scholarly journals Self-induced class stratification in competitive societies of agents: Nash stability in the presence of envy

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 200411
Author(s):  
Claudius Gros
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Simulations ◽  
Utility Function ◽  
Mixed Strategy ◽  
Reference Model ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Analytic Treatment ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Basic Reference ◽  
Pure Strategies

Envy, the inclination to compare rewards, can be expected to unfold when inequalities in terms of pay-off differences are generated in competitive societies. It is shown that increasing levels of envy lead inevitably to a self-induced separation into a lower and an upper class. Class stratification is Nash stable and strict, with members of the same class receiving identical rewards. Upper-class agents play exclusively pure strategies, all lower-class agents the same mixed strategy. The fraction of upper-class agents decreases progressively with larger levels of envy, until a single upper-class agent is left. Numerical simulations and a complete analytic treatment of a basic reference model, the shopping trouble model, are presented. The properties of the class-stratified society are universal and only indirectly controllable through the underlying utility function, which implies that class-stratified societies are intrinsically resistant to political control. Implications for human societies are discussed. It is pointed out that the repercussions of envy are amplified when societies become increasingly competitive.

scholarly journals Collective Strategy Condensation: When Envy Splits Societies

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Claudius Gros
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Strategy ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Class Separation ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Basic Reference ◽  
Pure Strategies ◽  
Classical Particles ◽  
Collective Strategy

Human societies are characterized by three constituent features, besides others. (A) Options, as for jobs and societal positions, differ with respect to their associated monetary and non-monetary payoffs. (B) Competition leads to reduced payoffs when individuals compete for the same option as others. (C) People care about how they are doing relatively to others. The latter trait—the propensity to compare one’s own success with that of others—expresses itself as envy. It is shown that the combination of (A)–(C) leads to spontaneous class stratification. Societies of agents split endogenously into two social classes, an upper and a lower class, when envy becomes relevant. A comprehensive analysis of the Nash equilibria characterizing a basic reference game is presented. Class separation is due to the condensation of the strategies of lower-class agents, which play an identical mixed strategy. Upper-class agents do not condense, following individualist pure strategies. The model and results are size-consistent, holding for arbitrary large numbers of agents and options. Analytic results are confirmed by extensive numerical simulations. An analogy to interacting confined classical particles is discussed.

Plural StratiWcation: Colour-Class and Culture

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Colour Class ◽  
Piped Water ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
East Indians

Urbanization in Kingston since independence, as the previous chapter demonstrated, has placed a very heavy burden on the already disadvantaged lower class. This burden is expressed in their dependence on the informal sector of employment, high rates of unemployment, rental of high-density accommodation (or outright squatting), shared access to toilet facilities, and lack of piped-water connections in the tenements—all these problematic characteristics piling up in the downtown areas—quintessentially in West Kingston. There is clearly a stratification of living conditions ranging from affluence in the uptown suburbs via a modicum of comfort in the middle zone around Half Way Tree and Cross Roads to outright deprivation in the downtown neighbourhoods. It was argued in the previous chapter that this stratification of living conditions is underpinned by class-differentiated neighbourhoods; as this chapter will show, these circumstances mesh with—and reinforce—colour-class stratification and cultural pluralism, or what I have called plural stratification (to distinguish it from class stratification alone). After the Second World War, it became the conventional wisdom among Caribbean social scientists (of local birth) to depict Jamaica—and the Windward and Leeward Islands—as colour-class stratifications. This had the advantage of linking these Caribbean stratifications to occupational/class systems in the US and Europe, while pointing to a colonial history of colour differentiation, which shadowed class and reinforced it. So, the upper class was white or pass-as-white, the middle class brown and black, and the lower class black with some brown (Henriques 1953: 42). A number of racially or ethnically distinct groups originally fell outside this colour-class stratification, but had, over time, been accommodated within it: Jews were absorbed into the upper class, as were the Syrian professionals; Chinese, the remaining Syrians, and a few East Indians were middle class; the majority of East Indians were lower class. Two further aspects of colour-class need underlining. There was a tendency for its advocates to regard class as unproblematic and consensual, as in the American tradition of social analysis (Parsons 1952). In short, the whole colour-class system was dependent upon the almost complete acceptance by each group of the superiority of the white, and the inferiority of the black (Henriques 1953).

Class Incorporated: Stratified Patterns of Academic Engagement at a Highly Selective University

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042110138
Author(s):  
Megan Thiele ◽  
Amy Leisenring
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Academic Engagement ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Elite University ◽  
Selective University ◽  
Academic Activities ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Achievement Beliefs

This research examines the influence of social class stratification on students’ self-reported academic engagement. Drawing from 44 interviews with students from the three major class groups at an elite university, we show how social class patterns academic engagement. We analyze academic engagement along the following four domains: strategies for academic achievement, beliefs in personal ability, connections to academics, and the alignments between academic activities and career plans (Wang and Castenada-Sound, 2008). Counterintuitively, compared to both upper class and students from the lower class, middle-class students reported the lowest levels of academic engagement. We discuss possible explanations for these non-linear findings. We conclude by recommending that our traditional conceptions of academic engagement need to take social class into account, and further, that policy makers consider scaffolding for all non-upper class students within elite spaces.

‘Tales of Wonder and Horror’: Coverage of insanity in the Leeds press, 1808-1840

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Evgeniya Kryssova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Body ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Periodical Literature ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
The North ◽  
The Press

<p>The press was at the centre of the reform of the meaning of insanity, during its evolution from an equivocal eighteenth-century concept of melancholia to a medicalised Victorian notion of ‘lunacy’. During the late Georgian era newspapers provided a public forum for the opinion of newly emerging psychiatric practitioners and fostered the fears and concerns about mental illness and its supposed increase. The press was also the main source of news on crime, providing readers with reports on criminal insanity and suicide. In the first half of the nineteenth century, newspaper contents included official legal reports, as well as editorial commentary and excerpts from other publications, and newspaper articles can rarely be traced to one single author. Historians of British insanity avoid consulting periodical literature, choosing to use asylum records and coroners’ reports, as these sources are more straightforward than newspapers. However, Rab Houston’s recent study of the coverage of suicide in the north of Britain shows that the provincial press has been unjustly overlooked and can offer the material for a unique social analysis. Asylum records and coroners’ records do not contain the same detail provided in the press. Newspaper commentary can arguably reveal contemporary attitudes towards insanity and, moreover, sources such as asylum records only deal with the lower-class patients, as the middle- and upper-class insane were usually privately detained.  This thesis examines the press coverage of insanity in Leeds newspapers, and expands on previous research by looking at the way insanity was portrayed in the two most popular publications in the industrial region of Yorkshire: the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury. Chapter one focuses on legal cases that featured a verdict of insanity and explores the language used by the press in the reports of, mainly, violent domestic crime. Chapter two looks at reports of suicide and considers how contemporary views on financial and moral despondency influenced the portrayal of self-murder. Chapter three considers editorial articles that cannot be described as either crime or suicide reports. This chapter uncovers the presence of surprisingly humorous and entertaining articles on insanity found in editorials and the ‘Miscellany’ sections of the newspapers. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the reportage of insanity in the Leeds press was sensational, moralistic and selectively sympathetic; furthermore, such portrayal of insanity was reinforced throughout the body of the paper. Leeds newspapers segregated the insane by adopting a moralising tone and by choosing to use class-specific language towards the insane of different social ranks.</p>

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