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[mèþru]

I'm back. How've things been?

I think I've changed a lot as a person since I've last been here; political views (well on specific people as a reaction to new information, not the actual framework), how I say things, my self-identity, no longer single

I miss this place, but I don't know if it'll fit the new me.

[Raphael]

Welcome back! Perhaps you won't fit here any more, but keep in mind that this board already contains a lot of other people who are pretty different from your old self.

[MacAnDàil]

Welcome back! Would you mind elaborating on those changes?

[Raphael]

Sociology question: I'm a low-income, unemployed guy with pretty nerdy/geeky interests and hobbies. To what social class do I belong? For the record, my parents are both university graduates, and the one who raised me spent most of her adult life moving back and forth between unemployment and lower-middle-class jobs.

My guess is that many working class and underclass people would see me as an effete middle-class snob because of the way I talk, and many middle-class and upper class people would see me as an underclass loser because of my answers to questions about my job or what stuff I own.

[Travis B.]

That is a good question, especially since today there are many people who have university degrees but have been unable to get jobs with their degrees and have ended up in working class jobs as a result - what social class do they belong to?

[Pabappa]

We love you, Raph.

Personally I think only income matters. Ive never considered myself anything but poor, but that term is unfashionable, so I say working class. Ive only worked one job where I felt social pressure against me because I didnt fit in, and I wouldnt say that was because I was too educated or even too intellectual ... some workplaces just seem to have their own impenetrable social cliques and hierarchies. It was an overnight job ... though I later took a different overnight job and didnt have any problems fitting in.

[Ryusenshi]

Thinking in terms of "class" isn't really natural for me, but I'm not sure if income is the only factor. If I may quote from SlateStarCodex Staying Classy:

[note that in-context, "Gentry" means something like "educated liberal middle-class"]

I grew up in a Gentry class family; I became a doctor, my brother became a musician, and my cousin got a law degree but eventually decided to work very irregularly and mostly stay home raising her children. I make more money than my brother, and we both make more money than my cousin, but this is not a victory for social mobility and family non-determinism; it’s no coincidence none of us ended up as farmers or factory workers. We all ended up Gentry class, but I chose something closer to the maximize-income part of the Gentry class tradeoff space, my brother chose something closer to the maximize-creativity part, and my cousin chose to raise the next generation. Any studies that interpret our income difference as an outcome difference and tries to analyze what factors gave me a leg up over my relatives (better schools? more breastfeeding as a child?) are stupid and will come up with random noise.

Things are not as rigid as they used to (think nouveau riche vs impoverished nobility), but there is something else than mere money.

[Linguoboy]

Thinking in terms of "class" isn't really natural for me, but I'm not sure if income is the only factor.

It isn't. One of the most consistent themes in that most middle-class of all literary forms, the novel, is the conflict between social class and economic means.

Zompist has written about this topic several times, trying to get to the essence of what defines the middle class. Traditionally, the defining characteristic is considered to be valuing education, which is seen as the key to success and obtaining a comfortable standard of living. Mark argued once that it's really planning, since in the USA obtaining a college education requires a lot of careful husbanding of household income. Poor people can't do that, since they're only ever one major crisis away from penury, and rich people don't need to.

Regardless, there's a lot of other baggage which comes along with this and which arguably doesn't really change in line with your financial circumstances. The "poverty" of my college-educated cousins pursuing careers in the theatre is not at all like the poverty of my country cousins who barely finished high school. Their habitus are completely different; you would know at once which you were talking to, even if they never mentioned what they did for a living.

I grew up very aware of the contrasts (even though I lacked a framework to articulate them due to the USAmerican willful ignorance of class distinctions) because my father was a first-generation college graduate with working class parents while my mother came from the petite bourgeoisie. Marrying him was an act of rebellion against her parents, but the alliance ultimately failed because she valued financial stability and long-term planning whereas he had the carpe diem approach characteristic of many nouveaux riches.

We were all raised primarily with my mothers' values but ended up across the spectrum of success they define. On the one end, you have my younger brother, who works for a corporate law firm in Chicago, is married to a banker's daughter from Westchester County, and lives in a million-dollar condo in River North. On the other, there was my unemployed older brother, who lived in a shabby one-bedroom apartment on the border of St Louis City paid for from his disability checks with assistance from an independent-living non-profit. Naturally, they didn't have anything like the same standard of living. But in other respects--hobbies, interests, aesthetics, conversational style, etc.--they were very similar. If you saw them together, you could pretty easily pick out which was which, but if you had to decide which of them went to prep school, you'd probably guess wrong.

It sounds to me, Raphael, that you're somewhat like my older brother (even down to the geeky hobbies). Despite not holding a job, he died with $2000 in his savings. That's how much the importance of saving and planning had been impressed upon him. Among his things, we found all of his prep school textbooks and notebooks--his Russian textbook right next to the computer because he was still pursuing methods of keeping up his language skills online. He didn't have a middle-class income or a typical middle-class lifestyle, but it wouldn't make sense to assign him to the "working class", "lower class", or "underclass" solely on that basis.

