Certainly income is different from class, but it serves as a pretty
decent proxy. A basketball star like Shaq is no ordinary laborer; teams
would happily enter a bidding war for his services. I suppose you could
call it human capital, but I never liked that phrase. But as they say in
the legal trade, hard cases make bad law; 7-figure athletes are not of
fruitful theoretical interest.
Still, income serves as a pretty good proxy for class position. Don't
incomes above a certain level represent a return to capital (see Eisner,
Michael)? And don't gradations of income within the working class
represent a social judgment on the kind of lifestyle appropriate to the
reproduction of that subclass of laborer?
Doug
Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Left Business Observer
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