I’ve always found it sloppy the way sociologists and evo-psych bloggers discuss income, status and class. Sometimes these three terms are used synonymously, other times income is considered a component of status/social class, and still other times, some or all of these variables are arbitrarily lumped together into a hybrid variable called socio-economic status (SES).
So allow me to offer my definitions:
MONEY: Economical capital; how much income and/or wealth you have.
STATUS: Social capital; how many admirers you have. For nearly seven decades, Gallup’s been asking Americans to name without prompting, what living man in the world they admire most & virtually every single year, the sitting president of the United States wins the poll. The president of the United States (whoever he is) is virtually always the most worshiped man in the world within the world’s sole super power; and as a corollary, the most powerful man on Earth. Status = social capital = power (conventionally defined).
SOCIAL CLASS: Genetic money and/or genetic status = social class. In other words, social class is not about how much money and status you have, but about how much your ancestors had. If you come from a long line of rich and powerful people, you have the genetic pedigree to be accepted by the cultural elites, regardless of how much you have achieved. Conversely, if you have the wrong ancestors, the cultural elite will almost never fully accept you no matter how rich and powerful you become.
This is why old money looks down on new money, even though the latter actually earned and the former just inherited. Because earning it could just be luck (including genetic luck) which will regress to the means in your descendants; while coming from a long line of wealth indicates something more genetically stable (see the book The Son also Rises which Bruce Charlton recently reviewed) though I personally believe IQ correlates better with self-made money than inherited money. But I’ve often wondered how much stronger the correlation between IQ and money would be if humans lived millenniums instead of decades, allowing far more time for good luck and bad luck to cancel each other out.
Brain Size 
@Pp – I used to write about social class/ socio-economic status or SES (e.g. http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/evolpsych.html) and I agree that it is an ill-formed concept.
In the US it is usually defined in terms of years of education or highest level of educational attainment, while in the UK it is usually defined in terms of jobs. Others have argued that income is the proper measure (although income means very little when the state confiscates and allocates most of resources, and when rich people minimize their taxable ‘income’).
Certainly, this imprecision renders SES almost useless when it comes to ‘explaining’ things (like health differences, longevity differences etc) – and it makes it hazardous to regard SES as a ‘confounder’, and use to to ‘correct’ data.
The definition of SES I’ve seen most often & which the APA uses is education + income + occupational status:
http://www.apa.org/topics/socioeconomic-status/
It just seems very nebulous and arbitrary. It’s not entirely clear to me why those 3 variables were chosen to the exclusion of other variables. I suppose they’re all measures of culturally defined success but education is only considered success if it translates into income or status. A PhD on welfare would not be considered successful so what’s the point of adding points for education independently of money & prestige, other than to improve the rank of the PhDs who created this formula in the first place. If anything a PhD on welfare might have even less social standing than a high school dropout on welfare because the latter at least has an excuse.
Also, an occupation’s prestige is almost entirely a function of its income and education. Occupations that pay well & require education get more respect, so measuring all 3 variables seems kind of redundant, though I suppose it makes the total score a more reliable measure, though what it’s supposed to be measuring is vague. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to reflect one’s success or how much respect one gets or the quality of environment one can provide for their children, or all of the above.
If it’s supposed to reflect one’s social rank, then a lot of other things influence that besides just one’s success. A person’s height, physical attractiveness, personality & IQ can have far more impact on how much others respect them than their income or job prestige. The most clear way to measure someone’s social standing is to count how many people respect him, which is why I like Gallup’s most admired poll, though that can only measure the far extreme high end of social rank.
Also the way occupational prestige is measured is misleading because occupations get lumped together. I once had a sociology professor who claimed that the president of the united states is not high status because “politicians” don’t rank high when people judge occupations and that Michael Jordan lacked status because “athlete” is not a respected job; as if all athletes were Michael Jordan.
@Pp – I just don’t think there is a ‘right answer’ to this question – because the concept comes from Marxism, originally; where it served a mostly rhetorical purpose. WHen people try to ‘operationalize’ social class/ SES – then its incoherence becomes clear… but they do it anyway.
Bruce,
Excellent point and reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s argument against “intelligence”, which might be better made against “social class”. Just because a word exists to describe something does not mean it refers to anything real.. The reification fallacy.
@Pp ” The reification fallacy.” yes indeed.
And the people who are always accusing other people of reification are Leftists! (I first heard the term from an uber-Leftist academic social scientist – now a very senior university manager, of course).
Such people know all about it because they do it all the time, and know they are doing it (for example with the word/ concept of ‘quality’ as applied to an organization) – therefore they (naturally) assume everybody else is doing it.
I think a lot of leftists learned about the reification fallacy from Gould’s hugely influential book “The Mismeasure of Man” which is the Bible of IQ deniers. In the last section of Jensen’s review of Gould’s book, he gives an in-depth defense against Gould’s reification charge:
http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
These are crucial distinctions to make in vocabulary. And I think you are right; they are far too often lumped together or confused. It is interesting to examine how the different aspects are viewed culturally.
Yes, and it’s especially crucial to make those vocabulary distinctions when doing scientific research, because science depends on precise definitions.
Marxist social classification might be helpful.
Very true, though my problem with Marx & Paul Fussell is their class distinctions were qualitative. Regardless of its flaws, at least SES is quantitative. That doesn’t make it better of course, but I just find linear concepts more elegant, parsimonious & aesthetically pleasing.
Marx is very clear in his definitions.
Capitalist = owner of business or manager with ownership interest.
Proletariat = employee.
But today everyone with a mutual fund is a capitalist and ceos without stock options are members of the proletariat.
It was remarked upon by Bolsheviks that almost all Russians were petit bougeois at the time of the revolution. They may have paid rent to a feudal lord, but they were no one’s employee.
And people tend to look down on everyone who isn’t them. I’m sure those who live in the hollers of Eastern Kentucky dislike outsiders.
But it is true that the phrase “rich white trash” is not necessarily contradictory. This is why several dimensions must be used. Then these several can be reduced to one principal component. It will be misleading, just like g.
And, btw, when I was younger I thought Gould was a douche. Then I actually read his book. ALL the douchiness and stupidity of the nature-nurture “debate” is on one side—the hereditist side. The people they imagine to be their enemies simply don’t exist. But paranoia has always characterized conservatives.
The analogy with g is interesting. It would be interesting to factor analyze various SES and social class measures to see if a general social standing factor emerges. If so, I imagine occupational status would load highest on said factor but a lot of variables not even included in SES might load high too, like height.
And what hereditist douchiness & stupidity are you referring to?
I rather like Michael Church’s ontology of social class: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/
His premise is that social class is primarily a function of values and attitudes towards work and life, and is not a function of money or pedigree. I think his analysis makes more sense than yours which is predicated on pedigree. Still, the heritability of values roughly implies the pedigree association of social class.
Thanks for the links. Looks like he put a lot of thought into it.