The Ranking Machine
Every society sorts its members into layers with unequal access to money, power, and prestige. Stratification is that layering as a system — a property of the society, not of the individuals stacked in it.
Systems differ in how sealed the layers are. Caste systems fix position at birth (closed); class systems allow movement (open, in principle). Modern economies are class systems with sticky floors and ceilings.
What exactly gets ranked? Marx answered with one axis: relation to the means of production — owners versus workers. Weber split rank into three currencies that need not travel together:
- Class — market position: what your assets and skills fetch.
- Status — social honor: prestige, lifestyle, respectability.
- Party — power: capacity to impose your will through organization.
A crypto millionaire (high class, contested status), a broke aristocrat (the reverse), and a union secretary (party without class) are all Weberian case studies.
Measuring the layers: sociologists use socioeconomic status (SES) — a composite of income, education, and occupational prestige. The Lorenz curve draws the whole distribution at once: population share on one axis, cumulated income share on the other; the deeper it sags below the 45° line of perfect equality, the more unequal the society. The Gini coefficient compresses that sag into a single number from 0 (everyone equal) to 1 (one person has everything).
Mobility is movement between layers: intergenerational (versus your parents), intragenerational (within your career), structural (the whole economy's shape shifted — farmhands' children became office workers because offices multiplied). The business relevance is immediate: stratification shapes who buys what, who applies to work for you, and which markets even exist.
Weber's three currencies
| Currency | What it is | Business face |
|---|---|---|
| Class | Market position — what assets and skills fetch | Salary, equity |
| Status | Social honor and lifestyle | Title, corner office, alma mater |
| Party | Organized power | Board seat, union, network |
Common pitfall: Collapsing all three into income. A judge outranks a crypto trader in status while earning less; a union leader holds party without class. The currencies travel separately — that is Weber's whole point against Marx's single axis.
Reading the Ladder: Mobility Tables and Odds
How open is a society really? Not a matter of opinion — there is an instrument: the mobility table. Rows are parents' class; columns are children's class; each cell counts who went from where to where. The whole debate about meritocracy lives inside that grid.
Reading the diagonal. Cells on the diagonal are immobility — children landing in their parents' class. Off-diagonal cells are movement: above it, upward; below it, downward. A perfectly fluid society would fill the table as if parent and child class were independent — each column looking the same regardless of row.
The trap of absolute numbers. In the twentieth century, most children did end up above their parents. Proof of open societies? Mostly not: the occupational structure itself moved — farms shrank, offices exploded. That is structural (absolute) mobility: the tide lifted everyone. The honest question subtracts the tide: given the new structure, do class origins still predict destinations? That residue is relative mobility, or social fluidity.
Odds ratios are the sociologist's microscope. Take two children, one born top, one born bottom. Compare their odds of reaching the top versus staying at the bottom:
If the odds ratio is 1, origins don't matter — pure fluidity. Real economies run odds ratios well above 1: being born at the top multiplies the chances of staying there several-fold, even in societies whose absolute mobility looks heroic. Odds ratios also have a useful property: they are immune to the tide, so they compare societies (or decades) whose occupational structures differ wildly.
The Great Gatsby curve closes the loop with the last lesson's tools: countries with higher Gini coefficients show lower intergenerational mobility — inequality and stickiness travel together. Where the rungs are far apart, the ladder is harder to climb.
For business readers: mobility tables are market intelligence. A rigid society reproduces its consumer segments and its talent pools generation after generation; a fluid one keeps reshuffling them. Hiring 'from the best schools' in a low-fluidity country is not selecting talent — it is photocopying the parental generation's class structure into your payroll.
Tip: Always split mobility into its two parts: absolute (how many moved — often driven by the occupational structure growing white-collar jobs) and relative (whose chances improved — the odds ratios). Societies celebrate the first; meritocracy claims require the second.
Common pitfall: Reading a full diagonal as proof of unfairness. Some immobility reflects inherited advantages, some reflects transmitted skills and preferences. The table shows the pattern; explaining it needs more than the table.