How does ‘class-passing’ actually work?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is the most insidious part.
The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is.
The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays.
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come.
I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".
The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole.
If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on.
The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today.
The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications.
You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
Except cottage content and product industries can now sell to virtually the entire planet. That simply wasn't available before.
>as (mostly) low-status low-value workers
Here you're projecting your own bias against them. I'm not suggesting "the system" is without flaws, but the average joe seems to be doing alright in general, especially if you consider average joe historically and globally.
>The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
Wealth concentration among the hyper-rich doesn't concern me in the least. Generally speaking wealth is created by providing value, not taking it.
>If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
The internet is in the process of unseating media monopolies and democratizing information. The poorest of the poor across the world have access to information that was previously only available to the wealthiest who could attend universities in rich countries. The internet has allowed small businesses with basically no infrastructure to reach the entire global market. It's allowed families to keep in touch instantaneously across oceans.
>You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
You're comparing the internet to some fantasy you have. I'm comparing the internet to the world before the internet.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea...
Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
Right. I'm sure that the fact that the leading internet companies are run by Harvard (FB) and Stanford (Google) grads will not interfere with the Revolution in any way.
Before the internet it used to take 10-20 years to foment discord against a particular group. Now we have a new boogeyman every 18 months and it's always other plebes or pariahs-- never the ruling elite.
If the last two years have shown anything, it's that the "common man" in America is extremely susceptible to cheap propaganda and misinformation.
Half the country would happily watch the entire thing burn down as long as "their team" is doing the burning.
The "plebs", so to speak, have never been more controlled than they are today. If anything, I'm more pessimistic than ever.
Powerful interests will be able to harness the massive amounts of data collected by social media to carefully formulate and craft the exact message they want to control who they want and people who I thought would easily see through that are now completely brainwashed into believing things that they would have laughed at 20 years ago.
The rich will be fine, and the poor will eat each other alive, just as they're told to by the other rich men on the TV.
Compare that to Google/FB where each person gets a catered experience. It would take an immense effort in data collection and analysis to find out just how hard they're screwing everyone. Going by all of the online scams I've had to ward friends and family away from (which came up on page-one Google searches BTW), my guess would be "very hard".
I don't buy it. First of all, the class system is about material interests - real physical tangible interests - and not about feelings. Even if 99% of the people live in a world of ideas, the ruling class, by virtue of the fact that they have to bargain over laws (multi hundred page documents that decide taxation and allocation as well as employee and business rights), live in the world of the material.
The American populace lives, and probably since at least the mid 20th century has lived, in a world of ideas. By this I mean, the country is torn asunder by feelings about abortion, race, gender and so forth, immigration [edit: and also celebrity-lead culture] -- all issues that, guess what, don't even touch the interests of the .01%.
#MeToo poses no threat whatsoever to any class system.
http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-...
I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers.
... from the article:
"Here is the list of the world’s top Loser Countries: (.nl, .de, .ch, .no, .dk)"
As someone who travels to these countries frequently (rsync.net has a Zurich location) I can certainly get on board with the desire to move to Switzerland. It is a nicer country than the US.
However, it is a ridiculous notion that the social success of these countries (and of Japan, which is conspicuously absent from that list) is due simply to some bad legislation here or there ... just a few technocratic choices made the wrong way.
In reality, the reason things are so nice in Switzerland and Norway and Japan are because they have extremely homogenous populations and cultural legacies.
It's easy to expand your circle of empathy to people whose names are also Lars Larson[1], just like yours is.
They didn't invent jazz, though ...
[1] Or Hiro Tanaka.
Which may explain why you can't say that without being called a racist.
Also, I'm not sure the facts back you up. Is the USA really more diverse than Canada? Is the UK really more diverse than Germany?
85% of those "foreigners" are your fellow Europeans. It would be like me saying Florida is less homogeneous because some people from Utah moved there. Except Utah is further away from Florida than any country in Europe is from any other. Switzerland is quite homogeneous.
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for a while too. It's very convenient that the whole 'Occupy' thing got followed up by a huge push for social justice beliefs and comments about deplorables. Like someone didn't want the attention to be focused on the rich, and thought a bit of interclass warfare would be a nice distraction about now.
You can see a huge media political shift about this time too.
But hey, maybe I'm coming across as paranoid here.
Stated this way, this appears to handwave real problems away. Yes, racial and gender issues are often exploited for political gain; but these issues usually have a basis in real problems.
Why should a member of the bottom 70% care that the top marginal corporate rate was just cut from 36% to 21%?
Uh, have you been paying attention to campus protesters?
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies.
It's not quite that simple, due to human psychology. Even if people are wealthy on a global and historical scale, relative poverty will still cause problems.
Maybe. A prerequisite would be for most people to realise that class is more important than gender and race.
https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...
What definition are you using for economic depression?
[0] https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...
Things have gotten worse as capital consolidated all the industries. Now we have an illusion of choice. When you go to the supermarket, there seems to be tons of variety of products by many companies. After all, there are so many brands. But all these brands are owned by a handful of companies. The same thing with banking. The last financial crisis was used by the FED ( a banking cartel ) to get large multinational banks to buy up smaller regional banks. Regional newspapers are being bought up by major media companies like news corp.
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
It's not just identity politics. It's also the bread and circuses. Nothing more poignant than the upcoming superbowl where the mindless stuff their faces while watching advertisements for 4 hours.
