Class Bullshitters
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Personally, I don't care if someone has rich parents. Covering for it in this way felt a bit like unearned prestige, though.
I don’t think kids or parents necessarily see it as some kind of scheme, probably it’s more like the parents want their kids to be successful, but the kids don’t have any idea what to do and are super comfortable having their rent paid + a parent’s credit card + a salary paid for by their parent’s investments, so they don’t really try that hard because there are no consequences for failure. And the parents don’t care too much either because they’re proud their kid has a business and think it’ll be valuable experience even if it doesn’t do well.
Kids doing drugs in rich families are very common as a way to handle the insane pressure. It's just that "Drugs Don't Work".
It’s hard for young people to just be rich.
Now that private enterprise is the hallmark of wealth/status instead of nobility, we have bullshit businesses. I’ve run into several of these people myself and it always takes me a while to figure out where the money’s coming from until it clicks. I’ve also seen these be quite common for wives (don’t mean to be sexist here, but I don’t know if examples for husbands) of rich men to do, either through straight up grift a la Newmann’s wife or something very very lifestyley like interior design or crafting.
What’s worse is that a lot of these fake entrepreneurs are in tech now too. Some of them are even “serial entrepreneurs”. I’m sure VC people run into them a lot, and I’m also sure a lot of them are actually talented and know what they’re doing, but to me too much involvement of the Bank of Mom and Dad makes a person/company lose a lot of legitimacy.
"Some experts say you are American middle class if you made between $51,200 to $153,000 in 2020."
what was the middle class income in the year that Bezos got the money?
I guess it seems reasonable to say though that actual median middle class is around 100,000 so the parent poster's question remains, where are they going to get the money. Well probably take a loan on the house for their son's crazy new-fangled internet scheme I guess, that seems unlikely.
So practically speaking, a small syndicate of middle class families (4-5) could reasonably found Amazon. Probably not one alone. Although I echo corndoge in that anyone describing 50-150k as the middle class income range is being polite rather than realistic about what what the class is.
yep, it sure would be possible in theory. Although in practice I don't think that's how it is for most people.
Also in a range of 50 - 150k obviously you have to assume that 50k is in the poorest parts of the country, and of course there is nothing saying that only nuclear families or larger can be middle class so I guess, a young single guy could be middle class.
so let's say
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/how-much-to...
California $111,206 $80,440
Tennessee $50,629 $56,071
In the case of Tennessee you might be earning enough at 50k a year to be ok, but it seems unlikely that in your region and class you will be getting the chance to invest in Amazon.
on edit: the money per year, first number middle class income in region, second number median income in region
At any rate a family I am going to suggest a family of three with 120,000 a year is probably around the same as young single guy with 50,000 a year. Which is just barely middle class.
I don't think the barely middle class is investing in anything (except for the ones with superhuman discipline, which I know some), and the ones who are actually in the middle of the middle class probably aren't going to have enough to fund early Amazon either, my disagreement was basically with the opinion that the middle class was much higher than 50k.
It was a bit over the top, but uncomfortably close to the truth.
Would 4-5 families really pool all their savings for 10 years to invest in one childs potential business?
Maybe. I think what is more likely is that 250k would represent a portion of the money a family could save and then put at risk. I would say this adds another order of magnitude on the earnings needed to be able to do this.
So I don't think it's worth quibbling over whether 50k or 100k is middle class. To do this I honestly think your parental income needs to be $1M+ a year.
However, IIRC his parents came on as investors in the same round at the same term as other non-family investors. So really it may have been more like Bezos giving his parents access to the deal of the century rather than his parents giving a leg up to Jeff.
This did not pass the sniff test for me, so I plugged $250k into usinflationcalculator.com, with a year of 1993. It came up with $486k. I think your estimates are off by a factor of 2 to 4.
I think the sort of person that just has that amount of available cash stretches most definitions of "Middle Class".
They do tend to have the same thing in common: flashy IG posts and the constant refrain of “work hard, play hard”.
I know people who are Gilmore Girls-style "old money" rich, and it's as much the fault of the parents as anybody else.
These kids, despite having IQ, diligence and other success-correlated traits being normally distributed just like everyone else, are under unbelievably immense pressure to be ridiculously "successful".
When the private tutoring and strings pulled aren't enough to get them over the line, these kids need _something_ to save face and be a success for their parents. For some, it's some bullshit managerial position. For those that can't even manage this, it's "entrepreneurship".
For these rich kids to do a job that they'd actually be well-suited for (say, retail worker or truck driver) would be social suicide for the parents and destroy the relationship they have with their family.
The corporate types are all quite cookie-cutter post-aspirational. They run marathons or do some other intensive sports, (mostly) the women play a musical instrument to a near-professional standard, they seem to have an intuitive grasp of how stocks, property, and investment markets work, they're terribly positive and friendly and charming.
The cultural types can be quite good in a limited niche, and they're often collected as trophy spouses by the other types.
The other types you'll meet are military officers - usually male - who are similar to the corporate types but more sporty without much of a cultural side (some of them enjoy consuming.)
And Notable Media Professionals who are a subset of the creative type. They somehow land astoundingly well-paid media jobs as high-profile journalists or writers, despite no evidence of deep insight or investigative ability. And a relatively light workload. (Maybe one article a week, and a few festival appearances a year.) At the very top of the tree they fall into media management at the highest levels - running newspapers and media channels.
All of these jobs are very, very difficult to get into for anyone from a genuinely working class background. They're also marked by very rigid conformity. These people all know how to play the game, and they're incredibly sensitive to insider/outsider status markers.
The idea that someone merely middle class with some working class family history could use the latter as a diversity lever to vault into them is simply nonsense.
That said, as you figured out, it doesn’t take long for people to identify who the trustafarian’s are in a group. I’m solidly upper middle-class myself but I grew up around a mix of old-money and new-money people, so it didn’t take long for me to figure out, once I got to New York, that any Smith grad working as a busker or doing burlesque while living roommate-free in a 1BR in the West Village or a 2BR in Prospect Height, had rich parents. Because only people with benefactors can do that. But I didn’t know too many trustafarian’s who would pretend to be self-made. They just didn’t advertise that it was daddy who was paying the Amex bill. But if you’re 25, working as a candle maker, and you have a Platinum card, well, we can all do the math and know what’s up. Also, if you went to an elite college and aren’t actively working in a high-paying industry, let alone in anything associated with your nebulously-defined liberal arts degree, well, again. Of course you have rich parents. Also, those are the people who are never complaining about student loans, unlike the gaggle of very vocal NYU, Columbia and New School grads who are trying to figure out how they can pay off $250,000 in loans while working at Vice. (The answer is most of them cannot and will wind up taking corporate jobs within 5 years.)
But NYC is even further different because there are so many levels of inherited wealth/rich parents. The person who has parents paying for their nice apartment and lifestyle, but is still pursuing a niche creative pursuit, is very different from the uber-rich young adult who has a job — even if it is in name-only — at the family-controlled business or who devotes their time to being on the board of a charity or museum. These are the people that have private planes and summer in the most exclusive parts of the Hamptons, have European vacation homes, where expensive (but understated) clothing and jewelry, attend frequent black tie galas, grew up in Greenwich and hang out almost exclusively with other people just like them, who come from families with hundreds of millions of dollars. Which are further different from the more west-coast like people that are children of parents who made their millions in tech or Hollywood and flaunt their wealth with zero pretense of where it came from, all over Instagram. Which is further different from the non-European foreign-born rich kids whose parents might have more money than everyone else, but don’t have the social class acceptance of that second group.
