mm, well in terms of economic class. I think the useful definitions are: 1) working class - includes the poor ( A lot sociologists divide the poor into a separate subclass).

2) middle classes (professional/bureaucratic/tecnical/small business) still make their living mostly from wages and worklives are still pretty much controlled in the larger sense but have some control over day to day or hour to hour. Also more chance to exercise decision making. In some cases (small business) some of the income is profit, but overwhelming it is wages and much of what is formally profit is still in practical senses wages (i.e. tied directly to how hard and well you work that dividends from stock in a pick corporation is not). (Some would clump everyone but the small business and self-employed professionals into the working class. Lumpers and splitters too: not just paeleo anthropologists).

3) Owner class - may or may work (and even work hard) but can get enough income without working that work is not needed. Again though there can be some distinctions between Ms.-doesn't-need-to work, Ms. hundred-millions and Bill Gates.

There are a bunch of arguments people can have over the specifics, but if we are really talking class there should not be a lot. If you get beyond a handful of classifications you are not talking classes you are talking demographics.

========================== I think definitions along these lines make discussions of things like class mobility a lot more meaningfully. Note that this is economic class, not social class. I think what people have been talking about as social class can be talked about much more clearly as something other than class - perhaps "caste" to steal a term from another culture. ================== In terms of mobility, it is true that the U.S. historically had greater economic class mobility that the rest of the world. Since the early to mid seventies most of Europe beats us in class mobility. A working class or poor girl or boy in France has a better chance of becoming middle class or rich than one in the U.S. A middle class girl or boy in France has a greater chance of growing up to become rich than a middle class girl or boy in the U.S. In spite of the presence of a landed aristocracy, I think the UK may actually be better than us in economic class mobility, certainly not much worse.

Can I have her gold star, anyway?

Hee.

Middle-class and Poor: Work for their money

Rich: Money works for them!

I'm so used to doing my own laundry, it was quite the dilemma when I got to Prague and asked about laundry. There was a crew of little old ladies and work study students who's scrub your clothes by hand for some minimal fee per pound. I couldn't get quite comfortable with it, it seemed too personal and just....by hand. A friend got a flat with a washer/dryer and after much hilarity that ensued as we tried to translate the directions, I mostly used that. Until it couldn't get my soot-embedded jeans really clean. Then I took it to the hand laundry service. The jeans were probably the cleanest they'd been since the fabric was woven, but they'd also been aged a couple years. They must have scrubbed the everloving shit out of them.

A working class or poor girl or boy in France has a better chance of becoming middle class or rich than one in the U.S. A middle class girl or boy in France has a greater chance of growing up to become rich than a middle class girl or boy in the U.S.

I wonder if this is really true. If it is, I'd say it has a lot to do with the (relative) uniformity of education, including cultural and social expectations on the part of parents, teachers, and the system.

That craiglist nanny ad is now flagged for removal, so maybe it's a fake?

I'm so used to doing my own laundry, it was quite the dilemma when I got to Prague and asked about laundry.

There were no laundromats in Lisbon. Some people paid for a laundry service. As I was extremely poor, I just hand-washed all my clothes in the bathtub and dried them on the balcony.

Anne goes to college and in her sophomore year, rooms with Stella, Priscilla, and Phillipa. Aunt Jimsie keeps house for them. I think she's Priscilla's aunt.

t /Anne likes carrots

Maybe it's a Canadian thing? We had cleaning ladies vacuum and bring us clean sheets once a week in the dorms at Trent. And this was a place that at its founding in the sixties actively recruited for faculty wanting to make a statement by leaving the U.S. over Viet Nam.

I didn't have a tub and it was winter! But I did develop the habit of washing my underwear in the shower every morning. Which I still do. I recognize this is kinda weird. But I never run out of underwear!

I *just* read an article about a study of the German system, hauptschule (trades) vs gymnasium and the role of social class in there. One kid said "I'm in the Hauptschule, so I know I won't be able to do much when I'm older." [link]