from Hacker News

Class Bullshitters

by hn-0001 on 3/4/22, 3:44 PM with 248 comments

• by rendall on 3/5/22, 2:24 AM

  In NYC, I fell in with a crowd who had quite a few extremely successful niche entrepreneurs. A kombucha maker, a boutique paper maker, some kind of avant-garde film editor, fine-art photographers, a fabric designer, this kind of thing. They were all so sought-after that they could spend only a few hours a week on their craft. Beautiful homes, expensive clothes, vacations. It took me some time to figure out that they were not successful entrepreneurs, but that these were fronts to cover for rich parents.

  Personally, I don't care if someone has rich parents. Covering for it in this way felt a bit like unearned prestige, though.

• by dijit on 3/4/22, 4:22 PM

  I get quite annoyed at this because personally I have faced extreme adversity and only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers from an early age have I been able to escape my circumstances.

  I’ll say it clearer for anyone who missed that: luck.

  A lot of social issues in the uk are primarily class based, you won’t even be aware of the jobs you’ll be looked over for because you didn’t go to the right school, and those “right schools” pre-select based on background.

  “Daddy is a barrister, I guess we let this one in?!”

  In the event you are born with privilege you prefer to be underestimated, I don’t think I’ve met many upper class people who are genuinely happy being removed from the masses. Maybe it’s a grass is always greener thing.

  Myself, I speak with a middle class accent, desperate not to be thrown back to where I came from.

• by rayiner on 3/4/22, 4:32 PM

  This is kind of an odd framing because the traditional notion of class is hereditary. If you look at it one way, my wife and I are the same class—professional degrees from the same school working for similar professional firms. At one point we lived in virtually identical 1950s split levels, on opposite sides of the country. But my family was affluent landowners for generations “back in old country” and my wife’s family comes from a poor rural part of the Oregon coast. Our acculturation and is completely different. My dad thinks and acts like someone whose dad had sharecroppers tending their farm, and her dad thinks and acts like someone whose dad hunted game to add protein to the family’s diet. And my dad raised me and her dad raised her and we still think and act differently as a result. It wouldn’t be a “lie,” as the title suggests, for her to say she comes from a working class background and for me to say that I don’t.

• by fredley on 3/4/22, 4:43 PM

  I think one of the things going on has to do with a decade or so of 'reality' TV being a primary source of entertainment for many (most?) people. And in particular one aspect: the 'sob story'.

  On any TV show, and in the media in general, there are a few different competition formats (a la Bake Off, The Apprentice, BGT, etc.) but all include a 'sob story' element, particularly near the end as we get to know more about the contestants. Every single person selected by the producers for these shows has some factor in their life that they've overcome to get this far.

  Individually, this makes for an engaging TV show, we warm to the characters because they have a good story, but overall the effect is damaging, I think. The effect is to create a system that only allows people to feel successful if they've overcome some terrible adversity. It's not enough to come from a comfortable, middle class background, do well in school and then lead a moderately successful life. What have you really achieved if you've done this?

  Most people in the UK live reasonably comfortable, stable lives (modulo class). Since—according to my theory—people need to feel like they have something to overcome in order to be allowed to feel successful, people will overstate hardships, and focus on and amplify negative events and circumstances in their lives in order to feel validated.

• by PaulHoule on 3/4/22, 3:51 PM

  A "working class" person in the US is blue collar. "working class" is a subaltern identity in the UK, that is a victim of social pathology, probably not even actually working. See

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_Labour

  I'd say though that culture studies today talks about "race, class and gender" but largely ignores class. I know plenty of white people who have black problems including a tendency towards meaningless but dangerous contacts with the police, but if you never got more than 50 miles from the coast you might not know there is such as thing as a hillbilly.

• by jmyeet on 3/4/22, 5:03 PM

  I hate to break it to the author but peole lie about pretty much everything.

  People will lie about their incomes on anonymous surveys. People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent. You can boil this down to:

  1. People lying to themselves and then reflecting that lie to others. A common one I see here is, for example, "it only takes me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work". At 1am on a Tuesday with a tailwind maybe. It's a form of cognitive dissonance; and

  2. People lying to others. This is for personal gain and because the person cares about how they're perceived by others.

  So if you take an example from the post (eg working class family background) it could be either. I've known people who really believe they're working class heroes but they're clearly middle class. It can be woven into their identity. It can just be virtue signaling. It can be to fit in. It can be aspirational.

