I would expand that to say that a person’s class is primarily defined by their attitudes towards and relationships with work, education, authority and wealth. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book Outliers. He cites several examples of how people’s behavior and attitudes are shaped early on in childhood by the culture they grew up in. In particular, he cites an example of two brilliant students. One who grew up in a relatively affluent environment and another who grew up in a poor broken family. The poor student never acheived success because the attitudes of contempt and distrust for the “system” led to a series of misteps that eventually caused him to lose financial aid, drop out of college and never return. The other student was J. Robert Oppenheimer who graduated from Harvard and Cambridge in spite of attempting to poison his teacher and went on to invent the atomic bomb.
Attempting to poision your teacher displays an attitute of hostility towards authorities … 
But sure, culture and attitude matter for success. Only problem is that it is by no means determinative what culture or attitude you will acquire. I grew up the son of a professor; my wife, the daughter of Ukranian peasants who spent their childhood being shuttled around Europe by Stalin, came to this country without a penny and speaking no English - yet we are now both the same “class”.
Congratulations. No irony.
Times have changed. Imagine coming to this country today, penniless, no contacts. Imagine even legally getting in.
Except millions of people still come to this country today, penniless, and with no contacts. Not that it’s a basket of roses to be an undocumented worker, but millions of people come here to do just that. And while it doesn’t look like there’s much social mobility for those workers, the early 20th century European immigrants didn’t find the streets paved with gold either, and neither did their children. Their children’s children did OK.
Wasn’t any cakewalk for my wife’s parents. They were most definitely “working class” - her father was lucky and got a good union job loading nuclear fuel pellets, shades of Homer Simpson; her mother worked as a check-out girl in a supermarket, before getting married and having three kids … all of whom went to university and got more “middle class” type occupations (my wife works as the editor of financial statements; her brother, a computer engineer; her sister, environmental consultant).
Her parents are also very sincerely religious in a manner that is very 'folk" (for example, they give money to nuns who they believe have stigmata). They are more or less what one would expect if one transplanted a Ukranian peasant to Canada, mid 20th century. My wife is very different, to say the least …
All of which leads me to conclude that one’s ancestry is not necessarily in any straightforward deterministic manner one’s fate in terms of social class.
This whole discussion is baffling me. I don’t know if there any way to separate Americans this way - unless you are willing to have 200 ‘classes’.
My whole extended family is pretty much a SWPL sterotype: WASPS, all college-educated, snobby about most things, obsessed with psychoanalyzing each other, buy organic and cooks elaborate gourmet meals, listen to NPR, garden as a hobby, drink expensive imported tea and coffee, worship Martha Stewart, love classical music, etc. Mom has BA, dad Ph.D. He taught college but never got tenure, so we were always ‘poor’ compared to who we socialized with - they owned houses, but we never had more than one car, went on vacation, or bought new clothes, and everything was budgeted to the last penny.
Then there’s me. I’m the only one who didn’t attend college - in fact I dropped out of high school - but I consider myself self-educated. I work odd jobs (office work, waitressing) and am pretty poor. However, I speak and dress just like my family and like most of the same things. What the hell ‘class’ am I in?
But Opppenhimer had the charm and saavy to work with the system to avoid getting expelled (or tossed in jail). He was identified as someone who was part of the group and others worked to keep him in. The other student (I forget his name) described in Outliers was basically viewed as an “outsider” because of his family background. The administration was less willing to work with him when he screwed up his financial aid forms and he eventually dropped out in frustration, even though in terms of IQ he was one of the smartest people in the world.
It is subtle things like this that separate classes and why social classes aren’t just about how much money you have.
I love the book and have read my copy to pieces, but it does have a strong bias toward the northeastern metropolitan US, not only in the author’s disdain for newer population centers, but also in terms of the accuracy of the class markers themselves. I don’t think the notion of super rich people driving scuzzy clunkers because they don’t need to impress other people ever applied to Southern California.
The author seems to have a lot of disdain for everyone.
Basically all classes can be defined as follows. Anyone who has achieved beyond what you can expect to achieve in your lifetime is a rich douchebag snob. Anyone who significantly poorer than you can ever expect to be is a pathetic loser. And that defines the boundaries of your social class. People in lower or higher classes than you might as well be from another country or another planet.
Ok, so I am apparently part of the White Overclass. What sort of benefits does my card get me and when should I expect to receive it?
Lind revisited the “overclass” in Up from Conservatism (1996):
The problem with the “overclass” analysis is that, to the extent it is true, it is merely stating the obvious: that a small minority of people have advanced degrees and can afford a nanny; that this minority has the most power and influence; and that your chances are better of ending up in this minority if your parents could afford the best education etc. for you (i.e., were part of this minority themselves).
