The Differences Between Social Class In The US And Britain

It's a pretty good essay below but he falls into the common trap of not asking what underlies class differences. Why is it so? The elephant in the room is IQ. Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein set it out decades ago -- in 1994 -- but nobody wants to know it.

But Murray was right. I have experienced it personally. I am a top scorer in IQ and I had a dream run through the British class system when I was there. Details of that below:

https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2022/07/a-disgraceful-sabbatical-in-london.html

For an extended coverage of IQ and class, see

http://jonjayray.com/toby.html

In any class system, high IQ people rise to the top -- even in the hereditary British system. Upper class males are very desirable to women so have their pick of women. And whom do they choose? Good-looking women. But good-looking women also tend to be smarter.

Sometimes it works out badly, with a vacuum-brained but pretty woman being chosen and giving birth to a scapegrace son who eventually blows the family fortune. But he in turn will look for the daughter of a rich family in order to restore his income -- so both the fortunes and the IQ of the family will tend to be restored

Sorry if that sounds glib but that is roughly how it works. My aristocratic girfriend wanted to marry me so if I had agreed it would have enhanced both the IQ and the wealth of her bloodline

America: the land of baseball, freedom, and “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. It doesn’t matter if you spent your childhood summers at a vacation home in Nantucket, or collecting recyclables and washing cars to help your parents pay the bills; with enough hard work and a sprinkle of ambition, everyone can expect a better life than their predecessors.

Britain: the country with a Royal family, and a working-class only slightly removed from Victorian chimney-sweeps. Everybody stays in their lane, or gets beaten back into it by the legendarily rigid British class system.

The truth in both countries, of course, is much more complex — however, these stereotypes are a great springboard for starting a discussion about the very real differences between their perception of social class.

Money has fairly little to do with social class in Britain
Nearly everywhere in the world, social class is a concept that involves far more than just money. Speech, skin colour, clothing, diet, and many other factors play a role.

In Britain, there is still a very real aristocracy. There are people who wear crowns, lords who still have direct political influence, and feudal estates that have been lived in for centuries. “Upper-class” does not mean “rich” or “powerful”; you can be both, but still not upper-class.

Take Rishi Sunak. He is the reigning British prime minister; he and his wife are worth hundreds of millions of pounds; he was privately educated, graduated from Oxford, got an MBA from Stanford, and amassed a fortune as an investment banker. He is most definitely “posh”.

He is not, however, upper-class, because he is the son of a doctor and a pharmacist rather than of dukes or earls.

The defining examples of American “old money” dynasties are families like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. According to the traditional British class system, neither family would be considered upper-class. Indeed, there are no British equivalents of these industrial dynasties, and even though the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, it had remarkably little impact on the composition of society’s elites.

In the US, fame and celebrity are what make the upper-classes. People as diverse as Bill Clinton (son of a traveling salesman), Eminem (grew up in a trailer park) and Mark Cuban (son of a car upholsterer) might be described as “the elite” or the upper-class. Eminem could get a meeting with a senator quite easily; Kim Kardashian probably could too.

By contrast, nobody in Britain would mistake football legends Wayne Rooney or David Beckham for members of the upper-class. Beckham hasn’t been able to obtain a knighthood, even after years of elocution lessons and relentless philanthropy and quiet campaigning.

On the other hand, Britain has upper-class people with no money. Many people are familiar with the cliché of aristocrats who can no longer afford to heat their homes (and indeed, many of Britain’s upper-classes have had to flog their family manors to hotel groups or museum trusts to clear their debts).

Without money as a reliable indicator of social class, Brits have to get more creative. One class trait I’ve always found fascinating is accent.

If you’re from Texas, you probably have a Texan accent. If you’re a very rich “old-money” Texan, maybe you have a slightly more restrained accent, but you certainly don’t speak with a New York or Chicago accent. The same is true of most of the world: accents tell you what region somebody is from.

And that is sometimes true in Britain as well. If you’re from Liverpool, you have the famously strong Scouse accent. Ditto for Newcastle (“Geordie”) and Birmingham (“Brummie”).

However, someone from the prosperous town of Chester (only 25 miles from Liverpool) will sound nothing like a Scouser; someone from Durham (11 miles from Newcastle) will sound nothing like a Geordie. Instead, the people from these rich little cities will sound like they come from southern England, hundreds of miles away.

When I studied in England, I was genuinely baffled at how people from Harrogate and Wakefield sounded so different. They’re 30 miles apart. Why did the people I knew from Harrogate sound like BBC presenters? As one friend helpfully explained, “Wakefield is a shit-hole and Harrogate isn’t”.

The effect is so extreme that you can find people from the same city, who grew up only a few neighbourhoods apart, but sound completely different just because one was privately educated and the other wasn’t.

Sports are another great dividing line. You play football? Working-class. Rugby union? Middle-class at the very least? Rugby league? Very working-class. You’re a girl who plays field hockey? Your parents are accountants. You’re a girl that plays lacrosse? Your parents own the accounting firm.

The US has some sports which are class-codified (golf, horse-riding), but many more which aren’t (American football, baseball). That’s largely due to high school and college sport being a much bigger deal in the US., and so there are more established systems to find talent regardless of background.

Education is also a clearer symbol of class in Britain than in the US. Oxbridge and the Ivy League have roughly equivalent social prestige, but the upper echelons of British society are much more dominated by private schools than in the US. 20 of the 55 British prime ministers attended Eton College (a high school). Only 11 prime ministers were educated at free state schools.

Going to a private school is widely seen as a dividing line between the bog standard middle-class (teachers, nurses, social workers) and the upper-middle-class (judges, surgeons, professors, politicians).

University is also a firmer class threshold in Britain than in the US.

America’s economic miracle was built on the back of well-paid, prosperous manual labourers like factory workers. These factory workers often consider themselves middle-class. In Britain, however, that doesn’t fly. To be in the middle-class, you need an education, preferably a university one (and nowadays, preferably a “redbrick” or Russell Group university).

Factory workers, no matter how materially well-off, are just fundamentally different to teachers or lawyers.

Middle-class pride (or lack thereof)

According to most measures of equality, Britain is more equal than America.

With a universal healthcare system, decent public transport, and comparatively generous welfare benefits, it should be harder to starve or go homeless in Britain than in America. On the other hand, higher taxes, smaller markets and less economic dynamism make it harder for an ordinary Brit to become a millionaire or billionaire.

You might therefore expect that Brits are more likely to fall into the middle-class than Americans. Yet, Brits themselves don’t seem to agree. Surveys in both countries suggest that Americans are much more likely than Brits to see themselves as somewhere in the broad middle. So why are Brits so hesitant to see themselves as ordinary?

Part of the answer is that class has been a driving force in British life more much longer, so people have created much narrower sub-categories.

You’re a construction worker? Working class.

You’re a skilled tradesman (like a plumber) and own your van? Upper-working class.

You’re a plumber but own your home and have a few employees? Lower-middle class.

You have a degree and are a manager at a construction company? Middle-class.

To an American, none of these people are homeless, and none are billionaires, so they’re all different shades of middle-class. But to a class-conscious Brit, there’s a huge difference between some dirty plumber who drives a white van, and the surveyor who studied geography at university and speaks “the Queen’s English”, and it has nothing to do with who owns the bigger house.

British society offers more material mobility than America, although that material prosperity brings fewer social rewards because Brits are so attuned to subtle cues like voice or hobbies.

But Britain is no longer living in the Victorian era. We can point to at least 3 great turning points in modern British history that have eroded the traditional class system.

Firstly, World War 2. With the introduction and expansion of welfare tools like the National Health Service and universal schooling, pretty much everyone in society was given the raw tools to climb up. Grammar schools in particular led to a generation of working-class Brits entering university, professional work and therefore the middle-class.

Secondly, Thatcher. Her capitalist reforms created a Britain that cared just as much about money as it did about social class. Investment poured in, the public sector was sold off, and London became the financial capital of the world. Suddenly, studying Latin poetry at Cambridge and snagging a lifetime job in civil service was no longer the clearest route to a successful life.

