In the chapter it was mentioned that American study participants exaggerate the permeability of the social class and thought that it wasn’t that hard to go up in the economic hierarchy. This belief shows itself in the term “American Dream” and the hustle culture that is quite dominant in today’s west centered social media. The truth is (like chapter said) class mobility is quite low in most countries. For example Barone and Mocetti (2021) conducted a research on class mobility in Florence and looked at the wealth inheritance of high class families from 1427 all the way to the 2021 and surprisingly large amounts of wealth stayed in the same families. This is a grim reality for most countries but in my opinion this wouldn’t entirely be the same in Turkey because of the establishment of the republic. Wealth shifted significantly with the establishment of a new country. People from villages are the rich people of today and I think it changed once again in recent time with the reign of the current government and they created a new type of bourgeois that mostly does not date back to any aristocratic past. Overall in Turkey it may be a bit easier to change social class due to the ever changing political climate but it is still quite hard. As Thomas Piketty mentions in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, when money from investments grows faster than the economy, the rich get richer, causing inequality because they earn much more than workers, whose wages grow slower, creating a cycle where the wealthy keep getting wealthier while others struggle.
Chapter also made a distinction between the social class and power, status. Mentions that these do not have the same definitions. Social Class is one’s overall place in society. Power on the other hand is specific to a given relationship or context. A person may have significant power in one domain but lack it in another. And to illustrate the different forms of power, consider the following riddle that emphasizes this. A rich man, a priest, and a king are in the room together. They all command a sellsword to kill the other two. Who lives, and who dies?
One study that I thought to be very interesting was about the Indian farmers who performed better on cognitive tasks after having more abundant food. Which in a way proved that poverty and scarcity have a dramatic effect on cognitive functioning. Reminded me of a quote about having to worry about one’s place in dirt and not being able to wonder his/her place in the stars.
Overall from the chapter I understood that social class shapes behavior, cognition, and self perception by influencing access to resources, perceived social rank, and cultural norms. Lower class individuals often experience greater external threats and resource scarcity, interdependence, early reproduction and present focused decision-making, which prioritizes immediate needs over long-term goals. In contrast, upper-class individuals typically enjoy resource abundance, enabling greater personal control, delayed reproduction, and long-term planning.
Guglielmo Barone, Sauro Mocetti, Intergenerational Mobility in the Very Long Run: Florence 1427–2011, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 88, Issue 4, July 2021, Pages 1863–1891, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaa075
Piketty, T. (2017). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Belknap Press.
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