How much do you think the head of a multi-million dollar corporation should earn per year? $1 million? $5 million? $20 million? How about $70,000? While that may be a far cry from your vision of a corporate salary, that is exactly what Dan Price, the owner of Gravity Payments, decided to pay himself starting in 2015. In fact, not only did he decide to reduce his salary from its previous high of $1.1 million, but he also decided that $70,000 should be the base salary for all of his 120 employees. Price decided to make this change after becoming aware of the financial struggles of his workers and the income difference in his workplace. Let’s consider some of the concepts around economic and social stratification, a system in which categories of people are ranked in a hierarchy.
We often think of stratification in terms of class, a type of open stratified system that allows social mobility. In sociology, we take a broader view of this concept. For sociologists, stratification also encompasses slavery, a type of closed stratified system in which slaves and owners exist, and estates, a type of closed stratified system in which wealthy landowners and peasants exist. Open systems encourage and allow for social mobility. On the other hand, closed systems do not allow for social mobility. Social mobility refers to an individual’s or group’s movement up or down the system of stratification in society.
Regardless of the specific terms, in Western society, our initial response to stratification is generally around the question of who has money and who doesn’t. If we consider how many people don’t have money, we are looking at the poverty rate, the percentage of people who are considered poor, in a society. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate in the United States is 11.8 percent. In real numbers, that means 38 million Americans live in poverty. Keep in mind that poverty isn’t simply the result of people being irresponsible with their money. Many factors contribute to the poverty rate, including the wealth gap — the uneven distribution of financial assets and resources in a society that results from the concentration of money in the hands of a small segment of the population. What does it mean to have wealth or a high total of personal assets, including property, investments, and income? This TikTok video helps us better understand the extremes of wealth. When watching the video, keep in mind that the minimum net worth of the top 1 percent of Americans is over $10 million, and 70 percent of American households have a net worth of less than $100,000. Anyone who earns more than $34 thousand a year is in the top one percent of earners for the planet. To put this in perspective, the typical adult in India has a net worth of $7,000, and the typical adult in Africa has a net worth of just over $4,000. Social stratification exists around the world and impacts our lives in a variety of ways.
Thompson is a co-owner of UITAC Publishing. UITAC’s mission is to provide high-quality, affordable, and socially responsible online course materials.
