Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2007 December 22

= December 22 =

1964 World's Fair


In the 1964 New York World's Fair there was a Time Capsule. It seems like I remember signing a journal, with thousands of other tourists, that was to be put into the capsule. Probably a micro film (or digital) of the books were placed in the capsule. Is there a record anywhere of the people that signed this or copies of those books where perhaps one could look through? Are the original journal entry books someplace like National Archives?--Doug talk 00:15, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * There is (or was) a replica of the time capsule at the George Westinghouse Museum in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania; however that museum's website is down, so there's no easy way to determine if it still exists or if it included a replica of the signatures. A year ago, it was suggested that the museum's contents would be moved to the Heinz History Center. - Nunh-huh 07:05, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer - that now gives me some clues of perhaps whom to contact. Maybe they will know something on this.--Doug talk 15:54, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Bob Considine
I've been trying to sort out whether the Bob Considine who was son of vaudeville impresario John Considine (Seattle) is the same one who wrote Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. John definitely had a son Bob; standard short bios of John's grandsons, actors John and Tim Considine, routinely mention him as their uncle. However, they often refer to him as a "sportscaster". We don't have an article on Bob Considine / Robert Considine, although the author and columnist clearly deserves one.

says the Bob Considine in this family wrote The Babe Ruth Story. [ His IMDB page] give his date and place of birth as "4 November 1906, Washington, District of Columbia, USA". The Find-A-Grave page on the Bob Considine who wrote Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo gives the same DOB. But someone might have been confused: these are not the strongest of sources. Does anyone have something more solid? - Jmabel | Talk 03:53, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Riley, S.G. (1995) Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists lists "Considine, Robert Bernard" (14 Nov. 1906–25 Sept. 1975), born Washington D.C., writer for INS, author or editor of more than 20 books including The Babe Ruth Story (1948) and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1953). His autobiography is: Considine, B. (1967). It's all news to me; a reporter's deposition. New York: Meredith Press. . Sorry, no mention of any family, but i'll keep looking.&mdash;eric 18:18, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, one step in the right direction: we now at least know with some confidence that the Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo guy is the same person as the Babe Ruth Story guy. Interesting that the birth date you have is off by 10 days from IMDB, though. - Jmabel | Talk 06:37, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * IMDB is not an unimpeachable source. It relies, as we do here at Wikipedia, on a large number of different contributors.  They're supposed to check the veracity of everything, but that has as many loopholes as Wikipedia's policy of verifiability, where sometimes uncited facts get tagged as such, sometimes they don't.  --  JackofOz (talk) 00:07, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Jahangir nanak
WHo is this Jahangir nanak in Bangladeshi politics? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.14.118.52 (talk) 04:25, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Are you referring to this Jahangir Nanak? —Preceding unsigned comment added by FisherQueen (talk • contribs) 13:03, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

What is the income range for middle, upper middle and upper classes in America?
Is there a simple chart that records income by class? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.163.233.199 (talk) 14:40, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * These are arbitrary distinctions. The fashion is to pretend that everyone who works is middle class and that everyone who doesn't work is poor (as opposed to rich).  A valid (that is, non-arbitrary) class distinction is that between the bourgeois (who obtain income by means other than wages: dividends, inheritance, etc.) and the proletariat (who obtain income only by wages, or perhaps contract work).  Yet, within the proletariat there are clearly distinctions of class.  These may have little to do with income; education is more important as what separates them socially.  A grad student who makes next to nothing is nevertheless comfortably within the "middle class," whereas a factory worker who makes three times as much money likely is not.  (This is true even if the grad student is studying literature and headed for a low-paying career, so long as it is an intellectual one; but if he winds up waiting tables then he becomes déclassé, de-classed.)  Likewise, extremely well-payed workers (upper management types, CEOs) may socially mingle with the bourgeois; of course, at a certain level of wage income, non-wage income becomes an easy possibility and thus practical reality.  The highest wages go to celebrities; here the simple unipolar measurement of class becomes ridiculous.  Celebrities are not within the same class as CEOs or as old money bourgeois, even if all these classes have more intersection between them than with the lower classes, and celebrities may or may not have any money or income but retain their status.  The analysis of the upper classes can't treat them as one bloc in the same way that is sometimes more feasible with the lower classes.


