"For most upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money will be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it."
I think of myself as upper middle class. My parents are divorced and my father is dead so I know how that inheritance played out. My mom will be leaving me very little (partially because her second husband has a child that will benefit from the money much more than any of his siblings or my siblings and I). The inheritance won't be even CLOSE to the biggest financial event of my life. I don't think I'm unusual. Maybe I am?
Or ... maybe my definition of upper middle class is off (but then I'd be rich, rather than middle-middle class ...). Or maybe my situation is unusual? I'd like to see any vaguely reasonable numbers for Scott's claim (and maybe clarification about who qualifies for upper middle class).
Neither of my grandmothers left any substantial inheritance their kids (and grandpas went first).
Nursing home care is very expensive and the government won’t cover it until you’re basically destitute. My guess is that will eat away any typical middle class inheritance pretty quickly.
Please note that you can place your house in a trust so that you do not legally own it for Medicaid eligibility purposes. My (upper-middle class) grandparents (middle-middle class) have done this.
The average savings for boomers is ~200k. Even the 99th percentile is under 3M. Add in stuff like retirement consumption, rest home costs, and the fact that most people have more than one child and you realize that not even the richest 1% are getting seven figures from their parents.
EDIT: Fair enough, this isn't total net worth. Apparently the 1% level for net worth is around $10M. But the 10% level (i.e. upper middle class) is ~$1M and a source on inheritances (link below in thread) claims that a 90th percentile inheritance is around 200k so I think my general point mostly holds - a typical upper middle class person doesn't have their lifestyle affected much by inherited wealth.
But presumably if the average savings is $200,000, and the average Boomers have two kids, then the average Millennial will inherit $100,000, which is a pretty upper middle class annual income. Presumably the actual upper middle class are quite a bit above the average, and while the inheritance isn’t likely to be seven figures, it’s still likely to be the largest financial event in one’s life (getting several years income in a single chunk).
Yeah, as best I can tell from simple web searches, a typical upper middle class person might get something like a year's salary via inheritance. Which is nice and all, but not life changing and certainly not behind any sort of wealth-gap of the sort hinted at by the comment Scott was replying to there.
You're looking at "retirement savings", not net worth.
According to this page https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net-worth-of-the-1.aspx, the cutoff net worth to be in the top 1% in the US is $11.1 million, while the cutoff net worth to be in the top 10% is $1.2 million. That, honestly, sounds more plausible to me than your numbers (given that a lot of houses are worth over a million dollars these days in HCOL and even MCOL areas). And bear in mind this is across all age groups, so the average net worth of the top 10% at their time of death is probably higher.
Fair enough, the data that I used didn't count total net worth. But according to this (can't vouch for the data, it was just the first google hit): https://www.annuity.org/retirement/estate-planning/average-inheritance , "The average for the most wealthy 1% reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200." I dunno if the discrepancy between your numbers and these is methodological or if there are big end-of-life costs not accounted for. Also according to this: https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/ top 10% by net worth is 850k (5% is only 1 mil).
So I dunno. The data seem somewhat fuzzy, but these two links back up my intuition that most upper-middle class folks don't inherit seven figures.
At the risk of really getting into the weeds here, that seems to be the average size of an inheritance, not an estate. Inheritances of course get split between children, but they may also include token amounts given to other relatives. If you give a million bucks to each of your two children, but also leave a token $5000 to your six nieces and nephews and five grandchildren, then that's ... well, I can't be bothered doing the maths right now, but you get the idea. The average will be brought down by small inheritances given to "lesser" relatives.
Yeah, I think this idea that there are huge sums of money passing over generations for non-elites assumes that people continue working long after they have the means to retire, and/or don't adjust their lifestyle in proportion to their retirement funds.
I would also describe myself as middle (maybe upper middle) class, but don't expect a huge windfall inheritance, either.
I feel like my family is a counterpoint, at least of sorts. Great grandparents were the immigrant success story of coming to America, working in the factory, eventually owning the factory. Then kids (my grandparents) realized that factories weren't such a hot prospect, took the intergenerational wealth and built it up through investing (stocks, real estate). They were not fantastically rich, just sort of regular rich, and they did indeed burn a lot of what they earned in end-of-life care. But not all of it, leaving my professional parents suddenly wealthier at end of life. And at some point my parents will leave professional me suddenly wealthier.
There is a lot of variation here across grandparents, cousins, etc. A branch of my family is crazy rich, most are normal comfortable, some are working class. But, yeah, inheritance is kind of a big deal.
Oh for sure it is if you get it, I think the question is more how many actually get it. I am for sure upper middle class these days, my father was in the air force but then disappeared from my life. Mother was a drunk on welfare. I won’t be inheriting anything. Even had various relatives who were fairly well off, never got anything from them other than mostly useless, but sometimes presents. I doubt my wife gets anything from her parents either.
Economic class isn’t fixed by bloodline. You may be upper middle class by wealth and income, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like your father or mother were.
Well sure it is not fixed by bloodline. But despite what you might hear, the US is actually fairly socially mobile by class. Lots of people go up and down the scales. So the thesis that the upper middle class is perpetuating their grip through the uber power of inheritances looses a little bit of teeth when you have people like myself who climbed there with fairly little fuss through just being bright and working a bit hard.
I was bottom quintile probably all through youth, in income, maybe 4th quintile by "family culture" (my single mother's father had been a schoolteacher), and likely even into my 20s that was my eocnomic station in life.
But then I started applying myself in the professional world, and quickly outpaced my peers. And by my mid thirties I would guess I was living a solidly median lifetyle, and now by my early 40s my family is definitely upper-middle-class. And this is no tech start-up magic or anything. I had standard office monkey paper pusher jobs (mor eor less) until 33 when I quit and started my own thing.
Another issue with the "inherit their parent's money" issue is that most people are going to be well past fifty by the time their parents die. At that point their habits, beliefs, and lifestyles are pretty much set. If they were currently in paycheck-to-paycheck land then probably now they don't worry so much about money, but they probably also don't do anything all that different than when they were living on the edge because fifty years of habits die hard.
Nor can you use "I will inherit bignum dollars in my fifties" to justify increased spending in your twenties and thirties, because it's very easy for your parents to wind up with approxinately zero net worth at death even if they were UMC all their working lives.
I just surveyed my 4 closest friends. We were all raised middle to upper-middle class.
1 person's dad died when they were 12, they will never inherit anything of substance.
I, and my three other friends, each expect to inherit $1-4 million in 2020 dollars, based on reasonable estimates of elder care costs and current assets (we're unusually happy to discuss finances with our parents, I realize; partly that's because somehow we're all executors of our parents' estates and trusts).
We're all wealthy enough that that amount of money isn't going to impact our lifestyles at all, but it is DEFINITELY going to be the most significant individual financial event in any of our lives.
One interesting (to me) commonality about our various situations is that all of our parents continued to live very frugal lives during our childhoods and after kids left the house, and have basically just saved most of their money and invested in moderately successful businesses or just index funds since then, expenses remaining much less than wage/investment income.
It's easy for me to agree that this is not typical (I didn't pick my math geek friends at random).
But I also am willing to believe that the phenomenon is real, at some margin.
I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't.
Scott's confusion is itself a little confusing. Most people aren't going to inherit anything from their parents until they are in their 50s, 60s, or even later. (Look at Warren Buffett's children who still haven't inherited anything.)
I doubt Scott spends a lot of time around people that age to hear the conversations.
In my limited experience those inheritances tend to be generation skipping. The money goes to grandchildren. And it suffers the eternal problem of wealth partitioning. 2 kids with 2 kids each means 4 grandchildren. $3 million is pretty great for a couple but split four ways it becomes $750,000 which becomes a lot less life-changing.
"I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't."
Thus my initial request for clarification on the term :-)
Can one be in the top 2% - 3% for both income and wealth in the US and accurately score one's self as middle class (not even upper middle class)? I'm fine with a definition of middle class that goes from maybe the bottom 5% to the top 2%, but if that is what we are going to use I think it important that this be made clear :-)
My grandparents would be middle class, but not upper middle class. My parents would be middle class or upper middle class. I score myself as economically upper middle class or at the low end or rich (because in a VHCOL area the rich often drive Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas ...). My son grew up being told that (by me) that his parents were rich. Which is true, but then 'rich' doesn't mean what it seems it should mean in a VHCOL area.
*Socially* I'm middle class of some sort, with some outlier behaviors maybe (I'm signed up with Alcor for cryonic suspension, my wife and I home schooled our child K-12). My wife and I have Planet Fitness memberships, which is pretty middle (but not upper middle) class, I think.
The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
My family story is this: my wife and I are only children. My kids are the only great-grandchildren of my 4 grandparents. We also picked up inheritances from a childless aunt (with probably another on the way) and even a childless first cousin.
All of these people are middle-class to maybe bottom-end of upper-middle but I think we’re generally thrifty, good investors (I’m a professional), there are a number of life insurance policies involved that naturally accumulated value. So it all amounts to several million most likely coming our way.
Skipping a generation is common enough in how this is set up, but far from universal. It’s most likely how I’ll look to structure inheritance though, but partly because wife and I would both like to maximize grandchildren before we die and I’d like if money weren’t seen as an obstacle to that.
> The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
I spent some time at China's immensely prestigious Fudan University and made contacts with various people you might term (pre-)meritocrats there.
I also met someone studying nursing at an affiliated school. To go to nursing school, you need a standardized test score _below_ the threshold that makes you eligible for admittance to a second-rate university. (Chinese universities are formally divided into 一本 "first-rate" and 二本 "second-rate" schools. When I was looking at test scores by province [a project that didn't get very far, but was nevertheless interesting], the second-rate cutoff was at about the 40th percentile, and the first-rate cutoff was at about the 80th. But you study nursing at a 大专, a technical school, not a university.)
So we may assume that this nursing student had scored below the 40th percentile for Xinjiang (already a low-performing province) on a rigorous standardized test.
She is doing the best of any of my acquaintances, though; braggy posts on wechat show off the title to her apartment, her new Tesla, and her baby. When I asked her how she was affording these things, she reported to me that her husband is a "driver", presumably making very little money - but his parents are happy to buy things for their son's family.
