Subjective social class has a bad name, but predicts life chances well

Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective class. The recurrent mismatch between subjective and objective class has led to the common wisdom that self-reported class is a poor measure of people’s life chances. This article questions this common wisdom. Based on ISSP 2009 and 2019, it shows for 55 country surveys that a pre-coded question on subjective class accounts for more variance in life chances – income and wealth – than various measures of objective class. Subjective class predicts individual income equally well as does objective class, but is a much better predictor of household income and wealth. It takes the two measures of respondents’ and partners’ objective class to match the variance explained in household income by a single measure of subjective class. In contexts of limited survey space and interview time, subjective class is an excellent indicator of people’s material situation.