 * Perhaps the best marker of class within the proletariat, that is of being "middle" rather than "lower" class, is the schools to which one sends one's children: those in the middle class proper (which might be called the "upper middle class" by those who maintain the above-mentioned fashion) send their children to primary schools in which practically all well-behaved students (those who are not extremely stupid) attend universities and the most intelligent and well-behaved attend "good" universities. Within the lower class proper (which is likely to be called the middle class), the primary schools do not guarantee college admission to all of their students, but only to the best of them.  The upper class would, in this system, be those who can afford to send their children to private primary schools which guarantee admission to the "good" universities.  —Jemmytc 15:14, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I am interested to read that there are, apparently, so many fine distinctions in American society. For example, I have never heard the term déclassé used in the sense Jemmy describes, either informally, or formally in any sociological study. The separation between "bourgeois" and "proletariat" also strikes me as, well, arbitrary. As for the highest wages going to celebrities, I rather think that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, using just two examples, are right up there with any celebrity on an annual basis, unless you are defining "celebrity" to mean anyone who is known to make a lot of money. I'd appreciate some references where I might read further about these class divisions. Bielle (talk) 16:51, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't know what Bill Gates' salary is, but I imagine it is much less than a film stars. Of course, he's made a lot of money through capital gains, which are not wages.  AFAIK, Warren Buffet does not receive wages at all; all of his income is through dividends and capital gains.  His wages are zero, which is less than a waitress!  I certainly didn't mean to say (nor did I say!) that celebrities have the highest incomes.  The highest incomes are not wages; I did not mean to say otherwise!   The distinction between bourgeois and proletariat on the basis of their source of income is arbitrary only in the sense that every distinction is arbitrary; I just meant that it is qualitative and concrete, unlike (say) some arbitrary amount of income.  It is also a damned important distinction in sociological analysis!


 * As far as my use of declasse, its literal translation from French is "declassed." The first definition in the American Heritage Dictionary is "1. Lowered in class, rank, or social position."  Its use to refer to someone who was born into a certain class, but has lost his class status, is (despite what you have seen!) quite common (considering that the word is uncommon) and is a simple literal usage of the French.  The usage that refers to behavior unfitting of one's class status is secondary and metaphorical.  In any case, when one refers to people rather than behavior as declasse, it always has the first meaning.  —Jemmytc 01:12, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Social class and income are both extremely hard to measure and make sense of, if it is even possible at all. However, you may be interested in the following articles:
 * Social class in the United States
 * Personal income in the United States
 * Household income in the United States
 * Affluence in the United States

-- zzuuzz (talk) 16:57, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Was Jemmy describing U.S. society? I certainly don't find that explanation to ring true. "...primary schools in which practically all well-behaved students (those who are not extremely stupid) attend universities and the most intelligent and well-behaved attend "good" universities. Within the lower class proper (which is likely to be called the middle class), the primary schools do not guarantee college admission to all of their students, but only to the best of them.' What? Rmhermen (talk) 21:07, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Rmhermen, you were a little more blunt that I was, but my puzzlement remains at the head-scratching stage in respect of almost every one of Jemmy's claims. Bielle (talk) 23:27, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I am indeed describing U.S. society. What kind of question is "what?"?  I will certainly agree that education is as arbitrary a marker as anything else; but if you look at American middle class you will see that I am not alone in assigning it a central importance (which is not to say that there is any sort of consensus either).  Anyway, I emphasize that I only suggested it as a marker, as one indicator which I consider to be the best single indicator, though certainly not the whole story.  It will correlate quite well with many other indicators, obviously.  I think it is certainly far better than any dividing line based on quantity of income; does anyone disagree with that?


