OT: This is why there are "denialists"...

Please name some classes and identify the class boundaries.

"Tall" and "short" are arbitrary distinctions, not a "class system." Similarly, there is a continuium of personal wealth in the USA, but no sharp lines and no boundaries to mobility in either direction. The richest people in the USA didn't inherit their wealth, they pretty much earned or stole it.

Inherited wealth tends to dissipate over a generation or two when it's inherited by duds, which is most often is.

And of course some people have more luck and talent than others. Someone who can hit a 90 mph fastball can make 10 million dollars a year for accidentally having that ability. A movie star can make $20M a film for having a great face or body or voice. It's not fair maybe, but it doesn't mean we have classes or class boundaries.

If you are a Jew in Saudi Arabia, or an ethnic Korean in Japan, class distinctions are real and make some things impossible to you.

Do you still have to be a Lord to get into the House of Lords?

John

I don't agree. But there's nothing in your statement dealing with my points, so I'll just leave it for others to worry over.

I think the phrase is, "A fool and his money are easily parted."

We do have those boundaries. Your point about fastball notwithstanding.

Bringing up a separate case doesn't dispel the one here in the US.

Isn't this entirely unrelated? What does an historical class system, which is admittedly different from the US, have to do with the US? The fact that there are other systems of class doesn't in any way dispel what exists here.

Strawman stuff, all of it.

Jon

So name some classes in the USA and identify the class boundaries.

John

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McCarthy used it to mean "boogymen hidden under the bed". His list of

205 or 57 or whatever communists in US government service wasn't "mostly right" - it was just numbers culled from out-of-date security surveys with "communist leanings" puffed up to outright communism for his rhetorical convenience.

Badly. Until your idiot banking system screwed up the Dutch economy, I'd find roughly one new electronic engineer job per week that I could apply for, even if I didn't get any of them. Nowadays,this has dropped to less than one a month

Despite your - ill-informed and silly - insinuation that I'm clueless on technology, there were occasional jobs where I had specific expertise where it did look quite likely that l would get the job. None of them turned into work, but I came close enough that I still spend time checking the ads.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

None so far. But - given a sufficiently extraordinary individual - nothing is impossible.

The essence of a class system is that some individual start off ahead of the game. Dividing what is - in fact - a continuously distributed population into discrete social classes is an academic exercise, If you knew any biology, you'd be aware that the concept of a species can apply a similarly academic division to groups of mutually intefertile individuals; it can be a usueful exercise - rich versus poor usually captures a lot of useful differences - but it isn't fundemental to the understanding the workings of class diferences in society.

You've got lots examples of exceptional individuals who have been able to overcome the disadvatages imposed by their class, race and sex. You've also got lots of room for affermative action to get the numbers of the disadvantaged classes, races and sexes in the top jobs into proportion with their numbers in the population as a whole.

Sure. You do better at that than the Dutch do, but worse on class and racial origin.

So what. You may do it right. Your society still has a way to go.

Greed is perfectly natural, but ti doesn't lead to system that work very well - as your banking system has just illustrated. Your system would have worked even better if you'd had the anti-trust legislation before you had the monopolies.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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As I've mentioned before, the existence of a "class system" doesn't depend on discontinuities in the distribution of advantage. The existence of a middle class spanning the gap between rich and poor doesn't mean that the rich don't have a flying start at anything they want to do, or that a poor man doesn't have to be a whole lot more competent than his rich competitor to do as well

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So what. Dubbya is a dud, and he inherited enough money to do a lot better than he should have done.

Whereas if you are a black female in America, nothing is absolutely impossible, but the class distincions are real enough to make some things a lot more difficul than they wouldbe for a white male with similar telents.

No. My younger brother has lunch there from time to time. as the guest of Lord Sebastian Coe, who got to be a life peer in large part because he could run 800 metres and 1500 metres faster than anybody else in the world when he was younger.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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No, he had real facts. Google "project verona." This stuff was made public in 1995. The people that McCarthy thought were spies *were* spies. He didn't want to arrest them or put them in gulags or shoot them or even name them in public; he wanted to get them out of government.

Ah, your inability to do engineering is our fault. Somehow that doesn't make me feel bad at all.

John

You are WILDLY out of touch with reality, no doubt reinforced by those stupid Hollywood movies that persist in creating a false view of the world.

Graham

-- due to the hugely increased level of spam please make the obvious adjustment to my email address

Oh yes. I am sure Charlie Chaplin was a huge threat to US state security. They certainly spent a heck of a lot of time persecuting him.

McCarthy was a paranoid drooling right wing nutter who foamed at the mouth and gave witch hunters a bad name. Incidentally how did the American right wing GOP party come to adopt "Red" as their colour?

Looking for reds under the bed has strange ambiguous connotations given the US political colour affiliations.

Regards, Martin Brown

No. Certain Bishops also get to sit in.

And by no means all hereditory peers sit in the House of Lords now. A fair number are life peers with major contributions to UK life. eg

(the latter is a Baron - they get to sit in the House of Lords too)

Working definitions would go something like:

Blue-collar unskilled manual labour Blue-collar skilled manual labour White-Collar skilled labour Professional Masters of the Universe

Same as in almost any other country. There are distinct social norms associated with each of these crude categories. Something that advertisers exploit ruthlessly. Japan is a slightly odd one in that everybody even the super rich claim to be "Middle-class" there.

