>The book came across to me as an expression of sanctimonious
>schmuckery with a veneer of pseudo-objective social science.
Emphasis on the pseudo. His sample isn't representative of anything in the statistical sense, other than being a reflection of Wolfe's sense of what suburban middle America is like. Quoting myself:
>Technically, Wolfe's Middle Class Morality Project is a joke. His
>200 respondents are meant to stand for about 50 million suburban
>households; his 24 black respondents get to speak for the entire
>"black middle class." He scores the interviews impressionistically;
>there's no way to control for, or even second-guess, his bias in
>drafting the questions or inventing the categories. But even if his
>picture of "middle-class" suburbia were accurate, it's a stretch to
>call that representative of the way a mythic unitary "America"
>thinks. Suburbanites are less than half the U.S. population, and
>affluent suburbanites of Wolfe's sort are still less. Just 1.5% of
>his sample has an income under $15,000, compared with almost 10% of
>the U.S. population; people with incomes between $15,000 and $50,000
>are greatly underrepresented, and those with incomes over $50,000,
>well under half the population, are two-thirds of his sample. Over
>three-quarters are married, compared with just over half of U.S.
>adults, and just 1% appear to be gay.
Doug