Lecture: Social Stratification & Class
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 7
Opening
Picture three people. A nursing student is comparing two job offers. A family is deciding whether an unpaid internship is affordable. A city council is reading a new poverty report. Each of them is running into the same ideas: the difference between a paycheck and a bank balance, where the poverty line is drawn, and whether the ladder people climb is as open as it looks.
In Week 1, you met Marx's owners and workers, and in Week 2 you learned to ask four questions of any figure. Week 6 asked who has the power to decide what counts as breaking the rules. In this lecture I want to ask who has the money, the prestige, and the power in the first place. We'll see the layers, tell income from wealth, draw the poverty line, name what a class is, follow people as they climb or slide, weigh three explanations for the ladder, and then read the real 2024 figures. Next week, in Week 8, the course reviews Weeks 1 to 7 before the midterm.
Let's start in a city with a river at one end and a highway at the other.
1. See the layers
Walk across an illustrative city. Near the river, houses have gates and big garages. A few miles inland, apartment buildings share one laundry room per floor. Past the highway, families rent single rooms. Nobody in that city decided, one by one, to live in layers. The layers were there before they arrived.
That's the first idea. Social stratification is a society's ranking of its members into layers by wealth, income, education, family background, and power, a pattern built into the whole society rather than a list of individual differences.
Societies have built their layers in four ways. In slavery, some people are owned by others as property. A caste system fixes a person's standing at birth, and no effort changes it. In an estate system, standing rests on inherited rank tied to land and law, with only narrow room to move. A class system is open: achievement as well as birth shapes a person's standing. So caste is a closed system, one that allows little or no movement, and class is an open system, one that allows movement.
Now a hopeful idea. A meritocracy is a hypothetical system in which a person's rank would rest entirely on individual effort and ability. Notice the word hypothetical. Every class system still passes some advantage from parents to children. That's why the conflict tradition reads the belief that we already live in a meritocracy as a legitimating ideology, a set of beliefs that makes an unequal arrangement look fair and natural.
Pause and try this. In a society where a child's family line decides the work they may do and whom they may marry, is the system open or closed?
Think about what decides the layer.
Here's the answer. Closed. Birth fixes the layer, which makes it a caste system, and effort cannot move a person out of it.
2. Tell a paycheck from a balance
Two coworkers at the same warehouse each earn 60,000 dollars a year. On paper, they're the same. Now open their bank statements. Coworker A has 15,000 dollars in savings and owes 22,000 on a student loan. Coworker B lives in a paid-off house worth 250,000 dollars, left by a grandparent, has 30,000 in savings, and owes 10,000 on a car.
Same paycheck, very different lives. Sociology names the difference. Income is a flow of money that comes in over a period of time, such as wages, salaries, and returns on investments. Wealth is a stock of value measured at one point in time: everything a household owns minus everything it owes. Coworker A's wealth works out to minus 7,000 dollars. Coworker B's is 270,000 dollars. Same income, and wealth that differs by 277,000 dollars.
Here's an analogy. Income is the water running from a faucet. Wealth is the water already in the tub. Turn the faucet off, and one tub is empty while the other is full.
Wealth builds up. Savings earn returns, a house can rise in value, and a family can pass it all down. That's why wealth is more concentrated than income. This course pins no wealth share, so a wealth figure is read at its source or not said at all.
One more tool. On an illustrative street, five households earn 28,000, 41,000, 52,000, 66,000, and 413,000 dollars. The median is the middle value when every case is lined up from lowest to highest, here 52,000 dollars. The mean is the total divided by the number of cases, here 120,000 dollars. One very high income pulled the mean up and left the median with the middle household.
Pause and try this. Coworker A takes home a paycheck every month. Is that paycheck part of A's income or part of A's wealth?
Ask yourself: is it flowing in, or is it owned minus owed?
Here's the answer. Income. A paycheck is a flow over a period. Wealth is the balance at one moment, and for Coworker A that balance is below zero.
3. Draw the poverty line
Picture two people. One lives where some days bring no meal at all. The other has a full refrigerator but can't afford the bus pass or the school trip that every classmate is taking. Are both poor?
Sociologists use two ideas. Absolute poverty is lacking the basic resources, such as food, shelter, and clothing, that a person needs to live. Relative poverty is having far fewer resources than most people in the same society, even when the basics are covered.
To count poverty, a government has to turn an idea into a line. That's Week 2's operationalize step. The Census Bureau does it two ways. The official poverty measure counts a family as poor when its income falls below a threshold set by family size and the ages of its members. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM, draws the line and counts a family's resources in a different way, so it gives a different rate for the same year.
Here's the key habit. A poverty line is drawn, not found. Move the line, and the count changes even though no family's life has changed. So a poverty rate is never the share of people who are poor, full stop. It's the share below a named line under a named measure.
Pause and try this. A family has food and housing but can't afford the internet service every classmate uses for homework. Absolute poverty or relative poverty?
Check whether the basics are there.
Here's the answer. Relative poverty. The basics are covered, but the gap from everyone around them shuts them out of ordinary life.
4. Name what a class is
Picture a school librarian and a landlord who owns 12 rental units. The landlord's income is higher. Yet at the neighborhood meeting, people go quiet when the librarian speaks, and the librarian chairs the committee planning the new park. Who ranks higher?
Marx had one answer. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written with Engels in 1848, he pictured two opposed classes: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor to live. By that test, the landlord owns property that earns income, and the librarian sells labor for a salary.
Weber thought one line wasn't enough. He gave us class, status, and party: three separate dimensions of inequality. Class is economic position. Status is social honor or prestige. Party is power gained through organized groups. Be careful with that middle word. In Week 5, status meant any position, like cousin or cashier. In Weber's sense, it means prestige.
Weber also named what a position does for a life. Life chances are the opportunities, such as good health, schooling, and safety, that a person's position in the layers makes more or less likely.
So Marx draws one line, and Weber builds three ladders. The landlord stands higher on class. The librarian stands higher on status and on party.
Pause and try this. Which thinker would say a person can rank high on prestige and low on money at the same time?
Count the dimensions each one uses.
Here's the answer. Weber. His class, status, and party are separate, so a person can stand high on one ladder and low on another. Marx's account has two classes, not three dimensions.
5. Climb or slide
Picture one family across three generations. A grandmother picked fruit for a living. Her son trained as an electrician. His daughter became an accountant, lost that job when her firm shut down, drove for a delivery service for two years, and then found accounting work again.
Each move is social mobility, movement by people from one layer to another, upward or downward. Intergenerational mobility compares a person's position with their parents'. The grandmother to her son is that kind, upward. Intragenerational mobility is movement within one person's own lifetime. The daughter's slide to delivery driving and her climb back are that kind.
Now picture an illustrative town where the paper mill closes and a regional hospital expands. Hundreds of people change work at once, not because each of them changed, but because the economy did. That's structural mobility, movement caused by a change in the economy itself.
Here Week 1's sociological imagination comes back. One laid-off mill worker has a personal trouble. Hundreds laid off when the mill closes is a public issue.
Pause and try this. When the mill closes and many workers move into health jobs, which kind of mobility is that?
Ask who changed: one person, or the economy.
Here's the answer. Structural mobility. The economy changed, and that change moved many people at once.
6. Explain the ladder
Why do layers exist at all? In 1945, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore gave a functionalist answer. The Davis–Moore thesis is their argument that the more functionally important a position is, the more reward it must carry to attract qualified people to fill it.
In 1953, Melvin Tumin answered back. Tumin's critique argues that functional importance is hard to measure and that stratification blocks talent and passes advantage down the generations. The conflict view goes further and reads stratification as the reproduction of advantage.
Each account has real strength, and this course declares no winner. Let's run one case through all three perspectives. An illustrative city agency offers unpaid summer internships that often lead to paid jobs. Structural functionalism, at the macro level, says the internship sorts and trains people for important positions. Conflict theory, also macro, says only students whose families can cover an unpaid summer can take it, so advantage passes down. Symbolic interactionism, at the micro level, notices that the line "summer intern" on a résumé signals "serious candidate" to a hiring manager, while a summer stocking shelves may be read, unfairly, as less ambitious.
Pause and try this. Which account says that stratification blocks talent from reaching the positions where it could help?
Think about who answered Davis and Moore.
Here's the answer. Tumin's critique. Tumin argued that unequal starting points keep talented people from ever reaching the training, so stratification can waste talent rather than reward it.
7. Read the real figures
Now the real numbers, from two Census Bureau reports on 2024. First, income. What is measured? Median household income, the income of the middle household when every U.S. household is lined up. Over whom? U.S. households in 2024. The figure was 83,730 dollars. The 2023 estimate, restated in 2024 dollars, was 82,690. That's 1,040 dollars apart, and the Census Bureau reports the two as not statistically different. So the read is no measurable change, not a rise.
Here's a trap. The 2023 report had first published that same year's median as 80,610 dollars, in 2023 dollars. That's 2,080 dollars away from the restated figure. Same year, two statements. That's why a figure always carries its report and its dollar year.
Next, poverty. The official poverty rate was 10.6% in 2024, which was 35,900,000 people. That 35,900,000 is a count; the 10.6% is a rate. Working backward, the measure covers about 339,000,000 people. The rate was down 0.4 percentage points from 2023, so these rounded figures put the 2023 rate at about 11.0%. The Supplemental Poverty Measure was 12.9%. That's 2.3 percentage points higher than the official rate, or about 21.7 percent higher, because the two measures count different things.
What don't these figures show? The spread of incomes, any wealth figure, or why a household earns what it does. Correlation or cause? Neither. They describe one year.
Pause and try this. Someone says the supplemental rate is "2.3 percent higher" than the official rate. What unit should they have used?
Think back to Week 2's unit for a gap between two percentages.
Here's the answer. Percentage points. 12.9% and 10.6% are 2.3 percentage points apart, which is about 21.7 percent of the official rate. The unit tells you which number someone means.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Stratification is a society-wide ranking, with caste closed and class open, and meritocracy is an ideal, not a description. Income is a flow and wealth is a stock, and a median sits with the middle household. A poverty line is drawn, not found, so the official rate and the supplemental rate differ. Marx draws one line between owners and workers; Weber builds three ladders. Mobility can be intergenerational, intragenerational, or structural. Davis and Moore, Tumin, and the conflict view still compete. And every figure carries its measure, its year, and its report.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Sociology in Action Workshop. Next week, in Week 8, the course reviews Weeks 1 to 7 and adds the level-of-analysis habit before the midterm.
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