It's so hard to think about class in the United States

[firecat]

snippy posted about an interactive feature on CNN.com that attempts to determine whether you, a person residing in the US, can correctly identify whether you count as "middle-class."

Here is the gist of the comment I left over at snippy's post:

Income is not a great gauge of class by itself. Net worth matters a LOT.

Have you read The Millionaire Next Door? One of the main themes is that some professionals with high incomes believe that appearing wealthy is an important part of their professional reputation. So they have big houses, expensive cars and clothes, and are deep in debt. Some rich people think it's important to save money, so they have lots of assets but they don't live in fancy houses, drive beat-up cars, etc. (The book is rather simplistic in its judgements but I agree that those patterns exist.)

Those rich folks and professionals might have similar gross incomes. But are they the same class?

They are defining "middle class" where I live as a household income of $68,420—$107,815.

They're counting it as the middle fifth of income, which means they're assuming five classes. One wonders what the results would be like if they took the middle third of income (I suspect the results would be more boring, although I'm sure some people would define themselves as middle class when they aren't in the middle third of income).

Comments

[marahmarie]

From what I read and absorbed around me while growing up class was about your place in society as determined not just by money, but by intangible things like gentility - which could be determined from how you spoke and even what accent and tone of voice you used along with how you paced and measured your words, your manners and reactions to others and events and so on. These markers of class were necessary going back centuries ago up until maybe the late 1920s or so to determine not just who had both money and "good breeding", who came from aristocracy, etc., but to determine how to treat people who through misfortunes and other events lost the money they had and who would otherwise lose their place in society without those marks of having been/still being genteel. I'm sure that such things are increasingly irrelevant to most people's opinion of class these days - with money being the overriding superficial characteristic looked to to determine that - but to a small amount of people scattered throughout the US it probably still matters a lot within their own social hierarchies.

[firecat]

Based on my personal experience and what I hear from some people who changed their social position and are self-conscious about how they speak and other markers, those things still matter to quite a lot of people. It might be that they are more cultural than class-based at this point, assuming there's a meaningful difference.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, *nods* but its application seems to be rapidly dwindling in most situations. There used to be a thing called nouveau riche (new rich) which up until the last 20 years or so could get you dinged on the social ladder for acquiring your wealth out of nowhere instead of being born into a "good family" that attracted its own wealth through business ties and/or ties to the community and reputation; I don't think people talk about that nor judge by such yardsticks so much anymore although maybe in some situations/neighborhoods they still do. On the far end of that scale you've got the impolite designation of "white trash", another way USians sort class by external markers as much as by how many zeros are on one's paycheck. We are a confusing country when it comes to sorting out class (and sort of annoying and very superficial for our apparent need to do so; I think it's an obnoxious pastime of ours at best that prevents people from understanding each other as people, not as a set of external markers that taken together prove what kind of person someone is; when you think about it, it's no more of an accurate social science that can be depended on for its predictions and outcomes than astrology is).

I think the problem with our country is we carry over this tradition of sorting out who belongs to what class from the mother country itself. England/the UK is probably still much more stringent in its class divisions than we are and we get almost all the ideas we've ever had about how to sort people into these various layers of what we call society from them. Being part English myself I have the USian resentment of how we moved away from England and had our ancestors cross a sea and die in large numbers just to get away from what goes on in England only to be dealing with the social effects of what goes on there over here something like 300 years later, and that's mostly because our white roots still dominate how class is thought about in this country. We advertise the US as a melting pot, as in come one, come all, make your way, and then prove the US is in some ways as stratified as England ever was with our carry-over pretensions, such as class markers, whch are literally still built into our social DNA.

Sorry, but had to rant about that a little.

[flarenut]

I'm not sure how right you are about how many people judge by which markers -- my information is 20-plus years out of date, but I still remember my european college-professor father being happy to cut dead the self-made americans who smoked cigarettes at dinner. It probably depends on which class you started in. And the nouveau riches have pretty much supplanted the Old Money types in visibility, so that they simply *are* what people think of as the uppermost class.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, it's like The Old Money types? Matter to themselves at this point and are probably in a permanent low level of seething rage at the rest of us - all of us - for supplanting them both culturally and economically. But no one cares and they know it, which probably drives their anger and resentment all the more.

I grew up without class distinctions being much of a thing that mattered in my corner of NY (and I'm 40+ years old, if that gives you an idea as to about when this was) and my upper middle class family did not really give a hoot about such distinctions, either, with the possible exception of my maternal grandfather, who thought his English family crest made the entire family practically descend from God. Curious as to what drove his infamous pomposity, I looked up his genealogy a few months ago, and while the family is indeed crested and helped settle America back in the early 1600s - something I'd had no idea about, as I thought my entire family on both sides did not immigrate here until the late 1800s at the earliest - there was no particular "good family" tied in to us that I would recognize the name of right off the bat; his branch of the family actually descends from some of the first pagans and can be traced back to about 30,000 years ago.