I find this an interesting example of "inheritance concentration" leading irresponsible lower-class splurging behavior to result in better life outcomes than responsible upper-class prudent self-reliance.
Relevant to some other comments on this post, it also illustrates that you can easily receive a significant part of your inheritance before your parents actually die.
It's interesting that there are, so far, zero comments reporting something like "yes, my parents/grandparents passed away and left my me/my parents enough money that it changed our lives, this is definitely how it works."
I do have the opposite story -- my Family Lore is rooted in the fact that, 150 years ago, our family was "wealthy." Through intermittent occurrences of frivolous spending, alcoholism, and having >2 children at every generation, the only remainder of that wealth is the tall tales and some land holdings that are owned jointly by 30+ descendants. In other words, the lesson of my personal narrative is that wealth dilutes and dissipates over time. The counterfactual world where I inherited an "aristocratic" position instead of a middle-class-professional lifestyle seems very very far away.
Here's another more well-known narrative: John D. Rockefeller accumulated a fortune of >$1 billion in the late 19th century. The Rockefeller family wealth is now allegedly over $360 billion, which provides an example of a family that seems to have actually grown their joint wealth. However, we are now 7 generations down the line, and there are 250 direct descendants of John D. Rockefeller. If you were to simply split that pot between the 250 descendents, and then factor in inflation, it would be evident that while the Rockefeller fortune has grown remarkably, it has actually not grown fast enough to make each individual Rockefeller descendent any richer than John D. Rockefeller was. In other words, the Rockefellers have essentially only managed to break even, at best. And the Rockefellers are often touted as an example of success at the art of sustaining family wealth!
This brings about an alternative take about something else: Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons (divorces, elderly healthcare costs). It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair.
"Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons..."
I may not have been clear. I *did* get an inheritance from my father, but the inheritance wasn't the single largest financial event of my life.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair."
Maybe? My grandparent on both sides were middle class. I would score my parents as upper middle class, though maybe just more solidly middle class than my grandparents. I dunno. *I* think of myself as upper middle class, but not "rich" (even though because of living and working in a VHCOL area I probably AM rich).
The next step "up" would be "rich" as in partner in a law firm or corporate vice president or something like that. There do seem to be a limited number of slots for those positions, though, so for my son to be rich (a) he'd need to move up relative to me, and (b) a rich someone else would need their kid to miss on continuing in the rich strata.
But I'm not seeing how, to pick an example, giving my kid $500K would help him become a law partner or VP or whatever. The limiter here really seems to be more his talent and interest rather than a lack of money due to inheritance.
We could pay to send him to Harvard MBA school. But he isn't interested and neither is Harverd.
Social mobility isn't about inheriting wealth, it's about creating wealth by virtue of the greater opportunities provided by the preceding generation's incremental move up the social ladder, e.g. generation 1 is a laborer who barely makes enough to feed his family, gen 2 is a simple store owner who scraps to make sure his kid can go to college, gen 3 is a white-collar worker who sends his kid to Harvard.
Also, social mobility means moving beyond your parents' economic class. If your wealth is obtained from inheritance, then it's definitionally not going to be more than what your parents had.
A well timed inheritance from my grandmother made it possible for my parents to send me to an elite university. My parents at that time were a teacher and a journalist, and the grandmother had been a professor. It wouldn’t exactly have been “never work again” money but in combination with my parents’ savings and need based aid, it was life changing for me.
The crypto bros becoming the idea is really weird. There’s nothing that will change the mind of the Crypto bros but you will not be the new ruling class.
I remember a line from a Norman mailer book: a rich guy had died and the protagonist was enquiring about him. Why was the sendoff not better? A local dignity answered that there what are two types of millionaires. “A million dollars can buy you power and influence, or a million dollars can buy you lots of groceries. This guy was the latter. “
Well the million is dated, think 100s of millions today. Mostly crypto is lots of money without power, although SBF was trying to change that I suppose.
There is no meritocracy in Britain.
There was an increase in social mobility post war, often driven by grammar schools, but the elite positions in Britain are now back in the hands of the fee paying privately educated, more firmly than before even with the city and journalism - historically both conduits to relative wealth or comfort from the working or lower middle classes now in the hands of the elites. Heck even pop is elitist now.
The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
>The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
Even if you don't agree with them, I don't think the reasons are unexplained, or even obscure: grammar schools were and are state-run whereas private schools aren't, and "the State should not do X" is much more compatible with liberalism than "the State should forbid anyone from doing X".
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the next Labour government strip private schools of their charitable status.
Local authorities were allowed to keep them open if they wanted to. Only conservative ones, ie. ones
with wealthier voters, did. That means the system became *more* unequal, because it was no longer the case that everyone had access to the grammar schools,
and only people in wealthier areas did.
On the other hand...academies.
"An academy is an independent state school governed by the Academy Agreement it makes with the Department for Education, and at that point it severs connections with the local education authority. The current advisory text is the Academy and free school: master funding agreement dated March 2018.[22][23] The governors of the academy are obliged to publish an annual report and accounts, that are open to scrutiny and inspections.[24]
All academies are expected to follow a broad and balanced curriculum but many have a particular focus on, or formal specialism in, one or more areas such as science; arts; business and enterprise; computing; engineering; mathematics; modern foreign languages; performing arts; sport; or technology. Although academies are required to follow some aspects of the National Curriculum,[25] they are otherwise free to innovate; however, as they participate in the same Key Stage 3 and GCSE exams as other English schools, they teach a curriculum very similar other schools, with only small variations.[26]"
The Labour Government under Tony Blair established academies through the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
The old joke was that the Labour Party did it for equality - for the teachers. The secondary modern teachers didn't like the grammar teachers looking down on them.
In real terms, meritocracy isn't egalitarian, and the justification was partly that everyone was starting to look down on the secondary modern kids, partly that the middle class kids were playing the system in order to stuff the grammar schools with their own kids and defeating the whole point of the system.
It’s interesting that people took only the last sentence to task - the end of British meritocracy not causing any ire.
The answer is that the State could reduce subsidies to the extent that nearly everybody is priced out. However my preference would be keeping both private schools and grammars. The last ship has sailed.
Being American, I have no notion of a meritocracy emerging from *anything other than* private school, or its functional equivalent, the "top public high school".
In the American context, the idea that competitive schools would ever lift substantial numbers of those at the bottom, or in the bottom half, or perhaps in the bottom three-quarters - is not supported. Competitive schools would either be expensive and private; or located in an area of expensive homes to which you would be zoned, so while not competitive to get into based on merit, would be quite competitive once in; or occasionally, "magnet" schools that require (or did) testing would be located in a lower SE area in the interest of geographic equity. One such school was in my town, housed in the normal (badly performing) high school - a sign of the latter's performance was that it was renamed several times. The kids in the magnet were indeed bused from areas that had better high schools - but the magnet, to some parents, was better still, being selective. This magnet "side" sailed along, winning prizes, no need for a name change, well-regarded - until, ultimately, there were complaints that the two schools were strictly in parallel and had no commonality, and the magnet school was kicked out.
Competitive schools will certainly lift a few individuals, that is surely true. It depends on whether one can tolerate that something can be more to one, than it is to a hundred.
Working class families do sometimes get their kids into the selective schools--famously, this happens among first-generation East Asian immigrants whose parents are both working some shit job.
Or, alternatively, I guess my view is that the meritocracy is the word we use for the churn within a rather small slice of humanity. Thus, I vaguely recall - notwithstanding the slaughter of some of their members, and whatever losses they sustained, lots of the families on top and on the make in the reign of Louis XVI, had quite miraculously recovered their position by the 1850s.
I feel like I read something similar re the Cultural Revolution but I do sometimes get things exactly backward.
This was the old argument from "The Rise of the Meritocracy" (which coined the term): even if you had a meritocracy, you'd end up creating a quasi-hereditary regime with a small amount of movement up and down because general intelligence is hereditary.
I would have thought that this was the most anti American ideology. The ideology of the US, in opposition to Europe, was that anybody could make. The president could be born in a log cabin.
It's less black and white than the end of meritocracy. The comprehensives were supposed to subsume the function of the grammars, hence the name. In areas that held on to grammars, that didn't happen, but they still had grammars.
Why were the comprehensives unsuccessful at replacing the grammars exactly? (This is all as baffling as cricket to me.) And if the grammars should have been left alone, who exactly was the enemy of this postwar meritocracy?
The grammars were academically selective. The comprehensives are not.
There are some very good comprehensive schools, but they now select by wealth (house prices), which is perhaps a less accurate and more unfair proxy for academic ability.
In areas without grammars, the best comp becomes a pseudo gramamr. In areas with survive grammars, comps become pseudo secondary moderns. There are a lot of organic effects and unintended consequences here.
Some local authorities ignored the dept of education and kept their grammars because they were popular with voters. Central government could only influence them via funding. The grammar I went to was noticeably not well funded.
Scott writes: "You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened."
There seem to be lots of people frustrated with not being able to get ahead to the degree they expected, especially in the PMC. There's a general mood of social pessimism, which Turchin usually says corresponds to elite overproduction.
Suppose that calibration is possible, in the sense that an external observer can observe different people, gauge their intelligence/competence, make predictions about their future earning+status potential, and have those predictions borne out on average. But suppose further that people's self-evaluations are overly optimistic, so that even if they apply the same downstream prediction architecture, their inputs are skewed so as to predict an unrealistic level of success. Does this indicate elite overproduction? For that matter, does it even require an explanation, or is it as simple as everyone thinking they're an above-average driver?
I do wonder just how many people can actually sit down and say to themselves "I'm in the top 5% but not the top 1%" and be accurate.
The more likely universal response is "I'm better than this." Which leads to Turchin's overproduction - a lot of people with a lot of education, but not educated to do the jobs that need doing.
When I was in high school (early 2000s, UK), the government had a policy of getting 50% (!) of young people into university, and I remember being regularly propagandised about how getting a degree would be great, it would open so many doors, I'd be able to shoot straight to the top in any business area of my choice, etc.
Of course, this all turned out to be BS, and the reality is that I ended up doing basically the same sorts of jobs as my parents had done with their A-levels (the qualifications you get from school at age 18). The mismatch between what I'd been sold and what I actually got is, I will admit, somewhat frustrating.
