The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States. $2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
What? Do you not live in your house?
Consider a farm that grows wheat on 15 acres of fields. Are those fields an income-producing asset? If so, your house is also an income-producing asset.
Depends on what you consider a reverse mortgage/equity loan they plan to die before paying.
Sweden is pretty hard on mortgages/loans to people who are retired, know problem for some actually.
I don't understand, is it paid for or not?
"Assuming that the house is paid for, of course; if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either"
Person A has a paid off house. If their net worth is 300k that implies a low cost of living area, and a small house. They likely are used to living a modest life (most people when given more money will spend it on a better house). They won't need much money, and better yet, since their house is paid for, they don't have to pay rent with their income. Of course it is entirely possible they are "party animals" who never are home and only need a tiny house for an address, and they spent every penny they earn on alcohol for their 'friends' - but this seems unlikely.
Person B doesn't have their house paid off (living in an apartment counts!), and their net worth is 300k. The question then becomes how much are they paying for housing every month, since this reduces their spending ability.
Neither person will have a great life (assuming they live in the US - 300k net worth in a poor country is considerable wealth), but a paid off house allows for a nice life, while paying for the house means scrapping by.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
When your renter informs you of the boiler breaking, or a roof needs replacing, that's going to get thorny - "It was fine when I was using it/living in it, did you break it?"
Perhaps the latest round of updates to property law for renters come along and suddenly as a landlord you have to above and beyond what you need to as an owner; you both have to do X, Y or Z to your properties because they're rental and not a basic owner situation.
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
That page has a telephone hotline that people can call to get advice, including help to find a reliable broker. Probably the biggest problem with (honest) reverse mortgages is that they can run out of money before you die. You can continue to stay in your house, but you probably immediately fall into extreme poverty.
> the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing)
Roughly 1/3 of Boomers also have private pensions (remember those from before the 2000s?). Social Security is about 25K USD per year. It is expected to only cover 40% of living costs. It is scary how many retired Americans live only from Social Security in their retirement.
Tell them that, not me. We live in a descriptivist universe.
Wild random insults don't change the definition
.... with the 30 crossed out and repalced by 40, which is crossed out and replaced by 50, which is..... you get the idea.
The young calling anybody over 28 'boomer' is the modern equivalent of this :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/old-corrup...
-- Karl Marx
> Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free
This was just the dying embers of feudalism. Which is still theoretically present in England, having been abolished in Scotland in the year 2000.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
But at the same time, it was the irony of life that while I could afford a car, I could not afford a maid."
- Agatha Christie
> 21% of US jobs are service occupations.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
> Service-Providing Industries: Account for roughly 80% to 81% of total U.S. employment, covering fields such as healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, finance, and professional/business services.Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.
>Britain's century of hegemony came afterwards
Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.
You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
So in a way, germany got its wish- the french and british empire where no more after 2 world wars.
Incidentally there was no greater period of free trade in human history than under British hegemony. Even the US has not pursued unilateral free trade.
India had a whole thing about that freedom of trade. The wheel in the flag is a symbol of not wanting to participate in that sort of free trade the british empire offered.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.
From that same blog post, they mentioned an excellent data source: "The World Inequality Database". Check this link[2] to compare historical "Top 1% net personal wealth share" for USA vs France vs UK. Hint: After the page loads, you need to drag the green slider at the bottom of the chart to the far left. Then you can see back to 1800. It is wild how unequal Victorian Britan was compared to anything today: Top 1% owned 68% of wealth!
[1] https://populareconomics.substack.com/p/is-wealth-inequality...
[2] https://wid.world/world/#shweal_p99p100_z/US;FR;WO-PPP;GB/la...
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
> The USA also used soft power much more effectively
Soft power was absolutely important before World War II. Obviously. Was that the claim you’re referring to? Because I didn’t say anything about before World War II.
And no, it’s not something you can easily create a precise metric for. But many historians agree that America was extremely effective.
Good god!
I genuinely choked on a mouthfull of tea reading this!
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.
The Industrial Revolution started in England, which gave them a technological leg up on everyone else, somewhat like playing a strategy game where you get to unlock certain techs before everyone else. If you have factories producing steamships while your opponents are still building sailboats by hand, you're probably going to win a naval conflict, which you can then use to start a colony.
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
Without those two it's a bit difficult to get to the point of obesity in a world where you have to walk a lot because cars and elevators don't exist.
That leaves vegetable oils, and cars. I think it's like 70/30 personally.
Also, food unevenly distributed across the day. Any one individual probably wouldn't have a large breakfast and elevenses and a large lunch and afternoon tea and a large dinner, on every single day. Even if you can find examples of each of those separately.
I imagine they did have a fair amount of obesity in the older members of the population, although it's also possible that the sportier ones (which I'm guess would have entailed things like polo and horseback riding) would remain fit into old age.