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The Registrar General's Decennial Supplement shows that the difference between the death rates for the different social classes has increased over the period from the early 1930s to the 1960s. The Registrar General allocates social class on the basis of the last full-time occupation of the male, Married women are classified by their husband's occupation. The death rates are generally given as crude death rates, the number of deaths per 1,000 or per 100,000 population as appropriate; or as Standardized Mortality Ratios (SMRs), which correct for differences in age structure. The Standardized Mortality Ratio is the actual number of deaths as a percentage of the number expected. Overall the SMR has decreased since 1930. However when the SMRs are considered by social class, the inequality of this improvement shows up. The overall SMRs for coronary heart disease, for lung cancer and for motor vehicle accidents increased from 1951 to 1961, whereas the overall SMR for all causes of death decreased.

The article seeks to demonstrate that there are certain fundamental flaws in the way the multidimensional approach to stratification is developed in recent years. Authors of the essay discuss the rank model on its own terms. Successive problems are raised and discussed and they then attempt to show that these damaging internal problems stem from the basic stance taken by rank theorists. The dimension of income is frequently taken as unproblematic as it fits the requirement of having a ratio scale. However, it is likely that individuals do not see income in terms of a ratio scale, but rather they create equivalence classes with respect to income. Having established that the study of rank dimensions themselves should involve study of how they enter into an individual's consciousness it would appear to follow that the same should apply to the study of status inconsistency. But it is seldom made clear whether the relationship between status inconsistency and some behavior is independent of the individual's perception of that inconsistency.

The article focuses on the fact that the working class affluence is changing the social class structure in Great Britain. It has been argued that prosperous manual--wage workers are losing their identity as a social stratum and are becoming merged into the middle class. The sociological implications of this argument would appear to be as follows: that these workers and their families are acquiring a standard of living which puts them on a level with the lower strata within the middle class; that these workers are acquiring new social perspectives and new norms of behavior which are more characteristic of middle class than of working class groups; that being essentially similar to many middle class persons in their economic position and their normative orientation, these manual workers are being accepted by the former on terms of social equality in both formal and informal social interaction. The link between `affluence' and `vote' is mediated by the social situation in which the affluent worker finds himself. The worker's present political allegiance may readily be switched if his failure to realize these expectations is associated with existing governmental policy.