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Comment by alexgmcm | Hacker News Reader

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.

The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it.

I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or wealth (real estate, investments etc.)

I think the insistence of many people that they aren't "working class" is bad as it prevents them from seeing what is really in their best interests.

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You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.

Class B is a different species. If they stop working, their money will still go up, indefinitely due to passive investments. The idea of getting to $0 is ridiculous because they get richer every day by doing nothing. Class B’s lifestyle is totally different than Class A.

Class A people like to invent all these other sub-classes to distance themselves from others in Class A: middle class. Upper middle class. Lower middle class. Middle upper middle class. It’s all pretty silly. We all have much more in common with each other than we do with people who get richer every day simply by existing.

You mean young people and old people, working age vs retirees. For the most part, that’s how wealth works. The more years a person works, the closer they are to group b. If young people had the same wealth as older people, that would be horrific!

Most retirees are racing against the clock still - they aren't getting ever richer, and instead crunched the numbers and retired with what they hope is enough to get them to their deaths.

Wealth is a side effect of age. Most millionaires and billionaires are seniors. Despite being in the top percentile in terms of capital, most millionaires they don’t feel financially secure, regardless of their age. I think that insecurity is understandable.

You nailed it. There was a thread on economics and Piketty's work which summed it up well: do you live off your labor? Or your capital? The comparison perfectly matches your description of Class A and B. The only way for us A folks to get ahead is to acquire capital.

Well put, but I'd argue it's the Class B people who invented all the sub-classes for Class A. Class A just passively accepts those divisions thinking that it is of their own ideas and doing--it's not. This is a very important distinction. It's through these divisions that Class A controls Class B. These divisions are not just of social class but also of race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Basically all the hate points of bigots are power plays by Class B to keep people in Class A down. Class A people that hate each other and create conflicts between each other are the bread and butter of control that Class B depends on to keep this charade going. Without those people stirring shit up, Class A might actually realize what's happening and call for heads of Class B to literally roll. It's happened in the past, but the same order reestablishes itself over and over throughout history.

>It's through these divisions that Class A controls Class B.

Um, did you accidentally mix those two up? I think you meant Class B controls Class A. No?

Ah yes, in one sentence there I did. B, the rich, control A, everyone else.

Does anyone know if there is existing terminology for Class A/B ? Investor class / working class ? Or maybe capital class / labor class.

The typically discussed classes in the US are lower, middle, upper which I always took to be one std below the mean income (lower) and one std above mean income (upper). Perhaps if we used mean days until $0 dollars in the bank if you stopped working it would be more useful.

They're generally referred to Bourgeoisie (for Class A) and Proletariat (for Class B). I can understand the hesitation in using those terms directly, as they're quite politically charged.

Crap I got this backwards, but I'm sure you still get the idea.

In the Anglo-American world "class" has a connotation of social standing and cultural position; probably because of the quasi-feudal meaning of "class" in the British isles (something you're born into). So few people in North America consider themselves "working class" for that reason.

However in the classic socialist sense of the world, or in other parts of the world, "working class" often just means "work for someone else."

And in that definition even I, an overpaid Google employee, am "working class"

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