  The 2000 election had Al Gore vilify the "top 1%". A survey at the time found that 19% of people thought they were the top 1% and another 20% thought they would be some day. So with this lie they've told themselves (knowingly or not) you've dended up alienating 39% of voters.

  Ultimately though a lot of these lies can be reduced to people feeling good about themselves even if that means making other people look bad.

  A lot of social media is built on such "flexing". Instagram in particular. Even Tiktok has all these videos where people post these "how am I so amazing?" videos. You just need to realize it's pretty much all lies.

  Oh and as for this specific example from the post (ie fetishization of a working-class background in the UK) this is interesting because my experience in the UK was there's a lot of value in signaling your upper class background, how you went to Oxford, Cambridge or Eton, the BBC accent (now this is really the modern RP accent) and so on.

  The UK is still quite classist (IME). Up until 20-30 years ago, university applications asked your father's occupation.

• by Biologist123 on 3/4/22, 4:46 PM

  Contrarian opinion: the class system in Britain is the legacy of an ethnic hierarchy which has (1) matured and become a little fuzzy over the course of a thousand years, and (2) is obscured by the fact all ethnic groups are white. Normans at the top of the hierarchy (Queenie is a descendant of William the Bastard), Angles, Saxons, Vikings in the middle, Celts at the bottom. This ethnic difference contributes to quite different class cultures.

  I read this is relevant to the US, as Celts by and large settled the Appalachian uplands where soils were poor, and the population of the mountains has maintained a distinct Celtic culture and position in the US class hierarchy.

  Additional aside, UK weird hostility to red heads (often remarked upon by visitors) is in fact legacy hostility to Celts.

• by sudosteph on 3/5/22, 1:07 AM

  I've felt what the author describes, but would probably call it "Class Imposter Syndrome" over anything else. I never thought I was anything other than "middle class" (American middle class) growing up, since my mom owned a home and had an office job, but whenever I'm with my family (who have most the hallmarks of being lower class southern mountain people) I'm reminded that we're a little different. I don't know if there's something about how I carry myself, or talk, but sometimes I wonder if people see it. Like I have memories of telling people the street I lived on and people assuming I lived in the trailer park, even though the street was mostly houses. And I remember little things like staying the night at a friend's house, the kind of look of pity on her parents' face when I was astounded by actual maple syrup being a different thing than Aunt Jemima, and trying in vain to explain that to my own parents.

  The end result is that even though I am very comfortable in the company of lower class people, I'd feel like a faker if I described myself like that. But when I'm around classier people, I feel so obviously uncultured and out of place, I end up trying to find ways to explain it, and just lean into being southern which is just another proxy for class in some ways.

  stereotypical southern mountain person = thick accents, living in trailers, drug issues, run ins with the law, lousy jobs, relationship drama, lots of children born out of wedlock

• by closeparen on 3/4/22, 5:57 PM

  I am a “class bullshitter” within the American class system because I stubbornly refuse to believe that selling my labor for a high price and paying a lot of rent puts me in the same class as people who buy labor and collect rent.

  I also don’t think these are identity traits of mine; rather they are contingent facts about living in a HCOL area. If I were slinging code 9-5 in e.g. Chicago then no one would doubt I was middle class.

• by IntFee588 on 3/4/22, 10:47 PM

  The "protestant work ethic" promotes this vague notion that labour, toil and suffering on earth brings one closer to god. This is more deeply rooted in western cultures than you'd think and feeds into the "work hard and you'll make it" attitude of western exceptionalism.

  Because of this, people have a vested interest in glorifying their own struggle, even if they had circumstances that led to their professional success. They're not going to admit that they had things handed to them on a silver platter or got lucky, they'd think of it as some sort of moral failing. They think success needs to be justified.

• by karaterobot on 3/4/22, 4:21 PM

  Understating your class background is a way to get around a couple of different problems: if you are successful in life, your successes are magnified because they are self-made, or even made despite the odds being against you. On the other hand, if you are not as successful as you'd like, a rougher background offers a handy justification for that. The underlying message is "my successes are more impressive, my failures aren't really my fault".

• by subjectsigma on 3/4/22, 5:01 PM

  1. In my liberal tech social circles, I hear so much talk about "eating the rich" and how the wealthy and privileged are ruining society that I'd be insane to self identify as anything but middle class.

  2. It's all relative anyways. By HN standards I'm making a measly salary, but my salary is over double the national average.