(And no, I don't think "You should have realised, at age 16/17, that society in general and your schools and teachers in particular were lying to you" is a reasonable response. Schoolchildren just don't generally have to sort of life experience to recognise that sort of thing.)
Honestly just the shitty messaging we have 80s and on kids about their life prospects. You can be anything you want even if you are a midwit if you just apply yourself.
Which you know isn’t true. I think way too many people who were fundamentally just bog standard Americans were raised thinking they were future somebodies.
The feeling when I was a girl was that there was pretty much a two-tier hierarchy of things to do - with the 60s over and done with, essentially no thought given to a well-lived life except that motherhood and household management were indisputably the lowest - essentially shameful, in one of those interesting inversions. However, there was no hierarchy of ability, of course; so the result was a sort of homogenization of outcome really. Perhaps a very small contributor to the way the world seems overall grayer with the passage of time, a phenomenon difficult to separate from one's own aging of course, so tending to get a discussion-stopping retort of "you think there was a good old days?", etc.
A lot of schools tell their students to "Go out and change the world!" as some kind of empowerment attempt, but I just think it's true. Statistically, only a tiny number of people will ever change the world in any meaningful way; if you encourage children to think of that as the baseline for living a successful life, you condemn the vast majority of them to frustration and disappointment.
It is true that the correlation between wealth and partisanship has weakened in the past decades, due to rising educational polarisation, and it wouldn't amaze me if it vanished or even reversed in the future, but it hasn't done so yet.
The more plausible claim is that Democrats are the party of the professional/managerial class while the Republicans are the party of the petit bourgeois small business people. Both of these groups have six figure salaries, but the latter don’t feel as rich as the former and don’t donate $200 to their favored candidates.
P(Democrat) = (Education) + (Extent of prejudice against your demographic) + (# people living within a mile of you) - (Wealth) -(Age)
At first glance, this would imply that being Republican would correlate strongly with being rich, but because wealth correlates strongly with education, the correlation between being Republican and being rich, while positive, is actually only weak.
This would imply that retired professional sportsmen would be mostly Republican: they are rich, older (note the "retired") and not well-educated.
And, if you look at white professional sportsmen, they don't face lots of prejudice, and they are mostly Republicans. Even African-Americans are a lot more Republican than other African-Americans.
Yeah, seems pretty solid.
I guess the exception is largely people working entertainment: lots of rich popstars and actors and the like are Democrats in spite of their poor educations and wealth.
Entertainment seems to be a job area where most people are in it for non-monetary rewards.
In the movie Idiocracry, there's a running joke about a really popular actor whose thing is to get kicked in the groin a lot. If you asked him (when he's rolling around) why he doesn't quit, he would probably say something like "What? And give up show business?"
The Democrats are also the party of African Americans and Hispanic Americans, so that's going to have a huge impact on average incomes. You'd need to specifically look at White Democrats vs White Republicans.
It says that according to IRS data, in 1990, Republican districts were richer than Democrat districts. Today it's reversed: "Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more".
Not really sure how to square these dueling stats, but obviously the threshold is different ($500k household income) and the data collection method is different.
I think the thing about /districts/ is probably true but misleading - I've seen it from several sources. But stats on individuals pretty consistently point the other way, except possibly in the far right tail, so I guess it's an urban/rural thing where cities have lots of poor people and a few super-rich ones and vote Democratic, and the country is lower variance and votes Republican.
Edit: I'm wondering if the difference is household vs individual income. If Republican voters tend to have more traditional, single-income households, you'd expect to see a smaller proportion of rich Republicans on studies that look at household income and a larger proportion for studies that use individual income. E.g. if you and your spouse vote Democrat and both earn $80k, you'd be included in the $100k+ household income group, but not the $100k individual income group.
The way incomes are distributed makes this effect much stronger. There are a lot more individuals earning $50k-$100k than there are people earning over $100k. Therefore a lot of two-income households will clear a $100k household income threshold and a lot of single-income households won't.
The Democrats are the party of the upper middle classes and the lower classes. But there are more of the latter than the former so they average out to poorer. The Republicans are the party of the middle classes so they're somewhat above average. You add in age polarization and that's how you get to a wealthier Republican base despite winning the poorer parts of the country. And the very wealthy might lean one way or another overall but mostly it's a case by case basis. Lots of Republican and Democrat billionaires.
This is actually a pretty normal pattern. It dates back at least to the 17th century where the middle classes and lower aristocrats fought against an alliance of the crown and its bureaucrats plus the lower classes. And the nobles split into factions. So while the statement might be technically false it's gesturing in a true-ish direction. It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
>It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
That's certainly true of the way the word is used here in the UK - the classic example of someone super-rich who parses as lower-class to UK eyes is Donald Trump - but a decade ago my impression was that when Americans use the word money is a larger part of it. I think that may have changed a bit in the past ten or twenty years, though?
I think that Americans are much more conscious of the difference between the guy who makes $400,000 a year because he owns five carlots in an exurb somewhere and the woman who makes $400,000 a year because she is a corporate lawyer.
I don't think they really get that the rich guy who behaves like he's lower-class is lower-class (like, as you say, Trump).
Americans mostly don't have a proper concept of social vs economic class. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in their society, it means they're not aware of it and it causes all sorts of problems.
They have contempt for a man who has a lot of money but exhibits lower-class tastes but they're not quite sure why. They guess it must be some kind of moral failing on his part.
There is an old British style American aristocracy, mostly on the east coast. But they began their slide into irrelevance with the American Revolution when much of their structural support was removed. Nowadays they're barely relevant even in their local regions.
Americans are less aware of class for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves middle class. And class has less impact on day to day preferences than in places like Europe. For example, there's no American equivalent to fox hunting or horse racing. Most upper class and lower class Americans have relatively similar habits in terms of entertainment, dress, etc. Richer Americans have nicer suits or bigger tvs. But it's a different of degree rather than kind.
But lastly, the American class system is vastly more fluid and complicated than the British one. Unlike most class systems that you have to be born into the American class system is based on education, profession, wealth, and mannerisms. And what matters depends on where you are. For example, wealth is relatively more important in New York City and fame relatively more important in LA. Engineers are relatively low status in much of the country but that's not true on the West Coast. Midwest, and the South. (This isn't recent either: Hoover was an engineer and came from California.) And so on.
The system does exist. Donald Trump is the same over here: a rich lower class guy (or at least that's his pose). But he's that way not because of his birth but because of his mannerisms and profession. (He had wealth and education which is why he coded as nouveau riche instead of a lower class slob.)
Likewise the system is relatively open. An American can simply join the upper classes if they adopt the right mannerisms, have enough money, etc. The Clintons are probably the closest the American left has to royalty at this point. But one of them was the son of a single mother and the other the daughter of a small business owner. Likewise you have a lot of elites who protest they came from a poor background. And it's often true. But Americans have accurately divined the poor kid who goes to the right schools, has the right mannerisms, and makes a lot of money IS part of the upper class without reservation in the US.
PS: This is all modulo the success of specific classes at reproducing themselves by passing along education, social customs, wealth, etc.
He probably should have said "rich normalizing for age, sex, and race." My impression is that for a given race, sex, and age, the richer you are the more you think Democrats speak to you, and the poorer you are the more tuned in to the Republican message you are.
Around here youngish brown female City Council members and NGO lawyers with good salaries think our top priorities should be rooting out prejudice and subsidizing higher education, but the brown middle-age male gardeners and drywall biz owners who live and die by deals and contracts want the government to stop fucking with their livelihood via pandemic ukases or licensing and environmental requirements, and they're not especially excited about allowing Mexican gangs to import street enforcers by just having them walk across an open border.
But when you mix together income, age, sex. and race, it's a big muddle, because younger people (who are almost always left) are usually poorer, black people are almost always poorer, brown people are sometimes poorer, brown and black people get special treatment by Democratic policies, and when it comes to men and women...well, who can explain *that* weird decision by The Creator?
Because it definitely isn't true for education - controlling for education strengthens the correlation between being rich and Republican - and I'm deeply sceptical about most of the other controls weakening it.
I think this isn't a hard phenomenon to explain - the obvious answer is the correct one.
Democrats favour policies which advance the economic interests of the poor, and are thus a majority among poorer-than-average people, and do less badly with people rich enough that they no longer care than they do with people richer than average but not ludicrously rich, while Republicans favour policies that advance the economic interests of the rich, and are thus a majority among richer-than-average people, especially but not exclusively those who aren't super rich.
But, because those facts are embarrassing to Republicans, there's a cottage industry that's sprung up around trying to deny or obfuscate them and claim the politically-valuable underdog card.
Sure, I just told you it was my experience. So that's 50+ years of observing a few hundred people and getting to know their attitudes. Whether it would hold up if we interviewed hundreds of thousands of people in a carefully controlled nationwide study I don't know, but obviously my priors would be that it does, because otherwise I have to believe my experience is weirdly idiosyncratic. Similarly, to seriously consider an alternative hypothesis, I would need some persuasive evidence.
It's been a long time in my experience since Democrat top policy preferences have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the poor -- at least, of the working poor. Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, affirmative action, unrestricted immigration, environmental regulation that makes pushes up the prices of utilities, transportation, or household appliances, are all things that negatively impact the economic interests of the working poor -- and the latter know that very well. That's why those policies are not popular among people who are trying to scratch out a living and get a little bit ahead, and why Democrats find it always necessary to couple their policy proposals with increasingly grandiose proposals for subsidies and class warfare FUD. I mean, go ahead and find some Central Valley immigrant family trying to save up to buy a little farmland of their own who are thrilled about the CARB mandate to only buy EVs after 2035 if you can. They can be (and if it comes to pass undoubtably will be) bought off by a subsidy sufficiently generous, but if the underlying policy were popular they wouldn't have to be.
It's also been a long time since the Republican policies have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the rich. The rich these days generally want a heavy regulatory state that raises the costs of entry of potential competitors, so they can stay atop the heap. The rich enjoy unequal access to the writers of law, so these days they prefer a big powerful government that can write law that freezes in place their domination. They're fine with high taxes -- which they can readily afford -- so long as what the government funds with those taxes benefits them, e.g. comes back as subsidies for the industries in which they work, or salaries for jobs they or their Stanford JD or Harvard MBA kids might take.
> Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position.
