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Comment by js8 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand their class definition. Does the article imply that the class divide based on income/wealth is dead and now there is a divide based on profession instead?

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There's a distinction to be made between economic class and social class: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light

There totally is, but not sure how one can get at the latter very well from census data.

The census continually surveys households year after year. The big one of course is the decannual census.

Much fewer households receive the census but they are much more rich in the questions asked.

Social class is very hard to qualify—its by-definition "collectively subjective". The best I can imagine census doin is asking one to self report and report on neighbors. I imagine this would also cause an uproar.

I found the class definition a bit odd. "Creative" seems to be used as a catch all for managerial, professional, and technical workers.

It's basically anyone whose job is non-routine and requires significant amounts of independent decision making.

I'm not even sure what differentiates any of the classes. How is creative not a subset of working and/or service classes? Wouldn't a lot of "creatives" be making less than a lot of working class?

Yeah, the use of "creative" here is odd. A corporate lawyer is a creative worker, whereas an artist or writer working in a coffee shop is probably a service worker.

Not hard to understand what they mean, but creative as a term is diluted here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data set that describes the skills generally used in occupations, was used to identify occupations that involve a high level of "thinking creatively." This skill element is defined as "developing, designing, or creating new applications, ideas, relationships, systems, or products, including artistic contributions.

[0] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/creative-class-county-...

The "Creative Class" is sort of (urban pundit and the article's co-author) Richard Florida's thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class

It tries to make events like gentrification a little more clear by focusing on working-age adult occupations. In particular, regular income/wealth statistics tend to hide trend signals because in-place retirees end up echoing the economics of the past for a long time.

It's an accurate distinction: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-di...

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