I think that you're inviting someone to build a Erdos-Number Bacon-number Friendster database on who connects to whom on the blogosphere. Throw in some ad revenue analytic projections, a headquarters in Bangalore, some pro forma spreadsheets, and some Internet 3.0 bar graphs and you have a business plan. Exit Strategy: be acquired by Google or Yahoo in 2010.

If SFWA were more like a Union, then ... naaahhh, never happen.

You've got spam. And damned fast.

TK

Can I take it as read that 'middle class' is now American English for 'working class'?

Wow. Is some sort of hairy-chested filter kicked in when a piece of comment spam shows up, or something? I tried about 5 times to post a joke regarding working empowerment and [the subject of comment sp*m above], but I keep getting "Your comment was denied for questionable content" no matter how many euphemisms I used.

I resist the notion that the software had determined the joke was so entirely lame that it couldn't possibly allow me to post it.

Yes, and if it had been Father's Day, I would have said so. (But unlike Atrios, I have always credited my inspiration.)

Ken, you're right, since the working poor and non-working poor are now lumped together as simply "poor". The "lower-class" is anyone who can't afford health insurance at all, I guess.

I'm pretty sure Atrios's proto-blogging career began when he became a frequent correspondent of BartCop, who would often feature snippets of his (Atrios's) emails on the site.

Don't you think "working class" is too commie for American politics? "Middle class" is so warm and fuzzy and heartland and American Dreamy and all that. And it's upscale. "Working class" is so, you know, working. Like you have to work or something to make a living.

Well, anyway, I better go take a shower and get ready for middle.

Ken: My thought exactly. Everyone's middle class now? Next move with the magic wand, making everyone white. And all the children are above average.

Whenever someone starts bitching about how bad unions are, and I don't hang out with a lot of conservatives, I'm always appalled. That conservative attitude IS creeping into the so-called "liberal" camp.

I always remind them that people fought, and were killed, so that we don't have 12 hour work days, and so that we have things like OSHA. Without unions, sweatshops would be the norm, rather than some heinous hell perpetrated on illegal aliens.

But, Jo, all the children will be above average, at least here in your neighbor to the South.

It's called "No Child Left Behind," dontcha no?

Yeah, the working class = middle class thing is a bit bizarre, if indicative of where American society has been going for a while. If I recall, about half the people who were asked if they were among the richest 20% of the country said that they were. It's mind control through inaccurate self-esteem.

Ditto on the unions thing. Even if unions are an evil (which I don't think is reasonable), they're certainly a minor one compared to the alternative.

I always remind them that people fought, and were killed, so that we don't have 12 hour work days, and so that we have things like OSHA. Without unions, sweatshops would be the norm, rather than some heinous hell perpetrated on illegal aliens.

The difference here between the "New Democrat" position against unions and the "Old Plutocrat" position is that the "New Democrat" who is opposed to unions readily grants, arguendo, their groundbreaking achievements in the past, and concedes that they deserve eternal thanks for their blood and effort — but that their work is done now, and the workplace (except for the lower rung of manual and service jobs) has achieved a kind of magical equilibrium wherein their continuing agitations are not only no longer needed, but, indeed, actively unhelpful. They are seen as a quaint anachronism, akin to hunger strikes in support of women's suffrage.

That's the thinking of New Democrats who are antagonistic or ambivalent towards unions. The position of Old Plutocrats (i.e., the current Republican Party) is, of course, that 12 hour work days and child labor are good things, that made this country great, and that things like OSHA and an honest NLRB are unacceptable roadblocks on the glorious march to the Nineteenth Century.

If it's ok to plug another blog, that's why I like to read Susie at Suburban Guerrilla (note the fancy new url, ooh).

She's masa, not elitista, as they would say in Manila.

Gary Farber is my blogfather--he nagged me to read his Amygdala until I started reading it, followed by reading other blogs and posting comments. After a while, I started Input Junkie at livejournal.

Speaking of which - this is bloody frightening (as usual):

Tom Tomorrow was my inspiration, though Atrios had a hand in it as well. I guess that makes them both my blogparents, though the union is only recognized in Massachusettes.

Part of it is the way some of us were brought into unions. Back in the 1980s I had a New Jersey civil service position. Unions were not exactly all that necessary for civil servants -- at least back then. We had plenty of protections built into the law. We had protection against arbitrary firing. We had real benefits -- including real vacation time. My mother had the same sort of benefits in the 1950s. So why did I have to pay a representation fee to the Communications Workers of America? The generally accepted reason was that some politicians were cosy with the CWA.

Unions became perceived as more important to their leaders than their members.

Today we -- well, some of us -- do note the way the middle class is being screwed over. For example, married couples now average 90+ hours per week of work in the economic workplace. That's arguably 30 more hours than is healthy. Do we have mass protests though? Not as far as I can see. Some workaholics (the last acceptable addiction) actively embrace that lifestyle.

What's the answer? It might help if prounion people got out into society and began listening to people as well as lecturing them. Coalition building is becoming a lost skill in our society.