I recently listened to a good chunk of the Revolutions podcast, which I'm guessing many people here are familiar with. One of the points the author makes is that revolutions do require the complicity of part of the ruling class. Basically, a united ruling class will generally be able to smack down any threat to its hegemony. If the regime in power becomes too sclerotic to respond to changing circumstances, a united ruling class will stage a coup, which is not the same as a revolution. True revolutions happen when there is a fissure in the ruling class, and one faction unites with a mass movement to restructure the system. There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
I don't want to over-analogize the French Revolution to the Harvard admissions office. But I think the general point stands that the interests of the "ruling class" can be cross-pressured.
It might not be "over-analogizing" so much as seeing the Harvard stuff as at a much later point in an unfolding chain that (sort of) begins with the French Revolution/Industrial Revolution/capitalism. What I took away from the Revolutions podcast is that it was the first real attack launched by the nascent professional managerial class (look how many of the leaders were lawyers! Liberal democrat parliaments & legislatures = still dominated by lawyers). Brooks unwittingly (or lazily, imho) gives the impression that the WASPs were an "aristocracy" overthrown by the PMC, but they were haute bourgeoise, not aristocrats.
>There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
It's worth noting here as an illustration that Napoleon Bonaparte's family had been officially classified as noble (nobility was a fuzzy concept in 18th century Corsica, but the Buonaparte family made the list when France took over and had to figure out who belonged to which estate), and had received his military education thanks to a scholarship for children of impecunious noble families.
>But eventually the rate of wealth creation got so out of hand that new millionaires were being minted faster than the upper class could co-opt them
There was also a step change in inheritance tax, meaning that British landowners would see their assets shrinking each generation...unless they found something more profitable than agriculture to invest in. So it was a two way process... successful industrialists would be given titles, but successful aristocrats would invest in industry. By no means all were successful: a number of great families could not adapt, and withered away.
>Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their positio
They don't entirely sit in their hands, but they don't entirely adapt either.
I'm sure it is real. I was questioning Scott's (initial) claim for common-ness.
Googling keeps coming up with this: "The average for the most wealthy [*] 1% [in the USA] reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200."
I'm going to assert a useful definition is that the most wealthy 1% in the US are not upper middle class, but are rich :-)
So we have an average of a bit under $200K for the next block that seem reasonable to consider as containing the upper middle class. And the bottom of this is probably "just" middle class?
So ... we don't particularly care about the average here as the curve is very skewed ...
So ... maybe we care about the top 4 percentage points of the 1% - 10% range and then want to know the median? Or the number inheriting more than $250K? Or $500K?
*Typical* cannot realistically be over $1M for that group, there just isn't enough money to go around.
[*] I cannot tell if the 1% here are the 1% most wealthy (dead) parents or the most 1% most wealthy people getting an inheritance. There is probably moderately high correlation in any event, but ???
"In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good)."
Interestingly, seniority (like primogeniture) also has a solution to this! If you're son #3, you do not expect to inherit, and probably have a downward mobility job lined up from family tradition ("we send our third sons to the navy"), and absent murdering your elder brothers, there's not a way to succeed by sacrificing more.
[Some monasteries assign status by seniority, a little because older people are wiser, and mostly because people can't affect how quickly they age, and so a potential source of conflict is out of their hands.]
I can't wait for a latter-day Carmina Burana to be written by the tonsured second sons of SV elites. Unless we send them with a monthly remittance to colonise Mars.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
The one time I remember hearing about this was when a family member got divorced, and it happened to be right before their spouse's parent died and left them millions of dollars. (So if the divorce had happened a bit later, they would have gotten half of the inheritance, which was the point people talked about; I imagine it would have gone unmentioned otherwise.)
It's been a topic of conversation between myself and my parents (not just their will, but also inheritances from my grandparents)--blunted in importance, from my perspective, by the high probability that they and I die at the same time.
Why do you expect that they and you will die at the same time? Given where we are commenting, I presume because you believe in some kind of imminent AI apocalypse?
In almost every state in the US, inheritances left to one spouse are typically *not* subject to being split in divorces. So the timing probably didn’t matter.
Probably a static number when Scott wrote that part of this post. If I were putting together a "Highlights from the Comments" post for something, I expect I'd compile it gradually as I read interesting or otherwise notable comments, not write it all at once right before posting it.
> I am less sure about this one. “Elite overproduction” means there are more aspiring elites than elite positions. But what is an “aspiring elite”?
We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out. The archetypical coffee barista with a degree in media studies.
I think if your ever looking for "elite overproduction" look for that mismatch between what people were raised to expect and what they got and you'll find it.
> Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals.
This strikes me as utterly wrong. If you have a small group who a) all know each other, b) all can benefit from rent seeking, and c) are protected from threats outside their clique. They won't stop each other rent seeking because of rivalries. They'll collude to rent seek on an unimaginable scale.
> We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out.
This; and also the fraction of people who go to universities is growing, and there is grade inflation. So the kids not only got to universities, but they are often straight A students... and still can't find a good job.
(At some moment they may realize that a plumber makes more than 2x the money they do. Then they might start screaming that it is not fair that the system does not reward intelligent people who spent lot of time and money getting their education.)
Theoretically, the government/accrediting organisations should impose minimum standards, although they have various incentives not to (putting people into more education keeps them off the unemployment lists, for example).
I mean, to the extent that slave-owning is an economic rent (and literal rent is an economic rent), then yes. I wouldn't oversell the making money from politics angle though - you could squeeze people a bit, in the lower and sub-magistracy offices your patron would finance you, but higher up you'd spend so much money on games and bribes you'd probably make a loss. Grain captains could do a lot better for themselves, but weren't elite positions.
In a healthy, open oligarchy society will be set up in such a way as to benefit the oligarchs but personal enrichment through the state is comparatively rare - your fellow oligarchs have all the money, so it's more like agreeing to sit on a homeowners' association to manage the country for your peers. The modern world is different, because everything has to be squashed into the shape as a fake democratic republic even when that's totally unnatural for the society in question.
Obviously there are questions of bias, but literary sources from the Late Republican period suggest that governors could be extremely corrupt, and that this was widely recognised as a problem. Supposedly Gaius Verres said that a governor needed three years in office: one to pay back his creditors, one to bribe the jurors in the inevitable corruption trial, and one to get rich.
It also probably didn't help that the Roman government tended to subcontract out the gathering of taxes to private companies, which were incentivised to squeeze the provincials for all they were worth. (Basically, the companies would pay for the right to collect taxes from a certain province, and then have to make up the sum by collecting them. Any extra was taken as profit.) There's a reason why the Gospels use "sinners and tax collectors" almost as a hendiadys.
Erusian's comment misses some basic facts about British applications (that I know because experienced them). I had to go through all the replies to it, because I couldn't quite believe that nobody had said anything.
In the UK, you can only apply to five universities. That's it, that's what you can do in a year. There are very limited exceptions if all of those five reject you, but every kid who in America would be applying to fifteen or more schools (AKA almost everyone from an elite background seriously looking at Ivies without a legacy or a truly absurd application) can only apply to five. So if you want a safety school, three uncertain unis, and Oxbridge, you can go for that. But it's *risky* in a way that it isn't in the US.
On top of that, UK applications are much more test-score dependent, and test scores are known in advance. In the US, I can tell someone I think they're a weak applicant relative to the standard that I expect Harvard has, but there's a lot of variation for what Harvard's standard happens to be depending on who reads the application, what the rest of the incoming class looks like, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. In the UK, you can count. They will tell you explicitly on the website what numbers they want, and if you don't have the numbers you don't bother, because you only have five schools.
To compare the acceptance rate of two schools under these wildly different systems is pointless. I'd also reference Tanner Greer's point that, as US political and business power have nationalized, becoming prominent among the national elite at an Ivy is now much more important than building a strong network and connections in your community at the local or state Good Enough University. To this day, if you want to do politics in Alabama the advice is to go to the University of Alabama and join the right fraternity. But in most of the country that has shattered, increasing demand by the elites to go to the nationally best-connected and best-regarded schools.
The other difference with the US is that nobody knows going in if the applicant is going to walk out with a degree in astrophys or medieval lit. This means that the physics departments over there don't get to handle their own admissions but rather have to deal with who the university as a whole picks.
That depends on the university. At my undergraduate Alma Mater (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, part of the California State University system), each "College' of the University had its own separate admissions criteria. You had to declare a first and second choice major when applying, and you'd be assigned one of these if admitted. Once you're in, it was usually pretty easy to change majors within a College, but there was a really high bar to switching to a different College.
"Colleges" in this context being administrative subdivisions of the University, each consisting of several thematically-related departments. The Colleges at Cal Poly being Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering, Math and Science, Liberal Arts, and Business.
4th constitution!
2nd is after civil war.
3rd is after new deal.
4th is after identity politics becomes government policy (via 60s civil rights laws)
"For most upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money will be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it."
I think of myself as upper middle class. My parents are divorced and my father is dead so I know how that inheritance played out. My mom will be leaving me very little (partially because her second husband has a child that will benefit from the money much more than any of his siblings or my siblings and I). The inheritance won't be even CLOSE to the biggest financial event of my life. I don't think I'm unusual. Maybe I am?
Or ... maybe my definition of upper middle class is off (but then I'd be rich, rather than middle-middle class ...). Or maybe my situation is unusual? I'd like to see any vaguely reasonable numbers for Scott's claim (and maybe clarification about who qualifies for upper middle class).
Neither of my grandmothers left any substantial inheritance their kids (and grandpas went first).
Nursing home care is very expensive and the government won’t cover it until you’re basically destitute. My guess is that will eat away any typical middle class inheritance pretty quickly.
Please note that you can place your house in a trust so that you do not legally own it for Medicaid eligibility purposes. My (upper-middle class) grandparents (middle-middle class) have done this.
Do they live in Massachusetts? I think this may be a unique arrangement there.
No, this is New York.
Yes but there is a 10 year clawback so you have to do it when you are healthy. Most people miss this window.
Actually my parents just recently did this, and this is the first time I've seen this trick mentioned anywhere.
You're right, this notion is complete nonsense. According to this:
https://dqydj.com/retirement-savings-by-age/
The average savings for boomers is ~200k. Even the 99th percentile is under 3M. Add in stuff like retirement consumption, rest home costs, and the fact that most people have more than one child and you realize that not even the richest 1% are getting seven figures from their parents.