"Housewife jobs" are structurally similar.
I'm based in Europe and work U.S. hours, so I usually have my mornings and early afternoons for leisure activities, including riding my horse. This means I travel a fair bit in social circles comprised mostly of middle-aged women who don't have regular jobs.
If you ask those women their job or, with a slight lack of tact, even ask directly how they make a living, it's usually something like yoga teacher, photographer, landscape designer, etc.
Initially, I always walked away from these interactions thinking something like: Wow, you must be a really good landscape designer, if you can actually make a living at it, and have the time and money for two horses at a pricey stable.
Later, I realized that these occupations are mostly fronts they put up because it's not socially acceptable these days for a woman to have a husband who does most of the earning for the shared household.
What you do is: You take some online class on landscaping and tell your girlfriend (the one who you're regularly giving $100-christmas-gifts to) that you're now a trained landscape designer. You do a bit of consulting for her by making a few suggestions about what flowers would look good on her front yard and have her pay $30 for the privilege of having consulted a trained landscape designer. From now on, whenever someone asks you your job, you no longer need to say "housewife", but you can say "landscape designer". If someone walks away with the misconception that you actually make enough money from your landscape designing to pay for your lifestyle, then that's just a misconception that you're under no moral obligation to straighten out.
The problem: This sort of behaviour is not really advancing the cause of feminism at all.
Because now, when a man tells me he's a landscape designer, I assume he makes enough money as a landscape designer to pay for his lifestyle. When a woman tells me she's a landscape designer, I assume it's a front and she really just has a rich husband who pays for everything.
In the larger sense, it's absolutely toxic, because it projects a wholly unrealistic vision. People see others "succeeding", and blame themselves for "failing" when in reality, the "failures" don't realize that the "successes" were bankrolled by parents/spouses.
It is of course possible to succeed without the benefit of being bankrolled, but our weirdo faux-entrepreneur class makes it really challenging for others to understand what it takes or their odds of success.
I'm glad someone else gets this. I would have a real-talk conversation with some of those friends about this, but it was really hard to get it across.
"People really look up to you, and aspire to do what you do."
"Oh that's awesome!"
"No, not awesome. They won't be able to. They don't have the advantages you do."
"Are you mad that I have money?"
"No, you're great. It's just that people won't have a realistic idea of what it takes to get where you are, if they think all you do is take photos for a living."
"Hmm. Is this important? I have to get ready for other thing."
They would assume it had something to do with jealousy, so I mostly stopped bothering.
Isn't the real problem that it is socially unacceptable to not have a job, even if you are a housewife, mother or even househusband. We have gone from women not having the choice to work to not having the choice to not work.
If we're talking solely of the class of people who own horses kept in upscale stables and have the leisure time to ride them daily, then perhaps for them simply maintaining a household and raising children isn't enough and they feel idle if they don't pretend to have jobs because they can pay full time maids and nannies and maintaining a household and raising children really isn't time consuming and leaves them too much idle time. That is hardly a common position to be in, though.
I’ll say it clearer for anyone who missed that: luck.
A lot of social issues in the uk are primarily class based, you won’t even be aware of the jobs you’ll be looked over for because you didn’t go to the right school, and those “right schools” pre-select based on background.
“Daddy is a barrister, I guess we let this one in?!”
In the event you are born with privilege you prefer to be underestimated, I don’t think I’ve met many upper class people who are genuinely happy being removed from the masses. Maybe it’s a grass is always greener thing.
Myself, I speak with a middle class accent, desperate not to be thrown back to where I came from.
It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that other people in other professions don't have to deal with.
Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's extremely accessible.
Nothing unhealthy about recognizing one’s luck and being correspondingly grateful for it.
It's luck that you like something that is sought after in the job market. But actually spending years learning about it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much because they are needed for the job, takes effort.
I mean, I did this for fun while I was still in high school. Did I put in a lot of hours? Yes. Were there some frustrating bits? Sure. But I know plenty of people who had to put far more work in to get mediocre grades in their high school qualifications than I've ever put into learning programming.
As an example, over a decade ago, I quit a job with no plans of getting another one. Someone I knew told me about an opportunity (luck / connections), and I pursued it. It was hard at first, but now it is almost a turn-key operation. Still requires work, but far less than it did at the beginning. It has netted me a good tidy sum which has been crucial for living the life I want.
Was it luck? Absolutely. Was it my own ability, hard work, and willingness to take that step? Yes. What would have happened had I said no? No idea, but probably less of a good outcome.
Ideally, one tries to frame one's life to be empowering but not arrogant, not trivializing the difficulty of other's paths. Luck is not empowering. Belief that hard work alone can get you to the height is not empowering. Some mixture of these things, that can be empowering. Understanding that the goal is to be useful to others as well as yourself, that's really empowering.
There's luck involved, but it's only part of the story.
I don't think this is unhealthy. I liked computers, my sibling liked painting... only one of us got a high-paying job and can afford a lot of leisure time and travel. I don't think that it requires shame to acknowledge that luck had something to do with it. Luck is ever-present in our lives.
You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice. Luck would literally have to come and hunt you down at random. If you're pretty good at [whatever] but at the right places (including virtually) and meeting the right people, luck will work far better for you.
In both cases, luck is important. You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly. Which is why we like to say it's important to get used to losing. Because even if you're very good and always in the right places at the right times with the right people - you _still_ need luck.
You just need less luck than someone who isn't showing up every day. And a lot less luck than someone literally doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. But you still need luck.
> You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice.
That is entirely based on luck. Were you born with the correct genetics and environment to get you off your couch or not?
> You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly
There's no difference between getting struck by lightning or being born with the right genetics that give you determination, intelligence, work ethic, etc. All luck.
I don't get this fixation with acknowledging how lucky one is when all of it is luck. We should be concerned with optimizing society so that we get to a point where no human has to struggle any more.
I'm in the same boat: loved computers early on and had no interest in pursuing them professionally (I was eight when I started programming). It's lucky because I could just as well have loved botany, or auto mechanics, or pottery, etc but I happened to pick the one that later in life was in high demand.
Sure, yeah, I worked hard, but not because "I want to make MONEY when I get older!" but simply because I had the interest (and supportive parents...luck again). The alignment of my early interests and market conditions today are 100% luck. And that's what you need: to be in the right place at the right time. I'd attribute my success to 10% personal factors and 90% external factors.
You still need to work your ass off for that 10%, but the other 90% is all out of your hands, and it's ok to acknowledge this (and that doesn't mean you feel guilty). In fact, if we ever want to create a world where the ratio is not 90/10, but 80/20 or 60/40 or dare I say 50/50, we need to acknowledge just how much of our lives is out of our control.
I guess just be grateful, don’t take your current circumstances for granted, and try and be kind to others if you can.
I think a lot of life is luck and it’s ok to admit that. I hate it when people who got lucky reject that idea and try to make you believe that it’s all hard work and if other people only worked hard they could achieve the same. I know enough people who simply don’t have the talent to do what I can do and there are plenty of things I can’t do no matter how hard I work.
