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    • CommentAuthorSum Mortis
    • CommentTimeJan 17th 2011 edited
     
    Well, school has taken me away for a while, but now that midterms are over, I decided to come back on and see what has been going on.

    So anyway, I was just wondering what the demographics of this site are? Are most people on here upper or lower end? I have been thinking about this a lot, since I moved from an inner city middle school to a VERY rich private school, and the changes are huge.

    In the US, I think the lower class gets a really bad rap, and going to that middle school taught me a lot about life that I dont think I would know otherwise.

    So I guess, besides knowing what "class" you guys are in, I am curious to hear what you think about it.

    edit: I am going to add more in the morning, since it is 1:53 right now.
    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeJan 17th 2011
     

    I think you’ll find that, Bell-curveistically, the majority of us are somewhere in the middle range. I for one really don’t care about what “class” I’m in unless it affects my taxes or potential government assistance eligibility. :P

    •  
      CommentAuthorRand
    • CommentTimeJan 17th 2011
     

    If you make more than $3 a day, you’re richer than 95% of the world’s population. So congrats.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2011
     

    If you want to put it like that, Rand, then if you’re breathing, you’re better off than 99.99·% of the world’s historical population of humans. So congrats on being one of the E -10 % of humans in the history of the species to still be alive.

  1.  

    102% of mammals can fly if you throw them.

    As to the thread topic, I’m comfortably lower middle class, and I’ll be lower middle class even once I’m rich.

    •  
      CommentAuthorSharkonian
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2011 edited
     
    Upper lower class or lower middle class, though many people think I'm rich before they know me. Not because I wear designer clothes, but because of the way I act, at least, that's what my friends tell me. It's odd.
    •  
      CommentAuthorRandomX2
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2011
     

    and I’ll be lower middle class even once I’m rich.

    +1 × 10 ^ 42. I greatly approve of this.

    Not really rich personally, but I’d put myself at middle class since I live in a nice area. However, due to

    If you make more than $3 a day, you’re richer than 95% of the world’s population.

    I also consider myself extreme high class at times.

    • CommentAuthorWiseWillow
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2011
     

    I’m solid middle, or at least my parents are. All the money I have/spend comes from savings from my summer job, no allowance or anything.

  2.  

    I think I’m upper-middle class, probably the lower end of the upper-middle class… if that makes sense.

    •  
      CommentAuthorDiamonte
    • CommentTimeJan 18th 2011
     

    That does, and I’d probably put myself (by which I mean my parents) into the same category. Being in midwestern suburbs and all, we probably would not fit into the same category elsewhere.

  3.  

    Being in midwestern suburbs and all, we probably would not fit into the same category elsewhere.

    Same here. We’re in southern suburbia, and if we lived in some big metropolitan area, we would probably have to live quite differently.

    • CommentAuthorNo One
    • CommentTimeJan 19th 2011
     

    Middle to upper middle class.

    It seems to me that middle class really hates upper class, and lower class relies/depends on upper class and partially on middle class.

    •  
      CommentAuthorThea
    • CommentTimeJan 19th 2011
     

    On the very sliding scale of class, I’m probably upper-middle-middle class and that’s mostly because we live in a rural area where my parents both had office jobs for the federal gov’t. Both more stable and better paying than the others in town. Not to mention the credit thing, though not as badly as most. So maybe more middle-upper-middle, because technically my parents make a lot. But in town, we don’t have the ‘elite’ work; which would be owning a ranch and a local pedigree. And I live with them, otherwise, money-wise I’d be rather lower class, outside of education.

    •  
      CommentAuthorSharkonian
    • CommentTimeJan 19th 2011 edited
     
    @No One

    At least, where I live, the whole of the economy rests on the middle class. Get rid of the middle class and our economy would crumble like a... Crumble cake? c: But, really, I'm lower class (I asked my parents) and we're middle lower class pretty much and we do pretty good, we don't take anything from the government (though my parents are really careful and good with money, so...)

    EDIT: And my parents don't like people who are richer than us, but I could really care less. For me, it seems pretty equal. Lower, middle, or upper, they all don't like each other (at least at the school I used to go to).
  4.  

    I think for middle class people some of the tension comes from the fact that for things like colleges, they’re too poor to pay their way through but not poor enough for a lot of financial aid. Basically, they’re stuck in the middle…ergo, middle class. XP

    • CommentAuthorNo One
    • CommentTimeJan 19th 2011
     

    Ahahaha, my primary school is middle class, and we absolutely hate colleges (that includes primary schools), which are high class. Mostly because we associate high class with snobby, rich, spoilt brats.

    SWQ and Zombie have good points.

  5.  

    they’re too poor to pay their way through but not poor enough for a lot of financial aid.