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
That's naive. The internet will almost certainly be used to reinforce it. More distractions, more propaganda and more divisions. Look how quickly the wealthy has come down on the internet and social media already. Look at the amount of censorship. Look what happened to youtube trending page and google news. Youtube trending is now all SNL, major news channels and late night shows. Google news is now all washingtonpost, nytimes, etc.
I hope you are right, but experience tells me money wins and the masses are not intelligent enough or united enough to challenge the wealthy. Our political system doesn't allow for it, nor does our education system or the media or anything else.
There is no collectivist, national (or global) hivemind or concensus among wealthy people about how to oppress the lower classes. The implication of the original post I've responded to is absurd. Wealthy people are more likely than not to be narcissistic and selfish, so any organization is really a prisoner's dilemma association of convenience, at best.
Mark Zuckerberg in alone in a room with an angry mob would be much more civilized than Mark Zuckerberg in a room with Rupert Murdoch - there is just a bunch of wealth people whose voice carries far due to their organizations, wealth, and power, who generally have no allegiance to one other, each espousing their own disparate viewpoints, which generally do not involve wealth re-distribution
Wealthy interests, like you are describing, and as the article portrays, exist in microcosms or small interests, and they conflict with other wealthy interests. One wealthy group might want to manipulate consumer group X to do Z and has to destroy organization B to manipulate consumer group X to do Y.
That's just one portion of the comment I'm responding to - the rest is just some rambling from a psychotic someone who will be carrying a torch to something while snarling the gripe du jour some day.
it's called socialism. it's been spawned already, and it's growing. people can thank bernie sanders for its major popularization, but he won't be around when the dream is complete-- if it ever is.
It might serve their richness but that does not mean they have hidden agendas in regards to it.
If everyone willingly walked in to a pit of spikes it is their own fault. People should be allowed to act out their own free will as long as that act does not fuck with other people.
If someone tricked them with lies to do that then there is a problem.
However, this is one issue that's hard to put solely on the foot of the rich or a broader system. Passing in many avenues, not just by class, is really deciding you want to be there and what the terms of your presence will be. It felt at times like trying to get into a club, if you look like you want in, you don't get in. If you don't want in, they let you in. You have to learn to look like you don't want it.
I think rather than teach young children how to hold spoons, or castigate the rich for yet another divide they were born into, probably we should just teach improv skills, confidence skills and encourage people to engage in open dialogue with others. Some solutions don't require us dismantling a system.
If the next time a rich person gives you an askance look and you immediately ask them to explain themselves, guess what, you just equalized yourself with them socially without having to learn which fork to use first.
Or you've shibboleth'ed yourself out by not already knowing what the askance look meant.
Personally, I've always thought the only way to win is to not play the game. High class values have never really appealed to me, although I guess feel the hierarchy/status issue as much as anyone else.
Any examples spring to mind?
- Talking specifically about money (how much high-ticket items specifically cost, how much anyone specifically makes) is gauche.
- Depending on the group and the location, there are functionally dress codes - you show up to brunch in sweats and sneakers and everyone else is in polos and boat shoes, you "dress up" in a shirt and khakis, everyone else is wearing a blazer and slacks, you put on a Macy's suit for a formal event and everyone else is wearing Tom Ford or Armani.
- What you do for leisure can be a fraught discussion - we eventually started traveling more, but I've met people who talked casually about summering in Ibiza or the Hamptons (and who used "summer" as a verb), or who have seasonal homes. "I stayed home and played X-Box" as an explanation for what you did on vacation earns a side-eye.
- What and how you eat, although that one has relaxed a little bit over the last few years as street food has been gentrified and made trendier.
Edit: I should note this was in northern California, where people generally do not vacation on the east coast because of both local attractions and a high cost of living that makes saving for vacations much harder to do. We happened to have some family in the Carolinas which was part of our reason.
This is not just a rich people rule.
I grew up solidly middle class, and you could hear a pin drop if you asked someone in the room how much they were paid or how much that engagement ring cost.
(Not to mention in the US even coal miners would describe themselves as "middle class" these days, nobody is "working class" anymore).
We were pretty much lower middle class (sometimes lower-lower) , had friends who were better off and friends who were much worse off, and nobody really talked about money openly.
In my family I always figured it was WASP reticence, but now that you mention it I think it was something broader. Maybe: people with money don't need to talk about it, people without money are embarrassed to talk about it, and if you're somewhere in the middle you don't want to reveal your hand.
My father poured molten metal in a foundry as a married 19 year old.
I'm so damn sick of all this stuff. It's like nobody can just make a normal dish without putting some insipid "twist" on it anymore.
Clothing is usually pretty easy once you find the staples; after that its your behavior that makes it. To actually look good though, you need to understand the group's values enough to move beyond the basics.
And of course, you need to learn to have an opinion on clothing, to understand (and deny) other's opinions. At the very least, when some chucklefuck gives you a look for eating fries by hand, you should be able to defend your position
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell
Link: http://a.co/406UQB1
Yes, and I'd extend this to talking about where your money comes from, as well as how you spend it. Don't expect a straight or detailed answer to "What do you do (for work)?" or "Where did you buy that?"
Asking those questions immediately marks you.
Not throwing daggers or anything, but every strata has things that are a bit strange about them.
