Class Bullshitters
I had an interesting conversation about class in the UK the other day. I took my friend and our four boys (all around 10) to a football (soccer) game.<p>It turned out that my friend had grown up with a different accent to what he currently speaks with. He&#x27;d grown up in a rough part of Essex, going to a school where kids normally don&#x27;t even think about university. After about two weeks at Cambridge, he realized he was different. To sum it up, almost nobody at Cambridge speaks like an Essex boy. That&#x27;s despite Cambridge being not terribly far from Essex.<p>I noticed something similar. My family are refugees, so spread all over the world, including an aunt North London who gave birth to six cousins. They speak English a certain way. Coming as an international student, I noticed a lot of accents at Oxford (hello Brummies, Scots, Welsh, Scousers) but not a lot of &quot;council house between hackney and Romford&quot; accents.<p>If you&#x27;ve followed British politics, you&#x27;ve heard of something called the Bullingdon Club. Cambridge has something similar. Neither of the two of us knew much about it when we were there, but we did know there were some veeeery posh kids around, because they speak a certain way and often have a pretty expensive style about them.<p>So that was the fathers. Working class? Well if you&#x27;re upper class traditionally it means you have a title, and not many people do, so in some sense it&#x27;s legit to call yourself working class. It doesn&#x27;t say much when your job could be anything between chronically unemployed and hedge fund manager, though.<p>For dinner, we took our boys to a restaurant. Being around the age of the 11 plus exam, the conversation turned to private schools. It turns out one of the boys had gotten into one of the most expensive selective schools in the country, which I pointed out (this is why I am so sought after as a dinner guest). Since they&#x27;re kids, they still have naive ideas about money, and the vogue among kids at the moment is to aspire to be an influencer. &quot;I&#x27;ll make a YouTube channel and millions of followers will see it&quot;.<p>Thus followed a little talk about how many views you actually need to make enough money to pay for two kids to go to the most expensive school in the country, and perhaps also a house and something to stave off starvation.<p>I&#x27;m also the kind of exciting person who has official statistics about income distributions in his head. A rough tax rate is also part of that spiel, in case I find an uninformed primary schooler.<p>Realistically, you either need to be in the top 1% (£175K&#x2F;year) or the top 2% (£120K&#x2F;year) with a second income (£50K is around 87th, so maybe two ~97th at ~£100K ) to be able to pay for two kids to go to a £30K&#x2F;year school, pay a £30k&#x2F;year rent&#x2F;mortgage, maybe eat and holiday for £15K, and also pay the tax man.<p>That&#x27;s what the numbers look like, and I&#x27;m not surprised at all that kids don&#x27;t know them. What are the chances when you&#x27;re sitting around at your school that you&#x27;ve been told is famous, that basically every single one of your classmates has either a top 1% earning parent or two top 3% earners? If you knew you would certainly think you were very lucky indeed.<p>So this kid, who is quite bright and has a place at a top school that sends dozens of kids each to his dad&#x27;s alma mater, can still claim to be working class by heredity. That is what this article seems to be about. People mostly want to feel that they deserve what they worked for, and certainly kids in prep schools work hard. But it&#x27;s also true that you almost never see anyone doing ordinary jobs. It&#x27;s not actually that weird that a kid thinks being a lawyer or trader is an ordinary job, when his entire class has parents that both do something like that. It&#x27;s not even that hard to imagine them thinking their parents work really hard. Certainly a couple of the other parents in my kid&#x27;s year are always traveling or working late.