In NYC, I fell in with a crowd who had quite a few extremely successful niche entrepreneurs. A kombucha maker, a boutique paper maker, some kind of avant-garde film editor, fine-art photographers, a fabric designer, this kind of thing. They were all so sought-after that they could spend only a few hours a week on their craft. Beautiful homes, expensive clothes, vacations. It took me some time to figure out that they were not successful entrepreneurs, but that these were fronts to cover for rich parents.
Personally, I don't care if someone has rich parents. Covering for it in this way felt a bit like unearned prestige, though.
I am pretty sure this has been a thing for as long as there have been rich people. In fact historically it’s been common for there to be plenty of noble titles and ministries that have no responsibilities at all, but have a title, pay, and “prestige” - which could be staffed by heirs and unlanded sons to help them build their “career” or give them some perfunctory thing to do.
Now that private enterprise is the hallmark of wealth/status instead of nobility, we have bullshit businesses. I’ve run into several of these people myself and it always takes me a while to figure out where the money’s coming from until it clicks. I’ve also seen these be quite common for wives (don’t mean to be sexist here, but I don’t know if examples for husbands) of rich men to do, either through straight up grift a la Newmann’s wife or something very very lifestyley like interior design or crafting.
What’s worse is that a lot of these fake entrepreneurs are in tech now too. Some of them are even “serial entrepreneurs”. I’m sure VC people run into them a lot, and I’m also sure a lot of them are actually talented and know what they’re doing, but to me too much involvement of the Bank of Mom and Dad makes a person/company lose a lot of legitimacy.
Bezos was like a VP at DE Shaw, that investment wasn't make or break, it does offload some risk. Someone else stated his parents invested in a later round with professional investors. It's odd how people focus on a parents investment, ignoring he was already probably in the top 1-2% in terms of income and so was his wife.
He only got it initially, that’s not what the parent comment was talking about. Future investments into the company came purely through the company’s success and growth (and VCs attracted to that). Just the initial investment would hardly count as “too much involvement from mom and dad bank”. Especially when that investment managed to grow to $1T+ without any involvement from them since then.
"Some experts say you are American middle class if you made between $51,200 to $153,000 in 2020."
what was the middle class income in the year that Bezos got the money?
I guess it seems reasonable to say though that actual median middle class is around 100,000 so the parent poster's question remains, where are they going to get the money. Well probably take a loan on the house for their son's crazy new-fangled internet scheme I guess, that seems unlikely.
If it is reasonable to survive on $51,200 then a family on $100k could reasonably be saving the balance $48,800 a year. Say half of that goes to tax because I'm too lazy to look up the tax rate, it'd take 10 years of savings to save up $250k.
So practically speaking, a small syndicate of middle class families (4-5) could reasonably found Amazon. Probably not one alone. Although I echo corndoge in that anyone describing 50-150k as the middle class income range is being polite rather than realistic about what what the class is.
You've also got to consider that this is putting _a lot_ of eggs in one basket.
Would 4-5 families really pool all their savings for 10 years to invest in one childs potential business?
Maybe. I think what is more likely is that 250k would represent a portion of the money a family could save and then put at risk. I would say this adds another order of magnitude on the earnings needed to be able to do this.
So I don't think it's worth quibbling over whether 50k or 100k is middle class. To do this I honestly think your parental income needs to be $1M+ a year.
>If it is reasonable to survive on $51,200 then a family on $100k could reasonably be saving the balance $48,800 a year.
yep, it sure would be possible in theory. Although in practice I don't think that's how it is for most people.
Also in a range of 50 - 150k obviously you have to assume that 50k is in the poorest parts of the country, and of course there is nothing saying that only nuclear families or larger can be middle class so I guess, a young single guy could be middle class.
In the case of Tennessee you might be earning enough at 50k a year to be ok, but it seems unlikely that in your region and class you will be getting the chance to invest in Amazon.
on edit: the money per year, first number middle class income in region, second number median income in region
before someone else comes in on it I'll note that families often say "we made x amount last year" while individuals say "I made x amount last year", it is up to whoever is putting the numbers together to determine how they want to deal with it.
At any rate a family I am going to suggest a family of three with 120,000 a year is probably around the same as young single guy with 50,000 a year. Which is just barely middle class.
I don't think the barely middle class is investing in anything (except for the ones with superhuman discipline, which I know some), and the ones who are actually in the middle of the middle class probably aren't going to have enough to fund early Amazon either, my disagreement was basically with the opinion that the middle class was much higher than 50k.
Keep in mind that was $250k in the late early 90s, which is more like $1-2M today - so I wouldn't really say it is within reach unless the parents are literally betting the farm on the business.
However, IIRC his parents came on as investors in the same round at the same term as other non-family investors. So really it may have been more like Bezos giving his parents access to the deal of the century rather than his parents giving a leg up to Jeff.
> Keep in mind that was $250k in the late early 90s, which is more like $1-2M today
This did not pass the sniff test for me, so I plugged $250k into usinflationcalculator.com, with a year of 1993. It came up with $486k. I think your estimates are off by a factor of 2 to 4.
>Personally, I don't care if someone has rich parents. Covering for it in this way felt a bit like unearned prestige, though.
I know people who are Gilmore Girls-style "old money" rich, and it's as much the fault of the parents as anybody else.
These kids, despite having IQ, diligence and other success-correlated traits being normally distributed just like everyone else, are under unbelievably immense pressure to be ridiculously "successful".
When the private tutoring and strings pulled aren't enough to get them over the line, these kids need _something_ to save face and be a success for their parents. For some, it's some bullshit managerial position. For those that can't even manage this, it's "entrepreneurship".
For these rich kids to do a job that they'd actually be well-suited for (say, retail worker or truck driver) would be social suicide for the parents and destroy the relationship they have with their family.
IME (in the UK) they either go into banking and finance-adjacent industries - often law - or (as noted earlier) they do something "creative" that requires a bit of cultural marketing and generates some output of no particular interest.
The corporate types are all quite cookie-cutter post-aspirational. They run marathons or do some other intensive sports, (mostly) the women play a musical instrument to a near-professional standard, they seem to have an intuitive grasp of how stocks, property, and investment markets work, they're terribly positive and friendly and charming.
The cultural types can be quite good in a limited niche, and they're often collected as trophy spouses by the other types.
The other types you'll meet are military officers - usually male - who are similar to the corporate types but more sporty without much of a cultural side (some of them enjoy consuming.)
And Notable Media Professionals who are a subset of the creative type. They somehow land astoundingly well-paid media jobs as high-profile journalists or writers, despite no evidence of deep insight or investigative ability. And a relatively light workload. (Maybe one article a week, and a few festival appearances a year.) At the very top of the tree they fall into media management at the highest levels - running newspapers and media channels.
All of these jobs are very, very difficult to get into for anyone from a genuinely working class background. They're also marked by very rigid conformity. These people all know how to play the game, and they're incredibly sensitive to insider/outsider status markers.
The idea that someone merely middle class with some working class family history could use the latter as a diversity lever to vault into them is simply nonsense.
> It took me some time to figure out that they were not successful entrepreneurs, but that these were fronts to cover for rich parents.
"Housewife jobs" are structurally similar.
I'm based in Europe and work U.S. hours, so I usually have my mornings and early afternoons for leisure activities, including riding my horse. This means I travel a fair bit in social circles comprised mostly of middle-aged women who don't have regular jobs.
If you ask those women their job or, with a slight lack of tact, even ask directly how they make a living, it's usually something like yoga teacher, photographer, landscape designer, etc.
Initially, I always walked away from these interactions thinking something like: Wow, you must be a really good landscape designer, if you can actually make a living at it, and have the time and money for two horses at a pricey stable.
Later, I realized that these occupations are mostly fronts they put up because it's not socially acceptable these days for a woman to have a husband who does most of the earning for the shared household.
What you do is: You take some online class on landscaping and tell your girlfriend (the one who you're regularly giving $100-christmas-gifts to) that you're now a trained landscape designer. You do a bit of consulting for her by making a few suggestions about what flowers would look good on her front yard and have her pay $30 for the privilege of having consulted a trained landscape designer. From now on, whenever someone asks you your job, you no longer need to say "housewife", but you can say "landscape designer". If someone walks away with the misconception that you actually make enough money from your landscape designing to pay for your lifestyle, then that's just a misconception that you're under no moral obligation to straighten out.
The problem: This sort of behaviour is not really advancing the cause of feminism at all.
Because now, when a man tells me he's a landscape designer, I assume he makes enough money as a landscape designer to pay for his lifestyle. When a woman tells me she's a landscape designer, I assume it's a front and she really just has a rich husband who pays for everything.
Yeah, this is a plague. At face value, it's not a big deal. Who cares if housewives lie/fib?
In the larger sense, it's absolutely toxic, because it projects a wholly unrealistic vision. People see others "succeeding", and blame themselves for "failing" when in reality, the "failures" don't realize that the "successes" were bankrolled by parents/spouses.
It is of course possible to succeed without the benefit of being bankrolled, but our weirdo faux-entrepreneur class makes it really challenging for others to understand what it takes or their odds of success.
> In the larger sense, it's absolutely toxic, because it projects a wholly unrealistic vision. People see others "succeeding", and blame themselves for "failing" when in reality, the "failures" don't realize that the "successes" were bankrolled by parents/spouses.
I'm glad someone else gets this. I would have a real-talk conversation with some of those friends about this, but it was really hard to get it across.
"People really look up to you, and aspire to do what you do."
"Oh that's awesome!"
"No, not awesome. They won't be able to. They don't have the advantages you do."
"Are you mad that I have money?"
"No, you're great. It's just that people won't have a realistic idea of what it takes to get where you are, if they think all you do is take photos for a living."
"Hmm. Is this important? I have to get ready for other thing."
They would assume it had something to do with jealousy, so I mostly stopped bothering.
...yeah, misrepresentation of the odds of success is actually an interesting part of the whole dynamic: I think many women sort of fall into this without intending it. Their peers suddenly all seem to be super-successful yoga solopreneurs, so they might get into it fully intending to use that as a career to financially support themselves and their families. When they later fail and discover the truth about their peers, they don't want to admit defeat and themselves fall into the pattern of bs'ing people about their success, thus becoming part of the problem.
>The problem: This sort of behaviour is not really advancing the cause of feminism at all.
Isn't the real problem that it is socially unacceptable to not have a job, even if you are a housewife, mother or even househusband. We have gone from women not having the choice to work to not having the choice to not work.
I thought that's what I was implying, although my choice of words was probably clumsy. I guess it's a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship. If it was more socially acceptable for women to be housewives, they would admit to it more freely. If women admitted to being housewives more freely, it would become more socially acceptable.
In what circles is it socially unacceptable to not have a job? I know of no systematic studies of who does this kind of thing and who does not and what the relative prevalence is, but of my entire extended family on both my side and my wife's side, other than my wife, I can't think of a single wife that has a job, and none of them pretend to have jobs, either.
If we're talking solely of the class of people who own horses kept in upscale stables and have the leisure time to ride them daily, then perhaps for them simply maintaining a household and raising children isn't enough and they feel idle if they don't pretend to have jobs because they can pay full time maids and nannies and maintaining a household and raising children really isn't time consuming and leaves them too much idle time. That is hardly a common position to be in, though.
You could even use Patreon to create an online proof of your successful business. If you have a hobby, like writing blogs or making photos, just subscribe to your friends' accounts, and they will subscribe to yours. Patreon will take some 30% of the money, which is not a problem if you are rich, and now you are a successful artist and you can prove it to the whole world.
There is a guy, Viktor Kozeny, who is known for some hard to understand scam, and, I think he's a guy just like that, who through some horrible mistake ended up having actual responsibility, and screwed up so completely that nobody is willing to believe it,
and there is no hidden tax haven money, only his well of mother.
Is it really a cover? Or is it just what they do and make money off it by already being rich and having connections as well as being supplemented by their parents.
It depends on the person, plenty of children of rich people run actually successful businesses, but there are definitely “businesses” that are a kind of pomp around not actually doing anything.
I don’t think kids or parents necessarily see it as some kind of scheme, probably it’s more like the parents want their kids to be successful, but the kids don’t have any idea what to do and are super comfortable having their rent paid + a parent’s credit card + a salary paid for by their parent’s investments, so they don’t really try that hard because there are no consequences for failure. And the parents don’t care too much either because they’re proud their kid has a business and think it’ll be valuable experience even if it doesn’t do well.
One of my first jobs was for a man whose parents were quite wealthy. I found his business decisions to be incomprehensible until I understood that his business was basically something he could point at so his parents would give him more money. Something internal to their family, I guess. He would have been quite fine with doing nothing at all, but then his parents would have cut him off.
Absolutely! Each episode could be a new bizarre business. A journey from idea, to creation, and to collapse. And of course each one starts with buying yet another new domain name.
I think the parents also see it as a good method to fill out the kids time as the parents are afraid that if the kids don't have anything to do, then the kids will end up doing drugs.
Kids doing drugs in rich families are very common as a way to handle the insane pressure. It's just that "Drugs Don't Work".
Were all of them really covers? If I were rich, I would love to be able to pursue some craft without caring about profits. In fact that is exactly what every human should be able to do, instead of slaving away their living hours to some job.
Ahh yes, the trustafarian. The classic NYC archetype. Having been in similar crowds in NYC (especially Brooklyn), I don’t know if I would say that these are “fronts,” per se. It’s just that most trustafarian’s don’t openly out themselves as such because it’s impolite/uncouth to out oneself that way. In LA, people with rich parents flaunt it, but on the east coast, it’s better to keep those things to oneself.
That said, as you figured out, it doesn’t take long for people to identify who the trustafarian’s are in a group. I’m solidly upper middle-class myself but I grew up around a mix of old-money and new-money people, so it didn’t take long for me to figure out, once I got to New York, that any Smith grad working as a busker or doing burlesque while living roommate-free in a 1BR in the West Village or a 2BR in Prospect Height, had rich parents. Because only people with benefactors can do that. But I didn’t know too many trustafarian’s who would pretend to be self-made. They just didn’t advertise that it was daddy who was paying the Amex bill. But if you’re 25, working as a candle maker, and you have a Platinum card, well, we can all do the math and know what’s up. Also, if you went to an elite college and aren’t actively working in a high-paying industry, let alone in anything associated with your nebulously-defined liberal arts degree, well, again. Of course you have rich parents. Also, those are the people who are never complaining about student loans, unlike the gaggle of very vocal NYU, Columbia and New School grads who are trying to figure out how they can pay off $250,000 in loans while working at Vice. (The answer is most of them cannot and will wind up taking corporate jobs within 5 years.)
But NYC is even further different because there are so many levels of inherited wealth/rich parents. The person who has parents paying for their nice apartment and lifestyle, but is still pursuing a niche creative pursuit, is very different from the uber-rich young adult who has a job — even if it is in name-only — at the family-controlled business or who devotes their time to being on the board of a charity or museum. These are the people that have private planes and summer in the most exclusive parts of the Hamptons, have European vacation homes, where expensive (but understated) clothing and jewelry, attend frequent black tie galas, grew up in Greenwich and hang out almost exclusively with other people just like them, who come from families with hundreds of millions of dollars. Which are further different from the more west-coast like people that are children of parents who made their millions in tech or Hollywood and flaunt their wealth with zero pretense of where it came from, all over Instagram. Which is further different from the non-European foreign-born rich kids whose parents might have more money than everyone else, but don’t have the social class acceptance of that second group.
I get quite annoyed at this because personally I have faced extreme adversity and only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers from an early age have I been able to escape my circumstances.
I’ll say it clearer for anyone who missed that: luck.
A lot of social issues in the uk are primarily class based, you won’t even be aware of the jobs you’ll be looked over for because you didn’t go to the right school, and those “right schools” pre-select based on background.
“Daddy is a barrister, I guess we let this one in?!”
In the event you are born with privilege you prefer to be underestimated, I don’t think I’ve met many upper class people who are genuinely happy being removed from the masses. Maybe it’s a grass is always greener thing.
Myself, I speak with a middle class accent, desperate not to be thrown back to where I came from.
> you won’t even be aware of the jobs you’ll be looked over for because you didn’t go to the right school, and those “right schools” pre-select based on background.
I didn't believe in class until I met rich people and got to know them quite well.
For Dutch people, all I say is: go to Delft for university. The UvA sucks, the VU sucks, Eindhoven sucks, Twente is irrelevant. Tilburg? No. Groningen? What? Rotterdam: only if you're doing Economics. Leiden? Too close to Delft.
I know how it sounds, but a recruiter also only looks 10 seconds at your resume. It shouldn't be this way, especially because uni's in The Netherlands are quite close in quality. But when it comes to recruiting, prestige signaling allows you to get the foot in the door and apparently Delft has the prestige.
It was painful seeing/hearing this and experiencing it second hand as someone who graduated from both universities of Amsterdam (VU and UvA).
Class was invisible to me in The Netherlands, and then I met rich people. I wish I hadn't. Though the people are awesome, so I am really happy knowing them. So on a personal level I wish I had, but in terms of outlook on Dutch society: I don't want to know (what I consider to be) the truth. It's depressing information and I don't know what I can do about it other than knowing that if I ever get kids they'll probably get a massive advantage in learning educational things really young.
I don't need to feed it. What I need to do is find interesting specific sub-cultures. That's where the consciousness arises, class is just one of the many.
Hmm… Well, that only works for degrees in engineering, it’s a ‘Technical University’. Also, Delft is probably a great university, but it doesn’t strike me as more prestigious than the other Universities you mention.
For what it’s worth, the members of the Royal family all attended Leiden University. As did the current prime minister. Most ministers of justice in recent history attended Leiden University and were a member of Minerva, a conservative student society.
Still, I wouldn’t consider Leiden a particularly prestigious university—none of the Dutch universities are, because they are all relatively accessible and publicly funded. Instead, the well-connected manage to create their own little groups inside of student life. Like the aforementioned Minerva, which like other student societies (that exist in Delft as well), has students make small clusters (jaarclub, dispuut), with all kinds of barriers to entry. I presume the richest kids cluster together. People then rely on these connections throughout their career.
To me it sounds like you met a group of rich people who were friends in Delft University (and I presume already rich) and relied on this network afterwards: this is a pattern that reproduces itself at other Universities. And inversely, attending Delft University is by no means a guarantee that you can profit from this mechanism.
It’s interesting what you say of not seeing class differences before, I think it’s quite common in The Netherlands. The image the Dutch have of their society is one with very little class differences. This might be a comforting idea in day to day live (as you mention) but it also makes it hard to do something about the unfair situations that persist.
Fwiw I went to Eindhoven and I never ever got the idea someone got better opportunities because they went to Delft. Everyone I know considers them to be similar.
And, for context, I know quite some rich/successful people.
Fair enough, the issue with these type of things is that there’s not enough data because it’s quite a sensitive topic. Another issue is that we might be talking about different things without realizing it. It’s my experience that it happens a lit with this topic.
I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when I was born, my father's experience meant he could help me with coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc. to do anything).
I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates. We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that really took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports instead of tearing open tvs.
For me, this is not luck, your parents worked hard from generation to generation instead of watching sports. This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society, it’s an inner stress that they had all their life, “How do I discover or make something to embed myself into a society where I can’t compete on connections or assets.”
You're thinking of this with a modern viewpoint, which holds that tech is inherently useful and a socially-worthy pursuit. This is a very recent cultural ideal: Even when I was growing up (in the 90s), it was way more the 'weird passion project' territory unless you were an academic.
My grandfather was born in 1919, and the parts of TVs he liked weren't the entertaining or cool parts. Furthermore, his obsession was actually detrimental to fulfilling his social role: My father says that his father wasn't good with money in part because he spent too much of it on things to tinker with, and he was socially not the most ept guy.
It was this way for other classes too:
My class background is complicated because my mother is from a decently well-off family but cut off contact and bailed at 15. One example from her childhood/family, however, is that one of her relatives was a tenured academic who helped found the academic study of pop culture. On the other hand, this was something he did after winning a Pulitzer and getting tenure for more serious work.
It's easy to forget, but 2-3 generations ago a tech interest was seen as a potentially useful eccentricity at best outside of a very few select sectors.
Luck is they got into tinkering with TVs which led to tinkering with computers and hence tech.
If they had worked hard in laying bricks maybe they wouldn't have had so much success probably.
Or making ships, in which case they would have been betrayed by their government and ended up watching their jobs, and entire professions, get shipped off to Korea.
> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society ...
That seems like a massive assumption about people you don't know.
IMO, a more likely explanation is that people just tend to do the things that their brains find rewarding. I like programming because it feels like playing a puzzle game, so I'll do it for fun. For lots of other people the idea of sitting behind a computer all day solving abstract problems is pure torture.
Doing the dishes on the other hand is not mentally stimulating so I kind of avoid it until I have to do them. So my place usually isn't as clean or tidy as it could be. I also know people who enjoy the process of cleaning and tidying, and their place is always clean and tidy.
I don't think these people are more virtuous than I am for keeping their place cleaner, nor do I think that I'm more virtuous than others because I enjoy programming and can make things that they cannot. None of this is caused by abstract pondering about one's value to society. We just follow the reward structure of our brains.
> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society
Meh, not necessarily. I like to tinker, but I wouldn't say I do it to provide value for anyone (and throwing something on GitHub won't provide value to almost anyone)
The biggest problem is demonstrated here too. You have no experience of existing in a higher social category, so your anecdotes of what you imagine it to be like are purely bogeyman fiction traded between lower classes.
That's bollocks. I attended a prep school where most kids came from multi-millionaire families. They knew their privilege inside and out, and weren't shy about broadcasting this knowledge. OP is not wrong.
