Class and the American System

So, I've recently decided that Richard Florida (correspondent with the Atlantic) is one of my favorite writers.  He discusses urban development and growth, and this week he's going to be a contributing writer on Andrew Sullivan's blog.  One of his posts today is about Class and the Class system.  Intriguingly, he separates modern American society into three classes: the working class, the service class, and the creative class.  He says that we define class "simply by peoples' position in the economy - not by perceived status, level of income or what we consume, but by the kind of work we do."

This is a completely different way from the way I had been taught to think about class.  From all my history courses, class has been thoroughly tied up with systems of royalty and wealth - even if a monarchy didn't exist, class was nevertheless defined by how much money you made or how much money you inherited - this definition of class by type of work runs completely counter to how I have thought of class.

In many ways the definition makes sense - but I am still left wondering by his separations of working, service and creative.  Where the working and service classes separate is a line that I don't fully get - and also the "Creative Class" seems to me to be overly broad - I wonder if the creative class includes jobs like lawyering or serving in the government - those jobs can be interpreted as a "service" to others, but they could also be seen as knowledge-based professions.

I'd be interested to know what you guys think, and I'm going to follow Florida over the course of the week as he explains these things.