Class discrimination is very real, and it is often useful to be able to feign a higher class than one was born into. Some of these class markers are obvious: graduating from an expensive private school, having lots of wealth but not flaunting it, knowing other wealthy/high-status people, etc.
However, some class markers are much less obvious. Given that the vast majority of most people’s social lives are spent with people of roughly the same class, it can be very difficult to learn these markers.
I was reminded of this recently, when I befriended someone of a lower-class background than mine but who had recently come into more money. Talking to her, I was struck by just how obvious it was that she had not grown up middle class.
I want to know what markers likely make my upper middle class background obvious to some, but that I never think about because of my relatively homogenous social circles, and more generally class markers that might be hard to notice because of one’s background.
Since “upper middle class” can mean a lot of things, here are some facts which may give you a better idea of my background:
Growing up, my family’s household income was ~70th percentile in our city.
I went to a public school, but a fairly good one (maybe 95th percentile for the US).
I have a safety net from my family, but I don’t have a trust fund or inheritance which makes work optional.
First off, a meta-answer: Asking “what are non-obvious x” is potentially less useful at capturing less-obvious examples of x than asking for as many distinct examples as possible. I think it is likely that of those who have some [less obvious observations] many will assume they are more obvious than they are for others.
In my case, I have a built-in bias to assume that any piece of knowledge I obtained without apparent effort must also be obvious to most other people.
So, all the examples I can think of, most of which I think are obvious:
Financial skills/credit score
Level of effort spent to save insignificant amounts of money (and the significance threshold is often OOM higher for wealthy vs poor)
“Sophisticated” vocabulary and hobbies (what counts as sophisticated probably varies a lot between different subcultures, and it’s easy to assume something is sophisticated that others do not. I’m not listing examples lest I out myself further :) )
Presence of Anti-work sentiment, Anti-capitalist sentiment, Anti-wealth sentiment. (It’s a lot easier to buy into a narrative like “all rich people are evil conniving bastards” if you have never gotten to know anybody wealthy and all your friends/family/coworkers are using the abstract idea of “the evil capitalists” as a convenient target upon which to place blame for all bad things)
IQ (e.g. general level of intelligence/problem solving/pattern recognition/critical thinking, not necessarily tested IQ)
Level of interest in Obviously Bad Deals e.g. lottery, gambling (with perhaps a distinction between skill-based and not, the person counting cards in blackjack is not getting an obviously bad deal if playing with people less skilled. The suckers playing with them, on the other hand...)
Who your friends are/who you spend time around
What you talk about/think about (needs specificity but I hope someone else will be able to give better examples than me)
What media you consume (Obviously LW is high status adjusts monocle and checks pocket-watch in a condescending manner)
Of the media you consume, how much is read/listened to vs watched?
Level of risk aversion (I’m curious about which ways this applies, because I can see plausible reasons why levels of risk aversion for different things might be either high-class or low-class depending on the details. I have not seen any research about this and I’m entirely speculating from lived experience)
Level of institutional/systemic knowledge, e.g. knowing there’s actually nothing stopping you from attending university classes you aren’t enrolled in.
General level of busyness (Is it high-class that you can afford lots of free time, or high class to always have another Important Meeting to attend? Or both? It’s interesting how context-dependent a lot of these things are.)
Level of agreeableness
I’m now questioning how many of these are generally considered high-class and how many of them I associate with high-class but are more just nerd-culture things that don’t entirely generalize.
All of these were off the top of my head in ~20 minutes, quality not guaranteed.
I resisted the temptation to have an LLM generate example ideas, I assume if you wanted LLM answers you would have already gotten them yourself.
I grew up lower middle class and then my dad got a new job and we moved to a far lower CoL area and we ended up in upper middle class of thereabouts. My friend group now is mostly people who grew up upper middle class. Some markers are like whether you went skiing as a child (if you didn’t grow up in CO/UT/etc.), whether you did travel sports in middle/high school, whether you went on vacations to places like Cancun as opposed to camping in the woods, whether you went to sleep-away summer camp as a kid. Cruises are a quintessential lower-class vacation. Another one seems to be money, whether you always pay attention to how much things cost. I don’t think frugality means lower class, but more like obsessing about prices and couponing etc. Whether you have a monetary safety net from your parents or just a place to stay type of safety net. Lower class people seem to be more into lottery and gambling too.
This isn’t politically correct, but weight and eating habits/comfort foods is also a class marker. Whether you like eating very fatty, processed foods. I suspect whether someone likes seafood if they didn’t grow up near a body of saltwater is a class marker too, but it’s very low n and confounded with being a picky eater.
Class by Paul Fussell is somewhat outdated but a good read, Scott Alexander has a good book review.
It seems like skiing is a “hereditary” class marker because it’s hard to learn how to do it as an adult, and you’re probably not going to take your kids skiing unless you yourself were taught as a kid, etc.
Skiing is an interesting one. I never thought about it in those terms since I grew up in Alaska where downhill skiing was relatively accessible (like CO/UT). I also wouldn’t be surprised if outdoor activities in general are correlated with class, even when they’re not necessarily expensive (e.g. hiking).
Maybe it’s more how much leisure time it takes or usefulness they confer; for example hiking feels slightly more upper middle class, but camping feels ambiguous. Fishing is lower (middle) class. Golf is upper class, swimming in a lake/body of water near your house is ambiguous (maybe depends on if it’s a pool or just a river?)