Do you remember this blog post on social class?

May 17, 2018 11:27 AM

A long time ago I read a blog post about categorizing social classes. The basics of it were that social class is not just a straight line defined by wealth, but that things were also separated into silos, like working in the arts or academics as opposed to finance.

I know this is not that unique in general but there were some specific ideas about how these silos and class levels interact. One of the examples was about how actors can be rich and famous, but they are still service workers in a way — and even ultra-wealthy CEOs are beholden to some people. Another example may have been about how one could be at the top of your profession in academics, of a "higher" social class than a junior finance worker, but this junior finance worker was on a different path and could maybe have more class mobility. I think the author even had odd labels that they used to explain all this like "A1, S3" or something like that. It was not in a big name publication, I'm pretty sure it was just someone's personal blog post. Does this sound familiar?

posted by solmyjuice to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Best answer: This sounds to me like Michael O. Church's "Three Ladder System of Social Class in the U.S." which used to be at https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/, but doesn't seem to be there anymore.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 12:05 PM on May 17, 2018

A lot of the text of the Three Ladder System article is reproduced here.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 12:06 PM on May 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Annnnd, finally, the entire text of the article is here.
posted by Juffo-Wup at 12:29 PM on May 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

Related blog post: [psych/anthro/soc, Patreon] Class (American) (LJ) and identical post on Dreamwidth (same contents; different comments).

Another way we substitute economic class for social class is in the "polite" – i.e. euphemistic – terms we use for referring to social classes, terms which allude to type of work or educational attainment as the organizing principles of social class. That's what we're doing – and what I did above – when we use terms like "white collar" and "blue collar" and "professional" and "service-industry worker" and "college-educated". These are not worthless terms, but they are not actually the same thing as social class. We just use them as if they were. Two baristas stand at an espresso machine, pulling drinks for identical wages: for one, this is a day job while she pursues her singer-songwriter career while living out of her lover's condo on Beacon Hill; the other is working two jobs to support three children in an illegal apartment in the basement of an Everett triple-decker. These two women are both "service-industry workers", but if they turn out to have two different social classes, would this be a surprise?

And an older DailyKos about the 3-ladder system: Examining social class in the US -- Church's 3-ladder system
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:42 PM on May 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Reminds me also of Paul Russell's 1983 book Class, summarized in the first part of this article.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 3:37 PM on May 17, 2018 [2 favorites]