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

[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.