Can I take it as read that 'middle class' is now American English for 'working class'?

Perhaps this parsing too fine a point, but I took Kevin's phrasing to mean that it was unions that allowed the working class to become middle class--that is, a good factory job would let you buy a house and a car and support a family, all while planning for a decent if not extravagant retirement.

What's the answer? It might help if prounion people got out into society and began listening to people as well as lecturing them. Coalition building is becoming a lost skill in our society.

Yes, something like that, to be sure. I have gradually come around from something like New Liberal antiunionism to being pro-union, but I still have these various reservations and complaints, not least of which is that my union, at least, and probably most, is still living in the last century in terms of how to build union networks that mean something in members' everyday lives. I suppose that means I need to get more involved with my union. I have ideas, but someone needs to get them pushed into place. Oh, well, who needs free time anyway?

I should start a blog. I didn't realize when I started my LiveJournal that it doesn't count, and I've written bloggy things there. If I started a blog, I could keep the bloggage there and keep the LJ for more personal musings.

In re Chuck: I wonder how it would work out if unions were viewed with the same level of mistrust that business and government get--most people seem to think that business and government are good for something, but are to varying degrees dubious about the motives of anyone who goes into them.

FOIA for unions? Making at least some effort to guarantee that union members get what they're paying for?

The American media have called working class people "middle class" for a long time -- at least for thirty-forty years now, and maybe longer. What I noticed when we were organizing our little small leather goods factory back in the midseventies was that a lot of people were reluctant to sign the cards because it interfered with their self-image as not really factory workers, but really small businessmen at the beginning of their careers: everybody, it seemed, was saving to buy a truck, start hauling and cutting wood, and work their way up to a little surfboard shop or something. And they all thought they were going to be like the owners of our little factory, striking it rich and having cocaine parties -- although, of course, they couldn't see that the owners were also going to be bought out and lose everything in a couple of years.

And now I have a question: can anybody think of the right search terms to find out if the number of labor actions (strikes and so on )is rising, falling, or staying steady by some comprehensible measure?

It's my impression that they're rising, especially in the public service area, but I don't know how to confirm this (I get google gibberish when I look). I do know I've been hearing about a lot of school and hospital strikes and work-to-contracts.

I've been a union worker and a non-union worker, and I'll tell you I know the difference, even with a sweetheart union.

Nancy, the guarantee that union members get what they're paying for is to get off their duff and get involved with the union. Even the biggest unions are mostly run by the efforts of their members.

We had plenty of protections built into the law. We had protection against arbitrary firing. We had real benefits -- including real vacation time. My mother had the same sort of benefits in the 1950s. So why did I have to pay a representation fee to the Communications Workers of America? The generally accepted reason was that some politicians were cosy with the CWA.

Or it could have something to do with maintaining all those protections enacted into law seemingly by the labour fairy.

Perhaps this parsing too fine a point, but I took Kevin's phrasing to mean that it was unions that allowed the working class to become middle class--that is, a good factory job would let you buy a house and a car and support a family, all while planning for a decent if not extravagant retirement.

By one of those strange quirks of English usage, people with all these characteristics are referred to as 'working class' in much of the English-speaking world. However, I'm very grateful for the clarification of US usage, and will bear it in mind.

If I'm not mistaken, the rest of the world considers someone to be in the Middle Class if they own their own small business and have a slightly more afluent lifestyle-- what we in ther US call Upper Middle Class.

That we have to make such a fine destinction harkens back to our unspokem class system: The working class is made up of hard laborers, janitors and school teachers; work only chumps would want. If you have a cushy factory job, making $25 an hour and can own your own house isntead of merely renting, you aren't the same species of worker as those poor people and you won't be satisfied until everyone knows it.

I don't think that Ken and Avedon are quite right. "Middle class" in the US does not mean working class. It really means nothing. "Middle class" is the label that almost all Americans use to describe, and that politicians and A-list journalists use in some vague inclusive sense to describe all of their listeners who count.

When discussing the Bush tax cuts, the Administration talked about the impact of those cuts on middle class families with incomes of $200,000/year. Currently, when discussin the proposed Bush Social Security cuts, the Administration is helpfully pointing out that the cuts only affect "better off" families with incomes of more than $20,000/year.

Yes, I put the right number of zeros in both of those numbers.

My conclusion is that the phrase "middle class" has no fixed meaning in American political discourse, and that it's too late to recover any coherent meaning for it. It would probably be better if that phrase were abandoned.

Matt: It might well be better if the phrase was abandoned, but it's not going to be, as it's a part of the propaganda framework which allows the Republican party (among others) to wield the accusation of 'class warfare' as a weapon.

After all, it's much easier to get people riled up about progressive taxation and suchlike if they identify themselves as middle- to upper-class property holders.

Ulrika: You ought to give me a call, drop me a line, and I'll put you in touch with Sola's SO, as he is going into/is into, union organising (he did a semester in Mexico organising unions, and that's how he makes his money, sort of) so he might want to talk about it with you.

