On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Doug Henwood quoted Larry Bartels talking about David Brooks:
>> In support of this assertion Brooks notes that "George W. Bush won the
>> white working class by 23 percentage points in this past [2004]
>> election." The 23-point margin refers to white voters without college
>> degrees - precisely the definition of the white working class now
>> proposed by Frank.
A definition that includes Bill Gates, no?
As Stonecash points out, if you hierarchize the population by education, as Teixeira did and Frank is now doing, you aren't talking about class -- you're talking about status.
And once you make that change, the whole mystery Frank was purporting to explain vanishes. Frank was trying to explain why people vote against their economic interests. Bartels has shown that isn't true. Defined in distributional income terms, classes do vote relatively more for the party that better represents their economic interests. And Franks and Teixeira, by dividing the country up into opposed status groups, has shown they vote their status interest too. The less educated group -- not to be confused with the lower income group, with whom it very imperfectly correlates -- has more conservative social mores, and votes relatively more for the party that represents them.
So the people are voting both their economic and their status interests "correctly" at the same time. I think both these things could only be true if the median Democrat was relatively poorer than the median Republican and at the same time relatively more educated. Is that true?
[To be precise, that would be the median white Democrat and Republican -- all these analyses are only of whites.]
If it was, then everything would fit perfectly. Everyone would be voting rationally (as statistically collective masses, if not as individuals). And the Franks puzzle would not only be solved, but would contribute to confirming the oldest assertion in the mainstream sociological book: that status varies independently of class, and can't be reduced to it.
Michael