Those are all wildly different cultures. India is very hierarchical and has a caste system with considerable overlap to social classes. In Japan, something like 80% of the country consider themselves to be middle class, but there's an increasing divide between full-time salarymen (genuinely middle class) and contract workers (unstable at best, frequent outright poor).

The class system in India is presently under historic overhaul, but here is how it has been for the last 50 years or so.

Class is geographically concentrated and inherited. It isn't as simple as caste. This is primarily because the top class of India is not very Hindu. Inherited classmen are descendents of local kings, cultural empire builders (kapoor family), descendents of top civil servants in the British Empire and descendents of oxford-cambridge educated freedom fighters. Children of industrialists are let in, but it might take a generation or two. These communities are concentrated in the Mumbai and Delhi region. Ties to the Gandhi-Nehru family also helps.

As a normie, there are only a few ways to enter this class. Early schooling at international schools(Ambani), residential schools (Doon) and select Army schools is the easiest way. If you grow up in the right neighborhood in Mumbai or Delhi, you will find yourself sharing space with them. Eventually you'll make friends and be let in. Select professions such Western Liberal Arts academia, Economics, Architecture or Journalism/think-thanks are ways to get some access. But, it is important that the accolades be from western institutes. Sometimes, running an NGO with the right aesthetic gets you there.

The historic overhaul is happening because of 3 reasons. First, the elite have lost political power and their free patronage. Unlike the US, where until recently, the upper class pretty evenly split between 2 political parties. In India, the upper class exclusively operated under the blessings of the Congress party. The rise of the BJP has been disastrous for them, especially journalists and political insiders. Second, as the country sheds its socialist skin, credentials in the armed forces and civil service simply do not matter as much. The introduction of hard examinations to enter any of these institutions blocks off the lazy elites, which in-turn makes the institutions lose some of their 'elite' status. (this is why Harvard still keeps legacy admissions. The bar HAS TO BE low for the real elites to maintain eliteness of your institution) Lastly, new money is snatching away cultural power. STEM grads are taking over Netflix & Youtube. The new Billionaires are all Tech folks. There even have a new mecca in Bangalore.

However, the upper class still influences the messaging in elite American outlets, admission procedures at Ivies, western think tanks and Bollywood. The smart ones have been front of line to welcome the likes of Netflix or have used their massive wealth to buy into the tech revolution by turning into investors instead. Those who have stuck to old ways are dying a slow death.

IMO, India's next upper class is going to be incredibly technocratic. Top IITs (Engg.), AIIMS (Med.), IIMs (B.schools) are treated with a never seen before level of reverence. But this is my personal conjecture. We will see if it works out.

> 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.

Not being in the legacy pre-capitalist aristocracy doesn't mean you are working class; basically the entire capitalist class structure from the working class to the haut bourgeoisie exists outside of that aristocracy. Or, rather, parallel to and overlapping it, for the most part, as, but for the senior royals, legacy titles no longer have a firm connection to how one relates to the economy and derives support.

Now that I've written an abridged mutli-generational autobiography, how does this relate to the topic? Simple - all of the above influence how I see myself.

I live in a town of 14k people, a few miles from the town of <200 people where I grew up. The median household annual income here is <$30k. The media per capita income is $16k. I work remotely for a West Coast tech company, and my salary alone puts us at over 5x the median income here. Relative to my community, I think it's fair to say that we're "white collar".

The people I work with come from a variety of backgrounds, but with few exceptions are third generation "white collar". Those born outside the US generally come from "merchant class" families or higher - otherwise, how would they have been able to afford to immigrate to the US in the first place? Relatively to my colleagues, I come from a "blue collar" world.

At one point, before I was able to reliably find remote work, we moved to Virginia where I was the first tech hire at a startup. The office I started in was actually a hotel meeting room that they had leased while they built out their permanent office space. While I was with that company, they expanded twice.

The second time they expanded, we were ready to move in to the new office space, except the desks hadn't arrived before the electricians left and it was going to be two weeks before they could get back out to wire them up. We _really_ needed the space, so I told the founders that I could install them in a couple of hours if the electricians could swing by in the afternoon to inspect the work for code compliance. In retrospect, I'm sure they thought I was nuts. They agreed, the electrician agreed, and I ran back to my apartment to grab my tools. By lunch I had all thirty or so of the desks wired up, the mess cleaned, and we were able to move everyone into the new space. I left the ceiling tiles open and the covers off the junction boxes in the ceiling so they could be easily inspected, but otherwise the job was 100% complete.

Why did I have the knowledge and tools to do that? After failing out of college, I'd worked for about a year as an apprentice electrician. I realized then that that all of my colleagues at that company came from multi-generational "academic class" families, and that that sort of thing was completely foreign to them. I spent the next two years at that company making good friends, comparing life experiences, and learning from each other. One of them shared his investment portfolio with me and walked me through his strategies and what his parents had taught him. I rented a garage and taught him basic auto maintenance - oil, tires, how an engine and drivetrain works, how to check each fluid and what they all did.

