I’ve always found the concept of social class (popularized by the Lion of the Blogosphere) to be very nebulous so I looked it up on wikipedia and the following section resonated with me:
In common parlance, the term “social class” is usually synonymous with “socio-economic class,” defined as “people having the same social, economic, or educational status,” e.g., “the working class”; “an emerging professional class.”[2] However, academics distinguish social class and socioeconomic status, with the former referring to one’s relatively stable sociocultural background and the latter referring to one’s current social and economic situation and, consequently, being more changeable over time.[3]
I too have always got the sense that social class is something you’re born with and something you die with, regardless of the wealth and status you achieve.
As I’ve stated before, social class is not about how much money and status you achieve, because even a country bumpkin can become a billionaire or U.S. president if they are sufficiently smart, lucky, talented and motivated; rather social class seems to be about whether money and power are in your genes.
So here’s my idea for how to make the concept of social class truly scientific: Take a bunch of billionaires, millionaires, average income earners, and homeless people, from every region on the planet, and scan their DNA. The higher the average income of the people you resemble genetically (after controlling for race and ethnicity), the higher your social class.
So you could be a billionaire, but if your DNA most resembles that of the average homeless person of your ethnic background, you belong to the lowest social class. Meanwhile, you could be homeless, but if your DNA most resembles that of the average billionaire of your ethnic origin, you belong to the highest social class.
So perhaps our obsession with social class (calling one another proles etc) simply evolved as a way of protecting our families from primitive genes. People who are dumber, less verbally skilled, more promiscuous, shorter, more muscular, more violent etc, simply resemble our ape-like ancestors, so humans evolved to be snobby towards them to keep them from marrying our daughters and lowering the genetic quality of our grandchildren.
Or maybe our obsession with social class is entirely cultural with no genetic basis. As blog commenter Mugabe reminds us, not everything is genetic, and not everything genetic served an evolution purpose. Some things are just spandrels.
As much as I love my job, the thing I’m most proud of is that I married up in social class because most women at my level are forced to marry down. I attribute it to the fact that I had the good judgement to marry very young (before I completed my PhD).
But I do agree with Charles Murray that the country is getting too stratified into distinct cognitive classes & I worry about what kind of impact growing up in a hyper intellectual environment will have on my kids. Sometimes I’m tempted to follow Charles Murray’s example and just move the family to a small town.
so you’re a colored and your husband is an Afrikaner?
I didn’t know you were married with kids.
That’s fuckin hot.
Nothing hotter than a young white married mother especially one who’s a professor and shit.
If you fucked me you’d be moving up in social class too. True I only flip burgers (for now) but I come from a long line of African doctors, one of whom helped with Ebola and on the Chinese side of the family, there’s some serious money.
And not only would our kids be brilliant, but Blasian + white produces the most beautiful combination.
Holler!
blasian again, obliviously, makes the case for anti-hereditarianism:
the performance of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans in the US relative to African-Americans CANNOT be explained by self-selection/selective immigration.
just look at blacks admitted to Harvard etc. the over-representation of immigrant blacks is FAR TOO GREAT to be explained by selective immigration. Thomas Sowell, himself black, has written on this.
not to mention the inverse gender imbalance at high IQ…that is, black women are MUCH more likely to have very high IQs than black men…the opposite of the white pattern.
and blasian is also an example, so far as his claims are veridical, of how IQ only tracks with accomplishment to the extent that individuals want to be accomplished.
and that…
IQ and other psychological traits like motivation and curiosity cannot be separated.
as vos savant said:
“smart people are VERY intellectually AGGRESSIVE.”
charles murray is a prole.
not just in outllook and affect but also in background.
a clue to non-Aemricans:
the Republican party today is the party of the nouveau riche and white gentile strivers as well as white genitle trash.
as educatinal attainment increases in the US for whites the more likely they are to vote Dem.
the very rich are predominantly Dems and not just because there are so many Jews among them, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon are Dems. even Trump was a Dem until he decided to be a candidate.
america is an oligarchy:
1. the Dems are the wives of the rich.
2. the Republicans are the whores of the rich.
at your level?
what “level” is that “Kate”?
As I believe Gregory Clark has discussed, we really have no idea what genetic factors (other than intelligence) make up social class and cause family lineages to stay stable for hundreds of years. We do have folk intuitions of what these factors are, and they’re likely genetically dependent also. These other genetic factors probably include those leading to greater education, greater savings behavior, physical attractiveness, and some aspects of the Dark Triad and social manipulativeness.