  3. The richer you are, the more likely people are to ask you for things. Money, favors, etc. This is both locally and globally true.

  4. Some of it is a mindset. Growing up I was absolutely not poor, but the way my parents talked about money felt different from others. For example I didn't get a cell phone until the end of middle school because it was "too expensive". Everyone was always asking for my phone number and I had to tell them I didn't have a phone. In the grand scheme of things this is really inconsequential, but at 13 it felt like my parents were ruining my social life with their penny pinching.

  Cars were another big thing. Our cars were ancient and my parents refused to buy new ones. We never went to a mechanic unless we absolutely had to. On Saturday mornings my dad would wake me up and tell me we were doing $X to the car and I knew I would be cancelling any plans that day. I didn't actually mind fixing the car, but I hated telling my friends "I can't go play basketball, I have to help fix the car" and having them wonder aloud "Why can't you just take it to a mechanic?" because it made me feel poor.

• by ggm on 3/4/22, 10:23 PM

  Age can play to this. My brother is 9 years older than me, born into postwar food rationing, a time my family would have been teetering on the edge of financial stability for complex reasons and hugely stressed about money, and financial stability. I was born into the 1960s boom years, The emergence of ubiquitous consumerism, plastics, technology.

  We have different perspectives on class, roots, class identification. Not that we were ever working class but we own different perceptions of our relative class status.

• by Aloha on 3/5/22, 6:23 AM

  A combination of Wealth and Education is increasingly becoming the class distinction in the United States.

  I sound like a college educated person, who might have a graduate degree. There is usually a long pause when people figure out I'm a high school dropout who had "some college".

  I grew up in a 'bill of the month' club house, and remember multiple times the electricity being turned off due to non-payment. But I picked up skills over time, and had the advantage of being both smart, a fast reader, and have reasonably good (better than my peers according to them), ability to absorb and synthesize information. From that I built a career, I've done a little bit of everything, security, truck driver, telecom engineer, IT guy, now I work on two way radio gear doing product development.

  I get and can see the class distinctions, even now, because I tend at times to dress in a way that does not look.. like I have two nickels to rub together, even though I can buy basically whatever I want - I have trouble getting places to give me the time of day.

  Between the awkward pauses when people try to talk to me about college life, and being able to see the class distinctions about money and style of dress, I get this, and get it pretty intuitively.

  I'm also very aware that some doors are just not open to me because of my lack of credentialing - even jobs that I would be otherwise very qualified for based on experience.

• by throwaway9980 on 3/4/22, 4:54 PM

  Maybe people just don’t have clear class identities? I grew up middle, perhaps upper middle class in the US. Both of my parents, especially my mother, came from lower social economic backgrounds than what they provided for me. I was very close to my mom’s extend family as a kid. My grandparents grew up very poor. No running water, dirt floors type of poor. By the end of their lives they were upper middle class. Some of their kids did even better, others regressed to the mean.

  We’re all still part of the same family. The shared values among the family are much stronger than any shared values across class identities. Class just doesn’t offer much explanatory value to me. I suppose I am upper middle class today, but I don’t think “oh yes, let’s instill some upper middle class values in our kids.” I don’t even know what those would be.

• by cardiology-fat on 3/5/22, 8:56 AM

  Just a note for American readers. In the US calling someone 'middle class' means that they are fairly ordinary salt-of the earth folks living a normal life, but who are not poor and not living paycheque to paycheque.

  This is not true in the UK. To call someone middle class here means that they are above average in money and social status. It would probably be similar to calling someone 'upper-middle class' in the USA.

• by tyjen on 3/4/22, 5:35 PM

  Unfortunately, many people from privileged backgrounds love to lie about their background by creating a "struggle story." They repeat the story enough that they genuinely believe that they faced adversity equivalent to people who literally lived through those circumstances.

  A frequent "struggle story" I´ve heard, is claiming to be a high school dropout, then attending attending a 60k a year an elite liberal arts college. They didn't dropout due to poor life conditions interfering with school, but they claim the association for credibility. Then it bleeds into, "Well, if I could do it, why can't they?" It's really an extreme form of mental gymnastics.

  I'd like to call this behavior, "poorfishing."

• by klodolph on 3/4/22, 4:51 PM

  Classism is definitely more pervasive in the UK than the US. This is one part of the story about the dominance of US in tech... during WWII, seems people in the UK were too busy waging war to bother as much with classism. War ends, and people with the "right breeding" come in and take over some of the tech projects, rather than the people with the right skills. Paradoxically, working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.