I am also lucky that I have decent looks so it’s not too hard to find a partner despite my often painful shyness and awkwardness. Other people aren’t that lucky.
Your post is one of the more direct renderings of that point of view: you don't really argue that the parent post is wrong, merely that it's not a healthy way to frame it. Which makes me curious: why do you believe that it is bad for someone to believe that their success is largely caused by luck?
As an aside, personally I subscribe to this view on the interaction of luck and success: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
It's the upper-middle class who are really uncomfortable with their social position.
This would probably hold true if I were going just based on the rich people I knew through work since most of them I've interacted with as a representative of my organization (which they have some interest in), so you'd be correct that there's a motive there.
On the other hand, I'm a talented peasant who went to a public school system of ~30 kids per grade. Setting aside IQ's usefulness as a measure, I had an IQ of ~145, which meant I was not socializing with the other kids the way I should have, and it also meant that (once the tests identified it), most adults were not interested in addressing my arrogance or mistreatment of other people. I very clearly remember in late elementary school, I viewed my classmates very similarly as I did to intelligent dogs. I can see a very similar thing happening to the one wealthy kid in, say, an Appalachian school. Sure, you're all nominally equals, but if the teachers need to go to your parents for help with the school supplies, you're not going to be disciplined in the same manner as other children, and wealthy parents teach their children to use their social status.
I'd be wary of solving social isolation between classes by opening up more ability for local fiefdoms to pop up. (Think of local business owners that are POSes to their employees because they know their only other option is Walmart.) From the point of view of the average citizen, neither type of ruler/elite is good to deal with.
No, on money.
If you come into a hundred million overnight, that doesn’t make up for your previously deprived life and the associated markers (lower register, lack of childhood polo lessons, no time/money/inclination to go play white saviour in the third world)
So yes, money is the trick, but it’s not worth it. I burned out at school hard because I’d been going at it for so long.
I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when I was born, my father's experience meant he could help me with coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc. to do anything).
I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates. We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that really took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports instead of tearing open tvs.
We're Michiganders.
Meh, not necessarily. I like to tinker, but I wouldn't say I do it to provide value for anyone (and throwing something on GitHub won't provide value to almost anyone)
That seems like a massive assumption about people you don't know.
IMO, a more likely explanation is that people just tend to do the things that their brains find rewarding. I like programming because it feels like playing a puzzle game, so I'll do it for fun. For lots of other people the idea of sitting behind a computer all day solving abstract problems is pure torture.
Doing the dishes on the other hand is not mentally stimulating so I kind of avoid it until I have to do them. So my place usually isn't as clean or tidy as it could be. I also know people who enjoy the process of cleaning and tidying, and their place is always clean and tidy.
I don't think these people are more virtuous than I am for keeping their place cleaner, nor do I think that I'm more virtuous than others because I enjoy programming and can make things that they cannot. None of this is caused by abstract pondering about one's value to society. We just follow the reward structure of our brains.
My grandfather was born in 1919, and the parts of TVs he liked weren't the entertaining or cool parts. Furthermore, his obsession was actually detrimental to fulfilling his social role: My father says that his father wasn't good with money in part because he spent too much of it on things to tinker with, and he was socially not the most ept guy.
It was this way for other classes too:
My class background is complicated because my mother is from a decently well-off family but cut off contact and bailed at 15. One example from her childhood/family, however, is that one of her relatives was a tenured academic who helped found the academic study of pop culture. On the other hand, this was something he did after winning a Pulitzer and getting tenure for more serious work.
It's easy to forget, but 2-3 generations ago a tech interest was seen as a potentially useful eccentricity at best outside of a very few select sectors.
Which incidentally made me a bit racist until I overcame that, because ultimately it’s nobodies fault.
I have no “absentee dad who helped out” and my family all died before I was 5 leaving behind a pitiful inherentence that barely covered their burials.
I get what you’re saying. But the reason it pisses me off is that while I have been extremely lucky, I sometimes wish to speak to my friends who were not so lucky and did not escape like I have. Having people discredit my lived experience or pretending as if it was the same for then us not helping them or me.
At the US office you just parked in the first available spot. In the UK office there were assigned parking spots for anyone with a management position closest to the door, roughly sorted by tittle. And the accents sounded a little bit different (for the British employees) between engineering and management and sales.
Central London, absolutely no driving.
Somewhere a bit further out of central London like Sydenham or Ruislip and I can see people driving to the office. If it’s there.
I didn't believe in class until I met rich people and got to know them quite well.
For Dutch people, all I say is: go to Delft for university. The UvA sucks, the VU sucks, Eindhoven sucks, Twente is irrelevant. Tilburg? No. Groningen? What? Rotterdam: only if you're doing Economics. Leiden? Too close to Delft.
I know how it sounds, but a recruiter also only looks 10 seconds at your resume. It shouldn't be this way, especially because uni's in The Netherlands are quite close in quality. But when it comes to recruiting, prestige signaling allows you to get the foot in the door and apparently Delft has the prestige.
It was painful seeing/hearing this and experiencing it second hand as someone who graduated from both universities of Amsterdam (VU and UvA).
Class was invisible to me in The Netherlands, and then I met rich people. I wish I hadn't. Though the people are awesome, so I am really happy knowing them. So on a personal level I wish I had, but in terms of outlook on Dutch society: I don't want to know (what I consider to be) the truth. It's depressing information and I don't know what I can do about it other than knowing that if I ever get kids they'll probably get a massive advantage in learning educational things really young.
Definition of rich: at least fat FIRE.
I agree.
> Hurrah for your class consciousness, feed it.
I don't need to feed it. What I need to do is find interesting specific sub-cultures. That's where the consciousness arises, class is just one of the many.
Hmm… Well, that only works for degrees in engineering, it’s a ‘Technical University’. Also, Delft is probably a great university, but it doesn’t strike me as more prestigious than the other Universities you mention.
For what it’s worth, the members of the Royal family all attended Leiden University. As did the current prime minister. Most ministers of justice in recent history attended Leiden University and were a member of Minerva, a conservative student society.
Still, I wouldn’t consider Leiden a particularly prestigious university—none of the Dutch universities are, because they are all relatively accessible and publicly funded. Instead, the well-connected manage to create their own little groups inside of student life. Like the aforementioned Minerva, which like other student societies (that exist in Delft as well), has students make small clusters (jaarclub, dispuut), with all kinds of barriers to entry. I presume the richest kids cluster together. People then rely on these connections throughout their career.
To me it sounds like you met a group of rich people who were friends in Delft University (and I presume already rich) and relied on this network afterwards: this is a pattern that reproduces itself at other Universities. And inversely, attending Delft University is by no means a guarantee that you can profit from this mechanism.
It’s interesting what you say of not seeing class differences before, I think it’s quite common in The Netherlands. The image the Dutch have of their society is one with very little class differences. This might be a comforting idea in day to day live (as you mention) but it also makes it hard to do something about the unfair situations that persist.
And, for context, I know quite some rich/successful people.
Some families in Christchurch are very proud of being descended from "First Four Shippers" (colonists who arrived on the four ships that started the settlement of Christchurch), and they all try to send their children to the "right" schools (private ones), but the old boys' club is far weaker here (seems to exist mainly in law firms).
