Social class in New Zealand

Such people have included Princess Te Puea Herangi (niece of King Mahuta) and "kingmaker" Wiremu Tamihana (a younger son of a chief).

[3] The evidence for this was the relatively small range of wealth (that is, the wealthiest did not earn hugely more than the poorest earners), lack of deference to authority figures, high levels of class mobility, a high standard of living for working-class people compared to Britain, progressive labour laws which protected workers and encouraged trade union membership, and a welfare state which was developed in New Zealand before most other countries.

As noted by the historian William Ball Sutch in 1966, Living standards rose in the post-war years through a combination of good prices for exports, borrowing abroad, and the much greater use of internal resources made possible by full production.

[5] James Belich has argued that most of this is not evidence of an absence of class but rather of the relatively high status and standard of living of the working-class in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It is partly for this reason that mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary is so admired in New Zealand; despite being the first person to climb Mount Everest, he was always very modest[citation needed].

[14][15] In an article entitled "Countries with the Biggest Gaps Between Rich and Poor",[16] BusinessWeek ranked New Zealand at 6th in the world: The U.N. Development Program recently came out with a report looking, among other things, at income inequality worldwide...

Most people do not care what others' parents do for a living, who a person is descended from, or where they went to school, and New Zealanders almost invariably have more respect for those who have earned their money through hard work than those who have inherited it or made it through investment.

The 'Brain Drain' (emigration of skilled young workers) is a troubling phenomenon for the Government, and often cited by Opposition parties in election campaigns.

The publication of the scale was welcomed by many researchers but regarded with suspicion by a number of lay critics who presumably clung to the belief that New Zealand was still a classless society.

Such characterizations, and the numerous critics who misinterpreted its intentions, no doubt added to the frequency of its citing, but it is true that many researchers have made appropriate use of it for its original purpose.

It was based on a 'returns to human capital' model of the stratification process and originally used data from the 1991 New Zealand census (n=1,051,926) to generate scores for 97 occupational groups.

[20] NZSEI is a linear scale of ranked occupation, produced using an algorithm involving age, income and education, and aggregated to six discrete groupings (called Socio-economic Status, SES) to enable comparison with E-I and ISEI.