User talk:BrendelSignature/Quotes

"A stratified society is one marked by ineqaulity, by differences among people that are regrded as being higher or lower... it is logically possible for a society to be stratified in a continous gradation between high and low without any sharp lines... in reality... there is only a limited number of types of occupations... People in similar positions... grow similar in their thinking and lifestyle... they form a pattern, and this pattern creates social class."- Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Strucutre, 1998^[1]

It is impossible to understand people's behavior... without the concept of social stratification, because class position has a pervasive influence on almost everything... the clothes we wear... the television shows we watch... the colors we paint our homes in and the names we give our pets... Our position in the social hierarchy affects our health, happiness, and even how long we will live." -William Thompson, Joseph Hickey; Society in Focus, 2005.^[2]

"We are proud of those facts of American life that fit the pattern we are thought but somehow we are often ashamed of those equally important social facts which demonstrate the presence of social class. Consequently, we tend to deny them, or worse, denounce them and by doing so we tend to deny their existence and magically make them disappear from consciousness."- W. Lloyd Warner, What Social Class Is In America

"It should be stressed... that a position does not bring power and prestige because it draws a high income. Rather, it draws a high income because it is functionally important and the available personnel are for one reason or another scarce. It is therefore superficial and erroneous to regard high income as the cause of a man's power and prestige, just as it is erroneous to think that a man's fever is the cause of his disease... The economic source of power and prestige is not income primarily, but the ownership of capital goods (including patents, good will, and professional reputation). Such ownership should be distinguished from the possession of consumers' goods, which is an index rather than a cause of social standing." - Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore, Principles of Stratification.

The parade [of income earners with height representing income] suggest that [the] relationship between the distribution of income and the class structure is... blurred in the middle... we saw dual-income working class marchers looking down on single-income upper-middle class marchers. In sum, the class structure as we have defined it... does not exactely match the distriubtion of household income."- Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure, 1998^[1]

"Everyone wants to believe they are middle class. For people on the bottom and the top of the wage scale the phrase connotes a certain Regular Joe cachet. But this eagerness to be part of the group has led the definition to be stretched like a bungee cord"- Dante Chinni, the Christian Science Monitor

"Based on those [income data] numbers, the statistical middle class can't afford the middle-class lifestyle. I think that's why there is so much confusion about what it is and why so many people have trouble identifying themselves as anything but middle class." - Anirban Basu, chairman and CEO of Optimal Solutions Group

"Laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to... all the fluctuations of the market... owing to the... division of labor, the work of proletarians has lost all individual character... the workman... becomes an appendage of the... easily acquired knack, that is required of him." - Karl Marx, 1848

"Essentially a group can be said to be exploited if it would be better off withdrawing... with assets specified by a withdraw rule. Hypothetically... workers would be better off if they would withdraw from society with their per capita share of society's... assets."- Douglas M. Eichar, 1989^[3]

"American families are smack up against the wall, financially speaking." A middle-class lifestyle, she says, is increasingly out of reach for middle-class families, many of whom are going broke trying to attain it... Compared with a generation ago, she found, today's middle-class families earn about 75 percent more (all figures are adjusted for inflation), thanks in large part to Mom's entrance into the work force. But after shelling out for four fixed expenses - mortgage, health insurance, child care or education, and car payments - today's median-income family has less left over, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the single-income family of the 1970s. "Families are not going broke over lattes," Warren quips. "Families are going broke over mortgages."- Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Magazine.^[4]

"The upper middle class has grown... and its composition has changed. Increasingly salaried managers and professionals have replaced individual business owners and independent professionals. The key to the success of the upper-middle-class is the growing importance of educational certification... its lifetsyles and opinions are becoming increasingly normative for the whole society. It is in fact a porous class, open to people... who earn the righ credentials. "- Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure, 1998.^[5]

