# Social Class

_Notes from the Salon_

ETA: This is a write-up of some interesting points raised at an in-person rationalist meetup on October 6th, 2019. It is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the topic. It is conventional for attendees to do all the suggested readings before salon starts, so some parts of the write-up might not make sense without that context.

Assigned readings: [Siderea on Class](https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light), [Thoughts on the "STEM" class](https://tsutsifrutsi.tumblr.com/post/139992202409/thoughts-on-the-stem-class)

Economic Class vs. Social Class
-------------------------------

Economic class and social class are not the same thing. The two are decoupled, but only partly. You can be wealthy but lower class (e.g. a skilled tradesman making 6 figures) or poor but upper class (e.g. an adjunct professor at a prestigious university). Everyone at the salon was in the same social class: the class that attends semi-ironic and entirely sober literary salons, likely [G2 on Church's ladder](https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder-system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/). But there's a much broader distribution of economic classes represented in the room.

Performing upper-(middle)-classness grants you privilege. It costs some amount of money, but not as much as you would think, to perform professional-classness. The harder part by far is knowing what to buy in the first place. A clean-ish hoodie emblazoned with your university seal does the job. A blazer with a loud animal print pattern does not.

Most people want to make more money, but few people are interested in climbing the social ladder. When you find the class that you belong to and join it, you tend to go “ew” at the people in the classes below you, and “yikes”* at the people in the classes above you.

_*Or the equivalent of “yikes”, if you’re in a class that doesn’t say “yikes”_

Everyone is "Middle-Class"
--------------------------

The middle class is the only virtuous class - both "lower class" and "upper class" are insults. This results in basically everyone except billionaires and the homeless identifying as middle class. [Premium mediocrity](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/) is what middle-classness could look like for millennials.

Class is a culture and a performance. For example, someone who makes six figures may choose to get their morning coffee at Tim Horton's instead of Starbucks or an indie coffee shop. They might make this decision even if they like their coffee not terrible, because it's more important to them to be seen as a salt-of-the-earth sort.

A more extreme example of this was outlined in [this piece](https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/), where a Yale student who was actually broke didn't realize that all of her classmates were only pretending to be broke. In one incident, she offered to buy a classmate that she knew for 3 years a sandwich, because she thought he was actually on the verge of starving. The classmate graciously broke the act and told her that he actually has a trust fund and was just carefully cultivating a starving artist image. In another incident, her classmates shamed her for not donating to a charity, because they perceived her to be only faking her destitution like the rest of them.

[Scott's cellular automata model of fashion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/) talks about something similar, but what this piece says is that this gives the elites an unfounded confidence in knowing how poor people live, which is terrible for society.

That "STEM Class" Piece
-----------------------

The makeup of this Salon session was something like 60% STEM folk, 20% non-STEM folk who work or socialize with STEM folk a lot, and 20% non-STEM folk who don't interact with STEM folk on a regular basis.

The only thing that the Salon agreed on was that STEM class people pretend more than other classes that they don't care about class and just wear things they like.

Things we disagreed on included:

*   how accurate the tumblr post was about STEM folk
*   how accurate the tumblr post was about the connection between STEM and the military-officer class
*   whether any single person in the Salon has a good idea of what a representative sample of STEM folk would look like
*   how much STEM folk cared about art, politics, and sports
*   whether the r/uwaterloo subreddit is a decent representative sample of STEM folk
*   if this is the class that's responsible for the existence of the alt-right
*   whether this is a class or a subculture, could a similar tumblr post be made for "the lawyer class", etc.
*   if "STEM folk" is a real and useful category

Diversifying
------------

People generally don't deliberately seek to hang out with other social classes. When it happens, it's usually as a result of another shared interest or trait. You can run into people in another social class at a con, or your sports league, or your very small local queer community. Or if you're doing a substantial amount of going on first dates with people from dating apps. It won't be the entire range of social classes, it's just a wider range than who you would hang out with by default. Talking to a person in another social class is generally more unpleasant than talking to a person in your own, but this shared trait can act like a social lubricant.

Many activist organizers come from the middle- and upper-middle classes. One common trap that they fall into is modelling working- and lower-class activists as sharing the exact same set of aversions that they do, to the upper class. In truth, working- and lower-class activists often have an aversion to middle-class norms as well -- things like tofu, women who don’t shave, and non-hierarchical meeting structures. To make meetings and spaces welcoming towards everyone, middle- and upper-middle class activists should reflect on their own cultural norms, and to what extent it is necessary to impose it on other classes.

Betsy-Leondar Wright, an activist-scholar, suggests [distinguishing between essential and non-essential weirdness](http://www.classmatters.org/2006_07/its-not-them.php), where essential weirdnesses are defined as practices that can't be eliminated without doing great injustice to someone. In other words, essential weirdnesses must be kept, even if they seem offputting to some attendants, because discarding them causes greater harm. Essential weirdnesses are things like “the practice of always speaking out against racist comments” or “having your meetings be secular”.

Non-essential weirdnesses, on the other hand, should be eliminated as much as possible because pushing lifestyle choices onto disinterested working-class people is a misuse of class privilege. Because classes are hierarchical in nature, this is especially important for middle-upper class people to keep in mind. An example of non-essential weirdness is “only having vegan options for dinner”.