Urbanization increases social stratification in that the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies, and in or near cities in modern societies.
You could just as easily disagree, with a valid point.
(And anyway, the phenomenon you are talking about stopped on most of the world at around the middle of the last century. The very few exceptions where it is still happening do not support you claiming it's a rule.)
I'm not sure that tracks. Farmers are the epitome of the upper to upper-middle class, deriving their living wholly or mostly from land and capital ownership.
Perhaps you meant upper to upper-middle income rather than class?
This must be why in the 1950’s large swathes of Europe saw so many farmers fleeing their land to go live in the city and take up those new fangled factory jobs. Same for Britain in the 1850’s. Or China in the 2000’s.
Usually when people talk about “farmers” in the context of social class migrations, they mean subsistence farmers eeking out a living from the land. Not the modern American or European industrial farmer who in effect owns and runs a multimillion dollar business. Although I hear margins are razor thin even for those.
Did they though? Doesn't match my knowledge.
Most farmers at the time who owned plots of fertile land would rather break their backs working the land themselves (even if for thin margins of subsistence farming) rather than move to the cities to live in cramped conditions and break their backs working factory jobs for low pay.
The only country folk who migrated to cities to take factory jobs were mostly people who didn't own much land or any at all, making them relatively poor, so a factory job in the city was a better prospect than poverty in the country side working someone else's land. But land owning farmers would never downgrade by going to work factory jobs.
Sure? There is nothing about upperclass-hood that implies that it is desirable or infinitely maintainable. In fact, beyond the romanticizing of the upper-class we see in popular culture, I suspect most actually prefer to be working class, especially when coupled with an upper income. There are way fewer nightmares when your only concern is showing up to work.
The bulk of the modern upper class are non-farm-specific capitalists, who tend to be urban-dwellers, and bulk of fhe petit bourgeoisie (middle class) are non-farm-specific small business owners and elite urban laborers whose wages have sufficed ti give them a capital nest egg sufficient to be a significant share of their economic support mechanism.
The modern farm, even small family farms, relies on capital to do the work. The farm owner's input is into the management of the operation. If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class. You can't own land and capital without some management.
All businesses rely on the application of labor to capital; if that labor is largely that of the owners, the owners are petit bourgeois, if it is predominantly rented labor of the proletariat, the owners are haut bourgeois. (In the simple case where the owners derive their support exclusively from that property.)
> If management is considered labour then there is no such thing as upper-class.
Management is labor, but that fact does not mean that there aren't a distinct class of people who, while they may incidentally do some labor in the marketplace, relate to the economy and derive support within it primarily through the returns of capital whose value is realized primarily by renting labor from the proletariat.
Yes, we call them retirees. Who, incidentally, as a group have a slight preference towards small town living.