Carl Beijer

Carl Beijer

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Carl Beijer
Is education really a good proxy for class?
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Is education really a good proxy for class?

The problem with looking at degrees.

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Carl Beijer
Jan 12, 2025
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How are Marxists supposed to conduct rigorous class analysis when most data sources aren’t broken down by class? This is a problem that’s vexed been vexing us since Marx itself, but in the age of data journalism — which expects political polemic and persuasion to be quantitative — it’s become particularly acute. No one at Gallup or the Census cares to distinguish respondents who control the means of production from those who have to sell their labor to survive, so ordinarily Marxist scholarship has to deduce these categories from indirect indicators.

As a rule, there are two strategies for solving this problem. The first is to just use wealth or income as a proxy for class. This has always been my preferred approach because the connection is logical: if someone is wealthy enough, we can be certain that they don’t need to work. And if someone is pulling in enough income this makes them wealthy, which is why the two are strongly correlated.

The main disadvantage to this approach is that many data sources — especially polls — do not track income or wealth, either. And for this reason, some Marxists prefer to rely on education.

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