Asia's new aristocrats
economist.com
economist.com
My father and mother both came from rural areas, where mud huts were not uncommon. Even in China, my dad didn't eat rice until he was in his teens. My father did extremely well on the national exams and managed to get into a university with most of his expenses paid by the socialist system at the time. After getting a PHD, he immigrated to the US with me.
Having visited China a few times with my family, I met some quite successful businessmen, all of whom have humble roots in poor countryside villages. Some of them didn't even graduate from elementary school, but due to connections with the government (the military for example), they managed to start businesses and acquire factories during the time of China's economic growth.
There are a lot of rag-to-riches stories in China, but at the same the time, the sheer size of the population means that there are even more stories of poverty. In my father's family, only he and one of his brothers out of a family of 6 or 7 managed to escape the rural area. Although life is getting better even in the rural areas, it seems there is a massive difference between the skyscrapers of Shanghai and a traditional farming village.
It is quite amazing that your father's university was covered by the government, and in a logistical sense, good to see that they want to promote intellectual pursuits.
Also, when you leave a country you emigrate :)
I hope you are living a good life!
What did he eat?
In India obviously we do not have anything like that, but there is a hint of resentment towards outside people who throng cities for jobs. North Indians were beaten up in Mumbai. You will hear faint sigh of a Bangalorean, how city has lost its culture and beauty. A Bank clerk in Chennai - for example can no longer afford auto rickshaw fair.
Allow prices to rise until people stop coming. For traffic specifically, impose congestion prices and raise them until the traffic reaches a reasonable level [1]. Allow the same process to occur with rents, food prices, etc.
Also, don't impose unnecessary regulations which would prevent construction to increase capacity.
[1] If the price is high enough, it will make financial sense to increase capacity.
Only a very few would claim "working class" status, and typically, that's claimed for ideological reasons, not actual tradesman or craftsman membership.
Your social class is defined by the people you associate with, typically in terms of wealth and culture.
Some people do not have a well-defined social class. Others may associate only with financial and cultural elites, etc. etc.
Virtually everyone or their direct ancestors earned their wealth in China and India, honestly or otherwise.
A social class is a cross-section of the population that shares an economic banding and cultural values.
That is, yuppies (middle-upper class professionals, frequently white or asian in the US), the working rich (MBA grads and entrepreneurs that built their wealth and frequently must continue working in order to maintain their status).
How old are you?
You'll notice that the specific category was "working rich". Corporate CEOs generally lose access to a lot of their income and wealth building avenues when they stop working, even if it scarcely means anything to their quality of life.
I don't consider my hackernews commentary to be research-grade so you'll excuse me if my precision isn't turned up to 11.
I use shortcuts. I trust the community here to be competent enough to know what I mean without some kind of pedant-autistic nitpicker harassing me every single bloody time I'm even slightly imprecise in discussing a subject in a way that isn't even remotely important.
I am exhausted with that tendency here.
I am exhausted with that tendency here.
Well said.
The answer to your question is, "it depends". It depends on their socioeconomic class and how many MBAs they know. It might also depend on how much class/profession specific resentment they feel towards MBA holders.
The poor are going to universally consider anyone with a business-oriented graduate degree to be rich, to a fault. There's little deviation you're going to find there unless you encounter the occasional circumspect/self-educated exception.
The middle class would probably vary wildly, depending on who they associated with. (A lot of the middle class don't associate with people of their exact quintile, so a lot of it's going to depend on whether they're looking up or down.)
No hard answers for you though.
The phenomena of nontransferable property rights exists only in a few parts of the US, so most Americans are unfamiliar with it. NY is one such place - claims on public housing or occupancy in a rent control apartment are a form of property rights (it's very difficult to deprive you of them) which is not transferable. NY is also one of the rare places where we have land used by very rich people directly adjacent to land hugely underused by it's occupants [1].
Most of the US is better run than NY, so phenomena like this are absent from most people's experience.
[1] Most of the value of the land is caused by it's proximity to institutions like GS or Bloomberg, but the lower middle class occupants of public housing and retirees living in rent controlled apartments do not make use of this proximity. Thus, the land is underused.
A development of the middle class and a wider gap between said middle class and the upper class?
I wasn't really expecting to read the word "gazillionaires" in an economist article. Has to mark some sort of a first for the publication.