Yes, I know that upper class does that too, unless you are in the hills where there really isn't any lawn to take care of, etc.
That's entirely the point. Lawns originated in the middle ages as a status symbol. They demonstrated a) that you could afford to waste a perfectly useful piece of arable land and b) you could afford to pay a team of men to neatly scythe and shear it. It's hard to tell how much land an aristocrat actually owns, but the size of their lawn acted as a reasonable proxy.
The invention of the mechanical lawnmower helped to democratize the lawn, establishing it as a symbol of middle-class suburbia. A small lawn in front of a suburban house didn't demonstrate that you were gratuitously wealthy, but did demonstrate that a) you could afford a larger plot of land than strictly necessary to accommodate your house and b) you had leisure time to spare.
Try liking somethings considered as "white trash" hobbies/entertainment/activities, or as "posh" ones as a middle class person.
(E.g. a middle class high schooler who likes the opera instead of say, Hip Hop or whatever. Or wear some Comme De Garcons clothes around middle class dressed people, or stuff you bought at the Dollar Store...)
My overall takeaways from the book were:
1. Class is correlated with income, but not identical.
2. Class is so ingrained in so many areas of our lives that it's almost impossible to change. You might as well just be comfortable with the class level you grew up in, because you'll probably always be there.
3. A big reason for #2: caring about your class in the first place is middle class. The more you care about where you fall in the class hierarchy, the more middle and upper-middle class you are. Lower class folks don't really care (and may even take a certain amount of "pride" in being lower / working class), and upper class people have nothing to prove to anyone.
But the book goes into excruciating detail about the way people dress, speak, decorate their homes, what jobs they have, cars they drive, etc, etc.
One of the takeaways I got from it was that every single upper class activity is designed to be incredibly expensive and time consuming, just because only the wealthy can maintain those form of activities. Having driveways made out of gravel, that constantly need to be redone at considerable expense, or having a yacht. Despite this, the true upper class is incredibly banal; Fussell describes them as totally uninterested in ideas, reading time and cheap disposable mysteries if they ever bother to do so. There's really a lot of Thurston Howell in them.
I think most people here would dislike how Fussell pegs liking science fiction and technology as a fairly low class activity. But it's funny how right he is, because among the upper-mids here...you hate social media in the same way, and the lower class uses it just as much.
But, oh that book is devastating. Fussell is a wonderful writer, and a keen critic.
The upper class hobbies are definitely a thing. Equestrian > sailing > skiing > golf probably. Golf only being this low because it was "democratized" by muni courses and popularized first by Arnold Palmer, then by Tiger Woods.
Skiing is probably the most approachable of the activities for the upper middle class professional, but it's a $300/day activity that necessitates travel. A fairly devastating expense for many.
A $50/day activity at a local hill + a $150 initial investment (one that will last you multiple winters) in some decade-old used equipment at a local swap event.
Skiing is not cheap. But it's extremely expensive only if you have extremely expensive demands - such was wanting to ski while living in an area without hills or snow.
Well, except for each other. And very much so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmGemNT7urY
The only thing this scene from the wire fails to capture is that once you learn the mannerisms, how you should look, how you should act to not feel out of place - you then need to learn how and what to speak about. It's hard to hold a conversation about Mr. Smith's recent trip to the maldives, his new non-profit business venture, and roger federer's latest australian open win if you're working a 9-5 and vacationing once a year in california. So in many cases you can look and act the part, but really you can't speak the part.
Then at the end of the meal, you're relying on them to pay for that $150 bottle of wine they ordered.
If you're going to resent someone getting an extra 10$ worth of food you split the check based on costs.
If 10$ is effectively meaningless but 200$ is not. Split it per person, it's fairly close and reasonably fast.
If 200$ is effectively meaningless, rotate who pays it's faster. This can blend into: If 2,000$ if effectively meaningless, or you want to show off, who pays may not relate to who paid last time.
That's how it's in my country for all classes, poor or rich.
When friends go out, someone and pays for all the others (and someone might ask to chip in or pay themselves, but the first one doesn't take no for an answer).
Next time you see each other, the other person can pay, but no one keeps any very specific tally ("I paid 3 times, you paid 1") -- that would be considered tacky and cheap. That said, if someone systematically over many meetings never takes initiative to pay that the rest start considering them a cheapskate (but never giving specific tally or anything -- it's more from the feeling "never remember you paying").
Anybody insisting on splitting the bill, or obsessing over who ordered what, is also seen as a cheapskate.
That's how it usually goes among people with regular income. Now, sometimes, when the company is comprised of people that might be students, unemployed, etc, they more often agree to split the bill. But in this case too, obsessing over who bought what is considered rude, and usually it's just a simple bill/persons split that's paid by all.
In our culture's case, in general the amount each one ate doesn't matter -- whether one had steak and the other just a salad, the salad person can very well still go on and insist on paying for everybody else. Nobody would care about "a 15% to 30% difference in cost" (the person paying for everybody wont feel it's a burden, and the persons having their meal paid, wont feel like imposing).
It's not about achieving some perfect balance or fairness in any particular meal -- people genuinely want to treat others, and enjoy taking turns doing so.
It's only longer term one would care for patterns of behavior (the person who after so many meals with others never volunteers to pay etc).
If we're splitting a bill, I insist on this, because some of my friends don't drink alcohol, and some do.