That is just selection bias, people who aren't rich have to work and therefore you meet them even when they don't want to socialize. Rich people who don't want to socialize don't need to, so you only see those who really wants to be out there and meet people.
Well, in my case, when I bumped arms with the rich and well off was mostly back before I was 25. There's some occasional intermixing between the talented peasants and the kids of the wealthy at things like prestigious scholarship trips and the like.
This would probably hold true if I were going just based on the rich people I knew through work since most of them I've interacted with as a representative of my organization (which they have some interest in), so you'd be correct that there's a motive there.
You have touched on one of the biggest reasons I am against private school. We can't force our countrymen to know each other as adults but I think they should start in the same classrooms.
I go back and forth on the question. I definitely think we need to get rid of the two-tier system that's functionally 'pay to play', but I don't think just public schooling is going to solve the issue, because the problem with putting either the peasant Einstein or oligarch's kid in a normal school is that their arrogance is almost never curbed, because there are a lack of peers to call them out. The exception to this would be areas where those groups cluster together: A Silicon Valley or DC public school might have enough privileged kids that they can call each other out.
On the other hand, I'm a talented peasant who went to a public school system of ~30 kids per grade. Setting aside IQ's usefulness as a measure, I had an IQ of ~145, which meant I was not socializing with the other kids the way I should have, and it also meant that (once the tests identified it), most adults were not interested in addressing my arrogance or mistreatment of other people. I very clearly remember in late elementary school, I viewed my classmates very similarly as I did to intelligent dogs. I can see a very similar thing happening to the one wealthy kid in, say, an Appalachian school. Sure, you're all nominally equals, but if the teachers need to go to your parents for help with the school supplies, you're not going to be disciplined in the same manner as other children, and wealthy parents teach their children to use their social status.
I'd be wary of solving social isolation between classes by opening up more ability for local fiefdoms to pop up. (Think of local business owners that are POSes to their employees because they know their only other option is Walmart.) From the point of view of the average citizen, neither type of ruler/elite is good to deal with.
This isn't class mattering, it's kids thinking class matters, and trying to build themselves up by virtue of it. They are literally trying to convert real class into "cool-at-school" props, which should tell you how much they get out of the first.
Not British but here’s something I noticed when we acquired a company with an office in the Bay and in the UK (London, if it matters).
At the US office you just parked in the first available spot. In the UK office there were assigned parking spots for anyone with a management position closest to the door, roughly sorted by tittle. And the accents sounded a little bit different (for the British employees) between engineering and management and sales.
In NZ, we made a deliberate effort to avoid the class system of the UK in certain ways (e.g., hunting and trout fishing are far more egalitarian here), but we also imported it in some ways.
Some families in Christchurch are very proud of being descended from "First Four Shippers" (colonists who arrived on the four ships that started the settlement of Christchurch), and they all try to send their children to the "right" schools (private ones), but the old boys' club is far weaker here (seems to exist mainly in law firms).
And no-one has class related accents (although a private primary school called Medbury, is very proud to teach a particular accent to its pupils, but they typically have it bullied out of them within a year at high school.
I once lived for almost a year in NZ. Afterwards, when people asked me about it, I often say: "Think about England without the class system." If I were to speculate on a reason for this, I would say that NZ perhaps had few upper-class immigrants. So there was no upper-class to begin with, which put NZ on a different trajectory. Does that sound plausible?
Definitely - while we had a few Lords and Barons and what-not turn up, they were typically here as adventurers/mercenaries[0] or amateur scientists. And usually not from the English nobility.
The people looking to move to colonies from Britain were typically those who were willing to risk the long sea voyage and the hard grind for a chance to build a better life. And English companies set up to colonise NZ focused on bringing large amounts of the working class so that they could do what was needed to make the "estates of gentlemen" productive.
But then combine the gold rushes[1, 2, 3], the Scottish colonisation of Otago/Õtākou[4], and other people settling who had no ties to the English class system (Irish via Australia, Chinese gold miners, Scandinavians up in Dannevirke), the the English class system was never going to really take hold, although the people who formed the new "upper classes" in terms of property holdings and social status did try to maintain it.
And all that said, the Canterbury Association that formed Christchurch did its best to ensure that Christchurch was the most "English city", it was strongly tied to the Anglican church which was gifted rather large plots of land (as was the Anglican private school, Christ's College[5], still a large landlord in the city), and indeed, the Canterbury diocese still holds a rather large property portfolio[6].
Christchurch is probably the most likely place for people to ask which school you went to, and where going to the same school as your interviewer might open some doors, but it's a lot less prevalent these days, IMO.
> only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers
It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that other people in other professions don't have to deal with.
Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's extremely accessible.
As someone who has been incredibly lucky _and_ has worked very hard to surpass a rough start, I think it simply helps to have a thorough understanding of what it means to be lucky.
You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice. Luck would literally have to come and hunt you down at random. If you're pretty good at [whatever] but at the right places (including virtually) and meeting the right people, luck will work far better for you.
In both cases, luck is important. You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly. Which is why we like to say it's important to get used to losing. Because even if you're very good and always in the right places at the right times with the right people - you _still_ need luck.
You just need less luck than someone who isn't showing up every day. And a lot less luck than someone literally doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. But you still need luck.
Everything is luck. You ability to learn, acquire and utilize knowledge, physical ability, not getting struck by lightning, being able to play basketball at the level of Lebron James, etc. None if it was earned - some dice were rolled when you were born and that's it.
> You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice.
That is entirely based on luck. Were you born with the correct genetics and environment to get you off your couch or not?
> You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly
There's no difference between getting struck by lightning or being born with the right genetics that give you determination, intelligence, work ethic, etc. All luck.
I don't get this fixation with acknowledging how lucky one is when all of it is luck. We should be concerned with optimizing society so that we get to a point where no human has to struggle any more.
Yeah, it's luck. It's perfectly healthy to frame things as: I took a deep interest in computers for which expertise is now in high demand.
I'm in the same boat: loved computers early on and had no interest in pursuing them professionally (I was eight when I started programming). It's lucky because I could just as well have loved botany, or auto mechanics, or pottery, etc but I happened to pick the one that later in life was in high demand.
Sure, yeah, I worked hard, but not because "I want to make MONEY when I get older!" but simply because I had the interest (and supportive parents...luck again). The alignment of my early interests and market conditions today are 100% luck. And that's what you need: to be in the right place at the right time. I'd attribute my success to 10% personal factors and 90% external factors.
You still need to work your ass off for that 10%, but the other 90% is all out of your hands, and it's ok to acknowledge this (and that doesn't mean you feel guilty). In fact, if we ever want to create a world where the ratio is not 90/10, but 80/20 or 60/40 or dare I say 50/50, we need to acknowledge just how much of our lives is out of our control.
No reason to be ashamed of luck. I feel tremendously lucky that I have enough brain power to be a decent programmer and engineer. This has helped me to recover from bouts of massive depression. There were years where I basically dropped out life but once things got better I was able to find well paying jobs pretty easily. I feel I am very lucky to have that fallback that a lot of other people don’t have. I was not so lucky that somehow I never seem to be able to improve my social skills much.
I think a lot of life is luck and it’s ok to admit that. I hate it when people who got lucky reject that idea and try to make you believe that it’s all hard work and if other people only worked hard they could achieve the same. I know enough people who simply don’t have the talent to do what I can do and there are plenty of things I can’t do no matter how hard I work.
I am also lucky that I have decent looks so it’s not too hard to find a partner despite my often painful shyness and awkwardness. Other people aren’t that lucky.
> It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind.
I don't think this is unhealthy. I liked computers, my sibling liked painting... only one of us got a high-paying job and can afford a lot of leisure time and travel. I don't think that it requires shame to acknowledge that luck had something to do with it. Luck is ever-present in our lives.
Software engineering has an incredibly low barrier to entry for a technical profession and has no formal checks. There’s plenty of smart people who don’t grok it.
I guess just be grateful, don’t take your current circumstances for granted, and try and be kind to others if you can.
Fwiw I disagree with it being unhealthy and I view myself the same way. It IS lucky that my only hobby/interest I’ve ever really had also happens to be something that pays so well.
Nothing unhealthy about recognizing one’s luck and being correspondingly grateful for it.
Just throwing another opinion in the mix. I think it's healthy to recognize one's own work in addition to that dumb luck. It's certainly lucky that we liked computers but it's also true that a lot of us worked hard and took advantage of our lucky situations. That's not to say we succeeded on hard work alone, far from it - luck is a crucial part, but it's also unfair to not give yourself a little credit sometimes.
Being willing to take advantage of the luck by working hard, taking risks, having a vision as to how to succeed and be useful. It is very much about empowering both yourself and others. The luck part is there to help prevent the "I did this, why didn't you?" crappy privileged perspective, but it needs to be balanced with the drive.
As an example, over a decade ago, I quit a job with no plans of getting another one. Someone I knew told me about an opportunity (luck / connections), and I pursued it. It was hard at first, but now it is almost a turn-key operation. Still requires work, but far less than it did at the beginning. It has netted me a good tidy sum which has been crucial for living the life I want.
Was it luck? Absolutely. Was it my own ability, hard work, and willingness to take that step? Yes. What would have happened had I said no? No idea, but probably less of a good outcome.
Ideally, one tries to frame one's life to be empowering but not arrogant, not trivializing the difficulty of other's paths. Luck is not empowering. Belief that hard work alone can get you to the height is not empowering. Some mixture of these things, that can be empowering. Understanding that the goal is to be useful to others as well as yourself, that's really empowering.
I would say it's unhealthy to think of it as only luck.
It's luck that you like something that is sought after in the job market. But actually spending years learning about it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much because they are needed for the job, takes effort.
I mean, I did this for fun while I was still in high school. Did I put in a lot of hours? Yes. Were there some frustrating bits? Sure. But I know plenty of people who had to put far more work in to get mediocre grades in their high school qualifications than I've ever put into learning programming.
Framing any and all success (maybe not what OP is doing, but a lot of people do this so it's probably worth addressing) as "sheer dumb luck" implies that you think there's a lot of things in your life that are outside your control when they really aren't. The OP may have deliberately chose that wording to convey that _in their case_, their love for computers was something they pursued completely and entirely ignorant of it being a high-demand/high-paying field. There's a lot of people that have convinced themselves that the odds of them getting a well paying job and doing better for themselves are approaching zero, for no reason other than believing that the only way to have that happen is to be born into it or to have "sheer dumb luck". That prophecy fulfills itself.
There's luck involved, but it's only part of the story.
Discussions on the role of luck in success pop up here on HN from time to time, and one pattern that stands out to me is that, for a good chunk of people, it seems really important to their sense of identity that luck is at best a minor factor in their success.
Your post is one of the more direct renderings of that point of view: you don't really argue that the parent post is wrong, merely that it's not a healthy way to frame it. Which makes me curious: why do you believe that it is bad for someone to believe that their success is largely caused by luck?
