ronisron wrote:
I would say the middle class is damn near extinct. The cost of keeping up with the Joneses is astronomical. All the prices have gone up, but overall, the wages haven't. In North America, there is an Elite class, then an upper class, then an upper middle class. The largest segment of the population is lower middle class or poverty level. There is no middle; it's one end of the spectrum or the other. Or, more fitting, the capstone, and then the ever widening base of the pyramid.
they don't have a working class in America?
In Britain you have God's(Monarchy, Princes etc), Seraphim(dignitaries, Lords, Vicounts, Barons), Angels (religious institutions, conservative ideologues, industrial wealth, some entertainers, obe's mbe's (cliff richards etc), Devils (left wing, radical ideologues, illuminatists, some entertainers(madonna etc)), Demons(police, current and ex military, hatchet men, spies etc), then you have men and women.
Men and women are branched into:
1.Upper class, landed, propertied, hereditary wealth, some industrial, legal and financial wealth, many social and professional links to the higher realms.
2.Upper middle class, entrepreneurs, global business men, bank and business execs, business owners, investors, hugely successful capitalists, resoundingly white and male dominated world.
3.Middle class, intellectuals, mainly employed as specialized labour in medical, financial, legal, research and other important industries, upwardly mobile, resoundingly White European, successful capitalists.
4.Lower Middle Classes, reasonable Labour value due to experience and perhaps some specialization in service sector, but dependent on credit, mortgages and cheap consumer products to sustain the middle class lifestyle, some immigrants, some unsuccessful capitalists, politically volatile, potentially susceptible to radical Marxist or ultra-Nationalist views, thus plied with entertainment and liberal conservative ideology on a plate.
5.Working Class, cheap labour value, mainly employed in service sector, exploited by capitalist system,mainly immigrants, rent accommodation from a landlord or social housing, some remnants of traditional culture and aspiration, which still sees many from the working class regions of Scotland and minority communities of England, reach upper middle class and in the occasional rare case, even higher being of course that they are white and male.
6.the Underclass, Immigrants and Criminal class, people who generally have to break the law/bend the rules to survive on a daily basis, I would say there are many from traditionally working class families and communities falling into the 6th category, generational unemployment, criminality and illiteracy, unregulated drug dependency, alchoholism, gang culture.
I hope that gives you some idea of the class system of Great Britain.
BTW the part of the country I live is filled with Angel's, Seraphim and their little underlings the Upper and Upper Middle classes