And no-one has class related accents (although a private primary school called Medbury, is very proud to teach a particular accent to its pupils, but they typically have it bullied out of them within a year at high school.
The people looking to move to colonies from Britain were typically those who were willing to risk the long sea voyage and the hard grind for a chance to build a better life. And English companies set up to colonise NZ focused on bringing large amounts of the working class so that they could do what was needed to make the "estates of gentlemen" productive.
But then combine the gold rushes[1, 2, 3], the Scottish colonisation of Otago/Õtākou[4], and other people settling who had no ties to the English class system (Irish via Australia, Chinese gold miners, Scandinavians up in Dannevirke), the the English class system was never going to really take hold, although the people who formed the new "upper classes" in terms of property holdings and social status did try to maintain it.
And all that said, the Canterbury Association that formed Christchurch did its best to ensure that Christchurch was the most "English city", it was strongly tied to the Anglican church which was gifted rather large plots of land (as was the Anglican private school, Christ's College[5], still a large landlord in the city), and indeed, the Canterbury diocese still holds a rather large property portfolio[6].
Christchurch is probably the most likely place for people to ask which school you went to, and where going to the same school as your interviewer might open some doors, but it's a lot less prevalent these days, IMO.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_von_Tempsky
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Gold_Rushes
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otago_Gold_Rush
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Gold_Rush
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Otago_Region#Sc...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ%27s_College,_Christchur...
[6]: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/89760490/churchs...
The concern the author of the piece has is that if she says she's working class, it will suggest she overcame adversity to get to where she is, but from your comment, it's possible she grew up in an area with good middle-class-school-district-funded schools. Or maybe she went to a bad school and qualified for financial aid, I don't know.
Our parents' attitudes which you're talking about can affect us, but so does our material circumstances and environment.
In the UK where there's a stronger class based system, middle class is expressed through your accent and dialect, how you dress, etc.
I don’t really understand the subject of the article mattering much in life though. Social class matters a lot in the U.K. but no one asks which class you identify with before they decide how to treat you. Instead, it matters which class you present and I suspect the middle-class-identifying-as-working-class will present as middle class both in obvious ways (e.g. accent, grooming, dress) and more subtle ways (e.g. choice of words or phrases, being able to comfortably/knowledgeably talk about certain things).
I also don’t really understand the politics of class or the class people identify as today. Maybe I just have a simplistic view of history, but it seems the ideas of working/middle/upper classes don’t really fit today’s society and I’m often surprised when I see contemporary political arguments based on this class system.
On any TV show, and in the media in general, there are a few different competition formats (a la Bake Off, The Apprentice, BGT, etc.) but all include a 'sob story' element, particularly near the end as we get to know more about the contestants. Every single person selected by the producers for these shows has some factor in their life that they've overcome to get this far.
Individually, this makes for an engaging TV show, we warm to the characters because they have a good story, but overall the effect is damaging, I think. The effect is to create a system that only allows people to feel successful if they've overcome some terrible adversity. It's not enough to come from a comfortable, middle class background, do well in school and then lead a moderately successful life. What have you really achieved if you've done this?
Most people in the UK live reasonably comfortable, stable lives (modulo class). Since—according to my theory—people need to feel like they have something to overcome in order to be allowed to feel successful, people will overstate hardships, and focus on and amplify negative events and circumstances in their lives in order to feel validated.
And with the infinite torrent of knowledge (including of the amount of suffering in the world) at our fingertips, guilt is an ever-present temptation for anyone with means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_Labour
I'd say though that culture studies today talks about "race, class and gender" but largely ignores class. I know plenty of white people who have black problems including a tendency towards meaningless but dangerous contacts with the police, but if you never got more than 50 miles from the coast you might not know there is such as thing as a hillbilly.
I can’t count the ways people invent criteria, such as “street cred”, to prefer some people upon others. “Humble”, “son of worker”, “comes from the hood” are other criteria people use to justify unfairness. Ironically, streed cred is so cheatable that the only ones we let down are the actual middle classes with strong sense of work, because they pass as supposedly rich. The middle and higher classes end up with heaps of resentment which harms society (I remember events such as a girl telling me “I ruined your reputation at school but I was wrong, you were the good guy. Oh sorry for your high school btw.”)
Class warfare is no good thing.
This is how we got the hilarious "but I don't work!" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZ52-XgUjA
People will lie about their incomes on anonymous surveys. People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent. You can boil this down to:
1. People lying to themselves and then reflecting that lie to others. A common one I see here is, for example, "it only takes me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work". At 1am on a Tuesday with a tailwind maybe. It's a form of cognitive dissonance; and
2. People lying to others. This is for personal gain and because the person cares about how they're perceived by others.
So if you take an example from the post (eg working class family background) it could be either. I've known people who really believe they're working class heroes but they're clearly middle class. It can be woven into their identity. It can just be virtue signaling. It can be to fit in. It can be aspirational.
The 2000 election had Al Gore vilify the "top 1%". A survey at the time found that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be some day. So with this lie they've told themselves (knowingly or not) you've dended up alienating 39% of voters.
Ultimately though a lot of these lies can be reduced to people feeling good about themselves even if that means making other people look bad.
A lot of social media is built on such "flexing". Instagram in particular. Even Tiktok has all these videos where people post these "how am I so amazing?" videos. You just need to realize it's pretty much all lies.
Oh and as for this specific example from the post (ie fetishization of a working-class background in the UK) this is interesting because my experience in the UK was there's a lot of value in signaling your upper class background, how you went to Oxford, Cambridge or Eton, the BBC accent (now this is really the modern RP accent) and so on.
The UK is still quite classist (IME). Up until 20-30 years ago, university applications asked your father's occupation.
Political scientists have had to develop a separate category, along with methods to identify its members, in order to capture actual "swing voters", for related reasons. Lots of folks like to classify themselves as "centrist" or "independent" or "on the fence" or what have you, while in fact voting party line every single time just as reliably as someone who self-identifies as being highly partisan. Actual swing voters are a tiny minority of the people who identify as such (which is why "get out the vote" is, not-so-secretly, far more important than courting those voters—lots of seemingly odd behavior by politicians makes way more sense when this is factored in)
Bad political reporting (which is lots of political reporting) won't bother to make the distinction, which results in misleading coverage, graphs, et c.
This is interesting. There is nothing I can think of people lie about more rampantly than how long it takes them to get places.
Are there any studies on this? I wonder if it's just people being optimistic, or if they're actually trying to signal that they're better than everyone else because they can get places faster than everyone else (even when they can't).
Over 11 percent of Americans will be counted among the top 1 percent of income-earners for at least one year.
https://www.humanprogress.org/high-turnover-among-americas-r...
"People feel it's a fixed club and no one else can get in, but that's not the case," said Mark Perry, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Once you get there, it's not easy to stay there."
Hmm, the figures show that 1.1% of the population get to spend 10 years in the top 1% of income, while another 2.2% only spend 5-9 years there and another 11.1% spend 1-4 years there. It's easy to "stay there" for some...
The flipside is, a higher income tax would affect 11.1% of people just a few years (times), and 1.1% of people would be affected many more years (times).
I can. Especially if the period the stats were collected over includes the period around and immediately following the Great Recession. Why?
(1) People work in fields with irregular income; a book might take years to write, but most of the income for it may be received in a much shorter window.