I don't entirely agree with the Wiki definition of social class for the US which seems to me too heavily biassed on household income.

And you can move between the classes in the UK. The boundaries have been fluid since the second world war.

Even into the upper class. It just takes about 100 years or so for vulgar new money to be accepted as old money. Becks & Posh will never be Upper Class no matter how much money they make. They may even go to all the right parties and be socially accepted but that doesn't count.

It is a bit tricky becoming Royalty though.

Regards, Martin Brown

He was a foreign national who refused to answer about his communist connections. He wasn't so much persecuted as questioned, and when he refused to cooperate, and left the US, he was threatened with further questioning if he returned, so he didn't. This is not an abuse of the rights of an American citizen, much less a trip to a forced-labor camp. His personal life was considered scandalous, which didn't help in those days. He did just fine.

He was looking for Reds in the State Department and the Pentagon and the White house, and there were a lot of them, many actual Soviet agents. He wanted them out.

John

THose are your definitions. There are no actual lines separating those classes, no jumps/bumps/gaps in a graph of distribution of income, no boundaries to overcome in crossing between your "clases." You could define your types of "classes" among any population, bu drawing arbitrary lines, making the "classes" meaningless. In other words, you just made them up.

If a distribution-of-income plot is gaussian or some other smooth bump type curve, there are no income classes. If there's a separated population spike at one end or another, and individuals are inhibited from crossing from one area to another, that's "classes."

Not a problem in California or Texas. Perhaps even the opposite.

John

You might start with Wiki?

....

You surprised me with your assignment of the rich as either those who earned it or else stole it. There are some very obvious 'others' that it shocks me to realize you don't see. Some simply inherit it. I remember one chap, just recently in fact, coming into a camera shop to buy an expensive lens ($120k.) He was complaining to the salesman that his family (I can name them, if you like, but for now it doesn't matter) was "cutting him back" to an allowance of $5M/yr and he had no idea how he was going to manage on that. I spoke with the salesman, who knew him off and on, afterwards. This customer, in his 40's, had never worked in his life. Not ever. Now, this person, so far as I'm aware, neither 'earned it' nor 'stole it.' I'm surprised you haven't met such folks enough to have added them to your list. That's by no means a list from me, John. Just a single data point so that you will open your eyes a little more.

In any case, this subject has received a lot of both scientific attention as well as public attention in the past. I believe a bunch of New York Times reporters got together to do a book on the subject a few years back. And I would refer you to Google Scholar for the scientific studies that have been done. At least a few I saw date back to 1960 (Warner et al), but you may want to ignore things that old. A pretty good book on the subject is Rhonda Levine's "Social Class and Stratification" which is in its 2nd edition in 2006, I believe. It's pretty solid.

I'm not so interested in convincing you of the fact, though, as much as I am in simply not letting your ignorant statement ride without challenge. You can keep your opinion and I'm fine with that. But others need to know your opinion has been challenged and is likely not true, at all.

Jon

I've met, and dated, trust-fund kiddies. Sure, rich people leave wealth to their kids. Why does that seem to upset you, if the wealth was acquired legally? We need wealthy people to invest, to defer consumption. Poor people can't afford to invest on any useful scale.

Inherited wealth tends to dissipate over a few generations anyhow. We don't "entail" wealth.

I suppose you define "class" as "inequality" with arbitrary, hence unmeasurable, boundaries. I define "class" as a distinct anomoly in a normal distribution, a sub-population that has identifiable barriers to entry. The US has little in the way of class by my definition. Maybe pro football players, where women are not allowed.

The US used to have a huge class, namely non-whites, who couldn't enter certain schools or professions simply because of their race. Same for women. This sort of thing is less and less frequent.

John

I define class when there are very substantial stratifications.

The US has made spurts of progress, at times, and at other times, fell backwards. Recently, comes to mind, for the latter.

But read some of the scholarly material on the subject. It's better about this than I'll be and far, far more comprehensive and thorough. I've provided one fairly decent example for you, which is Levine's book. It provides all the necessary definitions and documentation to make the points clearer to you.

Jon

I never said it bothered me. What I said is that you failed to note it in your remarks.

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My ability to do engineering is unimpaired. My prospects of finding someone willing to pay me to do engineering has definitely been impaired by the antics of the US banking system.

Americans are notoriously insensitive to the feelings of the rest of the world. Happily, I'm not one of psychotics who resents this, but even I can dream that eventually you too will reform your system of government, and replace your current oligarchy of the rich (plutocracy) with something rather more like representative democracy, which might regulate your internal markets rather more responsibly than - say - Dubbya's clowns.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

McCarthy didn't have real facts, and he certainly didn't have access to Project Verona data. There were Russian spies in the US administration of the time, as there were US spies in the Soviet administration, but McCarthy ddn't know who they were, and he didn't have any useful mechanism for finding them, while he did invent a mechanism for grossly inconveniencing a lot of entirely blameless citizens and non-citizens.

spies *were*

Alger Hiss sems to be the only name that rings a bell, and opinions are divided as to whether the Project Verona data really does identify him as a spy. As usual, you have fallen for the right-wing take on the significance of the data revealed - which wants to deny that McCarthy was witch-hunting nit-wit.

Wrong. He wanted to be the man that was seen as getting them out of government. For him it was a matter of no importance whether they were spies or not - they were merely his excuse for posturing in the lime- light.

-- BillSloman, Nijmegen