Chapter 8: Social Class in the United States

Question	Answer
Social Class	According to Weber, a large group of people who rank close to one another in property, power and prestige; according to Marx, one of two groups: capitalists who own the means of production or workers who sell their labor.
Property	Material possessions: animals, bank accounts, bonds, buildings, businesses, cars, cash, commodities, copyrights, furniture, jewelry, land, and stocks.
Wealth	The total value of everything someone owns, minus the debts.
Income	Money received, usually from a job, business, or assets.
Power	The ability to carry out your will, even over the resistance of others.
Power Elite	C. Wright Mills' term for the top people in U.S corporations, military, and politics who make the nation's major decisions.
Prestige	Respect or regard
Status Consistency	Ranking high or low on all three dimensions of social class.
Status Inconsistency	Ranking high on some dimensions of social class and low on others; also called status discrepency.
Status	The position that someone occupies in a social group.
Anomie	Durkheim's term for a condition of society in which people become detached from the usual norms that guide their behavior.
Contradictory Class Locations	Erik Wright's term for a positions in the class structure that generates contradictory interests.
Underclass	A group of people for whom poverty persists year after year and across generations.
Inter-generational Mobility	The change that family members make in social class from one generation to the next.
Upward Social Mobility	Movement up the social class ladder.
Downward Social Mobility	Movement down the social class ladder.
Structural Mobility	Movement up or down the social class ladder that is due more to changes in the structure of society than to the actions of individuals.
Exchange Mobility	A large number of people oving up the social class ladder, while a larger number move down; it is as though they have exchanged places, and the social class system shows little change.
Poverty Line	The official measure of poverty; calculated to include incomes that are less than three times a low-cost food budget.
Feminization of Poverty	A condition of U.S poverty in which most poor families are headed by women.
Culture of Poverty	The assumption that the values and behaviors of the poor make them fundamentally different from other people, that these factors are largely responsible for their poverty, and that parents perpetuate poverty across generations by passing these characteristics to their children.
Deferred Gratification	Going without something in the present in the hopes of achieving greater gains in the future.
Horatio Alger Myth	The belief that due to limitless possibilities anyone can get ahead if he or she tries hard enough.

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Chapter 8: Social Class in the United States

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