is the socio-economic layering of society’s members according to wealth, power, and prestige. 

Social stratification 

is all income, property, investments, and other assets. 

Wealth

is the degree of social honor attached to your position in society. As things go, those with lots of property tend to also have lots of power and social prestige. Those with less property tend to have less power and prestige. 

Prestige

 is the gross national income of a country converted to international dollars using a factor called the purchasing power parity. In other words this lets you understand how much a person could buy in the U.S. with a given amount of money, regardless of the country’s currency. It lets the United Nation and Population Reference Bureau have a common value to compare countries with when they look at international stratification issues. The 2008 estimates include key information from the World Bank. 

GNI PPP 

are nations with comparably higher wealth than most countries of the world including Western Europe, Canada, United States, Japan, and Australia-these are also called now rich countries. 

More developed nations 

are nations located near to or south of the Equator which have less wealth and more of the world’s population of inhabitants including Africa, India, Central and South America, most island nations, and most of Asia (excluding China)-these are also called now poor countries. Africa is the poorest region with the average person earning less than 1/10th of what the average U.S. person earns.

Less developed nations 

 is the official measure of those whose incomes are less than three times what it takes to provide an “adequate” food budget. This definition has been the U.S.’s official poverty definition since the 1930s with only a few adjustments. 

poverty line 

is up to 25% above the poverty line

Near poverty 

is the level of poverty where individuals and families cannot sustain food, shelter, and safety needs. Those below poverty are already in a bind. For example, the average home in Santa Clarita costs much more than the average poor family of ten could afford, and a family that big could not find a comfortable apartment to rent. They might find a mobile home or might even find some government subsidized housing assistance. Not being able to find suitable housing is correlated with many other social challenges for families.

Absolute poverty

are an individual’s access to basic opportunities and resources in the marketplace.

Life chances 

is an economic system that has upward mobility, is achievement-based, and allows social relations between the levels. 

open class system 

is an economic system that is ascribed-based, allows no mobility between levels, and does not allow social relations between the levels. 

closed caste system 

social mobility 

is moving from a higher to a lower class. 

is the mobility between generations (e.g., grandparents to parents to grandchildren to great-grandchildren).  When most people list the occupation their grandparents, parents, and they have and rank them by wealth, power, and prestige. This is a measure of inter-generational mobility at the personal level. 

Inter-generational mobility 

is mobility in social class which is attributable to changes in social structure of a society at the larger social, not personal level. The United States has experienced collective upward social mobility for the entire nation over the last 40 plus years. Figure 9 shows the median household income in 2006 dollars from 1967 to 2006.