*Canada, France, Germany, or the Nordic countries, as determined by a single study from ‘06 with race (apparently?) not taken into consideration for any of them
> In the UK, class consciousness is woven into the national identity. In America, however, people often like to pretend that a class system doesn’t really exist. But, of course, it does.
This is the most insidious part.
The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is.
The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays.
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come.
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".
The class system in the US might be about money but here in the UK you can be penniless and still look down upon someone by being born into the right family!
I think you're undervaluing the impact of the internet on small business. Sure, a few guys at the tippy top of Uber-eats are the only ones getting fabulously wealthy, but I've discovered several wonderful mom and pop restaurants through that service. Sure, only a hand full of people at Google are getting fabulously wealthy, but most of the video content I consume these days are regular-ish people on Youtube who now make their living making those videos without having to go through Hollywood gatekeepers. There's been at least a half dozen small businesses I've hired based solely off their Craigslist ads, businesses I likely would've never heard of and might not have ever existed without the internet/Craigslist. I don't understand why people point to the few fabulously wealthy people and exclaim that because everyone else isn't fabulously wealthy that the system is failing us all. We still have a ways to go, but the internet to me has moved several things further down the democratized spectrum than they ever had been before.
The Internet does enable easier local business discovery. Where are all the new small businesses though? The latest Census data is from 2015 and shows the number of new small businesses created is at a level not seen since the mid-1970s:
Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
The economy tanked and just as it was starting to recover the government made it illegal to take on risk by having no or crappy insurance. Meanwhile healthcare prices skyrocketed. Simultaneously we doubled down on our immigration policy towards providing citizenship for unskilled, impoverished immigrants rather than the kind of means based immigration policy popular in most of Europe. That means we missed out on a lot of talented, educated immigrants who might have either started companies or been willing to work for startups. We cracked down on internships. And we allowed patent trolls to run amok. Let's also not forget the credible threats of doubling minimum wage.
Just because you’ve thrown a few crumbs of business or exposure at these people doesn’t mean they’ve become any richer than their equivalents would have been in the pre-Internet days.
The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole.
If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on.
The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today.
The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications.
You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
>The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole.
Except cottage content and product industries can now sell to virtually the entire planet. That simply wasn't available before.
>as (mostly) low-status low-value workers
Here you're projecting your own bias against them. I'm not suggesting "the system" is without flaws, but the average joe seems to be doing alright in general, especially if you consider average joe historically and globally.
>The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
Wealth concentration among the hyper-rich doesn't concern me in the least. Generally speaking wealth is created by providing value, not taking it.
>If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
The internet is in the process of unseating media monopolies and democratizing information. The poorest of the poor across the world have access to information that was previously only available to the wealthiest who could attend universities in rich countries. The internet has allowed small businesses with basically no infrastructure to reach the entire global market. It's allowed families to keep in touch instantaneously across oceans.
>You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
You're comparing the internet to some fantasy you have. I'm comparing the internet to the world before the internet.
In my gated community the rich actually collude to keep the wages for maids, gardener etc low. When I moved to this place as a bachelor and attended couple of pool side parties I was surprised this was also one of the topics along with the ones like how bad Real played in last match.
Of course - and that's the entire point. There's a single neighborhood rich people organizing to accomplish a single, small goal that they can agree on. That single neighborhood is probably spending millions of dollars in legal fees to fight against the next neighborhood of rich people to determine who has to get the power plant closer to their neighborhood.
There is no collectivist, national (or global) hivemind or concensus among wealthy people about how to oppress the lower classes. The implication of the original post I've responded to is absurd. Wealthy people are more likely than not to be narcissistic and selfish, so any organization is really a prisoner's dilemma association of convenience, at best.
Mark Zuckerberg in alone in a room with an angry mob would be much more civilized than Mark Zuckerberg in a room with Rupert Murdoch - there is just a bunch of wealth people whose voice carries far due to their organizations, wealth, and power, who generally have no allegiance to one other, each espousing their own disparate viewpoints, which generally do not involve wealth re-distribution
Wealthy interests, like you are describing, and as the article portrays, exist in microcosms or small interests, and they conflict with other wealthy interests. One wealthy group might want to manipulate consumer group X to do Z and has to destroy organization B to manipulate consumer group X to do Y.
That's just one portion of the comment I'm responding to - the rest is just some rambling from a psychotic someone who will be carrying a torch to something while snarling the gripe du jour some day.
OMG talking about association football that's for Essex barrow boys who think they have made it and for 1st gen middle class types who think they are cool for following a team from the plush catered boxes.
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
Right. I'm sure that the fact that the leading internet companies are run by Harvard (FB) and Stanford (Google) grads will not interfere with the Revolution in any way.
Oil could have enabled that kind of coordiation too, how'd that work out? For a mass movement, you need lots of leaders (of people) to band together and agree to steer the ship in a specific direction.
It can, but it doesn't. If anything it drives divisiveness on a scale we've never seen before.
Before the internet it used to take 10-20 years to foment discord against a particular group. Now we have a new boogeyman every 18 months and it's always other plebes or pariahs-- never the ruling elite.
Martin Shkreli, Harvey Weinstein, Wall Street protests, and probably others that I forget were aided by the Internet. Hopefully it will become a bigger trend in the future.
Don't forget Wikileaks, et al., e.g. Snowden, Manning, Panama Papers, etc. Arab Spring and resulting unrest in Middle East countries is also notable (related I suppose to Wall street protests?). Thankfully we still have privacy tools like Signal, TOR, Wikileaks, etc. to facilitate these things.
That's my point though-- throw the occasional unsympathetic high-profile lamb under the bus so the bourgies act like they police their own.
These individuals are distractions, nothing more. Shkreli literally launched a sortie against the plebes by means of his obscene price gouging (which isn't even what put him in jail-- if not for his crimes against the elite, he'd be a free man!), and prolific sex offenders like Weinstein simply cannot be defended-- like Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby, he's just beyond redemption.
Meanwhile:
* All the internet attention in the world (or the Wall Street protests) didn't result in anyone responsible for the 2008 economic meltdowns seeing the inside of a courtroom for anything more than a deposition.
* The Wells Fargo C-level who encouraged half the company to commit fraud walked away with a severance package.
* The Equifax CEO walked away with a severance package after the largest consumer data breach in US history.
* Mitt Romney made a personal fortune bankrupting companies and decimating the retirement plans of their associated employees. Then he ran for president.
* Snowden released a bunch of documents confirming what a lot of us already believed, which caused some commotion and pit half the country against itself in a philosophical war over whether his actions were heroic or traitorous. Meanwhile while that pointless debate raged, life at the NSA continued under new project names and tighter controls.
Of all of the damage these individuals caused, only Snowden, a commoner, has a warrant out for his arrest. Of all of these, only Snowden's actions had no impact on the average American. We squabble on Facebook about his pointless actions while we're actively being fleeced by the other four guys.
Plenty of attention has been drawn to these matters. But nothing changes. Internet outrage is cheap and divisive.
>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
If the last two years have shown anything, it's that the "common man" in America is extremely susceptible to cheap propaganda and misinformation.
Half the country would happily watch the entire thing burn down as long as "their team" is doing the burning.
The "plebs", so to speak, have never been more controlled than they are today. If anything, I'm more pessimistic than ever.
Powerful interests will be able to harness the massive amounts of data collected by social media to carefully formulate and craft the exact message they want to control who they want and people who I thought would easily see through that are now completely brainwashed into believing things that they would have laughed at 20 years ago.
The rich will be fine, and the poor will eat each other alive, just as they're told to by the other rich men on the TV.
CNN and FOX as living proof. Give people whatever disinformation they're inclined to believe to sell them advertised pills to treat maladies they picked up at the advertised restaurants--along with a side of advertised crap investments in the hopes of paying for the rest. Since it's broadcast, we at least know what they're up to. It keeps them relatively honest.
Compare that to Google/FB where each person gets a catered experience. It would take an immense effort in data collection and analysis to find out just how hard they're screwing everyone. Going by all of the online scams I've had to ward friends and family away from (which came up on page-one Google searches BTW), my guess would be "very hard".
This is fantastic. For those unfamiliar, The Book of Life is an excellent online publication created with the assistance of Alain de Botton who wrote one of my favorite books, “The Course of Love”
"I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers."
... from the article:
"Here is the list of the world’s top Loser Countries: (.nl, .de, .ch, .no, .dk)"
As someone who travels to these countries frequently (rsync.net has a Zurich location) I can certainly get on board with the desire to move to Switzerland. It is a nicer country than the US.
However, it is a ridiculous notion that the social success of these countries (and of Japan, which is conspicuously absent from that list) is due simply to some bad legislation here or there ... just a few technocratic choices made the wrong way.
In reality, the reason things are so nice in Switzerland and Norway and Japan are because they have extremely homogenous populations and cultural legacies.
It's easy to expand your circle of empathy to people whose names are also Lars Larson[1], just like yours is.
This is absolutely true, and obvious to anyone open-minded who has spent time in those countries, but good luck trying to have any discussion about the downsides of immigration in the US without getting shouted down as a racist.
Unless your volunteering to deport your own ethic group to increase homogeneity (which you're obviously not) then you're probably advocating for the textbook definition of racism.
Which may explain why you can't say that without being called a racist.
Also, I'm not sure the facts back you up. Is the USA really more diverse than Canada? Is the UK really more diverse than Germany?
Switzerland is hardly homogeneous. 29% of residents are foreign born, which is one of the highest in the developed world (double that of the US). It has four main languages with the largest of those only being the first choice for 60% of the population. If anything it is less homogeneous than the US.
>Switzerland is hardly homogeneous. 29% of residents are foreign born. If anything it is less homogeneous than the US.
85% of those "foreigners" are your fellow Europeans. It would be like me saying Florida is less homogeneous because some people from Utah moved there. Except Utah is further away from Florida than any country in Europe is from any other. Switzerland is quite homogeneous.
>But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays.
What definition are you using for economic depression?
Here's just a passing figure for starters: 63% of Americans can't handle a $500 or $1000 emergency expense. Now, if you're willing to actually enquire into this there are plenty of additional dismal statistics about average American life, regardless of the dizzying heights of stock prices. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-...
Using a kind of dubious site because it was the first one I found with the 63rd% of income [0]. That clocks in right at $79,954.00. I would say that a significant portion of that 63% is poor money management as opposed to lack of income.
The link you provided shows percentile by household, not individual. Just clicking on the link on that page to go to individual brackets, suddenly 63% drops to 50,000/yr. That's not a terrible salary, but as expenses have gone up much more rapidly than wages for quite some time, it becomes feasible that that would be eaten up quickly by debt burden and cost of living in many places to where saving is difficult. https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/
Didn't mean to switch between household and individual, good catch.
While part of my agrees with you that in some areas 50k/yr gets eaten up quickly we are looking at having $500 or $1000 on hand that is either 1% or 2% of annual income in savings. While I have sympathetic to a significant portion of the country ~20%-25% that cannot do that, I hard time believing 40% of Americans could not trim $500 off their expenses each year and save it.
The Internet is, increasingly, controlled by a handful of companies, and in the event of serious unrest threatening the social order I don't find it hard to believe that the free exchange of information online would be curtailed.
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come.
I don't buy it. First of all, the class system is about material interests - real physical tangible interests - and not about feelings. Even if 99% of the people live in a world of ideas, the ruling class, by virtue of the fact that they have to bargain over laws (multi hundred page documents that decide taxation and allocation as well as employee and business rights), live in the world of the material.
The American populace lives, and probably since at least the mid 20th century has lived, in a world of ideas. By this I mean, the country is torn asunder by feelings about abortion, race, gender and so forth, immigration [edit: and also celebrity-lead culture] -- all issues that, guess what, don't even touch the interests of the .01%.
#MeToo poses no threat whatsoever to any class system.
I've known many "low-class" wealthy people. Likewise, I've met some incredible snobby, "upper-class" people who were not very wealthy, mainly intellectuals and artists.
> ...
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
> ...
Stated this way, this appears to handwave real problems away. Yes, racial and gender issues are often exploited for political gain; but these issues usually have a basis in real problems.
Totally understood, and advancing social progress and acceptance is very important, however, issues of economic inequality and the associated policies and government decisions that aid this increasing gap affect nearly 99% of the US population - they are inarguably more pressing, more important issues. Thus, I can agree with GP when they say these smaller issues, ones that affect very few Americans, but warrant hours of newscast time and require every American to formulate an opinion on, are distractions.
What i believe makes a difference is whether it happens cause of some malevolent force or if it is just a inherit part of our common reality.
If everyone willingly walked in to a pit of spikes it is their own fault. People should be allowed to act out their own free will as long as that act does not fuck with other people.
If someone tricked them with lies to do that then there is a problem.
I think a good number of people actually believe that rich people get together to conspire to keep the lower classes divided. So saying this as a metaphor without any caveats is probably not a great idea.
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
Uh, have you been paying attention to campus protesters?
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies.
It's not quite that simple, due to human psychology. Even if people are wealthy on a global and historical scale, relative poverty will still cause problems.
>The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US
it's called socialism. it's been spawned already, and it's growing. people can thank bernie sanders for its major popularization, but he won't be around when the dream is complete-- if it ever is.
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for a while too. It's very convenient that the whole 'Occupy' thing got followed up by a huge push for social justice beliefs and comments about deplorables. Like someone didn't want the attention to be focused on the rich, and thought a bit of interclass warfare would be a nice distraction about now.
You can see a huge media political shift about this time too.
But hey, maybe I'm coming across as paranoid here.
> The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is.
Things have gotten worse as capital consolidated all the industries. Now we have an illusion of choice. When you go to the supermarket, there seems to be tons of variety of products by many companies. After all, there are so many brands. But all these brands are owned by a handful of companies. The same thing with banking. The last financial crisis was used by the FED ( a banking cartel ) to get large multinational banks to buy up smaller regional banks. Regional newspapers are being bought up by major media companies like news corp.
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
It's not just identity politics. It's also the bread and circuses. Nothing more poignant than the upcoming superbowl where the mindless stuff their faces while watching advertisements for 4 hours.
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
That's naive. The internet will almost certainly be used to reinforce it. More distractions, more propaganda and more divisions. Look how quickly the wealthy has come down on the internet and social media already. Look at the amount of censorship. Look what happened to youtube trending page and google news. Youtube trending is now all SNL, major news channels and late night shows. Google news is now all washingtonpost, nytimes, etc.
I hope you are right, but experience tells me money wins and the masses are not intelligent enough or united enough to challenge the wealthy. Our political system doesn't allow for it, nor does our education system or the media or anything else.
It's become a common fad on the internet to assert that believing in classism is the real act of division. The other possibility that jumps out is that Arwa Mahdawi is either Muslim or of a culturally Muslim community (I've read her work and so I'm aware of her but not her history), and, well, could just be some racisms up in here. Pick your poison.
(Ordinarily I would not amplify that sort of post, but decent folks need to know what they're up against.)
I spent a summer in NYC a few years ago. While living in NYC I did get a flavor of higher class living with some roommates of mine. It really is true that there are unspoken codes and mores to follow, and it was uncomfortable when I didn't.
However, this is one issue that's hard to put solely on the foot of the rich or a broader system. Passing in many avenues, not just by class, is really deciding you want to be there and what the terms of your presence will be. It felt at times like trying to get into a club, if you look like you want in, you don't get in. If you don't want in, they let you in. You have to learn to look like you don't want it.
I think rather than teach young children how to hold spoons, or castigate the rich for yet another divide they were born into, probably we should just teach improv skills, confidence skills and encourage people to engage in open dialogue with others. Some solutions don't require us dismantling a system.
If the next time a rich person gives you an askance look and you immediately ask them to explain themselves, guess what, you just equalized yourself with them socially without having to learn which fork to use first.
I thought about this comment for awhile because I have unassailably high class friends who have spent $10k+ on TVs and sneakers. I think the key is they just do it with confidence. I jokingly made fun of my friend's sneaker collection but he just laughed it off without any hint of concern. Once you understand all the different social queues then you can start to act however you want as long as you have bulletproof self confidence. Taken to extreme lengths you might end up being referred to as eccentric but these days it's almost a desirable label.
I am really amazed that almost every response to this sees speakers (i.e., audio equipment) and then says something about sneakers (i.e., athletic footwear).
Don't waste your money on a new set of speakers / You get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers / Next phase, new wave, dance craze, anyways / It's still rock and roll to me
-- Billy Joel
Also: "Where have you been hidin' out lately, honey?
You can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money"
How you dress is very important. Knowing enough about current events and having your own, thoughtful opinion about them. Knowing a number of books and using them in conversation. Rules on when to be blunt are different. Never order a burger at a restaurant. I could go on but it's a hard thing to summarize. (source: was middle/lower class, now have many 1% friends)
oh wow.. brings back memories... back in the 90s use to go there for dinner on Thursday and then to Webster Hall for Psychedelic Thursdays (free entry with train badge/button)
They had good burgers and chef salad was good as well...
P. J. Clarke's is another one where you could get decent burgers.....
The only way to become wealthy is to spend less than you make. The only way to stay wealthy is to spend less than you make (and have your investments outpace inflation). One of the best ways to do that is to not inflate your lifestyle, like starting to think you're too good for things like putting together your furniture from Ikea.
Feel free to elaborate on why it's wrong. I don't mean spending less than you make at all times, and I don't mean "make" as in "earn at a wage-earning job", there are many more ways to make money than that. In the long term, your wealth is the money you've made (including capital gains), minus what you've spent.
You might say that's completely obvious, but it helps some people to be reminded of it.
It's not wrong, but think of it this way: if you short a stock, your downside exposure is unlimited because the price can go arbitrarily high, but your upside is finite because the stock can only go to zero. In the same way, you can only decrease your spending so much, even to zero, but you can increase your income by an unlimited amount.
Yep, you're right. For many people, though, increasing their income substantially is harder than decreasing their spending substantially, and also, many people are in the habit of increasing their spending when their earnings increase by, say, switching from Ikea to higher end furniture, or trading in that used Honda for a new Mercedes. For many people, it's so bad that they end up not saving any more, while putting themselves in a more precarious position if their income ever dried up.
Some of the wealthiest people I know are also the cheapest. The other week my gf's parents (very well off) refused to go to a clinic that their insurance didn't work at after their son cut off the tip of his finger. Took them and hour to find a place to go. It seemed absurd from my perspective to put a few hundred dollars in front of a medical emergency when you can afford a private plane, but I guess that's part of why they're rich.
> Some of the wealthiest people I know are also the cheapest.
this statement always shows up in these kinds of threads.
i bet some of the poorest people you know are just as cheap. and middle class too.
and in fact, as it turns out, there are cheap people all over the wealth spectrum. i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that being cheap/stingey is actually completely uncorrelated with wealth. it's a character trait like agreeableness.
Heh at that point, I'd say they're being cheap to the point of not being practical. A slightly greater chance of restoring that finger to full use is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks if you're not seriously low on money. But yeah, their cheapness probably has something to do with why they have so much money stored up.
It's not just furniture, it's staying at nicer hotels, going to Bora Bora instead of Hawaii, buying a Mercedes instead of a Honda, buying a boat instead of renting one. Each thing on its own wouldn't break someone with some money, but it adds up. And you can keep ramping that up, especially if you get into something like private aviation.
I think it has to do with it being a finger food and having less "class" associated with it. It's not always an issue but I have definitely received judgment for ordering a burger
I've noticed that waiters/waitresses seem to treat me worse if I order a beer where I could've ordered wine. Especially when the cuisine is French or centered around steak.
I could see that. Luckily, craft brewing is getting so big that some places also have interesting beer selections presented almost like a wine list. Probably not French places though, or higher end steakhouses. :/
The rules about books, food, and current events could just as well come from "how to fit in with graduate students in the humanities (and sometimes other disciplines)." Which might explain why I and my friends never "coded" as poor when I was in graduate school, even though I was technically living below the federal poverty line for a few years.
It's sort of a weird position and a good example for illustrating the distinction between social and economic standing. Grad school often feels like an extended exercise in class-passing.
The burger thing depends on context. I know some law firm partners who regularly get burgers at Peter Luger (popular steakhouse) with each other, but would never get a burger at a dinner with clients.
The only thing this scene from the wire fails to capture is that once you learn the mannerisms, how you should look, how you should act to not feel out of place - you then need to learn how and what to speak about. It's hard to hold a conversation about Mr. Smith's recent trip to the maldives, his new non-profit business venture, and roger federer's latest australian open win if you're working a 9-5 and vacationing once a year in california. So in many cases you can look and act the part, but really you can't speak the part.
Then at the end of the meal, you're relying on them to pay for that $150 bottle of wine they ordered.
Not the author of the parent comment, but my family shifted from solidly middle-class to members of the 1% over the course of a few years in the early 2000s (my teenage years) as our family business became significantly more successful. Here are some of the things I've experienced that strike me as examples of that:
- Talking specifically about money (how much high-ticket items specifically cost, how much anyone specifically makes) is gauche.
- Depending on the group and the location, there are functionally dress codes - you show up to brunch in sweats and sneakers and everyone else is in polos and boat shoes, you "dress up" in a shirt and khakis, everyone else is wearing a blazer and slacks, you put on a Macy's suit for a formal event and everyone else is wearing Tom Ford or Armani.
- What you do for leisure can be a fraught discussion - we eventually started traveling more, but I've met people who talked casually about summering in Ibiza or the Hamptons (and who used "summer" as a verb), or who have seasonal homes. "I stayed home and played X-Box" as an explanation for what you did on vacation earns a side-eye.
- What and how you eat, although that one has relaxed a little bit over the last few years as street food has been gentrified and made trendier.
I read that back in high school. I'd be interested to see how it holds up today, given the massive increase in overall inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class in the US.
I mean, there are social codes in any group. It's not unique to rich people, it's just how humans are. There are middle class equivalents to some of these. Growing up, we didn't shop at Nordstrom, but we certainly didn't shop at Goodwill. In most places, there are "middle class" grocery stores and clothing shops. It's just that, if you don't shift groups, you usually don't notice the rules and structures because you've internalized them so much. "What the hell is water?"[1] and all that.
Yeah, that's true. I can remember my mom acting like I'd completely lost my mind when I first discovered cheap jeans at Walmart and bought some, but there really wasn't much appreciable difference from the more expensive ones I usually got.
Try liking somethings considered as "white trash" hobbies/entertainment/activities, or as "posh" ones as a middle class person.
(E.g. a middle class high schooler who likes the opera instead of say, Hip Hop or whatever. Or wear some Comme De Garcons clothes around middle class dressed people, or stuff you bought at the Dollar Store...)
To my mind, watering and feeding your lawn so that it is nice and green and exactly 1 1/2" tall all year round is a solid middle-class indicator. I find it kind of strange to spend that time and money on doing something that has little to no productive value.
Not throwing daggers or anything, but every strata has things that are a bit strange about them.
Yes, I know that upper class does that too, unless you are in the hills where there really isn't any lawn to take care of, etc.
>I find it kind of strange to spend that time and money on doing something that has little to no productive value.
That's entirely the point. Lawns originated in the middle ages as a status symbol. They demonstrated a) that you could afford to waste a perfectly useful piece of arable land and b) you could afford to pay a team of men to neatly scythe and shear it. It's hard to tell how much land an aristocrat actually owns, but the size of their lawn acted as a reasonable proxy.
The invention of the mechanical lawnmower helped to democratize the lawn, establishing it as a symbol of middle-class suburbia. A small lawn in front of a suburban house didn't demonstrate that you were gratuitously wealthy, but did demonstrate that a) you could afford a larger plot of land than strictly necessary to accommodate your house and b) you had leisure time to spare.
Well not really My grandparents lived in a council house (with outside loo) in Birmingham (uk) and if you don't keep your garden looking nice the corporation would evict you.
I suppose it varies regionally. To me, merely owning a lawn is something reserved for the upper crust, let alone having the time to maintain one. The middle class lives in small apartments and rents houses (with roommates or extended family).
Everyone in the Bay Area was was forced to step down a class so that the tech boom and neighborhood character could coexist. Owning a (modest) suburban home for your nuclear family is baseline middle class everywhere else. Renting (and especially renting with roommates) is for students and the poor.
Really? I grew up in the Midwest where chicken fried rice from the local Chinese place was about as exotic as it got, and our standard meals were some form of overcooked meat, potatoes, and a token green. The evolution of the food and restaurant scenes in the US is one of the things I'm pretty happy about. It can definitely be handled poorly, but for the most part I think it's been a positive.
I think what's being referred to is less about more options, and more about combining options in a new way so you can up sell it. Getting access to your first Thai, Indian etc. restaurant is amazing. Suffering through someone's new tex-mex/filipino/Eskimo fusion because friends want to try it is often not.
Variety is great. I love access to various ethnic cuisines. What I'm sick of is how you can't get normal fries because they are all sweet potato fries with truffle oil and similar gimmicks.
The reverse of this can be true too. Growing up, we weren't rich, but did better than most my friends families. Downplaying that your largish (4 kids) family flies across the country for a week plus vacation once a year and not talking about money or new stuff stuff becomes a thing then too. Partly that was probably me being overly sensitive, but group dynamics and expectations are tricky things, and this was only a mild difference.
Edit: I should note this was in northern California, where people generally do not vacation on the east coast because of both local attractions and a high cost of living that makes saving for vacations much harder to do. We happened to have some family in the Carolinas which was part of our reason.
> Talking specifically about money (how much high-ticket items specifically cost, how much anyone specifically makes) is gauche.
This is not just a rich people rule.
I grew up solidly middle class, and you could hear a pin drop if you asked someone in the room how much they were paid or how much that engagement ring cost.
Maybe a regional thing then? Or as you hinted you're talking about a different sort of middle class. I grew up in a large family with a single government income, went to school with a lot of kids that were poorer than me (and some richer of course), and so on, and I can't remember a situation where it was just "ok" to talk about anything that made someone's finances explicit.
Not where I come from (rural Northern California).
We were pretty much lower middle class (sometimes lower-lower) , had friends who were better off and friends who were much worse off, and nobody really talked about money openly.
In my family I always figured it was WASP reticence, but now that you mention it I think it was something broader. Maybe: people with money don't need to talk about it, people without money are embarrassed to talk about it, and if you're somewhere in the middle you don't want to reveal your hand.
The clothing stuff works the other way too. My parents were always well off, but we’re immigrants. I know to wear a nice suit to a client meeting. But I’m completely at a loss when it comes to all the intermediate levels of clothing. Like, what do you wear when it would be weird to wear a business suit but improper to wear jeans?
Take a look in Brooks Brothers or Banana Republic. You'll see the standard upper-middle-class smart-casual wardrobe - chinos and cords, oxford shirts, v-neck sweaters, sport coats and brogues. There's some nuance, but it's not rocket science.
It is much more regional as well. Nantucket reds might be acceptable casual attire in places on the East coast; here in California they come off as the clown pants that they really are.
Sweater or loose shirt in a darker color (navy, dark green, etc), black pants, black simple shoes/boots is almost always a safe bet, at least in america. Comfy enough for casual settings, proper enough for more official settings, depending on how you carry it.
Clothing is usually pretty easy once you find the staples; after that its your behavior that makes it. To actually look good though, you need to understand the group's values enough to move beyond the basics.
And of course, you need to learn to have an opinion on clothing, to understand (and deny) other's opinions. At the very least, when some chucklefuck gives you a look for eating fries by hand, you should be able to defend your position
Yes, and I'd extend this to talking about where your money comes from, as well as how you spend it. Don't expect a straight or detailed answer to "What do you do (for work)?" or "Where did you buy that?"
I can't speak for OP, but a big one is how to deal with the check at a restaurant. For people who are lower/lower middle class (or at the least not financially secure), you pass around a receipt and take turns deciding who owes what. In the middle/upper middle class, there is an unspoken rule the check gets split, and anything else is awkward. In the upper class, oftentimes one person will pay for the check and it's awkward to object.
If you're going to resent someone getting an extra 10$ worth of food you split the check based on costs.
If 10$ is effectively meaningless but 200$ is not. Split it per person, it's fairly close and reasonably fast.
If 200$ is effectively meaningless, rotate who pays it's faster. This can blend into: If 2,000$ if effectively meaningless, or you want to show off, who pays may not relate to who paid last time.
I'm not sure the time thing is particularly true but you're absolutely spot on with it being a value of money thing. And you're spot on with your characterisation as to how it works.
I’ll never forget how odd and uncomfortable it felt the first time I went out to lunch with co-workers (at my first “real” job) and this “split the check” thing happened. I always thought it just seemed so much fairer for everyone to figure out what they ate and pay for that. Kind of a culture shock.
Is it? Not co-workers, but I always find it (extremely) annoying that after having a great meal with friends that some of them insist on counting item per item how much they owe at the end of the evening.
Yes, I might have had an extra glass of wine. Or you might have had an extra side dish or a G&T. Let's either just split the bill, or I'll pay today and you'll get the next.
Now it seems silly, but back then it was a sudden transition between honestly worrying about the implications of a $15 lunch vs a $5 lunch, to making some money and not having to sweat it.
>In the upper class, oftentimes one person will pay for the check and it's awkward to object.
That's how it's in my country for all classes, poor or rich.
When friends go out, someone and pays for all the others (and someone might ask to chip in or pay themselves, but the first one doesn't take no for an answer).
Next time you see each other, the other person can pay, but no one keeps any very specific tally ("I paid 3 times, you paid 1") -- that would be considered tacky and cheap. That said, if someone systematically over many meetings never takes initiative to pay that the rest start considering them a cheapskate (but never giving specific tally or anything -- it's more from the feeling "never remember you paying").
Anybody insisting on splitting the bill, or obsessing over who ordered what, is also seen as a cheapskate.
That's how it usually goes among people with regular income. Now, sometimes, when the company is comprised of people that might be students, unemployed, etc, they more often agree to split the bill. But in this case too, obsessing over who bought what is considered rude, and usually it's just a simple bill/persons split that's paid by all.
They wouldn't care about that. In fact when someone volunteers to pay for everybody, and someone else asks to chip in because e.g. they drank alcohol or they ordered a more expensive dish than the others, the person volunteering to pay just dismisses them (and jokingly feigns being insulted that they'd think he'd care for such a thing).