(I drink.)
A lot of things in this thread seem completely foreign to me. Every restaurant I've been to in the past few years has just asked how we want to split the bill. They seem to keep all orders separate in the system and just merge them if you want shared bills.
Know how to pronounce the items on the international restaurant menu before trying to order them. If you don’t know, don’t ask out loud. Whisper into your rich friend’s ear so as to not embarrass them.
Don’t speak about the unspoken codes either, and if you must, do it privately with your rich friends and go along with their answers.
Don’t not have enough money for something unless you express clearly that you are too good for it. Not needing it bad enough is not an acceptable excuse.
When others share stories of their extravagant lives, hold a straight face. This is normal stuff for you, remember? You already know what that’s like.
Speak of politics as though identity issues(D) or working hard for your money(R) are more important than class issues. Remember that class issues are not something you are particularly affected by. You can acknowledge they matter but insist identity issues are more important. This helps wealthy folk feel both compassionate, concerned and comfortable with their wealth. I’m not taking a side here, only giving proven survival tips.
Your family is kind of more like cartoon characters. You just share jokes with them and nothing else, unless something tragic happens or if they invite you on a nice vacation. Don’t discuss any other relations with your family members.
Fashion: In the least, if you wore it in high school, you don’t wear it now.
Music, art: Don’t ask who this is. You’ve heard it or you are too busy to care.
Like parent said, these can be overridden with confidence and flair but that takes some acclimating and strategy.
That said, I'm a big fan of burgers and order them often. Screw what other people think.
Whelp there goes my dreams of hanging with rich people
They had good burgers and chef salad was good as well...
P. J. Clarke's is another one where you could get decent burgers.....
I've noticed that waiters/waitresses seem to treat me worse if I order a beer where I could've ordered wine. Especially when the cuisine is French or centered around steak.
... unless you are taking part in some 'whimsically proletarian' sort of event, or making some sort of 'statement'
The biggest one was pouring wine. I remember a few times I poured it kind of off and I got that distinct look of class violation. Haggling about splitting checks also got those looks often, the lesson I learned there was that almost always, the party will want to split it evenly rather than do something as gauche as math, so rather than order less, order much more so you get a discount on your meal :-)
I also spent some time in a small rich beach town, and from that time I remember how my switching to boat shoes seemed to instantly ingratiate me with some people. Also never mention how "cool" it is that someone has a jetski or nice boat, those things were just taken as statements of fact.
To many people these might not seem like real mores or wealth signifiers. Maybe you think I was just over-sensitive. This whole article though, is about feelings, and certainly in those moments it seemed like everyone was certainly feeling something strongly.
Edit: Not talking about the guy who rents a $10k apartment he can't afford to trick people into thinking he's rich. Talking more about people buying into social strata they can reasonably or paying fealty to those in higher strata to benefit their career. It is a thing out here.
Original Religion Sex Politics Money
Addition 1 Hitler & the holocaust Abortion Child care Adult care
Addition 2 Trump
Stereotypes, glass ceilings and merit aside, ones ability to move up in the world is tied at least in part to their ability not be disagreeable (I specifically used a double negative there) among those who are already on top. If you're white, have dreads and whatever building you're in smells like a grow op or chewing tobacco gets its own line in your monthly budget don't expect your presence to be appreciated by the upper classes.
Fitting in is less important than not not fitting in. It's just a fact of life one's life experience is so directly tied to wealth that the more percent above of below you a group is the harder it will be to not, be rejected by that group.
I think there's an argument for a little of both, by way of giving them tools to fit in at multiple levels (classes, call it what you will). Then it's their choice to fit in or stand out as they feel best in the widest range of situations.
Of course knowing which of 5 sets of cutlery is for what shouldn't actually matter much...
Outside in. If you can't tell, look at what your neighbors are using.
My experience aligns with the author's. In movies and feel-good stories shared on social media, we romantically idolize the humble rich person, who came from nothing yet somehow stays "true to their roots". And that is a lovely, inspiring mindset necessary to keep people motivated...in theory.
In practice, in order to get ahead in life and to cross class boundaries, you will have to acknowledge that aspects of your upbringing and former way of life are "backwards". You'll have to reconcile that the rich will scorn you and think of your home as a "shithole", and that you "weren't supposed to" make it to the top. You'll have to see things in a new light, and as the author notes, your social life and identity will take a hit (e.g. old friends who won't come to your wedding, or dating prospects who are afraid of being associated with lower classes).
There is a moral failing in our country where the pursuit of money is seen as the objective optimal thing to do. But it's very reasonable to look at how money changes people, and to turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust.
I think the point of the article is that it's not that money changes people, but rather that change begets money; they are interrelated at least.
It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
edit: This site is slowly turning into Reddit - contrarian opinions need not apply. Instead of down-votes, why not rebut what I said? It's not like the matter is settled, and the last couple times the populous tried to "abolish" social classes, mass terror followed.
Now now relax. You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good because they glue our society together. You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
>It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
Sure but the veneration is usually weak, it's akin to the 'noble savage' - the 'hardworking blue-collar.' It's veneration at a distance, contact between the wealthy and the poor is frequently uncomfortable for both.
>One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
>I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
We can have a sensible discussion without condescension.
> You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good......You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
>You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
> Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist. I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
Fair.