EDIT: Fair enough, this isn't total net worth. Apparently the 1% level for net worth is around $10M. But the 10% level (i.e. upper middle class) is ~$1M and a source on inheritances (link below in thread) claims that a 90th percentile inheritance is around 200k so I think my general point mostly holds - a typical upper middle class person doesn't have their lifestyle affected much by inherited wealth.
But presumably if the average savings is $200,000, and the average Boomers have two kids, then the average Millennial will inherit $100,000, which is a pretty upper middle class annual income. Presumably the actual upper middle class are quite a bit above the average, and while the inheritance isn’t likely to be seven figures, it’s still likely to be the largest financial event in one’s life (getting several years income in a single chunk).
Yeah but by the time they inherit the dough it won't even buy a minivan to schlep around the teenagers, still less the fuel it burns in a year or two.
Yeah, as best I can tell from simple web searches, a typical upper middle class person might get something like a year's salary via inheritance. Which is nice and all, but not life changing and certainly not behind any sort of wealth-gap of the sort hinted at by the comment Scott was replying to there.
You're looking at "retirement savings", not net worth.
According to this page https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net-worth-of-the-1.aspx, the cutoff net worth to be in the top 1% in the US is $11.1 million, while the cutoff net worth to be in the top 10% is $1.2 million. That, honestly, sounds more plausible to me than your numbers (given that a lot of houses are worth over a million dollars these days in HCOL and even MCOL areas). And bear in mind this is across all age groups, so the average net worth of the top 10% at their time of death is probably higher.
Fair enough, the data that I used didn't count total net worth. But according to this (can't vouch for the data, it was just the first google hit): https://www.annuity.org/retirement/estate-planning/average-inheritance , "The average for the most wealthy 1% reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200." I dunno if the discrepancy between your numbers and these is methodological or if there are big end-of-life costs not accounted for. Also according to this: https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/ top 10% by net worth is 850k (5% is only 1 mil).
So I dunno. The data seem somewhat fuzzy, but these two links back up my intuition that most upper-middle class folks don't inherit seven figures.
At the risk of really getting into the weeds here, that seems to be the average size of an inheritance, not an estate. Inheritances of course get split between children, but they may also include token amounts given to other relatives. If you give a million bucks to each of your two children, but also leave a token $5000 to your six nieces and nephews and five grandchildren, then that's ... well, I can't be bothered doing the maths right now, but you get the idea. The average will be brought down by small inheritances given to "lesser" relatives.
Yeah, I think this idea that there are huge sums of money passing over generations for non-elites assumes that people continue working long after they have the means to retire, and/or don't adjust their lifestyle in proportion to their retirement funds.
I would also describe myself as middle (maybe upper middle) class, but don't expect a huge windfall inheritance, either.
Thanks, I've slightly toned down my wording in the post due to this.
I feel like my family is a counterpoint, at least of sorts. Great grandparents were the immigrant success story of coming to America, working in the factory, eventually owning the factory. Then kids (my grandparents) realized that factories weren't such a hot prospect, took the intergenerational wealth and built it up through investing (stocks, real estate). They were not fantastically rich, just sort of regular rich, and they did indeed burn a lot of what they earned in end-of-life care. But not all of it, leaving my professional parents suddenly wealthier at end of life. And at some point my parents will leave professional me suddenly wealthier.
There is a lot of variation here across grandparents, cousins, etc. A branch of my family is crazy rich, most are normal comfortable, some are working class. But, yeah, inheritance is kind of a big deal.
Oh for sure it is if you get it, I think the question is more how many actually get it. I am for sure upper middle class these days, my father was in the air force but then disappeared from my life. Mother was a drunk on welfare. I won’t be inheriting anything. Even had various relatives who were fairly well off, never got anything from them other than mostly useless, but sometimes presents. I doubt my wife gets anything from her parents either.
Economic class isn’t fixed by bloodline. You may be upper middle class by wealth and income, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like your father or mother were.
Well sure it is not fixed by bloodline. But despite what you might hear, the US is actually fairly socially mobile by class. Lots of people go up and down the scales. So the thesis that the upper middle class is perpetuating their grip through the uber power of inheritances looses a little bit of teeth when you have people like myself who climbed there with fairly little fuss through just being bright and working a bit hard.
I was bottom quintile probably all through youth, in income, maybe 4th quintile by "family culture" (my single mother's father had been a schoolteacher), and likely even into my 20s that was my eocnomic station in life.
But then I started applying myself in the professional world, and quickly outpaced my peers. And by my mid thirties I would guess I was living a solidly median lifetyle, and now by my early 40s my family is definitely upper-middle-class. And this is no tech start-up magic or anything. I had standard office monkey paper pusher jobs (mor eor less) until 33 when I quit and started my own thing.
Another issue with the "inherit their parent's money" issue is that most people are going to be well past fifty by the time their parents die. At that point their habits, beliefs, and lifestyles are pretty much set. If they were currently in paycheck-to-paycheck land then probably now they don't worry so much about money, but they probably also don't do anything all that different than when they were living on the edge because fifty years of habits die hard.
Nor can you use "I will inherit bignum dollars in my fifties" to justify increased spending in your twenties and thirties, because it's very easy for your parents to wind up with approxinately zero net worth at death even if they were UMC all their working lives.
I just surveyed my 4 closest friends. We were all raised middle to upper-middle class.
1 person's dad died when they were 12, they will never inherit anything of substance.
I, and my three other friends, each expect to inherit $1-4 million in 2020 dollars, based on reasonable estimates of elder care costs and current assets (we're unusually happy to discuss finances with our parents, I realize; partly that's because somehow we're all executors of our parents' estates and trusts).
We're all wealthy enough that that amount of money isn't going to impact our lifestyles at all, but it is DEFINITELY going to be the most significant individual financial event in any of our lives.
One interesting (to me) commonality about our various situations is that all of our parents continued to live very frugal lives during our childhoods and after kids left the house, and have basically just saved most of their money and invested in moderately successful businesses or just index funds since then, expenses remaining much less than wage/investment income.
It's easy for me to agree that this is not typical (I didn't pick my math geek friends at random).
But I also am willing to believe that the phenomenon is real, at some margin.
I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't.
Scott's confusion is itself a little confusing. Most people aren't going to inherit anything from their parents until they are in their 50s, 60s, or even later. (Look at Warren Buffett's children who still haven't inherited anything.)
I doubt Scott spends a lot of time around people that age to hear the conversations.
In my limited experience those inheritances tend to be generation skipping. The money goes to grandchildren. And it suffers the eternal problem of wealth partitioning. 2 kids with 2 kids each means 4 grandchildren. $3 million is pretty great for a couple but split four ways it becomes $750,000 which becomes a lot less life-changing.
"I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't."
Thus my initial request for clarification on the term :-)
Can one be in the top 2% - 3% for both income and wealth in the US and accurately score one's self as middle class (not even upper middle class)? I'm fine with a definition of middle class that goes from maybe the bottom 5% to the top 2%, but if that is what we are going to use I think it important that this be made clear :-)
My grandparents would be middle class, but not upper middle class. My parents would be middle class or upper middle class. I score myself as economically upper middle class or at the low end or rich (because in a VHCOL area the rich often drive Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas ...). My son grew up being told that (by me) that his parents were rich. Which is true, but then 'rich' doesn't mean what it seems it should mean in a VHCOL area.
*Socially* I'm middle class of some sort, with some outlier behaviors maybe (I'm signed up with Alcor for cryonic suspension, my wife and I home schooled our child K-12). My wife and I have Planet Fitness memberships, which is pretty middle (but not upper middle) class, I think.
The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
My family story is this: my wife and I are only children. My kids are the only great-grandchildren of my 4 grandparents. We also picked up inheritances from a childless aunt (with probably another on the way) and even a childless first cousin.
All of these people are middle-class to maybe bottom-end of upper-middle but I think we’re generally thrifty, good investors (I’m a professional), there are a number of life insurance policies involved that naturally accumulated value. So it all amounts to several million most likely coming our way.
Skipping a generation is common enough in how this is set up, but far from universal. It’s most likely how I’ll look to structure inheritance though, but partly because wife and I would both like to maximize grandchildren before we die and I’d like if money weren’t seen as an obstacle to that.
For some reason can’t edit: along with life insurance policies, I meant homes that naturally accumulated value.
> The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
I spent some time at China's immensely prestigious Fudan University and made contacts with various people you might term (pre-)meritocrats there.
I also met someone studying nursing at an affiliated school. To go to nursing school, you need a standardized test score _below_ the threshold that makes you eligible for admittance to a second-rate university. (Chinese universities are formally divided into 一本 "first-rate" and 二本 "second-rate" schools. When I was looking at test scores by province [a project that didn't get very far, but was nevertheless interesting], the second-rate cutoff was at about the 40th percentile, and the first-rate cutoff was at about the 80th. But you study nursing at a 大专, a technical school, not a university.)
So we may assume that this nursing student had scored below the 40th percentile for Xinjiang (already a low-performing province) on a rigorous standardized test.
She is doing the best of any of my acquaintances, though; braggy posts on wechat show off the title to her apartment, her new Tesla, and her baby. When I asked her how she was affording these things, she reported to me that her husband is a "driver", presumably making very little money - but his parents are happy to buy things for their son's family.
I find this an interesting example of "inheritance concentration" leading irresponsible lower-class splurging behavior to result in better life outcomes than responsible upper-class prudent self-reliance.
Relevant to some other comments on this post, it also illustrates that you can easily receive a significant part of your inheritance before your parents actually die.
It's interesting that there are, so far, zero comments reporting something like "yes, my parents/grandparents passed away and left my me/my parents enough money that it changed our lives, this is definitely how it works."
I do have the opposite story -- my Family Lore is rooted in the fact that, 150 years ago, our family was "wealthy." Through intermittent occurrences of frivolous spending, alcoholism, and having >2 children at every generation, the only remainder of that wealth is the tall tales and some land holdings that are owned jointly by 30+ descendants. In other words, the lesson of my personal narrative is that wealth dilutes and dissipates over time. The counterfactual world where I inherited an "aristocratic" position instead of a middle-class-professional lifestyle seems very very far away.