This definition is very loose. It is not, to my mind at least, sufficiently cohesive to form a “class system” similar to that of England over the past few centuries. He appears at one point in this extract to predict that at some indefinite point in the future it will, due to “associative mating”. The problem for his theory is that the rapidity of social mobility in N. America appears to militate against this, exactly because the differences in manners, accent, clothing, etc. between the successful and unsucessful - in short all the markers of class identity - are missing here; a student in anthropology who doesn’t get an academic position and ends up working as a waitress or potter’s assistant (as I did) is essentially indistinguishable from the same person getting a law degree and entering the nanny-employing overclass later in life (as I also did).
The author dismisses social mobility as irrelevant to the question of whether classes exist. I disagree; that changes the definition of “class’ from a proscriptive one, to a mere observation - that only a small percentage of people are at 'the top”. Which, absent some radical change in the nature of human society, will always be true.
Social mobility is the key. As you say, there will always be an elite consisting of the most educated and capable leaders. Whether or not they are the result of a class system or a meritocracy is dependent on social mobility.
I would further argue that this is why the use of “class” terminology is appropriate for the so-called “underclass” in America - in that, in this case, there appears to be a frightening degree of lack of social mobility and a great degree of common social markers in terms of language, dress, etc., all as a result in large part of the history of race relations in that country.
A waitress or potter’s assistant not of the “underclass” can save up, go to law school etc. and join the “overclass”. The same person can marry a person who does that - it is hardly unusual. Both are unlikely for members of the “underclass”. A major social problem in America is that, to a great extent, this whole group is excluded from participating in the meritocracy - not by racism today so much as by class identity created by racism in the past.
What is important and what you are missing is that the defining marks of today’s overclass are in several respects new. There has always been an elite of wealth and power, but it was not as large proportionally as a percentage of the population as it is now (it is still a small minority, but an elite class encompassing 5 percent of the generation is potentially much more powerful than an elite class of 1 percent). Nor was the overclass always predominated by professionals; nor was it always true that the hereditary top-crust rich tried to ape the professionals rather than the other way about. Nor was it always a national rather than a sectional elite. The “assortative mating” is also new, or at least more pervasive than in the past. There was a time when a doctor might marry his nurse, a lawyer might marry his secretary, providing at least a social promotion for the woman, and by extension her family; now professionals mostly marry other professionals. That is the makings of a hereditary class.
Still more important is what is not new: That the overclass in American society tends to provide most of the institutional elite. If your parents were working-class or even middle-class, you probably will never be a federal judge or a corporate CEO; you might, but the odds are much longer than if you had a more fortunate birth. And if your parents were working-poor or underclass, your chances of rising to the institutional elite are practically nil and so are your grandchildren’s.
Heh I recognize that anecdote is not statistical data, and I’m Canadian not American, but my own life violates in detail almost every one of your assertions. 
I take it from your second paragraph that you agree with me and disagree with the author you have cited that social mobility is an important factor in determining whether a “class” exists.
Certainly, no-one denies that your chances of being a “judge or CEO” are enhanced if you are born to professional parents. The problem with the thesis is that the definition of "professional’ is now cast too wide.
Think of your average student with a university degree. Are they part of the “overclass”? Perhaps “potential overclass”? If so, the “overclass” expands to something like half the population.
I have seen no data on the issue of ‘associative mating", but again it has been my experience that people very often marry people they meet in university - at least their first spouse - well prior to choosing a career, and certainly prior to making a successful bid to being a member of the “overclass” (unless one posits that merely by going to university they already are members of the “overclass”, which has its own problems - namely, casting the net too widely). The stereotype (with I fear some roots in reality) is that those, particularly men, who later succeed in joining the “overclass” later divorce these “first wives” and marry another, "trophy’ wife, generally younger.
To my mind at least, there is some validity to the notion that there is a threat of decreased social mobility these days, caused (among many factors) by an increase in credential inflation which requires a great deal of support in order to obtain a professional type career. What there is not, certainly not yet, is an established “class” system.
A couple of points. First of all, your chances of becoming a judge or CEO are pretty small regardless of what class you come from. Although CEOs come from a wide range of backgrounds while judges have to follow a specific legal career track.
I disagree with an elite class of 5% being more powerful thant 1%. Nor do I see how an economic system that creates more elites rather than less is necessarily bad.
I think it’s a positive thing that women do not have to depend on marying a man for social promotion (well…I would if I wasn’t a misogynist:)). They are fully capable of having their own careers now and establishing themselves.
I also believe the top-crust rich do not “ape the professionals”. Many of them ARE professionals who achieved great wealth by being at the top of their profession. The Mike Bloombergs, Bill Gates, and all the other businessmen, investment bankers, lawyers, Silicon Valley startup kings and others who became wealthy through their work. The Kardashians and Paris Hiltons and others whose wealth come from inheritance and the entertainment industry do not emulate the professional class. They live in their own bizarre world of fashion and excess.
Then again that might just be more of an East Coast vs West Coast LA vs NYC cultural thing. West Coast money tends to be neuvo riche Gucci bag Hollywood money while East Coast tends to be more old money summer in the Hamptons Wall Street money.