Furthermore, Thatcher’s “right-to-buy” scheme (which allowed long-term social housing tenants to buy their homes at a steep discount) seriously blurred the lines between the working and middle-classes. Plumbers and electricians could now be well-to-do: they could own their homes, send the kids to private schools, bring the family on regular holidays, and maybe even buy a vacation house in Spain or Portugal. You would never be posh, but your kids could be.

And finally, we have Tony Blair’s decision that over 50% of high school leavers should be going to university. That has seriously devalued one of the most powerful signs of the higher social classes, and created a sort of new working-class: whereas the working-class archetype of the 1970s was a Welsh or Yorkshire coal miner, today’s working-class is better exemplified by middle-class Isabella.

Isabella studied philosophy at a mid-ranking university and is now working part-time at a local bookshop, considering doing a master’s degree in communication to become more employable. She has a “neutral” accent, was privately educated, and grew up riding horses and playing tennis. Unless she settles down with someone richer, her kids will probably only inherit the accent.

So as Britain becomes a more modern country, class becomes an increasingly imprecise way to stratify society. It is still a very real feature of British social life, and will remain so for some time, but things have really changed. Today, electricians can marry doctors, and privately-educated diplomats might be the children of plumbers and hairdressers.

Meanwhile, in an increasingly unequal US, class is taking a new importance. As Trump professes his love for “the poorly educated” and every journalist in the country scrambles to talk with authentic “non-college-educated whites”, Americans are re-discovering the importance of education, family background, vocal mannerisms and hobbies — in short, class.

https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/the-differences-between-social-class-in-the-us-and-britain-12f830e768c5

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After Cruz Applies Heat, Intuit Sees Light and Backs Down on Anti-Gun Policy

Intuit—a company best known for its QuickBooks financial management software for businesses—earlier this year announced a cessation of services for firearms dealers, along with manufacturers of firearms or firearms components.

The latest attempt at woke corporate activity resulted in another embarrassing about-face, demonstrating left-wing social policies do not reflect American values and undermine the business interests of the companies that advance them. The threat this time came from Intuit, a software company that manages personal, business, payroll, and tax finances, but denied its services to gun makers, gun dealers, and even gun-parts manufacturers.

After Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, launched an investigation as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Intuit dropped this woke, discriminatory policy.

The sharp reversal under Cruz’s spotlight demonstrates the deep unpopularity of the woke anti-gun cause. Intuit’s decision to harm law-abiding businesses does not reflect American values and, in fact, harms its own shareholders.

Dawson Precision is a Texas-based manufacturer of firearms parts and a firearms dealer. Like many American small businesses, the company used Intuit to manage its payroll.

Suddenly and without warning, Intuit terminated the company’s payroll-service subscription—deeming the gun-parts maker in violation of Intuit’s “acceptable use” policy prohibiting services for gun manufactures. To no avail, Dawson appealed the termination, arguing that its business as a small firearm-parts manufacturer—rather than a manufacturer of firearms—did not violate the acceptable-use policy.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first woke discrimination policy employed by the company. In 2018, Intuit incorrectly classified Arizona-based Gunsite Academy as a gun seller. Despite clear proof of Gunsite Academy’s compliance with the policy—and that the business does not sell directly to consumers—Intuit denied the company an appeal, leaving it without payroll software.

As the investigation continued, Cruz found Intuit’s banking providers—JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America—were instigators of these discriminatory practices. These financial institutions demanded Intuit refuse to provide payroll services for gun manufacturers and retailers. As a result, Intuit terminated its relationship with scores of companies such as Dawson Precision and Gunsite Academy.

Thanks to Cruz’ investigation, Intuit acknowledged the unfair policy, its subjective application, and lack of a fair appeals process.

The subsequent removal of Intuit’s discriminatory gun-related payroll policies is a step in the right direction, but this denial of essential financial services to law-abiding businesses should sound alarm bells for Americans.

The risk to individuals, institutions, and businesses of being “debanked” simply for being on the “wrong” side of a woke creed continues to rise. Freedom-loving Americans are fighting back.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/27/intuit-backpedals-from-discriminatory-denial-of-services-to-firearms-industry/RBcwkUvjKVSNEuA6fbsqUpn2qoKOEBv71uBSv4jqjaoQDLAFFJJAMLvDOp7k

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Men and women are becoming increasingly unequal—and in one of the most basic measures of well-being, it's men who keep falling further behind

Equality always has been an American preoccupation, right from the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence.