That only makes sense if you're consuming roughly the same amount. If you have people who don't drink alcohol in your group, or don't eat meat/seafood/poultry, that's easily 15% to 30% difference in cost. I try to make sure those aren't sharing in alcohol or meat don't end up paying for it. It wouldn't be a problem if the difference was $5, but nowadays, in many cities this ends up being $10 per drink and an extra $10 on the entree...etc.
>That only makes sense if you're consuming roughly the same amount.
In our culture's case, in general the amount each one ate doesn't matter -- whether one had steak and the other just a salad, the salad person can very well still go on and insist on paying for everybody else. Nobody would care about "a 15% to 30% difference in cost" (the person paying for everybody wont feel it's a burden, and the persons having their meal paid, wont feel like imposing).
It's not about achieving some perfect balance or fairness in any particular meal -- people genuinely want to treat others, and enjoy taking turns doing so.
It's only longer term one would care for patterns of behavior (the person who after so many meals with others never volunteers to pay etc).
Longer term is when it would make leaa sense because even if everyone is volunteering to pay, the one who is consuming 15% to 30% less is always paying extra. I can see not caring if it's once or twice a year, but I'd feel bad for expecting someone to keep paying extra when I can easily add a couple numbers in my head and take care of my portion.
> you pass around a receipt and take turns deciding who owes what
A lot of things in this thread seem completely foreign to me. Every restaurant I've been to in the past few years has just asked how we want to split the bill. They seem to keep all orders separate in the system and just merge them if you want shared bills.
I highly recommend this book, which is dated but holds up pretty well. I found it funny, sad, but overall just brutal in its characterizations of class in America. It's only available in print too: https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...
My overall takeaways from the book were:
1. Class is correlated with income, but not identical.
2. Class is so ingrained in so many areas of our lives that it's almost impossible to change. You might as well just be comfortable with the class level you grew up in, because you'll probably always be there.
3. A big reason for #2: caring about your class in the first place is middle class. The more you care about where you fall in the class hierarchy, the more middle and upper-middle class you are. Lower class folks don't really care (and may even take a certain amount of "pride" in being lower / working class), and upper class people have nothing to prove to anyone.
But the book goes into excruciating detail about the way people dress, speak, decorate their homes, what jobs they have, cars they drive, etc, etc.
One of the takeaways I got from it was that every single upper class activity is designed to be incredibly expensive and time consuming, just because only the wealthy can maintain those form of activities. Having driveways made out of gravel, that constantly need to be redone at considerable expense, or having a yacht. Despite this, the true upper class is incredibly banal; Fussell describes them as totally uninterested in ideas, reading time and cheap disposable mysteries if they ever bother to do so. There's really a lot of Thurston Howell in them.
I think most people here would dislike how Fussell pegs liking science fiction and technology as a fairly low class activity. But it's funny how right he is, because among the upper-mids here...you hate social media in the same way, and the lower class uses it just as much.
But, oh that book is devastating. Fussell is a wonderful writer, and a keen critic.
I think my most memorable passage from that book is that cats are higher class than dogs because they are (mostly) useless. :P
The upper class hobbies are definitely a thing. Equestrian > sailing > skiing > golf probably. Golf only being this low because it was "democratized" by muni courses and popularized first by Arnold Palmer, then by Tiger Woods.
Skiing is probably the most approachable of the activities for the upper middle class professional, but it's a $300/day activity that necessitates travel. A fairly devastating expense for many.
A $50/day activity at a local hill + a $150 initial investment (one that will last you multiple winters) in some decade-old used equipment at a local swap event.
Skiing is not cheap. But it's extremely expensive only if you have extremely expensive demands - such was wanting to ski while living in an area without hills or snow.
The US has skiable mountain ranges near a majority of the main coastal population centers. Hills around the Great Lakes might not be high, but make up for it with the volume of snow. A back of an envelope estimate shows half of the US population having a ski hill within driving distance.
The codes change regularly and different social cliques or professional verticals distinguish themselves by them, so they can be hard to Define. When in doubt: don’t be a tourist.
Know how to pronounce the items on the international restaurant menu before trying to order them. If you don’t know, don’t ask out loud. Whisper into your rich friend’s ear so as to not embarrass them.
Don’t speak about the unspoken codes either, and if you must, do it privately with your rich friends and go along with their answers.
Don’t not have enough money for something unless you express clearly that you are too good for it. Not needing it bad enough is not an acceptable excuse.
When others share stories of their extravagant lives, hold a straight face. This is normal stuff for you, remember? You already know what that’s like.
Speak of politics as though identity issues(D) or working hard for your money(R) are more important than class issues. Remember that class issues are not something you are particularly affected by. You can acknowledge they matter but insist identity issues are more important. This helps wealthy folk feel both compassionate, concerned and comfortable with their wealth. I’m not taking a side here, only giving proven survival tips.
Your family is kind of more like cartoon characters. You just share jokes with them and nothing else, unless something tragic happens or if they invite you on a nice vacation. Don’t discuss any other relations with your family members.
Fashion: In the least, if you wore it in high school, you don’t wear it now.
Music, art: Don’t ask who this is. You’ve heard it or you are too busy to care.
Like parent said, these can be overridden with confidence and flair but that takes some acclimating and strategy.
I did not suggest being timid. The whole thing is a structure of symbols of timidity; an abstraction of wealth begetting confidence. So, it is certainly a matter of walking the ridge between symbolic timidity and actual timidity.
True! That's why you want to whisper to a friend, ideally one who invited you along. This 1. minimizes the exposure of you being an outsider 2. minimizes the friend's exposure of having invited an outsider and 3. shows your friend that you aren't going to embarrass them, making it more likely that you'll be invited along in the future, assuming you aren't sick of this shit already. Ideally, you'd rake a risk assessment of your options and balance that with the friend's comfort level and how close you are to one another.
I feel like a lot of class conflicts are, like, excessively direct expressions of emotion or conflict, or inappropriate subjects of conversation. I don't think people are going to be made uncomfortable if you ask what some kind of food is.
I'm in my mid 20s. I don't really know any of the ultra-wealthy, but I have some friends who are low execs in IB, Management Consulting, lawyers, have been to virtually every club in the city by now. How to dress when you enter a top club or SoHo House, who to go with, where to go on vacation with what friends to present an image of your wealth, "who did YOU go to the Hamptons with last weekend?" - people present an image to build a network - it's more complex than that, but everything the article is stating is true and may give you an idea.
Those people are most likely also up to their eyes in debt, just trying to show off and keeping up with the "true" upper class. Most people in their 20s working jobs won't have substantial wealth, unless they were born into money.
Some of what you’re saying does occur but that’s just a part of it. Come to nyc, there’s no shortage of IB associates, lawyer associates, and MC principals making 300k+ in their late 20s with a straight path upward
Edit: Not talking about the guy who rents a $10k apartment he can't afford to trick people into thinking he's rich. Talking more about people buying into social strata they can reasonably or paying fealty to those in higher strata to benefit their career. It is a thing out here.
300k is a mind blowing amount of money to most people, but it's also considered nothing to a lot of people. Though I'm impressed someone can make principal consultant in their 20s.
That's true - I'm just painting a picture. Same thing at most rungs of the ladder and I'm sure it happens in a similar way in many other places around the world - just the way it works. It's a different world than what most of the people on this site might see day to day - making big money in software requires a different set of soft skills to find success as I think most people on here would agree.
The guy I had in mind was, I think, 29, german and I think working at BCG? Very polished. Had his fresh-to-the-city model girlfriend and threw great parties.
The biggest one was pouring wine. I remember a few times I poured it kind of off and I got that distinct look of class violation. Haggling about splitting checks also got those looks often, the lesson I learned there was that almost always, the party will want to split it evenly rather than do something as gauche as math, so rather than order less, order much more so you get a discount on your meal :-)
I also spent some time in a small rich beach town, and from that time I remember how my switching to boat shoes seemed to instantly ingratiate me with some people. Also never mention how "cool" it is that someone has a jetski or nice boat, those things were just taken as statements of fact.
To many people these might not seem like real mores or wealth signifiers. Maybe you think I was just over-sensitive. This whole article though, is about feelings, and certainly in those moments it seemed like everyone was certainly feeling something strongly.
Stereotypes, glass ceilings and merit aside, ones ability to move up in the world is tied at least in part to their ability not be disagreeable (I specifically used a double negative there) among those who are already on top. If you're white, have dreads and whatever building you're in smells like a grow op or chewing tobacco gets its own line in your monthly budget don't expect your presence to be appreciated by the upper classes.
Fitting in is less important than not not fitting in. It's just a fact of life one's life experience is so directly tied to wealth that the more percent above of below you a group is the harder it will be to not, be rejected by that group.
> I think rather than teach young children how to hold spoons ... we should just teach improv skills
I think there's an argument for a little of both, by way of giving them tools to fit in at multiple levels (classes, call it what you will). Then it's their choice to fit in or stand out as they feel best in the widest range of situations.
Of course knowing which of 5 sets of cutlery is for what shouldn't actually matter much...
If the next time a rich person gives you an askance look and you immediately ask them to explain themselves, guess what, you just equalized yourself with them socially without having to learn which fork to use first.
Or you've shibboleth'ed yourself out by not already knowing what the askance look meant.
Sure, but you were already outside the group because of your misuse of spoons. I have difficulty picking up the nuance of these small askance glances, so without asking, it's unlikely I'll ever pick up the shibboleth.
Personally, I've always thought the only way to win is to not play the game. High class values have never really appealed to me, although I guess feel the hierarchy/status issue as much as anyone else.
This is the outsider play. It basically works by default if you’re a foreigner (aka an American in England) or vice versa. Americans can get away with it via improv or social ability sure... less so if there’s a language barrier.
HN should just change its name to Hate America and Capitalism Knews. Yet another all politics story about how America isn't perfect or capitalists is evil. A daily occurrence on HN.
Oh please. You can easily criticize something without hating it. I’m American and believe there are plenty of things to both admire and criticize about our nation. Blind nationalism doesn’t do us any favors, and is a lever by which cynical forces may manipulate us. It is therefore instrumental to the health of our republic that we constantly view ourselves with a critical eye.
My Mom was a immigrant who came from the Philippines. My dad was a polish person. I raised my income and made more than them by a few ways.
1. Figuring out how to get a degree in Computer Science. (I chose a state school UIC)
2. Getting a Job in CS (I worked at the school I had classes from and then transitioned to a real job locally).
The way I did it was taking my resume and applying to jobs I believe I was qualified in. I taught myself web development in high school and continued to be interested in it. I went to meetups to network with people.
All of this wouldn't be possible without my mom having a job at the local grocery store. Or my parents supporting me when I was getting my degree.
It’s still a great accomplishment but I think it’s easier for your next generation to jump a class. I think the harder idea is to personally jump a class after being in one.
But then again, it might just be that when someone has a child, they set them up to move up instead of themselves. They sacrifice their chance for their children. Otherwise they would have the capital to do it themselves.
Obviously I’m just thinking out loud. It just seems that it’s more common for someone’s child to get an education and eventually rise above their parents. If you have children, they might have a chance at an Ivy League school or something like that which they will then have the chance to rise above you.
Yea, I mean my parents couldn't really afford to be in the house we were in until I started to have a job. I bought my mom a Minivan.
Sometimes they couldn't pay for heat to get fixed. Or all the times I ate Ramen.
Or the fact that I wanted to be a MCS major but really had to have a CS degree.
But, I know many people that I went to school with who were unable to do so and had the same opportunities that I did.
Or had more money than me and couldn't get a job after they graduated. Even the people that I had the same high school weren't able to do that. They had more money than me. They were smarter than me. The only thing I can see that I had more than them was grit and determination. My intelligence wasn't even in their league.
I chose CS because I knew that an average person in CS could get a average job and the demand would be there when I graduated. My life is a constant hedge against the future.
This is absolutely the case for many poor families. My parents worked very hard so that their children could have a better life than they did. I am more educated, and wealthier than they ever were thanks to their hard work, and I am extremely grateful for it. Additionally they're also very happy their hard work and sacrifice has paid off.
Growing up poor has kept me grounded to the struggles of the working poor, even as my income has gone up many multiples since I started working.
We love to talk about how being born a certain gender or a certain race shouldn't hold you back from achieving anything you want in America. But what if you are unlucky enough to be born into a poor family, or in a backwoods, downtrodden region of the country?
My experience aligns with the author's. In movies and feel-good stories shared on social media, we romantically idolize the humble rich person, who came from nothing yet somehow stays "true to their roots". And that is a lovely, inspiring mindset necessary to keep people motivated...in theory.
In practice, in order to get ahead in life and to cross class boundaries, you will have to acknowledge that aspects of your upbringing and former way of life are "backwards". You'll have to reconcile that the rich will scorn you and think of your home as a "shithole", and that you "weren't supposed to" make it to the top. You'll have to see things in a new light, and as the author notes, your social life and identity will take a hit (e.g. old friends who won't come to your wedding, or dating prospects who are afraid of being associated with lower classes).
There is a moral failing in our country where the pursuit of money is seen as the objective optimal thing to do. But it's very reasonable to look at how money changes people, and to turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust.
> There is a moral failing in our country where the pursuit of money is seen as the objective optimal thing to do. But it's very reasonable to look at how money changes people, and to turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust.
It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
edit: This site is slowly turning into Reddit - contrarian opinions need not apply. Instead of down-votes, why not rebut what I said? It's not like the matter is settled, and the last couple times the populous tried to "abolish" social classes, mass terror followed.
Class distinction and hierarchy are precisely the sort of social mechanisms that convince people that there exists alternatives to certain modes of living (class aspiration).
What they are going to create a new class? Move up to the next one? Class mobility is a fallacy that was invented to support the hierarchy. Its not an alternative system in any sense.
This is patently false. Social mobility is entirely possible, although it has gotten harder since the 1980's, but that wasn't your claim.
> that was invented to support the hierarchy
The hierarchy doesn't need "support". Class and social hierarchy has been observed in every culture since time immemorial. The radical and unfounded claim is the notion that we can "remove" it in any meaningful sense.
> Its not an alternative system in any sense.
Moving into a new social class impacts your life in every conceivable way, from the way you speak, dress, behave, to the job you perform. On an individual level, it absolutely would resemble "systemic" changes to both one's material and immaterial life.
> It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
No one genuinely aspires to be destitute. The poor are seen as noble in some aspects, but that's often a defense mechanism from the extreme wealth on the other site of the spectrum.
> I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions.
I did not mean to imply that we should therefore demolish all class distinctions. But we certainly need introspection, and unfortunately rich perspectives are popularized by default (see film and social media examples cited earlier).
Just because classes are necessary does not mean our attitude towards classes is healthy.
>edit: This site is slowly turning into Reddit - contrarian opinions need not apply. Instead of down-votes, why not rebut what I said? It's not like the matter is settled, and the last couple times the populous tried to "abolish" social classes, mass terror followed.
Now now relax. You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good because they glue our society together. You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
>It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
Sure but the veneration is usually weak, it's akin to the 'noble savage' - the 'hardworking blue-collar.' It's veneration at a distance, contact between the wealthy and the poor is frequently uncomfortable for both.