 * Your previous objection, Bielle, was simply based on your failure to understand that by "wages" I meant "wages" and not "capital gains." Perhaps I am being misunderstood in other respects as well.  —Jemmytc 01:27, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Oddly enough, I did assume that by "wages" you meant "wages", Jemmy. 'Tis true that wages are not capital gains, though they may include stock options, bonuses and commissions. 'Tis also true that, for the purposes of classifying people according to income range, as requested by the questionner, the difference is likely only of interest to Infernal Revenue. Distinguishing between the "bourgeois" and the "proletariat" based on the source of their incomes ignores a lot of crossover: the retired, and those with family money who also hold down jobs. Many of the people whose income is solely from inheritances, dividends and the like are the retired, especially the retired who have created their own "pension funds" through investment. Does this make them bourgeois? Do those who have inheritances, dividends and capital gains, but who also work at salaried jobs (like Queen Elizabeth, for example, though she is not an American, or many of the Kennedys) become a member of the proletariat by virtue of their wage? I wouldn't disagree that education, both the "where" as well as the "what", may be a class indicator, but I do not know of any primary school that "guarantees" admission to university or of any sociological study that equates good behaviour in primary school with admission to university.  As for the class to which a graduate student belongs, my own observation would be that the student takes the class of his parents to school with him and, as post-graduate studies are expensive, most of such students will be at least middle class. Any such student who relies on scholarships and hasn't the money for the right clothes or the time to hang out in the right places will not be viewed as middle class, almost no matter what he studies. I would reiterate, these are my own observations; this is not a field in which I have expertise. I would be pleased to take a look at the studies on which you have based your conclusions. (Because we are wandering rather far afield from the original question, it might be more appropriate if you share your sources on my talk page.) Bielle (talk) 03:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, given that you used Warren Buffet as an example of someone receiving higher wages than a celebrity, it's clear that you either misunderstood "wages" or one of us is wrong about the source of Buffet's income. Regarding your question about the proletariat: I said, not that the proletariat is not anyone who receives a wage, but anyone who depends on a wage.  Retirees are indeed bourgeois, technically speaking.  You are not the first to point out that this distinction does not correspond to actual social groupings in every case; in fact, even I pointed it out, right before you did!  Your response to what I said about schools is malicious interpretation.  Obviously no schools guarantee admission to a university in the sense of, say, a contractual guarantee; that is so obviously false that you should interpret it not to mean that, if you really want to understand what I'm saying.  "Primary schools which guarantee admission to a "good" college" denotes prep schools where most students go on to highly selective schools and practically 100% go on to selective schools.  Likewise, decent private schools and public schools in sufficiently expensive districts send roughly 100% of students (exempting "bad students" and low IQ cases) to some college and regularly send some percentage to selective colleges.  By "good behavior" I just mean that the student does the necessary work and stays out of "trouble"--that the student is a "good student"; do you really need a sociological study to tell you that bad students don't end up in good universities even if they attend a decent high school?  Do I really need to explain my meaning of everything in such tedious detail?  All that I have said here is either obvious, or definitional.  You may think my definitions of class are no good, but they're at least quite plausible.  Parents who cannot send their children to schools that guarantee a certain outcome (in the sense that pressing down on the gas pedal guarantees the motion of the car) are not securely within a class; that is why the line is so well-drawn there. —Jemmytc 21:57, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Coming at this from another angle: "upper", "lower" and "middle" are only one way of coming at things, and income is only one determinant of class. I have some friends who we jokingly refer to as "lowest middle class" because they are economically poor (some would technically be considered homeless), but definitely have educations and middle-class values, and (as long as their health is OK) could certainly at any time decide to re-enter the more mainstream economy and would be firmly in the economic middle class within a year.

Also, the amount of money you need to lead a particular lifestyle varies wildly between a city like NYC (where even a shabby studio apartment typically goes for well over $1000/month) and Detroit (where that same amount of money will rent you a house quite sufficient for a large family) or a rural area (where that's a more than adequate mortgage payment).

