Although I agree with the fact that people with higher income aren't doing anything to close gaps in wealth, and that we're grouping people by "wealth, income, and education," I don't believe this grouping is beneficial. This grouping encourages people to feel as if they can't change their future, that they're restricted by their identity. Your identity shouldn't hurt you, it should give you challenges to overcome.
I think people who experience "rags to riches" transformations are people who see society as it is, and are not blinded by the "class system." If you're born into poverty, you're not going to get out if you don't believe you can do great things, even if you don't have privileges that make doing great things easier.
Your argument is interesting. I'm trying to convince people that we're living by our class system and it doesn't exist; classifying people through those objective and subjective criteria is wrong. However, your argument isn't really saying the opposite, just that there are all these factors, but they don't matter much, and we're doing a good enough to not classify people by them.
More on these stereotypes:
In a college lecture, an instructor asked his/her class who they thought of when they thought of the upper class, and "the first two things that were said out loud were the words 'rich' and 'white.'" For the lower class, "people said 'people of color' and 'people living in apartments.'"
These stereotypes are, overall, somewhat muddled. Different people have different ideas of who the different classes are, and it may depend on the immediate region in which you live.
If "women rarely ever push for high salaries or bonuses," and they have the same opportunities as men, why aren't they bushing for the salaries and bonuses? If you're not asking for something because you think you're less likely to receive it than someone else who deserves it just as much as you, don't you have an unequal opportunity.
Income gaps and the resulting social gaps are true facts and not issues of our perception. The issue with these facts are how we apply the facts. Just because there are these gaps between us, why should we let them divide us and change our identities?
As you said, these monetary gaps are affecting our identities through our social, economic, and academic status. However, those statuses are not tied to income alone. Who we are is not what we earn, and we are creating a situation where our identity is that way? Even though how rich or poor you are affects other things, it doesn't change who you are.
It's hard to tell if we really need rich vs. poor stereotypes, or any stereotype in general. My two cents on this is that stereotypes that are detrimental (such as poor people being less happy) cause problems (people believing that they are unhappy because they are poor and therefore "low class," and have failed in comparison to "upper class" people). Thinking of everyone as complete equals may indeed have some unintended consequences, but the rich vs. poor stereotypes are something I think our society could do just fine without.
What I'm beginning to see now from the differences among my argument versus everyone else is that our class system is mostly an illusion. Even though we have gaps between "the rich," "the middle class," and "the poor," the reason the poor suffer and the rich prosper, and the reason reforming these separate groups is so hard, lies in the fact that once you make a certain amount of money, you believe you are happy. Once you're rich, you become happy, and once you're poor, you're unhappy. We need to remove the mental block of wealth equals happiness in order to have equality among people of different incomes, and remove the image of money separating us all.