>One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
>I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
We can have a sensible discussion without condescension.
> You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good......You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
>You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
> Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist. I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
>We can have a sensible discussion without condescension.
Fair.
>I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
Well no. It may be self-evident when you're honest with yourself but when "we're" honest with "ourselves" it's not at all, hence the downvotes and disagreement in the replies.
>I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
This is the success sequence stuff? Look it's just not very true. Almost the entirety of various 'success sequence' poverty figures can be explained by one thing: maintaining full-time work. Everything else is small or zero. Well maintaining full-time work isn't always easy! There's a variety of circumstances outside ones control which can affect your ability to maintain full-time work.
>What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist.
You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
>I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
Are many mobile in an effortful sense though? Say I have a society where at birth we roll a bingo machine filled with balls 1-5 and we assign you to a quintile. This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance - same as race. Now what if instead of a bingo machine we just had a very large 'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal. It's not just about how many went from bottom quintile to third quintile or better, it's about how it happened.
>This is the success sequence stuff? Look it's just not very true. Almost the entirety of various 'success sequence' poverty figures can be explained by one thing: maintaining full-time work
This isn't true, and a random blog post where the author has difficulty replicating the studies results does not prove it so. There is a mile high pile of literature that shows marriage and high school graduation to be vitally important. It would not surprise me in the least that these two are strongly correlated with full-time employment. The "Success Sequence" has lifted more people from poverty than any social welfare program has to date.
>You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
I genuinely still have absolutely no idea what you are asking me to clarify, and I'm taking offense at your insinuation that I'm being coy about some matter regarding race. I will gladly answer your question, but what is it that you are asking or need clarification on? Are you asking me if racial distinctions are natural? Yes, race is hereditary, is this not self-evident?
> Are many mobile in an effortful sense though?
I don't know what you mean by effortful, so the best I can answer you is to say that socially mobility is a very real and recognized phenomena in the United States of America.
>This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance
As far as I understand you, your underlying premise here is that social mobility is, like a dice roll, pure luck. I think this premise is completely baseless.
>'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal
It absolutely isn't the same deal. I don't doubt that race makes it more difficult for some people to succeed, but this is completely tangential and I'm finding it difficult to see what, if anything, this has to do with my original statement.
Intergenerational mobility is a really interesting topic- I played around with a transition matrix for a high school project about Markov chains. I can't dig up the table right now but I believe it was based on data from around 2008 and was split into quintiles- i.e. the table tracked the income jump between you and your parents with bucket sizes set at every 20%.
What I'd really like to see is a similar table with smaller bucket sizes- namely, I'd like to see the intergenerational migration rates on the higher buckets. If we start seeing higher retention rates on the higher buckets and less entry into them from lower buckets, then we might be headed into a more fixed-class situation.
The number one indicator of your class standing is your parents' class standing. There is no American Dream, and "Rags to Riches" is more luck than skill and effort.
As someone who's navigated their way from poor->middle class->upper middle class I can give a bit of perspective that I rarely see mentioned in these articles...
One of the biggest barriers to moving up in class is the people in your starter class. Family, friends, neighbors... almost all of them will start to get very aggressive with you if you seriously try to better yourself. I remember being accused of using too many "five dollar words", being a nerd for spending time learning technology, being a loser for reading books! I found the crab bucket mentality to be very real. I tried to encourage others to have the strength to stand against it, but few did. I don't really talk to anyone I knew from back then anymore.
Going from middle to upper middle was interesting as well. There you also see pressure to stay as you are but it's less overt and more of a second order effect of trying to keep up with the Jones. The amount of debt that I saw the average middle class person bury themselves in just to achieve what they thought represented a slightly higher class than they actually lived was astounding. You can't move up in class when you're living paycheck to paycheck to pay for your car leases, oversized mortgage and credit cards balances that are full from paying for regular international travel.
Every step I've made has meant breaking ties with the people who weren't happy to see me move on. Now I find myself at the glass ceiling and this time there's very real pressure from above to stay where I'm at. Rich people may let you in the door occasionally but it will be on their terms. It's up to you as a person to decide if you're willing to contort yourself to their demands. Yes you can "hit it big" with a startup or something but there's a lot of chance involved in that. At this stage you're best off living below your means and investing since upper middle class people have a pretty meaningful revenue stream. Just not enough to call it quits and retire.
birth limits you to upper middle class. you can be fabulously wealthy, but if you did not have the upbringing, you can not claim it.
however, if you are wealthy, you can buy an upper class lifestyle, and your children will be upper class, while you will not be.
in other words, their peers that they grew up with will accept them as upper class (meaning they had an upper-class upbringing), while their parents still consider you to be an up-and-comer, because you did not.
once you realize this, it's a much healthier situation because you stop trying to make that final jump. and once you stop trying to make that jump, both your upper middle and upper class friends will be more comfortable around you.
in other words, once you make it to upper middle, it's not worth worrying over. it's better to just focus on the money to make your family's life comfortable without worrying about social details. money defines everything under upper class; birth and upbringing defines the upper class.
by the time your children's children come around, everyone will have forgotten about you, and the new normal will have taken hold.
that last jump can only be given by birth -- which, if you stop and think about it, is exactly how it works, right?
Tom Brady owns a multi-million dollar house next to "The Country Club" (yes, that is exactly how it is referred to, anyone who has to ask which country club does not belong) and he was denied a membership until this year:
Question -- how have your mannerisms, speech, attire, body language, etc changed as you moved up in ecocnmic class? I'm wondering how the cues for your social class have changed alongside it.
I'd say that all of the above have become more refined, but I was always different than my peers growing up so they were a bit more refined to start (in large part due to more reading and different media consumption).
My interests are very much middle/upper middle class geek though and that's definitely something that the upper classes aren't very comfortable with. I'm not interested in a lot of the thinking that comes out of high end private liberal arts schools for instance. Really a focus on math/computers/science is generally not an upper class thing. I like media but not "art".
Perhaps it is now, but it was not always the case. At the dawn of age of reason you would have certainly needed to be independently wealthy (upper class) in order to pursue purely intellectual activities.
For a time, anti-intellectualism was perhaps not as prevalent within the working class. Education was seen as a way to better ones self, people tended allotment gardens and took part in sports and cultural activities like workplace brass bands. Maybe they succeeded and their descendants are now middle class. The reality though, is largely defeat as was alluded to in this thread:
What I've seen (and mentioned in another comment) is that the upper classes view "education" to mean private liberal arts school, not math/computers/science. I think those are viewed as too hard to pursue if you don't have to and populated by non-rich people. That's definitely a generalization and not always the case but I've seen it a lot.
I notice a sort of cognitive dissonance with them though. It's undeniable that technology is powerful and many of the richest people in the world got there through tech. I don't think "old money" has quite digested what that means to them and it generally causes discomfort.
> What I've seen (and mentioned in another comment) is that the upper classes view "education" to mean private liberal arts school, not math/computers/science. I think those are viewed as too hard to pursue if you don't have to and populated by non-rich people.
I don't think that it's about the difficulty of math/computers/science; it's about the goal of the degree. A liberal arts degree is not a vocational credential: it means that one has been taught to think (literally, the 'liberal arts' are those studies useful to a free man, not an employee). If you have a math or chemistry degree, that can still be upper-class so long as you're not intending to make your money in math or chemistry; it's when you had to study a subject so that you can afford to live that you mark yourself as not upper class.
You’re correct about gaining an education that has nothing to do with employment as a signaling device. Your comment touches on my other point though. Regardless of employment options, “thinking” in the 21st century means STEM. Not knowing how to program is similar to not knowing how to read. I do think there’s a natural aptitude required to do STEM that has no relation to class. I think that’s why we see a lot of anti-tech commentary from institutions that have traditionally branded liberal arts as the only way to “think”.
As far as I understand it, the intellectuals among the upper class were always viewed as geeks/nerds. The overwhelming majority preferred to hunt, chase skirt, fight in wars or tournaments etc. It was so because the landed gentry were descendants of actual knights/warlords who, through force, amassed the land that was later passed through generations. These people were not unlike jocks of today and like them, they looked down on "nerds" who were into intelectual pursuits.
Yes written by a liberal arts guardian journo who totally ignores that fact that elements of the working class did look down on other members of the working class.
I have certainly heard that having one set of grandparents from the working class Gran started in service and Granddad was a coalminer then a buss driver.
I am always accused of "trying to be better than everyone" to the point of "stop putting me down, you think you are better than me?!" when I try to drag them along on things like going to the gym or learning to program.
tldr; class mobility has a muted standard deviation, likely on purpose.
There are tons of intentional and unintentional barriers for class mobility.
Here are the socially accepted ways that class mobility is rigged for developers specifically:
* A royalty-free tech culture. Since successful software is often exponential we don't get the meat of the value we create at a job. This could be compensated for with stock, but it's not because of the next point.
* Common stock/preferred stock. Employees get the worse of the two. Ask the Uber employees about this, where they had to pay income tax on an illiquid asset. Followed by a liquidation event that they could only participate in if they were accredited investor status.
* Accredited investor status. This states you must already be rich to make early stage investments. This is an important one because the best time to invest in a world-changing company is as soon as you can. As developers we've had to sit on the sidelines and watch investors get rich from obvious good ideas like github, airbnb, uber, sendgrid, facebook, etc while being told we can't put disposable income into the market because we didn't have enough of it. For instance, $1000 in facebook seed round today would be millions. Note that you can dedicate 2-4 years of your life for a very small portion of a different stock class. I fully expect the SEC to try to stop people investing in cryptocurrencies with the same scheme.
* Class-based social status. Your broke friends and family will come to you whenever there is a problem. They are more likely to be addicts and gamblers(statistically). If you help them and things go wrong and you stop helping them, they will hate you. If you refuse to help them you will feel like the worst person in the world. The 'crabs in a bucket' mentality op pointed out is real.
* Income tax. This is a hotly debated topic since often rich people are paid well. But for a poor person who is paid well one year, it's brutal. Not to mention your estimated taxes come from last years income, so if you have a bad year after a good one you will be forced to loan the government a ridiculous amount of money. Which you _might_ get back, eventually, at 0% apr. Don't try this the other way though, they can charge 5% apr a month plus fees.
* Capital gains tax. Often on assets which lack liquidity.
* Inflation. Having access to inflation is having access to variable taxes on the entire population of usd holders. The rich will have a majority of their money in assets.
* Game-able taxes. Taxes are completely context-dependent and no sane engineer would design it this way. The rich can afford people to play the games, which only makes sense at higher valuations.
* College. There are good things about going to college, but 2 years of "core curriculum", obscene costs, and unforgivable student debt are not part of them.
* Marriage. It's expensive. Having a family more so.
* Lack of identity theft protection. When this happens you get victim blamed and treated like a criminal. If you have money you can pay someone qualified to fix it, if not, good luck.
* Health insurance. If you want to start a company you better be okay with poor insurance since it's tied to your employer.
* Highly politicized culture. Society is willing to hurt people out who have controversial ideas that contradict the norm. These are often just working stiffs, not the decision makers. See James Damore.
* Fixed wages. Wages have not increased exponentially even though the power of individuals has.
Honestly I think almost all of it is intentional, like how the big tech companies colluded on engineer pay.
The system being rigged is why I believe in cryptocurrency in the long term. Sure there are scams and problems, but the alternative is to play an unfair game.
You can still invest in early stage currencies or ICOs, unlike startups.
As a creator if you have an idea for a currency you can release it without permission, and if people like it they will give you money.
The alternatives are bootstrapping, which is exhausting and what I've done. Have rich friends - you likely won't if you are poor. Or get accepted to some investment signaling filter like YC where you get to run as fast as you can for months while uprooting your life.
Edit: It won't let me reply to you, but ya I think ICOs can be legit. See ETH, WTC, SNM. There are bad actors too, but at it's best it's a way to route investment capital to creators regardless of socio-economic condition or location. You are correct that you have to tie the value of the chain back to they success of the product somehow. One way would be to share dividends.
You really think there's any sort of future in ICOs? The seem awfully faddish, and are quickly gaining the reputation for being ponzi schemes.
I don't see how they can easily be connected to the value create by a company over time. If you issue more coins or engane in buybacks, then they're basically stock and I'm sure the SEC will want to ask you some questions. If you don't issue new coins over the initial set amount, then it's deflationary and lends itself to the usual pump and dump.
Moreover, I don't see how ICOs offer anything to people without a lot of disposable income. They are simply too high risk for anyone who doesn't already have quite a bit of money they can afford to lose. At best they offer a way for people who are already in the top 1/3 of income earners to speculate and find greater fools among the slightly more wealthy.
Am I missing some fundamental value of ICOs as an instrument for investment?
>Now I find myself at the glass ceiling and this time there's very real pressure from above to stay where I'm at. Rich people may let you in the door occasionally but it will be on their terms. It's up to you as a person to decide if you're willing to contort yourself to their demands.
Can you expand on this? Interested in what examples you can provide.
Some of it is interests. As mentioned in another thread here, a lot of upper class people have no interest in skills that have vocational value. They consider programming and tech to be blue collar-ish. The amount of time you have to spend dedicated to tech to stay good at it isn't compatible with their lifestyles.
I also find that one of the doors that might be available to someone from a lower class is hedonism. There's a lot of partying going on and if you're willing, that's an avenue to access. I'm not willing.
The first step to understanding the class system is to differentiate between class and wealth. Class has very little to do with wealth, and it is mostly determined by your upbringing, mannerisms, profession, lifestyle and network.
A high net worth is helpful but insufficient for gaining entry to the higher class. It can also work against you, if you’re too visible with your money and spend it frivolously. For example, buying brand name designer clothing is not a traditionally “high class activity”, and would mark you as being, at best, nouveau riche.
The modern class structure is very complex, but can more or less be broken down to the following:
1. The “out of sight upper class”, who mostly keep to themselves and stay out of the public eye, especially as a reaction to public perception after the Great Depression. They are typically wealthy but not necessarily billionaires, and they live off of their capital instead of any particular profession. To be in this class, formally speaking, you must have been a part of the upper class for a couple of generations. You accelerate access into this class by elevating your family through e.g. high political achievement.
2. The upper class, who understand that they are not the true upper class. The nouveau riche with the potential to join the out of sight class also fall in here. Their children or grandchildren might be members of the out of sight class if their upbringing is “correct”. They have wealth or status, but have not had it for very long. Depending on their proclivities, they might not ever join the out of sight class because they’re too “visible”, for lack of a better word. These are traditionally doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and these days, software engineers. They have “respectable” careers and diversify themselves from the majority of their professional peers.
3. The middle class, who traditionally experience anxiety about their place in the class system, and who are encouraged to raise their status through their professional achievements. They associate high class with high class “things”, like brand name furniture, but don’t fully internalize the nuances of what makes for a high status individual. By definition, they can’t really perceive the true lifestyle of the upper class, which is why they associate it with things that are only externalities of its members.