That said, for a typical middling American city, I would say a person living alone needs to be able to spend about $20K a year in cash or equivalent (e.g. artificially low rent, informal barter, etc.) to have the choice of managing their money carefully and leading what I would consider a lower middle class life. More income needed if they are older or have health issues. Probably another $10K for additional people in a household. Again, this is very rough, but anyone below that level, I'd consider basically poor. Anywhere from that up to about $100K a year (plus, say $30K each for additional household members, and again I'm talking expenditures, wherever the money or equivalents is coming from), someone is probably living a basically middle-class existence, but one with more and more perks: eating out when you want to, owning your home, owning a car, giving to charity, buying nice electronic stuff, increasingly expensive hobbies, increasing ability to pay someone else to do tasks you find unpleasant, the chance to travel, etc. At the top end of that range, poor people would consider you rich, but even at the top end of that range, there would still be a lot of things you could only do if you budgeted carefully. Somewhere around that $100K money starts to translate into power not only on a personal level but at a societal level, if you choose to spend it that way (simply not an option below that level).

Or at least that's how it looks to me. Naturally, though, tastes enter the picture. If you like to keep six cats as pets and three of them are diabetic animals that need a lot of health care, they can be as expensive as raising a child. If your idea of a good time is sitting at home reading a book, then you may effectively live a much higher-class existence on a given amount of money than someone whose idea of a good time involves several rounds of drinks in a nice bar. - Jmabel | Talk 07:05, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I see there has been a lot of discussion of this topic, and yet there really is not a simple breakdown of the different levels of income in U.S. society, so I thought I'd provide that as succinctly as possible. Sociologists generally measure U.S. income to be broken down into five different divisions, called Quintiles (which if you follow that link does provide some brief graphs of income range). However, there are some Sociologists who feel that the breakdown into five divisions does not properly reflect American society's cultural perceptions of class, and so they favor a breakdown that combines the three middle quintiles to create three separate divisions instead of five, so that it looks like this instead:

20% of population with highest income

60% of population with medium income (combines the middle three categories, each with 20%)

20% of population with lowest income

So one may choose either way to represent these figures: either 5 divisions or 3, depending on your intended audience and what you're trying to illustrate with your thesis. -- Saukkomies 08:27, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Looking for source of quote.
I'm looking for a source of this quote, purportedly by H.L. Mencken, "Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans." I probably read it somewhere in one of those quasi-reliable trivia books like the Bathroom Reader and it shows up on some quote pages on the internet (though not Wikiquote). Besides confirmation that it's something he did say (so I can add it to the WQ page), I'd just like to know what work it came from so I can read the rest of the piece. Matt Deres (talk) 14:56, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Mencken, H. L. (1926). Notes on Democracy. New York: Knopf. p. 192. &mdash;eric 17:49, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Cool. Thank you very much! Matt Deres (talk) 02:25, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships
What are some examples (businesses) in the United States that are sole proprietorships or partnerships? 76.247.73.237 (talk) 16:47, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I found 5 partnerships in my yellow book: "the anonymous lobster-catching business that I found in a news article", "potbelly's", "partners in pediatrics, LTD", "Martin Painting & Coating Co.", "Digger & Finch Pub".76.247.73.237 (talk) 17:57, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Law firms, medical practices, architectural practices are all examples of the types of businesses that tend to be partnerships. Sole proprietorships are often the self employed, where the business's principal asset is the activity of the sole proprietor. Seamtress, a writer, a computer consultant (or another other kind of self-employed consultant) are examples. Bielle (talk) 19:45, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * In respect of the partnerships you found in your "yellow book", it is unlikely that "Partners in Pediatrics LTD" is a partnership, in spite of the use of "partners" in its name. "LTD" normally stand for "Limited" which refers to a company whose owners have limited liability, and that is definitely not part of a definition of a partnership. The same proviso applies to the business entitled "Martin Painting and Coating Co." where "Co." is short for "company" and a company is not a partnership, either, so far as I know. The lobster business might well be a partnership, but I'd be surprised if the pub were one.  I have no idea about the business named "Potbelly's". Bielle (talk) 20:33, 22 December 2007 (UTC)