Social class and inequality have always been live salient political issues. Indeed, politics is defined as ‘debating the distribution of power’. Politicians in all political camps have no option but to address class issues.
The mere existence of class drives Marxist theory. Oddly Marx had great difficulty defining class in the first edition of Das Kapital and abandoned the attempt in subsequent editions. I guess he went with ‘you know it when you see it.’
Those on the left, like Marx, see the solution as diminishing or eliminating class. Those on the right regard class as the normal result of merit and ambition and seek to persuade the population to accept it. Neither side want the lower classes to be poor in an absolute sense.
In the past people believed absolute poverty an inevitability but today most believe we can, and are, eliminating it. I was curious about whether classes were all that different, and what the prospects were of mitigating the differences.
I am only addressing the situation of classes within single race communities that have existed for many generations – in this case whites wherever they have been the majority. Situations where class is largely a matter of race introduce an additional range of poorly understood causes and explanations.
Considering those cases would just complicate the picture and divide people unnecessarily. I will just say that oppression remains a plausible explanation in cross-racial class differences, regardless of the findings regarding class within a single race. I chose to look at whites because there is a lot of relevant information about them.
That approach however raises the possibility that findings may not generalise to other groups. I either use a person’s own subjective self-classification, or the modern system of defining socio-economic class used in academic research – a combination of income/wealth, education and job prestige. Whenever we check the correspondence, the two approaches agree quite well.
How much do classes differ? If we picture America, we conjure up the contrast between ‘trailer trash’ and people living in mansions, or hillbillies and people attending operas, at the extremes. In the UK we picture the contrast between the welfare recipients and landed gentry. By definition they differ vastly in income, education and occupational prestige.
However, they also dress, eat, speak, entertain themselves and generally behave in radically different ways. Some of these differences reflect freely chosen preferences.
Middle-class smarts
In the USA the lower class (self-defined) comprise the bottom 4.7% and have an average (median) IQ of 90.8. The working class make up the next 42.7% and have an average IQ of 96.9. The middle-classes make up the next 49.2% and have an average IQ of 102.2. The upper class is the top 3.4% and has an average IQ of 109.4. Both the lower and upper classes are small. The large working and middle-classes differ by a mere 5.3 IQ points. That puts the median working-class person at the 36th percentile of middle-class smarts.
In contrast the upper and middle class differ by 18.6 IQ points, and the median lower-class person is at the 10th percentile of upper-class smarts. That exceeds the typical difference between friends or spouses by about 50%. It makes a reciprocal relationship difficult, that is, homework assistance and arguments would be one-way streets. So, members of the lower and upper classes were unlikely to become buddies even if they grew up together.
From another perspective these differences don’t seem that large. The IQ gap between real classes is only 30% as large as between the bottom 4.7% and top 3.4% in the general IQ rank order. The median upper-class IQ of 109.4 is far below the median 125 we see among professionals like doctors, lawyers and engineers. Clearly factors unrelated to intelligence class determine most of the differences. Those could be discipline, enterprise, hard work or by luck and who you know. Most likely a number of those factors play a role.
What are the chances of successfully abolishing, attenuating or otherwise mitigating classes? Obviously, a class rank order will remain even if we shrink the absolute class differences substantially. It is the possibility of reshuffling long-term class structures that I address here.
Many of the components making up the definition of class are highly heritable. Number of years of education is of the order of 75% heritable. So is intelligence. Heritability is a measure of influence independent of the environmental advantages or disadvantages your parents may have given you, or which may differ between siblings.
We now know that by adulthood the parental environmental effects are zero; merely growing up in a higher-class home (if, say, adopted) will not help you end up in the upper class. Something that happens to one sibling but not another might cause class differences. However, these are unknown and likely to be negative, such as an injury or a disease.
Income is less heritable
Polygenic scores for years of education (the sum of the effects of associated genes) differ by social class. Those who do end up in a social class higher than their parents usually have higher polygenic scores than their parents for education and intelligence. Income is less heritable, but making more money has a source of heritability independent of education. I have not seen a heritability estimate of job status.
The economic historian, Gregory Clark, established that socio-economic status is extremely stable across generations, about 75% heritable, regardless of political system. The purged and oppressed elite in the Soviet Union bounced back in two generations. The former upper classes now dominate professional and academic fields.
The same applies to Sweden, America, Japan and the UK. We do see more frequent class changes in a single generation than that, but that is largely due to random noise, for example, bad or good luck, which disappears in later generations. The deliberate destruction of the Soviet and Cambodian elites is an extreme but insightful example of a generational disruption that a class can recover from.
A 75% heritability implies that moving a social class a mere 16 percentile points (one class at best) in the long-term socio-economic tables would require a very large intervention via relevant non-genetic influences – a multi-generational 48 percentile shift to be exact.
The necessary interventions would have to be something other than things already tried, such as, for example, financial transfers, affirmative action or intense targeted education. The odds of that seem very long. The rank order sense of social classes, along with the differences in behaviour and preferences, seems here to stay.
If that is the case, then the only possible path to equality in the rank order of outcomes must involve the impoverishment, and massive oppression, of the higher classes. That will not improve the lot of the poor.
Highly destructive strategy
Destroying higher-class enterprise is likely to leave the poor even poorer. The elite will of course fight back, and historically they win more of these class battles than do the lower classes. Fighting a class war is a highly destructive strategy for everyone.
All is not lost, however. We can reduce the absolute gap in income and quality of life through income transfers or welfare systems. Economic growth tends to lift the level of welfare across the board.
Many formally poor people now enjoy better living standards that are better than that of royalty not so long ago. The grandchildren of the lower class could live like the upper class do now. Recent generations in much of the world have seen both of those things happen.
Countries not seeing that phenomenon should adopt the path of those countries that did.
[Image: by johan10]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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