TK

Xopher: I think of my LJ as a blog. There are some things about it I don't like, but I'll bet there are some quirks of other systems I wouldn't like either.

So make it what you will.

TK

Anytime some idiot starts mouthing off about how bad unions are, throw a copy of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and tell them to read that and think how bad things would be without unions.

"And now I have a question: can anybody think of the right search terms to find out if the number of labor actions (strikes and so on) is rising, falling, or staying steady by some comprehensible measure?"

Labor economists pay attention to such things; my suggestion would be find one and ask her; UCSC ought to have some.

I see there as being three sub-classes of each of the 3 classes in the USA. Unlike the European model, Class in the US is almost entirely defined by wealth, as opposed to accent or ancestry or education.

Lower-poor = underclass = homeless and on welfare, perhaps living in a motel unable to make the payments on an apartment, looking for a job. Includes illegal immigrants, but they understand what it takes to climb.

middle-poor = renting poor, crummy apartment, blue-collar worker.

upper-poor = nicer apartment or homeowning poor, having saved for a while, or working two or more jobs.

lower-middle-class = blue-collar or entry-level white collar job, even nicer apartment, or nicer house (the homeowner and apartment issues very geography-dependent).

upper-middle-class = professional class, higher status white collar, doctor, engineer, lawyer, professor, or the like. Note that this includes roughly 10 million men, women, and children living in a millionaire household. Yes, Bush is (darn it) actually right that a millionaire can be middle-class. That's partly from inflation and the real estate bubble.

lower-rich = starts at roughly $10 million, owns multiple properties, primary income is unearned (i.e. portfolio).

middle-rich = starts at roughly $100 million, NO upper limit on wealth. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are the very top of middle-rich.

upper-rich = Old Wealth. Finally, ancestry and education matter. Rockefellers, Duponts, Rothschilds, and the like. You can only get here with several generations of the right avocations, right schools, right amount of giving a lot away to the right causes. Bill Gates is perfectly following the strategy that will make his grandchildren upper-rich.

Each sub-class lives in terror of slipping down one sub-class, and has eyes fixed on the prize of rising one sub-class. No class understands any other.

Drugs, illness, crime, or bad luck can knock you down a subclass or more VERY fast.

There is considerable class mobility, but not as much as there used to be. My insight is from having a family which unusually maneuvered between lower-poor non-English-speaking immigrant to middle-rich in one generation (as per Horatio Alger), slipped badly in the crash of 1929, and my perspective includes brief periods in working poor as well as extended periods in midle-middle and professional.

Of course, the majority of Americans deny that there IS a class system, while the Old World snickers. For writers and scientists (my wife and I are both) the European position seems to be that American creative class should have solidarity with working class, but are stupidly coopted by the ownership class.

Emperor Bush II and his ilk have done a brilliant job of demonizing the very word "liberal" and the very purpose and value of Unions. It is, ideed, time to fight back. But the Democratic party is NOT a Labor Party as such, or a Social Democratic party as such. The two main parties in the US are different, but make little sense either from European OR historical American positions.

All the above, of course, IMHO.

JVP: Deadset, as we say down here.

There is, of course, the Marxist notion that the classes consist of those who sell only their labour, those who sell other goods and services, and those who rent out their accumulated assets. Then there would be an underclass that does none of those.

The problem with such a description, of course, is that it makes no necessary assumption about the market value of each type of activity, and hence of the wealth of those persons engaged in it.

Lucy Kemnitzer writes:

And now I have a question: can anybody think of the right search terms to find out if the number of labor actions (strikes and so on )is rising, falling, or staying steady by some comprehensible measure?

My instinct is to reach for the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which is online these days.

I think Table 637 may be what you seek.

Thanks, Bill. It's as close as I can get, so far. There are a couple of questions I have about the "work stoppages" table.

It doesn't include stoppages inolving less than a thousand workers -- but does that mean per workplace or per stoppage? I mean, when the smaller hotels go on strike, there might be several with less a thousand workers, but the strike will involve more than a thousand workers. Or, for example, the strike at the UC campuses a couple of weeks ago. Bargaining units included some that were over a thousand and some that were over a thousand, but it was one strike. How was it dealt with?

Agricultural and governmental employees are included in the total work time, but governmental employees are usually forbidden to strike and generally resort to work-to-contract instead, which is sort of like a work stoppage but it lasts less than a day at a time so it wouldn't be counted -- I suppose it wouldn't anyway because the work time that is lost is work that wasn't overtly contracted for and wasn't paid for in the first place (work-to-contract can bring a school district to a standstill). And agricultural employees are often bunched up in groups of less than a thousand even if they are working for huge international agribusiness concerns. So it seems to me that the account is diluted by treating all these workers the same way.

Okay, that'sd one set of questions. My next question is: 2001 and 2002 are much lower than the other years. I know what happened in those years, but I can't figure out how it would affect strikes. So that's a question: why did people hold off so much in those years? I mean, I could guess, but I'd be uncomfortable with it.

