Do you believe in the American Dream? How plausible do you think it is for someone to grow up in poverty and to become a millionaire? Watch this video from popular vlogger John Green to ponder how “open” our “open system” of stratification is in the United States. How does it compare to other open systems of stratification like those found in Denmark and Canada? How does systemic inequality of opportunity, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, and for women affect one’s ability to move up the social class ladder?

Consider the idea of the “American Dream” in viewing this video:

Life Chances

Max Weber’s conceptualization of social class examines class, status, and power. We know by now that all societies have a mechanism to rank, or stratify, its members and that this stratification is unequal in terms of rewards and benefits. Weber used the term life chances (Lebenschancen in German) to describe the opportunities to increase one’s position in the social class structure. Categories that affect life chances include the social class one is born into, geographic location, family ancestry, race, ethnicity, age, and gender.

Consider the life chances of a child born in Syria today. Syria is one of the most violent countries in the world, and millions of Syrians have been displaced or are refugees seeking asylum in other countries. What kinds of life chances are afforded to Syrian children? 

Consider the life chances of a child born into the Kennedy family in Massachusetts, which has been called “America’s top dynasty” ^[1] versus the life chances of a child born to a poor family in Mississippi. The Kennedy child is born into class, status, and power, having a U.S. President, three U.S. Senators, four U.S. Representatives, and one U.S. Cabinet member within his or her extended family. This boy or girl will attend elite private boarding schools, will travel the world, and will be exposed to possibilities largely unknown to his or her counterpart in Mississippi. Now imagine that the child born in Mississippi is African-American and has ancestors who were sharecroppers that lived under Jim Crow Laws, and whose more recent forebears struggled through the Civil Rights Movement. This child will likely attend underfunded public schools and watch his or her parents struggle economically to find sustainable work and obtain health care. More than likely, he or she will experience racism from a very young age. 

So, social stratification affects a wide range of life chances, including things like parenting, educational attainment, and health.

Watch this video to see how things such as class, status, race, and geography shape life chances:

Social Mobility

Social mobility refers to the ability to change positions within a social stratification system. When people improve or diminish their economic status in a way that affects social class, they experience social mobility. Social mobility is one way to attempt to measure opportunity. In a perfectly mobile society, parents’ resources would be completely irrelevant to a child’s prospects; in a perfectly immobile society (like a caste system), parents’ resources rigidly determine a child’s trajectory.

Individuals can experience upward or downward social mobility for a variety of reasons. Upward mobility refers to an increase—or upward shift—in social class. In the United States, people applaud the rags-to-riches achievements of celebrities like Jennifer Lopez or Michael Jordan. Bestselling author Stephen King worked as a janitor prior to being published. Oprah Winfrey grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi before becoming a powerful media personality. There are many stories of people rising from modest beginnings to fame and fortune. But the truth is that relative to the overall population, the number of people who rise from poverty to wealth is very small. Still, upward mobility is not only about becoming rich and famous. In the United States, people who earn a college degree, get a job promotion, or marry someone with a good income may also move up socially. In contrast, downward mobility indicates a lowering of one’s social class. Some people move downward because of business setbacks, unemployment, or illness. Dropping out of school, losing a job, or getting a divorce may result in a loss of income or status and, therefore, lead to downward social mobility.

It is not uncommon for different generations of a family to belong to varying social classes. This is known as intergenerational mobility. For example, an upper-class executive may have parents who belonged to the middle class. In turn, those parents may have been raised in the lower class. Patterns of intergenerational mobility can reflect long-term societal changes.

Similarly, intragenerational mobility refers to mobility within one’s own lifetime. For example, someone who is born into the lower working class could be the first in their family to obtain a college degree and move from the lower working class to the lower middle class and work as a teacher or other type of professional.

Structural mobility happens when societal changes enable a whole group of people to move up or down the social class ladder. Structural mobility is attributable to changes in society as a whole, not individual changes. In the first half of the twentieth century, industrialization expanded the U.S. economy, raising the standard of living and leading to upward structural mobility. In today’s work economy, the recent recession, increasing automation, and the outsourcing of jobs overseas have contributed to a decade of historically high unemployment rates. Many people have experienced economic setbacks, creating a wave of downward structural mobility.