>I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
Well no. It may be self-evident when you're honest with yourself but when "we're" honest with "ourselves" it's not at all, hence the downvotes and disagreement in the replies.
>I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
This is the success sequence stuff? Look it's just not very true. Almost the entirety of various 'success sequence' poverty figures can be explained by one thing: maintaining full-time work. Everything else is small or zero. Well maintaining full-time work isn't always easy! There's a variety of circumstances outside ones control which can affect your ability to maintain full-time work.
http://www.demos.org/blog/8/13/15/success-sequence-extremely...
>What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist.
You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
>I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
Are many mobile in an effortful sense though? Say I have a society where at birth we roll a bingo machine filled with balls 1-5 and we assign you to a quintile. This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance - same as race. Now what if instead of a bingo machine we just had a very large 'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal. It's not just about how many went from bottom quintile to third quintile or better, it's about how it happened.
This isn't true, and a random blog post where the author has difficulty replicating the studies results does not prove it so. There is a mile high pile of literature that shows marriage and high school graduation to be vitally important. It would not surprise me in the least that these two are strongly correlated with full-time employment. The "Success Sequence" has lifted more people from poverty than any social welfare program has to date.
Here is some compiled literature:
https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/marri...
http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IFS-Millennial...
>You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
I genuinely still have absolutely no idea what you are asking me to clarify, and I'm taking offense at your insinuation that I'm being coy about some matter regarding race. I will gladly answer your question, but what is it that you are asking or need clarification on? Are you asking me if racial distinctions are natural? Yes, race is hereditary, is this not self-evident?
> Are many mobile in an effortful sense though?
I don't know what you mean by effortful, so the best I can answer you is to say that socially mobility is a very real and recognized phenomena in the United States of America.
>This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance
As far as I understand you, your underlying premise here is that social mobility is, like a dice roll, pure luck. I think this premise is completely baseless.
>'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal
It absolutely isn't the same deal. I don't doubt that race makes it more difficult for some people to succeed, but this is completely tangential and I'm finding it difficult to see what, if anything, this has to do with my original statement.
No one genuinely aspires to be destitute. The poor are seen as noble in some aspects, but that's often a defense mechanism from the extreme wealth on the other site of the spectrum.
> I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions.
I did not mean to imply that we should therefore demolish all class distinctions. But we certainly need introspection, and unfortunately rich perspectives are popularized by default (see film and social media examples cited earlier).
Just because classes are necessary does not mean our attitude towards classes is healthy.
Yes
> Class mobility is a fallacy
This is patently false. Social mobility is entirely possible, although it has gotten harder since the 1980's, but that wasn't your claim.
> that was invented to support the hierarchy
The hierarchy doesn't need "support". Class and social hierarchy has been observed in every culture since time immemorial. The radical and unfounded claim is the notion that we can "remove" it in any meaningful sense.
> Its not an alternative system in any sense.
Moving into a new social class impacts your life in every conceivable way, from the way you speak, dress, behave, to the job you perform. On an individual level, it absolutely would resemble "systemic" changes to both one's material and immaterial life.
A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. I'm often called brutally blunt, but really, I'm very tame compared to most people I grew up around.
As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn.
Follow the money.
I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out.
As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along.
Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own.
A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.
What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."
> > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog
They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.
For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans.
I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.
We've been idealizing rural / commoner folk for a while. IIRC, French nobility in the 18th or 19th century had the habit of running out to the country and playacting as peasants for fun.
Not to mention there's a glut of 'rural/blue collar porn', (Duck Dynasty, etc) or at least there was a few years back. Some of that maybe people watched condescendingly but there could also be the tendency of portraying these folks as knowing something others do not.
There's a glut of "urban white collar porn": Nearly all mainstream television sitcoms and dramas.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/08/here_c...
I don't disagree about urban white collar porn (sitcoms, dramas, sure but all those house hunting shows too) but neither of these were the main thrust of my comment.
If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'.
PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.
They're just people. When the upper-classes talk about the poor as all good or all bad it's always in the context of selling you their politics.
Tell me more, please.
You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on.
You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented.
Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0.
Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset.
Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.
Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.
Meaning that people making $10 per hours use more or less coarse language than people making $50 per hour?
In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement.
That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.
This experience isn't exactly uncommon.
Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this.
That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.
The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce.
I think we're agreeing here.
If your assumptions/situation match those of the author/speaker---it will be good advice. If they don't---bullshit.
This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true.
Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit.
advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need.
then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb.
if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit?
remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success.
this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.
Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?
Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.
That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn.
Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/29/new-york-city-mayor-1...
No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it.
That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.
Not trying to detract from your overall point, just thought it was worth noting.
The more class/religious/language/wealth/cultural/racial/geographic barriers your cross the more difficult it is to change, but the Guardian often reduces this to a class war which is overly simplified.
Edit - I dont want to trivialize it, Money & Class is a big barrier to overcome if you want to move into high paying jobs. Maybe class matters in some jobs more than others.
My maternal grandmother's maiden name begins with von. She came from a low level German noble family. They sold the title when the family fell on hard times.
I was homeless for about a year before I recognized how upper class my mother's expectations were. I didn't think we were upper class. My mother worked as a maid. My father had been a soldier and failed to establish a second career after he left the army. I also didn't think we had money. We weren't millionaires, but when they bought a house when I was 3, my dad had 3/4 of the cost of the house in the bank. They put down such a large down payment that their mortgage payment was about 40 percent of what the neighbors were paying.