And I still don't know about the year 2004, which is the one I'm really interested in. I did see a fall from a peak in 1970, which is not surprising. Among other things, 1970 was a year when unions were trying to leverage a demand to stop closures and exporting of jobs to low-wage areas and -- well -- they lost that battle. What I'm interested in is too recent to show up, though.

Terry (and Xopher): Yeah, I don't understand why LJ isn't considered a "real" blog by so many... especially since my Friends List works better than any RSS reader I've found to date, when it comes to doing what I want to do (full-text, interleaved). "Normal" blogs are just so brain-damaged, to me, when it comes to their interfaces.

But then, I thought the same about BBS-based .QWK mail, compared to either CompuServe and its ilk, or Usenet. And web based fora just aren't even the same sport, usability-wise.

*^*^*

Jonathan: The problem is, money does not equal class in this country.

The best works I'm aware of on the subject are Paul Fussell's Class (which he now insists was a quasi-parody); Nelson Aldrich's Old Money; and Lewis Lapham's Money and Class In America.

Put it to you this way: It's cheap enough to subscribe to The Atlantic, or the Hudson Review, or Foreign Affairs. Wanting to, on other hand, is something that comes about much more through class than through money. Or being horrified when seeing "prole gap" at the back of someone's coat.

Collegiate or university academics have always been a good example of how class has little to do with money per se -- they're much classier than their income would suggest.

Also, having any sort of an interest in science makes one déclassé in some circles. Looked at this way, Bill Gates' (or Larry Niven's) great sin against his class isn't his money, but that he made it through that grubby technology.

Being willing to go to art museums, whether they have modern art or not. To my mind, the whole point of modern art is to keep hoi polloi uninterested. Which is why so much of it is bad as art, but performs its function perfectly.

Jonathan--your upper-middle class category includes folks with annual salaries from, say, the mid-20's, all the way up to those with assets worth nearly $10 million? I think each of the "prestige professions" alone has sufficient diversity within it to encompass several of the subclasses in the middle range.

That said, I think you are right to utilize sub-classes. And if you consider factors other than wealth, you could probably break it down further.

Re Unions & how the dog returns to his vomit. A couple of quite a few webplaces which discuss this event.

The Hamlet, N.C., Fire
When I was growing up, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was still vivid in people’s memories. () I often heard my mother, a garment worker and an ardent trade unionist, talk about how 150 workers, most of them young women, were killed in that fire. Many of them died struggling to escape through exit doors that were locked from the outside because the factory owners were afraid of workers’ stealing the garments. Others were killed as they jumped from windows to get away from the flames. That fire was 80 years ago, and most people thought nothing like it could ever happen again. It was part of a bygone era before there were unions and health and safety laws to protect workers and inspectors to enforce the laws. But we were wrong -- as we found out with the Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, N.C.

Last September 3, a fire broke out near the deep-fat fryer in Imperial’s chicken-processing plant and spread quickly through the one-story building. The plant had no windows and no sprinkler or fire alarm system. And workers who got to the unmarked fire exits found some of them locked from the outside. Imperial’s management was using the same "loss control" technique as the bosses at Triangle Shirt Waist -- and with the same result. Twenty-five of the 90-odd employees working at the time were killed, suffocated by the black smoke that filled the plant, and 55 more were injured.

Even more recent examples of a continuing problem are noted here, e.g. Suit Alleges Wal-Mart Locked in Janitors (Associated Press, Tuesday, February 3, 2004 ) and OSHA Cites Mobile Supermarket for Blocking Emergency Exits (Region 4 News Release No: 04-1708-ATL (195) Sept. 1, 2004)

From a speech by Gary Goff in Brooklyn, New York on March 23, 2002.
“An injury to one is an injury to all” – it’s as true now as when the Wobblies first said it nearly a century ago.

A final reason why organized labor has to be here today is globalization. The system that creates the conditions in third world countries that drive millions to leave their homelands is the same system that oppresses them when they join the American working class. The system that condones the assassination of labor activists in Colombia is the same system that allowed my brothers and sisters at the Imperial Chicken plant down in Hamlet, N.C. to be burned alive when the boss locked the fire exits to prevent theft. The same system that sustains sweatshops throughout the third world maintains sweatshops right here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

This is the system that says I’m supposed to feel I have more in common with the bosses because they look like me than I have with workers who don’t look like me. Well, this is a good time and a good place to say I’m not buying that lie – working people are not buying that lie – organized labor is not buying that lie.

