Whatever you want to call it, there are de facto class structures in the US that operate as the functional equivalents of class in Europe. You are either born into these circles or you remain outside of them (for at least a few generations). Wealth is only one part of this mix, and while it certainly does pay for your tickets into elite events, it does not buy you into the circle.
> social class in USA is fluid and can change
And this is one of the major false-hoods that people believe to be true but simply isn't. Americans in particular suffer from this belief. Social mobility is lower than most people expect, and the trend has been heading downwards for years.
Lower end is probably associated with your traditional professional classes. Then there is managerial classes. And finally the newly rich. Which might interact with others, but likely won't fully belong...
In fact, you still regularly hear the disparaging words "new money" today.
If you grew up old money, you get tapped for the best projects and will make Staff by 25, Principal by 30. If you don't have the technical abilities, they'll make you a manager. On the other hand, if you come from the rabble, you stay in the rabble--you get assigned regular grunt work and performance reviews actually matter to your future.
I could not disagree with this more. I would say that tech, unlike legal, medical or other fields, is by far the most egalitarian. You can be a kid that comes from the "rabble" and make Staff/Principle if you are really good and committed.
Likewise I have seen many "old money" folks like you describe completely wash out. We had a few at my company get their foot in the door because the parents play golf with the owner. Sure they have the advantage in getting in, but once youre in if you aren't skilled technically, you're going to wash out very quick (both guys we hired were gone in ~3 months)
You're right that they don't need to work. They do it to legitimize themselves. And, of course, to make sure any genuine opportunities go to their social class and not the rest of us.
In my org, half of the senior staff and executives weren’t even born in America. They were naturalized citizens or on work permits.
Not sure how those folks could be leveraging their social class in America.
One example off the top of my head: Indian caste discrimination in Silicon Valley [1][2]. Cisco was even sued by the state of California for such discrimination [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698
100%. You also have to keep in mind America is much younger as a nation compared to Europe, but the classism is trending it towards the hereditary classism found in Europe over time.
This is the reason why speaking of an "aristocratic class" remains somewhat inappropriate. The term "class" was introduced specifically to mark the difference between the old society, which was dominated by heritage ("estate"), and the new society, in which this has been replaced by wealth ("class"). That there was a lot of continuity from the old to the new order is another matter. Britian seems to be very special, because there the "upper class" is a mixture of old estate and new wealth (plus celebrities from academic, sport and culture), something that is more or less absent in the rest of Europe. While a poor Lord in England is still a Lord, a poor Graf in Germany is just a poor person.
Both you and sibling commenter (zbentley) are making points that don't contradict what I was talking about in my reply to gp kstenerud. I'm not saying stratification, hierarchy, elites, etc don't exist in USA. Instead, I'm explaining why Americans don't seem to be aware of their class.
To re-emphasize the specifics that I was focused on, he commented: "In older societies, everyone is aware of their class from a very young age, but in America they seem to pretend that class doesn't exist"
I was dissecting his phrase "their class from a very young age" and how why Americans (e.g. USA children's brains) don't even know there are classes and thus, they're unaware which one they are in. Maybe one can call that self-awareness "class consciousness" or something similar but there's a reason Americans do not have it to the same degree as Europeans. In USA, the so-called "classes" are not _overt_ and _blatant_ to the same degree.
In contrast, some societies with overt & blatant classes:
- India Hindu castes with the "untouchables"
- feudalism with "lords" and "serfs"
- peerage with titles of nobility
America's particular circumstances of nation creation means the class system emerges from money & wealth rather than the 3 examples above from religion or monarchy. A young child in India in the "untouchables" class will be self-aware they're part of the untouchables. And likewise, a serf knows he's not a lord and a lord knows he's not a serf. But an American child in deep south Alabama won't necessarily know they are "hillbillies" or other derogatory terms like "white trash". These are class terms that others give them. In America, "classes" for many people are the proverbial "water that fish don't even know they're swimming in".
But to re-state your points a different way... Just because the USA doesn't have overt classes, it doesn't stop "invisible" classes from forming ("old-money") and functioning in similar ways. Some Americans authors are so exquisitely observant of subtle class differences such that they can write books where characters' self-awareness of class adds tension to their novels. Examples being F Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" and Edith Wharton novels. Likewise, the readers of those books need to be aware of subtle class distinctions to see the significance of characters living in West Egg vs East Egg -- or that a Wharton character is driving a 2-wheeled horse & buggy instead of a more expensive 4-wheeled carriage.
WASPs might hold some prestige but I think as they lose power they become more irrelevant and less exclusive. I don't think it's straightforward right now who the upper class is. It feels like things are in a state of flux and amorphous or secretive. I completely agree net worth is not the only deciding factor.
