Scptt Alexander writes,

All those studies that analyze whether some variable or other affects income? They’d all be much more interesting if they analyzed the effect on class instead. For example, there’s a surprisingly low correlation between your parents’ income and your own income, which sounds like it means there’s high social mobility. But I grew up in a Gentry class family; I became a doctor, my brother became a musician, and my cousin got a law degree but eventually decided to work very irregularly and mostly stay home raising her children. I make more money than my brother, and we both make more money than my cousin, but this is not a victory for social mobility and family non-determinism; it’s no coincidence none of us ended up as farmers or factory workers. We all ended up Gentry class, but I chose something closer to the maximize-income part of the Gentry class tradeoff space, my brother chose something closer to the maximize-creativity part, and my cousin chose to raise the next generation. Any studies that interpret our income difference as an outcome difference and tries to analyze what factors gave me a leg up over my relatives (better schools? more breastfeeding as a child?) are stupid and will come up with random noise. We all got approximately the same level of success/opportunity, and those things just happen to be very poorly measured by money. If we could somehow collapse the entirety of tradeoffspace into a single variable, I bet it would have a far greater parent-child correlation than income does. This is part of why I don’t follow the people who take the modest effect of IQ on income as a sign that IQ doesn’t change your opportunities much; maybe everyone in my family has similar IQs but wildly different income levels, and there’s your merely modest IQ/income relationship right there. I think some studies (especially in Britain) have tried analyzing class and gotten some gains over analyzing income, but I don’t know much about this.

My thoughts:

1. I agree that income is a noisy measure of something that is more fundamental and more highly heritable. I take Gregory Clark’s The Son Also Rises as strong evidence for that. Re-read my review.

Clark and his researchers looked at multi-generational outcomes on a variety of measures in several countries. They concluded that under many different institutional arrangements and across many time periods, the true correlation across generations in social status is somewhere between .7 and.8, which is much higher than most conventional estimates. In short, persistence of social class is much higher than most researchers believe it to be, based on single-generation correlations that are biased downward by measurement error.

2. Alexander describes a number of impressionistic descriptions of social class. I prefer the data-based approach used by sociologists and market researchers. See, for example, The Clustering of America, which uses cluster analysis.

3. People are much more tightly grouped around social class than around income or political beliefs. That is why so many of us feel totally isolated from the Trump phenomenon. Remember Charles Murray’s bubble test?

4. Speaking of Trump, Alexander writes,

Donald Trump appeals to a lot of people because despite his immense wealth he practically glows with signs of being Labor class. This isn’t surprising; his grandfather was a barber and his father clawed his way up to the top by getting his hands dirty. He himself went to a medium-tier college and is probably closer in spirit to the small-business owners of the upper Labor class than to the Stanford MBA-holding executives of the Elite. Trump loves and participates in professional wrestling and reality television; those definitely aren’t Gentry or Elites pastimes! When liberals shake their heads wondering why Joe Sixpack feels like Trump is a kindred soul even though Trump’s been a billionaire his whole life, they’re falling into the liberal habit of sorting people by wealth instead of by class. To Joe Sixpack, Trump is “local boy made good”.

I find that insightful.