1. Describe the dimensions of social stratification in the United States: social class, status, and power.
    
2. Identify the factors involved in U.S. economic inequality, including income, wealth, and poverty.
    
3. Identify the types of social mobility in the United States and the forces that help and hinder them.
    
4. Discuss structural/functional, conflict/critical, and inter/actionist theories of social stratification.
    
5. Explain the relationship between consumption and social stratification in the United States.

Summary

Social stratification results in hierarchical differences and inequalities. In the money-based stratification system in the United States, wealth and income are the main determinants of social class. However, as Weber argued, social stratification also involves status and power. Since the 1970s, the United States has experienced increasing income inequality. However, the greatest economic differences in U.S. society are due to differences in wealth. People with great wealth often have high class, status, and power and can usually pass most of those advantages to future generations. Those who have little have a difficult time amassing their own wealth. The middle class in the United States has declined in recent decades, leaving a large “hole” in the stratification system between the lower and the upper classes. In the United States, the measure of absolute poverty is the poverty line, the level of income that people are thought to need in order to survive in our society. Members of minority groups, women, and children are overrepresented among the poor. Many more Americans feel themselves to be poor relative to others, but when we measure their status in absolute terms, they are far better off than the poor in some other parts of the world. While individuals in the United States have generally experienced intergenerational upward mobility, it seems likely that young people in the 21st century will experience more downward mobility. Sociologists are also concerned about structural mobility, or changes in the occupational structure. Structural-functional theories of stratification argue that societies need a system of stratification in order to function properly. Conflict theorists challenge this assumption, particularly the idea that positions at the higher end of the stratification system are always more important. Finally, symbolic interactionists view stratification as a process or set of interactions among people in different positions. Social stratification is related to consumption in a number of ways. Those in the higher classes can afford expensive items that those in the lower classes cannot. Elites use their patterns of consumption to distinguish themselves, sometimes conspicuously, from those beneath them.