[linguistcat]

Maybe this is simplistic of me but even with an education, I'd think that if you are forced to work constantly and live paycheck to paycheck even when you have avoided any unnecessary expenses, then you are working class or even in poverty. An education might give you a means out of poverty in the current economic system, but until someone has a job that they can live comfortably doing, they are still working class. It's just the signs of being working class are changing, and you might be able to define a difference between "uneducated/undereducated working class" and "educated working class".

But even if someone came out of a middle or upper middle class family, got disowned and so had no access to any of their family's resources, and then took up several part time jobs just to make ends meet, I'd still say they were working class. They might even be worse off than people who are "culturally working class" since they don't know a lot of the tips and tricks working class people use to stretch the resources they do have.

[Linguoboy]

But even if someone came out of a middle or upper middle class family, got disowned and so had no access to any of their family's resources, and then took up several part time jobs just to make ends meet, I'd still say they were working class. They might even be worse off than people who are "culturally working class" since they don't know a lot of the tips and tricks working class people use to stretch the resources they do have.

They might, and they also might be better off because their middle-class background makes them more effective when dealing with authorities who are used to showing a certain deference to middle-class folks. This is why I think habitus is important. It goes back to what Eliza Doolittle said: ultimately the difference is how you are treated.

[chris_notts]

I've always struggled to define myself class-wise because my family has been more or less hopping the boundary financially for a while. Going back beyond my grandparents we were undoubtedly a mostly working class group, but both pairs of grandparents leapt up the social scale and became effectively small business owners.

One pair of grandparents built a small property empire and left an estate to their children of maybe about three quarters of a million by my estimate, although I wasn't a direct beneficiary so I don't know the exact amount. Funnily enough, the seed money for that property empire was a win at the horses, which I find incredibly amusing given how prim, proper and conservative my grandparents became in later life. They were so ashamed of it that I only learned during the eulogy at one of their funerals.

The other pair earned their money acting as agents for a construction materials company. My grandfather was the agent and my grandmother sometimes helped in a more secretarial role. They got in early when this company entered the UK market, helped build market share, and until my grandfather retired he was still their main UK agent. Adding up the value of their large rural property and various investments I'm fairly positive they are multi-millionaires, although it's not a topic that's ever discussed in numbers.

On the other hand, my parents struggled to build their own finances from further down the financial ladder. Both pairs of grandparents had a tough love philosophy so they earned every penny themselves. My father dropped out of school and later had to study during the evenings to earn the qualifications for promotion when he finally realised the value of education. He eventually reached the first rung of management and was then made redundant, at which point he started his own company doing primarily manual (although technical) work.

My mother went into healthcare and worked her way up into management before retiring.

Educationally, none of my grandparents studied at university, although they all ended up fairly well-off. About half of my parents' generation did some form of university equivalent or professional studies. My mother did enter what you might regard as a profession, although my father didn't and even dropped out of school. In my generation, myself and all of my siblings are university graduates, although some of my cousins aren't.

In terms of cultural activities, I'm not even sure what defines the middle class. We are not opera or theatre or classical music people as a group, if that's what defines the middle class culturally. I suppose my immediate family has a shared attitude of "there's more important things that money" which perhaps we wouldn't have if any of us were on the breadline. One of my siblings has semi-retired in her thirties and now chooses to live on as little money as possible despite her qualifications because she prefers to be poor and have time over working, another has chosen a public service career. My parents chose to take a financial hit to retire early.

So... where am I on the great class hierarchy? I've always thought we were probably lower middle class, but with the built-in British suspicion that if you're not sure whether you're a member of a club you're probably not.

[Travis B.]

But even if someone came out of a middle or upper middle class family, got disowned and so had no access to any of their family's resources, and then took up several part time jobs just to make ends meet, I'd still say they were working class. They might even be worse off than people who are "culturally working class" since they don't know a lot of the tips and tricks working class people use to stretch the resources they do have.

They might, and they also might be better off because their middle-class background makes them more effective when dealing with authorities who are used to showing a certain deference to middle-class folks. This is why I think habitus is important. It goes back to what Eliza Doolittle said: ultimately the difference is how you are treated.

A good example is when I was arrested at a demonstration between high school and college - without my having to say a thing, the people at the local jail knew I was not supposed to be there and that I was not like them. Likewise, when I worked for a short stint at a factory after getting out of college, the people there knew that I was not like them and that I was going somewhere (and they were not).

[chris_notts]

A good example is when I was arrested at a demonstration between high school and college - without my having to say a thing, the people at the local jail knew I was not supposed to be there and that I was not like them. Likewise, when I worked for a short stint at a factory after getting out of college, the people there knew that I was not like them and that I was going somewhere (and they were not).

I guess accent is quite important as well. My accent at least is, I think, the kind of neutral educated that is probably the hallmark of the middle classes. I remember very clearly being corrected by my parents for speaking with any kind of local accent, and I was sent to a private school for a few years until it became too much of a financial strain for my parents. I guess they wanted us to be upwardly at the time... although it didn't exactly work out since I'm the only sibling who really followed the money at all. The others chose interests over money.

[Raphael]

Thank you for the feedback, everyone!

They might, and they also might be better off because their middle-class background makes them more effective when dealing with authorities who are used to showing a certain deference to middle-class folks. This is why I think habitus is important. It goes back to what Eliza Doolittle said: ultimately the difference is how you are treated.

A good example is when I was arrested at a demonstration between high school and college - without my having to say a thing, the people at the local jail knew I was not supposed to be there and that I was not like them. Likewise, when I worked for a short stint at a factory after getting out of college, the people there knew that I was not like them and that I was going somewhere (and they were not).

And, my impression is that in most or all of those places that have some kind of social safety net, getting unemployment benefits or whatever they call the local equivalent is basically an office job - lots of paperwork, writing letters, keeping correspondence files, and so on - so people who have experience working in office jobs can probably handle it better than people who haven't.

[Raphael]

A good example is when I was arrested at a demonstration between high school and college - without my having to say a thing, the people at the local jail knew I was not supposed to be there and that I was not like them. Likewise, when I worked for a short stint at a factory after getting out of college, the people there knew that I was not like them and that I was going somewhere (and they were not).

I guess accent is quite important as well. My accent at least is, I think, the kind of neutral educated that is probably the hallmark of the middle classes. I remember very clearly being corrected by my parents for speaking with any kind of local accent, and I was sent to a private school for a few years until it became too much of a financial strain for my parents. I guess they wanted us to be upwardly at the time... although it didn't exactly work out since I'm the only sibling who really followed the money at all. The others chose interests over money.

In Germany, different classes talk differently, too, but outside of migrant communities, it's mostly a matter of vocabulary and syntax, not accent.

[chris_notts]

A good example is when I was arrested at a demonstration between high school and college - without my having to say a thing, the people at the local jail knew I was not supposed to be there and that I was not like them. Likewise, when I worked for a short stint at a factory after getting out of college, the people there knew that I was not like them and that I was going somewhere (and they were not).

I guess accent is quite important as well. My accent at least is, I think, the kind of neutral educated that is probably the hallmark of the middle classes. I remember very clearly being corrected by my parents for speaking with any kind of local accent, and I was sent to a private school for a few years until it became too much of a financial strain for my parents. I guess they wanted us to be upwardly at the time... although it didn't exactly work out since I'm the only sibling who really followed the money at all. The others chose interests over money.

In Germany, different classes talk differently, too, but outside of migrant communities, it's mostly a matter of vocabulary and syntax, not accent.

I find myself correcting my own son for common but formally incorrect working class use of defective verbs like the copula / modal verbs, pronouns, and also certain contractions. Oh, and certain pronunciations like coronalisation of final velar nasals.

[Pabappa]

i worked with someone who changed his speech habits very abruptly and i never asked why. when i met him he never used any obscene words, always said "poop" etc, and avoided talking about those things at all when possible. Basically like me. Then suddenly he used all sorts of obscene words and for some reason said "come" as the past tense of come instead of "came". That puzzled me more than the bit about obscene vocabulary, but I never brought it up. I've heard a few other people using "come" that way and dont know what it is supposed to signify, if anything. I dont think my coworker's speech habits changed due to any income-related reasons ... it was around the time he got promoted out of the company we worked for (but we still saw each other almost as much after that). He also got engaged and then broke up around the same time, so maybe his wife-to-be changed him in some way. But I still think it was wholly conscious since it was so sudden.

[chris_notts]

According to the BBC class calculator I am "Technical Middle Class":

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973

This is a small, distinctive and prosperous new class group:

People in this group tend to mix socially with people similar to themselves
They prefer emerging culture, such as using social media, to highbrow culture such as listening to classical music
Many people in this group work in research, science and technical occupations
They tend to live in suburban locations, often in the south east of England
They come from largely middle class backgrounds

[Travis B.]

There are certain markers of working class speech here, such as the use of aint, the use of them as a demonstrative, and the use of negation agreement which are distinct from just standard/formal speech and dialectal speech; for instance I personally readily use dialectal speech, but I lack key markers of working class speech even when speaking clearly dialectally.

[chris_notts]

There are certain markers of working class speech here, such as the use of aint, the use of them as a demonstrative, and the use of negation agreement which are distinct from just standard/formal speech and dialectal speech; for instance I personally readily use dialectal speech, but I lack key markers of working class speech even when speaking clearly dialectally.

In the East Midlands it's similar, but there are also clear differences in pronunciation. To take our most famous dialect phrase, "hey up my duck" [eɪ ʌp mɪ dʌk] shows both h dropping and the use of [mɪ] for "my". One particularly jarring one my son has picked up from school is the use of [yə] as a stressed object pronoun, which is just not possible for me. Then there are incorrect verb forms like "was" as a general past in all persons.

There are also regional dialect differences which span classes though. Most people in the Midlands and the North, working class or not, have short a where many middle class southerners would have a long vowel, as in "bath".