I sometimes met people on the street with upper class manners. These were bitter people, failing to adapt to current reality.
I grew up learning to power dress. Being homeless taught me something I had not ever been able to figure out before: how to stop intimidating people and stop trying to win the damn pecking order game, a game I loathe but couldn't stop playing. I learned to wear t shirts with cartoons on them and to see that as a good thing, not something I should be ashamed of or embarrassed by or apologize for.
I learned to be approachable, a skill I never had before. That enormous confidence and ego this article talks about? It is obnoxious behavior that sticks out like a sore thumb in a group of not rich folks. It intimidates ordinary people.
It signals you have power they lack. You feel untouchable. You are confident that even if you fuck up, everything will work out okay.
Ordinary people don't feel that way. When it is clear you do, they know they are dealing with an asshole who will not hesitate to fuck up their life, whether due to obliviousness or casual malice.
Learning to class pass runs both ways. The fact that we don't talk or think like it does tells you how much contempt we fundamentally have for the little people.
The people most obsessed with putting up the act of their high class are those whom aren't there yet. The mid level professional who is working 80hrs a week and making $90k/yr will absolutely put on the whole 1% act. They will buy the luxury car, fancy clothes/watch/jewelry etc... and be in debt up to their eyeballs. They will also be the first to notice/comment on anyone who isn't up to their 'standards' while standing on cliquish etiquette rules.
Conversely working with true high net worth individuals is rarely an exercise in gate keeping. In many cases their standards for behavior are much lower than you would expect because the competitive pressure is off. You'll find that people with millions in the bank are more humble/genuine than those whom are trying to act the part.
One of the biggest barriers to moving up in class is the people in your starter class. Family, friends, neighbors... almost all of them will start to get very aggressive with you if you seriously try to better yourself. I remember being accused of using too many "five dollar words", being a nerd for spending time learning technology, being a loser for reading books! I found the crab bucket mentality to be very real. I tried to encourage others to have the strength to stand against it, but few did. I don't really talk to anyone I knew from back then anymore.
Going from middle to upper middle was interesting as well. There you also see pressure to stay as you are but it's less overt and more of a second order effect of trying to keep up with the Jones. The amount of debt that I saw the average middle class person bury themselves in just to achieve what they thought represented a slightly higher class than they actually lived was astounding. You can't move up in class when you're living paycheck to paycheck to pay for your car leases, oversized mortgage and credit cards balances that are full from paying for regular international travel.
Every step I've made has meant breaking ties with the people who weren't happy to see me move on. Now I find myself at the glass ceiling and this time there's very real pressure from above to stay where I'm at. Rich people may let you in the door occasionally but it will be on their terms. It's up to you as a person to decide if you're willing to contort yourself to their demands. Yes you can "hit it big" with a startup or something but there's a lot of chance involved in that. At this stage you're best off living below your means and investing since upper middle class people have a pretty meaningful revenue stream. Just not enough to call it quits and retire.
The upper class looks down on nerds, especially technology nerds, just as much as if not more than the lower class does.
If we're stereotyping, intellectualism is largely a middle class phenomenon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272553
"Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class"
"There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won"
I notice a sort of cognitive dissonance with them though. It's undeniable that technology is powerful and many of the richest people in the world got there through tech. I don't think "old money" has quite digested what that means to them and it generally causes discomfort.
I don't think that it's about the difficulty of math/computers/science; it's about the goal of the degree. A liberal arts degree is not a vocational credential: it means that one has been taught to think (literally, the 'liberal arts' are those studies useful to a free man, not an employee). If you have a math or chemistry degree, that can still be upper-class so long as you're not intending to make your money in math or chemistry; it's when you had to study a subject so that you can afford to live that you mark yourself as not upper class.
I have certainly heard that having one set of grandparents from the working class Gran started in service and Granddad was a coalminer then a buss driver.
however, if you are wealthy, you can buy an upper class lifestyle, and your children will be upper class, while you will not be.
in other words, their peers that they grew up with will accept them as upper class (meaning they had an upper-class upbringing), while their parents still consider you to be an up-and-comer, because you did not.
once you realize this, it's a much healthier situation because you stop trying to make that final jump. and once you stop trying to make that jump, both your upper middle and upper class friends will be more comfortable around you.
in other words, once you make it to upper middle, it's not worth worrying over. it's better to just focus on the money to make your family's life comfortable without worrying about social details. money defines everything under upper class; birth and upbringing defines the upper class.
by the time your children's children come around, everyone will have forgotten about you, and the new normal will have taken hold.
that last jump can only be given by birth -- which, if you stop and think about it, is exactly how it works, right?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2017/07/13/the-c...
Can you expand on this? Interested in what examples you can provide.
I also find that one of the doors that might be available to someone from a lower class is hedonism. There's a lot of partying going on and if you're willing, that's an avenue to access. I'm not willing.
My interests are very much middle/upper middle class geek though and that's definitely something that the upper classes aren't very comfortable with. I'm not interested in a lot of the thinking that comes out of high end private liberal arts schools for instance. Really a focus on math/computers/science is generally not an upper class thing. I like media but not "art".
There are tons of intentional and unintentional barriers for class mobility.
