A good way to see that social class is alive and well in the United States is to consult the wedding announcements in the Weekend Style Section of the New York Times. This is not what most sociologists would do. That is because those announcements are not a random sample of anything and, with the exception of the piece about the featured couple, largely contain only the information selected for presentation by the people making the announcements. Sociologists (and, nowadays, economists have entered this discussion) prefer to look at the various determinants of social class such as prior family wealth, education, and income to predict whether people are more likely over the generations or within a career to improve their chances of having power, prestige or position or additional wealth and income. But a consideration of what the Times chooses to notice about the lives of people tells more about how people make choices which have to do with social class or, more to the point, what beds they chose to sleep in for the long run.
A story is told by the first announcement, the one in the upper left column in the August 28, 2005 Style Section, which is the one on which I collected notes, and so still usable because the dynamics of social class change only very slowly (or else very cataclysmicly, as when the Black Plague made the work of day laborers very valuable. Because we do not yet know what will be the long term reprecussions of the coronavirus for social class, we deal with the status quo ante. Bradaigh O’Flanagan Flor and Dr. Thor Andrew Wagner both went to Princeton at about the same time. Even if they knew one another there, they put off their romance to pursue some world adventures. She was a Fulbright Exchange teacher in Southeast Asia before returning to the United States to get an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and then an associate in a Seattle investment firm. He was a volunteer pediatrician in the Arab world for Doctors Without Borders before moving back to Seattle, where his parents lived, to become a specialist in pediatric infections. Where their paths again crossed, and whether some of these moves were planned by one with the other in mind, doesn’t really matter.
The couple engaged in the social dynamics that seem standard for the joint capsule biographies that make up wedding announcements. That does not mean that they are just doing what other young couples do or are doing things with their lives so as to imitate what idealized couples do. They are just doing what makes sense to them in the circumstances of our time. They need not be conforming to a pattern. (Demographers and others who specialize in such matters may want to refine or even reject the dynamics I notice. That is fine. Whether my generalizations are accurate is, after all, an empirical question. We are not engaged in “creation science”, where facts don’t matter.
First off, they each went into ”the family business”, a term which can be understood to refer for the past few generations to the same institution rather than an organization owned or operated by successive generations within a family. Dr. Wagner is the son of an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Washington. Mrs. Wagner is the daughter of a woman who owned and managed “residential and commercial properties” in some up-scale communities, and so something of an entrepreneur. (Her father was an airline captain at a major airline, and so probably made a good living.) Second, they went to educational institutions of comparable prestige. Third, they are within a few years of one another in age, he just slightly older. Breaking that taboo seems more difficult than breaking racial or ethnic barriers. All in all, people of the same social class feather--in this case, professional-executive class comfortable--flock together.
The next couple, just below in the same column, are Sheila Kiernan and Stephen Fisher. The bridegroom is two years older than his bride. They were introduced by mutual friends as fellow Cornell graduates. He had gone back to Southern California, where he had grown up as the son of a dentist, and got an MBA and a law degree at UCLA, another first rank institution. He may not have gone into the family business, but he did go into another long standing profession, and so we can call that lateral movement, a shorthand way of saying that the occupation of the next generation was of the same social class as the occupation of the previous generation. The bride became a lawyer, her father’s profession, and now works in a law firm in San Francisco, while the husband works in a law firm in San Mateo, which is not too far a commute, by today’s standards. This is another professional class couple, where the issue of it being a mixed marriage of a Jew to a Catholic is reported only through the fact that an “American Catholic” would officiate while a Rabbi would “participate”. Conflict over religion does not play a role worth for these star-crossed lovers that is worth telling in the account of how they messed up their original restaurant reservations and how she did indeed move out of town without that disrupting the budding romance.
The next couple (whose announcement is to the right of that of the Fishers) tells a story of upward mobility rather than a story of lateral mobility. The children have moved up from the social classes of their parents. The bride is a resident at a good hospital who took her degree at an offshore medical school. Her father works and runs a business as a technician on heating and cooling systems. The bridegroom is a young financier whose mother was a legal secretary and whose father was a claims examiner. The bride went from the entrepreneurial working class to the professional class, skipping over the white collar class. That is plausible for people who have some business background in their families. It is harder for people to move up when their working class background is confined to wage employment. Entrepreneurial families, even of the lower ranks, know what it was to make business decisions on which the family’s income is based. They know that social as well as economic life is based on the imponderables of whether people will call on you for your services and the fortunes of nature, while wage employment centers on a sense of what you are entitled to because of a variety of bureaucratic regulations perpetrated by your employer and your union. The bridegroom, for his part, went from the white collar class to the lower rungs of the business class, one step up in the American class structure. The couple, each of whom grew up in a well to do New York City suburb, were married by a Hindu priest and celebrated their nuptials at the Waldorf Astoria, a sign of having made it in America. This story is the same one that could be told a few generations ago about many Jewish couples and in the last generation about African American couples.
Moving right along to the Hesslers, who are to the right of the Alis: he went to the University of Michigan Law School, a major law school, and is a litigator at a major law firm, while she was until recently at a New York law firm after having graduated from New York University Law School, another major law school. His father did well in manufacturing because the bridegroom’s mother could afford to be president of a fund-raising philanthropic organization. The bride’s family did even better. He is a financier who started up investment companies and did well enough at it to serve on the board of the Lincoln Center Film Society. So while neither of these families are in what used to be called the “400” most prosperous and powerful families, the parents are successful enough so that the children are not likely to do better than they did. It is hard to be upwardly mobile if you are already in the top social class. Donald Trump may have made himself outsize rich after having started out just rich because of a father who was a builder in the post-World War II boom, proving the point that it is easier to become a billionaire if you start out as a millionaire, but most well to do families just stay well to do. The rich are the prisoners of the ceiling effect. You can’t do much better than the 99% you got on a previous exam.
And, finally, to the immediate right, Alycia Lane and Lauster James Adkins, Jr., who are the last couple on the first page of wedding announcements, with the exception of the featured wedding story, which is, as usual, long on cutesy and short on information, and is usually about modern media types. The bride in the Lane-Adkins marriage is also a media type: a local news anchor in Philadelphia. She went to a middling college (the State University at Albany) and got a master’s degree in journalism. She is a year older than the groom, who owns a few insurance agencies and whose parents are working class. This is the only marriage on the page between people whose parents came from different social classes, and where the bride was older than the groom. But show business people, it has long been the case, lead lives that are a bit different from those of the rest of us.
The page doesn’t contain any working class or white collar class couples. Maybe they don’t think they would make the cut, or don’t think having a wedding announcement in the Times is the thing to do. The announcements that do appear would support either interpretation because they are always about successful people, whatever their previous luck in the venue of marriage. Then again, everybody seems successful in their wedding announcements and their obituaries.
The propositions that describe the social class contexts in which these various romances took place are readily found in any decent undergraduate text on social stratification, where also will be found reference to the numerous empirical studies on which the propositions are based. These propositions can be readily summarized:
1. Social life in the United States is stratified, which means that people belong to one or another social class, each one of which is ranked inferior or superior to every one of the others. These classes are, for the most part, defined by the occupations which provide income to a family, and so include such classes as those with income from investments in stocks and real estate, the professional-executive class, the white collar class and the working class, or through the styles of life whereby people consume their income, such as the upper class, the upper middle class, the middle middle class, the lower middle class, and so on. The two ways of seeing social class—either by production or consumption—are largely but not exactly symmetrical. The investment class is rich; the white collar class is middle or lower middle class. It is also the case, however, that you can live beyond your means or be a miser. Moreover, the various concomitants of social class, such as education and social manners, do not always correlate with money and power. You can make a lot of money by running movie studios and live a fabulous life even though, like the people who founded Hollywood, you have neither prior wealth or position or education. You are just something of a genius as an arts and entertainment entrepreneur.
2. Most upward social mobility takes place across generations, not within generations, and the higher the social class, the easier it is for children to move up. It is more likely for the child of a small businessman to become a lawyer than it is for the child of a laborer to become a white collar worker. The worlds are just much further apart.
3. The social classes at the bottom are getting successively closed out. Farmers now make up one percent of the labor force. Manufacturing, the traditional home for the working class, is decreasing as a percentage of the work force. White collar jobs, such as those of tellers and secretaries, are more and more displaced by technological advances. The places in the economy that are expanding are the high tech professions of medicine, finance and the media and the low level service occupations at Walmart and McDonalds, where people make less than the working class has made since the unions became successful at organizing manufacturing jobs during the course of the first half of the twentieth century.
Most moderately well-educated people know these things about American social structure, but some people are unwilling to admit them, even though the anecdotal and statistical evidence is abundant. People who deny there is social class in America or that this is the way it works are like creationists (often, in fact, the same people) in that they cannot face facts but prefer their sentiments. Creationists don’t like the idea of being descended from apes, and so they say we aren’t descended from apes. (I am not sure why they care all that much. The descent of the species doesn’t keep you from also being made in the image of God unless you mean by God someone who looks like you rather than like an ape, as opposed to thinking of God as like you in having given you whatever is the spirit that makes people distinctively people. The trouble with creationists is not that they just have a limited secular imagination; they also have a limited religious imagination.)
