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Comment by pat_punnu | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't describe most people who work at Facebook and Google as being upper class. They may earn above average when you look at all workers, but I think upper class is old money, privately education with independent wealth and social power. I don't think that describes most geeks.

Edit: I think in the US a Senator would be upper class, some random Google employee is probably middle-middle at best.

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If you are dependent on a paycheck from an employer to pay your bills (either as a regular employee or a contractor), and your annual pay isn't enough that you could, in principle, invest the surplus above the median income over your expected career and be able to live indefinitely at near-median income off the proceeds of that investment as passive recipient (IOW, if you work for a living and aren't something like a top-rank pro athlete or someone with similar pay), its probably safe to say that you are at best upper-middle class.

The upper class are the people that live comfortably off of capital (or have the resources where they could do so, in principle, even if instead they choose to consume their seed corn and don't.) They are the people that, if they have jobs, have no need to have fear of losing them, not because its easy to find another one (as might be the case for many elite workers), but because they don't really need the first one.

There was a post last month where the comments went into how the wealthy don't consider themselves "upper class". One fellow said he had $8M in investments but did not feel "upper class" due to lack of influence/respect.

Completely oblivious to the fact that he could cash out the investments, never work again and still be in the top 20% income bracket.

Here is how to become middle class. Go to school, get good grades, get a job.

Here is how to become "upper class". Get a pile of money. Stop working. Start accumulating influence and respect.

The $8M dollar working man is like a grad student who never leaves school. He keeps accumulating little bits of paper that say how awesome he is, but are worthless in the larger game. He never moves onto the next step.

Oh, and if you can't figure out how to gain influence/respect, get out of the Valley. You are a medium-sized fish in a giant pond. Find a smaller pond. Throw a dart at a US map, move to that town. Buy every piece of land that goes up for sale. Get involved in local politics, the Zoning Board will probably have the best results. Hire people and build your dream.

By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are lower class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular organization. Business owners (though this includes freelancers) form the middle class. People who have enough power to control the rules by which capital is allocated in the economy (and thereby basically have unlimited wealth, in a sense) are upper class. This used to be royalty, and those who could afford to spend all day bowing and scraping to them; in the modern day, it's congress, and the leaders of the industries who can afford to lobby them.

Interestingly, this class structure has been "rediscovered" in modern-day discourse, in the form of the MacLeod corporate hierarchy. It's harder to recognize within the context of a single corporation, but when you analyze, say, all of Silicon Valley in those terms (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/vcistan/), the class-structure leaps right out.

> By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are lower class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular organization.

The "traditional" scheme I'm most familiar with has the proletariat, the petit bourgeosie, and the haute borgeoisie; that is, the post-aristocratic system used in 19th century discussions of capitalist society. The petit bourgeosie includes both what would, in modern terms, be elite and white collar workers (technical experts, managers, etc.) and small business owners (who may technically be 'capitalist', but are nevertheless are dependent largely on their own labor for support even if it is not wage labor), while the haute bourgeousie are the major capitalists.

Both the proletariat (lower class) and much of the petit bourgeosie (middle class) work at wage labor, and the proletariat and the whole of the petit bourgeosie are dependent on their ability to find a market for their labor for their living. The haute bourgeosie corresponds very closely to how you describe the aristocracy, but the distinction between the proletariat and the petit bourgeosie is not at the point where your description draws the line between the proletariat and the bourgeosie; business ownership isn't the sine qua non of the middle class.

>>> Completely oblivious to the fact that he could cash out the investments, never work again and still be in the top 20% income bracket.

All fun and well until he needs medical treatment.

If a spectrum of measurement seems to generally fit a problem-space, but you're having problems putting names to the categories you've got (or the converse, everything you try to categorize seems to straddle one of the lines), you've probably sliced the spectrum up at the wrong points.

In this case, I recall an article (a chapter from a book, actually) that distinguished five or six separate social classes which exist in the US, and went into incredible detail about what makes someone fit into one or another of them. They felt pretty natural, both less politicized and easier to recognize by mannerism/belief/dress.

Ah, found it (the source was down, but I had a copy saved): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47375701/An_Anatomy_of_t...

I think most people would consider a college educated person earning a low six-figure income to be upper middle class.

I'm from the UK, and I think here class has nothing to do with money. It has something to do with education, but more to do with background, especially family background, culture, taste, leisure activities and so on.

It also has a lot to do with our system of peerage and nobility. I don't think you're truly upper class unless you are elevated to the peerage or in some other way decorated.

In the UK you can be destitute but upper class, and a millionaire but still working class.

Sounds a lot like a caste system

Americans (I am one) have the fantasy of a classless society, but we're every bit as class-oriented a society as India or the UK. It took me years to fully realize this.

The definition of social classes differ between Europe and the US; and there's also far less consensus on the US definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_upper_class

So if it's just about money, what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country, but happens to be poor in his old age? It's insane to call him working class, just because he's poor. Just like it's insane to call someone like David Beckham upper class - everything about the man is still working class.

Careful, you're showing your status by failing to read the article, respond to the points made in the post, or comprehend the basic idea that class delineations vary between cultures.

We don't call the "fifth generation Baronet" anything because, frankly, virtually no one of any class in the US cares.

In America, such a person would probably be called "retired", no different from someone who worked for 40 years in a factory before retiring to live on social security (= small government-provided pension). Being educated at a fancy school doesn't matter unless you're looking for a job in particular industries. A military career can earn some respect, but definitely not prestige.

I don't see either of your hypotheticals as "insane". Of course you call a rich guy "upper class", no matter how he acts, and a poor guy not, no matter how refined his background.

Wow - that is so totally different to how we look at class in the UK. I think what I'm thinking of the class divide, you might call the old-money, new-money divide.

Sounds about right to me. I'm not sure if "old money" could be applied when the money is gone, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Most Americans would call him poor (or retired) and Beckham rich.

The social signifiers Americans would recognize distinguish between the main groupings of people who work for a living: working class, middle class, and professionals. On either side of that are the rich and the poor. Take a poor person, give them a lot of money and they become rich. Their interests, habits, or speech are irrelevant.

Some rich Americans who happen to have inherited their money distinguish themselves from outsiders through affections related to clothing and habits. The vast majority of their fellow citizens would not even recognize most of what this group regards as markers of group status, any more than they would be able to distinguish between this or that gang sign.

America's original sin is slavery. Skin color was a quite simple way to distinguish between castes, so there was no reason to develop the mannerisms that became important in Britain. Someone studying acting in the UK will likely spend a tremendous amount of time on voice, so they can navigate the complexities of representing a variety of classes. It's not accidental that Americans are more noted for a much more inwardly focused "method".

what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country ...?

British. Very, very British.

Fine: they are almost certainly rising-upper-middle-class. Which is far different from working-class, or service-class. The point of the article is that, because of the frenzy for housing, and the absolute inability of Silicon Valley to allow high-density housing, teachers, manufacturers, and other laborers are being priced out of the community. Which will mean worse quality of life for higher pay: people will need to commute 1.5 hrs+ to get to $15/hr jobs instead of $10/hr jobs, though their take home pay (after commuting costs) will be about the same. Which is a really shitty situation, for everyone in the community. The solution is to stop having such restrictive zoning laws, and allow high-rises in the Valley.

Class is about power and influence. When everyone has two houses, a boat, and three cars, favors (political favors, jobs for kids at their parents' friends' companies) are the de facto currency.

People who earn a paycheck aren't upper class.

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