Industrial Fires

The Human Face of Sustainable Agriculture:
Adding People to the Environmental Agenda
by Patricia Allen
Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems
University of California, Santa Cruz
Issue Paper #4, November 1994

Much of the work in the food and agriculture industry is in factories rather than on farms. Working conditions in food processing vary, but workers in produce and meat processing industries are often poorly paid, seasonally terminated, have no benefits, and work under miserable conditions. In the 1980s, Iowa meat packing industry wages decreased regularly and in 1989 49% of Iowa meat packing workers suffered work-related injuries or illnesses.(52) At a North Carolina chicken plant 25 workers were killed when they could not escape a fire because fire exits were locked to prevent workers from stealing chicken. A U.S. congressman summed up the situation, saying that this was an industry that decided to subsidize its profits "with the broken lives, limbs, lacerations, and decapitations of their workers."(53)

Yeah, I don't understand why LJ isn't considered a "real" blog by so many
The LJ structure encourages community and interaction -- it's much "flatter" than other blogs. They are more like boards then they are webpages.

On blogger, or a blog like this one, it's always obvious who owns the blog, who has authority. This type of blog is more a webpage than a board.

It probably has a lot to do with LJ's excellent friends page feature.

That's my theory. LJ is more egalitarian. That's why it's got low(er) status.

Keith, I am your blog brother. my inspirations were Tom Tomorrow + Atrios + dKos(in that order), so i guess that is one step below in the 'slippery slope' that has been created in Mass.

moving to my main point,the reason i (used to)think of an LJ as less than a blog is because most of the journals i saw

a)were filled with hormone-driven whining by teenagers, or
b)provided a way to make vapid/inflammatory comments by disillusioned nerds.
but most importantly
c) had layout/design tendencies that would make Dali cringe.

let us just say the situation has improved significantly since then but still seems to have a good way to go.

had layout/design tendencies that would make Dali cringe.

Good point. I forget about that because I have my friends page set up so that it has the same layout as my page -- and I don't even know what most people's layout looks like. My layout is boring and easy to read. I like it that way.

Hal O'Brien: "Also, having any sort of an interest in science makes one déclassé in some circles. Looked at this way, Bill Gates' (or Larry Niven's) great sin against his class isn't his money, but that he made it through that grubby technology."

Bill Gates' parents were politically connected lawyers. His sin against Wealth was not technology, but the mere fact that he went to Harvard Business School, albeit he dropped out. Harvard is a Class Conscious place to be sure (my Dad went there, I could tell sories), but B-School? The rich pretend not to care about money. To openly study business is terribly Middle-Class and disgusting to them.

Science is not anathema to the Rich. Quite to contrary, 19th century science depended on The Independent Man of Leisure puttering about. Emperor Hirohito was a marine biologist. The Rothschilds had some notable naturalists. The Rockefellers explore a lot of remote places (Borneo, Amazonia).

The allowable avocations for the Rich include Science, Art, certain sports (yachting, polo), the Occult, politics.

Larry Niven has told me in detail about his parent's initial disdain for his professionalism. It wasn't Caltech they dislkiked, it was writing Science Fiction -- for MONEY! he won them over, but that's another story. His family is the Doheny family, who became rich by discovering oil in Los Angeles. They have advanced to the newer edge of Old Money now. Politics? It was a Doheny who caused the Teapot Dome scandal!

Kimberly: "Jonathan--your upper-middle class category includes folks with annual salaries from, say, the mid-20's, all the way up to those with assets worth nearly $10 million?"

What I'd said was: "upper-middle-class = professional class, higher status white collar, doctor, engineer, lawyer, professor, or the like. Note that this includes roughly 10 million men, women, and children living in a millionaire household."

The INDUSTRIES listed include people making in the $20,000-$30,000 per annum range, but those people are the support staff, not the professionals as such. For instance, doctors are easily Upper Middle Class, but the nurses, medical technicians, receptionists, and the like are not. Lawyers can easily become millionaires, but paralegals and legal secretaries make far, far less. I've worked on & off as a paralegal specializing in Appellate and Supreme Court procedure. I've personally written motre Appellate Briefs than 95%+ of attorneys, yet they get paid $100-$300/hour and I get $30.00. I'd get more, but there's a glut of paralegals in town, you know, "L.A. Law."

My figures are from "The Millionaire Next Door" -- a fascinating breakthrough academic study, with copious statistics. Millionaires are completely UNLIKE the stereotypess ("How to Marry a Millionaire").

Kimberly: "I think each of the 'prestige professions' alone has sufficient diversity within it to encompass several of the subclasses in the middle range."

That's true too, for complicated reasons. New attorneys with private practices will take a long time just to repay their law school loans. It's much harder these days to become a partner, or for a Partner to promote to Senior Partner. Both lawyers and doctors are crippled by the costs of malpractice insurance (which does NOT meran that Emperor Bush is right to attack "Frivolous" suits). The attorney I work for most often is not making the big bucks, because he is an unreconstructed Liberal, who takes a loss on clients for whom his heart bleeds. I'd make more working for someone else, but he's so outraged by injustice that I appreciate his motivation. Sometimes I get to use a pair of his season tickets for the Dodgers, except in times of poor cash flow, he scalps them.

Kimberly: "That said, I think you are right to utilize sub-classes. And if you consider factors other than wealth, you could probably break it down further."

Education does make a difference. It is a key to upward mobility. Language does make a difference. Gender inequity is real. Ageism is rampant. America is not homogenous; regional differences are still tremendous.

