Social class in America
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Highlights
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But when you see top college graduates marry construction workers and food service workers show up to dinner parties with private equity people, you start to realize that the world doesn’t have to be the way it was in the place and time in which you grew up.
- In Old England, class was something everyone talked about and no one did anything about; in modern America, class is something no one talks about and no one does anything about.
- The biggest divide, though we don’t often talk about it, might be between knowledge workers and other workers; between those who benefit from the spillovers of ideas and capital that arise in superstar cities, and those who will do just as well living in the exurbs. Knowledge clusters have reshaped the entire geography of the nation; this has led to a divergence of class interests between the residents of the exurb and the denizens of the megalopolis.
- Class in America is thus so complex, so multidimensional and fragmented, that it requires an enormous amount of cultural capital just to navigate. To decide whether someone is a suitable spouse for your child — perhaps the ultimate determinant of class in any society — requires solving a hard computational problem. You have to evaluate their income and their potential income; their wealth and their family’s wealth; their occupation and their career prospects; their race and their racial politics; and their educational attainment. And all the interactions between those things. And you have to do it all while studiously pretending to yourself that you live in a middle-class society where anyone can be anything they want to be.