(2) Lots of things (lots of them misfortune) produce income spikes besides work with irregular returns. Short sell a house for $200,000 less than the mortgage balance, with the rest forgiven by lender? That's $200,000 in income that year. Forced to liquidate your tax-deferred retirement savings early to pay for unexpected (say, medical) expense? Again, big one-time income spike.
Of course, this doesn't mean what writers from a right-wing propaganda mill want to make it mean.
- Sales with the same
- House Sales for owners
- Employees at public companies with RSU cliffs
- Business sales for entrepreneurs
- Employees at startups that have IPO'd
My understanding is a lot of Americans live on the coasts, and the coasts can have high salaries and costs of living (house prices). I do think it's likely that 1 in 10 people could have a very good year once.
I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large settled the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the population of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic culture and position in the US class hierarchy.
Additional aside, UK weird hostility to red heads (often remarked upon by visitors) is in fact legacy hostility to Celts.
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...
These are largely the "Scots-Irish", as we call them in the US. They originate as the Borderers, that is, the lowland folks who lived on the border of Scotland and England (an effectively lawless region for a long stretch of time). At some point a bunch of them were shipped off to Ireland, then a bunch of those moved to the US. Hence, "Scots-Irish".
The history of their migration paints a picture of a people disliked basically everywhere. Kicked out of the Border country, then kicked out of Ireland, then kicked out of Pennsylvania, before finally settling in Appalachia (and being hated there by almost everyone outside that country—it's still socially acceptable to say all kinds of horrible things about them).
We (I'm very, very much of that "stock" on one side of my family) seem to be some real bastards.
Those who settled in Ulster were looking for land (confiscated from the Irish). Those who came to America were looking for land. If they moved west and southwest, it was largely for more and perhaps better land.
Weep not for the Scotch-Irish. They've done pretty well out of America. (I have Scotch-Irish ancestry, traced by an uncle back to Bushmills in Ulster.)
East Anglia is the English region with highest modern Germanic ancestry, 30%. Samples from graves from Anglo-Saxon invasions suggest almost 100% population replacement. That’s consistent with panmixia.
As to red hair, attitudes change quickly. Kick a ginger day started with South Park.
I think the many legends/myths/stereotypes/fearmongering about red-headed warriors across Europe would beg to differ there. Maybe there have been intervals where red-headedness was a positive attribute, but I think the general historical record points to the opposite.
The end result is that even though I am very comfortable in the company of lower class people, I'd feel like a faker if I described myself like that. But when I'm around classier people, I feel so obviously uncultured and out of place, I end up trying to find ways to explain it, and just lean into being southern which is just another proxy for class in some ways.
stereotypical southern mountain person = thick accents, living in trailers, drug issues, run ins with the law, lousy jobs, relationship drama, lots of children born out of wedlock
I also don’t think these are identity traits of mine; rather they are contingent facts about living in a HCOL area. If I were slinging code 9-5 in e.g. Chicago then no one would doubt I was middle class.
Because of this, people have a vested interest in glorifying their own struggle, even if they had circumstances that led to their professional success. They're not going to admit that they had things handed to them on a silver platter or got lucky, they'd think of it as some sort of moral failing. They think success needs to be justified.
2. It's all relative anyways. By HN standards I'm making a measly salary, but my salary is over double the national average.
3. The richer you are, the more likely people are to ask you for things. Money, favors, etc. This is both locally and globally true.
4. Some of it is a mindset. Growing up I was absolutely not poor, but the way my parents talked about money felt different from others. For example I didn't get a cell phone until the end of middle school because it was "too expensive". Everyone was always asking for my phone number and I had to tell them I didn't have a phone. In the grand scheme of things this is really inconsequential, but at 13 it felt like my parents were ruining my social life with their penny pinching.
Cars were another big thing. Our cars were ancient and my parents refused to buy new ones. We never went to a mechanic unless we absolutely had to. On Saturday mornings my dad would wake me up and tell me we were doing $X to the car and I knew I would be cancelling any plans that day. I didn't actually mind fixing the car, but I hated telling my friends "I can't go play basketball, I have to help fix the car" and having them wonder aloud "Why can't you just take it to a mechanic?" because it made me feel poor.
We have different perspectives on class, roots, class identification. Not that we were ever working class but we own different perceptions of our relative class status.
I sound like a college educated person, who might have a graduate degree. There is usually a long pause when people figure out I'm a high school dropout who had "some college".
I grew up in a 'bill of the month' club house, and remember multiple times the electricity being turned off due to non-payment. But I picked up skills over time, and had the advantage of being both smart, a fast reader, and have reasonably good (better than my peers according to them), ability to absorb and synthesize information. From that I built a career, I've done a little bit of everything, security, truck driver, telecom engineer, IT guy, now I work on two way radio gear doing product development.
I get and can see the class distinctions, even now, because I tend at times to dress in a way that does not look.. like I have two nickels to rub together, even though I can buy basically whatever I want - I have trouble getting places to give me the time of day.
Between the awkward pauses when people try to talk to me about college life, and being able to see the class distinctions about money and style of dress, I get this, and get it pretty intuitively.
I'm also very aware that some doors are just not open to me because of my lack of credentialing - even jobs that I would be otherwise very qualified for based on experience.
We’re all still part of the same family. The shared values among the family are much stronger than any shared values across class identities. Class just doesn’t offer much explanatory value to me. I suppose I am upper middle class today, but I don’t think “oh yes, let’s instill some upper middle class values in our kids.” I don’t even know what those would be.
The author is in the UK, where class identities are much stronger and are not intrinsically tied to wealth (but are frequently associated with wealth, thanks to generational privilege).
An upper-class British acquaintance recently related to me that they'd never eaten certain foods that Americans think of as "quintessentially" British, because those foods are lower-class foods. They weren't afraid of eating them or snobbish about it, it just hadn't occurred to them that it was part of the international perception of their culture (because, to them, it just isn't their culture).
I think that they are weaker in the US, but also stronger than Americans think they are. Which can lead to confusion.
This is not true in the UK. To call someone middle class here means that they are above average in money and social status. It would probably be similar to calling someone 'upper-middle class' in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Kin...
A frequent "struggle story" I´ve heard, is claiming to be a high school dropout, then attending attending a 60k a year an elite liberal arts college. They didn't dropout due to poor life conditions interfering with school, but they claim the association for credibility. Then it bleeds into, "Well, if I could do it, why can't they?" It's really an extreme form of mental gymnastics.
I'd like to call this behavior, "poorfishing."
Keep in mind that this is a simplification, it's only part of the story, and it's a story about a particular time in UK history, and I'm not trying to draw larger conclusions about meritocracy in the US and UK. (Should go without saying.)
Also note that the narrative of British technological "decline", often cited as lasting from 1870-1970, is usually quite exaggerated and distorted. Entire books have been written on the subject. Classism is a piece of the puzzle but history defies simple explanations.
Fussell (though writing about the US) may have some insight here. For one thing, working is kinda low-class; for another, being concerned about the latest-and-greatest of technology is, separately, kinda low-class. He writes (I'm paraphrasing) that American old money is more likely to drive a 30-year-old truck, to have ancient kitchen appliances, maybe even fairly old entertainment-related electronics, than to have a flashy new sports car and top-end appliances—because caring about new technology is "low", so is something those sorts of people have been socialized not to care about (much of it's the "help's" problem, anyway, after all).
