Sociology 441: Stratification

Types of inequality

Class measures (money):

• Income.
This measures flows (e.g., per year, per week) of money coming to households, families, persons.
• Wealth.
This is a "stock" measure of accumulated assets you own. How well we live is affected not just by our income each year but by what we own and can fall back on if income drops.
• Standard of living.
Standard of living indexes try to measure the economic well-being of the family or household. They begin with total income (or sometimes spending) and adjust for how many (and sometimes what types of) people are in the family or household.
• Basic necessities versus hardship.
Hardship measures are a type of standard of living index, but targeted at some minimally acceptable well-being. Lack of one or more basic necessities would be considered living in hardship.

Class measures (work):

• Occupational status.
Occupations (the U.S. Census lists 503) can be ranked from high to low on various aspects of status (e.g., average earnings, perceived prestige).
• Work power.
Even detailed status rankings don't capture all that is important about stratification at work. Some positions confer power over other workers or over outsiders that have been said to define the major class division in modern societies.
• Employment.
Measuring your occupational status or work authority assumes that you are working. A more basic measure is whether you have a job or not.

Power:

• Government outputs.
We can look at legislation and government activity and make inferences about what groups have benefited or been hurt. For instance,
• Increases and decreases in the legal minimum wage are often considered as victories for the working class.
• The share of tax revenues coming from corporations may index the rise and fall of corporate power in the government.
• Spending on welfare may be one index of the relative political power of the poor.
• Union legislation (the 1935 Wagner Act, the 1949 Taft-Hartley Act) has often been used to explain the rise and decline of unions. (See Geoghegan 1991).
• Government inputs.
Others look at people's access to government leaders as a measure of their political power. Much of the controversy over campaign finance derives from fears that campaign contributions guarantee the rich greater access to political leaders. Sometimes, we can just count the number of elected officials as an index of a group's political power: for instance the rising political power of women or minorities.

Status: