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Comment by redcircle | Hacker News Reader

I agree: upper class isn't about wealth. So much of it is about culture (in the sense that culture breeds character traits). And the ambition to obtain wealth in the middle class breeds character traits that impose a barrier for entering the upper class.

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This is what folks in the upper class like to believe so they can feel like there's more separating them from the middle class than just money. It's also a comfort to believe that even if you end up bankrupt, you're still "upper class". (And often, that people who are new money and richer than you are somehow not "upper class.")

Make a million dollars a year, and you can go to all the charity balls and opera galas you want. And your kids can go to whatever prep school you want to send them to. That tells me it's about your wallet, not where your parents went to school.

It is quite possible for the middle class to move into the upper class. It is just ironic that the desire to entire the upper class is often part of neuroses that make it impossible to enter.

That's a pretty vague statement. Do you have any facts or citation to support it?

This is a good line of inquiry and one that should be put to the article itself.

The article takes one event, and then reapplies it liberally to a popular narrative.

I could never have imagined that this was HN material.

>the ambition to obtain wealth in the middle class breeds character traits that impose a barrier for entering the upper class.

Care to elaborate on said traits?

One example: the inferiority complex.

An ambition to achieve wealth breeds an inferiority complex? Actually quite the opposite. In the states snobbery of any kind is severely looked down upon, as it should be.

One example I can think of is saving mindset.

To save so much that you ultimately have a lot but spend none of it.

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