The US has a similar thing going on, along the "working/professional/upper" axis: many programmers make "professional" levels of money (e.g. doctor, lawyer, upper management at mid-level corporations, that kind of thing) but as a society we seem to have decided it's not proper to treat them as professionals, so they remain working-class in many respects (along with actual engineers).
The thing about old money having old cars and appliances applies to the UK too. If you're upper-class in the UK, you might wear Wellington boots and go hunting with your dogs in your Subaru hatchback. At a glance, it might look indistinguishable from something you might find someone doing in rural Montana.
The Gilded Age in the US is absolutely fascinating... it seems like at that point in history, the US was trying its hardest to ape European conventions for class, and simultaneously, there was a ton of economic growth fueling the noveau riche. That's when we got people like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. It's the time when Wharton's The Age of Innocence was set (highly recommend this book). Old money went to the opera at the Academy of Music Opera House, and new money went to the Metropolitan Opera House. (Guess which one is still around.)
If you’ve see the show Schitt’s Creek, think of the two adult children in that show. People want to not be seen as that.
If you’re cleaning foeces off the side of someone else’s room toilet you’re working class. I’m not sure why the author thinks it’s obvious that “her grandparents owned a hotel” means she’s not, like the quote above doesn’t count for anything.
Médiéval lord/peasant, Cotton plantation owner/African slaves, Captialist/worker, etc.
As such, owning a hotel, which is a business that can provide you with revenue without you working (obviously in this case the grandparents did choose to work, but could have chosen to have other do the work for them and still reap the profits), generally makes you upper class.
For another argument- If you own a hotel, you have a net worth greater than at least 80% of the population, and hence are upper middle/upper class.
A hobo on the street corner might work less, but has net worth 0, hence is lower class, which is often used as a synomym for working class
Why is that obvious? It seems to me the profits weren’t great as indicated by the grandparents cleaning.
When my parents got divorced, Mum wouldn’t take any cash from Dad. She was in her 50s and had been a housewife for 25 years. So we turned off the electricity to save money. I grew up reading by candlelight and cooking literally on an open fire. I know which kind of newspaper is best to wipe your bum with. (Sunday papers are thicker and crinklier because of the coloured ink.)
Fun game to play, no?
For instance, a middle class acquaintance once told me about his years in high school that "the rich guys didn't like me because they thought I was poor, and the poor guys didn't want me because they thought I was rich".
OTOH calling yourself 'rich' is going to sound braggy. Someone with a comfortable 6 figure income and a 2 million dollar house may sound like they are downgrading themselves by saying 'upper-class' but if they say 'rich' a lot people are going to think that 'rich' means private island in the Caribbean, not two weeks in Hawaii.
It's best to just stay away from it.
My sister has a degree, and is a nurse of a about 5-7 years. Her husband also has a degree (and even went to private school) and does local government procurement paying ~35k. I'm sure the author would describe both as "solidly middle".
They're still wondering how on earth they're supposed to pay for childcare, energy, mortgage. If the car breaks down, they're in trouble.
Plus there's the distinction between income and socialized class, which are tied up together, but which aren't identical, and lots of discussions take place without anyone bothering to specify which they're talking about.
[EDIT] Oh and then of course there's Marxist analysis. Folks should lead with explaining their angle and definitions, otherwise discussion about class tends to be a bunch of people talking past one another.
The angle of the article seem to be that the English notion of class is bullshit, because it does not directly correlate to wealth and privilege. Maybe so, but class is still a real thing in the sense it affect peoples attitudes and interactions in real way. It is like saying "race" in US is bullshit. But it is still a very real thing that affect peoples lives.
We’ve had class impostors forever. The OP mentioned a race imposter (we also have a sitting US senator arguably guilty of that) But it’s any group. Class, race, gender, first class, frequent traveler, club member, veteran, first responder, whatever.
IMO the solution is egalitarianism, but people hate that too, because they not only want the privilege but also the prestige- the feeling that they are better than you are.
Whatever the solution, legitimizing behavior that separates privileged and non-privileged makes things worse, not better.
This is not a rhetorical question, I'm interested in a scientific answer.
Is a FAANG engineer who earns $250k/year really an oppressed proletarian? Is the small bakery owner who struggles to make ends meet really a bourgeois because he owns a mean of production?
I think people get wrapped up in how difficult something is perceived to be and how much a particular occupation is compensated (ie, the modern version of "class"), but underlying dynamics are much more important if you're talking about working class vs owner class. The assumption here is that the baker works hard and gets little from it, therefor it's fine if they exploit labor, and the FAANGer plays ping pong all day and gets an assload of money for it, therefor it's okay if they have no say in their place of work.
Granted, then you get into things like the stock market, and suddenly most people are absentee owners in some company they've never set foot into, so things get weird...
If you must sell your labor to pay for the requirements of life, then you're vulnerable to being denied access to that transaction and will suffer the consequences.
The marxist analysis is limited in some ways but in this one it is a clarifying advantage. It doesn't matter, for some purposes, how much you earn if you must earn it to survive.
If you've earned enough that you can buy a bakery on a whim, or stop working entirely, then your economic interests are rarely if ever going to align with people forced to sell their labor and so you've partially or completely transitioned to something else, I think.
In large part, government decision makers are made up of people from dominant classes. They can hardly be relied upon to improve social mobility, as it's people like them who stand to lose from increased social mobility.
An oppressed class that doesn't recognize itself can't organize as a class to combat that oppression.
(This is coming from someone who left the UK for the US and hopes to move to Asia afterwards, so mildly biased but not that much)
For a few years after that I got random junk mail addressed to the Viscount =).
In general people don't deduce this from me and sometimes assume I came from privilege, and honestly I definitely prefer it that way.
I'm talking about people who are influential but not necessarily close, mostly friendly but I've fought some of these folks too. The people I come from but not my family. My people. Still seems fine honestly.
Technological growth and automation seems to have played (and is increasingly so?) a much larger factor than anything else in the past century. I assume I'm probably biased here though.
Class is geographically concentrated and inherited. It isn't as simple as caste. This is primarily because the top class of India is not very Hindu. Inherited classmen are descendents of local kings, cultural empire builders (kapoor family), descendents of top civil servants in the British Empire and descendents of oxford-cambridge educated freedom fighters. Children of industrialists are let in, but it might take a generation or two. These communities are concentrated in the Mumbai and Delhi region. Ties to the Gandhi-Nehru family also helps.
As a normie, there are only a few ways to enter this class. Early schooling at international schools(Ambani), residential schools (Doon) and select Army schools is the easiest way. If you grow up in the right neighborhood in Mumbai or Delhi, you will find yourself sharing space with them. Eventually you'll make friends and be let in. Select professions such Western Liberal Arts academia, Economics, Architecture or Journalism/think-thanks are ways to get some access. But, it is important that the accolades be from western institutes. Sometimes, running an NGO with the right aesthetic gets you there.