When analyzing the trends and movements in social mobility, sociologists consider all modes of mobility. Scholars recognize that mobility is not as common or easy to achieve as many people think. In fact, some consider social mobility a myth.

Standard of Living

In order to examine social mobility, it is important to understand standard of living, which refers to the level of wealth available to a certain socioeconomic class in order to acquire the material necessities and comforts to maintain its lifestyle. The standard of living is based on factors such as income, employment, class, poverty rates, and housing affordability. Because standard of living is closely related to quality of life, it can represent factors such as the ability to afford a home, own a car, and take vacations.

In the United States, as in most high-income nations, social stratifications and standards of living are in part based on occupation (Lin and Xie 1988). Aside from the obvious impact that income has on someone’s standard of living, occupations also influence social standing through the relative levels of prestige they afford. Employment in medicine, law, or engineering confers high status. Teachers and police officers are generally respected, though their jobs are not considered particularly prestigious. At the other end of the scale, some of the lowest rankings apply to positions like waitress, janitor, and bus driver.

The most significant threat to the relatively high standard of living we’re accustomed to in the United States is the decline of the middle class, as discussed above. The size, income, and wealth of the middle class have all been declining since the 1970s. This is occurring at a time when corporate profits have increased more than 141 percent, and CEO pay has risen by more than 298 percent (Popken, 2007).

G. William Domhoff, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, reports that “In 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers)” (Domhoff, 2013).

Thus, sociologists are interested in examining both social mobility among individuals and the likelihood of groups to move up or down within the U.S. class system over time. Within these categories one can also consider what the standard of living might be for individuals within each of the social classes.

Watch this video to learn more about social mobility. The video highlights research that began in 1982 by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson. They followed 800 first grade students in Baltimore for twenty five years and examined the impact their socioeconomic status had throughout their lives.

Poverty in the U.S.

Drawing the Poverty Line

The federal poverty level is based on relative poverty. Poverty in the United States is measured by the number of people who fall below a certain level of income—called the poverty line—that defines the income needed for a basic standard of living.

In the United States, the official definition of the poverty line traces back to a single person: Mollie Orshansky. In 1963, Orshansky, who was working for the Social Security Administration, published an article called “Children of the Poor” in a highly useful, but dry publication called the Social Security Bulletin. Orshansky’s idea was to define a poverty line based on the cost of a healthy diet.

Her previous job had been at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she had worked in an agency called the Bureau of Home Economics and Human Nutrition. One task of this bureau had been to calculate how much it would cost to feed a nutritionally adequate diet to a family. Orshansky found that the average family spent one-third of its income on food. She then proposed that the poverty line be the amount needed to buy a nutritionally adequate diet, given the size of the family, multiplied by three.

The current U.S. poverty line is essentially the same as the Orshansky poverty line, although the government adjusts the dollar amounts to represent the same buying power over time. The U.S. poverty line in 2015 ranged from $11,790 for a single individual to $25,240 for a household of four people.

Figure 1 shows the number in poverty and the U.S. poverty rate over time; that is, the percentage of the population below the poverty line in any given year. While the number in poverty has grown over time, the poverty rate declined through the 1960s, rose in the early 1980s and early 1990s, but seems to have been slightly lower since the mid-1990s. However, in no year in the last four decades has the poverty rate been less than 13.5% of the U.S. population—that is, at best about one American in nine is below the poverty line.

The federal poverty line in the U.S. is an example of relative poverty (not absolute poverty). The cost of living is not taken into consideration, so the federal poverty level is standard across the United States and fails to account for the fact that some cities are vastly more expensive than others.The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) created this family budget calculator (click on it to see how your city measures up to the federal poverty line). According to the EPI, in 615 U.S. cities,  it takes a total income at least twice the federal poverty line for any type of family with three children or fewer to afford basic expenses.^[2]

Figure 4. Changes in the number in poverty and the poverty rate.

