[0] Yes, that high-pitched sound you hear is a dog whistle.

Soccer and basketball for whatever reason seem to hit that egalitarian sweet spot.

Contrast that to hockey, lacrosse, or polo.

It's like golf: in business, playing golf made you more relatable to those able to advance your career, and so golf clubs proliferated. Whether you actually liked the sport itself was often a secondary concern.

edit.. and for that matter sports... uni groups maybe?

All I am interested as an employer is a person's ability to do the job. The type of job I'm offering requires a person to be intelligent => I'll choose the one who likes Beethoven more than Bieber.

>I'll choose the one who likes Beethoven more than Bieber.

But that is your personal preference.

>jazz beats rap for potential hires

Are you intentionally contradicting yourself?

“The new…elite listen to classical and to rap; they eat at fine restaurants and at diners. They are at ease everywhere in the world. We even seem to demand this omnivorousness pluralism of our elite. We don’t want a patrician president; we want a man who knows how to act around the queen of England but is just as comfortable sitting in a lawn chair holding a beer summit….[Elites] are comfortable almost anywhere. It is as if the new elite are saying, “Look! We are not some exclusive club. If anything, we are the most democratized of all groups. We are as comfortable with rap as opera. We can dine finely or at a truck stop. We accept all!”

from this book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (2011), Shamus Rahman Kahn

The only people I know who only listens to classical music are 75 year old Russian math professors and pretentious upper middle class teens

Anyway. Affinity to classical music (or classical poetry, for that matter) comes not from cultural background, but from a certain level of intellectual sophistication. I don't buy the thesis that some people are born into an oppressed class and can't escape it. In our age education is easily accessible to anyone who has internet. One can learn any language for free, become a developer or a musician or a photographer, all it takes is some will to make yourself learn some marketable skills.

Of course, now you'll likely say that some people are oppressed and conditioned to be unable to escape their caste, but it's just nonsense.

How does this match with the economist that determined that climbing out of poverty requires 20 years of nothing going wrong on average? [0][1]

0. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...

1. HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794514

I recommend to read "Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" by Pierre Bourdieu.

You see, very few people these days are taught to like Beethoven, most just find him on his own. That is a sign of a capability to think independently, which comes from higher intelligence.

If not, then it is exactly as I pointed out before: the bar is much higher if you come from the 'wrong' cultural background.

People who prefer classical music are trying to project an air of sophistication and intelligence but aren't any better at anything than anyone else

You also probably missed the part where I said, 'from my experience'. I know several people who rose from the extreme poverty of Soviet Union rural villages and shitty rural schools to university professor positions (basically the highest position you could achieve in USSR without participating in the Communist party activities), and you know what, for some reason, every one of them acquired a taste for classical music at one point of their lives. Coincidence? I think not.

[1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/22/smarter-people-listen-to-instr... [2] https://psmag.com/social-justice/classical-music-linked-to-h...