Here are the socially accepted ways that class mobility is rigged for developers specifically:
* A royalty-free tech culture. Since successful software is often exponential we don't get the meat of the value we create at a job. This could be compensated for with stock, but it's not because of the next point.
* Common stock/preferred stock. Employees get the worse of the two. Ask the Uber employees about this, where they had to pay income tax on an illiquid asset. Followed by a liquidation event that they could only participate in if they were accredited investor status.
* Accredited investor status. This states you must already be rich to make early stage investments. This is an important one because the best time to invest in a world-changing company is as soon as you can. As developers we've had to sit on the sidelines and watch investors get rich from obvious good ideas like github, airbnb, uber, sendgrid, facebook, etc while being told we can't put disposable income into the market because we didn't have enough of it. For instance, $1000 in facebook seed round today would be millions. Note that you can dedicate 2-4 years of your life for a very small portion of a different stock class. I fully expect the SEC to try to stop people investing in cryptocurrencies with the same scheme.
* Class-based social status. Your broke friends and family will come to you whenever there is a problem. They are more likely to be addicts and gamblers(statistically). If you help them and things go wrong and you stop helping them, they will hate you. If you refuse to help them you will feel like the worst person in the world. The 'crabs in a bucket' mentality op pointed out is real.
* Income tax. This is a hotly debated topic since often rich people are paid well. But for a poor person who is paid well one year, it's brutal. Not to mention your estimated taxes come from last years income, so if you have a bad year after a good one you will be forced to loan the government a ridiculous amount of money. Which you _might_ get back, eventually, at 0% apr. Don't try this the other way though, they can charge 5% apr a month plus fees.
* Capital gains tax. Often on assets which lack liquidity.
* Inflation. Having access to inflation is having access to variable taxes on the entire population of usd holders. The rich will have a majority of their money in assets.
* Game-able taxes. Taxes are completely context-dependent and no sane engineer would design it this way. The rich can afford people to play the games, which only makes sense at higher valuations.
* College. There are good things about going to college, but 2 years of "core curriculum", obscene costs, and unforgivable student debt are not part of them.
* Marriage. It's expensive. Having a family more so.
* Lack of identity theft protection. When this happens you get victim blamed and treated like a criminal. If you have money you can pay someone qualified to fix it, if not, good luck.
* Health insurance. If you want to start a company you better be okay with poor insurance since it's tied to your employer.
* Highly politicized culture. Society is willing to hurt people out who have controversial ideas that contradict the norm. These are often just working stiffs, not the decision makers. See James Damore.
* Fixed wages. Wages have not increased exponentially even though the power of individuals has.
Honestly I think almost all of it is intentional, like how the big tech companies colluded on engineer pay.
The system being rigged is why I believe in cryptocurrency in the long term. Sure there are scams and problems, but the alternative is to play an unfair game.
As a creator if you have an idea for a currency you can release it without permission, and if people like it they will give you money.
The alternatives are bootstrapping, which is exhausting and what I've done. Have rich friends - you likely won't if you are poor. Or get accepted to some investment signaling filter like YC where you get to run as fast as you can for months while uprooting your life.
Edit: It won't let me reply to you, but ya I think ICOs can be legit. See ETH, WTC, SNM. There are bad actors too, but at it's best it's a way to route investment capital to creators regardless of socio-economic condition or location. You are correct that you have to tie the value of the chain back to they success of the product somehow. One way would be to share dividends.
Moreover, I don't see how ICOs offer anything to people without a lot of disposable income. They are simply too high risk for anyone who doesn't already have quite a bit of money they can afford to lose. At best they offer a way for people who are already in the top 1/3 of income earners to speculate and find greater fools among the slightly more wealthy.
Am I missing some fundamental value of ICOs as an instrument for investment?
Try it today.
but we can die trying : ).
What I'd really like to see is a similar table with smaller bucket sizes- namely, I'd like to see the intergenerational migration rates on the higher buckets. If we start seeing higher retention rates on the higher buckets and less entry into them from lower buckets, then we might be headed into a more fixed-class situation.
Can't find the exact one I'm thinking of, but the visualization halfway down the page here shows expected income quintile as a function of your parents' income and location: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
This youtube video also shows expected income quintiles based on the income quintile you've been born into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2XFh_tD2RA (about a minute in)
1. Figuring out how to get a degree in Computer Science. (I chose a state school UIC)
2. Getting a Job in CS (I worked at the school I had classes from and then transitioned to a real job locally).
The way I did it was taking my resume and applying to jobs I believe I was qualified in. I taught myself web development in high school and continued to be interested in it. I went to meetups to network with people.
All of this wouldn't be possible without my mom having a job at the local grocery store. Or my parents supporting me when I was getting my degree.
But then again, it might just be that when someone has a child, they set them up to move up instead of themselves. They sacrifice their chance for their children. Otherwise they would have the capital to do it themselves.
Obviously I’m just thinking out loud. It just seems that it’s more common for someone’s child to get an education and eventually rise above their parents. If you have children, they might have a chance at an Ivy League school or something like that which they will then have the chance to rise above you.
Sometimes they couldn't pay for heat to get fixed. Or all the times I ate Ramen.
Or the fact that I wanted to be a MCS major but really had to have a CS degree.
But, I know many people that I went to school with who were unable to do so and had the same opportunities that I did. Or had more money than me and couldn't get a job after they graduated. Even the people that I had the same high school weren't able to do that. They had more money than me. They were smarter than me. The only thing I can see that I had more than them was grit and determination. My intelligence wasn't even in their league.