That's an antique notion that died in the '80s? Once the rules changed, the rich started skimming from every transaction (money tranfers, dividends, security exchanges, and on and on) until they have almost all the money. The rest of us serve at their pleasure.

That's not how it was supposed to work. You were supposed to succeed from being part of the generation of wealth. Not just sitting and skimming while everybody else works. And then passing it on to your heirs.

I wish it worked as you describe. That's where we need to get back to.

> If you're richer than your peers you did something that society considered valuable

Get born of the right parents? Meet the right oligarch?

If you are well off, it is comforting to believe that your wealth came from smartness and hard work, and that people who have less than you are dumb and/or lazy. That way you can ignore structural inequality and don't need to consider doing anything to correct it.

It is the same false moral back-patting of "I'm colorblind and don't see race," which usually really means "By pretending to not see race, I have an excuse for not recognizing race-based injustices."

> Unfortunately, victimhood is trendy these days and I feel most of it can be traced back to marxism.

What part of Marx's analysis of capitalism do you think caused people to adopt a victim mentality?

> 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

Why? By your metric, these people are creating value. Shouldn't that be celebrated?

I would suggest reading the book "The Value of Everything" by Mariana Mazzucato so that you can better understand the difference between wealth creation and wealth extraction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.”

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.

> 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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

> 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.

I didn't believe in class until I met rich people and got to know them quite well.

For Dutch people, all I say is: go to Delft for university. The UvA sucks, the VU sucks, Eindhoven sucks, Twente is irrelevant. Tilburg? No. Groningen? What? Rotterdam: only if you're doing Economics. Leiden? Too close to Delft.

I know how it sounds, but a recruiter also only looks 10 seconds at your resume. It shouldn't be this way, especially because uni's in The Netherlands are quite close in quality. But when it comes to recruiting, prestige signaling allows you to get the foot in the door and apparently Delft has the prestige.

It was painful seeing/hearing this and experiencing it second hand as someone who graduated from both universities of Amsterdam (VU and UvA).

Class was invisible to me in The Netherlands, and then I met rich people. I wish I hadn't. Though the people are awesome, so I am really happy knowing them. So on a personal level I wish I had, but in terms of outlook on Dutch society: I don't want to know (what I consider to be) the truth. It's depressing information and I don't know what I can do about it other than knowing that if I ever get kids they'll probably get a massive advantage in learning educational things really young.

Definition of rich: at least fat FIRE.

SO much of it is luck.

I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when I was born, my father's experience meant he could help me with coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc. to do anything).

I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates. We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that really took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports instead of tearing open tvs.

The biggest problem is demonstrated here too. You have no experience of existing in a higher social category, so your anecdotes of what you imagine it to be like are purely bogeyman fiction traded between lower classes.

Not British but here’s something I noticed when we acquired a company with an office in the Bay and in the UK (London, if it matters).

At the US office you just parked in the first available spot. In the UK office there were assigned parking spots for anyone with a management position closest to the door, roughly sorted by tittle. And the accents sounded a little bit different (for the British employees) between engineering and management and sales.

In NZ, we made a deliberate effort to avoid the class system of the UK in certain ways (e.g., hunting and trout fishing are far more egalitarian here), but we also imported it in some ways.

Some families in Christchurch are very proud of being descended from "First Four Shippers" (colonists who arrived on the four ships that started the settlement of Christchurch), and they all try to send their children to the "right" schools (private ones), but the old boys' club is far weaker here (seems to exist mainly in law firms).

And no-one has class related accents (although a private primary school called Medbury, is very proud to teach a particular accent to its pupils, but they typically have it bullied out of them within a year at high school.

> only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers

It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that other people in other professions don't have to deal with.

Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's extremely accessible.

But the thing is, you could be a class bullshitter, just like the woman the article describes! There is no objective test to determine if you had to overcome "extreme adversity" or if you were "privileged" like most middle/upper-class people were.

> “right schools” pre-select based on background

No, on money.

Well it’s somewhat hereditary. I often see class in the US described as exactly equivalent to which bucket of income/wealth you fall into, which is certainly not hereditary and feels obviously wrong too: I think a poorly paid academic or teacher is likely to be considered higher class than a successful used car dealership owner. I say it’s somewhat hereditary because it seems at least a little malleable over people’s lives, at least with university and certain professions socialising people into the middle class.

I don’t really understand the subject of the article mattering much in life though. Social class matters a lot in the U.K. but no one asks which class you identify with before they decide how to treat you. Instead, it matters which class you present and I suspect the middle-class-identifying-as-working-class will present as middle class both in obvious ways (e.g. accent, grooming, dress) and more subtle ways (e.g. choice of words or phrases, being able to comfortably/knowledgeably talk about certain things).

I also don’t really understand the politics of class or the class people identify as today. Maybe I just have a simplistic view of history, but it seems the ideas of working/middle/upper classes don’t really fit today’s society and I’m often surprised when I see contemporary political arguments based on this class system.

