It's a uniquely American thing.

I studied abroad for a semester in England, and in one of the classes I took there the (Australian) professor asked us what socioeconomic class we thought we belonged to. It was a good university, but most of the British kids answered "working class." When he asked "Why?" they answered, "Because our parents work."

That always stuck with me. In England, the aristocracy is alive and well. They don't have to work, and they don't pretend to. They do live comfortably, but they're highly educated and reasonably well adjusted. They don't have to partake in the charade that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and they generally don't blow their family's fortune over a debauched decade in Vegas like their American counterparts either.

Isn't this because British people see class a bit differently? Like you can win the lottery but don't consider yourself upper class because you weren't born in the right family/attended the right schools/whatever? Same as you can be down to your last penny, but you are from the Duke's family or whatnot and still consider yourself upper class?

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

That must have been a former polytechnic. I'm willing to be most university students in the UK would say they are middle class. Oxbridge is full of the upper class (although that is slowly changing).

The definition of "middle class" in the UK is different... Unintuitively middle class denotes a social standing well into the top decile - members of the middle class would be typically educated with a graduate or professional degree, top-5% salary, multiple properties, children in private schools. (Whereas in the US, any white collar person - so basically half the population - is "middle class".)

Yes, the UK middle class is over-represented at Oxbridge, but the definition is so narrow that they are outnumbered by the lower classes - state school kids and other riff-raff constitute two-thirds of Oxbridge classes, especially outside the upper-class signal subjects like Classics.

>top-5% salary

Well that's hardly the middle is it.

It's not the median but not intended to be - it is in the middle between the upper class (<1%) and the lower class, which used to be more than 90%; it's a description of all the professional jobs (doctors, lawyers, merchants) which are neither serf/farmer/servant/laborer nor the upper class.

They also haven’t invented or built anything meaningful in several hundred years…

The English or rich kids?

If the former, it might be worth remembering that ARM, which many consider the be the next big leap in computing (there was a thread saying it just yesterday) is an English company. Of course I could give many more examples, the technology you're using to post this comment for one, but I think I've made my point.

If the latter, I imagine thats too generic a group to say

The aristocracy. The staleness at the top has made Europe globally weak and bordering on irrelevant. (Not that the US in its current trajectory is all that far behind)

The Royal Society would disagree

I think the Royal Society could probably be considered biased.

Except for the WWW, of course.

Wasn't Alan Turing English and middle class?

Well thats depressing, I saw a similar documentary that didnt really have anything stark across gender lines, but did show how some private high school students in NYC had trouble reconciling their circumstance with the public housing across the street. The most apt similarity being how one boy took his life after pushing the school administration to lower admission costs for needy.

"A million one, a million two / A hundred more will never do" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCQNpjWmRE