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I had a great discussion about Class with author Sandra Tsing Loh:

https://mattasher.com/2020/09/01/ep-18-sandra-tsing-loh-on-a...

Sandra wrote what is imo the definitive book review of Class.

The US has some of this, and it's much of what the prep school to Ivy League pipeline is for. "There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a Choate graduate".

"Class", by Paul Fussell, is amusing, if dated.

This is a major point in Class by Paul Fussell.

https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...

I started reading Class over the weekend. I feel depressed because it described all of my middle class insecurities. I earn almost as much money as my doctor friends, but I'm desperate to prove that I am an equal.

There was an interesting London Java Community meetup[1] this week covering this topic. Matthew Gilliard demonstrated Class Data Sharing[2] and Application Class Data Sharing[3] and its impact on JVM startup times.

My work proxy is making it a pain to find the presentation, I'll try again at home.

[1] - https://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/252118399/

[2] - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/cl...

[3] - http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/310

No need to go for the throat there. And especially not when you're not totally correct.

Paul Fussell's Class documents the exact phenomenon OP describes. Wealth is not class [1]; class is much more complex. For example, poor academics are higher class than rich blue-collar workers. Donald Trump is crazy rich but affects many of the working-class behaviours described in said book (technically "high prole"). Barack Obama has much less money but most would view him as upper-middle class. Nobody would accuse the above of being "out of their lane".

My very rough approximation: class is something like the integral of wealth over very long periods of time. Being rich and well-connected for long periods gives you a chance to accumulate high-status behaviours and preferences, which can persist even when the wealth doesn't, and continue to confer benefits. Preferring golf or tennis to say, bowling, doesn't necessarily come with a major difference in affordability. But being good at golf might help your career more than bowling. Reading more helps in tons of ways, and most people only pick up this habit if they grow up with access to good education and parental cognitive surplus.

[1] https://resourcegeneration.org/breakdown-of-class-characteri...

I would read Paul Fussel's Class to understand the US social-status system, then multiply it significantly for the UK. Class even in the US is based more on birth and culture than you'd think (only the middle class thinks that social class is determined by job, for example); in the UK, everything I've heard is that this is still more pronounced, and more explicit.

> But I'll chase up some of the ASG references.

I recommend the introduction to

Class.Quant.Grav.27:245026,2010
DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/27/24/245026

https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3621

which is reasonably accessible and high-level in a way that's hard to find for asymptotically safe gravity (which is unsurprising given that renormalization group flow is a bit abstruse).

> im presently reading Paul Fussells "Class"

That's a really fun read. I had a great time playing "spot the behavior of parents/relatives, described as if he knew them personally" (all of which fell somewhere in Prole or Middle, for the record, so nothing to brag about, particularly in the latter case—oh boy, the poor, sad, misguided Middle)

Interesting lens through which to view Trump—does he ever have some weird displayed-class-markers. He reads as the most Middle and entirely un-self-aware and unobservant person possible, who's also won the lottery so all of that is on extreme display. Like a parody of the Middle. It's so strange. It's gotta be just a perfectly-maintained act, right? Given his upbringing it makes no sense for it to be natural, AFAIK. Utterly bizarre.

Lots of subtle observations in there that really do seem to match reality. The "mirrored surfaces signal you don't clean your own house" thing—that's been a fun one to watch out for. I felt very proud in a totally raised-Middle way that I knew the obelisk thing among the Upper-Middle and Upper was aimed at oblique association with Paris rather than Egypt before he got to the reveal, hahaha.

Some updated version by a similarly-observant person would be awesome, but Class is still remarkably accurate given how long ago it was written.

> I remember reading C++ intro books in my early teens. Class Train prints choo choo. Class Car says honk honk. Both inherit Vehicle. I thought, why do they do this dumb shit and how is it related to programming?

As someone who was once a known C++ and OOP zealot that later found their way to functional programming and now sits middle of the road on things, I am curious how exactly you would go about implementing polymorphism in C++ for, say a video game, where different entities had different sounds such that a single function can play the sounds of many entities without using this "train is a vehicle" and "car is a vehicle" text-book inheritance?

I'm not saying I cannot think of other ways to do it, but I am not really sure what the deficiency in your example actually is -- that seems like a pretty straightforward use of inheritance, and I can see it being useful in say a game as I made an example of.

Class is probably Fussel's hardest book to rip up. Look at Muscle, the book he ghost wrote for his son to find out what he really thinks.

To be fair when a graduate student I knew had an absentee PhD supervisor and a nervous breakdown and tried the "experiment" of not showing up for work and seeing how long it took for the paychecks to stop, the "experiment" strung on for most of a year until his dad realized he had no idea how to get in touch with his son, called up the department, and they called me up.

He had managed department failing department stores for decades and he thought our college town was a "dump" because it didn't have a Nordstrom's.

The social position of the college professor has changed a lot since Fussel's generation. Up until 1970 or so it was a path of upward social mobility, but a slowdown of tenure track hiring, social changes that doubled the number of professor's kids that could be recruited (counterbalanced enough by massive imports of male graduate students from hyperpatriarchical cultures to not threaten feminoid narriatives) mean it is no longer a path to social mobility, unless you mean trading a life of baking cookies at an organic cafe 9-5 to working 80 hours a week at 5 different colleges spread out over 200 miles while eating off food stamps...

Reread what I wrote: Class warfare by the upper class is a real thing, but trivializing every item as "pet issue" of this or that class doesn't help anybody and makes you look like a loony.

I'm not saying it's not true that some topics get more attention because they affect a certain class, but that if the problems are real (and we agree the TSA is a problem) and do not depend on class divide (and the TSA does not, at this point, depend on that), in strategic terms there is no point in bringing up the topic.