Transcript for:
Understanding Social Stratification and Meritocracy

so we're continuing on in this lecture looking at the remaining traits of stratification but talking about this idea of meritocracy and wanting to trouble it a little bit about who we pull out as our examples that America is a demur mayor mayor Craddock society but then also there's plenty of examples that people that have right are incredibly wealthy but perhaps we don't associate with being particularly intelligent or talented in a in a way and so the Kardashians are always a favorite and this is a calculator you can look at so the average salary for a doctor in the United States is 189 thousand dollars a year so this will tell us how long it takes Kim Kardashian to earn that so it takes her one day in nine hours to earn the average salary of a doctor and let's see average salary for a teacher and then North Carolina is creepy frowns and then it takes Kim eight hours to make that so we have examples in which meritocracy right at the top isn't completely there and the same at the bottom right not all people that are poor right or lazy are unintelligent uneducated right this is just another example of where it's not always just about talent working hard so this is looking at state championships and breaking it down by school and we can see in the schools that are attracting right the richest so they're coming from the most affluent neighborhoods I this they're in the richest 25 percentile and they take home the majority forty percent not the majority but most of the state championships are coming from them and not as much as those schools and in poor neighborhoods and so it's not just simply a matter of well the kids that are being born in the richer neighbourhoods are just better athletes but there's a lot of things that money is influencing in there that booster club so parents coming in and doing fundraisers and donating money to create in Booster Club so that there's a lot more money to be bought for equipment coaches right can supplement coaches salaries travel teams which gives you better competition so this is an idea it's not just simply write a matter of individual Talent so the third believe stratification carries over from generation to generation that whens in place there's a lot of things that are happening here that creeks is kind of inertia so looking at this we're looking at the children that are born right so those are born in the poorest 20 percentile which is red where they end up right so of the children born in the poorest 20 percentile 43 percent of them stay in the poorest 20 percent and some do a little bit upward social mobility and get to that second quintile but most of them would see 68 percent kind of stay near the bottom as opposed to those born in the top forty percent of the kids that are born in the top right stay in the top 40 percent stay in that richest quintile some do a little bit of downward social mobility but not far so we're looking at about 64 percent so two-thirds of the kids that are born in the poorest quintile right stay near the bottom I and about two-thirds of those that are born in the richest quintile right staying near at the top so and very we do have the racks or it's a story but they're they're few and far between so this is just saying that there's something right that most of us are kind of kind of stay around the social class that we were born into and we have an example from the education chapter of what's happening here with write the school way schools are funded and then what those extra funding can purchase in terms of a better quality of experience and in the last is social stratification is a trait of society not simply a reflection of individual differences so when we see differences among groups like health disparity or education differences in education attainment right we as sociologist are not going to say well that simply result of there's a lot of the difference it's a trait of society and again going back to the education chapter we've already talked about this in another way when we see differences among the groups in SAT performance we're not going to say it's a reflection of individual differences that the kids at the bottom are not as intelligent or not as motivated as the kids at the top we're going to say it's a trait of the fact that we stratify right rank these groups by income as one factor and then right there's that part of that ranking is the inequality and unequal distribution of resources that's going to affect the funding of schools right and neighborhood schools in blah blah blah and the bias and standardized testing and the right so we've already talked a lot about that but this graph the SAT graph is an example of this trait and if you're still listening this is going to be a question on the exam and a lot of students miss it by looking at this graph and asking you which trait of society it reflects so your answer should be number four social stratification is a trait of society not simply a reflection of individual difference alright so now that we kind of know the basics of stratification in general then over the next three modules we'll look at how we stratify on social class race and gender