As an aside, personally I subscribe to this view on the interaction of luck and success: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
But the thing is, you could be a class bullshitter, just like the woman the article describes! There is no objective test to determine if you had to overcome "extreme adversity" or if you were "privileged" like most middle/upper-class people were.
I understand what you’re saying but there’s nothing I can point to in my life that gave me privilege. Even being white and male have largely been detriments to my life as a lot of things designed to help low income people tended to have racial qualifiers.
Which incidentally made me a bit racist until I overcame that, because ultimately it’s nobodies fault.
I have no “absentee dad who helped out” and my family all died before I was 5 leaving behind a pitiful inherentence that barely covered their burials.
I get what you’re saying. But the reason it pisses me off is that while I have been extremely lucky, I sometimes wish to speak to my friends who were not so lucky and did not escape like I have. Having people discredit my lived experience or pretending as if it was the same for then us not helping them or me.
When I was seven I went to a public school (which in the UK is sort of like a posh private school, from a US perspective). To get in, at seven, we had to take an entrance exam on maths, science, and English. So to pass this I went to a feeder school from literally the age of two and a half to prepare for the exam. My entire class came from others who went to feeder schools. This in turn prepped us for the public school exam to get into senior school (which had a 100% success rate). And that in turn prepped a lot of people for the Oxbridge exams and so on.
So yes, money is the trick, but it’s not worth it. I burned out at school hard because I’d been going at it for so long.
Obviously money talks, but a school like Eton would be more willing to take a somewhat wealthy aristocrat than a common as muck lottery winner.
If you come into a hundred million overnight, that doesn’t make up for your previously deprived life and the associated markers (lower register, lack of childhood polo lessons, no time/money/inclination to go play white saviour in the third world)
This is kind of an odd framing because the traditional notion of class is hereditary. If you look at it one way, my wife and I are the same class—professional degrees from the same school working for similar professional firms. At one point we lived in virtually identical 1950s split levels, on opposite sides of the country. But my family was affluent landowners for generations “back in old country” and my wife’s family comes from a poor rural part of the Oregon coast. Our acculturation and is completely different. My dad thinks and acts like someone whose dad had sharecroppers tending their farm, and her dad thinks and acts like someone whose dad hunted game to add protein to the family’s diet. And my dad raised me and her dad raised her and we still think and act differently as a result. It wouldn’t be a “lie,” as the title suggests, for her to say she comes from a working class background and for me to say that I don’t.
Well it’s somewhat hereditary. I often see class in the US described as exactly equivalent to which bucket of income/wealth you fall into, which is certainly not hereditary and feels obviously wrong too: I think a poorly paid academic or teacher is likely to be considered higher class than a successful used car dealership owner. I say it’s somewhat hereditary because it seems at least a little malleable over people’s lives, at least with university and certain professions socialising people into the middle class.
I don’t really understand the subject of the article mattering much in life though. Social class matters a lot in the U.K. but no one asks which class you identify with before they decide how to treat you. Instead, it matters which class you present and I suspect the middle-class-identifying-as-working-class will present as middle class both in obvious ways (e.g. accent, grooming, dress) and more subtle ways (e.g. choice of words or phrases, being able to comfortably/knowledgeably talk about certain things).
I also don’t really understand the politics of class or the class people identify as today. Maybe I just have a simplistic view of history, but it seems the ideas of working/middle/upper classes don’t really fit today’s society and I’m often surprised when I see contemporary political arguments based on this class system.
I would say she comes from a working class background and is middle class or "middle class passing". Meaning when she goes to a job interview, or meets people socially, they think she is middle class.
The concern the author of the piece has is that if she says she's working class, it will suggest she overcame adversity to get to where she is, but from your comment, it's possible she grew up in an area with good middle-class-school-district-funded schools. Or maybe she went to a bad school and qualified for financial aid, I don't know.
Our parents' attitudes which you're talking about can affect us, but so does our material circumstances and environment.
In the UK where there's a stronger class based system, middle class is expressed through your accent and dialect, how you dress, etc.
I think one of the things going on has to do with a decade or so of 'reality' TV being a primary source of entertainment for many (most?) people. And in particular one aspect: the 'sob story'.
On any TV show, and in the media in general, there are a few different competition formats (a la Bake Off, The Apprentice, BGT, etc.) but all include a 'sob story' element, particularly near the end as we get to know more about the contestants. Every single person selected by the producers for these shows has some factor in their life that they've overcome to get this far.
Individually, this makes for an engaging TV show, we warm to the characters because they have a good story, but overall the effect is damaging, I think. The effect is to create a system that only allows people to feel successful if they've overcome some terrible adversity. It's not enough to come from a comfortable, middle class background, do well in school and then lead a moderately successful life. What have you really achieved if you've done this?
Most people in the UK live reasonably comfortable, stable lives (modulo class). Since—according to my theory—people need to feel like they have something to overcome in order to be allowed to feel successful, people will overstate hardships, and focus on and amplify negative events and circumstances in their lives in order to feel validated.
Victimhood is equated with morality, furthermore victims are entitled to compensation. There's incentive to be seen as a victim, because it screams both "I am moral, and I am entitled to compensation" It happens at both the individual level and at group levels. Its sort of a key to understanding modernity.
Furthermore, when you deny a person's victimhood -- you are immediately considered a very-bad-person (you are in league with the aggressor). Anyone who pointed out the Jussie Smollett hoax can attest to being treated poorly/as an aggressor. We also have #believeallwomen, and so forth.
Also, being a victim and being privileged are generally seen as mutually exclusive, so it's a way to avoid guilt.
And with the infinite torrent of knowledge (including of the amount of suffering in the world) at our fingertips, guilt is an ever-present temptation for anyone with means.
You see this with public figures, they do something horrible/super-unpopular and then they whine and say "I've been getting death threats" to posture as victims (maybe they are getting threats and maybe they aren't, but the effect is the same -- ie that they are transformed in the public consciousness into moral beings)
I often find it doesn't take much digging in someone else's life to find out they have lived through something awful or traumatic, either it happened directly to them or to someone very close to them. I'm always amazed people are willing to share their 'sob story' on TV, I think there are a lot of people that wouldn't ever share their stories.
I don't think it's damaging. I think it gives people a way to imagine the stories they will tell about themselves when they become successful someday in the best case. If not, well at least they had a nice fantasy for entertainment.
A "working class" person in the US is blue collar. "working class" is a subaltern identity in the UK, that is a victim of social pathology, probably not even actually working. See
I'd say though that culture studies today talks about "race, class and gender" but largely ignores class. I know plenty of white people who have black problems including a tendency towards meaningless but dangerous contacts with the police, but if you never got more than 50 miles from the coast you might not know there is such as thing as a hillbilly.
It is talked about, but maybe not to the extent that it could be. For obvious historic reasons, race and class are highly correlated. I think this causes certain class issues to disguise as race issues and vice versa. To be clear, both kinds of discrimination exist, both are terrible. But people are sometimes bad at separating correlated variables intuitively. And, how do I put it, the social sciences don’t have the reputation to always use the most statistically sound methods.
Also, people discriminate so much on class that it may not be an advantage to be of a higher class.
I can’t count the ways people invent criteria, such as “street cred”, to prefer some people upon others. “Humble”, “son of worker”, “comes from the hood” are other criteria people use to justify unfairness. Ironically, streed cred is so cheatable that the only ones we let down are the actual middle classes with strong sense of work, because they pass as supposedly rich. The middle and higher classes end up with heaps of resentment which harms society (I remember events such as a girl telling me “I ruined your reputation at school but I was wrong, you were the good guy. Oh sorry for your high school btw.”)
I hate to break it to the author but peole lie about pretty much everything.
People will lie about their incomes on anonymous surveys. People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent. You can boil this down to:
1. People lying to themselves and then reflecting that lie to others. A common one I see here is, for example, "it only takes me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work". At 1am on a Tuesday with a tailwind maybe. It's a form of cognitive dissonance; and
2. People lying to others. This is for personal gain and because the person cares about how they're perceived by others.
So if you take an example from the post (eg working class family background) it could be either. I've known people who really believe they're working class heroes but they're clearly middle class. It can be woven into their identity. It can just be virtue signaling. It can be to fit in. It can be aspirational.
The 2000 election had Al Gore vilify the "top 1%". A survey at the time found that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be some day. So with this lie they've told themselves (knowingly or not) you've dended up alienating 39% of voters.
Ultimately though a lot of these lies can be reduced to people feeling good about themselves even if that means making other people look bad.
A lot of social media is built on such "flexing". Instagram in particular. Even Tiktok has all these videos where people post these "how am I so amazing?" videos. You just need to realize it's pretty much all lies.
Oh and as for this specific example from the post (ie fetishization of a working-class background in the UK) this is interesting because my experience in the UK was there's a lot of value in signaling your upper class background, how you went to Oxford, Cambridge or Eton, the BBC accent (now this is really the modern RP accent) and so on.
The UK is still quite classist (IME). Up until 20-30 years ago, university applications asked your father's occupation.
> it only takes me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work
This is interesting. There is nothing I can think of people lie about more rampantly than how long it takes them to get places.
Are there any studies on this? I wonder if it's just people being optimistic, or if they're actually trying to signal that they're better than everyone else because they can get places faster than everyone else (even when they can't).
> People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent.
Political scientists have had to develop a separate category, along with methods to identify its members, in order to capture actual "swing voters", for related reasons. Lots of folks like to classify themselves as "centrist" or "independent" or "on the fence" or what have you, while in fact voting party line every single time just as reliably as someone who self-identifies as being highly partisan. Actual swing voters are a tiny minority of the people who identify as such (which is why "get out the vote" is, not-so-secretly, far more important than courting those voters—lots of seemingly odd behavior by politicians makes way more sense when this is factored in)
Bad political reporting (which is lots of political reporting) won't bother to make the distinction, which results in misleading coverage, graphs, et c.
I'm having trouble believing that figure. I read the article, not the study, so shame on me for that. 11% of Americans will make, at some point, over $300k per year? That is an obscene amount of money. I cannot believe that 1 in 10 people will make that much in a year for at least one year in their life times. Maybe amongst computer science grads from good schools, where 1 in 10 gets into a FAANG, but amongst the general populace?
Keep in mind this is from the Cato Institute and similar.
"People feel it's a fixed club and no one else can get in, but that's not the case," said Mark Perry, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Once you get there, it's not easy to stay there."
Hmm, the figures show that 1.1% of the population get to spend 10 years in the top 1% of income, while another 2.2% only spend 5-9 years there and another 11.1% spend 1-4 years there. It's easy to "stay there" for some...
The flipside is, a higher income tax would affect 11.1% of people just a few years (times), and 1.1% of people would be affected many more years (times).
- Real estate agents with a busy year vs. a bust year
- Sales with the same
- House Sales for owners
- Employees at public companies with RSU cliffs
- Business sales for entrepreneurs
- Employees at startups that have IPO'd
My understanding is a lot of Americans live on the coasts, and the coasts can have high salaries and costs of living (house prices). I do think it's likely that 1 in 10 people could have a very good year once.
