Was Wright Wrong? High‐Class Jobs and the Professional Earnings Advantage

Objectives. Wright and Perrone (1977) was an outstanding empirical analysis of social stratification, a major contribution to Marxist analysis of classes in modern capitalism, and an important contribution to popular discourse and academic research on “social class” in the United States. Since 1977, however, debates with “bean counters” in sociology and “epistemological and ontological purists” within Marxism have yielded a multidimensional game‐theoretic exploitation model that falls far short of Wright and Perrone (1977) on standards of social science, Marxism, commonsense, and the potential for inspiring future scholarship. Thus I propose moving away from game theory and toward Tilly's (1998) model of durable inequality, which might accommodate the dialectic of life and work. Methods. An OLS regression analysis of income inequality among white men in the United States illustrates the benefits of this reconceptualization in capturing the interactive effects of occupational titles, educational credentials, and class relations. Results. Specifically, we find that the professional earnings advantage is associated with J.D. and M.D. credentials and small‐scale proprietorship, rather than supervisorial authority or ownership in large‐scale corporate practice. Conclusions. These results suggest that we should reconsider the Wright (1997) conceptualization of Marxist class categories.