Yet even that phrase is not egalitarian enough by today’s lights; feminists long have objected to the gendered language of “all men.”

Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean to commit a microaggression; in 1776, “all men” meant women, too.

We know this because the Founding Fathers—must we say Founding Parents?—argued about the mismatch between their universal philosophy and the endemic inequalities of their time, with Abigail Adams asking her husband John to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors” when the time came for America to declare independence.

Today, however, men and women are becoming increasingly unequal—and in one of the most basic measures of well-being, it’s men who keep falling further behind.

Life expectancy has declined for all Americans in recent years. It’s fallen more for men than for women, though, producing the largest gender gap in nearly two decades.

According to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine, as of 2021 women were outliving men by 5.8 years.

As much as postmodern academics and progressive political activists may deny it, there are natural differences between the sexes, and the mere fact that women live longer is not so surprising.

For one thing, men are disproportionately employed in the nation’s most hazardous jobs, including as loggers, roofers, construction workers, aircraft pilots, and steel workers.

And if a male propensity for risk-taking makes men more successful in certain executive and entrepreneurial roles, it also leads to more men and boys dying young of misadventure and accident.

But the gap in longevity has widened by a full year since 2010, when it was at an historic minimum of 4.8 years.

Human nature hasn’t changed in that time; rather, something has changed in America to make it a deadlier place for men.

COVID-19 contributed twice over, to the extent that the disease may have affected men more severely and they, in turn, were less inclined to take its flu-like symptoms seriously.

Deaths from despair have ravaged both sexes, but suicide and overdose do exacerbate the gender disparity, with men at greater risk of dying from each of those causes.

Unsurprisingly, men are also more likely to die by homicide, and when violent crime escalates, male life expectancy predictably will fall.

But there are less obvious forces in play, too.

Men are less likely to go to college or complete a degree, which in an increasingly service-oriented and knowledge-based economy translates into worse life and career prospects—conditions that foster deaths from despair.

Whether ironically or cynically, progressives can be conservative and hidebound in their assumptions about inequality: They presume that whoever was more-than-equal in the past must still be privileged today, and so the one kind of inequality that doesn’t prick the progressive conscience is whatever harms groups that were formerly better off.

Income inequality and racial inequality are outrages that fill the streets with protesters from Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter—but there won’t be any protests over men’s worsening life prospects.

Then again, the last thing men need is to be designated as another victim group.

Right now, the very concept of manhood is under attack from two directions: from those on the left who see masculinity as inherently “toxic” and those on the right who idolize the likes of Andrew Tate—overgrown adolescent hedonists without an ounce of self-control, let alone any traditionally manly moral responsibilities for family or others.

If life is unfair to men, the masculine remedy is not to complain about unfairness but to be tough enough, and mature enough, to endure and prosper despite inequality.

That doesn’t mean that men don’t need help, especially when facing despair, but a sense of social or political victimhood is only destructive; what kills men is not something that can be solved with another equality-demanding movement.

As dedicated as our Founding Fathers were to equality—even to the point of recognizing in principle, if not in practice, that the words of the Declaration of Independence applied to women and black people as well as to white men—they did not believe that everyone could or should be equal in every way.

Men and women will forever be different, and the ways they differ will not always be favorable to men.

Rather than seeing this as a betrayal of equality, or overlooking it as a politically incorrect fact, the best response is to treat men as men and women as women in their virtues and hardships alike—and look to men’s strengths for the answer to their plight.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/21/when-inequality-is-fatal-for-men/

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The present Australian Leftist federal government: Ideology, idiocy and incompetence

Peter Dutton has committed his party to a return to government at the next election. This development is welcome. The damage being inflicted upon this nation by the Albanese government, which we pointed out over a year ago comprises a core group of some of the least impressive individuals to ever run this country, is immense and needs to be stopped.

