Marriage is a luxury good [NYT] After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad on Feb 18, 2012 - 66 comments

Class Conflict Awareness Rose Significantly From 2009 To 2011 A new Pew Research Center survey reports that "the issue of class conflict has captured a growing share of the national consciousness".
posted by Benny Andajetz on Jan 12, 2012 - 86 comments

Social Class Calculator From the NYT series on social class. What is social class in America? Little has changed in fifty years, or has it?
posted by caddis on Jun 26, 2007 - 65 comments

In Britain: Upper class, Upper middle class, Middle class, Lower middle class, Working class. An American on class.
posted by Aloysius Bear on Mar 30, 2007 - 93 comments

Class in American society, a survey by the Economist.
posted by daksya on Jul 17, 2005 - 48 comments

"They [the bipartisan elite] have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down." While a lot of people (okay, maybe just me) have criticized David Brooks' column as an only-infrequently-successful attempt to channel Malcom Gladwell for the McCain-Specter set, I think he may have stumbled onto a provocative insight here.
posted by MattD on May 29, 2005 - 62 comments

Michael Young's critique of the meritocracy is brilliant, subversive and quite possibly based on faulty assumptions. "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
posted by lbergstr on Jun 29, 2001 - 11 comments