Here's another more well-known narrative: John D. Rockefeller accumulated a fortune of >$1 billion in the late 19th century. The Rockefeller family wealth is now allegedly over $360 billion, which provides an example of a family that seems to have actually grown their joint wealth. However, we are now 7 generations down the line, and there are 250 direct descendants of John D. Rockefeller. If you were to simply split that pot between the 250 descendents, and then factor in inflation, it would be evident that while the Rockefeller fortune has grown remarkably, it has actually not grown fast enough to make each individual Rockefeller descendent any richer than John D. Rockefeller was. In other words, the Rockefellers have essentially only managed to break even, at best. And the Rockefellers are often touted as an example of success at the art of sustaining family wealth!
This brings about an alternative take about something else: Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons (divorces, elderly healthcare costs). It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair.
"Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons..."
I may not have been clear. I *did* get an inheritance from my father, but the inheritance wasn't the single largest financial event of my life.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair."
Maybe? My grandparent on both sides were middle class. I would score my parents as upper middle class, though maybe just more solidly middle class than my grandparents. I dunno. *I* think of myself as upper middle class, but not "rich" (even though because of living and working in a VHCOL area I probably AM rich).
The next step "up" would be "rich" as in partner in a law firm or corporate vice president or something like that. There do seem to be a limited number of slots for those positions, though, so for my son to be rich (a) he'd need to move up relative to me, and (b) a rich someone else would need their kid to miss on continuing in the rich strata.
But I'm not seeing how, to pick an example, giving my kid $500K would help him become a law partner or VP or whatever. The limiter here really seems to be more his talent and interest rather than a lack of money due to inheritance.
We could pay to send him to Harvard MBA school. But he isn't interested and neither is Harverd.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder"
Social mobility isn't about inheriting wealth, it's about creating wealth by virtue of the greater opportunities provided by the preceding generation's incremental move up the social ladder, e.g. generation 1 is a laborer who barely makes enough to feed his family, gen 2 is a simple store owner who scraps to make sure his kid can go to college, gen 3 is a white-collar worker who sends his kid to Harvard.
Also, social mobility means moving beyond your parents' economic class. If your wealth is obtained from inheritance, then it's definitionally not going to be more than what your parents had.
A well timed inheritance from my grandmother made it possible for my parents to send me to an elite university. My parents at that time were a teacher and a journalist, and the grandmother had been a professor. It wouldn’t exactly have been “never work again” money but in combination with my parents’ savings and need based aid, it was life changing for me.
The crypto bros becoming the idea is really weird. There’s nothing that will change the mind of the Crypto bros but you will not be the new ruling class.
I remember a line from a Norman mailer book: a rich guy had died and the protagonist was enquiring about him. Why was the sendoff not better? A local dignity answered that there what are two types of millionaires. “A million dollars can buy you power and influence, or a million dollars can buy you lots of groceries. This guy was the latter. “
Well the million is dated, think 100s of millions today. Mostly crypto is lots of money without power, although SBF was trying to change that I suppose.
There is no meritocracy in Britain.
There was an increase in social mobility post war, often driven by grammar schools, but the elite positions in Britain are now back in the hands of the fee paying privately educated, more firmly than before even with the city and journalism - historically both conduits to relative wealth or comfort from the working or lower middle classes now in the hands of the elites. Heck even pop is elitist now.
The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
>The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
Even if you don't agree with them, I don't think the reasons are unexplained, or even obscure: grammar schools were and are state-run whereas private schools aren't, and "the State should not do X" is much more compatible with liberalism than "the State should forbid anyone from doing X".
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the next Labour government strip private schools of their charitable status.
The Grammar Schools weren't entirely closed in the 1960s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_10/65)
Local authorities were allowed to keep them open if they wanted to. Only conservative ones, ie. ones
with wealthier voters, did. That means the system became *more* unequal, because it was no longer the case that everyone had access to the grammar schools,
and only people in wealthier areas did.
On the other hand...academies.
"An academy is an independent state school governed by the Academy Agreement it makes with the Department for Education, and at that point it severs connections with the local education authority. The current advisory text is the Academy and free school: master funding agreement dated March 2018.[22][23] The governors of the academy are obliged to publish an annual report and accounts, that are open to scrutiny and inspections.[24]
All academies are expected to follow a broad and balanced curriculum but many have a particular focus on, or formal specialism in, one or more areas such as science; arts; business and enterprise; computing; engineering; mathematics; modern foreign languages; performing arts; sport; or technology. Although academies are required to follow some aspects of the National Curriculum,[25] they are otherwise free to innovate; however, as they participate in the same Key Stage 3 and GCSE exams as other English schools, they teach a curriculum very similar other schools, with only small variations.[26]"
The Labour Government under Tony Blair established academies through the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
The old joke was that the Labour Party did it for equality - for the teachers. The secondary modern teachers didn't like the grammar teachers looking down on them.
In real terms, meritocracy isn't egalitarian, and the justification was partly that everyone was starting to look down on the secondary modern kids, partly that the middle class kids were playing the system in order to stuff the grammar schools with their own kids and defeating the whole point of the system.
Not being familiar with it, and given the casualness of your last sentece: would the UK have the authority to outlaw private education?
It’s interesting that people took only the last sentence to task - the end of British meritocracy not causing any ire.
The answer is that the State could reduce subsidies to the extent that nearly everybody is priced out. However my preference would be keeping both private schools and grammars. The last ship has sailed.
Being American, I have no notion of a meritocracy emerging from *anything other than* private school, or its functional equivalent, the "top public high school".
So you think that meritocracy is paid for? I’m not sure what you are saying here.
In the American context, the idea that competitive schools would ever lift substantial numbers of those at the bottom, or in the bottom half, or perhaps in the bottom three-quarters - is not supported. Competitive schools would either be expensive and private; or located in an area of expensive homes to which you would be zoned, so while not competitive to get into based on merit, would be quite competitive once in; or occasionally, "magnet" schools that require (or did) testing would be located in a lower SE area in the interest of geographic equity. One such school was in my town, housed in the normal (badly performing) high school - a sign of the latter's performance was that it was renamed several times. The kids in the magnet were indeed bused from areas that had better high schools - but the magnet, to some parents, was better still, being selective. This magnet "side" sailed along, winning prizes, no need for a name change, well-regarded - until, ultimately, there were complaints that the two schools were strictly in parallel and had no commonality, and the magnet school was kicked out.
Competitive schools will certainly lift a few individuals, that is surely true. It depends on whether one can tolerate that something can be more to one, than it is to a hundred.
Ok. Whatever that is, it isn’t meritocratic.
Working class families do sometimes get their kids into the selective schools--famously, this happens among first-generation East Asian immigrants whose parents are both working some shit job.
Or, alternatively, I guess my view is that the meritocracy is the word we use for the churn within a rather small slice of humanity. Thus, I vaguely recall - notwithstanding the slaughter of some of their members, and whatever losses they sustained, lots of the families on top and on the make in the reign of Louis XVI, had quite miraculously recovered their position by the 1850s.
I feel like I read something similar re the Cultural Revolution but I do sometimes get things exactly backward.
This was the old argument from "The Rise of the Meritocracy" (which coined the term): even if you had a meritocracy, you'd end up creating a quasi-hereditary regime with a small amount of movement up and down because general intelligence is hereditary.
I would have thought that this was the most anti American ideology. The ideology of the US, in opposition to Europe, was that anybody could make. The president could be born in a log cabin.
It's less black and white than the end of meritocracy. The comprehensives were supposed to subsume the function of the grammars, hence the name. In areas that held on to grammars, that didn't happen, but they still had grammars.
Also, academies
Why were the comprehensives unsuccessful at replacing the grammars exactly? (This is all as baffling as cricket to me.) And if the grammars should have been left alone, who exactly was the enemy of this postwar meritocracy?
The grammars were academically selective. The comprehensives are not.
There are some very good comprehensive schools, but they now select by wealth (house prices), which is perhaps a less accurate and more unfair proxy for academic ability.
In areas without grammars, the best comp becomes a pseudo gramamr. In areas with survive grammars, comps become pseudo secondary moderns. There are a lot of organic effects and unintended consequences here.
Some local authorities ignored the dept of education and kept their grammars because they were popular with voters. Central government could only influence them via funding. The grammar I went to was noticeably not well funded.
Scott writes: "You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened."
What makes you think this hasn't happened?
There seem to be lots of people frustrated with not being able to get ahead to the degree they expected, especially in the PMC. There's a general mood of social pessimism, which Turchin usually says corresponds to elite overproduction.
Suppose that calibration is possible, in the sense that an external observer can observe different people, gauge their intelligence/competence, make predictions about their future earning+status potential, and have those predictions borne out on average. But suppose further that people's self-evaluations are overly optimistic, so that even if they apply the same downstream prediction architecture, their inputs are skewed so as to predict an unrealistic level of success. Does this indicate elite overproduction? For that matter, does it even require an explanation, or is it as simple as everyone thinking they're an above-average driver?
I do wonder just how many people can actually sit down and say to themselves "I'm in the top 5% but not the top 1%" and be accurate.
The more likely universal response is "I'm better than this." Which leads to Turchin's overproduction - a lot of people with a lot of education, but not educated to do the jobs that need doing.
When I was in high school (early 2000s, UK), the government had a policy of getting 50% (!) of young people into university, and I remember being regularly propagandised about how getting a degree would be great, it would open so many doors, I'd be able to shoot straight to the top in any business area of my choice, etc.
Of course, this all turned out to be BS, and the reality is that I ended up doing basically the same sorts of jobs as my parents had done with their A-levels (the qualifications you get from school at age 18). The mismatch between what I'd been sold and what I actually got is, I will admit, somewhat frustrating.
(And no, I don't think "You should have realised, at age 16/17, that society in general and your schools and teachers in particular were lying to you" is a reasonable response. Schoolchildren just don't generally have to sort of life experience to recognise that sort of thing.)
Honestly just the shitty messaging we have 80s and on kids about their life prospects. You can be anything you want even if you are a midwit if you just apply yourself.
Which you know isn’t true. I think way too many people who were fundamentally just bog standard Americans were raised thinking they were future somebodies.