I would say she comes from a working class background and is middle class or "middle class passing". Meaning when she goes to a job interview, or meets people socially, they think she is middle class.

The concern the author of the piece has is that if she says she's working class, it will suggest she overcame adversity to get to where she is, but from your comment, it's possible she grew up in an area with good middle-class-school-district-funded schools. Or maybe she went to a bad school and qualified for financial aid, I don't know.

Our parents' attitudes which you're talking about can affect us, but so does our material circumstances and environment.

In the UK where there's a stronger class based system, middle class is expressed through your accent and dialect, how you dress, etc.

Victimhood is equated with morality, furthermore victims are entitled to compensation. There's incentive to be seen as a victim, because it screams both "I am moral, and I am entitled to compensation" It happens at both the individual level and at group levels. Its sort of a key to understanding modernity.

I often find it doesn't take much digging in someone else's life to find out they have lived through something awful or traumatic, either it happened directly to them or to someone very close to them. I'm always amazed people are willing to share their 'sob story' on TV, I think there are a lot of people that wouldn't ever share their stories.

I don't think it's damaging. I think it gives people a way to imagine the stories they will tell about themselves when they become successful someday in the best case. If not, well at least they had a nice fantasy for entertainment.

> it only takes me 30 minutes on the bus to get from SF to work

This is interesting. There is nothing I can think of people lie about more rampantly than how long it takes them to get places.

Are there any studies on this? I wonder if it's just people being optimistic, or if they're actually trying to signal that they're better than everyone else because they can get places faster than everyone else (even when they can't).

> People lie in anonymous polls about their voting intent.

Political scientists have had to develop a separate category, along with methods to identify its members, in order to capture actual "swing voters", for related reasons. Lots of folks like to classify themselves as "centrist" or "independent" or "on the fence" or what have you, while in fact voting party line every single time just as reliably as someone who self-identifies as being highly partisan. Actual swing voters are a tiny minority of the people who identify as such (which is why "get out the vote" is, not-so-secretly, far more important than courting those voters—lots of seemingly odd behavior by politicians makes way more sense when this is factored in)

Bad political reporting (which is lots of political reporting) won't bother to make the distinction, which results in misleading coverage, graphs, et c.

> 20% thought they would be [top 1%] some day

Over 11 percent of Americans will be counted among the top 1 percent of income-earners for at least one year.

https://www.humanprogress.org/high-turnover-among-americas-r...

> 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.

These are largely the "Scots-Irish", as we call them in the US. They originate as the Borderers, that is, the lowland folks who lived on the border of Scotland and England (an effectively lawless region for a long stretch of time). At some point a bunch of them were shipped off to Ireland, then a bunch of those moved to the US. Hence, "Scots-Irish".

The history of their migration paints a picture of a people disliked basically everywhere. Kicked out of the Border country, then kicked out of Ireland, then kicked out of Pennsylvania, before finally settling in Appalachia (and being hated there by almost everyone outside that country—it's still socially acceptable to say all kinds of horrible things about them).

We (I'm very, very much of that "stock" on one side of my family) seem to be some real bastards.

See "Surnames and social mobility in England, 1170–2012"

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/60593/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...

This seems unlikely. Ethnic groups are cultures, much more than associations of genes. African-Americans are ~80% West African ~20% British by ancestry but there’s a lot more British in their culture than West African. Absent Indian jati style strict endogamy genetic distinctiveness will disappear quickly even with low levels of exogamy. Jatis in the same village have levels of genetic distance similar to Sweden-Sicily. Those are people whose last common ancestor was 1000-1500 years ago. There’s nothing like that anywhere in Europe.

East Anglia is the English region with highest modern Germanic ancestry, 30%. Samples from graves from Anglo-Saxon invasions suggest almost 100% population replacement. That’s consistent with panmixia.

As to red hair, attitudes change quickly. Kick a ginger day started with South Park.

> Paradoxically, working in tech is seen as somewhat low-class.

Fussell (though writing about the US) may have some insight here. For one thing, working is kinda low-class; for another, being concerned about the latest-and-greatest of technology is, separately, kinda low-class. He writes (I'm paraphrasing) that American old money is more likely to drive a 30-year-old truck, to have ancient kitchen appliances, maybe even fairly old entertainment-related electronics, than to have a flashy new sports car and top-end appliances—because caring about new technology is "low", so is something those sorts of people have been socialized not to care about (much of it's the "help's" problem, anyway, after all).

The US has a similar thing going on, along the "working/professional/upper" axis: many programmers make "professional" levels of money (e.g. doctor, lawyer, upper management at mid-level corporations, that kind of thing) but as a society we seem to have decided it's not proper to treat them as professionals, so they remain working-class in many respects (along with actual engineers).

Didn't the British carry their classism even into war, until at least WWII? As in, officers would be drawn from the upper classes, and the enlisted men would be drawn from the lower classes?