What is Class? — People's Policy Project

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Many use it. Few define it. The result is a discursive mess.

by<br>Matt Bruenig

July 12, 2026

Class, Income, Education

The American discourse on "class" is a mess. It seems like everybody has their own private meaning of the word and not just at the boundaries of the term, but also regarding many core aspects of it. In debates about how to sort contested individuals into one class or another, the normal mode of engagement is to provide a fuzzy mini-narrative about someone's life and then conclude that something about that narrative makes it obvious what the person's class must be. The best way to predict what someone is going to conclude about what class a contested individual belongs to is to first determine whether they, for unrelated reasons, like or dislike the person. Somewhat bizarrely, when people have favorable inclinations towards someone, they tend to say they are lower class, and when they have unfavorable inclinations, they tend to say they are higher class.

Some of this just reflects the usual bad faith and motivated reasoning that infects any sort of political discourse. But some of it also just reflects the slipperiness of the term. People conflate economic class and social class, but also define each of those sub-concepts differently. Within conventional usage, there are many different indicators of class, which means it is possible, and in fact common, for the same person to have a mix of indicators that point in different directions. For example, someone can have a high education and a low income, a high job and a low education, a low childhood and a high adulthood, or high wealth and a low job.

There are divergent opinions about which of the various indicators should be used in an assessment of class, what weight to give each of them if you decide to use multiple indicators, and whether to use a conjunctive assessment (i.e. all of the indicators have to be low for someone to be low class) or a disjunctive assessment (i.e. only one of the indicators has to be low for someone to be low class).

Socioeconomic Status

Sociology came up with the concept of socioeconomic status (SES) to try to cut through these challenges. Rather than defining class by a single variable, which does not seem to reflect how our current society treats the idea, SES is defined by an index that combines multiple variables together into a single number. SES is not a discourse-friendly approach to the question because it effectively treats class as a spectrum when the discourse really craves discrete buckets. With SES, you could say that someone is at the 20th percentile of the "class" distribution, but not that they are "lower class" or "working class" or "professional class." So, although it kind of solves one of the problems that plagues this discourse, it does so in a way that is simply incompatible with the ways people have become accustomed to talking about the topic.

SES indexes typically combine education, income, and occupation variables together into a single number. When other variables like wealth, family background, or consumption are available, they might get rolled in as well. To get someone's SES index number, you first find the average of each of the indicators and then measure how far above or below an individual is from that average. You then sum or average their score on each of these sub-indicators to get their overall score. From there, you can compare their overall score to the total distribution of overall scores and determine whether they are, say, in the bottom 10 percent of the SES distribution, the top 1 percent, or at the median.

When I first learned about SES in college, I thought it was pretty clever and elegant. The income-education-occupation SES index does a good job of registering that, in our society, people are frequently tripped up by the fact that these things don't always align, which endlessly frustrates class discourse.

Many want to be able to say that someone with a PhD who earns $80,000 per year as a college professor really is in a higher "class" than a high school graduate who earns $100,000 per year as a plumber. In fact, many want to be able to say that even if the PhD becomes a $100,000/year plumber, he is still in a higher "class" than the plumber who only has a high school degree. On the flipside, I think mostly we don't want to say that someone with a college degree who works for low wages in retail or food service is in a higher class than someone without a college degree who is a high-paid corporate executive.

Income-only, education-only, or occupation-only definitions of class would not allow us to generate these preferred conclusions. But an income-education-occupation SES index potentially does as it gives weight to all three of the indicators on the theory that each contributes to one's class, but is not solely determinative of it.

Doing an SES analysis, and then...