The lower middle class... these are people in technical and lower-level management positions who work for those in the upper middle class as lower managers, craftspeople, and the like. They enjoy a reasonably comfortable standard of living, although it is constantly threatened by taxes and inflation. Generally, they have a high school educational and perhaps some college or apprenticeship education." - Brian K. William, Stacy C. Sawyer and Carl M. Wahlstrom, Marriages, Families & Intimate Relationships, 2006 (Adapted from Dennis Gilbert 1997; and Joseph Kahl 1993)^[6]

The parade [of income earners with height representing income] suggest that [the] relationship between the distribution of income and the class structure is... blurred in the middle... we saw dual-income working class marchers looking down on single-income upper-middle class marchers. In sum, the class structure as we have defined it... does not exactely match the distriubtion of household income."- Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure, 1998

"Most ideas that find their way into the cultural mainstream... are crafted by a relative elite: people who are well educated, reasonably well-paid, and who overlap, socially and through family ties, with at least the middling levels of the business community—in short, the professional middle class." -Barbara Ehrenreich

"...It is essential that the duties of the positions be performed with the diligence that their importance requires. Inevitably, then, a society must have, first, some kind of rewards that it can use as inducements, and, second, some way of distributing these rewards differently according to positions. The rewards and their distribution become part of the social order... If the rights and prequisites of different positions in a society must be unequal, then society must be stratified... Hence every society... must differentiate persons... and must therefore possess a certain amount of institutionalized inequality."- Kingsley Davis & Wilbert E. Moore, Some Principles of Stratification re-published in Social Class and Stratification by Rhonda E. Levine in 1998.^[7]

"From 1969 to 1996, median household income rose a very modest 6.3 percent in constant dollars... The 1969 to 1996 stagnation in median household income may, in fact, be largely a reflection of changes in the size and composition of households rather than a reflection of a stagnating economy."- John McNeil, US Census Bureau

"Median income is the amount which divides the income distribution into two equal groups, half having income above that amount, and half having income below that amount. Mean income (average) is the amount obtained by dividing the total aggregate income of a group by the number of units in that group. The means and medians for households and families are based on all households and families. Means and medians for people are based on people 15 years old and over with income."^[8]
-US Census Bureau, Frequently Asked Question, published by First Gov.

"The typical middle-class household in the United States is no longer a one-earner family, with one parent in the workforce and one at home full-time. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising at dawn to commute to jobs so they can both pull in paychecks... Today the median income for a fully employed male is $41,670 per year (all numbers are inflation-adjusted to 2004 dollars)—nearly $800 less than his counterpart of a generation ago. The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother." - Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Magazine.^[4]

"When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me", Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money. The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Call them the hyper-rich."- David Cay Johnston, The New York Times.^[9]

"Due to the difficulties of comparing national crime trends between countries some of the data included in this report may be adjusted or estimated. This is because of differences in measuring crimes and definitions of crime type. The report does however state clearly which pieces of data have been adjusted and why."-David P. Farrington, Patrick A. Langan, Michael Tonry (Bureau of Justice Statistics), 2004^[10]

"...Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 28 August 1963.^[11]

"The nuclear family... is the idealized version of what most poeple think when they think of "family..." The old definition of what a family is... the nuclear family- no longer seems adequate to cover the wide diversity of household arrangements we see today, according to many social scientists (Edwards 1991; Stacey 1996). Thus has arisen the term postmodern family, which is meant to describe the great variablity in family forms, including single-parent families and child-free couples."- Brian K. Williams, Stacey C. Sawyer, Carl M. Wahlstrom, Marriages, Families & Intinamte Relationships, 2005.^[12]

"The percentage of the foreign born with a high school diploma (67 percent) was dramatically lower than that of the native population (88 percent), but paradoxically, the percentage with a bachelor’s degree was the same (27 percent)... At the bachelor’s level, foreign born Blacks and non-Hispanic Whites fared better than their native counterparts. Foreign-born Hispanics, in contrast, had a smaller proportion with a bachelor’s degree than the native population... The low educational attainment of foreign-born Hispanics, who compose more than 50 percent of the Hispanic population, contributes to the low attainment levels of the entire Hispanic population."
- US Census Bureau, 2003