Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I'm not from the US, and yes, I'm always astounded by americans who think that your income bracket defines your class.

> Here in the US I've heard families earning from $30k to $200k, working jobs from manual labor to white collar, call themselves "middle class."

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Where I'm from, the most important marker for middle class is that you value education very highly, and that you don't value physical labour above any kind of work.

Obviously, the people in your example at the low end of the pay scale would most likely be lower middle class, and those at the upper would be upper middle class. The major distinctions between those would be how to perform social interactions and the size of their social networks, but they all agree that life's goal is to send your kids through college.

(As opposed to being working class which means you do not value education highly, and you value physical labour ("real work!") higher than any other kind of work.)

> I'm always astounded by americans who think that your income bracket defines your class.

Given that defining class is entirely and inherently arbitrary in nature, it means your premise is no more valid than an American that chooses to define themselves on class by income.

That's a very relativistic point of view.

I'm talking about social class, which is a very real and well-documented phenomenon. Money is not a very good predictor of social class, because it only controls what you can buy.

To belong to a higher class, you have to use your money to buy the props that are necessary to perform that higher class, and you have to be able to do the performance as well.

For example: You buy business class tickets for your entire family for a vacation in Europe, and you still complain about how horrible flying is. Congratulations, you just performed upper-middle class!

The american definition of middle class is "there shows on TV that are about people like me."

Huh? There is an abundance of shows in America about rich people.

That's obviously false since american TV shows portray people of pretty much every social class.

Right. And if they aren't in prison, they are all middle class.

They do? What American TV shows focus on the poor or the working class? Other than Roseanne (which went off the air in 1997) I struggle to think of one.

There are a few. Always Sunny in Philadelphia (arguably), King of Queens (NJ USPS driver), The Wire, Sons of Anarchy, Bob's Burgers. I'm sure there's some others; most of the street-level police procedurals are pretty blue-collar.

That's impossible. Almost everyone in TV shows is far richer than the overwhelming majority of Americans can ever become. Like, Friends is so famously about a group of people who live in large, expensive, well-furnished apartments without ever having to do commensurate work that TVTropes coined "Friends Rent-Control" to describe it. The Simpsons is about a man who can always support a family of five people and two pets on a blue-collar worker's income even though he quits his job to pursue a non-remunerative life-dream in one third of all the episode plots. And then he always gets the same job back!

TV labor-economics is a special category composed exclusively of hand-waving that lets the writers portray cool stuff without having to actually use nothing but the idle rich as characters.

And this itself is something that seems to vary by country. In the US, the average TV show character seems to be fairly well off, at least 'middle class' and able to pretty much work maybe two hours in their entire life.

In the UK on the other hand, a lot of our characters seem to be from working class backgrounds with a lot of money troubles and lower key living conditions. Like say, basically anyone from a UK soap opera (like Eastenders or Coronation Street). Or the main characters from Only Fools and Houses or Steptoe and Son.

> The Simpsons is about a man who can always support a family of five people and two pets on a blue-collar worker's income

He's a nuclear safety inspector; does that count as blue-collar? I don't really know much about the job frankly. I don't think it's implausible that it may be quite enough to support a family, especially in a small town.

Not to defend the realism of the Simpsons wrt his job, but I'm pretty sure the joke is that he manages to keep his well-paid, relatively important job.

The actual real-life job might not be blue-collar, but as portrayed in The Simpsons, he walks into an interview having graduated high school and gets the job, so is pretty solidly blue-collar.

It's easy to believe though. Most Americans watch TV to indulge in escapist Beverley Hills (sp?) fantasies, not to see a mirror image of their own dull, drab life. They also tend to believe that these "celebrities" deserve their riches because of their charisma or their athletic ability, MUCH more so than your average white collar yuppie who climbed the social ladder IRL deserves anything.

Old money has just had a longer time in Europe to convince everybody that new money doesn't belong. Europe also had royalty.

I wouldn't consider either of these things something to proudly stick to.

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