The upper class will always be a small exclusive group by design so regardless of who is in it, social mobility is probably lower than most people expect. So to sum it up I only disagree with you about the power of "old money" in the US now. I think there is a somewhat parallel class with actual hereditary advantages that is replacing the "old money" class.
edit: I see dzdt has provided something useful.
What can't Jeff Bezos do that he would be able to do if he had parents from a different class?
That's old money?
$300,000 is simply not an outsize amount of capital to start a business. People do it all the time. Expect to put out $1.3 to 2.3 million to start a McDonald's franchise, and those are everywhere. (Other franchises are less expensive, not more.)
The idea that one has to be rich to raise $300,000 is simply not true.
It's like Bob and Ted have an equal financial position.
Bob: I just borrowed $10,000 and put it into Bitcoin!
Ted: Haha, you fool, that's so risky!
--- 5 years later ---
Bob: My bitcoin is now worth $1,000,000!
Ted: That's sooo unfair!
And remember, Bezo didn't have $300,000 either. He borrowed it.
This. The idea that we were founded by the industrious poor of Europe doesn't really hold out. People came to the New World with all sorts of different motivations, and from all social classes. The rich who came over to get super-rich got super-rich and their descendants are now the elite. The poors who came over to work in the coal mines stayed poor and their descendants now work at Wal-Mart. And the one-sixth of this country whose ancestors were brought over against their will are still treated horribly because their skin color makes it evident (or at least likely).
Not only is social mobility rare, but there's a mean-reversion. Class doesn't prevent you from attaining wealth, but it makes it harder to keep it; there are so many forces in play that most people aren't even aware of, but that exist to keep long-term upward mobility at a minimum. You can get a PhD and work at a FAANG, and you're still going to lose in project allocation and in promotion battles to 23-year-olds whose fathers and grandfathers the VPs are afraid of.
How about one of the richest men in America? The son of a butcher:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor#Early_life
How about the Kennedys? Irish immigrants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._Kennedy#Early_life
The Vanderbilts? From an indentured servant coming to America:
Similar to the UK, most of these dynasties were based on real estate and failed to safeguard their wealth during the transition to the postindustrial era (post-civil war), unless they transitioned into finance/insurance.
Because of this, we don’t know their names today as well as we know the (post-)industrial names (your example of Astor is an exception because his story & wealth were singular, but even Astor isn’t well-known outside of NY).
John Jay, the various Roberts Livingston, the van Rensselaers,the Van Cortlandts, the Schuylers, Morris, etc.
These were people who had functionally feudal titles in post-revolutionary America, and many descendants retained them until the mid 19th Century.
They weren’t Windsors, Hohenzollerns or the uppermost crust of European houses. They were generally the descendants of Scottish, Dutch, or French elites who came to the new world once they caught wind of the killer opportunity provided by untouched and underutilized natural resources, in combination with a highly malleable set of local legal institutions. Many of them also had the motivation of fleeing asset seizures at home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay#Family_history
I didn't look at the others you mentioned. If you've got a cite that shows they came to America wealthy, feel free.
BTW, Astor is well known on the west coast. See Astoria, Oregon.
It required capital and connections to make it big in the Hudson valley: many of the wealthiest families in the US at 1776 were descended from people of relative wealth and influence (again, not Windsors and Hohenzollerns), who found the british colonies to be a place where skill, capital and connections could be compounded into meaningful wealth at a far higher rate than their birth countries.
Jay's progenitor fled asset seizure in France to take up commodity trading in NY, where he became cozy with the established elites: Jay's mother was a Van Cortlandt, themselves married into the Van Rensselaers, who were among the founders and directors of the Dutch West India Company.
(Most prominent New Yorkers of the 1770s intersect with the Van Rensselaers). Alexander Hamilton married a Schuyler, a family whose history mirrors the Van Cortlandt's (wealth deriving from the furs trade, cemented with marriage to the "Vans").
Robert Livingston the Elder fled to the Netherlands from Scotland, where his well-to-do father had faced religious persecution. He ended up in New York, where he married a Van Rensselaer widow and was granted a "patent" to 160,000 acres of farmland along the Hudson.
---
South of the Potomac River, the stories are pretty similar if you substitute "fur trade" for "tobbacco trade".
e.g. James Madison's paternal grandfather was a man of influence and landowner in Virginia, who cemented his family's future influence with a marriage into the Penn family. The Penns, along with the Baltimores, represent an extreme end of the "arrived wealthy" spectrum.
