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I like this framing. The differences between these two groups is much bigger than the differences within these groups, at least at some fundamental level. There is as always, nuances, and a grey area somewhere at the transition.. but overall yeah. You are either in need of some sort of income related to something you actively do, or not. There are of course ways to distinguish subgroups, but that is often as much or more culturally / socially than purely economical / financial.

A friend once relayed his mental scale that people usually fall somewhere on...

1) Must plan to buy a meal out.

2) Must plan to take a vacation.

3) Must plan to buy a house.

4) Must plan to pass it on.

...and that these are useful subgroupings for large-scale discussion.

It's an interesting question, we often talk of 'socioeconomic class' but in reality social and economic class are quite distinct things I think. This is particularly pronounced in countries like the UK where the social class system is very entrenched; it correlates with wealth but can be fairly independent of it, it's much more about the subculture you belong to and the way you see yourself within the world. You're born into your social class and you can't really change it within one generation no matter how much wealth you acquire.

Economic class is the more useful framing and it's exactly as you say I think, you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you. There's other features of economic class but that's the dominant one. This is the class difference that matters the most in my opinion when it comes to explaining aggregate motivations.

> you either work to put your bread on the table or you own things that put your bread on the table for you

I would propose a slight correction: you either work to put bread on the table, or someone else works to put bread on your table.

The capital return from investments does not come from the assets themselves, it is extracted from the labor of workers and from the externalization of costs onto public or shared resources, for which the working class ultimately, and disproportionately, foots the bill.

Working class, business class, investment class.

> it is extracted from the labor of workers and from the externalization of costs onto public or shared resources

If that were true, then the laborers could generate the same returns without the capital. Which is obviously not true.

I do think there's more class granularity than that, and it's important to understand how such distinctions can make it more or less difficult to organize and cooperate. E.g. the idea of a petit bourgeoisie is useful for understanding why small business owners, despite indeed needing to work for a living, are generally against unionization.

But the core of your point certainly stands. "Higher wage" vs "lower wage" does not make a big difference in terms of our fundamental interests, and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.

> and the interests of workers are far more similar than people realize.

You're confusing "experiences" with "interests." Worrying about paying your mortgage isn't an "interest" you have in common with someone else. It's an "experience." But people with similar experiences can and often do have conflicting interests.

Another way to make a distinction is between retirees and people who don't have enough money to retire yet. (The FIRE folks are looking to speedrun becoming an retiree.)

This is a bit blurred by wealthy people who could retire and yet keep working, and people who have to retire despite not having the money to live comfortably.

But everyone stops working eventually, one way or another.

Yea, I think retirees and FIRE people could be either in group 1 (net draw-down) or group 2 (net gains), depending on their post-work spending.

But then you have things like "works for a living, but contributes to a 401k". Now they work for a living, and their net wealth grows from other people working. (I mean, not enough - yet - for them to be able to quit working themselves...)

So where are they? They have a foot in both worlds. And there are tens of millions of them. They work, but they're taking what they can from what they earn, and using that to bootstrap them toward the "don't have to work" category, but they aren't there yet. Those people are fundamentally different from "working class", even though they work.

> But then you have things like "works for a living, but contributes to a 401k". Now they work for a living, and their net wealth grows from other people working.

I think these are still group 1. Without their job pumping their savings/investments, they are back to "N paychecks away from broke."

At the inflection point where their spending becomes less than their passive income, they move over to group 2.

> Yes, small-N is more difficult living than big-N, but we are more similar than different.

Absolutely, this is something I always try to explain regarding this topic.

Of course it is a lot more comfortable if you can live for two years without a paycheck vs. if you can only make it to the end of the week.

But at a structural level, both those people are still working stiff who will need that future paycheck. So they (we) are much more similar in life experience than different.

The people who are truly different category are those who will never have to work.

What about soccer players actors that make millions and their income comes from working?

They play a game for a living. Their labor provides only indirect economic benefit in providing entertainment. They are also simply waiting to officially join the second group once they retire at a young age.

You can surely find edge cases everywhere when trying to classify the entire population of the industrialized world into two groups.

What about the 10 year NVIDIA employee who held on to every stock grant and bought at every opportunity?

Most professional athletes in the US go broke 3-5 years after they retire.

One of the things Marx got right was to analyze society in terms of economic interests, and realizing that there was an intermediate class whose interests are more linked to that of the upper class than to the interests of the masses.

In feudal times, kings and barons needed lesser gentry to carry out their plans. "Billionaires" likewise need armies of professionals to run their organizations. This group "works for a living," but that's a superficial distinction. In reality, those peoples' financial interests are strongly linked to the interests of the billionaires. There's a lot of people who "work for a living" that sent their kids to college by helping paper up deals that moved factories and jobs to China. The fact that those lawyers and accountants and bankers also "work for a living" was only a superficial similarity they shared with the factory workers whose jobs were outsourced. What dominated was the material interest--one group had skills that enabled them to benefit from globalization. And another group lacked those skills and suffered from globalization. You'll see the same from AI.

Your "class solidarity" has had the opposite effect of what you probably intend. The more the upper middle class started seeing themselves as "part of the 99%," the more they diluted the mission of organizations that advocate for working class interests.

Perhaps incentives among workers will align better as those lawyers, accountants, bankers and other billionaire-supporting professionals themselves also start getting discarded by the billionaires in favor of AI and automation. The material interest alignment will evaporate the second the billionaires don't need those professionals.

I doubt it. At least in the States, lawyers can always generate more make-work for themselves and are not seriously threatened by AI.

Courts will probably punish self-representation by AI just as heavily if not more so than self-representation without AI.

Lawyers have a de facto monopoly on legal practice, and too many politicians are lawyers or ex-lawyers for that to change any time soon. There’s not much opportunity for class consciousness to manifest there.

I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class has gotten much richer in material terms over the past 50 years. The top 0.01% has obviously gotten richer much faster if you count all the paper money locked up in the stock market. But it's not clear to me that Sergei Brin consumes more actual resources than a Rockefeller did. But their respective bankers and lawyers almost certainly do. If you look at the established, affluent suburbs where these people live, everything is much bigger and nicer than it was in the 1990s.