Understanding Class in American society

Most discussions of Class are not useful

My first two books and this Substack column have primarily focused on progress of entire societies. In particular, I have focused on the:

• The Five Keys to Progress, which I believe are the necessary preconditions of human material progress. When those keys are achieved, the society transforms into a vast decentralized problem-solving network that generates progress.

• How Progress Works, which explains day-to-day human behaviors that create progress once those keys are achieved.

• How Progress Spread Across the Globe

It is important to understand, however, that just because a society experiences long-term economic growth, this does not mean that all people within that society share the benefits of that growth. So I think that something important is missing if one focuses exclusively on entire societies. In particular, one needs to focus on those who have less in wealthy societies. How might their needs to addressed?

The typical answer from the Left is to expand government social programs and regulations to help create a more egalitarian society. I believe that this strategy has reached a natural limit, particularly in Europe, where the economy has been stagnant for 15 years and government spending takes up roughly 50% of the economy. It is difficult to see how government social programs can be expanded any further.

Progress + Upward Mobility

There is, however, another strategy. Rather than redistribute wealth, we should be trying to create wealth and enable a greater portion of the people benefit from that growth. We need a Progress-based reform agenda focused on the following principles:

1. Promote long-term economic growth.

2. Create a prosperous working class.

3. Promote a clear pathway that enables youths from low-income families to enter the prosperous working class.

4. Focus relentlessly on results; experiment in a controlled way; do more of what works; do less of what does not work.

5. Reform the political process to make all the above possible.

I sum up goal #1 as “Promoting Progress” and goals #2 and #3 as “Promoting Upward Mobility.” I focus on goals #1, 4, and 5 in my book: Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. In my forth-coming book, Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda for Uplifting the Working Class and Poor, I focus on the second and third goals.

While I have argued that Equality is impossible to achieve, I believe that Upward Mobility is an achievable goal. While Progress is an increased material standard of living for the society, Upward Mobility is the increased material standard of living for the individual.

To fully understand the challenges of promoting Upward Mobility, I think it is important to understand “class” in American society. I believe that most uses of the term “class” are not very useful because they use the wrong demographic characteristics to identify class categories. Worse, they lead to the wrong conclusions about how best to assist the lower classes achieve Upward Mobility.

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See more articles on Upward Mobility:

1. Why achieving Equality is an Impossible Dream

2. Why Progress and Upward Mobility should be the goal, not Equality

3. Why Equality of Opportunity is not enough

4. Upward Mobility in the USA (1947-1965)

5. Why Life Choices are key to Upward Mobility

6. The Traditional Pathway to Success

7. Constructing a modernized Pathway to Success

8. The Pathway to Success

9. The case for Upward Bound accounts

10. The case for a Working Family Tax Credit

11. more

I also will be writing a significant number of excerpts from my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. Most of these excerpts will only be available to paid subscribers.

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Defining Class Categories

There is no generally agreed-upon definition of class, how many classes there are, and how each of them is defined. This is not surprising given how controversial the concept of class is and how closely tied it is to ideology. Typically, when journalists write about class, they write exclusively about “the middle class.”

In defining the middle class, journalists or social science researchers typically pick an income range with an upper and lower limit – for example, everyone with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000. This is an enticing method to measure class because it is simple and easily understandable to readers. Income also directly translates into the ability of a person to purchase products or services that directly affect one’s material standard of living.

Unfortunately, using income to measure class is very misleading. Few people realize how much an individual’s income varies throughout one’s lifetime.

In general:

1. People in their twenties earn very low incomes, regardless of their class.

2. As they gain skills and acquire work experience, their income gradually increases until sometime in their 50s.

3. Then their income drops dramatically when they decide to retire. For most people, retirement occurs sometime in their 60s.

For this reason, our definition should focus heavily on those between the ages of 30 and 65. Persons below age 30 and above age 65 have incomes that more closely reflect the material standard of living over the course of their lives. This is not true for those under age 30 and over age 65.

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You are reading an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda for Uplifting the Working Class and Poor. The remainder of this excerpt is only available for paid subscribers.