I think there’s an objective definition of social class but a lot of people have their own opinions of what social class is and isn’t based on their own personal biases, so this confuses the conversation. For example, a lot of proles (to use Lion of the Blogosphere term) believe that class is having a big house and big car and being able to take trips to Las Vegas and Branson, Missouri every year. People from an old-money background would laugh at this notion of class, but this what Middle America defines as class.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2015/03/genes-for-class-education-and-iq.html
They’ve already found genes for social class, now that I’ve looked into it.
what “they” have found is heritability. “they” have never found a single gene for any psychological trait which is consistently reproducible.
Mugabe holds several honorary degrees and doctorates from international universities, awarded to him in the 1980.
clark’s measures may be gerry-mandered. he’s not just using income. besides he laughs through his nose and has bad skin. by using a large number of indicators obne can make a formula which preserves its values over the generations more than others do.
what happens when baboons like Kate marry humans?
are the children more Kate-like or more human-like?
above all the characteristic which if heritable would preserve class is thrift. and thrift strangely has little or nothing to do with IQ according to the NLSY.
I think there’s an objective definition of social class but a lot of people have their own opinions of what social class is and isn’t based on their own personal biases, so this confuses the conversation. For example, a lot of proles (to use Lion of the Blogosphere term) believe that class is having a big house and big car and being able to take trips to Las Vegas and Branson, Missouri every year. People from an old-money background would laugh at this notion of class, but this what Middle America defines as class.
I don’t know about that. I find low class people to be even more aware of class than high class people, analogous to how black people are more aware of skin color differences and short people are more aware of height differences and fat people are more aware of weight differences. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy often internalize it most acutely, partly because of self-hatred, and become their own worst oppressors (stockholm syndrome?)
I never hear a high class person call anyone white trash or low class (except in movies), but I will often hear low class people refer that way to people who are even lower class than them, and not based on money, but based on behavior.
So I think most people get that social class is not about your economic level; it’s about the culture and genes associated with different economic levels, thus I think a DNA test could rank people by social class and that ranking might correlate highly with subjective judgments.
It’s ironic because I agree that poor people are more obsessed with class, but my point is that their idea of class is still very different than that of people from a wealthy family background*. Like you said, poor people are more judgmental about pre-marital sex and drug usage (even though they engage in more of it, particularly the former). At the same time, they believe the height of class is a large McMansion in an American suburb and a Ford Escalade. Old-money wealth and SWPLs with a lot of money tend to think of class in terms of occupation, hobbies and cultural interests. In other words, they’re more concerned about what organizations one volunteers for or what newspaper they write for than material wealth. Of course all of these distinctions (in terms of what one cares about) are genetically determined.
I put the asterik by “wealthy family background” because I find that wealthy foreigners tend to care more about material wealth and social transgressions the way poor Americans do. It’s mostly only rich SWPL whites that care about “occupation, hobbies and cultural interests” more than traditional factors in social class like material possessions. But they’re still the ones who make up the majority of the rich in the Western world so wealthy family background still equals rich SWPL in my mind.
Read of the Lion of the Blogosphere and Charles Murray for more info.
Not that I agree with everything either of them says (I think they’re very wrong sometimes).
I think there’s a broad consensus on who is low class, but perhaps as you imply, low class people are confused about what is considered high class, largely because they have no experience with that world.
Old-money wealth and SWPLs with a lot of money tend to think of class in terms of occupation, hobbies and cultural interests. In other words, they’re more concerned about what organizations one volunteers for or what newspaper they write for than material wealth. Of course all of these distinctions (in terms of what one cares about) are genetically determined.
I think that people with the “right” occupation, hobbies, and cultural interests, would cluster genetically much more with the average billionaire than with the average homeless person, regardless of whether they were personally poor or rich.
The key point, is that class is not about being rich, but it is about being like the rich or at least like old money. Some people get rich and never quite fit in with other rich people because they are intrinsically low class. Others are homeless, but exude dignity and sophistication because they are intrinsically high class.
I don’t know whether this is primarily genetic, or whether it’s just cultural traits that are passed down when money stays in families for many generations, and the rich all attend the same private schools and Ivy League universities. Meryl Streep talked about how girls who attended private school speak with a certain “flutiness” that girls from public schools lack and she brought that to her portrayal of Julia Child.
