I've never understood that notion of social stratification applied to modern socities. What kind of classes are we talking about? Isn't it just a plain linear function of your income?
This is the current human mentality: no lower boundary for sanity. Any nonsense may be considered correct if it has support from stereotypes or prejudices.
To me using income as social scale is insane. It would give a very high position to cartel bosses, and these guys should be on the bottom.
If you'd need a social scale for some l practical reason, I suppose the only workable one is education level. it ids not fair to everyone but I think it is the last horrible.
When we humans see things clustered together in a multidimensional configuration space we often try to draw borders between the clusters and give them names.
To use a computer analogy, we divide laptops into clusters like 'netbook', 'budget laptop', 'desktop replacement', 'ultrabook', 'gaming laptop' and so on - based on their position in the screen size-performance-cost-weight configuration space.
These aren't clear-cut lines, there are border cases and people's opinions vary - but we can still tell an Eee PC from a Alienware from a Macbook Pro!
