Your Class and Knowing Your Place

[BjornP]

So, all you peasants, plebs, proles, merchants and our one patrician... how well do you know your place (if you believe in such things)?

[Martin Hash]

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

[brewster]

The flaws in this poll illustrate the differences in how "class" is done in Europe vs US. No one would frame class here as "betters and lessers". It's one of the things that actually feeds inequality, the perception that anyone can get lucky and become one of the upper class. Post WW2 that class is defined here nearly exclusively by wealth rather than heritage and education as in Europe. Why would anyone think a random tech millionaire or a complete asshole like Trump is their "Better"?

Luck is only part of success, not fucking up is also big. I bought a building from a guy who inherited it, then leveraged it to the max to buy more trying to build a real estate empire. Unfortunately he did this in he years before 2008, it all went underwater and he lost everything. I bought his property in a short sale. You could argue his problem was he didn't fail big enough like Trump or Sam Walton by losing other people's money.

[BjornP]

The flaws in this poll illustrate the differences in how "class" is done in Europe vs US. No one would frame class here as "betters and lessers". It's one of the things that actually feeds inequality, the perception that anyone can get lucky and become one of the upper class. Post WW2 that class is defined here nearly exclusively by wealth rather than heritage and education as in Europe. Why would anyone think a random tech millionaire or a complete asshole like Trump is their "Better"?

Luck is only part of success, not fucking up is also big. I bought a building from a guy who inherited it, then leveraged it to the max to buy more trying to build a real estate empire. Unfortunately he did this in he years before 2008, it all went underwater and he lost everything. I bought his property in a short sale. You could argue his problem was he didn't fail big enough like Trump or Sam Walton by losing other people's money.

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.

[Speaker to Animals]

The wealth distribution says you are wrong about that. Far more of your top wealthy families inherited it rather than earned it, and your turnover whereby new rich rise and old rich fall is much lower.

[brewster]

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.

I think it's just that they have a soapbox, they're visible. Who else is visible? Really only politicians and journalists. It's very hard to overcome obscurity. Trump's success is arguably due more to the fact he was on TV for over a decade and a media whore for decades before that, rather than his wealth or views. Ross Perot was able to buy visibility, GWB got it through his family name and connections. But notice this tends to be a GOP thing currently, in the last 40 years there's been very few prominent Democrats who were very wealthy before their political careers. It was more common before that, FDR & JFK notably. I can't recall the last major Democratic candidate after Carter who was already wealthy. On the other hand much press was made of Trump's cabinet having the net worth of a mid sized nation.

[Martin Hash]

Athletes, entertainers & politicians are the top of the heap, followed by random famous people, then The Rich, but everyone’s a peon after that; it doesn't make any difference if you’re the only-ever simultaneously licensed doctor, lawyer, accountant & engineer in the world, wrote and produced 3 movies & traveled to 100+ countries.

[brewster]

The wealth distribution says you are wrong about that. Far more of your top wealthy families inherited it rather than earned it, and your turnover whereby new rich rise and old rich fall is much lower.

Recent studies report economic mobility to be higher in Europe than the US.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detai ... ir-country

[Speaker to Animals]

The wealth distribution says you are wrong about that. Far more of your top wealthy families inherited it rather than earned it, and your turnover whereby new rich rise and old rich fall is much lower.

Recent studies report economic mobility to be higher in Europe than the US.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detai ... ir-country

People are playing statistical games to pull the wool over your eyes at the Economist.

The top wealthy families of Europe are the same people they have been for centuries. In Florence, for example, the same medieval families hold all the wealth.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -700-years

Where Europeans have an edge is in the mobility from the working to middle class, imo, not in and out of the top percent of wealth holders. Not even remotely so. They enforce strict privilege for the existing wealth and the people from those families basically look at the wealth as generational property they are responsible to maintain. The reason they don't have as much huge innovation as us is that for something like Google to have happened, the wealthy would simply hire the guys who developed the initial pagerank algorithm. In America, those guys sought venture capital and became billionaires themselves by taking risks and creating a huge corporation from scratch. The incentive structure in Europe is fucked up.

[Speaker to Animals]

The other bogus metric Europeans use to try to argue they have a better economic system (I swear to God, is it something genetic that makes them constantly need to be better than America at shit they obviously are not better at?) is income inequality in the sense that the top 1% do not control as much of the total European wealth are our 1% controls of our total wealth.

But Europe has no Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Our 1% is a dynamic demographic in which turnover is pretty high. At any given time, the people in that 1% range predominantly come down to people who actually innovated and drove the economy forward. Much of that wealth that our tech oligarchs are sitting on was taken from European consumers, I might add.