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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (116329)	5/26/2005 12:28:07 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793800

. . . . but it makes sense, to me, to differentiate the economic from the social. Agree, in principle. In practice, it's hard. It's okay for a game like this one. However, my small problem is with the way they characterized the "social." Particularly, the use of only one dimension with a bad label for one end. It's multiple dimensions. I'm a bit surprised but it looks as if I scored the highest libertarian score of the ones reported. -5.02. Is that right? More fun. I am sure you are reading the "Class" series in the NYT. It's a marxist approach, and the underpinning research that started it is open to question, but it is a good wonkish subject to cover. It's not really Marxist in any serious sense of that word because it neither positions class as structurally determined by economics, nor tries to position class culture as only myopic. Having said that, I've only skimmed it. The data seem noncontroversial and the interpretations are fairly conservative ones (in the sense they fit the data, not in any political sense). One of the major debates in the social sciences is whether resource allocation can be spoken of as a smooth distribution from top to bottom or whether there are reasonably sharp breaks which could be called divisions between "classes." The latter position is hardly a "Marxist" position. The Times pieces, in the portions I skimmed, tended to take the divisions position as an interpretive base. I doubt the piece argues social mobility has "ceased." It has always been unevenly distributed, however, race being one of the major divisions, ethnicity another.