    I hate that. I ran into that when I was trying to get scholarships. If I didn’t get good grades in high school, either my parents or I would have had to take out loans.

    •  
      CommentAuthorRandomX2
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    we absolutely hate colleges (that includes primary schools), which are high class

    Primary schools can be colleges? What is this magic?

    If I didn’t get good grades in high school, either my parents or I would have had to take out loans.

    +1. I was stuck in that medium even more, since reported income > actual income. Thank god for scholarships.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    In Australia, Random, a “college” can be any educational institution. Usually, the word is used to mean an educational institution (be it primary, secondary, or tertiary) that has an attached set of dormitories for students to live in during term . In Melbourne University, for example, there are several separate colleges within the university (each building is counted as its own college within the institution).

    In the United States and Ireland, “college” and “university” are loosely interchangeable,[citation needed] whereas in the United Kingdom, Australia and other Commonwealth countries, “college” may refer to a high school, a training institution that bestows trade qualifications, or a constituent school within a university. ~ Wikipedia

    •  
      CommentAuthorThea
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    If I didn’t get good grades in high school, either my parents or I would have had to take out loans.

    Eh. In that same situation (of the government thinking my parents had no expenses other than my education) I had awesome grades through high school so they were willing to give me automatic acceptance into any of the UC schools. I only got a few small scholarships and had to pay my way through 2 years of community college through bonds and then through the CSU I eventually went to with student loans. Because despite my awesomeness few people wanted to give me money for school, even in exchange for working.

    Sorry. I may be a little bitter.

    Actually, my family a little upper class, even more than I thought, because we’re so into education. I was talking to my mom recently: the past 4 generations, and maybe more, have been college graduates. Which is more unusual than I tend to think of it (given that I always assumed it was a given that I’d go to college). So while I may regret I didn’t go to a more ‘prestigious’ school when I’m feeling sorry for myself, I tend to forget how lucky I am. And college was probably the best thing to ever happen to me anyway. Some people look back to high school, but I wish I could go back to university.

    •  
      CommentAuthorDiamonte
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    Your bitterness is not unjustified. Being a middle class white kid from the suburbs with nothing too exceptional, but good grades and a high ACT score, I get no scholarship money. My parents don’t have that much money that they can throw $20,000+ a year for university schooling. Come on now.

    •  
      CommentAuthorRandomX2
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    Ah, thanks Taku.

    In Melbourne University, for example, there are several separate colleges within the university (each building is counted as its own college within the institution).

    Yeah, I’m more familiar with college being used in this sense, or as a standalone institution.

    $20,000+ a year for university schooling.

    Ouch. Is that including residence/ accommodation?

  6.  

    Being a middle class white kid from the suburbs with nothing too exceptional, but good grades and a high ACT score, I get no scholarship money. My parents don’t have that much money that they can throw $20,000+ a year for university schooling. Come on now.

    I’m Indian, which is synonymous with Asian, and they’re actually trying to cut down the percentage of Asian students at the UC schools, which are already hypercompetitive for Asian people. And my dad’s already talking about Stanford. Sorry to shoot down your wonderful expectations of me, but it’s not going to happen in terms of both admission and finances. XP

    (I’m bitter too.)

  7.  

    IIRC Stanford doesn’t do academic scholarships anyway. If I could’ve, and for some reason would’ve, gone to a California school, Stanford would be it though.

  8.  

    Being a middle class white kid from the suburbs with nothing too exceptional, but good grades and a high ACT score

    Wow, that’s pretty much me. I must be really lucky with my scholarships. Plus, I don’t live on campus, so I only have to spend about $8,000. And half is covered by a school scholarship, and the other half is covered by a state scholarship.

    they’re actually trying to cut down the percentage of Asian students at the UC schools

    That sounds really ridiculous. I’m not really fan of “we need this many or X type of individual to go here, and we have to many of Y type, so stop letting them in.”

    •  
      CommentAuthorDiamonte
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    That sounds really ridiculous. I’m not really fan of “we need this many or X type of individual to go here, and we have to many of Y type, so stop letting them in.”

    I agree 100%. This kind of thinking has to be banished if we ever want to achieve equality.

  9.  

    Okay, I looked it up and I was mistaken- this is what the bill in question (I think it was already passed now) was about:

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-04-24-university-california-asian_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

    •  
      CommentAuthorThea
    • CommentTimeJan 20th 2011
     

    That is an…interesting article. The thing about the UC system is that generally they’re all considered fairly prestigious (and omg I can’t spell today worth beans) and in today’s culture (or at least the culture of a few years ago) there hasn’t exactly been a shortage of qualified students. So instead they make it harder for themselves to find qualified students? I can see where it might open it up to those who don’t have extra money for 2 SATs (which I didn’t even know was a requirement that just seems ridiculous) but it also looks to me that it would just make finding good candidates harder, since they’ll be buried with those who maybe don’t belong there.

