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Since 1980, real wages have stagnated, while property prices have grown dramatically & equity prices even more. This means: if you became an asset holder before 2000, esp. if you owned stock, times have been good. But now a whole generation has been locked out of wealth building.
In this environment, class can no longer realistically be identified as a simple function of wages from labor or professional status, and must instead be re-thought in terms of asset ownership and intergenerational transfers.
Given the importance of access to credit in this asset-ownership driven economy, there's been some discussion of the asymmetric power of creditors and debtors, but this too only captures part of the dynamic.
But the asset economy is not identical with the credit-debt economy, and doesn't directly address the dynamics and significance of sustained and institutionally organized asset price inflation, particularly in the housing market.
The consequence is an overly bifurcated model of class that obscures the stratifying effects of asset ownership (particularly housing) in terms of the distribution of life chances. Put simply: asset price inflation in itself has calcified the class structure.
The bottom line, as @AdkinsProf @konings_martijn
& Melinda Cooper suggest, is a scheme of class-stratification-in-an-age-of-asset-price-inflation that looks something more like this journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
& Melinda Cooper suggest, is a scheme of class-stratification-in-an-age-of-asset-price-inflation that looks something more like this journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
