As Lehmann puts it, “Getting the New York Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license to explain sex to you: there are simply far too many conflicts that run far too deep to result in any reliable account of how the thing works.”


But months before the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were exploring class, the Los Angeles Times was drawing some conclusions of its own — and timely ones, at that. Starting its series in the heat of election fever, the Times drew connections between the isolated rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags tales, the academic research showing stagnated social mobility, and the political implications of the two.


The first article of its series, by Peter G. Gosselin, published on October 10, 2004, called attention to a deliberate move by government leaders that began 25 years ago to rely upon and even subsidize the free market, while cutting back on government regulation and reining in social programs. The resulting economic makeover, Gosselin says, “has come at a large and largely unnoticed price: a measurable increase in the risks that Americans must bear as they provide for their families, pay for their houses, save for their retirements and grab for the good life.” He questioned President Bush’s campaign assertions at the time that “people are better off relying on themselves, rather than on business or government, in case of trouble” by providing both anecdotal and analytical evidence to the contrary.


Instead of just presenting individual anecdotes and relying on pathos to keep people reading, leaving the question of “but how do we fix this?” dangling unsaid, the Los Angeles Times dared not only to ask, but also to answer. In the December 30 installment of its series — still more than four months before the Wall Street Journal and New York Times would jump on the bandwagon — Gosslein summed up the paper’s findings under the headline, “How Just a Handful of Setbacks Sent the Ryans Tumbling Out of Prosperity”:


Throughout this series, the Times has sought to make sense of an American paradox: why so many people report being less financially secure even as the nation, by many measures, has grown far more prosperous. The answer, the newspaper has found, lies in the shifting of economic risks from the broad shoulders of business and government to the backs of working families.


And it had earned the right to call those findings its own, by conducting an extensive analysis of something called the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, funded by the National Science Foundation and run by the University of Michigan. That study “followed a nationally representative sample of 5,000 families and their offshoots for nearly 40 years.” With the help of a few experts, the Times “analyzed the annual fluctuations of panel-study families’ income in five-year increments from 1970 through 2000.”


Instead of relying solely on what this economist or that economist claims about social mobility over the past 30 years, Gosslein presents his own extensive analysis of that data, allowing him to draw more solid conclusions than can be found in either the New York Times series or the Wall Street Journal series.


The Los Angeles Times came roaring back again on May 15, the same day that the New York Times finally launched its own belated overview of class. With the first follow-up to its “New Deal” series since late 2004, the Times tied its mobility findings squarely to current events, including President Bush’s prescription for Social Security, and the recent court ruling which permits “United Airlines’ parent to dump its pensions on the federal government,” thereby leaving “workers and their families bearing big new risks.”


As the Times study showed, that latest decision was one of a piece with the ongoing trend of firms “retreating from the safety-net business” and “shifting responsibility to employees”:


An analysis by the Times last year of a long-term, government-financed database of 5,000 families found that most families experienced income swings of no more than 16 percent in the early 1970s. But those swings had nearly doubled by the start of this decade. The greater the swings, the greater are the chances that a family will be in the midst of a downdraft when a crisis such as a layoff or illness hits. Then it can be very difficult to bounce back.


It’s shrewd that the Los Angeles Times is still cashing in on its data analysis. After all, just as there’s no real reason for major newspapers to cover the ever-present issue of class today rather than yesterday, there’s also no reason why they should stop addressing it just because their packaged series has officially ended.


But in the absence of its own study to draw upon, the New York Times, whose series is still rolling , seems more intent on describing the experiences of people going through those income swings, without bringing in much evidence of overarching trends. It doesn’t totally fail to bolster the anecdotes with numbers and research; its Web site offers an impressive interactive feature on “how class works,” with graphics describing “components of class,” “how class breaks down,” “income mobility,” and “a nationwide poll.” But even those features are not without flaw. Despite the claim in the overview that the series “offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people,” we can’t help but note that the “components of class” section seems to exist for exactly that purpose, urging users to fill in their information for occupation, education, income and wealth to “see where you fit” on a computer-generated “prestige-o-meter.” Select that you’re a writer, for instance, and a red bar appears to illustrate your 66th percentile rating for occupational prestige; say you’re a surgeon, and it leaps to 99th. Seems like a nifty formula for pigeonholing people to us — and with a cute graphic to boot.