Social structure USA & CANADA

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Question English Answer English
CLASS in THE UNITED STATES
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CLASS in THE UNITED STATES • the essence of the American dream is that anyone can rise – American society is meritocratic and class is achievement based – one s membership in a particular social class is based on educational and career accomplishments
•most Americans recognize a three tier structure that includes the upper, middle, and lower classes, but variations delineate an upper middle class and a working class
•high income earners likely are substantially educated, have high status occupations, and maintain powerful social networks
THE UPPER CLASS
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private and corporate lenders, landlords, and employers the political or ruling class they makes all of the executive decisions in the economy that are not delegated to the state
THE MIDDLE CLASS
subclasses upper, middle, and lower middle
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professionals, small business owners, middle management, some government officials, and people who generally own their own property without making a living on idle income from it, but must work to make ends meet
THE LOWER CLASS
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everyone who does not own or manage property, but who rent their places of living from landlords and seek employment from others
such as service workers, factory workers, farmhands, unskilled government workers or who are otherwise unemployed or on welfare
intergenerational earnings elasticity- IGE
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used by the economists to measure how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income
•an IGE of zero means that there’s no relationship at all between parents’ income and that of their offspring
•an IGE of one says that the destiny of a child is to end up right where she came into the world
a ccording to Miles Corak, an economics professor at the City University of New York
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• half a century ago IGE in America was less than 0.3 • today, it is about 0.5
•in America, the game is half over once you’ve selected your parents •IGE in America is higher than in almost other developed economy
•on this measure of economic mobility, the United States is more like Chile or Argentina than Japan or Germany •Canada, for example, has an IGE of about half that of the U.S
The Great Gatsby Curve:
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Inequality and class immobility go together.
ACCESS TO ELITE EDUCATION - USA
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• the top 10 can afford private secondary schools, private college counselors and SAT coaches, and tuition at private colleges they often benefit from elite affirmative action ― legacy admissions
•only 2 of America’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, they comprise 26 of students at Harvard University and 28 at Princeton
•in a 2017 study, 38 top tier colleges had more students from the top 1 than from the bottom 60 •after college and graduate school this privileged cadre far surpasses other college graduates
UPPER CLASS (10 percenters) advantages and impact of their money and capital
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• influence on the government ’s decisions, • self narcotizing myth, • corporate consolidation, • technology
THE SITUATION OF OTHER CLASSES
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• the middle class struggles and the poor suffer • l ess educated whites increasingly suffer death by class ― suicide, substance abuse or neglected health
•satisfaction with life is rising among the affluent, declining among those beneath o ne obvious cause is the pervasive sense of falling behind •many children of the 90 aren’t getting what they need
•compared to other Western countries, the U.S. has very high rates of child poverty, homelessness, violence and ill health • the rate of maternal death in childbirth esp / among black women) and infant death rate ha ve increased dramatically since 1990
CANADA - social structure
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• one of the most socially mobile countries in the world • is doing well on social fluidity measures, like the ‘Great Gatsby’ curve
•in terms of the absolute degree of social fluidity, Canada wa s ranked 1 st in the world, in a cluster with Nordic countries such as Norway, Finland and Denmark
•the only country where the children of a manual worker are as likely to grow up to be managers as they are to be manual workers themselves
CANADA’S MIDDLE CLASS
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• Canadians’ median wealth of $106,342 is significantly higher than the comparable figure of $61,670 for Americans (and it is rising)
•compared with the United States, Canada has a lower percentage of people with wealth below $10,000 and a higher percentage with more than $100,000
•1.59 million Canadians are part of the world’s top 1 percent of wealth holders, according to Credit Suisse’s calculations •politicians, particularly Prime Minister Justin usually present themselves as champions of the middle class

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