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Not everything is a class dynamic. “Analyst at GS hanging out in the Hamptons” doesn’t scream working class. The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just dif

• steveBK123 3y ago
  Actually its extra funny because he is, objectively, a pretty bad CEO! Probably the worst GS has ever had. He will not last much longer in the seat. The big push into consumer finance has been a complete multi-billion loss making debacle under his leadership.
• thegaulofthem 3y ago
  They may both be richer than you (they’re certainly richer than I), but they’re definitely not of the same class.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Yes, even well paid worker bees are still worker bees. The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.
    • generic92034 3y ago
      What about managers/trainers of sports teams, if the stars of the team get a significantly higher salary? The manager/trainer might order them around, but does that make them belonging to a higher class, even if they earn way less than their "subordinates"?
      • steveBK123 3y ago
        you are misreading "owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees" Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria. At most the GM meets the majority of them. Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.
        • vasco 3y ago
          What about all the trades people that own their own small businesses? Like some young guy with a grass mowing business?
          • brewdad 3y ago
            That hive is too small to matter. Kind of like I don't really concern myself with all of the wildlife in Australia that would like to eat me. It doesn't affect me in the least day to day. Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.
          • notfromhere 3y ago
            Tradespeople with businesses are still pretty much tradespeople. At a small business the owner is basically a foreman It’s rare that those businesses scale to the point of where your role is purely abstract management layers removed from the front line workforce.
      • nkjnlknlk 3y ago
        Players have not been subordinate to managers (in most sports) for decades.
• flandish 3y ago
  Class is in no way related to salary.
  • FredPret 3y ago
    I didn't mention salary. I mentioned other indicators; being an analyst for GS (probably went to an Ivy League school) who hangs out in the same restaurant as the CEO in the Hamptons
    • topaz0 3y ago
      Class is also not these social/economic/cultural signifiers. As yogthos said in a different comment, differences in class are about having substantially different economic incentives. (I wouldn't go as far as GP and say they are unrelated. Of course they are strongly correlated. But they are different things in fundamental ways).
    • lancesells 3y ago
      I think you're thinking too much about the restaurant. A CEO can go have a $1000 meal at the same place the analyst has a $200 meal. The CEO could even have the $200 meal. Even multi-millionaires might not want a seven course prix fix for lunch. If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.
  • skissane 3y ago
    > Class is in no way related to salary. It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means) Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all
• ElFitz 3y ago
  A 150k-250k analyst isn’t upper class. Nor is it really middle-class (although that would depend on the cost of living). It’s that weird in-between, where one still needs to earn a living and make even more money for someone else. A 25M / year CEO is far past "earning a living" and really only works because they want to.
  • freetanga 3y ago
    Could be family money. A lot of IB folk come from wealthy families to begin with, then off to expensive Universities, and close the circle. Upwards mobility my ass.
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      "a lot" describes one area in one department in very large global organizations. For every daddy money nepobaby, theres 1000 other roles filled by people who got there the hard way. There's only so many of these people you can find if you are hiring for orgs of 50K people.
  • mytailorisrich 3y ago
    A junior analyst at Goldman Sachs who's having lunch in the Hamptons, in a restaurant the CEO also goes to, is probably upper class, just very young/recenly graduated though we don't know the details. Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'... Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      Taking the other side - the junior was out to lunch with a bunch of coworkers. In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul. I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert. It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class. You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc. Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich
• thfuran 3y ago
  Someone who has made twenty million for just a single year isn't working class even if they choose to continue working. They could immediately retire and perpetually draw on investments for an income several times higher than that of a person who's working for 150k.
• skissane 3y ago
  > The CEO and analyst are both upper class Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?) Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class. There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.
  • HelloNurse 3y ago
    There are other dimensions than number of millions; money might be an universal measure, but people are different. Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?
    • skissane 3y ago
      > Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.) In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it. In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself. The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
• FormerBandmate 3y ago
  The different levels of power and seniority is a class within a class. Different levels of money, power, and prestige (which seniority is a proxy for here) is all class is really
• gochi 3y ago
  Have you heard of phrases like "old money" and "new money"? Or "upper middle" and "lower upper"? The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals. This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.
  • afiori 3y ago
    There can be many class horizons, it could very possibly be that the young analyst would dislike a plumber (as in someone owning a plumbing comapany) talking casually to him, the plumber a retail casher, the retail casher an homeless person. Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.
  • vasco 3y ago
    People like to find ways to feel superior to others regardless of how much money they have. Money is just one of the easiest and most transversal ways. But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about. Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    CEO is New Money. Analyst is Not Money.
• yogthos 3y ago
  The only meaningful way to look at class is by looking at class interests. On the one hand, you have the capitalist class who own significant amount of capital and use this capital to further their wealth. On the other hand, you have working class people for whom selling their labour is the primary source of their income. These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that. People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.
  • hibikir 3y ago
    It's still more complicated than that, as ultimately a non trivial number of people end up making more from investments than labor, just from savings and time. Basically every 45 year old developer in the US that tried to save at all is a capitalist in your book. If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.
    • yogthos 3y ago
      I don't think it's that complicated actually. The basic question is whether the individual has to keep going to work to maintain their lifestyle. Pretty much every 45 year old developer out there wouldn't last long without having a job. They probably have a mortgage to pay on their house, they have car payments, credit card debt, and so on. They're not living off their capital even though they might own some capital. An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle. Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.