I picked up most of what I know about class distinctions from reading, TV, movies - a more trope-filled education than an actual one, I guess, though I know a lot of what I learned happens to be true. I was schooled in an upper middle class neighborhood as a child, but again, these people were more crass and brand-conscious than they were literally Old Money. Which was probably one reason I really hated that school; I was always a bit happier in more economically mixed schools, which fortunately I got to spend the rest of my school age years in.

[firecat]

I grew up in Michigan among a certain type of American Old Money folks. They were exactly as described in The Official Preppy Handbook.

[marahmarie]

OMG, in my economically mixed high school, I went to school with some of those. And because in 9th grade I considered myself a badass, me and my badass best friend would observe how between classes and at lunch the preppy girls would always jump up and down and scream and hug just to greet each other when they'd already seen each other that day just a few hours before.

After a few months of this we were so nauseated and I was so sick of watching them act like - preps - we started imitating them: we'd wait until they gathered but before they began screaming, jumping and hugging, then rush each other screaming, jumping and hugging - I'd usually try to jump right into her arms so she'd have to catch me mid-air - which admittedly, in my Led Zep shirt, acid wash blue jeans, and long, straight, stoner hairstyle had to look and sound completely ridiculous, as she caught me in her blue jeans jacket and studded black leather high heel boots - then we'd turn around and laugh in their direction without making eye contact and they'd just freeze cold and stare because eventually they got the point - that we were cutting them. I made those girls really kind of hate me.

I outgrew my desire to lampoon them between classes within another year or so and was actually looking and dressing - if not acting - more like them than like a badass by the time I finished up with school, but boy, those were some good times, back when I was still mean enough to actually enjoy them. :)

[firecat]

Yeah my "artsy ones" clique picked on some of the preppy ones a lot. Private day school with strict dress code which limited how far away from preppy we could dress. (No T-shirts, collared shirts only. No jeans, only khakis. No sneakers, but docksiders, gum boots, and clogs.)

[marahmarie]

Yeah, making fun of them was one of the few ways I could safely prick that halo they kept around themselves which they honestly seemed to believe set them apart as being "better" than us, somehow. I've always been about making fun of that sort of attitude. On the other hand, I was so sick of our class (as in socioeconomic) class divisions by the end of 9th grade - and had gotten into such deep doo-doo for generally bucking every rule there was by the end of that school year - that I begged my mom to send me to Catholic school - and I wasn't even Catholic; she was - just to get into a school where we all had to dress the same and could not judge nor be judged on appearances alone - at least, so I thought. That became my dream. And I won the battle - mom took me down to the Catholic school I wanted to attend at the end of that school year to sign me up for their fall semester, but it cost too much and they wouldn't let us finance my education so I had to give up my dream of just blending in, for once.

[firecat]

Do you think your life would have turned out different if you'd been able to go to the blender school?

[marahmarie]

Yeah, I do, though I'm not sure for good or bad; maybe I would've hated it and quit, transferred back to regular public high school, or maybe it would've been the best thing for me. Catholic school might've given me more discipline and focus, two things I lack, along with less distraction, one thing I seemingly cannot avoid falling prey to. When I decide I'm determined enough to get something done I just go and do it, there's no problem, but 99% of the time, left to my own devices, nothing is that important. Which of course is sort of an unusual attitude to have. And one I don't like having, but there seems to be a divide between my inertia and my more kinetic focus that I cannot bridge myself most of the time.

Stricter/more focused/less distracted schooling might've made the difference back when I was still in my more formative time (and therefore, might've made me a more successful person now), but I would've missed out on a few good times and key people at non-blender school, and maybe some achievements I managed to pull off later on (like, becoming copy editor of my school paper along with storyboard layout person and opinion article writer was mind-blowing enough to everybody, believe me, since I was like, destined for exactly nothing but failure a few years before that) but maybe I could've done even more at blender school, or maybe I would've done exactly nothing at all. There's no way to know, really, without having been able to just go and get it done.

[firecat]

When I decide I'm determined enough to get something done I just go and do it, there's no problem, but 99% of the time, left to my own devices, nothing is that important.

Hey, give the shared brain back when you're done with it! :D

[marahmarie]

Ha, right? I get that from my mom...she was very focused, methodical, and deliberate, and got all the important things done every day, but was not ambitious enough most of the time to go over and beyond just taking care of those things. Which is exactly how I function (except I'm quicker and more impatient about getting through those things, overall).

It's when there's something else beyond those needs that I have to push for to get it done that my inertia sets in; then everything else in the world becomes more important and can most easily distract me (this is from my dad, who was like "Whoa, squirrel!" personified, he could not keep his mind on anything less than three things at once, and he never wanted to, and he was extremely ambitious and at least moderately successful at what he did, overall).

