Ran across a reference to a class chart in Victor Lombardi’s blog “A Noise Between Stations“. When I clicked through, I discovered that it was, indeed, as simultaneously impressive and silly as he had suggested. Lombardi’s post notes that designers were significantly lower-class than something called “management analyst.” In fact, the chart places designers within one percentile point of mail carriers - and only 10 points north of “motor vehicle repairers” and still alarmingly close (46th percentile to 26th percentile) to “pest control workers.”

Granted, this is only one of the four axes of income that the Times’ fancy interactive chart allows you to operate. And on the “education” axis, you can feel pretty good about yourself if you have a college degree, which apparently places you in the 91st percentile. Earning over $100K doesn’t hurt either, if you’re so lucky - but then you’re potentially nailed again with the household net worth question (at least if you are like most Americans I keep reading about - or me - and really don’t save any money). And then, I guess, the chart averages all this to give you a percentile score that you can then correlate to one of the five qualtitative measures of class: the diplomatically-named “bottom fifth,” “lower middle,” “middle,” “upper middle” and “top fifth.”

Personally I prefer Paul Fussell’s nine-level taxonomy of American class (especially because it includes nomenclature like “upper out of sight” and three levels of “prole”). But not every interactive chart can be as saucy as Mr. Fussell. So, that aside, an interesting facet of this toy is how little, apparently, education and income get you, class-wise. That is, suppose you have a college degree and are earning that $100K per year, mid-career. If you have no savings/inherited wealth and the “wrong” profession, the Times says you’re solidly middle class. But a profession change (from, say, “designer” to “management/marketing-sales”) takes you into the obviously preferable upper middle class - even if nothing else shifts.

It’s hard to know exactly what to conclude from this, although “labelling is everything” comes to mind. Also interesting is the fact that, even if you are earning a lot of money, have a great education and have the highest-possible-prestige job (try “physician/surgeon”), you still won’t make it into “upper class” unless you’ve got a decent net worth. Which I guess makes a certain kind of traditional sense.

On a separate note, the chart is fairly usable - and the additional tabs less fun but in their own way just as interesting. All in all, a fairly successful rendering of a great deal of data for a casual browser. I do wish they had a more nuanced set of job descriptions - there’s a large dearth of interactive-type jobs, for instance (where do bloggers fit in? Journalism?) - but some limits had to be prescribed, for sure.

JF

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Finds, Diary of a Business Blog.