I guess, for me, there are a lot of confounding issues that play into class identification re: education. When I ask my students (I teach at an open-enrollment, public state university campus where the average age of undergraduates is 26), they almost without exception identify an education as one leg up on the ladder to success. At the same time, most would call themselves middle class of one stratum or another. If pressed, I'm sure some would identify the very act of going to college as a middle-class (read: "bourgeois") pursuit, but I imagine there would be ambivalence: aren't I already middle class?

I think a general culture of anti-intellectualism and a history of it among the working classes in particular plays a role here, but I haven't thought it through enough to say anything definitive. I do find it interesting that so many in the business world--entrepreneurs, if you like--(adherents of neoclassical economics, if only in a practical way) would probably by any objective measure have a lot of working-class values: thrift, hard work, a distrust of the motives of fifth-column lefties, but would never identify themselves as working class.

What I may be pointing at is that I think notions of class cut across strata of economic wherewithal; that is, there's a disconnect from the strict spectral notion I think most have: that if you earn a working class wage in a working class job, you have working class values and identify yourself as working class. It is partially about alterity, but I think a lot of it's about wish fulfillment, or some inchoate notion that if I act middle class, I will be.

Long aside: I've generally encountered Smith, Ricardo, and Marx referred to as classical economists. The two (possibly wrong) things I know about this are:

they all had labor theories of value--differing labor theories of labor, but still labor theories of labor;

they all were concerned with the relation between price and value.

 The one (possibly wrong) thing I know about neoclassical economics is:

• it drops both value and the labor theories of value in favor of market price theories.

Maybe that just adds to the confusion, or you already know its wrong, in which case I apologize, but I hope its correct and possibly helpful--although how it might be so I couldn't say. Argh. Sorry. End of long aside.

Could Mr. Montrachet drink PBR? Sure. Could Mr. PBR buy the expensive stuff? Probably, if it were important to him. Maybe beer consumption as a class marker is anomalous, I'm not sure. But whether they can afford one v. the other is not the point here, obviously. Neither man can envision himself buying the other's beer. Perhaps it's a privilege of wealth to be able to make choices based on taste, since affordability isn't (supposed to be) an issue. Maybe it's a way of reifying class identity. Maybe it's just preference. (I think a good French Bordeaux tastes like nail polish remover, so I'll continue to buy stuff in the $8-15 range.)

So a college education--is it essentially a really expensive beer (a consumable good)? If so, Mr. Montrachet buys the Yale because, of course, how could he do otherwise. Mr. PBR can't even envision himself buying the Yale, because Eastern Molehill College is affordable, and (we can say, if he cannot) appropriate to his conception of class. To Mr. M, it's a matter of class identity (or perhaps taste, if he's choosing between Yale, Princeton, and Harvard). To Mr. PBR, it's not. It's what's affordable. No, I have no clue where I'm going with this. It just seemed an interesting parallel.

[utility curves] were governed by what was called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. According to this "law," the marginal utility (the utility of the last amount consumed) decreases with additional comsumption. (Alfred Marshall illustrated this with the charming example of a small boy eating berries.) Arthur Cecil Pigou's enormously influential Economics of Welfare, published in 1920, derived a simple argument for at least some redistribution of wealth from these "neo-classical" premises. If the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is right, then the marginal utility of money should also diminish. And even if these marginal utilities vary considerably from person to person, it is still plausible that the marginal utility of, say, a thousand dollars to someone at the point of going hungry or becoming a homeless beggar is much greater than the marginal utility of a thousand dollars to, say, Bill Gates. Conclusion: the total utility (often identified with "the total happiness" by utilitarian writers) of the population as a whole would be increased by taking a thousand dollars away from Bill Gates in taxes and giving a thousand dollars to the destitute person; more generally, other things being equal, income redistribution promotes welfare. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy,, p. 53. Emphasis in the original

Manufacture can also arise in exactly the opposite way. One capitalist simutaneously employs in one workshop a number of craftsmen who all do the same work, or the same kind of work, such as making paper, type or needles. This is co-operation in its simplest form. Each of these craftsmen (with the help, perhaps, of one or two apprentices) makes the entire commodity, and he consequently performs in succession all the operations necessary to produce it. Capital, Ch 14, The Division of Labour and Manufacture, Sec 1, The Dual Origin of Manufacture, p. 456 (my copy, at least) emphasis added

By the way, I don't know what foo-fah means, but it seemed appropriate.

"H"

Vitia outlines several theories of class, acknowledges the paradoxes, (noble n'ere-do-wells and rich boors) and then asks, So I might ask the Tutor-as-Moralist: what are ...

1. No rule can be given for preferring or avoiding the Latin form. Some words invariably use it; nobody says specieses, thesises, or basises, [Alas for the last! --Curtiss] instead of the Latin species, theses, and bases (bâ´-sêz). Others nearly always have the Latin form, but occasionally the English; bacilluses, lacunas, and genuses, are used at least by anti-Latin fanatics instead of bacilli, lacunae, and genera. More often the Latin and English forms are on fairly equal terms, context or individual taste deciding for one or the other; formulas, indexes, narcissuses, miasmas, numbuses, and vortexes, are fitter for popular writing, while scientific treatises tend to formulae, indices, miasmata, narcissi, nimbi, and vortices. Sometimes the two forms are utilized for real differentiation, as when genii means spirits, and geniuses men. All that can safely be said is that there is a tendency to abandon the Latin plurals, and that, when one is really in doubt which to use, the English form should be given the preference.

"H"

"H"

In my own defense, I tend to read your latest post at either 0650 or 0030. I've learned I shouldn't try to post coherent comments when tired and consequently stupid.