So you combine those two and you get me and people think I have like, ADD, because of all the combined traits but I don't. Though sometimes I think just treating myself like I do would not hurt, regardless. :)

[firecat]

Yeah, I am not diagnosed with ADD either, but there's a reason I have "attention machine in need of calibration" as part of my user name here.

I think in my case the lack of motivation is partly depression, because when I'm better medicated, the "nothing is that important" part is not so all-encompassing — I'm more likely to find projects I'm interested in.

[flarenut]

I'm not sure how thoroughly the Old Money types have been supplanted -- they've been diluted, but they still have the habits that make wealth powerful. Their kids go into middle-level jobs in government service, into second-tier law and finance, all the places where a phone call or two, or having lived in the same House at Harvard or whatever still make a huge difference in how smoothly things get done. You read a lot about the various New Money industries learning to spend money on lobbying the government, but you don't have to do nearly as much of that when your cousins and uncles *are* the government. The whole ongoing thing about internships has been fascinating for me to read at a safe distance, for example, because it's ultimately about the breakdown of the old system. The right kind of moneyed people would pay their kids' expenses during an internship (which poorer people wouldn't be able to afford, and the wrong kind of moneyed people wouldn't think of), and that would lead to permanent employment and a slow-but-sure rise through the ranks (I remember an acquaintance's brother who started as an unpaid "copy boy" at the NYT and eventually became a reporter/editor). Then the wrong kind of moneyed people started getting their kids in on the game, and then internships stopped being such reliable ways onto the lower rungs of the ladder, and now the whole system has effectively blown up...

I'm in my 50s, and grew up in connecticut, where the class distinctions were quite clear but also somewhat strange. There was town vs gown, but there were also distinctions of intellectual interest and manner and ethnicity and blah blah blah. I had the experience you did with mixed environments, only later in life -- a few years out of college I was living in NYC and invited to the wedding of a friend of my older sister, and it kinda freaked me out that in a crown of 100+ people there were something like two non-european faces.

[marahmarie]

Huh, interesting. My immediate family wound up in a subsidized neighborhood by the time I was 10 or 11 - me, my mom and my sister. It was mostly black and of course we were white, so we learned to adapt. Once I got into my teens I actually liked living there; I liked being exposed to another culture and way of life (and the music! I loved the music!) and I felt I was safer there in some ways than people in some of the nearby white bastion communities who actually had something to worry about in terms of losing things of value through robberies or whatever (as in, I knew they were targets for anything nefarious, while generally we were not).

Don't get me wrong: overall it could be a pretty bad neighborhood, especially depending on who was in it at any given time, and got so bad that 18+ years later we had to leave because the crime and ugliness was just through the roof, but it really wasn't too bad when I was growing up. My best male friend was one of my neighbors there, a black guy my age who was my boyfriend's best friend, as well. It felt very culturally mixed and appropriate, like perhaps the melting pot dream had finally come true. Our country has an awful long way to go before that actually happens, of course, but I was still glad - and still am glad - for at least being exposed to that kind of diversity from a fairly young age.

[marahmarie]

Also, what burns me up about How Things Work Now is that just 10-20 years ago it often worked the way you just described but on a lower level for people from all economic backgrounds - you could talk to someone who knew someone else who could help push you along into higher paying jobs, or whatever - but these days the upper class - the owners of the corporations, businesses, etc., have stripped us of our ability to help each other the way we once did.

Knowing someone is not enough now and generally won't get you too far unless you happen to know someone - or you happen to already be someone who is - rich. Getting pushed up the ranks on the word of one or two other key colleagues or supervisors just doesn't happen like it used to and when it does will not get you as far or give you as much job security as it once did. And besides that, unions have been gutted, personal decision making power has been stripped from most higher ups who don't actually run the place, and computers are left to decide things actual human beings used to sort out amongst themselves years ago.

Which is not a rant against technology so much as it's a rant against the deliberate misuse of it, so that only those at the top of the pile get to make the really critical life-changing, life-determining decisions which most of us don't have any influence over. So the entire country gets locked into the whims, wishes and rules of a small but incredibly powerful ruling class with an absolute lock on most of the money and decision-making power, leaving us with a gutted middle class hanging on by its teeth for dear life and still losing out by the day, and an absolutely invisible yet 50 million plus strong poverty-stricken lower class that will never get to have any influence or decision making power again.

It makes me sad, really, how the upper echelon of our system have taken everything from the ability to move up to the technology that could be used to help us do it and turned it against over 90% of us in this country for their own gain and quite frankly, their own pleasure. It's not by accident that they're the only ones with any real money left or decision-making power to speak of - with control not just over their own lives, which in itself is a luxury most of us don't get to enjoy anymore - but control over ours, as well.