  Keep in mind that this is a simplification, it's only part of the story, and it's a story about a particular time in UK history, and I'm not trying to draw larger conclusions about meritocracy in the US and UK. (Should go without saying.)

  Also note that the narrative of British technological "decline", often cited as lasting from 1870-1970, is usually quite exaggerated and distorted. Entire books have been written on the subject. Classism is a piece of the puzzle but history defies simple explanations.

• by softwarebeware on 3/5/22, 4:13 AM

  Most people without an inheritance probably miss the fact that tons of people they know do. You often have journalists as friends for example who unbeknownst to you are “subsisting” on their parents’ wealth and who secretly have millions of wealth in the bank. I recall meeting a “guitarist” in local bands in Seattle who confessed after a good amount of alcohol one night that his father had given him and his brother a million each when they turned 18 and he had decided to grind out the “starving musician” life until he “made it.”

• by 6gvONxR4sf7o on 3/4/22, 4:27 PM

  People are trying to say, “I worked for/earned what I have.” I think it’s as simple as that.

  If you’ve see the show Schitt’s Creek, think of the two adult children in that show. People want to not be seen as that.

• by nailer on 3/4/22, 4:28 PM

  > They did all the cleaning, all the cooking, all the entertaining, and all the decorating and did really well.

  If you’re cleaning foeces off the side of someone else’s room toilet you’re working class. I’m not sure why the author thinks it’s obvious that “her grandparents owned a hotel” means she’s not, like the quote above doesn’t count for anything.

• by dash2 on 3/5/22, 5:45 AM

  I’m an Old Etonian. After that, I went to Cambridge. I will inherit a large sum very shortly.

  When my parents got divorced, Mum wouldn’t take any cash from Dad. She was in her 50s and had been a housewife for 25 years. So we turned off the electricity to save money. I grew up reading by candlelight and cooking literally on an open fire. I know which kind of newspaper is best to wipe your bum with. (Sunday papers are thicker and crinklier because of the coloured ink.)

  Fun game to play, no?

• by moralestapia on 3/5/22, 12:16 AM

  Nice read. Just as there's times where middle class could (kind of) play both roles, there also some situations where you get the downsides of both.

  For instance, a middle class acquaintance once told me about his years in high school that "the rich guys didn't like me because they thought I was poor, and the poor guys didn't want me because they thought I was rich".

• by nineplay on 3/4/22, 4:54 PM

  In the US, at least, people's thoughts on classes seem all over the map. Some people think of 'working class' or 'blue collar' as people without degrees but if a teacher makes less than a plumber than who is in what class.

  OTOH calling yourself 'rich' is going to sound braggy. Someone with a comfortable 6 figure income and a 2 million dollar house may sound like they are downgrading themselves by saying 'upper-class' but if they say 'rich' a lot people are going to think that 'rich' means private island in the Caribbean, not two weeks in Hawaii.

  It's best to just stay away from it.

• by mvc on 3/4/22, 4:41 PM

  But "solidly middle" is still working class really.

  My sister has a degree, and is a nurse of a about 5-7 years. Her husband also has a degree (and even went to private school) and does local government procurement paying ~35k. I'm sure the author would describe both as "solidly middle".

  They're still wondering how on earth they're supposed to pay for childcare, energy, mortgage. If the car breaks down, they're in trouble.

• by Thorentis on 3/5/22, 3:29 AM

  If somebody works hard at a working class job, enough to become their own boss by either e.g. starting their own cleaning company, or buying another business like a hotel that they cleaned - are they no longer working class? Can they no longer claim to be of working class background? This seems absurd to me. They were not born into money. They had to work hard to get to where they were.

• by dynamohk on 3/5/22, 9:30 AM

  For most using HN, the standard of living is likely better than all the pharaohs and kings of the past by a considerable margin. Gratitude is important, all the rest is relative.

• by goto11 on 3/5/22, 11:56 AM

  The English and US notions of class are very different. In the US, class basically mean income bracket. In England, class is more akin to "caste", a basically hereditary status which correlate with wealth, but it not determined by it. A broke aristocrat is still an aristocrat, a working class person winning the lottery is still working class, even if they stop working. A family may migrate from one class to another, but it takes multiple generation.