> 11% of Americans will make, at some point, over $300k per year? That is an obscene amount of money. I cannot believe that 1 in 10 people will make that much in a year for at least one year in their life times.
I can. Especially if the period the stats were collected over includes the period around and immediately following the Great Recession. Why?
(1) People work in fields with irregular income; a book might take years to write, but most of the income for it may be received in a much shorter window.
(2) Lots of things (lots of them misfortune) produce income spikes besides work with irregular returns. Short sell a house for $200,000 less than the mortgage balance, with the rest forgiven by lender? That's $200,000 in income that year. Forced to liquidate your tax-deferred retirement savings early to pay for unexpected (say, medical) expense? Again, big one-time income spike.
Of course, this doesn't mean what writers from a right-wing propaganda mill want to make it mean.
Contrarian opinion: the class system in Britain is the legacy of an ethnic hierarchy which has (1) matured and become a little fuzzy over the course of a thousand years, and (2) is obscured by the fact all ethnic groups are white. Normans at the top of the hierarchy (Queenie is a descendant of William the Bastard), Angles, Saxons, Vikings in the middle, Celts at the bottom. This ethnic difference contributes to quite different class cultures.
I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large settled the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the population of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic culture and position in the US class hierarchy.
Additional aside, UK weird hostility to red heads (often remarked upon by visitors) is in fact legacy hostility to Celts.
> I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large settled the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the population of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic culture and position in the US class hierarchy.
These are largely the "Scots-Irish", as we call them in the US. They originate as the Borderers, that is, the lowland folks who lived on the border of Scotland and England (an effectively lawless region for a long stretch of time). At some point a bunch of them were shipped off to Ireland, then a bunch of those moved to the US. Hence, "Scots-Irish".
The history of their migration paints a picture of a people disliked basically everywhere. Kicked out of the Border country, then kicked out of Ireland, then kicked out of Pennsylvania, before finally settling in Appalachia (and being hated there by almost everyone outside that country—it's still socially acceptable to say all kinds of horrible things about them).
We (I'm very, very much of that "stock" on one side of my family) seem to be some real bastards.
Kicked out of Pennsylvania? Did someone forget to serve the eviction notice on Simon Cameron, James Buchanan, James Laughlin, etc.?
Those who settled in Ulster were looking for land (confiscated from the Irish). Those who came to America were looking for land. If they moved west and southwest, it was largely for more and perhaps better land.
Weep not for the Scotch-Irish. They've done pretty well out of America. (I have Scotch-Irish ancestry, traced by an uncle back to Bushmills in Ulster.)
This seems unlikely. Ethnic groups are cultures, much more than associations of genes. African-Americans are ~80% West African ~20% British by ancestry but there’s a lot more British in their culture than West African. Absent Indian jati style strict endogamy genetic distinctiveness will disappear quickly even with low levels of exogamy. Jatis in the same village have levels of genetic distance similar to Sweden-Sicily. Those are people whose last common ancestor was 1000-1500 years ago. There’s nothing like that anywhere in Europe.
East Anglia is the English region with highest modern Germanic ancestry, 30%. Samples from graves from Anglo-Saxon invasions suggest almost 100% population replacement. That’s consistent with panmixia.
As to red hair, attitudes change quickly. Kick a ginger day started with South Park.
I think the many legends/myths/stereotypes/fearmongering about red-headed warriors across Europe would beg to differ there. Maybe there have been intervals where red-headedness was a positive attribute, but I think the general historical record points to the opposite.
I've felt what the author describes, but would probably call it "Class Imposter Syndrome" over anything else. I never thought I was anything other than "middle class" (American middle class) growing up, since my mom owned a home and had an office job, but whenever I'm with my family (who have most the hallmarks of being lower class southern mountain people) I'm reminded that we're a little different. I don't know if there's something about how I carry myself, or talk, but sometimes I wonder if people see it. Like I have memories of telling people the street I lived on and people assuming I lived in the trailer park, even though the street was mostly houses. And I remember little things like staying the night at a friend's house, the kind of look of pity on her parents' face when I was astounded by actual maple syrup being a different thing than Aunt Jemima, and trying in vain to explain that to my own parents.
The end result is that even though I am very comfortable in the company of lower class people, I'd feel like a faker if I described myself like that. But when I'm around classier people, I feel so obviously uncultured and out of place, I end up trying to find ways to explain it, and just lean into being southern which is just another proxy for class in some ways.
stereotypical southern mountain person = thick accents, living in trailers, drug issues, run ins with the law, lousy jobs, relationship drama, lots of children born out of wedlock
I am a “class bullshitter” within the American class system because I stubbornly refuse to believe that selling my labor for a high price and paying a lot of rent puts me in the same class as people who buy labor and collect rent.
I also don’t think these are identity traits of mine; rather they are contingent facts about living in a HCOL area. If I were slinging code 9-5 in e.g. Chicago then no one would doubt I was middle class.
I would agree. In the US any class is defined by the social safety net they have and in the current workforce it's often entirely self funded with many parents/older generation reaching into the pockets of their children for labour or money. Even people living a 'middle class lifestyle' are one bump or bruise away from losing everything. Since the UK has a different expectation of a social safety net I can see how things might go in a different direction. If I was not constantly under the risk of healthcare costs blowing up what little I have built up then I probably would consider myself middle class. But since my income stops as soon as I stop and I don't have a huge runway to get going again I don't feel like I'm in the middle at all.
The "protestant work ethic" promotes this vague notion that labour, toil and suffering on earth brings one closer to god. This is more deeply rooted in western cultures than you'd think and feeds into the "work hard and you'll make it" attitude of western exceptionalism.
Because of this, people have a vested interest in glorifying their own struggle, even if they had circumstances that led to their professional success. They're not going to admit that they had things handed to them on a silver platter or got lucky, they'd think of it as some sort of moral failing. They think success needs to be justified.
Catholicism, however, changed the focus away from judgement based on what you did towards judgement based on what you believe. I don't know too much about Orthodox Christianity, but I have some vague sense that it is even more focused on belief (and piety) than on the notion of good work being the path to heaven.
Understating your class background is a way to get around a couple of different problems: if you are successful in life, your successes are magnified because they are self-made, or even made despite the odds being against you. On the other hand, if you are not as successful as you'd like, a rougher background offers a handy justification for that. The underlying message is "my successes are more impressive, my failures aren't really my fault".
1. In my liberal tech social circles, I hear so much talk about "eating the rich" and how the wealthy and privileged are ruining society that I'd be insane to self identify as anything but middle class.
2. It's all relative anyways. By HN standards I'm making a measly salary, but my salary is over double the national average.
3. The richer you are, the more likely people are to ask you for things. Money, favors, etc. This is both locally and globally true.
4. Some of it is a mindset. Growing up I was absolutely not poor, but the way my parents talked about money felt different from others. For example I didn't get a cell phone until the end of middle school because it was "too expensive". Everyone was always asking for my phone number and I had to tell them I didn't have a phone. In the grand scheme of things this is really inconsequential, but at 13 it felt like my parents were ruining my social life with their penny pinching.
Cars were another big thing. Our cars were ancient and my parents refused to buy new ones. We never went to a mechanic unless we absolutely had to. On Saturday mornings my dad would wake me up and tell me we were doing $X to the car and I knew I would be cancelling any plans that day. I didn't actually mind fixing the car, but I hated telling my friends "I can't go play basketball, I have to help fix the car" and having them wonder aloud "Why can't you just take it to a mechanic?" because it made me feel poor.
"You should get therapy" is becoming the new "fuck you, touch grass" on HN. You have absolutely no idea who I am or what my situation is, so there's no way you're actually recommending me therapy with any intent to help me. So you must be insinuating that my comment is so deranged that only someone who needs professional help would write it. You are just insulting me for no reason. Stop this bullshit.
Age can play to this. My brother is 9 years older than me, born into postwar food rationing, a time my family would have been teetering on the edge of financial stability for complex reasons and hugely stressed about money, and financial stability. I was born into the 1960s boom years, The emergence of ubiquitous consumerism, plastics, technology.
We have different perspectives on class, roots, class identification. Not that we were ever working class but we own different perceptions of our relative class status.
A combination of Wealth and Education is increasingly becoming the class distinction in the United States.
I sound like a college educated person, who might have a graduate degree. There is usually a long pause when people figure out I'm a high school dropout who had "some college".
I grew up in a 'bill of the month' club house, and remember multiple times the electricity being turned off due to non-payment. But I picked up skills over time, and had the advantage of being both smart, a fast reader, and have reasonably good (better than my peers according to them), ability to absorb and synthesize information. From that I built a career, I've done a little bit of everything, security, truck driver, telecom engineer, IT guy, now I work on two way radio gear doing product development.
I get and can see the class distinctions, even now, because I tend at times to dress in a way that does not look.. like I have two nickels to rub together, even though I can buy basically whatever I want - I have trouble getting places to give me the time of day.
Between the awkward pauses when people try to talk to me about college life, and being able to see the class distinctions about money and style of dress, I get this, and get it pretty intuitively.
I'm also very aware that some doors are just not open to me because of my lack of credentialing - even jobs that I would be otherwise very qualified for based on experience.
Maybe people just don’t have clear class identities? I grew up middle, perhaps upper middle class in the US. Both of my parents, especially my mother, came from lower social economic backgrounds than what they provided for me. I was very close to my mom’s extend family as a kid. My grandparents grew up very poor. No running water, dirt floors type of poor. By the end of their lives they were upper middle class. Some of their kids did even better, others regressed to the mean.
We’re all still part of the same family. The shared values among the family are much stronger than any shared values across class identities. Class just doesn’t offer much explanatory value to me. I suppose I am upper middle class today, but I don’t think “oh yes, let’s instill some upper middle class values in our kids.” I don’t even know what those would be.
Class identities are much weaker in the US: they're much more tightly tied to economic status and are thus fungible (almost anybody can move up or down the US class ladder by gaining or losing wealth.) We have a "cultural class" system as well, but it's similarly weak (with opportunity, nearly anybody can join the starving intelligentsia).
The author is in the UK, where class identities are much stronger and are not intrinsically tied to wealth (but are frequently associated with wealth, thanks to generational privilege).
An upper-class British acquaintance recently related to me that they'd never eaten certain foods that Americans think of as "quintessentially" British, because those foods are lower-class foods. They weren't afraid of eating them or snobbish about it, it just hadn't occurred to them that it was part of the international perception of their culture (because, to them, it just isn't their culture).
I think the patterns and consequences of American racism has resulted in a lot of what would be class tensions elsewhere being subsumed into race tensions in the US. The system is the US has resulted in a very high correlation between being working class and being Black or Latino. So a lot of stereotypes and harassment of working class people have been applied to that group, as well as on the other end attempts to improve the situation.
