Interesting thread. The various posts seem to have concluded that the Working Class, Middle Class, .... concepts are still valid in some guise, but it's difficult to specify exactly what characteristics define them.
Those aspects of society that don't fall into clear black/white categories (i.e. always exist in some shade of grey), I've always found are best interpreted by
Bell Curves or overlying families of Bell Curves. A general example for the "Working Class" question is shown below.
The horizontal X-axis shows some numerical or semi-quantitative attribute, like "Places high value on a University Education", which could appear on the scale as Zero, Low, Medium, High, Very High, or as a number scale if you can properly quantify it (e.g. number of cigarettes smoked per day).
The vertical Y-axis is always the fraction or percentage of the people within that group with that belief or attribute.
For this particular subject, the X-axis attributes could be:-
1) Places high value on a University Education.
2) Supports significant cuts to the Welfare system.
3) Number of cigarettes smoked per day.
4) Degree of support for continuation of the Monarchy beyond Elizabeth II.
5) How willing to try unfamilar foreign food?
you can easily think of many more which might define Working Class etc.
Obviously the image above shows some random, unspecific example.
The position and shape of each curve can shift about without restriction, depending on what attribute you're looking at and you could compare families of curves for different attributes, one under the other on the same page.
The interesting thing is not so much precise numbers as the visual patterns:
- Relative position of the maximum peaks (most frequent value) of the different curves.
- The width or spread of the curves - is it very sharp, or is there a large or small proportion of people with extreme opinions, or personal wealth or BMI, or whatever? This is where the Working Class curve for Personal Wealth has a very long, skinny tail due to the small number of entertainers (including footballers) who've acquired high personal wealth.
- Relative overlaps of the different curves. And do some curves overlap at all?
It's also interesting to look at changes to families of curves over a period of time.
If you could look at the "Willing to Try Foreign Food" curves from the 1960s, they'll be very different to 2014 for all the classes.
Beyond the topical "
Working Class" question, you can extend it to the international sphere. For example "all Americans are fat".
If you overlayed bell curves for Body Mass Index of the US, UK and Japanese populations (for example), you would probably find the mean is a bit higher for the US, the spread of the US curve is very broad (there are many obese Americans, but also a large proportion who take their personal image very seriously and stay in shape) and the Japanese curve may be narrow and sharp relative to US and UK.
You can do the same thing with any other favourite national / ethnic characterisation like:
1) Germans are hardworking and efficient.
2) Italians dress very well.
3) Muslims support Islamic terrorism.
4) Australians are obsessed by sport.
From any group, you can always cherry-pick an example or two to confirm or disprove whatever message or prejudice you have, but it takes a properly-constructed Bell Curve (and better still a family of Bell Curves) to cut through the
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.