4. The lower class, who are mostly incapable of differentiating between wealth and class, even if specifically told about it. They typically lack education and are very nearly always impoverished. But importantly, even a wealthy person can be a member of the lower class if they share its lifestyle and understanding of the class system. Many nouveau riche who earned their wealth through the entertainment industry and who are exceptionally visible are essentially barred from being part of the upper class.
The modern suit is very illustrative of the nuances in the hierarchy. A middle class individual might “splurge” on a suit from Mens Wearhouse. A low class individual will buy a suit from a highly visible fashion brand, like Armani. An upper class individual will buy a suit and have it tailored to fit, probably from a less “loud” designer in Neiman Marcus or Nordstrom. The out of sight class will wear bespoke suits from a tailor on Saville Row, or a similarly understated venue of high prestige.
If this all sounds exceptionally pretentious, that’s because it is. The class system does not revolve around money, it revolves around prestige. It is mostly associated with money because that’s politically expedient on the national stage. That said, wealth is something of a class multiplier - it is difficult to remain in the middle class once you’re wealthy, and more often than not you’ll end up in either the lower class or the upper class depending on your lifestyle and spending habits.
The article actually profiles one guy who had to acclimate himself twice over, first to the old-money world of the East Coast, then once more over to the new-money world of Silicon Valley.
I don't "fetishize" any of this, but I'll grant you that efforts to categorize and classify things can be excessively boring :). What's fascinating to one person is boring to another!
This article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr to 5x that and never experienced anything in between. The struggle is huge, and I keep having to look inside myself to figure out what "my people" is supposed to mean.
A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. I'm often called brutally blunt, but really, I'm very tame compared to most people I grew up around.
As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn.
> I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them.
What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?
In my mind child abuse is hurting a child for selfish reasons and discipline is punishment to cause behavioral changes. Some cultures allow for different severity of punishments. However the intent of the parent is very important when labeling child abuse.
Intent is important, but if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse.
Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.
> if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse.
That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn.
Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.
> . If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely
No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it.
That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.
While there are certainly abusers out there that relish it, (likely in most of the worst cases) I think you'll find that many who commit undeniable abuse don't do it for any sort of joy. They would describe their motivations as being good or an unfortunate necessity–sometimes even altruistic. Abuse is a complicated thing and many who mete it out were, or are, themselves victims of abuse.
Not trying to detract from your overall point, just thought it was worth noting.
There was a genuine tragedy[0] just over a month ago in NYC from such an unchecked child who "had a history of playing with the burners and turning them on." The family of the firestarter all escaped but placed others at heightened risk of death by leaving their doors open as they fled.
While this used to be a not uncommon form of punishment, it is now typically used as an empty threat ("someone ought to wash your mouth out with soap") or to criticize someone's foul mouth.
Enumerating badness and blacklisting it is a bad approach in security. I believe that this applies to detecting bullshit. It comes in many forms, including those that make you believe you are cutting through bullshit.
Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
Is it alluring? Does it fit within some nice narrative? Can it be explained inside a one-page newspaper article? Then it has enough going for it that it doesn't necessairly need to be true in order to propagate.
This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true.
Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
"whose goals get accomplished by believing this claim" is the biggest question to get into a habit of asking yourself. make it unconscious. make it follow every line of written text and every sentence you hear.
you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit.
advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need.
then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb.
if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit?
remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success.
this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.
> As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn.
Nearly every bit of advice you read on interviews and how to get a job never happens in the real world.
You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on.
You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
I'd say that's more of a selection bias that bullshit. The only companies blogging about interviewing are the few ones that actually have made a conscious decision to deviate from the norm (regardless of the reasons).
It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented.
Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
The fact that so many tech professionals don’t have GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles, personal projects, etc is exactly why having those things helps you stand out. It’s definitely helped me, hugely, aside from just plain increasing my self confidence. I’m no web startup Silicon Valley brogrammer either, 50 something application support specialist in London.
With the exception of the github profile, that's not my experience at all -- if anything, lots of hiring managers want to ape that sort of experience even if they can't really assess it because the alternative is something like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-job
Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.
You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0.
Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset.
Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.
> it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog
Follow the money.
I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out.
As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along.
Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own.
A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.
You don't have to look to greed or malice, but simply the fact that people carry their unexamined biases with them when they speak their opinions.
> > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog
They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.
There is also an ego aspect to it. When people have done well they think it is all skill. Look at people who were really successful on crypto and now give financial advise as if they were an economist. Or go to a casino and talk to someone after they win big.
What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."
> "The struggle is huge, and I keep having to look inside myself to figure out what "my people" is supposed to mean."
For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans.
I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.
I work with plenty of people that may put in a "hard" 2-3 hours of actual work a day. Comparing effort and every poor person I grew up with actually worked really hard.
If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'.
PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.
I think the point here is that in white-collar workplaces long hours are mostly an abstract way of signaling that you take the job seriously, not exhausting in the way that long hours in a job demanding physical labor would be.
There are different kinds of tired — physically exhausted, brain-fried, and emotionally spent — but I’m not making any sort of comparison between them.
No doubt. They are hard workers, hustlers (in the best sense of the word), scammers, grifters, and some of the laziest folks I've ever met -- and everything in between.
They're just people. When the upper-classes talk about the poor as all good or all bad it's always in the context of selling you their politics.
We've been idealizing rural / commoner folk for a while. IIRC, French nobility in the 18th or 19th century had the habit of running out to the country and playacting as peasants for fun.
Not to mention there's a glut of 'rural/blue collar porn', (Duck Dynasty, etc) or at least there was a few years back. Some of that maybe people watched condescendingly but there could also be the tendency of portraying these folks as knowing something others do not.
I don't disagree about urban white collar porn (sitcoms, dramas, sure but all those house hunting shows too) but neither of these were the main thrust of my comment.
At some point you end up in this in between world, where the office worker sees you as a car mechanic and the car mechanic sees you as an office worker. This gray area is very difficult to navigate and causes severe identity crisis.
You know, this is interesting, because I have a different, but I think somewhat related, experience. I am from a pretty comfortable background but I'm a lifelong suburbanite and now live in one of Boston's less tony suburbs. I work in Boston, though, and there is a lot of kind of subterranean contempt for the "townies" who live in these places and their tastes and habits (naturally enough many of them I share and I like my neighbors, making that a little uncomfortable). People blithely say things like "oh, yeah, it's full of white trash over there." And if you tell people in Boston you're visiting from one of these suburbs a lot of them act like you just said you flew in from Idaho, never mind that a ton of people take a train to Boston every single day. People can find a lot of different reasons to be snobs.
>his article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr
This experience isn't exactly uncommon.
Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this.
That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.
Yeah, that's what I mean. If your parents were already middle class, you aren't strictly broke earning that in the same sense as you parents were on welfare and you never stepped foot on a college campus.
The college kids who have jobs so they have more pocket money to spend on lifestyle stuff (i.e. beer) is exactly who I'm talking about when I say "most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder"
The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce.
Not really. The language in lower class is coarse, but it's also very blunt. For example, I was once told that it must be irritating to know myself by some working class, or I've been insulted by a food order. This is how they talk among each other. Heavy insults and expressing your opinion is unambiguous.
In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement.
That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.
If people call you brutally blunt, you might be able to improve your career and relationships with some simple changes to the way you say things. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg is a great place to start. It's full of examples of people saying something that made other people angry and upset, then showing how they could say the same thing in a different way so that people listened and understood and often gave the person what they needed. Not by wrapping it in bullshit, but by connecting the request to relatable human needs.
I disagree its a simple as class & money, there is no such thing as "the rich" or "the workers". Old money vs New Money, West Coast vs East Coast, South Vs North, Coastal vs Midwest, Lawyers vs Tech, USA vs Europe there are a million sub-classes of "Rich" and even more subclasses of working class esp in NYC. Yes I completely agree its very difficult to change your behavior/job/class like the guys in the article. Its also difficult for a middle class Alaskan to make friends in NY or female nerd to enjoy working in tech or a fat lazy MidWesterner to make friends in Malibu.
The more class/religious/language/wealth/cultural/racial/geographic barriers your cross the more difficult it is to change, but the Guardian often reduces this to a class war which is overly simplified.
Yes its true that rich people behave different to poor, but its misleading because its not the whole story. Good example is the second guy who turned up in the bay area from a prestigious East Coast school wearing a suit, and didn't fit in.
Edit - I dont want to trivialize it, Money & Class is a big barrier to overcome if you want to move into high paying jobs. Maybe class matters in some jobs more than others.
I suppose it's passe to report like this, but the irony of making this statement, "Nevertheless, the country remains enamored of these rags-to-riches tales which perpetuate the myth that, in the US, anything is possible if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.", in a story where they are talking to someone who did exactly that means it isn't a myth is it? Myths by definition are 'not real', 'imaginary', or 'allegorical'. So this story clearly happened, it is clearly real, so it doesn't qualify as a myth. And yet the author throws out there this narrative that implies it is. Frustrating.
It also focuses on the east coast experience. Anyone who has lived in the US for any length of time knows that "social societies" in the US have a variety of roots, whether it is the bloodlines of the deep south, the money makers of wall street, the entertainment moguls of LA, or the tech whizzes of the North west.
I don't have visibility into other areas but I know that with just Apple, Facebook, and Google they have moved thousands of people from having a negative net worth, to having a net worth in excess of a $1M. You meet them when they go to seminars about diversifying one's wealth, or at events that have been expressly targeted to HNWI[1] types.
And "Class Passing", a reference perhaps to a practice where light skinned blacks would present themselves as white to avoid discrimination? If that is what they were going for its a bit provocative is it not? Especially for what is essentially a story that says "Some of the people we need/want to hang out with for social reasons are really annoying/irritating/offensive." That has nothing to do with 'wealth' or 'class' and everything to do with groups that self identify with offensive traits or values.
An interesting story is one where you are suddenly much wealthier or much less wealthy than people in your current social group that you like. How do you keep those relationship vital and alive in the presence of this disparate wealth. I have watched many people struggle with that and some master it effortlessly. I'd love to collect those stories and pull out the essence of how to make that work in an accessible way.
[1] "High Net Worth Individual." You know that this is what the market thinks you are when you get a box of artisan chocolate with a brochure describing a service for providing private air transportation on demand for you and your friends.
It is noticeable the resentment in this thread of the arbitrary BS you have to go through when you change classes to not seem awkward. But we should remind ourselves there is a whole bunch of arbitrary BS we common folk are just used to. It isn't that the higher classes have more BS, it is just that it is not ingrained to your experience, so it is frustrating that your habits for interaction do not work. I would prefer we get rid of lots of arbitrary BS at every level, but unfortunately you can't fight the system.
If you want a quick hack to be seen as high class and authoritative (and you probably do since this is hackernews) in any situation just follow this one simple rule: Don’t move your head around so much, keep it straight forward and still. If you must look at things, do so only by moving your eyes, not rotating your whole head. If you need to turn your gaze more, turn your whole body. Look at things with intent, and on your own terms.
The so-called high-class are born rich. They never had to work hard for what they have. You can be pretty sure they couldn't. Most poor people do stay poor, after all.
If you made your own fortune, then you're objectively better than most of them. In fact, they do not deserve your time.
Well, because to be successful in their world you have to, if not pass for one of them, at least not make them so uncomfortable they don't want to work with you.
This article is not really about "class passing." It is about "upper class passing." The fact that it uses the term class passing solely to mean you went up in status and need to fit in there is part of the problem. In this framing, lower classes are negated as legitimate social classes.
My maternal grandmother's maiden name begins with von. She came from a low level German noble family. They sold the title when the family fell on hard times.
I was homeless for about a year before I recognized how upper class my mother's expectations were. I didn't think we were upper class. My mother worked as a maid. My father had been a soldier and failed to establish a second career after he left the army. I also didn't think we had money. We weren't millionaires, but when they bought a house when I was 3, my dad had 3/4 of the cost of the house in the bank. They put down such a large down payment that their mortgage payment was about 40 percent of what the neighbors were paying.
I sometimes met people on the street with upper class manners. These were bitter people, failing to adapt to current reality.
I grew up learning to power dress. Being homeless taught me something I had not ever been able to figure out before: how to stop intimidating people and stop trying to win the damn pecking order game, a game I loathe but couldn't stop playing. I learned to wear t shirts with cartoons on them and to see that as a good thing, not something I should be ashamed of or embarrassed by or apologize for.
I learned to be approachable, a skill I never had before. That enormous confidence and ego this article talks about? It is obnoxious behavior that sticks out like a sore thumb in a group of not rich folks. It intimidates ordinary people.
It signals you have power they lack. You feel untouchable. You are confident that even if you fuck up, everything will work out okay.
Ordinary people don't feel that way. When it is clear you do, they know they are dealing with an asshole who will not hesitate to fuck up their life, whether due to obliviousness or casual malice.
Learning to class pass runs both ways. The fact that we don't talk or think like it does tells you how much contempt we fundamentally have for the little people.
I highly recommend checking out the book 'White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America' from your local library! A fantastic read about the historical realities of class in America. It reads quite academically, so I think some here would enjoy that style.
Marriage is commonly a class conferring activity, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned by any of the people profiled in the article.
It's something I'm confronting as a mid 20s middle class guy dating a girl from the upper, upper middle class...older folks have a lot of strange expectations for marriage, what it means, and how to make it successful.
There is a difference between those who actually have money and class vs people desperately trying to project the image of money and class. Anyone concerned about 'class-passing' should be aware that it's not the top that is behaviorally constraining, it is the middle.
The people most obsessed with putting up the act of their high class are those whom aren't there yet. The mid level professional who is working 80hrs a week and making $90k/yr will absolutely put on the whole 1% act. They will buy the luxury car, fancy clothes/watch/jewelry etc... and be in debt up to their eyeballs. They will also be the first to notice/comment on anyone who isn't up to their 'standards' while standing on cliquish etiquette rules.
Conversely working with true high net worth individuals is rarely an exercise in gate keeping. In many cases their standards for behavior are much lower than you would expect because the competitive pressure is off. You'll find that people with millions in the bank are more humble/genuine than those whom are trying to act the part.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadThis is the most insidious part.
The media in the US has historically been 100% controlled by rich people, and all major media still is.
The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies. But as long as 70%+ of Americans are wallowing in economic depression there will be no lasting social progress. Just the way most rich people hope it stays.
The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US. People are just waking up to how bad it is. The #MeToo movement only happened because rich people are losing media control, and it's just one of many to come.
I'm unconvinced. The class system is, at its core, money. And short of eBay allowing people to sell second hand items peer to peer, I really don't think the internet has enabled economic mobility all that much. A select few in Silicon Valley have gotten very rich, certainly, but an effect on the population at large? Maybe it'll happen one day, but even stuff like Bitcoin has somehow transformed from "the new cash" to "the new speculative investment that promises to make people with disposable income even richer".
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea...
Whatever combination of factors is at work suppressing small business creation since the 2008 recession is not being overcome by the advantages you listed.
The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole.
If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on.
The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today.
The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications.
You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
Except cottage content and product industries can now sell to virtually the entire planet. That simply wasn't available before.
>as (mostly) low-status low-value workers
Here you're projecting your own bias against them. I'm not suggesting "the system" is without flaws, but the average joe seems to be doing alright in general, especially if you consider average joe historically and globally.