The historic overhaul is happening because of 3 reasons. First, the elite have lost political power and their free patronage. Unlike the US, where until recently, the upper class pretty evenly split between 2 political parties. In India, the upper class exclusively operated under the blessings of the Congress party. The rise of the BJP has been disastrous for them, especially journalists and political insiders. Second, as the country sheds its socialist skin, credentials in the armed forces and civil service simply do not matter as much. The introduction of hard examinations to enter any of these institutions blocks off the lazy elites, which in-turn makes the institutions lose some of their 'elite' status. (this is why Harvard still keeps legacy admissions. The bar HAS TO BE low for the real elites to maintain eliteness of your institution) Lastly, new money is snatching away cultural power. STEM grads are taking over Netflix & Youtube. The new Billionaires are all Tech folks. There even have a new mecca in Bangalore.
However, the upper class still influences the messaging in elite American outlets, admission procedures at Ivies, western think tanks and Bollywood. The smart ones have been front of line to welcome the likes of Netflix or have used their massive wealth to buy into the tech revolution by turning into investors instead. Those who have stuck to old ways are dying a slow death.
IMO, India's next upper class is going to be incredibly technocratic. Top IITs (Engg.), AIIMS (Med.), IIMs (B.schools) are treated with a never seen before level of reverence. But this is my personal conjecture. We will see if it works out.
What are your thoughts on the extant caste system? How similar is it to the racial legacy that America deals with?
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Oh, I see you commented on it already from the caste system article that got popular a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521888
Thanks for posting.
For context, I admittedly come across as jaded towards some sub-sections of american liberal folk in that comment. That part takes away from what I consider an otherwise neutral comment. It's just that the combination of "genuine worry + half knowledge + talking down to you" reminds me of school hall monitors, which triggers my defensiveness.
One of my favorite comments about India is : "The only thing every Indian can agree on is that no one fully understands India.". So, I'll add that caveat as an Indian myself.
It turned out that my friend had grown up with a different accent to what he currently speaks with. He'd grown up in a rough part of Essex, going to a school where kids normally don't even think about university. After about two weeks at Cambridge, he realized he was different. To sum it up, almost nobody at Cambridge speaks like an Essex boy. That's despite Cambridge being not terribly far from Essex.
I noticed something similar. My family are refugees, so spread all over the world, including an aunt North London who gave birth to six cousins. They speak English a certain way. Coming as an international student, I noticed a lot of accents at Oxford (hello Brummies, Scots, Welsh, Scousers) but not a lot of "council house between hackney and Romford" accents.
If you've followed British politics, you've heard of something called the Bullingdon Club. Cambridge has something similar. Neither of the two of us knew much about it when we were there, but we did know there were some veeeery posh kids around, because they speak a certain way and often have a pretty expensive style about them.
So that was the fathers. Working class? Well if you're upper class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some sense it's legit to call yourself working class. It doesn't say much when your job could be anything between chronically unemployed and hedge fund manager, though.
For dinner, we took our boys to a restaurant. Being around the age of the 11 plus exam, the conversation turned to private schools. It turns out one of the boys had gotten into one of the most expensive selective schools in the country, which I pointed out (this is why I am so sought after as a dinner guest). Since they're kids, they still have naive ideas about money, and the vogue among kids at the moment is to aspire to be an influencer. "I'll make a YouTube channel and millions of followers will see it".
Thus followed a little talk about how many views you actually need to make enough money to pay for two kids to go to the most expensive school in the country, and perhaps also a house and something to stave off starvation.
I'm also the kind of exciting person who has official statistics about income distributions in his head. A rough tax rate is also part of that spiel, in case I find an uninformed primary schooler.
Realistically, you either need to be in the top 1% (£175K/year) or the top 2% (£120K/year) with a second income (£50K is around 87th, so maybe two ~97th at ~£100K ) to be able to pay for two kids to go to a £30K/year school, pay a £30k/year rent/mortgage, maybe eat and holiday for £15K, and also pay the tax man.
That's what the numbers look like, and I'm not surprised at all that kids don't know them. What are the chances when you're sitting around at your school that you've been told is famous, that basically every single one of your classmates has either a top 1% earning parent or two top 3% earners? If you knew you would certainly think you were very lucky indeed.
So this kid, who is quite bright and has a place at a top school that sends dozens of kids each to his dad's alma mater, can still claim to be working class by heredity. That is what this article seems to be about. People mostly want to feel that they deserve what they worked for, and certainly kids in prep schools work hard. But it's also true that you almost never see anyone doing ordinary jobs. It's not actually that weird that a kid thinks being a lawyer or trader is an ordinary job, when his entire class has parents that both do something like that. It's not even that hard to imagine them thinking their parents work really hard. Certainly a couple of the other parents in my kid's year are always traveling or working late.
Not being in the legacy pre-capitalist aristocracy doesn't mean you are working class; basically the entire capitalist class structure from the working class to the haut bourgeoisie exists outside of that aristocracy. Or, rather, parallel to and overlapping it, for the most part, as, but for the senior royals, legacy titles no longer have a firm connection to how one relates to the economy and derives support.
Everyone likes this working-class label for some reason. Something between "Worked your way up" and "didn't have a silver spoon" is the desire.
Less Educated != Unskilled
Skill is a matter of practice (even if you have natural talent). I know plenty of very skilled people that earn less than they are worth. I know plenty of educated people that are unprofessional and earn more than they are worth. The world just is not a fair place.
Don’t let your past define you
It seems quite understandable that people whose your ancestors were kings, presidents and other notable figures would be in favor of being given a leg up based on the status of their ancestors.
I'm an American, and I consider myself "middle class". I was born when my mother was 17. She finished high school and went on to work and get a two-year degree from a tiny business college that no longer exists. She married in her mid-20s, when I was in first grade, got a job at a company and is still there over three decades later. She went from making minimum wage in 1991 to in the ballpark of $350k / year today. My father - the man she married, not my biological father - was a public school teacher.
I attended school in a very poor area, and my experience in high school was far more comfortable than my peers.
My dad bought me a very inexpensive truck when I was 12. It was ~20 years old, the bed was badly damaged, and the engine didn't run due to a combination of overuse and neglect. We parked it outside our garage and he taught me how to work on it, return it to operable condition, and sell it for profit. With his guidance I pulled and completely rebuilt the engine and transmission. We went to scrapyards on the weekends, and eventually found a steel bed for it in good condition. We kept all the receipts. The total cost, including purchase price, parts, and a couple of services like having a machine shop mill the engine block flat for the new head, was ~$2k. By the time I turned 14, when I could get a "learner's permit" in my state, we sold that old truck for $4k. I then had my choice - I could take that $4k (of which I had earned about half through my labor) and buy whatever I wanted, or my parents would sell me the truck my dad already owned for the same price. Because I'd done so much work on "my" truck, I jumped on that offer; I knew that his truck was well-maintained, and I didn't want to have to rebuild a vehicle that I was going to rely on.
By 2002, when I graduated high school, I think my parents were making about $175k/yr combined. I went to college on an academic scholarship and my life fell apart almost immediately. After a couple of years of struggling (and my parents paying for mental health services), I was finally diagnosed with severe depression and ADHD. It took me until I was 23 before I was "functional", and another two years after that before I felt at all confident that I wasn't going to fall back into that pit of despair. Throughout that dark period of my life, my parents were there both emotionally and, to a reasonably limited extent, financially. They weren't paying all of my bills, but I knew they wouldn't let me die hungry and homeless.
