3 Responses to “A few quick links.”

1. Seth Gordon Writes:
   September 24th, 2003 at 8:08 am

   Regarding upper/middle/lower class, Daniel Davies floated an interesting hypothesis on his blog (it’s way back in the archives, which are bloggered, so I can’t find the original post):

   You’re upper-class if a collapse in the economy as a whole is the only thing that could threaten your standard of living.

   You’re middle-class if a fall in the market value of work in your profession would harm your standard of living. (Think of all the computer programmers worried that cheap competition from India is going to make them unemployable.)

   You’re lower-class if, along with the above two risks, you face the risk of losing your physical capacity to perform the labor. (Think of a factory worker whose hands get mangled in an industrial accident.)

   This comment was written by Seth Gordon.
   Report this comment to the moderators
   
2. Seth Gordon Writes:
   September 24th, 2003 at 8:40 am

   Aha, found the proper link, which is a good thing, because I described Davies’ hypothesis incorrectly. I’ll just quote him:

   I think that there is an interesting analysis of class based on exposure to risk, which creates room for that bastard entity the “middle class”, which famously doesn’t have any room to exist in class theories (like Marx’s) based on relationship to the means of production. Say we define three classes thus:

   • The “upper” or rentier class, whose standard of living is at risk if the economy as a whole fails to produce as much as anticipated.
   • The “middle” class, whose standard of living bears the risk of surprises in the production of firm-level business units (economic entities larger than a household but small relative to the economy as a whole).
   • The “working” class, who bear both of the above risks, but who are also exposed to risks associated with their own bodies.

   It’s not a fully worked out theory, so don’t take it seriously. But it strikes me that what’s bad about being a proleterian in Marx’s analysis is that you have to sell your labour in order to live, and a lot of what’s bad about [it is] that the fluctuations in your ability to supply it are potentially as dangerous to you as fluctuations in the demand for it. I’d certainly argue that one of the biggest differences between the working class and the middle class in the ordinary language senses of the terms, is that if you’re middle class, it’s not such a big deal to miss a few days through illness.

   Lots of other interesting stuff in that posting … check it out.

   This comment was written by Seth Gordon.
   Report this comment to the moderators
   
3. Keywords Writes:
   September 24th, 2003 at 12:06 pm

   Class
   Calpundit asks: “is there any kind of rough consensus about what income it takes to reasonably label someone as “rich” or “poor” or “middle class”? I have great respect for Kevin Drum, but the way he phrases this question (he basically lists a set of i…

   This comment was written by Keywords.
   Report this comment to the moderators
   

Leave a Reply

If you have questions about the moderation policies here, please read this post. Short version: treat other posters with respect.

(Need to know how to create blockquotes and links, i.e., linked text?)

If your submitted comment fails to appear, without even an error or "waiting for moderation" message, then our spam-blocking program may have blocked your comment by mistake. When this happens, please contact the moderators right away so we can rescue your comment!