“An Outer Party member could reach the Inner Party by chancing into an early job at a lottery-ticket company (such as Facebook or Google) or by becoming a successful entrepreneur. But that’s rare; most of the Outer Party prefers working for the Inner Party, gradually accumulating equity through stock grants and appreciating real estate.” -If you look at the bios of VC “inner party” people, very few were born VC. Many became VC based on their work experience. The quote calls this a “lottery-ticket” experience implying that there’s no free will involved with the shift between statuses.
The article also calls out the difficulty of moving from service to skilled worker “outer party”-“The Service Class will likely never be able to drive/shop/handyman enough to rise to the Outer Party, at least not without additional training or skills.“
This is really odd because how else would you change status of not through training or skills? Complaining about randomness for skilled->VC and also about need for education for service->skilled seems like a mixed message.
Caste means a rigid hierarchy with no ability to change or even being born into ones status and no or limited marriage between castes [0]. This is not the case based on the level of mobility into and out of status that clearly breaks the definition of caste. This old paper from 1999 shows 24% of firms led by just Chinese or Indian immigrants [1]. So obviously they could not have been born into Silicon Valley castes if they are new to the US altogether.
The mobility to enter, exit, and change between these four defined statuses seems, to me, to disprove the entire premise of this article.
Perhaps the article would be more accurate if addressing issues of wealth and wealth segmenting social constructs like marriage, socialization within communities, etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste [1] http://wwww.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_502ASR.pdf