Today, I'm 38. I've been with my wife since were 14, married her at 21, and now have two daughters. We live in a five-bedroom home that we purchased in our name, with money that we earned and saved. While we don't feel like we have a huge safety net for ourselves yet, we are definitely "financially stable" - and a big part of the reason we feel like we don't have that safety net built is because of the depth of the financial safety net that my parents were able to provide.
So... in summary, while I consider myself "middle class", objectively I'm firmly in the "white collar" world. My wife doesn't work for anyone outside our home, is able to run a side business primarily for personal fulfillment, and our children are happy, well cared for, and want for little.
My wife's parents' story is very different from ours. Her dad was "working class", and retired from Walmart as a cashier in "Tire & Lube Express". He has a large but benign brain tumor that is becoming more and more of an issue as he ages. Her mother has struggle with mental health issues and has never been able to hold down a job more than a year or so at a time. My wife moved between her parents' home and her grandparents' home multiple time growing up. While they have their own problems to deal with, I think they really did the best they could raising my wife.
One of the highlights of my adult life so far came a couple of years ago, when my wife's parents' car broke down yet again. They had asked us a couple of times to take them to doctors appointments, and while I have offered fixed their vehicles a few times over the years, they will not ask me to do things like that. I sat down with my wife, looked at our finances, and decided that we could reasonably take responsibility for their transportation needs from here on out. We looked at reliable used cars, but decided that buying a reasonable new car would mean a warranty and that the total cost of ownership amortized over the expected lifetime of the vehicle would be comparable. Plus, her parents had never owned a new car; at best they were able to buy a reliable used car a couple of times in the past.
We bought them a new Kia Rio S. It's cherry red, and her parents cried when we gave it to them. It's still in my name, so I put it on our insurance and bought a service contract through a local shop. The only thing they have to pay for is fuel.
(continued in a reply to this post)
I live in a town of 14k people, a few miles from the town of <200 people where I grew up. The median household annual income here is <$30k. The media per capita income is $16k. I work remotely for a West Coast tech company, and my salary alone puts us at over 5x the median income here. Relative to my community, I think it's fair to say that we're "white collar".
The people I work with come from a variety of backgrounds, but with few exceptions are third generation "white collar". Those born outside the US generally come from "merchant class" families or higher - otherwise, how would they have been able to afford to immigrate to the US in the first place? Relatively to my colleagues, I come from a "blue collar" world.
At one point, before I was able to reliably find remote work, we moved to Virginia where I was the first tech hire at a startup. The office I started in was actually a hotel meeting room that they had leased while they built out their permanent office space. While I was with that company, they expanded twice.
The second time they expanded, we were ready to move in to the new office space, except the desks hadn't arrived before the electricians left and it was going to be two weeks before they could get back out to wire them up. We _really_ needed the space, so I told the founders that I could install them in a couple of hours if the electricians could swing by in the afternoon to inspect the work for code compliance. In retrospect, I'm sure they thought I was nuts. They agreed, the electrician agreed, and I ran back to my apartment to grab my tools. By lunch I had all thirty or so of the desks wired up, the mess cleaned, and we were able to move everyone into the new space. I left the ceiling tiles open and the covers off the junction boxes in the ceiling so they could be easily inspected, but otherwise the job was 100% complete.
Why did I have the knowledge and tools to do that? After failing out of college, I'd worked for about a year as an apprentice electrician. I realized then that that all of my colleagues at that company came from multi-generational "academic class" families, and that that sort of thing was completely foreign to them. I spent the next two years at that company making good friends, comparing life experiences, and learning from each other. One of them shared his investment portfolio with me and walked me through his strategies and what his parents had taught him. I rented a garage and taught him basic auto maintenance - oil, tires, how an engine and drivetrain works, how to check each fluid and what they all did.
I often find myself writing a novella here, and rarely get any feedback from them aside from a couple of upvotes. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I'll try to take this as motivation to clean up my writing a bit. It always seems like I grossly overuse commas when I read it later. It's really just stream-of-consciousness.
Centuries ago, people who owned land, workshops etc. but were not nobles were referred to as the "middle class" - the middle between the peasantry and the nobility. Today that moniker is meaningless, though it persists - even though people of "middle" wealth are in no way not a distinct class.
We should be celebrating richness, not poverty. Unfortunately, victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be traced back to marxism.
Why should we celebrate richness?
If you're richer than your peers you did something that society considered valuable. Money is the ultimate form of direct democracy.
Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up people left and right, that governments can print off money and that governments can force people to give them money.
These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something should be done about these - but still, the people in Wall Street are providing financial services that businesses find useful. And those businesses provide useful services to people, so the richness of Wall Street can be traced back to useful services. Governments printing money affects the market via inflation. Nothing much can be done about governments taking money from people under the threat of incarceration (unless you have an army), but the government is, in most countries, a form of indirect democracy - so the government still end up providing some value to end users with the money they forcefully took. Sure, part of it get burned in the inefficiency of centralisation and bureaucracy but most of it keeps going around (eg. by paying contractors to fix the roads).
Therefore, I think becoming rich can absolutely become a moral value and I think the world would be better that way.
In the words of the working class hero 50 cent: Get rich or die tryin'.
Get born of the right parents? Meet the right oligarch?
That's not how it was supposed to work. You were supposed to succeed from being part of the generation of wealth. Not just sitting and skimming while everybody else works. And then passing it on to your heirs.
I wish it worked as you describe. That's where we need to get back to.
What part of Marx's analysis of capitalism do you think caused people to adopt a victim mentality?
> Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up people left and right, that governments can print off money and that governments can force people to give them money. These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something should be done about these
Why? By your metric, these people are creating value. Shouldn't that be celebrated?
Not Marx's analysis of capitalism, but rather Marx's creed from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. This became the slogan of the Marxist movement which rejected the prior socialist creed of to each according to their contribution.
If people's reward is independent of their contribution and instead a function of their needs then it incentivizes presenting oneself as the least capable, since those who do so are the ones for whom the least will be asked of. Adopting a victim mentality and presenting oneself as a victim of some kind is a fairly inexpensive way to maximize the receipt of ones needs while minimizing ones contribution.
So from my point of view, that slogan is a completely simplified description of what a communist society might look like. From what I know it was coined before Marx even wrote Kapital, which is the underlying basis of Marxism.
> If people's reward is independent of their contribution and instead a function of their needs then it incentivizes presenting oneself as the least capable
I can agree with that. However I think there are other interpretations of the phrase that might be more generous. In general, I think of a socialist mode of production as one in which production is for-use as opposed to for-profit/sale/exchange. Capitalists will say for-use/for-exchange are the same, socialists argue the two are distinct groups (with some obvious overlap). This is entirely compatible with some people being paid more than others.
> Adopting a victim mentality and presenting oneself as a victim of some kind is a fairly inexpensive way to maximize the receipt of ones needs while minimizing ones contribution.
We have that in increasing amounts today and our society looks about as far from a Marxist vision as anyone could imagine. So whether a society is based in Marxism or Liberalism seems to have very little bearing on victim mentality.
You could argue the victim mentality comes from academia and their bizarre interpretation of Marxism (ie "cultural Marxism") but the two things are similar in name only.
I think of Marxism as a critique of capitalism and absentee property norms. I don't think it has much intersection with people trying to get things for free by playing the victim.
It is the same false moral back-patting of "I'm colorblind and don't see race," which usually really means "By pretending to not see race, I have an excuse for not recognizing race-based injustices."