The feeling when I was a girl was that there was pretty much a two-tier hierarchy of things to do - with the 60s over and done with, essentially no thought given to a well-lived life except that motherhood and household management were indisputably the lowest - essentially shameful, in one of those interesting inversions. However, there was no hierarchy of ability, of course; so the result was a sort of homogenization of outcome really. Perhaps a very small contributor to the way the world seems overall grayer with the passage of time, a phenomenon difficult to separate from one's own aging of course, so tending to get a discussion-stopping retort of "you think there was a good old days?", etc.
A lot of schools tell their students to "Go out and change the world!" as some kind of empowerment attempt, but I just think it's true. Statistically, only a tiny number of people will ever change the world in any meaningful way; if you encourage children to think of that as the baseline for living a successful life, you condemn the vast majority of them to frustration and disappointment.
Phil Getz's claim that "The Democrats are now the party of the rich" is just false.
For example, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/ finds that the D/R split among voters with incomes:
:- under $50k was 57%/42%
:- between $50k and $100k was 56%/43%
:- over $100k was 43%/54%
What about the very rich? Well, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/10/20/even-americas-billionaires-are-tilting-toward-biden-in-the-2020-presidential-race/ finds that billionaires are more likely to be Republicans than the average American, and more likely to be Republicans than Democrats (although slightly more voted for Biden than Trump - I suspect because there will be a significant Never-Trump-Republican contingent among them).
It is true that the correlation between wealth and partisanship has weakened in the past decades, due to rising educational polarisation, and it wouldn't amaze me if it vanished or even reversed in the future, but it hasn't done so yet.
The more plausible claim is that Democrats are the party of the professional/managerial class while the Republicans are the party of the petit bourgeois small business people. Both of these groups have six figure salaries, but the latter don’t feel as rich as the former and don’t donate $200 to their favored candidates.
My rough formula is that
P(Democrat) = (Education) + (Extent of prejudice against your demographic) + (# people living within a mile of you) - (Wealth) -(Age)
At first glance, this would imply that being Republican would correlate strongly with being rich, but because wealth correlates strongly with education, the correlation between being Republican and being rich, while positive, is actually only weak.
This would imply that retired professional sportsmen would be mostly Republican: they are rich, older (note the "retired") and not well-educated.
And, if you look at white professional sportsmen, they don't face lots of prejudice, and they are mostly Republicans. Even African-Americans are a lot more Republican than other African-Americans.
Yeah, seems pretty solid.
I guess the exception is largely people working entertainment: lots of rich popstars and actors and the like are Democrats in spite of their poor educations and wealth.
Entertainment seems to be a job area where most people are in it for non-monetary rewards.
In the movie Idiocracry, there's a running joke about a really popular actor whose thing is to get kicked in the groin a lot. If you asked him (when he's rolling around) why he doesn't quit, he would probably say something like "What? And give up show business?"
The Democrats are also the party of African Americans and Hispanic Americans, so that's going to have a huge impact on average incomes. You'd need to specifically look at White Democrats vs White Republicans.
> Phil Getz's claim that "The Democrats are now the party of the rich" is just false.
I don't know if this is as obvious as you state because stats are hard and there's always someone who has stats that can prove the opposite position.
Here's an article from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-19/democrats-tax-hike-bet-relies-on-their-new-500-000-plus-voters
It says that according to IRS data, in 1990, Republican districts were richer than Democrat districts. Today it's reversed: "Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more".
Not really sure how to square these dueling stats, but obviously the threshold is different ($500k household income) and the data collection method is different.
I think the thing about /districts/ is probably true but misleading - I've seen it from several sources. But stats on individuals pretty consistently point the other way, except possibly in the far right tail, so I guess it's an urban/rural thing where cities have lots of poor people and a few super-rich ones and vote Democratic, and the country is lower variance and votes Republican.
For another data point, this 2014 Pew Research survey finds an even split in the highest income group (47% lean Republican, 44% lean Democrat).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/income-distribution/
Edit: I'm wondering if the difference is household vs individual income. If Republican voters tend to have more traditional, single-income households, you'd expect to see a smaller proportion of rich Republicans on studies that look at household income and a larger proportion for studies that use individual income. E.g. if you and your spouse vote Democrat and both earn $80k, you'd be included in the $100k+ household income group, but not the $100k individual income group.
The way incomes are distributed makes this effect much stronger. There are a lot more individuals earning $50k-$100k than there are people earning over $100k. Therefore a lot of two-income households will clear a $100k household income threshold and a lot of single-income households won't.
The Democrats are the party of the upper middle classes and the lower classes. But there are more of the latter than the former so they average out to poorer. The Republicans are the party of the middle classes so they're somewhat above average. You add in age polarization and that's how you get to a wealthier Republican base despite winning the poorer parts of the country. And the very wealthy might lean one way or another overall but mostly it's a case by case basis. Lots of Republican and Democrat billionaires.
This is actually a pretty normal pattern. It dates back at least to the 17th century where the middle classes and lower aristocrats fought against an alliance of the crown and its bureaucrats plus the lower classes. And the nobles split into factions. So while the statement might be technically false it's gesturing in a true-ish direction. It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
>It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
That's certainly true of the way the word is used here in the UK - the classic example of someone super-rich who parses as lower-class to UK eyes is Donald Trump - but a decade ago my impression was that when Americans use the word money is a larger part of it. I think that may have changed a bit in the past ten or twenty years, though?
I think that Americans are much more conscious of the difference between the guy who makes $400,000 a year because he owns five carlots in an exurb somewhere and the woman who makes $400,000 a year because she is a corporate lawyer.
I don't think they really get that the rich guy who behaves like he's lower-class is lower-class (like, as you say, Trump).
Americans mostly don't have a proper concept of social vs economic class. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in their society, it means they're not aware of it and it causes all sorts of problems.
They have contempt for a man who has a lot of money but exhibits lower-class tastes but they're not quite sure why. They guess it must be some kind of moral failing on his part.
There is an old British style American aristocracy, mostly on the east coast. But they began their slide into irrelevance with the American Revolution when much of their structural support was removed. Nowadays they're barely relevant even in their local regions.
Americans are less aware of class for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves middle class. And class has less impact on day to day preferences than in places like Europe. For example, there's no American equivalent to fox hunting or horse racing. Most upper class and lower class Americans have relatively similar habits in terms of entertainment, dress, etc. Richer Americans have nicer suits or bigger tvs. But it's a different of degree rather than kind.
But lastly, the American class system is vastly more fluid and complicated than the British one. Unlike most class systems that you have to be born into the American class system is based on education, profession, wealth, and mannerisms. And what matters depends on where you are. For example, wealth is relatively more important in New York City and fame relatively more important in LA. Engineers are relatively low status in much of the country but that's not true on the West Coast. Midwest, and the South. (This isn't recent either: Hoover was an engineer and came from California.) And so on.
The system does exist. Donald Trump is the same over here: a rich lower class guy (or at least that's his pose). But he's that way not because of his birth but because of his mannerisms and profession. (He had wealth and education which is why he coded as nouveau riche instead of a lower class slob.)
Likewise the system is relatively open. An American can simply join the upper classes if they adopt the right mannerisms, have enough money, etc. The Clintons are probably the closest the American left has to royalty at this point. But one of them was the son of a single mother and the other the daughter of a small business owner. Likewise you have a lot of elites who protest they came from a poor background. And it's often true. But Americans have accurately divined the poor kid who goes to the right schools, has the right mannerisms, and makes a lot of money IS part of the upper class without reservation in the US.
PS: This is all modulo the success of specific classes at reproducing themselves by passing along education, social customs, wealth, etc.
He probably should have said "rich normalizing for age, sex, and race." My impression is that for a given race, sex, and age, the richer you are the more you think Democrats speak to you, and the poorer you are the more tuned in to the Republican message you are.
Around here youngish brown female City Council members and NGO lawyers with good salaries think our top priorities should be rooting out prejudice and subsidizing higher education, but the brown middle-age male gardeners and drywall biz owners who live and die by deals and contracts want the government to stop fucking with their livelihood via pandemic ukases or licensing and environmental requirements, and they're not especially excited about allowing Mexican gangs to import street enforcers by just having them walk across an open border.
But when you mix together income, age, sex. and race, it's a big muddle, because younger people (who are almost always left) are usually poorer, black people are almost always poorer, brown people are sometimes poorer, brown and black people get special treatment by Democratic policies, and when it comes to men and women...well, who can explain *that* weird decision by The Creator?
Do you have any evidence to support that?
Because it definitely isn't true for education - controlling for education strengthens the correlation between being rich and Republican - and I'm deeply sceptical about most of the other controls weakening it.
I think this isn't a hard phenomenon to explain - the obvious answer is the correct one.
Democrats favour policies which advance the economic interests of the poor, and are thus a majority among poorer-than-average people, and do less badly with people rich enough that they no longer care than they do with people richer than average but not ludicrously rich, while Republicans favour policies that advance the economic interests of the rich, and are thus a majority among richer-than-average people, especially but not exclusively those who aren't super rich.
But, because those facts are embarrassing to Republicans, there's a cottage industry that's sprung up around trying to deny or obfuscate them and claim the politically-valuable underdog card.
Sure, I just told you it was my experience. So that's 50+ years of observing a few hundred people and getting to know their attitudes. Whether it would hold up if we interviewed hundreds of thousands of people in a carefully controlled nationwide study I don't know, but obviously my priors would be that it does, because otherwise I have to believe my experience is weirdly idiosyncratic. Similarly, to seriously consider an alternative hypothesis, I would need some persuasive evidence.
It's been a long time in my experience since Democrat top policy preferences have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the poor -- at least, of the working poor. Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, affirmative action, unrestricted immigration, environmental regulation that makes pushes up the prices of utilities, transportation, or household appliances, are all things that negatively impact the economic interests of the working poor -- and the latter know that very well. That's why those policies are not popular among people who are trying to scratch out a living and get a little bit ahead, and why Democrats find it always necessary to couple their policy proposals with increasingly grandiose proposals for subsidies and class warfare FUD. I mean, go ahead and find some Central Valley immigrant family trying to save up to buy a little farmland of their own who are thrilled about the CARB mandate to only buy EVs after 2035 if you can. They can be (and if it comes to pass undoubtably will be) bought off by a subsidy sufficiently generous, but if the underlying policy were popular they wouldn't have to be.
