Social_Classes

Robert Byrne Student No. 10711437 What is social class and why is it important' Social class is simply derived from the type of society in which we live; it is a necessary addition to the manner in which our society operates. Social class is the division of certain classes within a society due to their economic status, their power within that society and also the popularity of that individual within the society all of which are hugely contributing factors that determine a person’s social class within any given society. I do believe social classes are important devices to motivate employees excelling at work to earn increased income, it also rewards persons in special positions within a society to receive high pay for duties rendered such as doctors or judges. It could be argued that without class our current existence would fall apart, if everyone had as much money as they needed to not work, who would provide all the tertiary industries we have grown accustom to, who would work in all the vital manufacturing factories that contribute to the ease of walking into a shop a purchasing any item of clothing you need in thousands of styles. Who would run the agriculture business ensuring food is available to collect from the isles of the local supermarket, which would struggle to exist itself with no employees willing to work obviously. On the flip side of all this, there are some negative impacts which the classes system creates. Persons with a weaker suitability for top-level positions within certain corporations and most top government positions are more often than not appointed because of their social status, not their ability to assume the duties of the role in the most efficient, economically sensible and ethically responsible manner. I am not going to articulate my views of international societies on this issue but from an Irish perspective I imagine it is safe to assume the majority of the top level positions of certain businesses and government positions are not decided with the efficient, sensible and ethical manner I discussed earlier in mind. I would speculate that other factors such as family pass downs in terms of parliamentary seats, state run or semi state run top positions awarded for length of service and social status, the government positions themselves are a lot more likely to be filled by people with a high social status within a society rather than ability for the role. The class system in which we live can be effective for rewarding people doing vital work such as a doctor but it can also be said to reward people who do mediocre things such as play football, sing songs, or look attractive on magazines with a lot of money, in the majority of cases substantially more than professionals providing vital human service work of a highly skilled nature. An Irish example of persons receiving extraordinary income for mediocre work would be property developers earning spectacularly enormous profits during the Celtic tiger days in exchange for putting up rushed, wafer thin walled, architecturally un-sound apartment buildings (I refer to the case in which an apartment block roof fell off a 2 year old apartment block in Carrickmines Manor in South Dublin in a so called prestigious complex of apartments on November 25th 2009), with third rate fixtures and little perceivable planning structure in terms of apartment design, layout. Not to mention absolutely no thought to improve road infrastructure around large newly built residential estates such as the dozens built in Lucan and for that matter, seemingly no stipulations for such by our government for large-scale developments strangely enough. All the while this simplistic, unimpeded financial racket operated for a decade and a half earning greater and greater profit margins as house prices in the country soared exponentially. I recall reading newspaper reports in around 2006 stating how property prices in Dublin per square foot were higher than that of downtown Manhattan. Something quite very wrong with that report that admittedly never raised much alarms bell in me at the time. What did sound a bell at that time tough was decisions made by several, if not all of the major banking establishments in this country to sell their prestigious head office locations dotted around the capital to move at tremendous expense into rented office buildings still within the capital. One can assume they would be incurring a huge monthly expense for rent when such a cost was not in existence before. It did not make much sense to me at the time. Conveniently and coincidently in retrospect the property bubble had hit its height in 2006 and 2 years later the banks who had each been earning profits of €1 billion annually in recent years aside from the capital injection of the sale of head office premises, actually somehow had no money and bad debts recently estimated to be a minimum of €37 billion. Speaking of the bailout and from what I can ascertain from media reports a special elite of the property developers are receiving state funded bailouts through the Nama scam scheme. They failed in investments intended to earn more super normal profits as they usually did and the market suddenly changed and their investments quickly turned to massive losses in a global financial catastrophe. These select few property developers obviously have a high social status to earn such benefits, most people will never have the ability to earn huge chunks of money for deciding where to buy land or property, outsourcing the work and taking the lions share of the profit and then after years of lavish wealth earned during an extended period of economic growth, the bubble finally burst but the lucky investor is not financially liable for it. For Ireland’s standards, it must be said that the developers being bailed out must be among persons of the highest social status in Ireland. The importance of classes cannot be excused however despite its obvious flaws. Our society operates efficiently in the manner it does because of social class, in economic terms the class system provided the ideal society to divide areas of labour into specialized fields, which we know has been a hugely contributing factor in the speed at which humans have evolved over the last century or two. Not every job is desirable within a society, which is why a free and equal society would be tremendously difficult ideal to achieve as a simple fact of the existence we live in is that some jobs will always be more desirable than others and in a classless society it would be hard to imagine who would get what job. I do feel the system currently operating is quite prehistoric and cruel on humans, as has been the standard with human evolution that I can synopsize from reading history, quite substantial parts of documentation relating to human slavery, invading armies and general cruelty to fellow man. Forward on to our modern day citizen with all our human rights yet army invasions are currently taking place in the world today, starvation on one of our huge continents of the world and humans are still killing each other. History doesn’t look that dissimilar to present day in that respect, save a better standard of living that seems to have lapsed behind the times and must serve as an indictment of our class system and the balance of power within the system that seems to stand forever tilted in favour of the elite minority of past and present societies. Although the bottom line would have to be that this particular class system we live in today is quite unnecessarily harsh on our species, as has always been the case, but now more than at any other period of time, would be the ideal moment to change things. With the abundance of food and resources around the planet to be shared everywhere, for starters, not asking for even distribution because that would not happen in my lifetime I feel, just making the point that starvation in this and age is nothing short of deliberate. I do ask myself why the E.U. lets mountains of fruit and vegetables rot in fields because it is not quite good enough for the European market due to maybe minor dis-colouration and then we have a starving continent below us. Something does not add up and this particular class system has laid the foundation for the painfully slow moving societal change to remove human abuse, starvation, etc. – very easily remedied issues but yet still not solved. As a society it’s as if how we act is ten steps behind how we think. All in all I do believe the class system to be important however but I also think a much higher balance of equality amongst our class structures can be achieved that would not inhibit the progress gained from the system itself.