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Comment by ireadmevs | Hacker News Reader

There’s no middle class. You either have to work for a living or you don’t.

You either have to work for a living or you don’t

The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.

I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.

> I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.

What income? Income from job, or from capital? A huge difference. Also a lot harder to lose the latter, gross incompetence or a revolution, while the former is much easier.

Yea, should have been clearer. Income from work (or unemployment benefits) in this case. Someone who works to essentially supplement their income, but could live off their capital, is in a very different position than someone for whom work is their only source of income or wealth.

The sentence works without those two words. “You either work for a living or you don’t.”

Now what?

Now it comes down to how you define 'for a living'. You still need to differentiate between people who work to survive, people who work to finance their aspirational lifestyle, and people who have all the money they could possibly need and still work because they either see it as a calling or they just seem to like working. Considering all these people in the same 'class' is far too simplistic.

Enh, to me it’s not, either you work or you don’t.

So someone on the edge of poverty, balancing two or three minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet, should be considered part of the same class as the CEO of Microsoft or Google? Hell most people on the Forbes list 'work' in at least some meaning of the word, even if many of them effectively work for themselves.

What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists? Same class?

And on the flip side, are pensioners, the unemployed, and people on permanent disability part of the same class as the dilettante children of billionaires?

Are we talking about the verb or an ideal? Either you work or you don’t.

Are we talking about the verb or an ideal?

We are talking about class, and if we should be making distinctions between groups of people who work for a living based on their wealth, income, and economic stability. I believe there is a fundamental class difference between people who work, but are rich enough to stop working whenever they want, those who can't quite stop working but are comfortable enough to easily go 6 month without a pay check, and people who are only a couple of missed pay checks away from literal homelessness.

I guess I lost the plot. Same point, either you work or you don’t. I grew up not knowing if I would have dinner that night because we were so poor. I learned I needed to work to eat. I don’t care that rich people are rich, I only care about myself and my family.

Coddling poor people is so severely out of touch with their reality, they most likely resent the hell out of you for it, I know I did.

Nobody's coddling anyone here. Acknowledging the reality of class in society isn't doing anything but analysis.

The original claim was a proposal to increase the resolution of class analysis one degree "higher" than Marx and no longer differentiate between the modern proletariat (working class), bourgeois (middle class), and aristocracy (upper class), in this case proposing to lump together the bourgeois and proletariat because they both have to work or they'll starve to death.

In this world, being born from the orifice of an aristocrat means you never have to work (have meaning, "or you'll die of exposure"). That's a frank reality. If your reaction to being born from a non aristocratic orifice is to shrug your shoulders and accept reality, great, nobody's trying to take that from you.

However you seem to be taking it a step further and suggesting that the people pointing out that this nature of society is unfair are somehow wrong to do so. I disagree. I think is perfectly valid to be born from whatever orifice and declare the obvious unfairness of the situation and the work to balance things out for people. That's not coddling, it's just ensuring that we all benefit in a just way from the work of your grandfather. Cause right now, someone has stolen the value of his work from you, and that's why you (and I) had to work so hard to get where we are today.

If you love that you had to work so hard, fine. I could take it or leave it. Instead of working a double through school I would have preferred to focus more on my studies and get higher grades, find better internships instead of slinging sandwiches. Personally I look at the extraordinarily wealth of the aristocrat class and I think, "is it more important that they're allowed to own 3 yachts or that all the children of our society can go to college?" I strongly believe any given country will be much stronger if it has less yachts and more college-educated people. Or people with better access to healthcare. Or people with better transit options to work. Etc.

I strongly believe any given country will be much stronger if it has less yachts and more college-educated people.

And even you strongly disagree with that statement, it is important to have framework within which your opinion of that statement can be analysed.

There was the articles on AI, that linked to how its used in Microsoft.

Satya Nadella doesn't read his emails, and doesn't write responses. He subscribes to podcasts and then gets them summarised by AI.

He turns up to the office and takes home obscene amounts of money for doing nothing except play with toys and pretend he's working.

They are "working", but they are actually just playing. And I think thats the problem with some of these comments, they aren't distinguishing between work and what is basically a hobby.

> What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists?

Its a hobby. They don't have to do it, and if they get fired for gross misconduct then they could find alternative things to pass the time.

Homeless or loose current house? Downsizing and/or moving to cheaper places could go a long way. Yet loosing current level of housing is what most people think want to avoid.

Either work, but homeless is more absolute. For some downsizing means moving into their car and for others it means moving into a 3000 sq ft house, with a smaller pool, in the third nicest neighbourhood in town. But yea, losing your house and being forced to drastically downsize against your will is no doubt traumatic in both cases.

“from losing all your income until you're homeless.”

I’m willing to bet you haven’t lived long enough to know that’s a more or less a proxy for old age. :) That aside, even homeless people acquire possessions over time. If you have a lot of homeless in your neighborhood, try to observe that. In my area, many homeless have semi functional motor homes. Are they legit homeless, or are they “homeless oligarchs”? I can watch any of the hundreds of YouTube channels devoted to “van life.” Is a 20 year old who skipped college which their family could have afforded, and is instead living in an $80k van and getting money from streaming a “legit homeless”? The world is not so black and white it will turn out in the long run.

Many of those semi-functional motorhomes are actually owned by a particular type of slumlord (vanlord) who rent them out to homeless people.

https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-to-crack-down-on-rv-re...

While you’re not wrong in what differentiates those with wealth to those without, I think ignores a lot of nuance.

Does one have savings? Can they afford to spend time with their children outside of working day to day? Do they have the ability to take reasonable risks without chancing financial ruin in pursuit of better opportunities?

These are things we typically attribute to someone in the middle class. I worry that boiling down these discussions to “you work and they don’t” misses a lot of opportunity for tangible improvement to quality of life for large number of people.

It doesn't - its a battle cry for the working classes (ie anyone who actually works) to realize they are being exploited by those that simply do not.

If you have an actual job and an income constrained by your work output, you could be middle class, but you could also recognize that you are getting absolutely ruined by the billionaire class (no matter what your level of working wealth)

I'm really not convinced that I and my CEO share a common class interest against the billionaires, and I'm not particularly interested in standing together to demand that both of us need to be paid more.

I don't know how to convince you that both of you are struggling against each other when you should be in common cause, but in my experience if the CEO thinks even more they are a temporarily embarrassed billionaire then I can see why you'd resent them. That doesn't change the facts of the matter though.

Traditionally there were the English upper class, who had others work for them, and the working class who did. Doctors and Bankers were the middle class, because they owned houses with 6-8 servants running it, so while they worked, they also had plenty of people working for them.

I agree with your point. Now doctors are working class as well.

That's reductive. The middle class in the US commonly describes people who have access to goods and services in moderation. You aren't poor just because you can't retire.

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