Breaking Up the Cash Nexus: The Social Stratification of American Post-War Spending

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Imperfect Information, Market Conflict

Abstract

The purported revolutionary potential of commodification (i.e., the transformation of aspects of social life into goods and services for sale and purchase for money) is at the heart of arguments for and against the contemporary relevance of traditional socio-economic inequalities, the emergence of a uniform consumer culture or inversely of its postmodernist fragmentation. In this paper, these arguments are confronted with empirical evidence on spending practices of American households as they evolve between the early 1960s and the early 2000s. Based on data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and on latent class methods, the analysis reveals a consumption space with a structure that lacks discrete social classes, shows no signs of uniformization or inversely of fragmentation of social organization. The observed stability of spending patterns throughout the second half of the twentieth century points to the resilience of a classic form of social distinction around the unequal access to discretionary spending and homeownership status. The determinants of spending differences are not reducible to differences in financial resources, over and beyond which inequalities in occupational class, educational level and racial origin are found to have a lasting and, importantly, increasing effect on the budget priorities of American households.

Author

• Ivaylo Dimitrov Petev, National School of Statistics and Economic Administration