Certainly. America is not a post-class society, and in some ways has a more subtle and pernicious class system than the UK’s. At least the British are aware of their class shackles!
Just a note for American readers. In the US calling someone 'middle class' means that they are fairly ordinary salt-of the earth folks living a normal life, but who are not poor and not living paycheque to paycheque.
This is not true in the UK. To call someone middle class here means that they are above average in money and social status. It would probably be similar to calling someone 'upper-middle class' in the USA.
Well people use the terms differently, but I think upper-middle class in the UK corresponds roughly to the lower-reaches of the upper class in the US: lots of money, interested in high culture, maybe expensive private schools and multiple houses, but probably not aristocracy/senator/private jet level.
Unfortunately, many people from privileged backgrounds love to lie about their background by creating a "struggle story." They repeat the story enough that they genuinely believe that they faced adversity equivalent to people who literally lived through those circumstances.
A frequent "struggle story" I´ve heard, is claiming to be a high school dropout, then attending attending a 60k a year an elite liberal arts college. They didn't dropout due to poor life conditions interfering with school, but they claim the association for credibility. Then it bleeds into, "Well, if I could do it, why can't they?" It's really an extreme form of mental gymnastics.
Classism is definitely more pervasive in the UK than the US. This is one part of the story about the dominance of US in tech... during WWII, seems people in the UK were too busy waging war to bother as much with classism. War ends, and people with the "right breeding" come in and take over some of the tech projects, rather than the people with the right skills. Paradoxically, working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.
Keep in mind that this is a simplification, it's only part of the story, and it's a story about a particular time in UK history, and I'm not trying to draw larger conclusions about meritocracy in the US and UK. (Should go without saying.)
Also note that the narrative of British technological "decline", often cited as lasting from 1870-1970, is usually quite exaggerated and distorted. Entire books have been written on the subject. Classism is a piece of the puzzle but history defies simple explanations.
> Paradoxically, working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.
Fussell (though writing about the US) may have some insight here. For one thing, working is kinda low-class; for another, being concerned about the latest-and-greatest of technology is, separately, kinda low-class. He writes (I'm paraphrasing) that American old money is more likely to drive a 30-year-old truck, to have ancient kitchen appliances, maybe even fairly old entertainment-related electronics, than to have a flashy new sports car and top-end appliances—because caring about new technology is "low", so is something those sorts of people have been socialized not to care about (much of it's the "help's" problem, anyway, after all).
The US has a similar thing going on, along the "working/professional/upper" axis: many programmers make "professional" levels of money (e.g. doctor, lawyer, upper management at mid-level corporations, that kind of thing) but as a society we seem to have decided it's not proper to treat them as professionals, so they remain working-class in many respects (along with actual engineers).
Yes, there's a lot of similar stuff going on in the US. However, the new money / old money distinction in the US seems to not have the teeth that it does in the UK, at least, from the mid 20th century onwards.
The thing about old money having old cars and appliances applies to the UK too. If you're upper-class in the UK, you might wear Wellington boots and go hunting with your dogs in your Subaru hatchback. At a glance, it might look indistinguishable from something you might find someone doing in rural Montana.
The Gilded Age in the US is absolutely fascinating... it seems like at that point in history, the US was trying its hardest to ape European conventions for class, and simultaneously, there was a ton of economic growth fueling the noveau riche. That's when we got people like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. It's the time when Wharton's The Age of Innocence was set (highly recommend this book). Old money went to the opera at the Academy of Music Opera House, and new money went to the Metropolitan Opera House. (Guess which one is still around.)
Didn't the British carry their classism even into war, until at least WWII? As in, officers would be drawn from the upper classes, and the enlisted men would be drawn from the lower classes?
Most people without an inheritance probably miss the fact that tons of people they know do. You often have journalists as friends for example who unbeknownst to you are “subsisting” on their parents’ wealth and who secretly have millions of wealth in the bank. I recall meeting a “guitarist” in local bands in Seattle who confessed after a good amount of alcohol one night that his father had given him and his brother a million each when they turned 18 and he had decided to grind out the “starving musician” life until he “made it.”
> They did all the cleaning, all the cooking,
all the entertaining, and all the decorating and did really well.
If you’re cleaning foeces off the side of someone else’s room toilet you’re working class. I’m not sure why the author thinks it’s obvious that “her grandparents owned a hotel” means she’s not, like the quote above doesn’t count for anything.
Historically, those who owned property were the haves, and those who worked it were the have-nots.
Médiéval lord/peasant,
Cotton plantation owner/African slaves,
Captialist/worker,
etc.
As such, owning a hotel, which is a business that can provide you with revenue without you working (obviously in this case the grandparents did choose to work, but could have chosen to have other do the work for them and still reap the profits), generally makes you upper class.
For another argument-
If you own a hotel, you have a net worth greater than at least 80% of the population, and hence are upper middle/upper class.
A hobo on the street corner might work less, but has net worth 0, hence is lower class, which is often used as a synomym for working class
I’m an Old Etonian. After that, I went to Cambridge. I will inherit a large sum very shortly.
When my parents got divorced, Mum wouldn’t take any cash from Dad. She was in her 50s and had been a housewife for 25 years. So we turned off the electricity to save money. I grew up reading by candlelight and cooking literally on an open fire. I know which kind of newspaper is best to wipe your bum with. (Sunday papers are thicker and crinklier because of the coloured ink.)
Nice read. Just as there's times where middle class could (kind of) play both roles, there also some situations where you get the downsides of both.
For instance, a middle class acquaintance once told me about his years in high school that "the rich guys didn't like me because they thought I was poor, and the poor guys didn't want me because they thought I was rich".
In the US, at least, people's thoughts on classes seem all over the map. Some people think of 'working class' or 'blue collar' as people without degrees but if a teacher makes less than a plumber than who is in what class.
OTOH calling yourself 'rich' is going to sound braggy. Someone with a comfortable 6 figure income and a 2 million dollar house may sound like they are downgrading themselves by saying 'upper-class' but if they say 'rich' a lot people are going to think that 'rich' means private island in the Caribbean, not two weeks in Hawaii.
But "solidly middle" is still working class really.
My sister has a degree, and is a nurse of a about 5-7 years. Her husband also has a degree (and even went to private school) and does local government procurement paying ~35k. I'm sure the author would describe both as "solidly middle".
They're still wondering how on earth they're supposed to pay for childcare, energy, mortgage. If the car breaks down, they're in trouble.
Discussing this is a mess for a bunch of reasons, including that no-one bothers to agree on a framework before starting to argue over it, and that there's overlapping terminology, and there are major differences between countries. So you've got "lower/middle/upper-middle/upper" (or more nuanced versions like Fussell's that add a few more), you've got "working/professional/upper", et c, and terms get recycled such that some will say "lower" in the first is the same as "working" (and distinct from "middle") and so on. Then, on top of that, it's all different in Britain.
Plus there's the distinction between income and socialized class, which are tied up together, but which aren't identical, and lots of discussions take place without anyone bothering to specify which they're talking about.
[EDIT] Oh and then of course there's Marxist analysis. Folks should lead with explaining their angle and definitions, otherwise discussion about class tends to be a bunch of people talking past one another.
If somebody works hard at a working class job, enough to become their own boss by either e.g. starting their own cleaning company, or buying another business like a hotel that they cleaned - are they no longer working class? Can they no longer claim to be of working class background? This seems absurd to me. They were not born into money. They had to work hard to get to where they were.
For most using HN, the standard of living is likely better than all the pharaohs and kings of the past by a considerable margin. Gratitude is important, all the rest is relative.
The English and US notions of class are very different. In the US, class basically mean income bracket. In England, class is more akin to "caste", a basically hereditary status which correlate with wealth, but it not determined by it. A broke aristocrat is still an aristocrat, a working class person winning the lottery is still working class, even if they stop working. A family may migrate from one class to another, but it takes multiple generation.
The angle of the article seem to be that the English notion of class is bullshit, because it does not directly correlate to wealth and privilege. Maybe so, but class is still a real thing in the sense it affect peoples attitudes and interactions in real way. It is like saying "race" in US is bullshit. But it is still a very real thing that affect peoples lives.
Any time you set up any kind of system that organizes people into groups and where members of a group have disparate privilege or prestige versus non-members, then people will try to find all sorts of ways to get into the privileged group whether they “qualify” or not.
We’ve had class impostors forever. The OP mentioned a race imposter (we also have a sitting US senator arguably guilty of that) But it’s any group. Class, race, gender, first class, frequent traveler, club member, veteran, first responder, whatever.
IMO the solution is egalitarianism, but people hate that too, because they not only want the privilege but also the prestige- the feeling that they are better than you are.
Whatever the solution, legitimizing behavior that separates privileged and non-privileged makes things worse, not better.
I am also interested in this. I don't understand how it makes sense to talk about "class" in such a discrete way.
Is a FAANG engineer who earns $250k/year really an oppressed proletarian? Is the small bakery owner who struggles to make ends meet really a bourgeois because he owns a mean of production?
If you're looking at it through a Marxist lens, then it depends. Is the FAANGer a part owner of the company? Is the baker using their control of the MoP to extract value/profit from employees who have no stake or say in the bakery?
I think people get wrapped up in how difficult something is perceived to be and how much a particular occupation is compensated (ie, the modern version of "class"), but underlying dynamics are much more important if you're talking about working class vs owner class. The assumption here is that the baker works hard and gets little from it, therefor it's fine if they exploit labor, and the FAANGer plays ping pong all day and gets an assload of money for it, therefor it's okay if they have no say in their place of work.
Granted, then you get into things like the stock market, and suddenly most people are absentee owners in some company they've never set foot into, so things get weird...
the example kinda shows that a basic Marxist analysis doesn't reveal much useful insight about the modern world. the faang engineer's stock is probably worth more than the bakery to begin with, but it doesn't actually give them any control over the MoP. if they really wanted to, they could become the bakery owner. but that would be an indulgence, not a smart financial move.
No because you're still thinking about it in terms of personal economics when actually it's about power and violence.
If you must sell your labor to pay for the requirements of life, then you're vulnerable to being denied access to that transaction and will suffer the consequences.
The marxist analysis is limited in some ways but in this one it is a clarifying advantage. It doesn't matter, for some purposes, how much you earn if you must earn it to survive.
If you've earned enough that you can buy a bakery on a whim, or stop working entirely, then your economic interests are rarely if ever going to align with people forced to sell their labor and so you've partially or completely transitioned to something else, I think.
I'm from a working class family but have done okay for myself, my salary, house, and lifestyle would be considered by most people to be middle-class now, but I still consider myself working class because I don't feel you can change classes. However, if I were to have children now, they would grow up in a middle-class household and would be middle-class forever, but I am and will always still be working class.
The whole idea of social class is so disgusting and dehumanising that whilst I think it's important to talk about Social Mobility and how we can improve that - I wish people would stop self-classifying and talking about classes like they actually exist. To me, the whole idea of classes revolves around the gatekeeping of opportunity by (generally) the most fortunate. I always refuse to classify myself. Aside from demographic studies by governments to improve social mobility, what good can it do the world to know the class of an individual?
