What the Comfort Class Doesn't Get
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own.
These people don’t have “generational wealth,” they’re just normal, middle class people. The median income of a married couple with kids is $120,000. If you live in say Georgia and go to UGA and maintain a 3.0 GPA, your tuition is $122 per semester: https://osfa.uga.edu/types-of-aid/undergraduate/scholarships.... Between your parents and summer jobs, you can cover your housing costs and graduate with little debt. This is a life that’s accessible not to everyone, but to a large swath of the population that follows the success sequence (graduate high school, get a full time job, get married before having children).
Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.
Halfway through:
As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.
Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.
IE they are intentionally conflating wealth with security to illustrate the concept of a “comfort class”. It’s The Atlantic, not The Economist. There Will Be Style.
For example, “millionaires” aren’t rare. The median age of Congressional representatives is 57.5. That puts the average House member outside the top 10% of wealth for that age group, but somewhat inside the top 25%. https://www.myroadtofire.com/blog/average-net-worth-by-age. Similarly, a $1,200 medical bill wouldn’t “send most Americans into a financial tailspin.” Neither of my wife’s parents finished college, and none of their parents did. They could all afford a surprise $1,200 medical bill.
Again, the median income of a married couple household with children is $120,000/year. These are folks who can expect to be worth a million dollars after working and saving for 30 years, and who can afford a $1,200 medical bill (and support their kids or family members in such a situation). The article is painting a misleading picture of how secure Americans are. It is making this level of security seem rare, akin to “generational wealth,” when in fact it’s extremely common.
“Middle class” was used once in reference here to class dysmorphia while working-class was used 5 times:
the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences
Thus, a “comfort class”. Big enough to have seemingly hijacked the Democratic Party. Reads as less rare than distinct from the working class proper for me, personally.
Generational wealth is where you inherent wealth from parents. What’s being described in the article isn’t a level of security for which you need generational wealth.
> to whom the "success sequence" sounds like what I would promote if I were a Capitalist.
I’m from a literally socialist country and the success sequence would be considered a no brainer where I’m from. The success sequence is even more important in a socialist society. Because such societies commit to the collective caring for the individual, they have greater motives to maximize the number of individuals contributing and minimize the number of individuals being supported. It’s in individualist, capitalist economies where people can tolerate a diversity of lifestyle choices, because nobody cares if anyone else lives or dies.
Like the idea of new money vs old money, there is a difference in mindset for people who may have taken different paths to the same net worth at a given age.
The article is taking an extremely common thing and making it seem like a rare or unusual thing.
I certainly wouldn't characterize it as a 'totally mistaken' view on 'most Americans', even if it's overstating the scope of the problem.
On the other hand I know a person who hasn't worked full time for a while, who still depends on family for handouts because they don't have the financial discipline to have any savings whatsoever. Some of the financial stress people have is self-inflicted. Allocating a percentage of income to an emergency spending account until it reaches $200 initially and then $2000 over a longer term would help reduce stress of accidentally overdrawing the checking account or having a small (by US standards) medical bill.
That is true for most of Europe. There must be more to US problems.
Yes, there are many people in the US that are highly insecure financially and socially.
The E.U. has a much higher floor. Workers have more rights. There is more social support. Medical bankruptcy is practically impossible. It's not to say that it's all sunshine and rainbows, but I'd guess that very few Europeans are one paycheck and 3 months of eviction proceedings away from being literally homeless. In the U.S., a large fraction of people are like that.
And our government, as the article says, is largely run by people that have "got theirs". They have some savings. They may have a home (albeit with a mortgage). They may stand to inherit from relatives. They have better job prospects, maybe even the luxury of a high prestige, low paying job. And these people, for the most part, can't or won't imagine or understand what it's like to live a life of insecurity.
The E.U., in my opinion, has some sense of class consciousness and solidarity among the workers, especially those that would be insecure if they lived in the states. But in the U.S., there's a substantial fraction of vulnerable people that feel morally opposed to welfare even though they'd benefit from it. They have a mentality often called that of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". So when a politician comes along that promises that he'll give them security without a handout, that they've already earned it but he'll stop those stealing it, these people will support him wholeheartedly.
This particular lens is just one of several that explain the rise of someone like Trump. There are also accelerationists, people that think that blowing up a stable system will accelerate the revolution. There are bigots, who think that some "other" is the cause of their suffering. There are people that are merely self-interested, and think that Trump with benefit them, either correctly or incorrectly. And on and on, so many various and overlapping reasons.
And there is a missing condition: the existing political parties in the U.S. did not empathize or respect or give voice or deliver for the insecure. It was easy to think that the system as it existed offered a binary option where neither choice served their interests, so why not pick something radical and risk blowing it up?
Europe, I think, is getting close to these conditions in some respects. The far right has been doing too well recently. But Europe is also constitutionally more capable of pulling back from the brink and providing an effective centrist government in spirit, even if it sometimes has trouble affording it.