son is better off than we are." The American Ideal The original exemplar of American social mobility was almost certainly Benjamin Franklin, one of 17 children of a candle maker. About 20 years ago, when researchers first began to study mobility in a rigorous way, Franklin seemed representative of a truly fluid society, in which the rags-to-riches trajectory was the readily achievable ideal, just as the nation's self-image promised. In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing. If that had been the case, the rise in income inequality beginning in the mid-1970's should not have been all that worrisome. The wealthy might have looked as if they were pulling way ahead, but if families were moving in and out of poverty and prosperity all the time, how much did the gap between the top and bottom matter? But the initial mobility studies were flawed, economists now say. Some studies relied on children's fuzzy recollections of their parents' income. Others compared single years of income, which fluctuate considerably. Still others misread the normal progress people make as they advance in their careers, like from young lawyer to senior partner, as social mobility. The new studies of mobility, which methodically track peoples' earnings over decades, have found far less 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. "We all know stories of poor families in which the next generation did much better," said Gary Solon, a University of Michigan economist who is a leading mobility researcher. "It isn't that poor families have no chance." But in the past, Professor Solon added, "people would say, 'Don't worry about inequality. The offspring of the poor have chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich.' Well, that's not true. It's not respectable in scholarly circles anymore to make that argument." “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 4 of 8 One study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, found that fewer families moved from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's. The incomes of brothers born around 1960 have followed a more similar path than the incomes of brothers born in the late 1940's, researchers at the Chicago Federal Reserve and the University of California, Berkeley, have found. Whatever children inherit from their parents - habits, skills, genes, contacts, money - seems to matter more today. Studies on mobility over generations are notoriously difficult, because they require researchers to match the earnings records of parents with those of their children. Some economists consider the findings of the new studies murky; it cannot be definitively shown that mobility has fallen during the last generation, they say, only that it has not risen. The data will probably not be conclusive for years. Nor do people agree on the implications. Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better early-education and antipoverty 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. But there is broad consensus about what an optimal range of mobility is. It should be high enough for fluid movement between economic levels but not so high that success is barely tied to achievement and seemingly random, economists on both the right and left say. As Phillip Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, put it, "We want to give people all the opportunities they want. We want to remove the barriers to upward mobility." Yet there should remain an incentive for parents to cultivate their children. "Most people are working very hard to transmit their advantages to their children," said David I. Levine, a Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "And that's quite a good thing." One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place. Those comparisons may seem hard to believe. Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen. The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal. The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe's in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity. But the United States differs from Europe in ways that can gum up the mobility machine. Because income inequality is greater here, there is a wider disparity between what rich and poor parents can invest in their children. Perhaps as a result, a child's economic background is a better predictor of school performance in the United States than in Denmark, the Netherlands or France, one recent study found. "Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said. "Being born poor in the U.S. “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 5 of 8 gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada." Blurring the Landscape Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in American life? For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone. Federal 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 economic changes making material goods cheaper have forced businesses to seek out new opportunities so that they now market to groups they once ignored. Cruise ships, years ago a symbol of the high life, have become the ocean-going equivalent of the Jersey Shore. BMW produces a cheaper model with the same insignia. Martha Stewart sells chenille jacquard drapery and scallop-embossed ceramic dinnerware at Kmart. "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 1950's, 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, like gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many working-class voters rightward and upper income voters toward the left. But increasing affluence plays an important role, too. When there is not only a chicken, but an organic, free-range chicken, in every pot, the traditional economic appeal to the working class can sound off key. 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, just as earlier generations of Roman Catholics moved up in the mid-20th century. It is no longer necessary to switch one's church membership to Episcopal or Presbyterian as proof that one has arrived. "You go to Charlotte, N.C., and the Baptists are the establishment," said Mark A. Chaves, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. "To imagine that for reasons of respectability, if you lived in North Carolina, you would want to be a Presbyterian rather than a Baptist doesn't play anymore." 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 American 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 “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 6 of 8 the last 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 S. 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." These success stories reinforce perceptions of mobility, as does cultural myth-making in the form of television programs like "American Idol" and "The Apprentice." 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. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, 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 American 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 just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent. For most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90's. Reduced pensions have made retirement less secure. 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 in the country, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk. Some colleges, worried about the trend, are adopting programs to enroll more lower-income students. One is Amherst, whose president, Anthony W. Marx, explained: "If economic mobility continues to shut down, not only will we be losing the talent and leadership we need, but we will face a risk of a society of alienation and unhappiness. Even the most privileged among us will suffer the consequences of people not believing in the American dream." Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows. Life expectancy has increased over all; but upper-middleclass 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 who have studied data from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 censuses say the isolation of the affluent has increased. 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. On average, according to one study, college-educated women have their first child at 30, “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 7 of 8 up from 25 in the early 1970's. The average age among women who have never gone to college has stayed at about 22. Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children. "There is no reason to doubt the old saw that the most important decision you make is choosing your parents," said Professor Levine, the Berkeley economist and mobility researcher. "While it's always been important, it's probably a little more important now." 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. In downtown Manhattan, black cars line up outside Goldman Sachs's headquarters every weeknight around 9. Employees who work that late get a free ride home, and there are plenty of them. Until 1976, a limousine waited at 4:30 p.m. to ferry partners to Grand Central Terminal. But a new management team eliminated the late-afternoon limo to send a message: 4:30 is the middle of the workday, not the end. A Rags-to-Riches Faith Will the trends that have reinforced class lines while papering over the distinctions persist? The economic forces that caused jobs to migrate to low-wage countries are still active. The gaps in pay, education and health have not become a major political issue. The slicing of society's pie is more unequal than it used to be, but most Americans have a bigger piece than they or their parents once did. They appear to accept the tradeoffs. Faith in mobility, after all, has been consciously woven into the national self-image. Horatio Alger's books have made his name synonymous with rags-to-riches success, but that was not his personal story. He was a second-generation Harvard man, who became a writer only after losing his Unitarian ministry because of allegations of sexual misconduct. Ben Franklin's autobiography was punched up after his death to underscore his rise from obscurity. The idea of fixed class positions, on the other hand, rubs many the wrong way. Americans have never been comfortable with the notion of a pecking order based on anything other than talent and hard work. Class contradicts their assumptions about the American dream, equal opportunity and the reasons for their own successes and even failures. Americans, constitutionally optimistic, are disinclined to see themselves as stuck. Blind optimism has its pitfalls. If opportunity is taken for granted, as something that will be there no matter what, then the country is less likely to do the hard work to make it happen. But defiant optimism has its strengths. Without confidence in the possibility of moving up, there would almost certainly be fewer success stories. “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide” by Scott and Leonhardt -- page 8 of 8 Data overlook upward mobility By Steven G. Horwitz January 26, 2011 The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is once again arguing that the United States is suffering from a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Using a variety of economic data, they argue in “The State of Working America” that a few are profiting at the expense of the many, whose hard work continues to go unrewarded. Indeed, they argue that the “poor are getting poorer.” Common sense and our own observations inform us that the reality of the U.S. economy in 2011 is that upward mobility is alive and well. One look around the homes of American households today — even those in the bottom fifth, where the family is watching cable TV, surfing the Web, or chatting on a cell phone while Dad takes free generic antibiotics and mom heats something up in a microwave — is evidence that the poor are hardly poorer than 10, 20, or 50 years ago. But simply comparing poor Americans of today to poor Americans of yesteryear makes little sense either. That’s because the poor Americans of yesteryear are actually the middle class Americans of today. Much of EPI’s argument involves comparing the income or wealth gains of groups within the income distribution across some number of years. This allows them to argue that, on average, the bottom fifth of households earned only $200 more per year on a pre-tax basis in 2005 than they did in 1979 (adjusted for inflation). But the bottom fifth in 2005 are not the same as those that occupied the bottom fifth in 1979. If we really want to know what happened to the poor in 1979, we need to be able to track specific households through time. Fortunately, we can do that. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that the poorest fifth of households in 1975 earned, on average, almost $28,000 more per year by 1991, adjusted for inflation. According to U.S. Treasury data, an astounding 86 percent of households that constituted the bottom fifth in 1979 had climbed out of poverty by 1988. EPI’s new report does not account for the fact that individual households move up and out of poverty and are then “replaced” in the bottom fifth by new and different households. The bottom fifth is made up of newly formed households — recent high school graduates or new immigrants, for example — taking their first steps up the income ladder. The vast majority of American households do move up: The reality of the U.S. economy over the last 30 years is that everyone has gotten richer in absolute terms; significantly so. Poor Americans today are more likely to own household goods like washing machines, dishwashers, color TVs, refrigerators and toasters than the average household was in 1973. The inequality of personal well-being has clearly narrowed over time even if we grant that income gaps have increased. Both Bill Gates and over 80 percent of poor U.S. households own cars, though they likely differ in quality. Fifty or 100 years ago, the gap would have not been one of quality, but of owning a car at all. Yes, during a recession there are more Americans in poverty than normal — some of them in deep poverty. EPI’s data shows that; but it also shows that since about 1980, the share of the population below half the poverty line has hovered between 5 and 6 percent. There’s been no long-term upward trend. So when you hear someone tell you that the poor are getting poorer, don’t be fooled. Instead, ask yourself how much better off you are now than you were 10, 20, or 30 years ago and take comfort in the fact that the poor of today will likely be similarly better off 10, 20 and 30 years in the future. Steven G. Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair in the Department of Economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. Myths of the rich and poor can lead to many false conclusions. Upward mobility among groups more common than usually portrayed. For example, from 2000 to 2009, inflation-adjusted household income fell 4.5 percent, but consumer spending increased 22.4 percent. This raises an obvious question: How did people dramatically increase spending on shrinking paychecks? Steven R. Cunningham is director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research in Massachusetts The answer is: They didn't. One of the most enduring economic myths in our society is that the rich keep getting richer, while the poor keep getting poorer. It isn't true. When most people think of the rich, they probably are thinking of people with great wealth. When they think of the poor, they probably are thinking of people with low incomes. While there's obviously a correlation between wealth and income, they're not the same. And we shouldn't confuse them. A retiree who has $1 million invested in CDs is a millionaire; most people would consider this person wealthy. But at a 2.5 percent rate of return on the CDs - about twice what the typical bank is paying today this person could have an annual income of just $25,000. We don't have to rely on hypotheticals to illustrate this. The households of people ages 70 to 74 have the highest average wealth of any age group in America but less than half the income of those in the 35-to-44 age bracket. Government data, if misunderstood or improperly used, They did increase spending. But paychecks weren't shrinking. Instead, the number of individuals per U.S. household was shrinking, which lowered the average. Real disposable income, which is essentially total aftertax income, rose 25.2 percent from 2000 to 2009. At the same time, however, households got smaller, as more people divorced, or rejected or delayed marriage. So total spending went up, while average household income - due to the larger number of households - went down. Like household-income data, income-distribution data often are misunderstood. For purposes of analysis, the Census Bureau divides households into fifths - or quintiles - yielding the bottom 20 percent of income earners, the next 20 percent, and so on, up to the highest 20 percent.While this is a reasonable approach, it can be extremely misleading. We often hear, for example, that the top 20 percent of U.S. households receives roughly 50 percent of total income, while the bottom 20 percent receives less than 4 percent. According to the Census Bureau's household data and quintile distribution, this is correct. 1 The problem is that we are not told that the top 20 percent of households includes four times as many workers as the bottom 20 percent, and nearly six times as many full-time, year-round workers. Knowing this makes a lot of difference in interpreting the original statement. Is U.S. income growth stagnant? Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Neither is true. Income-distribution data provide, at best, a snapshot, but this snapshot tells us little about movement within the economy. Contact Steven R. Cunningham via www.aier.org. The power of the U.S. economy is that it provides opportunity. The income-mobility numbers make this abundantly clear. Yet, economic mobility is a characteristic that helps differentiate the United States from many other countries. Between 2004 and 2007, for example, roughly a third of the households in the lowest income group moved up to a higher income group, according to the Census Bureau, while roughly a third of the households in the highest income group moved down. Another study, conducted in 2007 by the U.S. Treasury, examined income-tax returns from 1996 to 2005. Over the period, the median income of the study group rose 24 percent. Almost 58 percent of those in the lowest income group in 1996 moved to a higher group by 2005. About a fourth of them rose to middle- or upper-middleclass incomes; more than 5 percent made it into the highest income group - in 10 years. The only group experiencing a decline in income was the richest 1 percent. This is hardly what most people have been led to believe. While this may seem like an economic version of "musical chairs," it tells us that mobility among economic groups is high and chronic poverty is rare. 2
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Running head: SOCIAL CLASS SYSTEM

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Social class systems
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Institution
Course
Tutor
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SOCIAL CLASS SYSTEM

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Essay 1
Social class system in the U.S

Functionalists and conflict theorists each have their own way of understanding and
explaining the social class system in a completely different way, one that is not contradictive
to the other. It is however hard to understand their radical difference in assessment of the social
class especially in the United States (Relic, 1958). This part of study aims to point out the
differences in both functionalists and conflict theorists’ belief about the social class systems and
their impact to the society so as to get a clear picture of what each entails.
Understanding the differences
Social class systems are seen to be harmful and dysfunctional to the society according to
the conflict theorists. They argue that the gap between the rich and the poor widens each day as
the richer continue getting richer and the poor continue getting poorer. They further argue that
social class systems are an unfair competition since the rich take advantage of the poor by giving
them low wages compared to the amount of work done. This has resulted

to the poor not being

able to live a lifestyle of pay-check to pay-check but rather feeding from hand to mouth and
remaining in financial stagnation for a very long time (Marshall, 1950). Conflict theorists use the
nanny occupation to back up their argument of how the rich continue exploiting the poor in the
society. Nannies spend most of their time...


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