What factors do you consider most important?

A slight correction to JvP's post above:

Bill Gates dropped out not from Harvard B-school but
from undergrad computer science at Harvard College.
His official biography says that he developed a version
of BASIC for the Altair and left during his junior year.
He also published at least one serious mathematical
result (on the diameter of the pancake graph) with the
highly-renowned computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.

Bill's parents were certainly upper-class. The most famous
public disagreement between Bill and his father is that the
latter opposed repeal of the estate tax. However Bill has
given his father a large role in distributing Gates Foundation
money, so they seem to be on reasonable terms.

Dave MB:

Friendly amendment accepted. Take the Official Biography with 65537 grains of salt. It omits, or spins, for instance, the story of his mom being on the board of United way, and just happening to hear from boardmember Thomas J. Watson, Jr., that IBM would dearly like to have a BASIC interpreter and an operating system for their forthcoming PC. Were his parents Upper Class? They were well on the way, not from the law practice as such, but from the way they exploited the political connections therefrom. Or am still missing something? Ronald Reagan was not upper class, but the rich liked having him as a lapdog, so made him a sweetheart deal on Real Estate to get him over the $$$ barrier. He and the Emperor Bushes have returned the favor a million-fold. $10 million invested in that branch of th GOP; $10 trillion extracted from the Poor and Middle Class to reward the Upper Class. Great Return on Investment, eh?

Dave: "The most famous public disagreement between Bill and his father is that the latter opposed repeal of the estate tax."

Not according to USAToday, in a quickly found search. Nor in any other press report I've seen. Do you have personal knowledge, or a citation available?

(I note that the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft is William H. Gates III, so presumably his father was born William H. Gates, Jr... Yet, these days, the elder Gates goes by "Bill Gates, Sr." Thus, by implication, both Gateses are taking the names of their fathers. I'm sure it'll be a great psych thesis for someone someday. :)

Jonathan: "Bill Gates' parents were politically connected lawyers. His sin against Wealth was not technology, but the mere fact that he went to Harvard Business School, albeit he dropped out. Harvard is a Class Conscious place to be sure (my Dad went there, I could tell sories), but B-School? The rich pretend not to care about money. To openly study business is terribly Middle-Class and disgusting to them."

Ah, where to start. First, only his father was a lwayer, not his mother. He did not go to Harvard B-School, as has already been noted. Yours is not the only father who went to Harvard. {cough} And if B-School is regarded as so repulsive by the rich, it would be a surprise to the family of a certain alum of Harvard's B-School, from 1975.

"Science is not anathema to the Rich. Quite to contrary, 19th century science depended on The Independent Man of Leisure puttering about."

This is notably not the same age as 150 years ago.

"Emperor Hirohito was a marine biologist."

Who isn't American.

"The Rothschilds had some notable naturalists."

Who aren't American.

"The Rockefellers explore a lot of remote places (Borneo, Amazonia)."

Ah, here we're finally getting somewhere. I will grant that the Romantic view of Nature can sometimes trump other concerns. But how many papers have come out of these explorations, exactly? (And of that number, how many were not ghost written?)

"Larry Niven has told me in detail about his parent's initial disdain for his professionalism. It wasn't Caltech they dislkiked, it was writing Science Fiction -- for MONEY! he won them over, but that's another story. His family is the Doheny family, who became rich by discovering oil in Los Angeles. They have advanced to the newer edge of Old Money now. Politics? It was a Doheny who caused the Teapot Dome scandal!"

Oddly, you're not the only friend of Larry's in the sound of your voice. Again, {cough}. So I already knew all this. (Larry and I went to boarding schools in the same athletic league -- he {strike}Mt. Lookithat{/strike} Cate, myself Midland.)

But the point wasn't the reaction of his family as much as the reaction of his class.

I will skip the rest not addressed to me, save for two items:

"The INDUSTRIES listed include people making in the $20,000-$30,000 per annum range, but those people are the support staff, not the professionals as such."

Depends on where. This is true in the larger coastal cities, but I personally know both professors and lawyers with incomes in this range.

"My figures are from "The Millionaire Next Door" -- a fascinating breakthrough academic study, with copious statistics. Millionaires are completely UNLIKE the stereotypess ("How to Marry a Millionaire")."

Yes. I'm sure Sir Humphrey would call Millionaire Next Door "bold, imaginative, and innovative."

The problem is, after having gathered some data, the authors then get prescriptive, and manage to forget that correlation does not equal causation, and that such a thing as survivorship bias exists. In other words, they don't go back and find out how many people have exactly the same traits they describe, yet never managed to become millionaires. (Jim Collins also tends to get this wrong as well.)

Perhaps a better book is Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb is a follower of Popper, and tends to look for more objective, falsifiable criteria.

OK, I was wrong, there's one other thing: Bill Jr.'s law firm, Preston Gates Ellis, is the largest for a 700 mile radius. It didn't start that way, obviously, and I realize compared to NY law firms it's not all that grand... But if you don't think the senior partner is "upper class" in the relevant region...