>The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
Wealth concentration among the hyper-rich doesn't concern me in the least. Generally speaking wealth is created by providing value, not taking it.
>If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
The internet is in the process of unseating media monopolies and democratizing information. The poorest of the poor across the world have access to information that was previously only available to the wealthiest who could attend universities in rich countries. The internet has allowed small businesses with basically no infrastructure to reach the entire global market. It's allowed families to keep in touch instantaneously across oceans.
>You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
You're comparing the internet to some fantasy you have. I'm comparing the internet to the world before the internet.
There is no collectivist, national (or global) hivemind or concensus among wealthy people about how to oppress the lower classes. The implication of the original post I've responded to is absurd. Wealthy people are more likely than not to be narcissistic and selfish, so any organization is really a prisoner's dilemma association of convenience, at best.
Mark Zuckerberg in alone in a room with an angry mob would be much more civilized than Mark Zuckerberg in a room with Rupert Murdoch - there is just a bunch of wealth people whose voice carries far due to their organizations, wealth, and power, who generally have no allegiance to one other, each espousing their own disparate viewpoints, which generally do not involve wealth re-distribution
Wealthy interests, like you are describing, and as the article portrays, exist in microcosms or small interests, and they conflict with other wealthy interests. One wealthy group might want to manipulate consumer group X to do Z and has to destroy organization B to manipulate consumer group X to do Y.
That's just one portion of the comment I'm responding to - the rest is just some rambling from a psychotic someone who will be carrying a torch to something while snarling the gripe du jour some day.
Right. I'm sure that the fact that the leading internet companies are run by Harvard (FB) and Stanford (Google) grads will not interfere with the Revolution in any way.
Before the internet it used to take 10-20 years to foment discord against a particular group. Now we have a new boogeyman every 18 months and it's always other plebes or pariahs-- never the ruling elite.
These individuals are distractions, nothing more. Shkreli literally launched a sortie against the plebes by means of his obscene price gouging (which isn't even what put him in jail-- if not for his crimes against the elite, he'd be a free man!), and prolific sex offenders like Weinstein simply cannot be defended-- like Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby, he's just beyond redemption.
Meanwhile:
* All the internet attention in the world (or the Wall Street protests) didn't result in anyone responsible for the 2008 economic meltdowns seeing the inside of a courtroom for anything more than a deposition.
* The Wells Fargo C-level who encouraged half the company to commit fraud walked away with a severance package.
* The Equifax CEO walked away with a severance package after the largest consumer data breach in US history.
* Mitt Romney made a personal fortune bankrupting companies and decimating the retirement plans of their associated employees. Then he ran for president.
* Snowden released a bunch of documents confirming what a lot of us already believed, which caused some commotion and pit half the country against itself in a philosophical war over whether his actions were heroic or traitorous. Meanwhile while that pointless debate raged, life at the NSA continued under new project names and tighter controls.
Of all of the damage these individuals caused, only Snowden, a commoner, has a warrant out for his arrest. Of all of these, only Snowden's actions had no impact on the average American. We squabble on Facebook about his pointless actions while we're actively being fleeced by the other four guys.
Plenty of attention has been drawn to these matters. But nothing changes. Internet outrage is cheap and divisive.
If the last two years have shown anything, it's that the "common man" in America is extremely susceptible to cheap propaganda and misinformation.
Half the country would happily watch the entire thing burn down as long as "their team" is doing the burning.
The "plebs", so to speak, have never been more controlled than they are today. If anything, I'm more pessimistic than ever.
Powerful interests will be able to harness the massive amounts of data collected by social media to carefully formulate and craft the exact message they want to control who they want and people who I thought would easily see through that are now completely brainwashed into believing things that they would have laughed at 20 years ago.
The rich will be fine, and the poor will eat each other alive, just as they're told to by the other rich men on the TV.
Compare that to Google/FB where each person gets a catered experience. It would take an immense effort in data collection and analysis to find out just how hard they're screwing everyone. Going by all of the online scams I've had to ward friends and family away from (which came up on page-one Google searches BTW), my guess would be "very hard".
http://www.thebookoflife.org/countries-for-losers-countries-...
I live in the U.S., but I think I'd prefer to live in one of the countries for losers.
... from the article:
"Here is the list of the world’s top Loser Countries: (.nl, .de, .ch, .no, .dk)"
As someone who travels to these countries frequently (rsync.net has a Zurich location) I can certainly get on board with the desire to move to Switzerland. It is a nicer country than the US.
However, it is a ridiculous notion that the social success of these countries (and of Japan, which is conspicuously absent from that list) is due simply to some bad legislation here or there ... just a few technocratic choices made the wrong way.
In reality, the reason things are so nice in Switzerland and Norway and Japan are because they have extremely homogenous populations and cultural legacies.
It's easy to expand your circle of empathy to people whose names are also Lars Larson[1], just like yours is.
They didn't invent jazz, though ...
[1] Or Hiro Tanaka.
Which may explain why you can't say that without being called a racist.
Also, I'm not sure the facts back you up. Is the USA really more diverse than Canada? Is the UK really more diverse than Germany?
85% of those "foreigners" are your fellow Europeans. It would be like me saying Florida is less homogeneous because some people from Utah moved there. Except Utah is further away from Florida than any country in Europe is from any other. Switzerland is quite homogeneous.
What definition are you using for economic depression?
[0] https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...
While part of my agrees with you that in some areas 50k/yr gets eaten up quickly we are looking at having $500 or $1000 on hand that is either 1% or 2% of annual income in savings. While I have sympathetic to a significant portion of the country ~20%-25% that cannot do that, I hard time believing 40% of Americans could not trim $500 off their expenses each year and save it.
I don't buy it. First of all, the class system is about material interests - real physical tangible interests - and not about feelings. Even if 99% of the people live in a world of ideas, the ruling class, by virtue of the fact that they have to bargain over laws (multi hundred page documents that decide taxation and allocation as well as employee and business rights), live in the world of the material.
The American populace lives, and probably since at least the mid 20th century has lived, in a world of ideas. By this I mean, the country is torn asunder by feelings about abortion, race, gender and so forth, immigration [edit: and also celebrity-lead culture] -- all issues that, guess what, don't even touch the interests of the .01%.
#MeToo poses no threat whatsoever to any class system.
Stated this way, this appears to handwave real problems away. Yes, racial and gender issues are often exploited for political gain; but these issues usually have a basis in real problems.
Why should a member of the bottom 70% care that the top marginal corporate rate was just cut from 36% to 21%?
It might serve their richness but that does not mean they have hidden agendas in regards to it.
If everyone willingly walked in to a pit of spikes it is their own fault. People should be allowed to act out their own free will as long as that act does not fuck with other people.
If someone tricked them with lies to do that then there is a problem.
Uh, have you been paying attention to campus protesters?
The US has gotten richer and richer, if it functioned properly everyone could have enough without resorting to any radical policies.
It's not quite that simple, due to human psychology. Even if people are wealthy on a global and historical scale, relative poverty will still cause problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...
Maybe. A prerequisite would be for most people to realise that class is more important than gender and race.
it's called socialism. it's been spawned already, and it's growing. people can thank bernie sanders for its major popularization, but he won't be around when the dream is complete-- if it ever is.
Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for a while too. It's very convenient that the whole 'Occupy' thing got followed up by a huge push for social justice beliefs and comments about deplorables. Like someone didn't want the attention to be focused on the rich, and thought a bit of interclass warfare would be a nice distraction about now.
You can see a huge media political shift about this time too.
But hey, maybe I'm coming across as paranoid here.
Things have gotten worse as capital consolidated all the industries. Now we have an illusion of choice. When you go to the supermarket, there seems to be tons of variety of products by many companies. After all, there are so many brands. But all these brands are owned by a handful of companies. The same thing with banking. The last financial crisis was used by the FED ( a banking cartel ) to get large multinational banks to buy up smaller regional banks. Regional newspapers are being bought up by major media companies like news corp.
> The evil rich people figured out that if you start a gender and race war among the 99%, you can distract them from the fact that they're all being economically exploited and subjected to wage slavery.
It's not just identity politics. It's also the bread and circuses. Nothing more poignant than the upcoming superbowl where the mindless stuff their faces while watching advertisements for 4 hours.
> The internet will almost certainly spawn a social movement to destroy the class system in the US.
That's naive. The internet will almost certainly be used to reinforce it. More distractions, more propaganda and more divisions. Look how quickly the wealthy has come down on the internet and social media already. Look at the amount of censorship. Look what happened to youtube trending page and google news. Youtube trending is now all SNL, major news channels and late night shows. Google news is now all washingtonpost, nytimes, etc.
I hope you are right, but experience tells me money wins and the masses are not intelligent enough or united enough to challenge the wealthy. Our political system doesn't allow for it, nor does our education system or the media or anything else.
(Ordinarily I would not amplify that sort of post, but decent folks need to know what they're up against.)
http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html
However, this is one issue that's hard to put solely on the foot of the rich or a broader system. Passing in many avenues, not just by class, is really deciding you want to be there and what the terms of your presence will be. It felt at times like trying to get into a club, if you look like you want in, you don't get in. If you don't want in, they let you in. You have to learn to look like you don't want it.
I think rather than teach young children how to hold spoons, or castigate the rich for yet another divide they were born into, probably we should just teach improv skills, confidence skills and encourage people to engage in open dialogue with others. Some solutions don't require us dismantling a system.
If the next time a rich person gives you an askance look and you immediately ask them to explain themselves, guess what, you just equalized yourself with them socially without having to learn which fork to use first.
Any examples spring to mind?
I think Astoria is slightly wealthier than Harlem in recent history, but neither is known for for having a particularly moneyed population.
Today, I know more wealthy people in Harlem than in Astoria.
-- Billy Joel
Also: "Where have you been hidin' out lately, honey? You can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money"
Whelp there goes my dreams of hanging with rich people
They had good burgers and chef salad was good as well...
P. J. Clarke's is another one where you could get decent burgers.....
This is hilariously wrong.
You might say that's completely obvious, but it helps some people to be reminded of it.
You also used the word "only".
Your sentence read as "you can't become rich other than just saving on expenses." Maybe you can see how that is a really weird thing to say.
this statement always shows up in these kinds of threads.
i bet some of the poorest people you know are just as cheap. and middle class too.
and in fact, as it turns out, there are cheap people all over the wealth spectrum. i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that being cheap/stingey is actually completely uncorrelated with wealth. it's a character trait like agreeableness.
That said, I'm a big fan of burgers and order them often. Screw what other people think.
I've noticed that waiters/waitresses seem to treat me worse if I order a beer where I could've ordered wine. Especially when the cuisine is French or centered around steak.
... unless you are taking part in some 'whimsically proletarian' sort of event, or making some sort of 'statement'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmGemNT7urY
The only thing this scene from the wire fails to capture is that once you learn the mannerisms, how you should look, how you should act to not feel out of place - you then need to learn how and what to speak about. It's hard to hold a conversation about Mr. Smith's recent trip to the maldives, his new non-profit business venture, and roger federer's latest australian open win if you're working a 9-5 and vacationing once a year in california. So in many cases you can look and act the part, but really you can't speak the part.
Then at the end of the meal, you're relying on them to pay for that $150 bottle of wine they ordered.
- Talking specifically about money (how much high-ticket items specifically cost, how much anyone specifically makes) is gauche.
- Depending on the group and the location, there are functionally dress codes - you show up to brunch in sweats and sneakers and everyone else is in polos and boat shoes, you "dress up" in a shirt and khakis, everyone else is wearing a blazer and slacks, you put on a Macy's suit for a formal event and everyone else is wearing Tom Ford or Armani.
- What you do for leisure can be a fraught discussion - we eventually started traveling more, but I've met people who talked casually about summering in Ibiza or the Hamptons (and who used "summer" as a verb), or who have seasonal homes. "I stayed home and played X-Box" as an explanation for what you did on vacation earns a side-eye.
- What and how you eat, although that one has relaxed a little bit over the last few years as street food has been gentrified and made trendier.
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell
Link: http://a.co/406UQB1
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607
Try liking somethings considered as "white trash" hobbies/entertainment/activities, or as "posh" ones as a middle class person.
(E.g. a middle class high schooler who likes the opera instead of say, Hip Hop or whatever. Or wear some Comme De Garcons clothes around middle class dressed people, or stuff you bought at the Dollar Store...)
Not throwing daggers or anything, but every strata has things that are a bit strange about them.
Yes, I know that upper class does that too, unless you are in the hills where there really isn't any lawn to take care of, etc.
That's entirely the point. Lawns originated in the middle ages as a status symbol. They demonstrated a) that you could afford to waste a perfectly useful piece of arable land and b) you could afford to pay a team of men to neatly scythe and shear it. It's hard to tell how much land an aristocrat actually owns, but the size of their lawn acted as a reasonable proxy.
The invention of the mechanical lawnmower helped to democratize the lawn, establishing it as a symbol of middle-class suburbia. A small lawn in front of a suburban house didn't demonstrate that you were gratuitously wealthy, but did demonstrate that a) you could afford a larger plot of land than strictly necessary to accommodate your house and b) you had leisure time to spare.
I'm so damn sick of all this stuff. It's like nobody can just make a normal dish without putting some insipid "twist" on it anymore.
Edit: I should note this was in northern California, where people generally do not vacation on the east coast because of both local attractions and a high cost of living that makes saving for vacations much harder to do. We happened to have some family in the Carolinas which was part of our reason.
This is not just a rich people rule.
I grew up solidly middle class, and you could hear a pin drop if you asked someone in the room how much they were paid or how much that engagement ring cost.
(Not to mention in the US even coal miners would describe themselves as "middle class" these days, nobody is "working class" anymore).
We were pretty much lower middle class (sometimes lower-lower) , had friends who were better off and friends who were much worse off, and nobody really talked about money openly.
In my family I always figured it was WASP reticence, but now that you mention it I think it was something broader. Maybe: people with money don't need to talk about it, people without money are embarrassed to talk about it, and if you're somewhere in the middle you don't want to reveal your hand.
My father poured molten metal in a foundry as a married 19 year old.
Clothing is usually pretty easy once you find the staples; after that its your behavior that makes it. To actually look good though, you need to understand the group's values enough to move beyond the basics.
And of course, you need to learn to have an opinion on clothing, to understand (and deny) other's opinions. At the very least, when some chucklefuck gives you a look for eating fries by hand, you should be able to defend your position
Yes, and I'd extend this to talking about where your money comes from, as well as how you spend it. Don't expect a straight or detailed answer to "What do you do (for work)?" or "Where did you buy that?"
Asking those questions immediately marks you.
If you're going to resent someone getting an extra 10$ worth of food you split the check based on costs.
If 10$ is effectively meaningless but 200$ is not. Split it per person, it's fairly close and reasonably fast.
If 200$ is effectively meaningless, rotate who pays it's faster. This can blend into: If 2,000$ if effectively meaningless, or you want to show off, who pays may not relate to who paid last time.
Yes, I might have had an extra glass of wine. Or you might have had an extra side dish or a G&T. Let's either just split the bill, or I'll pay today and you'll get the next.
That's how it's in my country for all classes, poor or rich.