Watch this CrashCourse video to understand how poverty looks in the United States:

Causes of poverty

Poverty as a personal failing

When it comes to poverty in the United States, there are two main lines of thought. The most common line of thought within the U.S. is that a person is poor because of personal traits–things like personality characteristics, motivation, and education. This viewpoint puts the blame on an individual’s personal failure not to climb out of poverty and is centered around the belief that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough. This thought pattern stems from the idea of meritocracy, or the belief that individuals are selected and moved ahead based primarily on their achievements and intellectual abilities.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secretary of Labor and sociologist, completed a report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (known as the Moynihan Report) in 1965. The intent was to show that civil rights legislation alone would not produce racial equality, and to advocate for additional policies to address structural discrimination. Unfortunately, the report was interpreted as focusing on the internal dynamics of Black families, as it seemed to identity racially disproportionate rates of divorce, “illegitimate” children, welfare dependence, and unemployment as primary factors. This reading allowed many conservatives to argue that racial self-help was both adequate and necessary, with some some commentators straying into judgement instead of analysis so as to focus on “loose morality among African Americans” as a way to blame Black families themselves for inequality ^[3].

Poverty as a structural failing

Another explanation for poverty is that it results from structural inequality. For example, the job market fails to provide a proper number of jobs which pay enough to keep families out of poverty. Even if unemployment is low, the labor market may be saturated with low paying, part-time work that lacks benefits such as health insurance coverage or employee retirement contributions (thus limiting the number of full-time, good paying jobs). Low minimum wages and the increasing prevalence of part-time jobs that offer no benefits have contributed to the labor market’s inability to produce enough jobs sufficient for keeping a family out of poverty. This is an example of an economic structural failure. It exists independently of any one individual’s actions or priorities, and as such it is an apt object of analysis for sociologists.

Poverty is not equally distributed among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Although whites make up the largest total number of people in poverty, Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor by comparison.

The 1965 Moynihan Report began with the following rationale for why Blacks were not experiencing equality as a group: “There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American bloodstream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people” (as reprinted in Geary, 2015).

Sociologist William Julius Wilson has written extensively about the institutional barriers Black Americans face, and has examined structural causes of poverty. His books The Declining Significance of Race (1972), The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and When Work Disappears (1996) examine what he calls the “underclass.” In one case study, Wilson documents the economic and social changes in the North Lawndale area of West Chicago over several years. He notes that North Lawndale lost 75 percent of its businesses from 1960-1970, resulting in unprecedented levels of unemployment. While 70 percent of Black men nationwide worked full-time, year-round in the 1970s, by the 1980s, only half did (1996). Although Wilson’s books have won numerous awards and have been widely read, he has been heavily criticized for prioritizing the role of social class over that of race and institutional racism.

A recent survey by the U.S. Federal Reserve found that 47 percent of Americans would have a difficult time raising $400 cash in an emergency^[6] This supports recent census data, which shows that half the population qualifies as poor or low income. Poverty rates are persistently higher in rural and inner city parts of the country as compared to suburban areas. Children, the disabled, the elderly, and minority populations are particularly vulnerable to poverty.

Most people tend to think about poverty as “cyclical” or generational poverty, but in a recent study conducted by the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis, the average “spell of poverty” lasted 2.8 years, and although most people become poor due to less money being earned by a head of household, 25 percent entered into poverty as the result of a breadwinner’s death or through divorce^[7]. The effects of poverty on children are many, including an increased likelihood of reduced life chances.

Watch as Dr. Ann Huff Stevens, Director of the Center for Poverty Research and Chairperson of Economics at UC Davis, describes one way to address poverty among children and to reduce its long-term effects:

Watch this video to hear from Princeton sociologist Kathryn Edin as she describes her research on welfare programs in the United States.

Further Research: Stratified Monopoly

Figure 2. In Monopoly the game, unlike in real life, all players start on equal footing.

Many sociologists and economists have used the classic board game Monopoly to illustrate poverty, social mobility, and the principles of a market economy. The game, nearly a century old, was originally designed to show the benefits of a limited tax system as well as those of a monopoly, or owning all of a particular type of property, utility, or transportation system.

However, if we consider Monopoly as an example we can see that several aspects of the game do not in fact translate to everyday life.

1. Each player begins at “GO” with the same amount of money and an opportunity to buy property as soon as one lands on it.
2. Each player “earns” the same amount of money when they pass “GO.”
3. Each player has the same likelihood of rolling the die, going to jail, and bailing themselves out.

When we consider players who are unsuccessful at Monopoly, we often say they have had “bad luck.”

You can play your own game of stratified Monopoly following the rules found here.

• What does Stratified Monopoly show us about wealth and poverty in the U.S.?
• Which version of Monopoly is closer to reality in the U.S.?