So too, people who don’t like to think that there are social classes in America, some better off than others, and that there are increased restrictions on life the lower down you get in the class structure that are only in part ameliorated by the political equality conferred by American citizenship cannot admit what is right in front of their noses: that is it here to sympathize with the lives of people of a different social class whose lives take a different turn than their own because of the different opportunities and resources set before them. Even with affirmative action, it is harder to get from an elementary school in Bedford-Stuyvesant to Harvard than it is to get there from an elementary school in Great Neck. It isn’t just for the trying. It is because the better teachers and the better families opt out of the poorer schools and so those schools become dumping grounds for poor learners, not to speak of those students coming from impoverished educational backgrounds. If there are no books in the home, young people will not come to think of reading as the normal sort of thing adults do, and so another generation of the service class becomes, on the whole, barely literate.
Those people who insist that the Democrats invoke class warfare whenever they refer to the fact that one class benefits at the distress of another, are simply either ignorant louts or else hypocrites who should know better. First, people in different circumstances will define their responsibilities differently even if they are not acting in what economists would regard as their own interests. A working class person who is desperate to keep some sort of employment will not support free trade, even if free trade does mean cheaper goods for most people. A middle class person who has to spend every cent on a mortgage and car payments and college tuition for a child is not going to worry about why the savings rate of Americans is so low. Second, there is something of a zero sum game in the distribution of social benefits. If investment bankers get larger tax breaks, the working class gets smaller tax breaks. It is not the middle class that suffers if Medicare is underfinanced.
Commentators like David Brooks want to believe that the Republicans in most administrations, even if not in the current one, offer alternative social policies for upgrading the poor, ones that do not depend on matters of social class but rely instead on notions of individual responsibility. These “humanist conservatives” are covering up for the Republican kleptocracy which takes money from the poor so that it can give money to the rich, as was the case when 80% of the Trump tax cuts went into the pockets of the rich, as did 80% of the money in the coronavirus inspired funding for private business. Not even classical Marxists thought that capitalism was greedy in this simple minded way. To think that Republicans have policies that differ in principle from the policies of Democrats while still addressed to the goal of all social policies, which is to use government action to improve American society, is to suffer a failure of the political imagination as profound as the failure of religious imagination that afflicts creationists. A policy of greed is not a policy because it cannot be sustained as a logical argument in a debate that goes beyond the first three sentences.
On another front, W. H. Auden and other literary types who did and do denigrate sociology as just pigeonholing people and taking the poetry out of life are just plain wrong. Sure, there is a certain intellectual satisfaction in getting someone’s social class right. That is no different than the satisfaction that comes from providing any other explanation. Identifying a person’s social class is also satisfying because it provides yet another exemplification of the basic sociological principle that people in similar circumstances behave in similar fashions. That principle is the equivalent of the mean value theorem in calculus. Everything else about sociology follows from it.
There are a number of alternative explanations for why the basic sociological principle holds. Followers of Emile Durkheim think people act in a similar fashion because social life intimidates them to do what is expected of them. You are a dutiful breadwinner if you are working class because a male who does not support his family is thought to be a disgrace both by himself and the people he knows. Followers of Max Weber think people act in a similar fashion because different people have different amounts of resources to mobilize when they pursue their self interests. Rich people can afford long vacations and long retirements though they might put those aside because they get some continuing satisfaction from their work even if in no other way then that they can aggrandize even more wealth and prestige by continuing to work. For my part, I prefer to think that people act alike under similar circumstances because they are being reasonably reasonable. They are doing what makes sense under that set of circumstances. People who have never been successful in school will expect little from schooling, and so working class kids are expected by their parents to learn obedience. People who have been successful in school expect a lot from schooling, and so professional-executive class kids are expected by their parents to learn in school how to think outside the box.
Sure, there are exceptions to the basic sociological principle. Sometimes people fall in love with people very unlike them who come from very different backgrounds. When people do so, going against circumstances is taken to mean they have a truly great love. That is what happens with Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane Eyre and Lord Rochester, and Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night”. (It didn’t happen in “Pretty Woman”, where we knew Richard Gere was not falling for a hooker; he was falling for Julia Roberts, who had briefly dressed up as a hooker. Otherwise, how could she so quickly accuse him of questioning the depth of their relationship?) For the most part, people will indeed fall in love, though with people who are socially acceptable and socially compatible in their social milieu. To think otherwise is to suggest that most people will leave a classroom by jumping out the window rather than going out the door. One option makes sense while the other doesn’t. Nobody is “determined” to do anything.