When friends go out, someone and pays for all the others (and someone might ask to chip in or pay themselves, but the first one doesn't take no for an answer).
Next time you see each other, the other person can pay, but no one keeps any very specific tally ("I paid 3 times, you paid 1") -- that would be considered tacky and cheap. That said, if someone systematically over many meetings never takes initiative to pay that the rest start considering them a cheapskate (but never giving specific tally or anything -- it's more from the feeling "never remember you paying").
Anybody insisting on splitting the bill, or obsessing over who ordered what, is also seen as a cheapskate.
That's how it usually goes among people with regular income. Now, sometimes, when the company is comprised of people that might be students, unemployed, etc, they more often agree to split the bill. But in this case too, obsessing over who bought what is considered rude, and usually it's just a simple bill/persons split that's paid by all.
If we're splitting a bill, I insist on this, because some of my friends don't drink alcohol, and some do.
(I drink.)
In our culture's case, in general the amount each one ate doesn't matter -- whether one had steak and the other just a salad, the salad person can very well still go on and insist on paying for everybody else. Nobody would care about "a 15% to 30% difference in cost" (the person paying for everybody wont feel it's a burden, and the persons having their meal paid, wont feel like imposing).
It's not about achieving some perfect balance or fairness in any particular meal -- people genuinely want to treat others, and enjoy taking turns doing so.
It's only longer term one would care for patterns of behavior (the person who after so many meals with others never volunteers to pay etc).
A lot of things in this thread seem completely foreign to me. Every restaurant I've been to in the past few years has just asked how we want to split the bill. They seem to keep all orders separate in the system and just merge them if you want shared bills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
My overall takeaways from the book were:
1. Class is correlated with income, but not identical.
2. Class is so ingrained in so many areas of our lives that it's almost impossible to change. You might as well just be comfortable with the class level you grew up in, because you'll probably always be there.
3. A big reason for #2: caring about your class in the first place is middle class. The more you care about where you fall in the class hierarchy, the more middle and upper-middle class you are. Lower class folks don't really care (and may even take a certain amount of "pride" in being lower / working class), and upper class people have nothing to prove to anyone.
But the book goes into excruciating detail about the way people dress, speak, decorate their homes, what jobs they have, cars they drive, etc, etc.
Well, except for each other. And very much so.
One of the takeaways I got from it was that every single upper class activity is designed to be incredibly expensive and time consuming, just because only the wealthy can maintain those form of activities. Having driveways made out of gravel, that constantly need to be redone at considerable expense, or having a yacht. Despite this, the true upper class is incredibly banal; Fussell describes them as totally uninterested in ideas, reading time and cheap disposable mysteries if they ever bother to do so. There's really a lot of Thurston Howell in them.
I think most people here would dislike how Fussell pegs liking science fiction and technology as a fairly low class activity. But it's funny how right he is, because among the upper-mids here...you hate social media in the same way, and the lower class uses it just as much.
But, oh that book is devastating. Fussell is a wonderful writer, and a keen critic.
The upper class hobbies are definitely a thing. Equestrian > sailing > skiing > golf probably. Golf only being this low because it was "democratized" by muni courses and popularized first by Arnold Palmer, then by Tiger Woods.
Skiing is probably the most approachable of the activities for the upper middle class professional, but it's a $300/day activity that necessitates travel. A fairly devastating expense for many.
A $50/day activity at a local hill + a $150 initial investment (one that will last you multiple winters) in some decade-old used equipment at a local swap event.
Skiing is not cheap. But it's extremely expensive only if you have extremely expensive demands - such was wanting to ski while living in an area without hills or snow.
Ditto skiing with lift passes, travel, and lodging. Having a local hill is the exception rather than the rule tbh.
Know how to pronounce the items on the international restaurant menu before trying to order them. If you don’t know, don’t ask out loud. Whisper into your rich friend’s ear so as to not embarrass them.
Don’t speak about the unspoken codes either, and if you must, do it privately with your rich friends and go along with their answers.
Don’t not have enough money for something unless you express clearly that you are too good for it. Not needing it bad enough is not an acceptable excuse.
When others share stories of their extravagant lives, hold a straight face. This is normal stuff for you, remember? You already know what that’s like.
Speak of politics as though identity issues(D) or working hard for your money(R) are more important than class issues. Remember that class issues are not something you are particularly affected by. You can acknowledge they matter but insist identity issues are more important. This helps wealthy folk feel both compassionate, concerned and comfortable with their wealth. I’m not taking a side here, only giving proven survival tips.
Your family is kind of more like cartoon characters. You just share jokes with them and nothing else, unless something tragic happens or if they invite you on a nice vacation. Don’t discuss any other relations with your family members.
Fashion: In the least, if you wore it in high school, you don’t wear it now.
Music, art: Don’t ask who this is. You’ve heard it or you are too busy to care.
Like parent said, these can be overridden with confidence and flair but that takes some acclimating and strategy.
Edit: Not talking about the guy who rents a $10k apartment he can't afford to trick people into thinking he's rich. Talking more about people buying into social strata they can reasonably or paying fealty to those in higher strata to benefit their career. It is a thing out here.
The guy I had in mind was, I think, 29, german and I think working at BCG? Very polished. Had his fresh-to-the-city model girlfriend and threw great parties.
Original Religion Sex Politics Money
Addition 1 Hitler & the holocaust Abortion Child care Adult care
Addition 2 Trump
The biggest one was pouring wine. I remember a few times I poured it kind of off and I got that distinct look of class violation. Haggling about splitting checks also got those looks often, the lesson I learned there was that almost always, the party will want to split it evenly rather than do something as gauche as math, so rather than order less, order much more so you get a discount on your meal :-)
I also spent some time in a small rich beach town, and from that time I remember how my switching to boat shoes seemed to instantly ingratiate me with some people. Also never mention how "cool" it is that someone has a jetski or nice boat, those things were just taken as statements of fact.
To many people these might not seem like real mores or wealth signifiers. Maybe you think I was just over-sensitive. This whole article though, is about feelings, and certainly in those moments it seemed like everyone was certainly feeling something strongly.
Stereotypes, glass ceilings and merit aside, ones ability to move up in the world is tied at least in part to their ability not be disagreeable (I specifically used a double negative there) among those who are already on top. If you're white, have dreads and whatever building you're in smells like a grow op or chewing tobacco gets its own line in your monthly budget don't expect your presence to be appreciated by the upper classes.
Fitting in is less important than not not fitting in. It's just a fact of life one's life experience is so directly tied to wealth that the more percent above of below you a group is the harder it will be to not, be rejected by that group.
I think there's an argument for a little of both, by way of giving them tools to fit in at multiple levels (classes, call it what you will). Then it's their choice to fit in or stand out as they feel best in the widest range of situations.
Of course knowing which of 5 sets of cutlery is for what shouldn't actually matter much...
Outside in. If you can't tell, look at what your neighbors are using.
Or you've shibboleth'ed yourself out by not already knowing what the askance look meant.
Personally, I've always thought the only way to win is to not play the game. High class values have never really appealed to me, although I guess feel the hierarchy/status issue as much as anyone else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. Figuring out how to get a degree in Computer Science. (I chose a state school UIC)
2. Getting a Job in CS (I worked at the school I had classes from and then transitioned to a real job locally).
The way I did it was taking my resume and applying to jobs I believe I was qualified in. I taught myself web development in high school and continued to be interested in it. I went to meetups to network with people.
All of this wouldn't be possible without my mom having a job at the local grocery store. Or my parents supporting me when I was getting my degree.
But then again, it might just be that when someone has a child, they set them up to move up instead of themselves. They sacrifice their chance for their children. Otherwise they would have the capital to do it themselves.
Obviously I’m just thinking out loud. It just seems that it’s more common for someone’s child to get an education and eventually rise above their parents. If you have children, they might have a chance at an Ivy League school or something like that which they will then have the chance to rise above you.
Sometimes they couldn't pay for heat to get fixed. Or all the times I ate Ramen.
Or the fact that I wanted to be a MCS major but really had to have a CS degree.
But, I know many people that I went to school with who were unable to do so and had the same opportunities that I did. Or had more money than me and couldn't get a job after they graduated. Even the people that I had the same high school weren't able to do that. They had more money than me. They were smarter than me. The only thing I can see that I had more than them was grit and determination. My intelligence wasn't even in their league.
I chose CS because I knew that an average person in CS could get a average job and the demand would be there when I graduated. My life is a constant hedge against the future.
Growing up poor has kept me grounded to the struggles of the working poor, even as my income has gone up many multiples since I started working.
0. Having your parents immigrate to a country with better opportunities.
My experience aligns with the author's. In movies and feel-good stories shared on social media, we romantically idolize the humble rich person, who came from nothing yet somehow stays "true to their roots". And that is a lovely, inspiring mindset necessary to keep people motivated...in theory.
In practice, in order to get ahead in life and to cross class boundaries, you will have to acknowledge that aspects of your upbringing and former way of life are "backwards". You'll have to reconcile that the rich will scorn you and think of your home as a "shithole", and that you "weren't supposed to" make it to the top. You'll have to see things in a new light, and as the author notes, your social life and identity will take a hit (e.g. old friends who won't come to your wedding, or dating prospects who are afraid of being associated with lower classes).
There is a moral failing in our country where the pursuit of money is seen as the objective optimal thing to do. But it's very reasonable to look at how money changes people, and to turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust.
It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
edit: This site is slowly turning into Reddit - contrarian opinions need not apply. Instead of down-votes, why not rebut what I said? It's not like the matter is settled, and the last couple times the populous tried to "abolish" social classes, mass terror followed.
Yes
> Class mobility is a fallacy
This is patently false. Social mobility is entirely possible, although it has gotten harder since the 1980's, but that wasn't your claim.
> that was invented to support the hierarchy
The hierarchy doesn't need "support". Class and social hierarchy has been observed in every culture since time immemorial. The radical and unfounded claim is the notion that we can "remove" it in any meaningful sense.
> Its not an alternative system in any sense.
Moving into a new social class impacts your life in every conceivable way, from the way you speak, dress, behave, to the job you perform. On an individual level, it absolutely would resemble "systemic" changes to both one's material and immaterial life.
No one genuinely aspires to be destitute. The poor are seen as noble in some aspects, but that's often a defense mechanism from the extreme wealth on the other site of the spectrum.
> I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions.
I did not mean to imply that we should therefore demolish all class distinctions. But we certainly need introspection, and unfortunately rich perspectives are popularized by default (see film and social media examples cited earlier).
Just because classes are necessary does not mean our attitude towards classes is healthy.
Now now relax. You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good because they glue our society together. You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
>It's also very easy and PC to venerate the poor out of some misguided sense of pity or moral absolutism.
Sure but the veneration is usually weak, it's akin to the 'noble savage' - the 'hardworking blue-collar.' It's veneration at a distance, contact between the wealthy and the poor is frequently uncomfortable for both.
>One could look at poor communities, and, as you said "turn away from such a lifestyle in disgust" and choose enrich themselves.
You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
>I'm also not entirely, or even in the least bit, convinced that our society, institutions, social structures, and general well-being would be better off WITHOUT class distinctions. Going deeper, they seem to me to be an essential component of civilization, one of the many necessary "glues" of social order.
Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
We can have a sensible discussion without condescension.
> You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good......You don't think those people who have experienced the bottom are going to have a reaction to that?
I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
>You make it sound so easy! But it's not, growing up in a poor community frequently means growing up in poor schools with poor opportunities, no mentors and rare role models.
I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
> Would you say the same thing about racial distinctions? If not, why?
What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist. I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
Fair.
>I've "experienced bottom" and I don't really find what I said to be inflammatory or offensive, if we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's rather quite self-evident.
Well no. It may be self-evident when you're honest with yourself but when "we're" honest with "ourselves" it's not at all, hence the downvotes and disagreement in the replies.
>I'm familiar with how "easy" or not it is - I've lived it. If you graduate high school and don't have a kid before you are married, you're pretty much guaranteed to enter the middle-class.
This is the success sequence stuff? Look it's just not very true. Almost the entirety of various 'success sequence' poverty figures can be explained by one thing: maintaining full-time work. Everything else is small or zero. Well maintaining full-time work isn't always easy! There's a variety of circumstances outside ones control which can affect your ability to maintain full-time work.
http://www.demos.org/blog/8/13/15/success-sequence-extremely...
>What exactly do you mean? Do I think that racially homogeneous societies exhibit more social order? I don't know, that to me sounds like a question for a social scientist or sociologist.
You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
>I don't find it to be analogous to what we're talking about here though, as one cannot change their race, but many are socially mobile.
Are many mobile in an effortful sense though? Say I have a society where at birth we roll a bingo machine filled with balls 1-5 and we assign you to a quintile. This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance - same as race. Now what if instead of a bingo machine we just had a very large 'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal. It's not just about how many went from bottom quintile to third quintile or better, it's about how it happened.
This isn't true, and a random blog post where the author has difficulty replicating the studies results does not prove it so. There is a mile high pile of literature that shows marriage and high school graduation to be vitally important. It would not surprise me in the least that these two are strongly correlated with full-time employment. The "Success Sequence" has lifted more people from poverty than any social welfare program has to date.
Here is some compiled literature:
https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/marri...
http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IFS-Millennial...
>You didn't need a social scientist or sociologist to declare that class distinctions are natural and helpful. Why the trepidation on race?
I genuinely still have absolutely no idea what you are asking me to clarify, and I'm taking offense at your insinuation that I'm being coy about some matter regarding race. I will gladly answer your question, but what is it that you are asking or need clarification on? Are you asking me if racial distinctions are natural? Yes, race is hereditary, is this not self-evident?
> Are many mobile in an effortful sense though?
I don't know what you mean by effortful, so the best I can answer you is to say that socially mobility is a very real and recognized phenomena in the United States of America.
>This society would demonstrate perfect intergenerational mobility yet there would be no way to exert effort and change your circumstance
As far as I understand you, your underlying premise here is that social mobility is, like a dice roll, pure luck. I think this premise is completely baseless.
>'luck' component to mobility? It's the same deal
It absolutely isn't the same deal. I don't doubt that race makes it more difficult for some people to succeed, but this is completely tangential and I'm finding it difficult to see what, if anything, this has to do with my original statement.
I think the point of the article is that it's not that money changes people, but rather that change begets money; they are interrelated at least.
What I'd really like to see is a similar table with smaller bucket sizes- namely, I'd like to see the intergenerational migration rates on the higher buckets. If we start seeing higher retention rates on the higher buckets and less entry into them from lower buckets, then we might be headed into a more fixed-class situation.
Can't find the exact one I'm thinking of, but the visualization halfway down the page here shows expected income quintile as a function of your parents' income and location: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
This youtube video also shows expected income quintiles based on the income quintile you've been born into: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2XFh_tD2RA (about a minute in)
One of the biggest barriers to moving up in class is the people in your starter class. Family, friends, neighbors... almost all of them will start to get very aggressive with you if you seriously try to better yourself. I remember being accused of using too many "five dollar words", being a nerd for spending time learning technology, being a loser for reading books! I found the crab bucket mentality to be very real. I tried to encourage others to have the strength to stand against it, but few did. I don't really talk to anyone I knew from back then anymore.
