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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Back to the drawing board on defining "class""

8 Comments -

1 – 8 of 8
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Perhaps class is to fluid a term to capture very well by definition. Two reasons: good opportunities in America for upward mobility, and a deeply rooted inability, or lack of desire, to think in terms of class.

5/12/07, 7:43 PM

Anonymous Mark Seecof said...

You realize, of course, that there is already a word defined in the way that you proposed to define class: "caste."

I realize, of course, that you still need a good way to define class.

5/12/07, 9:59 PM

Anonymous JSBolton said...

Class is a status hierarchy, which usually has discrete grades, but is essentially analog, when understood most accurately.
The Duncan scale and its similars, come down to an equal ranking of income and years of education.
This is the modern, urban all-purpose status hierarchy of 'class'.
The older hierarchy, still extant in much of small town America, is a mix of size and antiquity of landownership relative to the time of settlement of a district, and military rank of one's forebears, plus the money-education scale averaged-in to some extent.
Fame hierarchies are highly susceptible to interpenetration with notoriety.
The delineation of class hierarchies, even presenting one scale as competing with another, has been a province of writers to a great extent; fiction writers who took advantage of their privilege, and left us with less than one would expect.

5/12/07, 11:33 PM

Anonymous JSBolton said...

A definition then could be:
the locally-dominant analog status hierarchy,
where dominant means deferred to by the majority in a locality,
whether they themselves share the implicit ranking of values involved or not.
Class does not imply community of values.
People recognize and defer to, other value-rankings, especially when these are fossilized in institutions, and never stated explicitly.

5/13/07, 1:44 AM

Blogger dearieme said...

Congratulations for having a try, and also for having a re-think.

5/13/07, 3:53 AM

Blogger Anthony said...

If you haven't already, you really must read "Class" by Paul Fussell. Some of the examples of class markers are dated, but the general outlines seem pretty accurate.

5/13/07, 10:58 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

What facts does the concept "class" capture that, say, "status ranking" does not? In America, there is plenty of pecking-order and money oligarchy, but the class thing is pretty fluid. Is it a useful concept here? What are we using the concept to designate?

Does anyone have any anecdotes about class in the USA that don't boil down to something else (like race or income?). I don't.

5/14/07, 11:12 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's definitely a notion of shared values, too, in the sense that people of similar social class can more easily interact than people of very different social class. This encompasses education, background, interests, etc.

This drives some of the dysfunctional drive to send everyone to college. You pretty much have to have gone to college to be in the educated class, and despite a higher income, you wouldn't expect a plumbing contractor to feel comfortable at a gathering of programmers, research scientists, and college professors.

I suspect this also has a lot to do with the drive to get your kids into an ivy league school. Getting into Harvard almost automatically puts your kids into a higher class, and by association, puts you into a higher class.

5/15/07, 6:41 AM

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