Your Class and Knowing Your Place

[Montegriffo]

Class has less to do with money and more to do with status in the UK (as Bjorn suspected).
Members of the aristocracy are often fairly broke, the upkeep of their crumbling stately homes being one of the main reasons for this. They are still considered upper-class.
You can also have a working-class job and income but still be considered middle-class due to the way you speak or the level of your education.
Conversely, you can be rich but still working class.
A working-class millionaire is not an oxymoron in the UK. Many soccer players fall into this bracket.
Most would consider me middle-class but I have a working-class job and am generally pretty broke.

Did you ever watch BBCs Shakespeare Retold version of Taming of the Shrew?

This one?


No, is it good?
I know the story of course.

[Speaker to Animals]

Class has less to do with money and more to do with status in the UK (as Bjorn suspected).
Members of the aristocracy are often fairly broke, the upkeep of their crumbling stately homes being one of the main reasons for this. They are still considered upper-class.
You can also have a working-class job and income but still be considered middle-class due to the way you speak or the level of your education.
Conversely, you can be rich but still working class.
A working-class millionaire is not an oxymoron in the UK. Many soccer players fall into this bracket.
Most would consider me middle-class but I have a working-class job and am generally pretty broke.

Did you ever watch BBCs Shakespeare Retold version of Taming of the Shrew?

This one?


No, is it good?
I know the story of course.

It's absolutely hilarious.

It's basically the same play, but she is a conservative MP in parliament and he is a broke aristocrat. She needs breeding to advance politically, and he needs her money to get his estate out of bankruptcy so that he does not lose his title.

[Montegriffo]

Seems to be on youtube, I'll check it out some time.

[BjornP]

I am not moving any damned "goal posts", and don't dishonestly cut out what I wrote to pretend that is so.

You used the term 1% like 4 times in your 2 consecutive posts whereas it had not been used in the thread at all, and the article I linked used quintiles. Do you think Bjorn the OP defines Upper Class only by 1%ers?

You are so dishonest.


This is what I replied to:

Aside from Britain, and even there it's not to the same degree as a couple of generations ago, Europe doesn't define class by heritage and education is only factored into class based on job status. An long term unemployed disabled college graduate can easily be lower class.

It's my impression that the way we used to treat class here, three or four generations ago, is still alive in the States. That is, people looking to the rich, the famous, the outwardly succesful elites for guidance and direction.

My point, which is backed up by actual evidence, is that class in Europe very much is defined by heritage where it comes to the 1%. They treat class exactly the way he accused us of doing it.

"Accused" you?

My OP isn't about whether or not you have a class system or not. All societies have had, have and will always have, classes. The only difference is what those classes are, what sort of people are on top, in the middle and on the bottom. In Soviet Russia, for example, the upper class was the Communist party leadership. My OP is about how you see yourself in relation to other classes.

When I hear brewster use the word "heritage", I imagined him to be talking about a more formalized class system, one where you don't simply inherit wealth but also theprestige from the community around you. Like Britain we have nobility in my country, but unlike Britain they're not aristocrats because all the privileges of the nobility were abolished in 1849. The few nobles that have managed to hold unto, or grow, their wealth since losing most of it in the time after 1849, aren't treated or seen by the public as in any way "more" than the rest of the people. Neither are people who generally inherit wealth. Generally, in the US if you're succesful it seems you can say and be taken seriously on any matter, no matter if it's your profession or not. The way Americans listen to and take seriously those richest celebrities and entrepeneurs with their nonsense ideas about the world, is such an example of what I'm referring to about "looking to the rich, the famous, the outwardly succesful elites for guidance and direction".

It's not an "accusation". Americans either do that, or they don't.

[Hastur]

Social Class theory is about identity. It is the origin of all identity reasoning. It is used to describe the different strata that make up a society basically lower-, working-, middle- and upper class. You will get different sorting depending on if you use the objective method that measures and analyses “hard” facts, the subjective method where you ask people what they think of themselves or the reputational method where you ask what people think of others.

It has little to do with better or worse. Contempt for other classes goes in all directions including towards the own group. Making a "class journey" is mostly seen as desirable but can also be regarded as form of treason. Liberals of all classes want to encourage class mobility, envisioning to always be beneficiary and 'upward'. Conservatives want to keep people in their proper place not to upset the order.

I think the US with its origin of emphasis on liberty and the pursuit of happiness idea is the closest we have ever seen to a classless society. That is why a lot of Americans struggle with the concept. It's starting to calcify somewhat nowadays.

Identity politics is taking over though, so I don't know how relevant the class question is today.

[Zlaxer]

Life is a Lucktocracy: I can be envious of people who are luckier than me but unluckly people are legion.

Luck and skill/intelligence - takes luck to get opportunity and takes intelligence to capitalize on opportunity. Most get the first but lack the second.

[Martin Hash]

Life is a Lucktocracy: I can be envious of people who are luckier than me but unluckly people are legion.

Luck and skill/intelligence - takes luck to get opportunity and takes intelligence to capitalize on opportunity. Most get the first but lack the second.

Nicely done.

[Montegriffo]

Patrician pronounces praise pertaining to poster, perhaps patronising?
Provocateur possibly practises purloining the 'P's.

[brewster]

Social Class theory is about identity. It is the origin of all identity reasoning. It is used to describe the different strata that make up a society basically lower-, working-, middle- and upper class. You will get different sorting depending on if you use the objective method that measures and analyses “hard” facts, the subjective method where you ask people what they think of themselves or the reputational method where you ask what people think of others.

It has little to do with better or worse. Contempt for other classes goes in all directions including towards the own group. Making a "class journey" is mostly seen as desirable but can also be regarded as form of treason. Liberals of all classes want to encourage class mobility, envisioning to always be beneficiary and 'upward'. Conservatives want to keep people in their proper place not to upset the order.

I think the US with its origin of emphasis on liberty and the pursuit of happiness idea is the closest we have ever seen to a classless society. That is why a lot of Americans struggle with the concept. It's starting to calcify somewhat nowadays.

Identity politics is taking over though, so I don't know how relevant the class question is today.

Much of the class mess in the US is due to the centuries long campaign to conflate race and class in a supposedly "classless" society. By handicapping economic opportunities for non-whites and declaring "poor" synonymous with non-white, they were able to create a class line between races that wasn't actually economic based. A white was always a "higher class" than a black no matter how poor he was, because he was the same race as rich people. He would always vote against anything to help the "poor", because that would help the non-whites. A wealthy nonwhite would make his head explode.

This problem is so entrenched even the Liberals buy into it hook line and sinker with affirmative action, basing it on race rather than economic class. I recently saw a piece pointing out that the majority of blacks at elite universities are not of American heritage but rather recent Caribbean or African immigrants who are often not disadvantaged.