It's also been a long time since the Republican policies have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the rich. The rich these days generally want a heavy regulatory state that raises the costs of entry of potential competitors, so they can stay atop the heap. The rich enjoy unequal access to the writers of law, so these days they prefer a big powerful government that can write law that freezes in place their domination. They're fine with high taxes -- which they can readily afford -- so long as what the government funds with those taxes benefits them, e.g. comes back as subsidies for the industries in which they work, or salaries for jobs they or their Stanford JD or Harvard MBA kids might take.
The claim that minimum wage laws hurt the working poor is extraordinary, and poorly a supported. It has been debated here many times.
> Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position.
I recently listened to a good chunk of the Revolutions podcast, which I'm guessing many people here are familiar with. One of the points the author makes is that revolutions do require the complicity of part of the ruling class. Basically, a united ruling class will generally be able to smack down any threat to its hegemony. If the regime in power becomes too sclerotic to respond to changing circumstances, a united ruling class will stage a coup, which is not the same as a revolution. True revolutions happen when there is a fissure in the ruling class, and one faction unites with a mass movement to restructure the system. There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
I don't want to over-analogize the French Revolution to the Harvard admissions office. But I think the general point stands that the interests of the "ruling class" can be cross-pressured.
It might not be "over-analogizing" so much as seeing the Harvard stuff as at a much later point in an unfolding chain that (sort of) begins with the French Revolution/Industrial Revolution/capitalism. What I took away from the Revolutions podcast is that it was the first real attack launched by the nascent professional managerial class (look how many of the leaders were lawyers! Liberal democrat parliaments & legislatures = still dominated by lawyers). Brooks unwittingly (or lazily, imho) gives the impression that the WASPs were an "aristocracy" overthrown by the PMC, but they were haute bourgeoise, not aristocrats.
>There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
It's worth noting here as an illustration that Napoleon Bonaparte's family had been officially classified as noble (nobility was a fuzzy concept in 18th century Corsica, but the Buonaparte family made the list when France took over and had to figure out who belonged to which estate), and had received his military education thanks to a scholarship for children of impecunious noble families.
>But eventually the rate of wealth creation got so out of hand that new millionaires were being minted faster than the upper class could co-opt them
There was also a step change in inheritance tax, meaning that British landowners would see their assets shrinking each generation...unless they found something more profitable than agriculture to invest in. So it was a two way process... successful industrialists would be given titles, but successful aristocrats would invest in industry. By no means all were successful: a number of great families could not adapt, and withered away.
>Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their positio
They don't entirely sit in their hands, but they don't entirely adapt either.
I'm sure it is real. I was questioning Scott's (initial) claim for common-ness.
Googling keeps coming up with this: "The average for the most wealthy [*] 1% [in the USA] reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200."
I'm going to assert a useful definition is that the most wealthy 1% in the US are not upper middle class, but are rich :-)
So we have an average of a bit under $200K for the next block that seem reasonable to consider as containing the upper middle class. And the bottom of this is probably "just" middle class?
So ... we don't particularly care about the average here as the curve is very skewed ...
So ... maybe we care about the top 4 percentage points of the 1% - 10% range and then want to know the median? Or the number inheriting more than $250K? Or $500K?
*Typical* cannot realistically be over $1M for that group, there just isn't enough money to go around.
[*] I cannot tell if the 1% here are the 1% most wealthy (dead) parents or the most 1% most wealthy people getting an inheritance. There is probably moderately high correlation in any event, but ???
"In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good)."
Interestingly, seniority (like primogeniture) also has a solution to this! If you're son #3, you do not expect to inherit, and probably have a downward mobility job lined up from family tradition ("we send our third sons to the navy"), and absent murdering your elder brothers, there's not a way to succeed by sacrificing more.
[Some monasteries assign status by seniority, a little because older people are wiser, and mostly because people can't affect how quickly they age, and so a potential source of conflict is out of their hands.]
I can't wait for a latter-day Carmina Burana to be written by the tonsured second sons of SV elites. Unless we send them with a monthly remittance to colonise Mars.
Music will be amazing, libretto will be trash.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
The one time I remember hearing about this was when a family member got divorced, and it happened to be right before their spouse's parent died and left them millions of dollars. (So if the divorce had happened a bit later, they would have gotten half of the inheritance, which was the point people talked about; I imagine it would have gone unmentioned otherwise.)
It's been a topic of conversation between myself and my parents (not just their will, but also inheritances from my grandparents)--blunted in importance, from my perspective, by the high probability that they and I die at the same time.
Why do you expect that they and you will die at the same time? Given where we are commenting, I presume because you believe in some kind of imminent AI apocalypse?
Yes, I think AI will probably happen in my parent's lifetimes (and then either all of us will die or none of us will die for quite some time).
In almost every state in the US, inheritances left to one spouse are typically *not* subject to being split in divorces. So the timing probably didn’t matter.
A quite extraordinary number of idiotic comments on this.
>Will Bitcoiners be the new aristocracy? (79 replies)
There were more than 79 replies; the interface says 156.
>Will Elon’s Twitter prove the uselessness of the professional managerial class? (24 replies)
There were 40 replies downstream of the linked comment, not 24.
Sorry for being tedious.
The number in the OP is just a static number; it doesn't dynamically update when the thread gets more comments.
Yeah, but I think the vast majority of them were there before this was posted.
Probably a static number when Scott wrote that part of this post. If I were putting together a "Highlights from the Comments" post for something, I expect I'd compile it gradually as I read interesting or otherwise notable comments, not write it all at once right before posting it.
> I am less sure about this one. “Elite overproduction” means there are more aspiring elites than elite positions. But what is an “aspiring elite”?
We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out. The archetypical coffee barista with a degree in media studies.
I think if your ever looking for "elite overproduction" look for that mismatch between what people were raised to expect and what they got and you'll find it.
> Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals.
This strikes me as utterly wrong. If you have a small group who a) all know each other, b) all can benefit from rent seeking, and c) are protected from threats outside their clique. They won't stop each other rent seeking because of rivalries. They'll collude to rent seek on an unimaginable scale.
> We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out.
This; and also the fraction of people who go to universities is growing, and there is grade inflation. So the kids not only got to universities, but they are often straight A students... and still can't find a good job.
(At some moment they may realize that a plumber makes more than 2x the money they do. Then they might start screaming that it is not fair that the system does not reward intelligent people who spent lot of time and money getting their education.)
Theoretically, the government/accrediting organisations should impose minimum standards, although they have various incentives not to (putting people into more education keeps them off the unemployment lists, for example).
Wasn't the top of the Roman Republic basically "rent seeking on an unimaginable scale" ?
I mean, to the extent that slave-owning is an economic rent (and literal rent is an economic rent), then yes. I wouldn't oversell the making money from politics angle though - you could squeeze people a bit, in the lower and sub-magistracy offices your patron would finance you, but higher up you'd spend so much money on games and bribes you'd probably make a loss. Grain captains could do a lot better for themselves, but weren't elite positions.
In a healthy, open oligarchy society will be set up in such a way as to benefit the oligarchs but personal enrichment through the state is comparatively rare - your fellow oligarchs have all the money, so it's more like agreeing to sit on a homeowners' association to manage the country for your peers. The modern world is different, because everything has to be squashed into the shape as a fake democratic republic even when that's totally unnatural for the society in question.
Obviously there are questions of bias, but literary sources from the Late Republican period suggest that governors could be extremely corrupt, and that this was widely recognised as a problem. Supposedly Gaius Verres said that a governor needed three years in office: one to pay back his creditors, one to bribe the jurors in the inevitable corruption trial, and one to get rich.
It also probably didn't help that the Roman government tended to subcontract out the gathering of taxes to private companies, which were incentivised to squeeze the provincials for all they were worth. (Basically, the companies would pay for the right to collect taxes from a certain province, and then have to make up the sum by collecting them. Any extra was taken as profit.) There's a reason why the Gospels use "sinners and tax collectors" almost as a hendiadys.
Erusian's comment misses some basic facts about British applications (that I know because experienced them). I had to go through all the replies to it, because I couldn't quite believe that nobody had said anything.
In the UK, you can only apply to five universities. That's it, that's what you can do in a year. There are very limited exceptions if all of those five reject you, but every kid who in America would be applying to fifteen or more schools (AKA almost everyone from an elite background seriously looking at Ivies without a legacy or a truly absurd application) can only apply to five. So if you want a safety school, three uncertain unis, and Oxbridge, you can go for that. But it's *risky* in a way that it isn't in the US.
On top of that, UK applications are much more test-score dependent, and test scores are known in advance. In the US, I can tell someone I think they're a weak applicant relative to the standard that I expect Harvard has, but there's a lot of variation for what Harvard's standard happens to be depending on who reads the application, what the rest of the incoming class looks like, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. In the UK, you can count. They will tell you explicitly on the website what numbers they want, and if you don't have the numbers you don't bother, because you only have five schools.
To compare the acceptance rate of two schools under these wildly different systems is pointless. I'd also reference Tanner Greer's point that, as US political and business power have nationalized, becoming prominent among the national elite at an Ivy is now much more important than building a strong network and connections in your community at the local or state Good Enough University. To this day, if you want to do politics in Alabama the advice is to go to the University of Alabama and join the right fraternity. But in most of the country that has shattered, increasing demand by the elites to go to the nationally best-connected and best-regarded schools.
The other difference with the US is that nobody knows going in if the applicant is going to walk out with a degree in astrophys or medieval lit. This means that the physics departments over there don't get to handle their own admissions but rather have to deal with who the university as a whole picks.
That depends on the university. At my undergraduate Alma Mater (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, part of the California State University system), each "College' of the University had its own separate admissions criteria. You had to declare a first and second choice major when applying, and you'd be assigned one of these if admitted. Once you're in, it was usually pretty easy to change majors within a College, but there was a really high bar to switching to a different College.
"Colleges" in this context being administrative subdivisions of the University, each consisting of several thematically-related departments. The Colleges at Cal Poly being Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering, Math and Science, Liberal Arts, and Business.
People *did* comment on that, but maybe in not the same branch ?
The UK also has clearing, where students who haven't found a college can be matched with unfilled places at any college.