It’s largely dependent from state to state and area to area, but here’s a glimpse of my observations of Silicon Valley in California (where I live, grew up, and study in):

Everything is oriented around money and how many connections you have with family or trusted friends. With connections you can rise up the social ladder, but without people in the right places stagnation is the best you can hope for. But in regards to money…

• If your family has <$1 million in total assets, you are expendable items on someone else’s balance sheet.
• If your family has >$1 million in total assets, you are marketed to and are the key demographic advocated for in local politics and incentives. You are also asked to participate in the “better jobs” of the area and are given favorable circumstances in higher education.
• If your family brings $1 million or more in collective income each year, you have a seat at the table where the real decisions are made: district zoning and business investments. The “expendables” fates are at your will.
• If you personally make more than a million dollars in collective income, you’re at the head of the table. You can do what you like with the first two categories, and most of the time there will be no resistance. You are secure from crisis, with no real need to maintain social connections. If you want something to happen in town, so be it.

From a lay person’s perspective living here my whole life:

• I grew up middle class. My parents made like $60k combined in the 90s/00s.
• I grew up around lots of different classes.
• I lived in the New England and Southern Belt areas.

One extreme, poverty:

• Many of my friends lived in public housing. This means smaller apartments and usually shadier folks.
• People try to pitch you on schemes or odd jobs.
• A lot of my friends had single mothers.
• I found out later that several dated drug dealers.
• I’ve had many people die from overdose (heroin, fent).
• In south and north, the poorer you are, the more your ethnic accent comes out (southern slang & Boston southie).
• Many smoke or eat poorly. Eating is usually because of material circumstances.
• A lot of people are giving in terms of money or time. They’ll rib you about it, but they’ll help you.

Other extreme, wealth:

• I work in tech. I’ve been successful and have hung out with pretty wealthy people, certainly much wealthier than me.
• They often live somewhere lavish, like a lake house, expensive apartment, or a family house.
• Most have some generational wealth. Some had successful parents. Others come from linages.
• Many have no awareness of how difficult things can be on the poor side. They lack lived experience.
• Most are kind, and self aware of their wealth.
• However, it feels like many have a “rules don’t apply” mindset.
• Tend to have worse empathy for the poor.
• Tend to have worse manners, but I wouldn’t say they are spoiled.
• More giving to their friends, less giving or trusting of strangers.
• Many are good at managing optics & image. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how home lives were too faced, like everyone saw the good side, but there was some darker edge beneath the surface.
• Older rich people seem to be the least empathetic. Younger rich people seem better.

It’s not really possible to capture what it’s like to live. Homelessness is a real problem and a worse version of poverty. The most sociopathic people I’ve known have been ultra wealthy. This is anecdotal.

So I live just down the road from Bentonville, Arkansas which is best known for Walmart. The Walton’s are still probably one of the wealthiest families in the world and you don’t have to do more than stick your head out the door around here to see something that one of them has had a hand in.

I think it’s hard for most people to comprehend what being a billionaire, nevermind a multi-billionaire, is like. It’s not just “rich.” Depending on where you live in the States, you can have $2 million and be considered rich.

Billionaire rich is being so rich that you literally need a large team of people to manage all your assets. Billionaire rich is being able to personally fund art museums, medical schools, and all kinds of other vanity projects and it not even be a drop in the bucket because you make money faster than you can spend it.

There’s a lot of American’s that like to imagine that this will be them someday. But that’s not possible because most of them don’t have rich daddies to leave them a massive inheritance.

The real rich (don’t have to work)

The rich (earn lots of money, have enough assets to coast of needed)

The poor (anyone who already is, or would end up on the street if they stopped working for a couple years.)

The owners and the owned.

Welcome to the US: where the classes are completely made up and the points don’t matter.

The Bourgeoisie - monopoly capital, own vast majority of the means of production, project influence internationally, shape our economy through their decisions, and are primarily motivated by profit seeking

The Petit Bourgeoisie - small business owners, share similar material interests as the big Bourgeoisie but don’t have comparable influence, usually consumed by monopoly capital during bust periods, and often cling to status quo politics in order to retain their relative position of privilege.

The Proletarian - those who sell their labor for a wage, do not own the means of production except in the case of co-ops but thats a different conversation, material interests contradict that of the bourgeoisie as the worker seeks higher wages which decreases the profits of the employer, and makes up the majority of the population

Lumpenproletariat - these are your unemployed or illegally employed workers, their interests and ideologically leanings can vary dramatically but typically align with the working class except sometimes in cases of organized crime, Lumpens are a important part of the capitalist class system as their desperation makes them good scabs when the workers try to unionize and their condition provides coercion to the worker by reminding them of how they will live without selling their labor. Edit: I think it should be noted that lumpens can play an important role for both communists and fascists depending on who is most successful at agitating them. Nazi Germany spent a lot of effort rallying the Lumpen to their cause and it worked while the Black Panthers also spent a lot of time radicalizing the Lumpens to great success. This is a class that has the least to lose and most to gain from radical social change one way or the other.

The landlord and politician classes are more complex and I don’t have the time to cover them rn. Their interests are almost exclusively aligned with the bourgeoisie though. It should be noted that most politicans are bourgeois and/or landlords. They either own land and business themselves or their family does.

My writing here is very simplistic and there is far more to these classes than I have mentioned but I feel I covered the important bases. If anyone wants to add to it I encourage that.

Edit: I forgot the labor aristocracy. This one is unique to imperialist nations and very difficult to maintain without that imperialist plundering. The labor aristocracy is a subset of the working class which the bourgeoisie allows to live in relative luxury in order to keep the masses from revolting. These people recieve a larger portion of the value they produce for the bourgeoisie in exchange for their investment in the capitalist/imperial system that keeps them interested in maintaining the status quo. They also often receive positions of power over other workers like management.

There’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and then there’s everyone else.

This is a literal answer to your question.

https://a.co/d/hgrtZb1

It is not long, nor expensive, but is the definitive work on the topic - as have been the several earlier versions.

Class. The news pretends otherwise but material conditions are, if not everything, a lot. There’s no House of Lords where we store our drunken perverts but it’s similar to England.

It gets different the further you are from DC. Money is always involved but no one in Oregon gives a shit what you wear and lots of places in the South and West make folk heroes out of hard working and even rebellious people. (Rebellious in this case can be good resistance or just the worst shit ever.)

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