    (And I went to a school, well, let’s just say with a reputation that meant business students were taught to expound upon their schooling there with “I had many opportunities to handle myself in social situations” or something like that. I think there are more important things to worry about than where they rank on the ivy-league scale)

  10.  

    On the other hand, now class rank isn’t as important. This could help me because I’m not sure whether I’m in the top 5-10% of my graduating class- not because I’m stupid or incompetent, but because of all the other people who are insanely smart. In a less competitive high school, I could be in a more attractive class rank and still be the same student in terms of academic achievement.

    It’s all very infuriating.

    •  
      CommentAuthorEbelean
    • CommentTimeJan 21st 2011
     

    @SWQ: I have the same sort of problem with my high school- it’s really academically competitive, so I’m lower down on the totem pole than I would be at a different high school. My school doesn’t have a valedictorian or class rank anymore due to that sort of thing.

  11.  

    At my school, it’s not really ‘official’, but you can look up your class rank. I’m not going to, because I’m scared stiff. The trauma might crush my fragile academic self-esteem forever.

    • CommentAuthorSum Mortis
    • CommentTimeJan 24th 2011
     
    See, I am flat out middle class, but I got money to go to a very prestigious high school, one of the best known in the country as a matter of fact, and certainly the most well known on the West Coast.

    It is a great school, but I dont like quite a few number of kids, whereas at my poor middle school, I respected most of the other kids there. As much as I would love to be upper class, I dont want the attitude that goes with it.
    •  
      CommentAuthorEbelean
    • CommentTimeJan 28th 2011
     

    I think class is such a vague term, because it all depends on what you’re looking at. I mean, if you look at my family in terms of the whole country, we’d be upper-middle class, but in terms of the area I live in (where you have some ridiculous amounts of upper-classers), we’re on the low end of the scale.

  12.  

    “Yet I believe there is some hope that when Socialism is a living issue, a thing that large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about, the class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable. In the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist party that we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism is coming; probably a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika. But if we do get it there will be a struggle, conceivably a physical one, for our plutocracy will not sit quiet under a genuinely revolutionary government. And when the widely separate classes who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have fought side by side, they may feel differently about one another. And then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of the sinking middle class — the private schoolmaster, the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with L75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns — may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
    ——George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeApr 8th 2012
     

    I think class is such a vague term, because it all depends on what you’re looking at. I mean, if you look at my family in terms of the whole country, we’d be upper-middle class, but in terms of the area I live in (where you have some ridiculous amounts of upper-classers), we’re on the low end of the scale.

    Nicely put. Definitely an interesting problem.

    In Australia, the traditional “upper”, “middle”, and “lower” classes are being replaced by “miners”, “manufacturers” and “the rest of us”, but not necessarily in that order. Miners at the top, the rest of us in the middle, and manufacturers at the bottom.

    •  
      CommentAuthorInkblot
    • CommentTimeApr 8th 2012
     

    I would not have put the miners at the top if asked. :P

    To the OP: I consider myself just classy.

    I’m comfortably upper-middle class in terms of money. In terms of intellectual experience and background, though… anyone heard of this American radio host who wrote a book about the isolation of the middle and upper classes from the lower classes in America? The most popular sport in America is NASCAR, and there’s this one man who is the most well-known sports player in the entire country. He’s a NASCAR driver, and I literally have never heard of him. Not only that, I have never met anyone else who’s heard of him. I find that absolutely fascinating, how isolated I am without knowing it.

  13.  

    That’s really interesting, Inkblot. I was under the impression that NASCAR has already hit its popularity peak and is now dying. Apparently I’m wrong?

    •  
      CommentAuthorNorthmark
    • CommentTimeApr 8th 2012
     

    I always think of NASCAR as being more of a geographical interest than a class one. I guess the areas where it’s most popular are also more likely to be low-income?

    Personally I’m pretty much in the American middle-class, although I go to school in a lower-class area. I’ve definitely picked up some values from it (like the importance of self-reliance, even among people on welfare) but sometimes I wish I went somewhere with more AP classes/other special interest things that my school doesn’t have the money for.

    • CommentAuthorDanielle
    • CommentTimeApr 8th 2012
     

    My family is comfortably middle-class. We’re well off, but not incredibly wealthy; we’re rich enough to get catalogues for overpriced clothes and kitchen items, but not rich enough to buy them. We make enough to pay for what we need, to have a little fun, and to have a nice Christmas every year, but not enough to do it on a daily basis. On the more annoying side of things, my parents make too much money for me to qualify for government-supported college scholarships, but not enough to pay for my education out of pocket.

  14.  

