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

[necturus]

I disagree that we have an aristocracy in the European sense here in America. The European aristocrats were in origin lords of manors in a feudal system that America has never seen; the closest analogue to it here were perhaps the plantations of the old South. Aristocrats enjoyed a degree of privilege, enforced by law, tradition, and immemorial custom, far beyond anything we've seen in this country's history. Aristocracy was determined strictly by birth in a society where God was held to have put everyone, from the king down to the lowest serf, in the place where he or she belonged. The notion of a divinely ordained social pecking order was beloved by eighteenth century conservatives but anathema to the founders of the American republic.

The empowered class in America is based on capital; it may be inherited, even for many generations, but there is nothing about the scion of wealth that empowers him or her but the wealth itself; by contrast, the privileges of a marquis under the Ancient Regime were conveyed by birth alone.

The class to which the vast majority of Europeans belonged in feudal times, whose labor made the rise of the aristocracy possible and who are represented by the sickle, as opposed to the workers' hammer, in the classic Communist emblem, is the peasantry. We have no peasantry today; in today's mechanized agriculture, farm workers have much the same status and interests as the rest of the working class.