“Leave the apartment to buy alcohol/ Hung our diplomas on the bathroom wall/ Pick at the plaster chipped away/ Survey some stunning tooth decay/ Enl

The homevoters and the haut precariat

submited by
Style Pass
2021-07-28 12:30:04

“Leave the apartment to buy alcohol/ Hung our diplomas on the bathroom wall/ Pick at the plaster chipped away/ Survey some stunning tooth decay/ Enlist the cat in the impending class war” — The Weakerthans

There’s an idea I’ve been toying around with, about the emergence of a new social class in America. Making up new class categories is always a bit of a dubious endeavor — there’s always an element of “Oh yeah, I know some people who are just like that”. Look, a guy in overalls on his way to a construction job…he must be a proletarian! Maybe he’ll join my workers’ revolution! Worth finding out, anyway. I mean OK, if you had multidimensional data, you could do a cluster analysis on all the various things that determine class in America (income, race, wealth, occupation, education, and so on) and correlate it with voting behavior or location choice or whatever and maybe extract some identifiable groups. And then no one would listen to you, because you’re just a boring statistics grad student, and definitely not in the class of people who, in the words of Douglas Adams, get invited to those kind of parties.

But anyway, I do think that spinning theories about new social classes can be an interesting and occasionally even fruitful activity. The best example of this that I know of is Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay “The Professional-Managerial Class”, in which they laid out a theory of a new class of Americans defined by their high-human-capital occupations. Although it wasn’t backed up by any statistical cluster analysis, the idea of the PMC was a useful addition to leftist discourse, because modern economies and especially the American economy had changed a lot since the days of Karl Marx. A new kind of capital — human capital — was becoming increasingly important to earning power, and the pursuit of human capital was reshaping lives, institutions, and social relations.

Leave a Comment
Related Posts