That kind of thing is obviously cultural, but Rushton talked about how the lower class are less K selected than the higher class…this might imply the lower class have larger breasts and buttocks, bigger genitalia, earlier onset of puberty, greater frequency of twinning etc…
this exchange would never occur between two people who weren’t themselves proles.
did pp tell you about his big screen tv and how he has bragged about it on his blog? and that he “needs” it to watch horror movies?
dear God pp is the proliest prole ever. but Canada is an entire country of proles.
in People Like Us there’s a scene where the big screen tv people are ridiculed.
http://www.pbs.org/program/people-like-us/
and prole men will never wear pastels unless they’re homosexuals.
what’s wrong with a pink shirt? it’s the best color there is for shirts.
prole men are obsessed with not being gay.
only closet faggots are afraid to wear a pink shirt.
of course proles are 99.9%+ of all americans. america and canada are prole countries from top to bottom.
what James called “the american european myth” is lost on them.
compared to “lower class” continental europeans, “upper class” americans and canadians are proles.
and the British are proles from top to bottom too.
as Hitch said, “the royal family is trailer park.”
America & the UK are a lot more prole than Canada.
Rural Canadians are prole, but the city is pretty sophisticated.
Every other person I meet is either a software developer or a policy analyst.
I don’t think I’d be considered prole by the high class.
I have some prole hobbies (watching horror) but there’s usually a sophisticated reason behind it.
And I have sophisticated interests too (Atom Egoyan movies, heritability, statistics).
But as a celebrity I pretty much float above the whole class system & transcend it.
And I should add, not all horror is prole.
shoe’s most recent post is a great example of ideology and how socially retarded shoe and the commenters he allows are.
shoe finds it hard to believe that the mean income for white males between 40 and 50 in the bottom 10% of IQ is 40k per year but at the same time easy to beleive that the mean income for those in the top 10% of IQ is 160k per year.
1. mean income is almost meaningless in a very unequal society like the US. what is meaningful is median income.
2. a lot of income is passive, not earned, in fact such income is at an all time high in the US as a % of total income…(even for the bottom 10%? idk).
so…these figures are believable…but meaningless on many levels.
yet shoe is too autistic to see his own inconsistency and ridiculousness.
the top 10% isn’t much of a cutoff and all those i-bankers, lawyers, and doctors in the 1% are very likely in the 10% too.
the median income for 40-50 year old american white males in the top 10%, it is my guess, is between 70 and 100k per year.
the median income for a white male with a masters degree is only about 65k. but most masters are given in useless subjects or “education”.
still…in the US at least, the highest salary for those who do rather than manage or sell is between 100k and 200k.
and shoe shows his conceptual and social barrenness by taking IQ as an independent factor.
as LotB has mentioned: high IQ leads to high educational attainment and to connections and this really is more than sufficient to explain all of the correlation.
that is:
smart people get good grades and get into good schools and are socialized and etc.
the effect of IQ ceteris paribus is positive but not by much.
and as both Chris Langan and Chomsky have noted in so many words…if everyone’s foremost ambition were making as much money as possible then the correlation would be much much higher.
the impecunious gentleman is a trope of 19th c English novels, but is an oxymoron for americans.
some iranians call the US “the great satan”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Satan a very appropriate name.
so today a 4000 year old nation must grovel to a < 250 year old country of mongrels whose representative, John Kerry, is half Jew.
Israel has nukes. Pakistan has nukes. South Africa had nukes prior to 1994. but Iran can’t have nukes?
so how do the “negotiations” go?
the iranian says:
ok. so you’re a jew run country who thinks iran is crazy and you want to negotiate?
most jews have a very deep seated paranoia that…
despite all their success there is some vast conspiracy of old WASP families and European aristocrats that really has all the power.
the truth is…
worldly position and influence, status and power, are prole and Jewish ambitions and that the heirs of the former masters of the universe have and have had the luxury and the intelligence to realize this…
is this all there is?
is that all there is? of course…
but that is specific…the bigger question is…
is this all there is?
a much better accompaniment with the dancing indian midget.
More inbreeding material of individuals, correlate with more corruption and petty greed. It seems like Ashkenazis and the Chinese, are notorious cheaters and dirt bags, at a more evolved level than Africans!
worldly position and influence, status and power, are prole and Jewish ambitions and that the heirs of the former masters of the universe have and have had the luxury and the intelligence to realize this
Jews are less talented and finesse than White gentiles when it matters, such as civilization attainment and cultural output.
America no doubt is a prole nation — you probably heard that before on LoftB.
Dems are less prole than Repubs, but prole nevertheless!