Well. Yes.

the reason i (used to)think of an LJ as less than a blog is because most of the journals i saw
   a)were filled with hormone-driven whining by teenagers, or
   b)provided a way to make vapid/inflammatory comments by disillusioned nerds.
but most importantly
   c) had layout/design tendencies that would make Dali cringe.

adithemopur - on the blogger.com page where you log in there is a list of links to the most recently posted blogs. (It used to be rather more prominent.) I make it a habit to look at at least one or two each time I'm there. Your three points are a fair description of quite a large proportion.

Maybe it's because they are the free ones (like mine), and other forms (like this) are more 'professional'. Depends on how you're defining blogs. Linguistically, though it pains me greatly to read them, they're a fascinating window into the development of hybrid Englishes in Asia & other places, as well as developments among native speakers.

JVP, I think that there is incredible stratification on salaries within the profession, excluding support staff.

I would put starting salaries for lawyers, not support staff, in a range from $25K (some public interest work) to about $120 or even $130K (biglaw in big city markets). Biglaw is the perception, but it is not the reality for most law school graduates. Although a majority of my graduating class probably went into biglaw, that's only true for the top law schools, and there are an awful lot of law schools out there. But I know that I have some actual statistics at home on this (my alma mater and my bar association keep close track; this information is widely available), so I'll try to look some actual facts up after work.

If you look at those who work in small or medium-sized law firms instead of biglaw, those who hang out their own shingles, government lawyers, public defenders, and the white knight lawyers, I'm fairly certain that biglaw and big salaries and potential millionaire-ness is, for all but a small percentage of lawyers, the myth, not the reality.

And it's different if you look at annual salary per individual or per household (1 or 2 incomes?), debt (my student loans are another mortgage), family background, the benefits of the professional job, etc.

So I am definitely not saying that I disagree with your placement of those professionals in upper middle class, based on education, prestige, potential for upward mobility (just by virtue of getting that JD), etc.

I'll try to find some of those career stats later on and post again so that I'm not just talking out of my ass. For now, though, I've got to go earn the salary.

Hal: (I note that the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft is William H. Gates III, so presumably his father was born William H. Gates, Jr... Yet, these days, the elder Gates goes by "Bill Gates, Sr." Thus, by implication, both Gateses are taking the names of their fathers. I'm sure it'll be a great psych thesis for someone someday. :)

According to Miss Manners, that's how it's done, if one's family isn't royalty. When the eldest with the name dies, the younger bump up.

JVP: I need a detail-oriented paralegal, btw. Want to move to Michigan?

Needless to say, that last post was from me, not Jonathan. Too little coffee and too many distractions. Sorry about that.

Hal O'Brien:

I thank you for your many corrections.

According to The Gates Family Service Award page: "William H. Gates II attended the University of Washington on the G.I. Bill after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He earned his law degree in 1950 and launched what would prove to be a long and successful career as a founding partner of the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis. After graduating from the UW, Bill married Mary Maxwell, whom he had met when both were students at the University. Their 44-year marriage produced three children, Kristianne, Bill, and Libby, and an impressive record of service to their community."

"Involved in more than two dozen local charities, including the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Seattle Symphony, and United Way, Bill and Mary also took an active role in the affairs of the University. Mary served on the UW Foundation Board of Directors, the UW Medical Center Board, and the School of Business Administration’s Advisory Board. She was a UW Regent for 18 years and an outspoken champion of undergraduate education." But you're right, Mary Gates grew up in Seattle’s North End and graduated from Roosevelt High School where she was class valedictorian and a star forward on the girls’ high school basketball team. She received a degree in education from the University of Washington 1950. Not in Law.

True, things differ from 150 years ago, but to the Old Rich, those rules still apply, including Science being a plausible avocation, especially as it is unlikely to earn any money for the researcher. Horohito and Rothschild were not Americans, but the Old Rich, although they may give lip service to nationalism, are (if only to hedge their portfolios) inherently globalist in outlook.

I don't know much about ghostwriters for the Rockefellers, except, of course, Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose Ph.D. work was subsidized.

Yes, I'm aware that other Friends of Larry Niven read this blog, and so I omitted the details of his stories of his parents, as they were told as if in confidence. But the specifics of their initial reaction, and how he won them over, are typical of their Class.

It's true that attorney incomes vary greatly with geography, which is why I put in a geography caveat. Similarly, on pro bono and idealist and Liberal attitude.