Going from middle to upper middle was interesting as well. There you also see pressure to stay as you are but it's less overt and more of a second order effect of trying to keep up with the Jones. The amount of debt that I saw the average middle class person bury themselves in just to achieve what they thought represented a slightly higher class than they actually lived was astounding. You can't move up in class when you're living paycheck to paycheck to pay for your car leases, oversized mortgage and credit cards balances that are full from paying for regular international travel.
Every step I've made has meant breaking ties with the people who weren't happy to see me move on. Now I find myself at the glass ceiling and this time there's very real pressure from above to stay where I'm at. Rich people may let you in the door occasionally but it will be on their terms. It's up to you as a person to decide if you're willing to contort yourself to their demands. Yes you can "hit it big" with a startup or something but there's a lot of chance involved in that. At this stage you're best off living below your means and investing since upper middle class people have a pretty meaningful revenue stream. Just not enough to call it quits and retire.
however, if you are wealthy, you can buy an upper class lifestyle, and your children will be upper class, while you will not be.
in other words, their peers that they grew up with will accept them as upper class (meaning they had an upper-class upbringing), while their parents still consider you to be an up-and-comer, because you did not.
once you realize this, it's a much healthier situation because you stop trying to make that final jump. and once you stop trying to make that jump, both your upper middle and upper class friends will be more comfortable around you.
in other words, once you make it to upper middle, it's not worth worrying over. it's better to just focus on the money to make your family's life comfortable without worrying about social details. money defines everything under upper class; birth and upbringing defines the upper class.
by the time your children's children come around, everyone will have forgotten about you, and the new normal will have taken hold.
that last jump can only be given by birth -- which, if you stop and think about it, is exactly how it works, right?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/names/2017/07/13/the-c...
My interests are very much middle/upper middle class geek though and that's definitely something that the upper classes aren't very comfortable with. I'm not interested in a lot of the thinking that comes out of high end private liberal arts schools for instance. Really a focus on math/computers/science is generally not an upper class thing. I like media but not "art".
The upper class looks down on nerds, especially technology nerds, just as much as if not more than the lower class does.
If we're stereotyping, intellectualism is largely a middle class phenomenon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272553
"Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class"
"There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won"
I notice a sort of cognitive dissonance with them though. It's undeniable that technology is powerful and many of the richest people in the world got there through tech. I don't think "old money" has quite digested what that means to them and it generally causes discomfort.
I don't think that it's about the difficulty of math/computers/science; it's about the goal of the degree. A liberal arts degree is not a vocational credential: it means that one has been taught to think (literally, the 'liberal arts' are those studies useful to a free man, not an employee). If you have a math or chemistry degree, that can still be upper-class so long as you're not intending to make your money in math or chemistry; it's when you had to study a subject so that you can afford to live that you mark yourself as not upper class.
I have certainly heard that having one set of grandparents from the working class Gran started in service and Granddad was a coalminer then a buss driver.
PS, not claiming to be anybody.
There are tons of intentional and unintentional barriers for class mobility.
Here are the socially accepted ways that class mobility is rigged for developers specifically:
* A royalty-free tech culture. Since successful software is often exponential we don't get the meat of the value we create at a job. This could be compensated for with stock, but it's not because of the next point.
* Common stock/preferred stock. Employees get the worse of the two. Ask the Uber employees about this, where they had to pay income tax on an illiquid asset. Followed by a liquidation event that they could only participate in if they were accredited investor status.
* Accredited investor status. This states you must already be rich to make early stage investments. This is an important one because the best time to invest in a world-changing company is as soon as you can. As developers we've had to sit on the sidelines and watch investors get rich from obvious good ideas like github, airbnb, uber, sendgrid, facebook, etc while being told we can't put disposable income into the market because we didn't have enough of it. For instance, $1000 in facebook seed round today would be millions. Note that you can dedicate 2-4 years of your life for a very small portion of a different stock class. I fully expect the SEC to try to stop people investing in cryptocurrencies with the same scheme.
* Class-based social status. Your broke friends and family will come to you whenever there is a problem. They are more likely to be addicts and gamblers(statistically). If you help them and things go wrong and you stop helping them, they will hate you. If you refuse to help them you will feel like the worst person in the world. The 'crabs in a bucket' mentality op pointed out is real.
* Income tax. This is a hotly debated topic since often rich people are paid well. But for a poor person who is paid well one year, it's brutal. Not to mention your estimated taxes come from last years income, so if you have a bad year after a good one you will be forced to loan the government a ridiculous amount of money. Which you _might_ get back, eventually, at 0% apr. Don't try this the other way though, they can charge 5% apr a month plus fees.
* Capital gains tax. Often on assets which lack liquidity.
* Inflation. Having access to inflation is having access to variable taxes on the entire population of usd holders. The rich will have a majority of their money in assets.
* Game-able taxes. Taxes are completely context-dependent and no sane engineer would design it this way. The rich can afford people to play the games, which only makes sense at higher valuations.
* College. There are good things about going to college, but 2 years of "core curriculum", obscene costs, and unforgivable student debt are not part of them.
* Marriage. It's expensive. Having a family more so.
* Lack of identity theft protection. When this happens you get victim blamed and treated like a criminal. If you have money you can pay someone qualified to fix it, if not, good luck.
* Health insurance. If you want to start a company you better be okay with poor insurance since it's tied to your employer.
* Highly politicized culture. Society is willing to hurt people out who have controversial ideas that contradict the norm. These are often just working stiffs, not the decision makers. See James Damore.
* Fixed wages. Wages have not increased exponentially even though the power of individuals has.
Honestly I think almost all of it is intentional, like how the big tech companies colluded on engineer pay.
The system being rigged is why I believe in cryptocurrency in the long term. Sure there are scams and problems, but the alternative is to play an unfair game.
As a creator if you have an idea for a currency you can release it without permission, and if people like it they will give you money.
The alternatives are bootstrapping, which is exhausting and what I've done. Have rich friends - you likely won't if you are poor. Or get accepted to some investment signaling filter like YC where you get to run as fast as you can for months while uprooting your life.
Edit: It won't let me reply to you, but ya I think ICOs can be legit. See ETH, WTC, SNM. There are bad actors too, but at it's best it's a way to route investment capital to creators regardless of socio-economic condition or location. You are correct that you have to tie the value of the chain back to they success of the product somehow. One way would be to share dividends.
Moreover, I don't see how ICOs offer anything to people without a lot of disposable income. They are simply too high risk for anyone who doesn't already have quite a bit of money they can afford to lose. At best they offer a way for people who are already in the top 1/3 of income earners to speculate and find greater fools among the slightly more wealthy.
Am I missing some fundamental value of ICOs as an instrument for investment?
Can you expand on this? Interested in what examples you can provide.
I also find that one of the doors that might be available to someone from a lower class is hedonism. There's a lot of partying going on and if you're willing, that's an avenue to access. I'm not willing.
A high net worth is helpful but insufficient for gaining entry to the higher class. It can also work against you, if you’re too visible with your money and spend it frivolously. For example, buying brand name designer clothing is not a traditionally “high class activity”, and would mark you as being, at best, nouveau riche.
The modern class structure is very complex, but can more or less be broken down to the following:
1. The “out of sight upper class”, who mostly keep to themselves and stay out of the public eye, especially as a reaction to public perception after the Great Depression. They are typically wealthy but not necessarily billionaires, and they live off of their capital instead of any particular profession. To be in this class, formally speaking, you must have been a part of the upper class for a couple of generations. You accelerate access into this class by elevating your family through e.g. high political achievement.
2. The upper class, who understand that they are not the true upper class. The nouveau riche with the potential to join the out of sight class also fall in here. Their children or grandchildren might be members of the out of sight class if their upbringing is “correct”. They have wealth or status, but have not had it for very long. Depending on their proclivities, they might not ever join the out of sight class because they’re too “visible”, for lack of a better word. These are traditionally doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and these days, software engineers. They have “respectable” careers and diversify themselves from the majority of their professional peers.
3. The middle class, who traditionally experience anxiety about their place in the class system, and who are encouraged to raise their status through their professional achievements. They associate high class with high class “things”, like brand name furniture, but don’t fully internalize the nuances of what makes for a high status individual. By definition, they can’t really perceive the true lifestyle of the upper class, which is why they associate it with things that are only externalities of its members.
4. The lower class, who are mostly incapable of differentiating between wealth and class, even if specifically told about it. They typically lack education and are very nearly always impoverished. But importantly, even a wealthy person can be a member of the lower class if they share its lifestyle and understanding of the class system. Many nouveau riche who earned their wealth through the entertainment industry and who are exceptionally visible are essentially barred from being part of the upper class.
The modern suit is very illustrative of the nuances in the hierarchy. A middle class individual might “splurge” on a suit from Mens Wearhouse. A low class individual will buy a suit from a highly visible fashion brand, like Armani. An upper class individual will buy a suit and have it tailored to fit, probably from a less “loud” designer in Neiman Marcus or Nordstrom. The out of sight class will wear bespoke suits from a tailor on Saville Row, or a similarly understated venue of high prestige.
If this all sounds exceptionally pretentious, that’s because it is. The class system does not revolve around money, it revolves around prestige. It is mostly associated with money because that’s politically expedient on the national stage. That said, wealth is something of a class multiplier - it is difficult to remain in the middle class once you’re wealthy, and more often than not you’ll end up in either the lower class or the upper class depending on your lifestyle and spending habits.
A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. I'm often called brutally blunt, but really, I'm very tame compared to most people I grew up around.
As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn.
What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?
Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.
That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn.
Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.
No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it.
That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.
Not trying to detract from your overall point, just thought it was worth noting.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/29/new-york-city-mayor-1...
Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true.
Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit.
advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need.
then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb.
if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit?
remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success.
this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.
Tell me more, please.
You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on.
You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented.
Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.
I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0.
Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset.
Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.
Follow the money.
I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out.
As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along.
Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own.
A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.
> > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog
They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.
What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."
For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans.
I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.
If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'.
PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.
They're just people. When the upper-classes talk about the poor as all good or all bad it's always in the context of selling you their politics.
We've been idealizing rural / commoner folk for a while. IIRC, French nobility in the 18th or 19th century had the habit of running out to the country and playacting as peasants for fun.
Not to mention there's a glut of 'rural/blue collar porn', (Duck Dynasty, etc) or at least there was a few years back. Some of that maybe people watched condescendingly but there could also be the tendency of portraying these folks as knowing something others do not.
There's a glut of "urban white collar porn": Nearly all mainstream television sitcoms and dramas.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/08/here_c...
I don't disagree about urban white collar porn (sitcoms, dramas, sure but all those house hunting shows too) but neither of these were the main thrust of my comment.
If your assumptions/situation match those of the author/speaker---it will be good advice. If they don't---bullshit.
This experience isn't exactly uncommon.
Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this.
That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.
The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce.
I think we're agreeing here.
Meaning that people making $10 per hours use more or less coarse language than people making $50 per hour?
In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement.
That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.
The more class/religious/language/wealth/cultural/racial/geographic barriers your cross the more difficult it is to change, but the Guardian often reduces this to a class war which is overly simplified.
Edit - I dont want to trivialize it, Money & Class is a big barrier to overcome if you want to move into high paying jobs. Maybe class matters in some jobs more than others.
It also focuses on the east coast experience. Anyone who has lived in the US for any length of time knows that "social societies" in the US have a variety of roots, whether it is the bloodlines of the deep south, the money makers of wall street, the entertainment moguls of LA, or the tech whizzes of the North west.
I don't have visibility into other areas but I know that with just Apple, Facebook, and Google they have moved thousands of people from having a negative net worth, to having a net worth in excess of a $1M. You meet them when they go to seminars about diversifying one's wealth, or at events that have been expressly targeted to HNWI[1] types.
And "Class Passing", a reference perhaps to a practice where light skinned blacks would present themselves as white to avoid discrimination? If that is what they were going for its a bit provocative is it not? Especially for what is essentially a story that says "Some of the people we need/want to hang out with for social reasons are really annoying/irritating/offensive." That has nothing to do with 'wealth' or 'class' and everything to do with groups that self identify with offensive traits or values.
An interesting story is one where you are suddenly much wealthier or much less wealthy than people in your current social group that you like. How do you keep those relationship vital and alive in the presence of this disparate wealth. I have watched many people struggle with that and some master it effortlessly. I'd love to collect those stories and pull out the essence of how to make that work in an accessible way.
[1] "High Net Worth Individual." You know that this is what the market thinks you are when you get a box of artisan chocolate with a brochure describing a service for providing private air transportation on demand for you and your friends.
The myth is that of social mobility (upwards and downwards) based on merit, being the primary way that society stratifies itself.
I have seen an inverse relationship between hard work and wealth within people I know, and even periods of my own life.
but we can die trying : ).
Try it today.
The so-called high-class are born rich. They never had to work hard for what they have. You can be pretty sure they couldn't. Most poor people do stay poor, after all.
If you made your own fortune, then you're objectively better than most of them. In fact, they do not deserve your time.
My maternal grandmother's maiden name begins with von. She came from a low level German noble family. They sold the title when the family fell on hard times.
I was homeless for about a year before I recognized how upper class my mother's expectations were. I didn't think we were upper class. My mother worked as a maid. My father had been a soldier and failed to establish a second career after he left the army. I also didn't think we had money. We weren't millionaires, but when they bought a house when I was 3, my dad had 3/4 of the cost of the house in the bank. They put down such a large down payment that their mortgage payment was about 40 percent of what the neighbors were paying.
I sometimes met people on the street with upper class manners. These were bitter people, failing to adapt to current reality.
I grew up learning to power dress. Being homeless taught me something I had not ever been able to figure out before: how to stop intimidating people and stop trying to win the damn pecking order game, a game I loathe but couldn't stop playing. I learned to wear t shirts with cartoons on them and to see that as a good thing, not something I should be ashamed of or embarrassed by or apologize for.
I learned to be approachable, a skill I never had before. That enormous confidence and ego this article talks about? It is obnoxious behavior that sticks out like a sore thumb in a group of not rich folks. It intimidates ordinary people.
It signals you have power they lack. You feel untouchable. You are confident that even if you fuck up, everything will work out okay.
Ordinary people don't feel that way. When it is clear you do, they know they are dealing with an asshole who will not hesitate to fuck up their life, whether due to obliviousness or casual malice.
Learning to class pass runs both ways. The fact that we don't talk or think like it does tells you how much contempt we fundamentally have for the little people.
It's something I'm confronting as a mid 20s middle class guy dating a girl from the upper, upper middle class...older folks have a lot of strange expectations for marriage, what it means, and how to make it successful.
The people most obsessed with putting up the act of their high class are those whom aren't there yet. The mid level professional who is working 80hrs a week and making $90k/yr will absolutely put on the whole 1% act. They will buy the luxury car, fancy clothes/watch/jewelry etc... and be in debt up to their eyeballs. They will also be the first to notice/comment on anyone who isn't up to their 'standards' while standing on cliquish etiquette rules.
Conversely working with true high net worth individuals is rarely an exercise in gate keeping. In many cases their standards for behavior are much lower than you would expect because the competitive pressure is off. You'll find that people with millions in the bank are more humble/genuine than those whom are trying to act the part.