Class is more than just individual earning potential. I think a lot of people here (myself included) know that the scientist is more educated than the romance novel degree holder. The part we don't talk about though is that the people with degrees of "negative market value" often have those degrees because their families are rich enough that they don't have to work for a living and can do things like pay to study romcoms.
This is one of the arguments people make against unpaid internships in media and fashion industries. Only rich kids can live in NY for peanuts so these internships effectively filter out poor people (as they were designed to do).
In the US, we don't have any other social stratifications that would justify your response. Typically when we speak of class in the US we are talking exclusively about economic class. The problem with your argument is that our democratic institutions aren't fine. (Sure, sure Representative Republic). For instance in nearly every single state we have a group of people that are underrepresented by their electorate. In blue states it's typically conservative viewpoints and in red states it's liberal voices. Because of gerrymandering, in some cases unlawful, we've lost most of our moderate representatives that have led to the gridlock and partisanship we have today.
Proportional voting or a move to a parliamentary type of electorate would help these issues and allow for more voices to be heard. There's also the fact that more populous states have less representation in the House than do less populous states due to the limits imposed on the number of Representatives due to space requirements. This is problematic. Add to that the Citizen's United verdict that lifted campaign contribution limits on corporations while still enforcing them on individuals and I think I've made my point that our Democracy is in trouble without even touching the malfeasance by the actual political actors of either party.
The real problem though is that the middle class, the foundational aspect of a functional democratic process is being hollowed out.
When you look at the fact that money is considered speech and the top .001 of the US makes as much every year as the bottom 80% of the country there is no way that even the amalgamated voices of the bottom 80% could hope to have the same political sway as those with money and this divide is only getting worse.
Education is a poor classification of Americans, except for the fact that it generally correlates that the higher education you achieve the more likely you are to have higher income. Obviously your position of negative value degrees are the exception, however I'd be less likely to think that the wealthy are getting these poor degrees as are the poor. The wealthy can just write/ghost write their books and have them immediately be New York Times bestsellers without a single person other than themselves buying the book.In fact this is a common trick. The poor are generally less educated than the wealthy and this leads to an information imbalance that would prevent people from going into poor degrees instead of fields in demand like nursing, math, computer science, etc.
I'm sure many people on this board know someone stuck in a poorly paid IT helpdesk job because they got a Bachelors in IT or something else that didn't lead to money.
"In the US, we don't have any other social stratifications that would justify your response."
We do have this. Have you ever tried to raise money or interacted with VCs? Or dealt with the CEO of a large company? There is definitely a class divide. Look at all of the high end liberal arts students that monopolize the media industries. These aren't people from the trailer park.
"When you look at the fact that money is considered speech and the top .001 of the US makes as much every year as the bottom 80% of the country there is no way that even the amalgamated voices of the bottom 80% could hope to have the same political sway as those with money and this divide is only getting worse"
Except they were able to do this as per my example with Trump. Your theory sounds very valid, but the reality of it was the upper classes and all of their media empires couldn't stop someone from being elected. I think we can thank the internet for giving voice to those who historically wouldn't have it.
First of all let me just say, I love HN because of these conversations. It's so rare that we can have a place for rational discourse. This has been a great conversation.
Dealing with VCs/CEOs typically involves having the money in the first place. You have numerous cases of people without degrees at all getting VC money and building platforms. I deal with CEOs of large companies on a fairly regular basis. While the Alma Mater matters it's typically a stand in for economic class. People who can afford to not work for a few years to go the HBS aren't typically in the lower echelons. Also workplaces are more conducive to taking time out of your regular schedule for educational advancement the higher up you go, especially since you're usually always working. So the degrees come back to money.
Of the people who voted for President Trump almost all of that lies with white, male voters and that was regardless of whether they were college educate or not, and most of that was in the South. Take from that what you will as neither candidate was a PoC so race wouldn't apply as a divisor. What might have had an impact was the border security discussion. The President's election was as much a fluke as a response to disaffected Sanders voters as a weak Democratic candidate.
This is one of the arguments people make against unpaid internships in media and fashion industries. Only rich kids can live in NY for peanuts so these internships effectively filter out poor people (as they were designed to do).