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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in a handful of countries and UK is where I experienced the most intense classism.

Unlike other countries where class is mostly defined by money, the UK tends to define it in the old school heritage and upbringing sense of the word. No matter if you made millions, unless you have pedigree, you don't belong. Makes me chuckle a bit when people complains about classism in the US.

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I'm from the UK and I think that the majority of people think you can't change class. You're born into a class, you can have the lifestyle of a different class if you make or lose a lot of money, if you then have children, they inherit your lifestyle class. This is not a formal rule in the slightest, but it's how most people here think/operate. I'm working class, enjoying a middle class lifestyle now, if I decide to have kids and my situation remains the same, they're middle class; I'm still working class.

Honestly -- I feel like the US works this way also. It's just unspoken and unrecognized. (My POV: raised middle-class, public school (in the US sense), by working-class parents, flirting daily with the lifestyle and members of the upper-middle-class thanks to tech work and salary.)

In the US, we both deflate the open class-ist discussion prevalent in the UK by pretending we are above that, while hypocritically we conflate class with cash -- in effect you buy 'pedigree' which is why our growing nouveau riche are such exceptionally gormless, gaudy jackwagons who often exhibit the worst of all trait-sets: often milquetoast but boorish, pearl-clutching yet belligerent, all while terrified of everything "different"...and we're the greatest place on Earth.

It should be a condition in the DSM-V.

Ironically, respect/disrespect for DSM definitions strikes me as good class marker, at least in the US.

I don't think that's really how we do it in the US. A lot of tradespeople may be rich (making 6 figures in a very low cost of living area), but no one would call them high class, at best they would just be "well off".

6 figures is not rich. Hasn't been for a very long time.

It is if you're living in central Mississippi earning 600k/yr

It absolutely is for anywhere in the US except for a handful of metropolitan areas. The median income in the US is still hovering around 30K.

Funny anecdote I have that kinda counters what you say.

I know from family who live where Taylor Swift bought a mansion in RI that she was denied membership to the local yacht club because she was not "old money". I heard this back in 2013 when she first bought the place and I haven't been back so I don't know if that has changed since then.

Maybe some people see the rich as "high-class" not everyone does.

Pretty much its the case EXCEPT maybe the Hamptons, and a few very old (read, direct descendants 'spiritually' to their English colonial forebears) institutions, but the list of spots like that are quite rarified air compared to the UK.

I do believe this is the bes explanation.

The real reason is that they don't want the paparazzi hanging around and they really don't want the scrutiny into the club's details (like membership lists, past member affiliations, etc) that Ms. Swift would bring along. It's not really a new vs old money thing, but that does make for a better story.

This also happened when Michael Jordan tried to join country club/golf courses in the wealthy northern suburbs of Chicago

The thing that is so foreign to me in the UK is their academic culture.

There are people who literally think there are only two universities worth being at: Cambridge and Oxford. They are shocked when they find candidates from abroad turning down offers for permanent positions there or leaving their positions for somewhere else.

As a brit I get quite frustrated by this too. The obsession with Oxford and Cambridge is hugely frustrating. We have many really good universities, but somehow many people will just never be able to get over the obsession with oxbridge.

As a non Brit but had a permanent position in Oxbridge, my advice was to look beyond the UK.

Even within Europe, there are many institutes that are strictly better than oxbridge. If you’re a scientist, there is no point in being too narrow and confining yourself to UK.

I would agree though that at the undergraduate level oxbridge is excellent. Postgraduate what matters actually is the advisor and grant money.

As a Brit, I’d agree that classicism is bad here, and it feels worse than the US. However, much of Europe is the same. E.g. France.

From my more distant (US) perspective, the classism in France is different. It's based on what university you went to, not who your ancestors were.

It's based on social codes more than anything, similar to other countries. There are preferred vectors of transmission for such codes. In France some schools my play a part but I don't believe it's so segregated. The role of grandes écoles is overblown and they're not nearly as influential as Ivy League schools and Oxbridge are in the US and UK. I'd say the high school you went to is probably a more important factor, as are the extra-curricular activities you were doing growing up, in deciding which class you fit in.

Could you expand in this? Do you mean material way of life or how people treat each other socially.

For me it's a combination of how people talk about others 'below' their class, and how much social mixing between the classes there is - but I realise that this is very hard to measure. Just my 2c having lived in UK, Europe, and US.

The French literally executed away their class system.

Of course they didn't, unless you are using some extremely narrow and historical definition of "class". France still have significant wealth inequality and rent-seeking, so by most modern definitions of "class" they certainly have a class system.

The UK has a formal class system that's actually encoded in law (peerages, knights, royal family, etc.) France got rid of all that.

There's a facinating article on by Scott Alexander about classism in the US https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on...

> No matter if you made millions, unless you have pedigree, you don't belong.

It works the other way also......... plenty members of our upper class aristocracy are penniless, but are, and remain, upper class.

I always find the US approach to equating money with class rather amusing.

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