> Aside from demographic studies by governments to improve social mobility, what good can it do the world to know the class of an individual?
In large part, government decision makers are made up of people from dominant classes. They can hardly be relied upon to improve social mobility, as it's people like them who stand to lose from increased social mobility.
An oppressed class that doesn't recognize itself can't organize as a class to combat that oppression.
I registered for a The Economist event a while back. I have never ever seen such a laundry list of titles you had to choose from. And I don't think not choosing one was even an option. Basically the usual few plus pretty much every aristocratic and clergy title you could think of.
I'm from the US, and when I was in college I took a British Airways flight for the first time, and on the way home I got a stern talking to from the gate agent in London about fraud because I chose some random foreign (to me) royalty title.
For a few years after that I got random junk mail addressed to the Viscount =).
It doesn't necessarily mean much - I think there's some standard (ISO?) list somewhere. I remember many years ago when the www was new and spiffy the British Airways booking website had a drop-down title selector that included "Pope" but I can't imagine he ever flew with them!
I'm sure there's an ISO standard :-) I've never seen that anywhere else though. Admittedly, tech has generally gotten away from emphasizing titles much to the point that it's sometimes a slightly contentious topic.
In what way doesn’t it influence enough? The political system in the UK is fairly broken such that PPE at Oxford will get you a long way in your goal to being an MP, and going to a public school gets you a long way towards getting into Oxford, which is a classist system with practical output
Still the 6th largest economy with seats on the UN Security Council and others - it might be going the way of Switzerland (that’s the model most Brexiters I know want) but that doesn’t mean it’s fading away into obscurity on the global stage
(This is coming from someone who left the UK for the US and hopes to move to Asia afterwards, so mildly biased but not that much)
Doing well in a grammar school works to an extent but still disproportionately less than say Eton. You can see this by just looking at current cabinet ministers
This is interesting, but it overlooks the way people often bullshit their way into a higher class. Boris Johnson is a common example of this: he's sort of an everyman's stereotype of what an upper-class person is like, and he plays up to it, but he's certainly not upper class himself.
I just wish I didn't have to hear the nasty shit people in tech say about my people when they're assuming everyone who does this job has a similar background.
Felt right to me at the time and I'm not able to come up with a better alternative right now so offer one if you got it.
I'm talking about people who are influential but not necessarily close, mostly friendly but I've fought some of these folks too. The people I come from but not my family. My people. Still seems fine honestly.
How does class work in Asian cultures like India, China, Japan, Korea, etc.?
Technological growth and automation seems to have played (and is increasingly so?) a much larger factor than anything else in the past century. I assume I'm probably biased here though.
Those are all wildly different cultures. India is very hierarchical and has a caste system with considerable overlap to social classes. In Japan, something like 80% of the country consider themselves to be middle class, but there's an increasing divide between full-time salarymen (genuinely middle class) and contract workers (unstable at best, frequent outright poor).
The class system in India is presently under historic overhaul, but here is how it has been for the last 50 years or so.
Class is geographically concentrated and inherited. It isn't as simple as caste. This is primarily because the top class of India is not very Hindu. Inherited classmen are descendents of local kings, cultural empire builders (kapoor family), descendents of top civil servants in the British Empire and descendents of oxford-cambridge educated freedom fighters. Children of industrialists are let in, but it might take a generation or two. These communities are concentrated in the Mumbai and Delhi region. Ties to the Gandhi-Nehru family also helps.
As a normie, there are only a few ways to enter this class. Early schooling at international schools(Ambani), residential schools (Doon) and select Army schools is the easiest way. If you grow up in the right neighborhood in Mumbai or Delhi, you will find yourself sharing space with them. Eventually you'll make friends and be let in. Select professions such Western Liberal Arts academia, Economics, Architecture or Journalism/think-thanks are ways to get some access. But, it is important that the accolades be from western institutes. Sometimes, running an NGO with the right aesthetic gets you there.
The historic overhaul is happening because of 3 reasons. First, the elite have lost political power and their free patronage. Unlike the US, where until recently, the upper class pretty evenly split between 2 political parties. In India, the upper class exclusively operated under the blessings of the Congress party. The rise of the BJP has been disastrous for them, especially journalists and political insiders. Second, as the country sheds its socialist skin, credentials in the armed forces and civil service simply do not matter as much. The introduction of hard examinations to enter any of these institutions blocks off the lazy elites, which in-turn makes the institutions lose some of their 'elite' status. (this is why Harvard still keeps legacy admissions. The bar HAS TO BE low for the real elites to maintain eliteness of your institution) Lastly, new money is snatching away cultural power. STEM grads are taking over Netflix & Youtube. The new Billionaires are all Tech folks. There even have a new mecca in Bangalore.
However, the upper class still influences the messaging in elite American outlets, admission procedures at Ivies, western think tanks and Bollywood. The smart ones have been front of line to welcome the likes of Netflix or have used their massive wealth to buy into the tech revolution by turning into investors instead. Those who have stuck to old ways are dying a slow death.
IMO, India's next upper class is going to be incredibly technocratic. Top IITs (Engg.), AIIMS (Med.), IIMs (B.schools) are treated with a never seen before level of reverence. But this is my personal conjecture. We will see if it works out.
> IMO, India's next upper class is going to be incredibly technocratic.
It's interesting you say that. I think for the most part, this is actually a global phenomenon.
What are your thoughts on the extant caste system? How similar is it to the racial legacy that America deals with?
I'm surprised you found the post, but I'm glad you did. It took a bit of effort to get the whole thing down in 1 page.
For context, I admittedly come across as jaded towards some sub-sections of american liberal folk in that comment. That part takes away from what I consider an otherwise neutral comment. It's just that the combination of "genuine worry + half knowledge + talking down to you" reminds me of school hall monitors, which triggers my defensiveness.
One of my favorite comments about India is : "The only thing every Indian can agree on is that no one fully understands India.". So, I'll add that caveat as an Indian myself.
Interesting combo. Did you start out as a drunk bar singer with a propensity for fighting and later decide to pursue the art of mind control? Or were you a devout mind control expert who dabbled with the guitar and a few Martial arts classes along the way?
There are clearly two classes, supposing someone is not handicapped: the ones who parasite others intentionally and the ones who are net tax payers. It is not about amount of income but about role.
I had an interesting conversation about class in the UK the other day. I took my friend and our four boys (all around 10) to a football (soccer) game.
It turned out that my friend had grown up with a different accent to what he currently speaks with. He'd grown up in a rough part of Essex, going to a school where kids normally don't even think about university. After about two weeks at Cambridge, he realized he was different. To sum it up, almost nobody at Cambridge speaks like an Essex boy. That's despite Cambridge being not terribly far from Essex.
I noticed something similar. My family are refugees, so spread all over the world, including an aunt North London who gave birth to six cousins. They speak English a certain way. Coming as an international student, I noticed a lot of accents at Oxford (hello Brummies, Scots, Welsh, Scousers) but not a lot of "council house between hackney and Romford" accents.
If you've followed British politics, you've heard of something called the Bullingdon Club. Cambridge has something similar. Neither of the two of us knew much about it when we were there, but we did know there were some veeeery posh kids around, because they speak a certain way and often have a pretty expensive style about them.
So that was the fathers. Working class? Well if you're upper class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some sense it's legit to call yourself working class. It doesn't say much when your job could be anything between chronically unemployed and hedge fund manager, though.
For dinner, we took our boys to a restaurant. Being around the age of the 11 plus exam, the conversation turned to private schools. It turns out one of the boys had gotten into one of the most expensive selective schools in the country, which I pointed out (this is why I am so sought after as a dinner guest). Since they're kids, they still have naive ideas about money, and the vogue among kids at the moment is to aspire to be an influencer. "I'll make a YouTube channel and millions of followers will see it".
Thus followed a little talk about how many views you actually need to make enough money to pay for two kids to go to the most expensive school in the country, and perhaps also a house and something to stave off starvation.
I'm also the kind of exciting person who has official statistics about income distributions in his head. A rough tax rate is also part of that spiel, in case I find an uninformed primary schooler.
Realistically, you either need to be in the top 1% (£175K/year) or the top 2% (£120K/year) with a second income (£50K is around 87th, so maybe two ~97th at ~£100K ) to be able to pay for two kids to go to a £30K/year school, pay a £30k/year rent/mortgage, maybe eat and holiday for £15K, and also pay the tax man.
That's what the numbers look like, and I'm not surprised at all that kids don't know them. What are the chances when you're sitting around at your school that you've been told is famous, that basically every single one of your classmates has either a top 1% earning parent or two top 3% earners? If you knew you would certainly think you were very lucky indeed.
So this kid, who is quite bright and has a place at a top school that sends dozens of kids each to his dad's alma mater, can still claim to be working class by heredity. That is what this article seems to be about. People mostly want to feel that they deserve what they worked for, and certainly kids in prep schools work hard. But it's also true that you almost never see anyone doing ordinary jobs. It's not actually that weird that a kid thinks being a lawyer or trader is an ordinary job, when his entire class has parents that both do something like that. It's not even that hard to imagine them thinking their parents work really hard. Certainly a couple of the other parents in my kid's year are always traveling or working late.
> Working class? Well if you're upper class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some sense it's legit to call yourself working class.
Not being in the legacy pre-capitalist aristocracy doesn't mean you are working class; basically the entire capitalist class structure from the working class to the haut bourgeoisie exists outside of that aristocracy. Or, rather, parallel to and overlapping it, for the most part, as, but for the senior royals, legacy titles no longer have a firm connection to how one relates to the economy and derives support.
Absolutely true. But it's still a thing you can say, however trivial and however long ago it was that people with titles meant something. You can also muddy the waters by pointing at the few aristocrats who do actually have a pile of money.
Everyone likes this working-class label for some reason. Something between "Worked your way up" and "didn't have a silver spoon" is the desire.
A marxist class analysis clears this issue up pretty well, as its based on the relationship to labor and capital. The example interviewee would be working class based on their relationship to capital. Grandparents that own a hotel (assuming its not a large chain) would be petite bourgeoisie, as they own a small amount of capital, but must work to make it productive and are therefore still a kind of working class. The accountant father is still working class, as he must work for a living, but would be considered Private Managerial Class, as they are rewarded well for their skills within capital.
In the US, there is a huge cultural and economic divide between the processional/educated class vs. the low-skilled class, whereas elsewhere in the world not so much. In the US, the goal or aspiration is to escape being working class, as epitomized by the likes of JD Vance and others, whereas elsewhere being working class is not something to be so ashamed of or to escape from.
If JD Vance epitomizes anything then it might be something very close to the "bullshit" considered in TFA. He writes as if from Appalachia while in reality he was raised in suburban western Ohio. Mostly he just writes to confirm that everything is fine in the land of capital and we really don't want to inconvenience rich people like his boss Peter Thiel.