    On the more annoying side of things, my parents make too much money for me to qualify for government-supported college scholarships, but not enough to pay for my education out of pocket.

    Yeeeep.

  15.  

    On the more annoying side of things, my parents make too much money for me to qualify for government-supported college scholarships, but not enough to pay for my education out of pocket.

    This was me. Thank God for merit scholarships. :P

    •  
      CommentAuthorKyllorac
    • CommentTimeApr 8th 2012 edited
     

    He’s a NASCAR driver, and I literally have never heard of him. Not only that, I have never met anyone else who’s heard of him.

    ...wat. You sure we live in the same state?

    ...you wouldn’t happen to live in a suburb, would you? >.>

    On a national scale, my family’s upper-lower class. Locally, we’re upper-middle class. Even after the business went under. Before then, we were definitely upper-high class locally and upper-middle class nationally. My father used to make more per hour than most other area “rich” kids’ parents made per day; I got called a liar when I told them what my dad made when everyone started talking about how much their parents made. The trials of attending a private school.

    That said, we live in a very rural area, so all our neighbors are definitely on the lower-lower class end of the class scale. Class has never been an issue between our immediate neighbors and us, though, in rather stark comparison to the other upper-middle class folks that have moved in in the past decade or so.

    I’ve always felt that the clash of the classes wasn’t so much a clash of income so much as a clash of attitudes that the differing income levels tend to foster. How much a person made was never an issue among our community, though it wasn’t a secret, either. People knew if you were well-off (or not), whether you were a good person (or a selfish bastard) and helped out (or the opposite) accordingly in little ways. If your door was open to them, theirs was open to you, and vice versa.

    Honestly, even back when I was a member of the upper-middle class, I never could stand the majority of them. They were always so self-entitled, wasteful, and materialistic, and if you didn’t have all the latest whatever, you weren’t as good as them. And, despite my family’s having money, I never had the latest whatever since my parents strongly believed in earning your wants, rather than being given them. As a result, all my needs were covered, but I had no allowance, and therefore no disposable income to buy whatever it was I wanted. I had to get an actual paying job for that.

    Things, especially money, tend to mean a lot more if you have to work hard to earn them. You also tend to respect other people’s efforts and achievements more if you’ve had to expend a lot of effort to achieve something yourself. A lot of middle and upper class people, though they may know it in the sense of a passing thought, don’t really understand the reality of this, though, and I think that’s the root of a lot of the class conflicts. The higher class folks are so rich, they don’t have to worry about making money because they have tons of it, and unless they built up their own wealth, they have no idea what it’s like to go without necessities. The middle class have just enough money to forget what it’s like to be unable to fill their basic needs and then some, and they feel entitled to having more of their wants fulfilled. In stark contrast, the lower class has to work hard just to fulfill basic needs, much less make a comfortable living. It’s easy for members of the lower classes to resent the uppers for having more while putting in less (perceived) effort, just as it’s easy for the uppers to disdain the lowers for having less of everything while putting in more effort (after all, if you’re putting in tons of effort and getting nothing out of it, you’re stupid for not putting your effort to better use elsewhere, right?).

    But I’m rambling.

    —-

    And I almost lost that monster rambling post. Thank goodness for Firefox’s cache.

    On the more annoying side of things, my parents make too much money for me to qualify for government-supported college scholarships, but not enough to pay for my education out of pocket.

    My parents made me pay for my education. And back when I started, I couldn’t get any financial aid because of how much my parents made.

    Somehow I’ve managed. XD

    • CommentAuthorDanielle
    • CommentTimeApr 9th 2012
     

    My parents made me pay for my education. And back when I started, I couldn’t get any financial aid because of how much my parents made. Somehow I’ve managed. XD

    Same story here. I just went to a cheaper college, took out as little loan money as I could get away with, and paid for the rest. I’m not in bad shape, honestly.

    •  
      CommentAuthorWulfRitter
    • CommentTimeApr 9th 2012
     

    Class is a weird thing, particularly because so much of it is based on earned yearly income. Which does make a certain sense. But then you have people like my parents who earned enough to be qualified as lower upper class, but they chose to live a middle class lifestyle. Then there’s me: my husband’s income qualifies us as lower class, but because I knew my job was unstable, we saved everything we could for four years and are now able to live as lower middle class while I try to find another job.

    •  
      CommentAuthorInkblot
    • CommentTimeApr 9th 2012
     

    @ Kyllorac:

    I see your point, which is the classical, well-established case. I would say, though, that for my own part I have always seen the value of honest labor for a living. That being said as I prepare to embark on a period of being totally and completely flat broke.

    I would say also that in the modern welfare state one of the worst injuries done has been to create a lower class who have never had to work for a living either. If you happened to know only the solid lower class, good on you, but in urban areas the welfare-dependent lower class are all too common.