Mr Albanese presides over a government of the ‘three i’s’: every policy can be explained within the parameters of ideology, idiocy and incompetence.

Take climate change. This week Chris Bowen flies off at taxpayer’s expense along with 70,000 other globalist jet-setters to Dubai for the annual climate gabfest, Cop28. (Why any self-respecting politician would attend these events is beyond us – it was a Cop that heralded the beginning of the end for Kevin ‘rat-f-ckers’ Rudd and of course it was at Glasgow’s ignominious Cop26 that Scott ‘net zero’ Morrison sealed his own fate).

Mr Bowen’s trip is fuelled not only by an abundance of fossil fuel (of course) but also by Labor’s flawed and foolish climate ideology. In Mr Bowen, the climate zealots have a man of limited work experience outside of Labor party undergraduate politics and of limited ability who is the perfect patsy for implementing hugely expensive and almost certainly futile green climate measures at the behest of the renewables industrial complex. His career to date boasts a litany of failed and destructive policies in every portfolio he has been gifted, from the silliness of GroceryWatch to the deaths at sea during his time as immigration minister to the money-grabbing, vote-losing franking credits fiasco. Mr Bowen’s ideology is compounded by idiocy.

The fact that the USA and the UK at this climate meeting are pushing for nuclear to be a key component of reaching net zero means that instead of us being in lockstep with our most important Aukus allies, and instead of using Cop28 as the perfect launchpad for an Australian nuclear industry, Mr Bowen will be standing on the sidelines, a ‘nuclear Nigel no-friends’. The idiocy is then shrouded in incompetence.

Having vandalised vast swathes of agricultural land with his transmission-lines madness and touted offshore wind farms as the solution to his renewables quest, Mr Bowen has met stiff resistance from many of Labor’s natural constituency and is now running around proposing silliness like floating windmills miles out at sea or even greater taxpayer expenditure on solar farms. Future nuclear-powered generations will look back on his hare-brained follies, along with Snowy 2.0, green hydrogen, carbon capture and so on, with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

Next, take Labor’s hapless immigration and home affairs ministers, both clearly floundering and out of their depth; hardly surprising from a party that brought us over a thousand deaths at sea and an endless flotilla of leaky people-smuggling boats. Following the chaos surrounding the release of long-term detainees (including rapists, murderers and pedophiles) by the increasingly activist left-wing High Court, the Albanese government is now voluntarily importing hundreds of Gazan refugees into this country, despite the fact hat a recent survey showed a terrifying 75 per cent of Palestinians support Hamas and the 7 October atrocities. How are Australians, and more specifically Australian Jews, meant to feel secure with Labor in power?

On the economy we clearly see the three i’s hard at work as well as on industrial relations and especially on Labor’s defence policy, which expert Greg Sheridan derides as ‘criminally negligent’.

Meanwhile, everyday Australians increasingly struggle to make ends meet as the Prime Minister jets around the globe with no discernible benefits to the nation. Back at home, emboldened by the absence of any moral leadership and moral clarity from the government, foolish youth (urged on by teachers and unions) and imbecilic actors don keffiyehs to parade their obscene ‘support for Palestine’, in the process terrifying Jewish communities and giving succour and encouragement to the vile rapists, torturers and murderers of Hamas and their acolytes.

From a purely political level, the self-evident failures of the Albanese government, including the huge own goal of the Voice referendum, make a change of government increasingly likely, as the trend in current polls suggests. But there is a long hard slog ahead and there is certainly no room for complacency.

Peter Dutton himself is an impressive opposition leader, exuding an air of common sense and mainstream values. The Voice victory and the way he stood back to allow Senator Jacinta Price to shine bodes well for his prime ministership.

Arguably, it is only the Liberals themselves who stand in the way of a Coalition victory at the next election. If the so-called ‘moderates’ – the Birmingham-Leeser-Bragg brigade – repeat the errors of the past and attempt to water down or ditch conservative policies, the Libs will lose.

Left to his own devices and political instincts and free of any stupidity or sabotage from the Teal-soaked bed-wetters, Peter Dutton will likely be our next prime minister. And it can’t come soon enough.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/the-three-is/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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