>So, for instance, if I don't like the medical care I get from the doctors my state-subsidized health plan (thanks, Mitt!) gives me access to, I can't just whip out my checkbook and buy myself care from a better reputed specialist. Being poor might yet shorten my lifespan, as it curtails my access to care. But on the other hand, if I present with a serious booboo to just about any doctor, I will have narcotic pain relief offered me with no questions asked, because someone of my social class is not suspected of being one of those naughty "med-seeking" addicts. The decision of whether or not to trust me with a prescription for percoset is not made on the basis of the MassHealth card in my pocket marking me one of the precariat, but my hair style, my sense of fashion, my (lack of) make-up, my accent, my vocabulary, my body language, my (apparent) girth, my profession (which, note, doctors often ask as part of intake), and all the other things which locate me in a social class to observers that know the code. Contrariwise, a patient of mine – who is a white woman of almost my age – who is covered with tattoos, speaks with an Eastie accent, is over 200lbs, and wears spandex and bling and heavy make-up, gets screamed at by an ER nurse for med-seeking when she hadn't asked for medication at all, and just wanted an x-ray for an old bone-break she was frighted she had reinjured in a fall.
Family status in the UK is less about history than shared context: not "what titles did your ancestors hold?" (that might be highly relevant for the fractional upper crust, but not so much for others), but "did you go to the same (exclusive) schools as others in your social class?" and "did your last generation or two originate from the same (exclusive) areas?"
The same is true in the US, ironically even more-so in some ways: while people certainly can change their status by becoming [mb]illionaires, that's both vanishingly rare and insufficient on its own.
Rare: in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent--so rare that many elite groups and institutions presume that none of their members transitioned into the elite by acquiring wealth. Whether mobility is greater in the US or the UK is a belabored and unclear argument I won't get into.
Insufficient: as the article mentioned, there is a massive set of social context and mores that are shared by elites that are not necessarily shared by someone who recently became wealthy. This works almost identically to that context in the UK, just with superficial differences.
That context amounts to an entire culture--which can be learned, or faked, but doesn't automatically switch on when you e.g. inherit money or sell a business to become wealthy. This isn't quite the same as the distinction between "old money" and "new money"; shared elite-culture context can be built in a single generation: a newly wealthy person is not automatically able to navigate and benefit from existing elite cultural structures, but if they research the shared background of people already in those cultures, they may put their children into e.g. the elites' schools or communities, at which point their children have a good chance at becoming "authentic" (really "passing", since authenticity is sort of a tautological quality here) members of the elite themselves.
Everyone can point to an outlier to these phenomena--someone that proves that you can "break into" or are falsely excluded from a class by some criteria. You point to Schwarzenegger, others point to various rags-to-riches stories, or stories of people who carefully research and dissemble to enter elite cultural circles. While those stories certainly exist, outliers are, by their nature, less relevant than the rules that govern the overwhelming majority of class dynamics in these societies.
What? I personally know lots of people who went from zip to millionaire.
Even in the 1990s, it was estimated that Microsoft had minted over 10,000 millionaires, not including the value of their homes. And that's just Microsoft.
1. The first is a difference in degree. Millionaires (even in 1990s) money do not necessarily have cultural access to the kind of elite circles discussed in the article. Now, you might be right--I'm not going to no-true-scotsman the entire claim, as I have no way of deriving a particular asset value that makes access likely--but it does seem unlikely to me that "millionaire" has substantial overlap with the multiple-vacation-homes types of people attending the gathering in the article. Similarly, mobility fluctuates; the '90s were a time of both elevated economic prosperity and elevated opportunities to transition upward in economic class. Now not so much.
2. I think we can refute the statistical claim, that mobility is less scarce than I stated. That one we can verify with data--as others in this thread have pointed out, anecdotes are insufficient. Numerous analyses indicate that "upward mobility" (which, fair enough, is often a flawed measure) has decreased or remained stagnant since the '70s. Additionally, elite classes have widened the asset-value gap that needs to be crossed by someone looking to join those classes via wealth alone.
In short: zip to millionaire might not be relevant to the claim; even if so, it happens less frequently (per capita if not absolutely) now; when it does happen it is less likely to imbue the kind of cultural status/class change that I mentioned due to the increased economic "distance" that the people in that status/class have accumulated in the last decades.
How many of the people born in the first quintile of wealth in the 80s are still in the first quintile? How many people born in the last quintile are now in the first quintile?
If the answer is 20% to both, great, you have no predetermination of wealth at all. if you have 50%/10%, you have what is expected in a country with correct social mobility (Most western countries post WW2 until the 70s). If its 95%/2%, or less, you have an almost non-existant wealth mobility.