  The angle of the article seem to be that the English notion of class is bullshit, because it does not directly correlate to wealth and privilege. Maybe so, but class is still a real thing in the sense it affect peoples attitudes and interactions in real way. It is like saying "race" in US is bullshit. But it is still a very real thing that affect peoples lives.

• by efitz on 3/5/22, 4:27 AM

  Any time you set up any kind of system that organizes people into groups and where members of a group have disparate privilege or prestige versus non-members, then people will try to find all sorts of ways to get into the privileged group whether they “qualify” or not.

  We’ve had class impostors forever. The OP mentioned a race imposter (we also have a sitting US senator arguably guilty of that) But it’s any group. Class, race, gender, first class, frequent traveler, club member, veteran, first responder, whatever.

  IMO the solution is egalitarianism, but people hate that too, because they not only want the privilege but also the prestige- the feeling that they are better than you are.

  Whatever the solution, legitimizing behavior that separates privileged and non-privileged makes things worse, not better.

• by spacemanmatt on 3/4/22, 6:20 PM

  HN needs to attract some actual sociologists to talk with.

• by jonathanstrange on 3/4/22, 4:40 PM

  Is "class" still considered a meaningful term in sociology? Does it even exist?

  This is not a rhetorical question, I'm interested in a scientific answer.

• by unfunco on 3/4/22, 4:50 PM

  I'm from a working class family but have done okay for myself, my salary, house, and lifestyle would be considered by most people to be middle-class now, but I still consider myself working class because I don't feel you can change classes. However, if I were to have children now, they would grow up in a middle-class household and would be middle-class forever, but I am and will always still be working class.

• by 12ian34 on 3/4/22, 5:33 PM

  The whole idea of social class is so disgusting and dehumanising that whilst I think it's important to talk about Social Mobility and how we can improve that - I wish people would stop self-classifying and talking about classes like they actually exist. To me, the whole idea of classes revolves around the gatekeeping of opportunity by (generally) the most fortunate. I always refuse to classify myself. Aside from demographic studies by governments to improve social mobility, what good can it do the world to know the class of an individual?

• by vmception on 3/4/22, 4:17 PM

  Would love to have this conversation about the US but UK class system just doesnt influence enough to be so complicated

• by cardiology-fat on 3/5/22, 8:53 AM

  This is interesting, but it overlooks the way people often bullshit their way into a higher class. Boris Johnson is a common example of this: he's sort of an everyman's stereotype of what an upper-class person is like, and he plays up to it, but he's certainly not upper class himself.

• by readme on 3/4/22, 11:45 PM

  In the US I have not been tempted to flaunt the fact that I am from a practically welfare background. I mean no joke, I lived in section 8 housing.

  In general people don't deduce this from me and sometimes assume I came from privilege, and honestly I definitely prefer it that way.

• by lawrenceyan on 3/4/22, 11:44 PM

  How does class work in Asian cultures like India, China, Japan, Korea, etc.?

  Technological growth and automation seems to have played (and is increasingly so?) a much larger factor than anything else in the past century. I assume I'm probably biased here though.

• by devoutsalsa on 3/4/22, 4:31 PM

  I'm a 1st level bard / 1st level fight / 12th level psionicist.

• by germandiago on 3/5/22, 3:18 PM

  There are clearly two classes, supposing someone is not handicapped: the ones who parasite others intentionally and the ones who are net tax payers. It is not about amount of income but about role.

• by lordnacho on 3/4/22, 5:24 PM

  I had an interesting conversation about class in the UK the other day. I took my friend and our four boys (all around 10) to a football (soccer) game.

  It turned out that my friend had grown up with a different accent to what he currently speaks with. He'd grown up in a rough part of Essex, going to a school where kids normally don't even think about university. After about two weeks at Cambridge, he realized he was different. To sum it up, almost nobody at Cambridge speaks like an Essex boy. That's despite Cambridge being not terribly far from Essex.

  I noticed something similar. My family are refugees, so spread all over the world, including an aunt North London who gave birth to six cousins. They speak English a certain way. Coming as an international student, I noticed a lot of accents at Oxford (hello Brummies, Scots, Welsh, Scousers) but not a lot of "council house between hackney and Romford" accents.

  If you've followed British politics, you've heard of something called the Bullingdon Club. Cambridge has something similar. Neither of the two of us knew much about it when we were there, but we did know there were some veeeery posh kids around, because they speak a certain way and often have a pretty expensive style about them.

  So that was the fathers. Working class? Well if you're upper class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some sense it's legit to call yourself working class. It doesn't say much when your job could be anything between chronically unemployed and hedge fund manager, though.

  For dinner, we took our boys to a restaurant. Being around the age of the 11 plus exam, the conversation turned to private schools. It turns out one of the boys had gotten into one of the most expensive selective schools in the country, which I pointed out (this is why I am so sought after as a dinner guest). Since they're kids, they still have naive ideas about money, and the vogue among kids at the moment is to aspire to be an influencer. "I'll make a YouTube channel and millions of followers will see it".

  Thus followed a little talk about how many views you actually need to make enough money to pay for two kids to go to the most expensive school in the country, and perhaps also a house and something to stave off starvation.

  I'm also the kind of exciting person who has official statistics about income distributions in his head. A rough tax rate is also part of that spiel, in case I find an uninformed primary schooler.

  Realistically, you either need to be in the top 1% (£175K/year) or the top 2% (£120K/year) with a second income (£50K is around 87th, so maybe two ~97th at ~£100K ) to be able to pay for two kids to go to a £30K/year school, pay a £30k/year rent/mortgage, maybe eat and holiday for £15K, and also pay the tax man.

  That's what the numbers look like, and I'm not surprised at all that kids don't know them. What are the chances when you're sitting around at your school that you've been told is famous, that basically every single one of your classmates has either a top 1% earning parent or two top 3% earners? If you knew you would certainly think you were very lucky indeed.

  So this kid, who is quite bright and has a place at a top school that sends dozens of kids each to his dad's alma mater, can still claim to be working class by heredity. That is what this article seems to be about. People mostly want to feel that they deserve what they worked for, and certainly kids in prep schools work hard. But it's also true that you almost never see anyone doing ordinary jobs. It's not actually that weird that a kid thinks being a lawyer or trader is an ordinary job, when his entire class has parents that both do something like that. It's not even that hard to imagine them thinking their parents work really hard. Certainly a couple of the other parents in my kid's year are always traveling or working late.

• by ecshafer on 3/4/22, 4:30 PM

  A marxist class analysis clears this issue up pretty well, as its based on the relationship to labor and capital. The example interviewee would be working class based on their relationship to capital. Grandparents that own a hotel (assuming its not a large chain) would be petite bourgeoisie, as they own a small amount of capital, but must work to make it productive and are therefore still a kind of working class. The accountant father is still working class, as he must work for a living, but would be considered Private Managerial Class, as they are rewarded well for their skills within capital.

• by paulpauper on 3/4/22, 10:17 PM

  In the US, there is a huge cultural and economic divide between the processional/educated class vs. the low-skilled class, whereas elsewhere in the world not so much. In the US, the goal or aspiration is to escape being working class, as epitomized by the likes of JD Vance and others, whereas elsewhere being working class is not something to be so ashamed of or to escape from.

• by foogazi on 3/4/22, 7:16 PM

  Why would we ever allow others to label us based on our ancestors choices?

  Don’t let your past define you

• by humanistbot on 3/4/22, 4:48 PM

  Because you can easily lie about your class background, especially to yourself.

• by Ancapistani on 3/4/22, 5:31 PM

  I think the answer here is simple: "class" means different things to different people.

  I'm an American, and I consider myself "middle class". I was born when my mother was 17. She finished high school and went on to work and get a two-year degree from a tiny business college that no longer exists. She married in her mid-20s, when I was in first grade, got a job at a company and is still there over three decades later. She went from making minimum wage in 1991 to in the ballpark of $350k / year today. My father - the man she married, not my biological father - was a public school teacher.

  I attended school in a very poor area, and my experience in high school was far more comfortable than my peers.

  My dad bought me a very inexpensive truck when I was 12. It was ~20 years old, the bed was badly damaged, and the engine didn't run due to a combination of overuse and neglect. We parked it outside our garage and he taught me how to work on it, return it to operable condition, and sell it for profit. With his guidance I pulled and completely rebuilt the engine and transmission. We went to scrapyards on the weekends, and eventually found a steel bed for it in good condition. We kept all the receipts. The total cost, including purchase price, parts, and a couple of services like having a machine shop mill the engine block flat for the new head, was ~$2k. By the time I turned 14, when I could get a "learner's permit" in my state, we sold that old truck for $4k. I then had my choice - I could take that $4k (of which I had earned about half through my labor) and buy whatever I wanted, or my parents would sell me the truck my dad already owned for the same price. Because I'd done so much work on "my" truck, I jumped on that offer; I knew that his truck was well-maintained, and I didn't want to have to rebuild a vehicle that I was going to rely on.

  By 2002, when I graduated high school, I think my parents were making about $175k/yr combined. I went to college on an academic scholarship and my life fell apart almost immediately. After a couple of years of struggling (and my parents paying for mental health services), I was finally diagnosed with severe depression and ADHD. It took me until I was 23 before I was "functional", and another two years after that before I felt at all confident that I wasn't going to fall back into that pit of despair. Throughout that dark period of my life, my parents were there both emotionally and, to a reasonably limited extent, financially. They weren't paying all of my bills, but I knew they wouldn't let me die hungry and homeless.

  Today, I'm 38. I've been with my wife since were 14, married her at 21, and now have two daughters. We live in a five-bedroom home that we purchased in our name, with money that we earned and saved. While we don't feel like we have a huge safety net for ourselves yet, we are definitely "financially stable" - and a big part of the reason we feel like we don't have that safety net built is because of the depth of the financial safety net that my parents were able to provide.

  So... in summary, while I consider myself "middle class", objectively I'm firmly in the "white collar" world. My wife doesn't work for anyone outside our home, is able to run a side business primarily for personal fulfillment, and our children are happy, well cared for, and want for little.

  My wife's parents' story is very different from ours. Her dad was "working class", and retired from Walmart as a cashier in "Tire & Lube Express". He has a large but benign brain tumor that is becoming more and more of an issue as he ages. Her mother has struggle with mental health issues and has never been able to hold down a job more than a year or so at a time. My wife moved between her parents' home and her grandparents' home multiple time growing up. While they have their own problems to deal with, I think they really did the best they could raising my wife.

  One of the highlights of my adult life so far came a couple of years ago, when my wife's parents' car broke down yet again. They had asked us a couple of times to take them to doctors appointments, and while I have offered fixed their vehicles a few times over the years, they will not ask me to do things like that. I sat down with my wife, looked at our finances, and decided that we could reasonably take responsibility for their transportation needs from here on out. We looked at reliable used cars, but decided that buying a reasonable new car would mean a warranty and that the total cost of ownership amortized over the expected lifetime of the vehicle would be comparable. Plus, her parents had never owned a new car; at best they were able to buy a reliable used car a couple of times in the past.

  We bought them a new Kia Rio S. It's cherry red, and her parents cried when we gave it to them. It's still in my name, so I put it on our insurance and bought a service contract through a local shop. The only thing they have to pay for is fuel.

  (continued in a reply to this post)

• by einpoklum on 3/7/22, 8:35 AM

  Being in the "middle" is not a class. Social classes - certainly in Marxist theory, but also in other classes analyses of society - are not the rungs on a ladder: Low, Middle, High. Rather, they are characterized by their social role (e.g. role with respect to production, distribution, ownership etc). And a social class may have more or less power and wealth, depending on circumstances.

  Centuries ago, people who owned land, workshops etc. but were not nobles were referred to as the "middle class" - the middle between the peasantry and the nobility. Today that moniker is meaningless, though it persists - even though people of "middle" wealth are in no way not a distinct class.

• by jokethrowaway on 3/4/22, 4:42 PM

  Because our moral values are wrong.

  We should be celebrating richness, not poverty. Unfortunately, victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be traced back to marxism.

  Why should we celebrate richness?

  If you're richer than your peers you did something that society considered valuable. Money is the ultimate form of direct democracy.

  Now, we can argue that people in Wall Street are screwing up people left and right, that governments can print off money and that governments can force people to give them money.

  These are serious issues and I'm the first one to say something should be done about these - but still, the people in Wall Street are providing financial services that businesses find useful. And those businesses provide useful services to people, so the richness of Wall Street can be traced back to useful services. Governments printing money affects the market via inflation. Nothing much can be done about governments taking money from people under the threat of incarceration (unless you have an army), but the government is, in most countries, a form of indirect democracy - so the government still end up providing some value to end users with the money they forcefully took. Sure, part of it get burned in the inefficiency of centralisation and bureaucracy but most of it keeps going around (eg. by paying contractors to fix the roads).

  Therefore, I think becoming rich can absolutely become a moral value and I think the world would be better that way.

  In the words of the working class hero 50 cent: Get rich or die tryin'.