Skill is a matter of practice (even if you have natural talent). I know plenty of very skilled people that earn less than they are worth. I know plenty of educated people that are unprofessional and earn more than they are worth. The world just is not a fair place.
> Why would we ever allow others to label us based on our ancestors choices?
It seems quite understandable that people whose your ancestors were kings, presidents and other notable figures would be in favor of being given a leg up based on the status of their ancestors.
I think the answer here is simple: "class" means different things to different people.
I'm an American, and I consider myself "middle class". I was born when my mother was 17. She finished high school and went on to work and get a two-year degree from a tiny business college that no longer exists. She married in her mid-20s, when I was in first grade, got a job at a company and is still there over three decades later. She went from making minimum wage in 1991 to in the ballpark of $350k / year today. My father - the man she married, not my biological father - was a public school teacher.
I attended school in a very poor area, and my experience in high school was far more comfortable than my peers.
My dad bought me a very inexpensive truck when I was 12. It was ~20 years old, the bed was badly damaged, and the engine didn't run due to a combination of overuse and neglect. We parked it outside our garage and he taught me how to work on it, return it to operable condition, and sell it for profit. With his guidance I pulled and completely rebuilt the engine and transmission. We went to scrapyards on the weekends, and eventually found a steel bed for it in good condition. We kept all the receipts. The total cost, including purchase price, parts, and a couple of services like having a machine shop mill the engine block flat for the new head, was ~$2k. By the time I turned 14, when I could get a "learner's permit" in my state, we sold that old truck for $4k. I then had my choice - I could take that $4k (of which I had earned about half through my labor) and buy whatever I wanted, or my parents would sell me the truck my dad already owned for the same price. Because I'd done so much work on "my" truck, I jumped on that offer; I knew that his truck was well-maintained, and I didn't want to have to rebuild a vehicle that I was going to rely on.
By 2002, when I graduated high school, I think my parents were making about $175k/yr combined. I went to college on an academic scholarship and my life fell apart almost immediately. After a couple of years of struggling (and my parents paying for mental health services), I was finally diagnosed with severe depression and ADHD. It took me until I was 23 before I was "functional", and another two years after that before I felt at all confident that I wasn't going to fall back into that pit of despair. Throughout that dark period of my life, my parents were there both emotionally and, to a reasonably limited extent, financially. They weren't paying all of my bills, but I knew they wouldn't let me die hungry and homeless.
Today, I'm 38. I've been with my wife since were 14, married her at 21, and now have two daughters. We live in a five-bedroom home that we purchased in our name, with money that we earned and saved. While we don't feel like we have a huge safety net for ourselves yet, we are definitely "financially stable" - and a big part of the reason we feel like we don't have that safety net built is because of the depth of the financial safety net that my parents were able to provide.
So... in summary, while I consider myself "middle class", objectively I'm firmly in the "white collar" world. My wife doesn't work for anyone outside our home, is able to run a side business primarily for personal fulfillment, and our children are happy, well cared for, and want for little.
My wife's parents' story is very different from ours. Her dad was "working class", and retired from Walmart as a cashier in "Tire & Lube Express". He has a large but benign brain tumor that is becoming more and more of an issue as he ages. Her mother has struggle with mental health issues and has never been able to hold down a job more than a year or so at a time. My wife moved between her parents' home and her grandparents' home multiple time growing up. While they have their own problems to deal with, I think they really did the best they could raising my wife.
One of the highlights of my adult life so far came a couple of years ago, when my wife's parents' car broke down yet again. They had asked us a couple of times to take them to doctors appointments, and while I have offered fixed their vehicles a few times over the years, they will not ask me to do things like that. I sat down with my wife, looked at our finances, and decided that we could reasonably take responsibility for their transportation needs from here on out. We looked at reliable used cars, but decided that buying a reasonable new car would mean a warranty and that the total cost of ownership amortized over the expected lifetime of the vehicle would be comparable. Plus, her parents had never owned a new car; at best they were able to buy a reliable used car a couple of times in the past.
We bought them a new Kia Rio S. It's cherry red, and her parents cried when we gave it to them. It's still in my name, so I put it on our insurance and bought a service contract through a local shop. The only thing they have to pay for is fuel.
Now that I've written an abridged mutli-generational autobiography, how does this relate to the topic? Simple - all of the above influence how I see myself.
I live in a town of 14k people, a few miles from the town of <200 people where I grew up. The median household annual income here is <$30k. The media per capita income is $16k. I work remotely for a West Coast tech company, and my salary alone puts us at over 5x the median income here. Relative to my community, I think it's fair to say that we're "white collar".
The people I work with come from a variety of backgrounds, but with few exceptions are third generation "white collar". Those born outside the US generally come from "merchant class" families or higher - otherwise, how would they have been able to afford to immigrate to the US in the first place? Relatively to my colleagues, I come from a "blue collar" world.
At one point, before I was able to reliably find remote work, we moved to Virginia where I was the first tech hire at a startup. The office I started in was actually a hotel meeting room that they had leased while they built out their permanent office space. While I was with that company, they expanded twice.
The second time they expanded, we were ready to move in to the new office space, except the desks hadn't arrived before the electricians left and it was going to be two weeks before they could get back out to wire them up. We _really_ needed the space, so I told the founders that I could install them in a couple of hours if the electricians could swing by in the afternoon to inspect the work for code compliance. In retrospect, I'm sure they thought I was nuts. They agreed, the electrician agreed, and I ran back to my apartment to grab my tools. By lunch I had all thirty or so of the desks wired up, the mess cleaned, and we were able to move everyone into the new space. I left the ceiling tiles open and the covers off the junction boxes in the ceiling so they could be easily inspected, but otherwise the job was 100% complete.
Why did I have the knowledge and tools to do that? After failing out of college, I'd worked for about a year as an apprentice electrician. I realized then that that all of my colleagues at that company came from multi-generational "academic class" families, and that that sort of thing was completely foreign to them. I spent the next two years at that company making good friends, comparing life experiences, and learning from each other. One of them shared his investment portfolio with me and walked me through his strategies and what his parents had taught him. I rented a garage and taught him basic auto maintenance - oil, tires, how an engine and drivetrain works, how to check each fluid and what they all did.
I often find myself writing a novella here, and rarely get any feedback from them aside from a couple of upvotes. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I'll try to take this as motivation to clean up my writing a bit. It always seems like I grossly overuse commas when I read it later. It's really just stream-of-consciousness.
Being in the "middle" is not a class. Social classes - certainly in Marxist theory, but also in other classes analyses of society - are not the rungs on a ladder: Low, Middle, High. Rather, they are characterized by their social role (e.g. role with respect to production, distribution, ownership etc). And a social class may have more or less power and wealth, depending on circumstances.
Centuries ago, people who owned land, workshops etc. but were not nobles were referred to as the "middle class" - the middle between the peasantry and the nobility. Today that moniker is meaningless, though it persists - even though people of "middle" wealth are in no way not a distinct class.
We should be celebrating richness, not poverty. Unfortunately, victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be traced back to marxism.
Why should we celebrate richness?
If you're richer than your peers you did something that society considered valuable. Money is the ultimate form of direct democracy.
Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up people left and right, that governments can print off money and that governments can force people to give them money.
These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something should be done about these - but still, the people in Wall Street are providing financial services that businesses find useful. And those businesses provide useful services to people, so the richness of Wall Street can be traced back to useful services.
Governments printing money affects the market via inflation.
Nothing much can be done about governments taking money from people under the threat of incarceration (unless you have an army), but the government is, in most countries, a form of indirect democracy - so the government still end up providing some value to end users with the money they forcefully took. Sure, part of it get burned in the inefficiency of centralisation and bureaucracy but most of it keeps going around (eg. by paying contractors to fix the roads).
Therefore, I think becoming rich can absolutely become a moral value and I think the world would be better that way.
In the words of the working class hero 50 cent: Get rich or die tryin'.
That's an antique notion that died in the '80s? Once the rules changed, the rich started skimming from every transaction (money tranfers, dividends, security exchanges, and on and on) until they have almost all the money. The rest of us serve at their pleasure.
That's not how it was supposed to work. You were supposed to succeed from being part of the generation of wealth. Not just sitting and skimming while everybody else works. And then passing it on to your heirs.
I wish it worked as you describe. That's where we need to get back to.
If you are well off, it is comforting to believe that your wealth came from smartness and hard work, and that people who have less than you are dumb and/or lazy. That way you can ignore structural inequality and don't need to consider doing anything to correct it.
It is the same false moral back-patting of "I'm colorblind and don't see race," which usually really means "By pretending to not see race, I have an excuse for not recognizing race-based injustices."
> Unfortunately, victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be traced back to marxism.
What part of Marx's analysis of capitalism do you think caused people to adopt a victim mentality?
> Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up people left and right, that governments can print off money and that governments can force people to give them money. These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something should be done about these
Why? By your metric, these people are creating value. Shouldn't that be celebrated?
>What part of Marx's analysis of capitalism do you think caused people to adopt a victim mentality?
Not Marx's analysis of capitalism, but rather Marx's creed from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. This became the slogan of the Marxist movement which rejected the prior socialist creed of to each according to their contribution.
If people's reward is independent of their contribution and instead a function of their needs then it incentivizes presenting oneself as the least capable, since those who do so are the ones for whom the least will be asked of. Adopting a victim mentality and presenting oneself as a victim of some kind is a fairly inexpensive way to maximize the receipt of ones needs while minimizing ones contribution.
> This became the slogan of the Marxist movement which rejected the prior socialist creed of to each according to their contribution.
So from my point of view, that slogan is a completely simplified description of what a communist society might look like. From what I know it was coined before Marx even wrote Kapital, which is the underlying basis of Marxism.
> If people's reward is independent of their contribution and instead a function of their needs then it incentivizes presenting oneself as the least capable
I can agree with that. However I think there are other interpretations of the phrase that might be more generous. In general, I think of a socialist mode of production as one in which production is for-use as opposed to for-profit/sale/exchange. Capitalists will say for-use/for-exchange are the same, socialists argue the two are distinct groups (with some obvious overlap). This is entirely compatible with some people being paid more than others.
> Adopting a victim mentality and presenting oneself as a victim of some kind is a fairly inexpensive way to maximize the receipt of ones needs while minimizing ones contribution.
We have that in increasing amounts today and our society looks about as far from a Marxist vision as anyone could imagine. So whether a society is based in Marxism or Liberalism seems to have very little bearing on victim mentality.
You could argue the victim mentality comes from academia and their bizarre interpretation of Marxism (ie "cultural Marxism") but the two things are similar in name only.
I think of Marxism as a critique of capitalism and absentee property norms. I don't think it has much intersection with people trying to get things for free by playing the victim.
I would suggest reading the book "The Value of Everything" by Mariana Mazzucato so that you can better understand the difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction.
Personally, I don't care if someone has rich parents. Covering for it in this way felt a bit like unearned prestige, though.