I chose CS because I knew that an average person in CS could get a average job and the demand would be there when I graduated. My life is a constant hedge against the future.
Growing up poor has kept me grounded to the struggles of the working poor, even as my income has gone up many multiples since I started working.
0. Having your parents immigrate to a country with better opportunities.
It also focuses on the east coast experience. Anyone who has lived in the US for any length of time knows that "social societies" in the US have a variety of roots, whether it is the bloodlines of the deep south, the money makers of wall street, the entertainment moguls of LA, or the tech whizzes of the North west.
I don't have visibility into other areas but I know that with just Apple, Facebook, and Google they have moved thousands of people from having a negative net worth, to having a net worth in excess of a $1M. You meet them when they go to seminars about diversifying one's wealth, or at events that have been expressly targeted to HNWI[1] types.
And "Class Passing", a reference perhaps to a practice where light skinned blacks would present themselves as white to avoid discrimination? If that is what they were going for its a bit provocative is it not? Especially for what is essentially a story that says "Some of the people we need/want to hang out with for social reasons are really annoying/irritating/offensive." That has nothing to do with 'wealth' or 'class' and everything to do with groups that self identify with offensive traits or values.
An interesting story is one where you are suddenly much wealthier or much less wealthy than people in your current social group that you like. How do you keep those relationship vital and alive in the presence of this disparate wealth. I have watched many people struggle with that and some master it effortlessly. I'd love to collect those stories and pull out the essence of how to make that work in an accessible way.
[1] "High Net Worth Individual." You know that this is what the market thinks you are when you get a box of artisan chocolate with a brochure describing a service for providing private air transportation on demand for you and your friends.
The myth is that of social mobility (upwards and downwards) based on merit, being the primary way that society stratifies itself.
I have seen an inverse relationship between hard work and wealth within people I know, and even periods of my own life.
http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html
A high net worth is helpful but insufficient for gaining entry to the higher class. It can also work against you, if you’re too visible with your money and spend it frivolously. For example, buying brand name designer clothing is not a traditionally “high class activity”, and would mark you as being, at best, nouveau riche.
The modern class structure is very complex, but can more or less be broken down to the following:
1. The “out of sight upper class”, who mostly keep to themselves and stay out of the public eye, especially as a reaction to public perception after the Great Depression. They are typically wealthy but not necessarily billionaires, and they live off of their capital instead of any particular profession. To be in this class, formally speaking, you must have been a part of the upper class for a couple of generations. You accelerate access into this class by elevating your family through e.g. high political achievement.
2. The upper class, who understand that they are not the true upper class. The nouveau riche with the potential to join the out of sight class also fall in here. Their children or grandchildren might be members of the out of sight class if their upbringing is “correct”. They have wealth or status, but have not had it for very long. Depending on their proclivities, they might not ever join the out of sight class because they’re too “visible”, for lack of a better word. These are traditionally doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and these days, software engineers. They have “respectable” careers and diversify themselves from the majority of their professional peers.
3. The middle class, who traditionally experience anxiety about their place in the class system, and who are encouraged to raise their status through their professional achievements. They associate high class with high class “things”, like brand name furniture, but don’t fully internalize the nuances of what makes for a high status individual. By definition, they can’t really perceive the true lifestyle of the upper class, which is why they associate it with things that are only externalities of its members.
4. The lower class, who are mostly incapable of differentiating between wealth and class, even if specifically told about it. They typically lack education and are very nearly always impoverished. But importantly, even a wealthy person can be a member of the lower class if they share its lifestyle and understanding of the class system. Many nouveau riche who earned their wealth through the entertainment industry and who are exceptionally visible are essentially barred from being part of the upper class.
The modern suit is very illustrative of the nuances in the hierarchy. A middle class individual might “splurge” on a suit from Mens Wearhouse. A low class individual will buy a suit from a highly visible fashion brand, like Armani. An upper class individual will buy a suit and have it tailored to fit, probably from a less “loud” designer in Neiman Marcus or Nordstrom. The out of sight class will wear bespoke suits from a tailor on Saville Row, or a similarly understated venue of high prestige.
If this all sounds exceptionally pretentious, that’s because it is. The class system does not revolve around money, it revolves around prestige. It is mostly associated with money because that’s politically expedient on the national stage. That said, wealth is something of a class multiplier - it is difficult to remain in the middle class once you’re wealthy, and more often than not you’ll end up in either the lower class or the upper class depending on your lifestyle and spending habits.
It's something I'm confronting as a mid 20s middle class guy dating a girl from the upper, upper middle class...older folks have a lot of strange expectations for marriage, what it means, and how to make it successful.
"I'm OK with who I am, and I don't need to look down on anybody to feel OK about myself" sets you free from a lot of the games that are played in the name of "class". (It doesn't make it easier to feel like you fit with other people, but it makes it so that you don't have to try to move to (or stay in) some particular class.)
Odd how people in suits keep seeming to meet with our CEO then. I guess they all get kicked out? Poor guys.
The so-called high-class are born rich. They never had to work hard for what they have. You can be pretty sure they couldn't. Most poor people do stay poor, after all.
If you made your own fortune, then you're objectively better than most of them. In fact, they do not deserve your time.