> correct social mobility
a meaningless term
But picking Microsoft as an example or any of the faangs feels wrong, because they are the outliers. Millions of companies don't get that big and millions more fail.
The fact that a very small percentage of people do move between wealth classes and possibly social classes doesn't actually negate the original statement.
For context, Schwarzenegger met Maria Shriver after he had gotten the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor for Stay Hungry(1976) while in an open relationship with another woman and married around a decade later after his big breakout in Conan and Terminator.
He was by then already a successful bodybuilder, she didn't really marry a bricklayer, and anyway it's not like you can't find similar example in European nobility.
Maybe the most prominent example is Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden. She married her personal trainer, a gym entrepreneur and son of an ordinary civil servant, who received the titles of Prince and Duke.
One addition: social mobility is possible in almost any class based society. So using one such example does not prove that class in USA==wealth.
In theory it is supposed to be egalitarian, and everyone will pay lip service to it. In practice, not so much.
As the sibling said about the Netherlands, there very much is a sort of class system built around education. When you meet someone, usually, the first question is "what do you do for a living" and the second is "where did you go to school".
People will also pay attention to the way you talk. If you have a "hood" accent, you'll be considered "less than" someone "without" accent. If you don't speak fluent French, it's also "better" to speak with an English/American accent than, say, eastern European.
The middle level are now called Universities of Applied Sciences, which give out a bachelors, but as far as I know never a masters diploma.
The lowest level are vocational colleges, which don’t give you any internationally recognized credential at all (but do train you to do a variety of occupations).
You basically get sorted into one of these levels once you leave elementary school based on educational skill and aptitude (by your final year teacher), and while changing is possible, it costs you years (which still seem very precious at the time).
If you meet any Dutch person outside the Netherlands they almost per definition are middle level or higher, because anyone without a bachelors diploma often doesn’t get to immigrate (depending on country).
Netherlands seems fairly egalitarian by contrast to these other systems.
Except in California, where you can inherit property tax valuation from your parents and grandparents. Or transfer your below-market valuation to another property. Oh, and your valuation is required to decrease over time in real-dollar terms.
It had artistic merit. So with the Kennedy's remember they're Irish, so the Irish nobility was disintegrated by the English, all Irish are Irish nobility. And it has the most welcoming laws of returning, because it is actually far below it's peak population in the 19th century, when people were starving and escaping, the lowest point of poverty.
Like if you want a title do an online class, fuck. And it didn't work the same way, it was Celtic not Germanic nor Roman, much less conquest, Bronze Age traditions to this day.
So what you get instead is the origin of nobility, which are heroines and heroes. The Irish who made it in America attained worth, the whole premise of America is its the place to which people leave to come back--if they even feel like coming back--with reknown.
Nobody gives a shit whom Beowulf's father was either. I'm not sure it's addressed in the tale, it doesn't matter. What matters is Beowulf, the hero. And in fact the monsters he fought were descended from Cain, that's like nobility, Beowulf ripped the monster's fucking arm off with his own masculine strength, declining to use a sword because he considered himself his equal.
.
I think the additional question is one of History. You go to a new place, what happens to your History? It's very tied to place, time originally comes from the idea of wanting to understand the heavenly spheres, that was time. "When" comes from "where".
This is ironic as Joe Kennedy (the patriarch) struggled hard against being an outsider for being Catholic.
As far as I can tell, discrimination against Catholics has simply disappeared in the US.
Americans aren't pretending because unlike England, the country itself was created without a monarchy handing out titles of nobility[1]. Europeans can trace deep historical bloodlines -- which further reinforces class distinctions and self-awareness across generations. However, America was built on immigrants arriving on ships where family records were lost.
So if one still insists on overlaying the word "classes" on top of America, it is very different from "class" in Europe. Therefore, social class in America is more about wealth rather than hereditary titles. The ability for money (e.g. become a millionaire/billionaire) to change your status in society means social class in the USA is fluid and can change.
Maybe a loose USA version of hereditary class might be families like Kennedys, Bushes, etc where the media nicknames the Kennedys "Camelot". Even so, a bricklayer who was the son of an Austrian village policeman and had a bloodline tainted by a bastard great-grandfather -- was able to marry into the Kennedy family. Why? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger became a successful multi-millionaire. The European-version of "lower class" in Arnold's family background wasn't a barrier in the USA.
>Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots
I think many do have pure and simple racism based on skin color. E.g. they don't care for black billionaires like Michael Jordan and they think it's wrong that a black judge sits on the Supreme Court. Yes, racism for some people may be (subconsciously) intertwined with class as you point out ... but for others, it's a simple dislike of black people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom