Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010

Abstract

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60 percent since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.

Influence of Socioeconomic Status and Stress Over Quality of Sleep: A Systematic Review

“…Certain individuals die at a very early age; others have chronic diseases, and many live up until a very advanced age. Health differences may be analyzed according to geographic region, race, age ranges, and according to SES 60,61 . These factors reveal systematic trends in the distribution of health so that, from birth, each person is not as likely as the other to live in good health for a long time.…”

“…The SES indicates the position that a person holds in the community. One cannot measure this status directly, but there are some indirect indicators, for example, income, education, occupation, household or the social class (SC) 60,61 . Whatever the indicator used, there is a universal tendency for people from lower socioeconomic groups to die younger and to get sick more often during their lives.…”

Occupational propensity for training in a late industrial society: evidence from Russia

“…Since occupation‐specific skills play an important role in earnings (Akerman et al ., ; De Beyer & Knight, ; Kambourov & Manovskii, ), heterogeneity within occupations can be effectively captured by occupation‐specific wage differentials. We assume that both employees and employers are usually well informed about the wage spreads within ‘their’ occupations (Hansen, ; Wodtke, ), so that labour market participants can rely on this information for skills development and career track decisions (Cover, ). If wage differentials within occupations indicate skills differentials, small occupation‐specific wage gaps can encourage people to undertake training, while huge gaps discourage workers from training.…”

A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution

“…Many social scientists have proposed that income distribution is connected to class structure [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. However, there is no consensus on what, exactly, a 'class' is.…”