Bottom of the class

Since taking the class test the other day, I have been wondering what the point of it all was. I suppose that if I bothered to read the stuff which came with the test I could find out, but it is much more educational to try and work it out for oneself first.

A prior wonder is about what sort of a classification we have here. Some things come in a small number of natural categories, so sex is male, female, other, refused and not known, with other being a very small category indeed, usually omitted. Other things come in numbers, so age is anything from nothing to more than a hundred, with anything in between being allowed, including fractions, and if one were numerological or perhaps whimsical, one might celebrate a person achieving the age of pi or e and light a candle at just the right moment. But statisticians (of which I used to be one) and sociologists (of which I once aspired to be one) like to classify people, so we have to chop the number age into a small number of fairly arbitrary groups: under one, one to under 5, 5 to under 15 and so on. We can then tabulate people by sex and age. But what sort of a classification is class? Is it sex-like or age-like? Do people fall into well-defined, well-separated groups like sex, or is it all rather arbitrary like age, with one group drifting into another, more or less imperceptibly?

No doubt, if I were to read the forthcoming article in 'Sociology' I would get to find out.

But coming back to the point, what it is all for? Is it more than a device for the upper classes to put the lower classes in their place? Is it very polite for the upper classes to spill so much ink explaining why the lower classes are lower? Would it not be better and less divisive to preserve a decent silence, to draw a veil over the whole matter? Not to draw attention to the uncomfortable fact that the upper classes are getting more upper, more different from the lower classes as time goes on, certainly in this country? That some people are very much more equal than others.

I can see that if we were to record class, postcode and email address on our census form and this information was made available to retailers, those retailers could better target their advertisements than would otherwise be the case. We would gain because more of the advertisements arriving in our letter boxes, be those boxes bricks or clicks, would be for things that we might actually be interested in and they would gain because they would sell more stuff.

In the same way, civil servants could target their efforts. Statisticians might have worked out that people in Class VIIa were much more likely than those in other classes to be underweight and to eventually peg out of streptomianasis, costing the health service untold billions. So then the civil servants could target Class VIIa for action. All members of the class to be visited by action teams carrying weighing machines and packets of pasta, the latter for stuffing into the people who fail the former. Or the sociologists might have worked out that Class XXXIIIc was bottom of the class and ought to be eliminated, by fair means rather than foul. Nobody in the New Labour world is allowed to be bottom of the class, so let the civil servants chew on that one.

And journalists could fill up their pages with think pieces on days when news was a bit slow.

I suppose it does all add up to a reasonable case for class analysis. But I do fret about the divisiveness, the existence of top and bottom classes. It would be so much simpler if classes were more like occupations, just different, rather than arranged on a ladder from top to bottom. Which reminds me of the stage hand who comes on the very last page of the very long CODOT classification of occupation (see February 15th 2010) with the code 991.30: I wonder how he (or she) feels about ladders and rankings? Although there is always comfort in that coming last does have some distinction, much more so than coming in a few pages from the end.

PS: having some white bread for once, thought to celebrate with a fried egg sandwich for breakfast this morning. We also had lard and egg, so all systems go. Produced a perfectly decent fried egg sandwich but did not enjoy it as much as I had expected. Seemed to have lost the taste for the things. Noticed the lardy taste from the lard. And we are left wondering what to do with a tablespoon of liquid lard, no longer running the fat bowl of our more lardy years.