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Stress and ClassAn NYU sociologist claims, preposterously, that it's more stressful to be rich than poor.

By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, at 6:29 PM ET

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By mere happenstance, the day chosen to record for posterity Fidanza's varying blood pressure was Oct. 19, 1987 ("Black Monday"). On that day, the stock market set a record for the largest one-day percentage decline: The Dow fell 508 points, or 22 percent. In all likelihood, it was the most stressful day Fidanza ever experienced in his working life. The day chosen to record Collins' blood pressure, meanwhile, was "a perfectly ordinary Wednesday." Yet during their respective workdays, the increase in blood pressure experienced by Fidanza as he watched the stock market crash matched that experienced by Collins as she went about her daily chores. And while Fidanza's blood pressure dropped back to normal once he got home, Collins' rose 10 percent after she returned home and started tending to her two children.

What did Collins experience at work that could match Fidanza's Black Monday stress? Tierney, who followed Collins around that day, recorded a typical stress-inducing moment:

At 10:26 A.M., she was standing, the phone cradled on her shoulder, and contending with the following:
* One patient at her desk, waiting to talk to her.
* One secretary with a question about another patient's chart.
* Two lighted buttons on her telephone, indicating incoming calls, and one buzzing intercom.
* Two forms on her desk, which she was filling out as she punched back and forth between phone calls.
* A three-inch-thick stack of paperwork in her ''In'' box, above which she had taped a sign, ''Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.''
* Her boss, who had just emerged from his office with a sheet of paper and said, ''Cathy, I need this Xeroxed right away, please.''
At that moment, a beep sounded, the machine at her waist started drawing in air, and the cuff on her arm tightened. The monitor showed her pulse, which had been 71, to be 82; her blood pressure was 116/72. (Researchers don't agree which of these three numbers is the best indicator of stress, but the one that has traditionally received the most attention is the diastolic blood pressure—the second figure given, in this case, 72—which is used to diagnose hypertension. It measures pressure in the arteries between heart beats; the other reading, the systolic pressure, here 116, measures peak pressure while the heart is pumping.) Collins's diastolic pressure had risen 26 percent, an even greater percentage change than Fidanza had registered that first hour of Black Monday. And, as it turned out, this wasn't even the biggest surge of the day for Cathy Collins.

There is no reason to believe that American working-class life has become more easeful since Tierney published this article in May 1988. Nor am I aware that respective health outcomes for rich and poor—surely a reasonable measure of stress—have altered since I cited Britain's Whitehall Study, a medical survey of British civil servants, in this column in 1999. That study (mentioned in Helen Epstein's excellent 1998 essay in the New York Review of Books "Life and Death on the Social Ladder") found death rates to be lower for civil servants in the highest ranks even when smoking and cholesterol were taken into account. As Epstein put it, "Simply being a senior assistant statistician, rather than chief statistician, increased one's risk of having a fatal heart attack nearly twofold, even if one led an apparently salubrious life."

It's easy to imagine that "It is now the rich who are the most stressed out" is what readers of the Times op-ed page want to hear. But that doesn't make it true.