"This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of U.S. 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 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose 9 percent."
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On the surface, lines have blurred, but Americans still divided by class
By Janny Scott and David Leonhardt
The New York Times
There was a time Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshipped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to unions, voted Democratic and did not take Caribbean cruises.
Today, the United States 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 U.S. life, playing a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. 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 life span 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. In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has flattened out lately or possibly even declined, many researchers say.
The promise of mobility
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, differences between them do not add up to class barriers.
Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a Supreme Court justice or a chief executive, 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-1980s.
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 arguably are more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.
Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, but merit 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, that 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 New York social-science research group that recently published a series of studies on the social effects of economic inequality. In place of the old system, Wanner said, have arisen "new ways of transmitting advantage that are beginning to assert themselves."
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 in the past 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. Most say their standard of living is better than their parents' and imagine that their children will do better still.
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.
End of the "class" era?
A few sociologists 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 Kingston, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. To him, U.S. society is a "ladder with lots and lots of rungs."
"There is not one decisive break saying that the people below this all have this common experience," 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."
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 naive 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.' "
The new studies of mobility, which methodically track people's earnings over decades, have found little 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. But such studies probably will not be conclusive for years.
Liberals say the findings are evidence of the need for better early-education and anti-poverty 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.
Jumbling of class markers
Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in U.S. life?
For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries are affordable to almost everyone. 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 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 1950s, 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, such as gun control and same-sex marriage, which have tilted many working-class voters rightward and upper-income voters toward the left.
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.
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 nation's 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 the past 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 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."
Divisions deepening
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. That manual labor now can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, so 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 U.S. 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 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose 9 percent.
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, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.
Class differences in health, too, are widening, recent research shows. Life expectancy has increased overall; but upper-middle-class 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 say.
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. Those widening differences have left the educated and affluent in a superior position when it comes to investing in their children.
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.
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
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