And I seriously disagree that it was common for a middle class professional man to marry a working class woman who worked under him. A lawyer didn’t marry his secretary, he married the daughter of his boss.
And the reason for the old saw of the secretary who really ran the business, was that women weren’t allowed to run the business. Nowadays a hypercompetent secretary doesn’t exist, because if she’s hypercompetent she’s not working as a secretary, she’s working as a manager.
Businessmen rarely married secretaries in the old days, because they didn’t marry out of their class. And they don’t marry the secretary nowadays because they don’t have secretaries any more. I worked for years at Microsoft and never met one secretary. I suppose Steve Ballmer and that ilk might have had secretaries, I wouldn’t know. But in the old days, everyone who got the title of “manager” had a secretary. Nowadays, at least in the technology sector that I’m familiar with, nobody does.
There are still working class people around–the guys who do the landscaping, the cleaning staff, and so on. But they don’t mingle intimately with the managers the way secretaries and valets and butlers used to. The modern overclass household doesn’t have live-in servants, they hire a housekeeper who comes in once a week, and a gardener who comes in once a week, they eat at restaurants instead of a live-in cook. The only exception is the nanny might be live-in, because who wants to get up in the middle of the night to change a wet diaper? But while the overclass husband might have an affair with the Venezeulan nanny, he sure isn’t going to marry her.
Well, that makes “assortative mating” among the overclass all the likelier, doesn’t it?
For one thing, a larger overclass can occupy even more of the institutional-elite positions – not only the highest, but the second and third tiers down – than a smaller one can; including in the media and political organizations that shape public opinion. For another, members of a very large overclass can more readily delude themselves – and, more importantly, delude others – that they are not an overclass at all, but simply the normal people. Which would, indeed, be a very fine thing if it were true. (For my part, I like the idea of a classless society – but the point of it should be to make everybody bourgeois, not to make everybody proletarian; Marxists seem to have that bassackwards.)
By “top-crust” I meant not the richest of the rich, but the hereditary rich, the old money, the rentiers. Lind’s thesis is that, since WWII, these have been increasingly intermarrying with the rising managerial-professional class – much the same way the British aristocracy, in the early 19th-Century, intermarried with new-rich merchants and industrialists; except that, in Britain’s case, the parvenus turned themselves into accurate copies of the aristos, while in America it has worked the other way around. Which does have a dangerous character of its own. A class of mere “owners” is less useful to society than fleas to a dog, and deep down most of them probably know it. Managers and professionals, OTOH, are unmistakeably useful; and old-money people who acquire professional degrees and embark on professional careers (even though they don’t have to) can fool themselves, and even with some little justice, that they are useful too. It makes them all the more comfortable, therefore more secure, in their status.
There is a bit of confusion over what the “overclass” is supposed to be and their relationship to the “institutional elites”. There is a larger “overclass” because there are more jobs that require highly educated and talented people than there were in the past. These are jobs in accounting, law, finance, marketing, PR, advertising, engineering, medicine, media, technology and so on. These are the so called jobs in “large downtown office building in an East or West Coast metropolis” requiring a “graduate or professional degree from an expensive university”. The “overclass” doesn’t occupy just the top few tiers in these jobs. They occupy EVERY tier. As a general rule, don’t get a first year law associate, banking analyst, Big 4 CPA accountant or Silicon Valley start up job unless you have the right background, education and experience.
There was a thread some time ago about working in a Big-4 and people were saying how stupid these kids were for putting in 70 hour weeks for $45 k a year. Well I have worked in the Big-4 and similar types of firms. The reason kids do this is because out of college they make $45 k as an “Analyst”. A couple of years later they are making $75 k as an “Associate”. $150 k as a manager, $200 as a senior manager or director and $300 k and up as a partner. And even if you don’t stay with the firm until partner, it opens up other opportunities.
So IOW what makes the “overclass” different from some dude working in some company is that they are in a pool of people who are on a track to eventually becoming an “institutional elite” whether it is a partner in a law/consulting/accounting firm, managing director of an investment bank, or a vice president of some division in a large company.
Ah the old theory that the poor and working classes are somehow more “real” or “normal”. The overclass are “normal” people but they are people who benefited from enough talent and hard work to either graduate from the elite schools or start their own small businesses. While the jerkoffs in highschool spent their time getting drunk and skipping class and went off to the Army or community college (IOW “more highschool”), the “nerds” studied, earned scholarships to quality schools and landed desirable jobs in lucrative career paths.
I do not. I don’t see why stupid, lazy people who make horrible life decisions based on poor impulse control should enjoy the same standard of living as people who are highly skilled and highly motivated. People should be able to rise or settle into what social strata they feel comfortible with. You may not want to work an 80 hour week or deal with difficult clients and tight deadlines. But don’t expect to make $150000 a year.