Search

American sociology is distinguished from British and continental European sociology by, among other things, a lack of interest in identifying and measuring social class, as distinct from social status. Indices of occupational prestige ratings have served as indices of social status. This article explicates the most popular American scale of occupational prestige ratings, and concludes that this index is not a plausible index either of the relative prestige of occupations or of social status, and furthermore, that such an index in principle is not obtainable. The errors of proponents of the scale lie in an idealistic theory of the social order and repetition of the classic mistake once committed, but now long avoided, by economists: aggregation of subjective evaluations. A well-known characteristic feature of American sociology, in contrast to British and continental European sociology, has been the absence of serious attempts to establish numerical indices of social class. Yet there have been a number of attempts to establish indices of what is variously known as social status or socio-economic status, mainly by means of polled verbal evaluations of occupations.

The article discusses the national product and structural change in the French economy. During the last two decades national income and social accounting has emerged as a meaningful tool of economic analysis and an instrumentality for the formulation of public policy. After World War II nearly all of the nations of western Europe resorted to social accounting to some extent, a development which resulted in a wealth of empirical data, and provided, as well, valuable theoretical insights into the basic problems of national income analysis. This is true of France. In conjunction with the endeavor to rehabilitate the economy through the modernization and equipment plan (i.e. the "Monnet Plan"), a vigorous effort was made to develop an adequate system of national accounts. Now, the stress placed upon national accounting is such that the annual "economic budget" is one of the key instruments for economic planning, and ranks in importance with the fiscal budget among the documents a government presents to the National Assembly.