Word: stratum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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However, when the top layer of the middle classes -- professionals, senior managers, proprietors whose businesses have not been damaged by the current hard times -- is skimmed off, a certain unity appears. That top stratum is relatively small. But even some members of that favored group share a strong bond of attitude with those a step or two down: they share a feeling of loss. A recent TIME/CNN survey showed that 88% think it is more difficult, compared with a few years ago, "for the average middle-class American to make ends meet...
...became popular in the late 1970s, "instant millionaires" were the isolated stuff of media sensation. Now Porchia, Ryan and Palermo are part of something else entirely: an expanding niche of American society filled with overnight plutocrats. As lottomania has swept the nation, one result is an entirely new social stratum of millionaires, over 3,000 in all, and more are added each month. With some prizes soaring past nine digits (the largest: $118 million in California last April), a few recipients even approach being superrich. But America's pot-of-gold winners are to a surprising degree the opposite...
Just 10 years ago, teenage gambling did not register even a blip on the ! roster of social ills. Today gambling counselors say an average of 7% of their case loads involve teenagers. New studies indicate that teenage vulnerability to compulsive gambling hits every economic stratum and ethnic group. After surveying 2,700 high school students in four states, California psychologist Durand Jacobs concluded that students are 2 1/2 times as likely as adults to become problem gamblers. In another study, Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John's University in New York, found eight times as many gambling addicts among...