Yes, there are biases in millionaire statistics, but the book I mention has pretty careful numerical methodology, state by state, profession by profession, broken down by age, and so forth. The real bias is in trying to define "net assets" in a way that makes sense when compared to other locations, especially other countries. Roughly half of USA citizens have ZERO wealth, no net assets. Of the half with positive wealth, half of those could only survive 3 months if their salary stopped, before they're out on the street. Half of the remainder have only 6 months. Fewer than 10% can be comfortable for 18 months to 3 years with no new income. Class is partly about whether one has the perpetual desparation that comes from the gaping holes in the safety net. Note to the English and Scots reading this: the "dole" in the USA is not perpetual. It cuts off after a relatively short time. "Unemployment Compensation" is a small fraction of salary. In my city, with my salary history, it maxes out at $140 a week, which doesn't cover gas, electricity, water, garbage collection, and similar expenses, let alone rent or mortgage. It also lasts just 26 weeks, with your having to report in writing, under penalty of perjury, every fornight that you are looking for work, have earned nothing whether or not paid, and have not turned down any jobs.

Karl Popper is dead? How can I falsify that?

Kimberly:

I don't disagree. I didn't mean that ALL lawyers were millionaires, merely that it is not uncommon for mawyers to become millionaires. Coffee stops identity theft? I have done paralegal work, unofficially, for people in other states. I had a client in Washington State who objected on Constitutional grounds to the statutory assumption there that someone arrested for driving drunk or on drugs is implitly giving permission for a blood test, even if dead. The dead can give informed consent? Sounds like a Horror novel in the making...

Hey, the making of "vapid/inflammatory comments by disillusioned nerds" is a cherished tradition in the history of blogging!

Avram:

That set me pondering. Of (1) vapid, (2)inflammatory, (3) disillusioned, (4) nerds, and (5) bloggers, exactly how many of those five am I? How many is Bill Gates?

Hrmn... LJ versus other blogs.

Looking around, I see the other blogs have much the same problem (noise to signal).

What I also see is the ease of finding LJs, both the good and the ill.

When it comes to finding Blogger blogs, I don't see any easy way to hop from one to the other. I can't easily find 500 people who share an interest in macro-photography (heck, right now I can't find one, at least not with a hyphen), and I can't easily aggregate them.

Which makes them more clubby. It also means I have filters, which keep the chattering classes from showing up. I don't expect to find Dave Niewert linking to a bunch of people interested in nothing but what went on at Monroe High School today.

This also skews the perception of MT, and Blogger type blogs.

I know that some of them drive me buggy for design too, and in ways which are harder to deal with (the link buttons on Rude Pundit and our own dear Rivka's Respectful of Otter are both huge (extending half the width of the page) and invisible meaning I have inadvertantly clicked through to someplace else, just because I was trying to make my mouse-wheel active again.

LJ, at least, lets me look at all the pages in blissfully boring white, with a few people I really want to know have posted possessed of a colored sidebar.

If only I was able to easily disemvowell people (I can only truly do it to people who have posted anonymously).

I do know that I've not gotten any comment spam. Which right there makes up for a lot of things.

TK

And, on this heels of this post, the United Airlines debacle, where a union contract has been abrogated because, well, apparently because employees and pensioners are last in the list of people who a bankruptcy court considers UA has obligations to. UA's unions, some of which are major stockholders, are ready to walk out.

A plunge back into 19th-century labor relations would be unimaginably destructive to the US economy, which would stand to lose enormously to economies which have healthier labor relations, yet that appears to be where we are being led.

Terry, for macrophotography, perhaps Reid Stott?

[Hal O'Brien links to USA Today story saying that Bill Gates,
like his father, favors the estate tax. He asks if I have competing
evidence for my claim that they disagree on this.]

I do not, and I stand corrected. Bill-the-zillionaire did openly
endorse GWB for reelection, though, and his father's activism
against the estate tax was spun as anti-GWB. This is probably
the source of my mistaken impression.

Bill did say at some point that he and Melinda plan for their
children to inherit only a small fraction of their wealth, with the
bulk going to charitable activities. So only a small part of their
fortune would be subject to estate tax even if it existed.

his father's activism against the estate tax

From context I think you meant "his father's activism against the repeal of the estate tax," right?

[Xopher corrects me that Bill Gates' father opposes
the repeal of the estate tax, not the tax itself.]

Yes, sorry.

Re Estate tax, and small portions of wealth.

For a period of time I satisfied various curiosities about the law by taking classes in paralegal certification. Heck, push come to shove I could even look for work in the field.

If one has the wealth of a Gates, the trick is to figure out how much one wants to see the little buggers get.

At which point you write the trust in such a way that the requisite amount is given to allow the after tax (which was been 50 percent of a taxable estate, at least until the repealed it altogether, the requirements to be a taxable estate were played with, from years of nothing, to as little as 2 million dollars) remainder to be the amount desired.

Where it got tricky is the estate was total assets. In the present market it is possible for people with little cash to hand over, to have million dollar homes (the place Maia's grandparent's own has a theoretical value, at present, of about $600,000. It's a two-bedroom, two-bath, with a fireplace, a small kitchen, a largish living room, a strange back room and 2/3rds of an acre of property rated for horses.

Were it 100 feet to the North we could add another one, to two, hundred grand (it's at a T-intersection, and the feng-shui is said to be bad, and that reduced the buying price by $75 grand, fifteen years ago).

So I can see where modifying the tax might have been useful. But doing away with it altogether... not a good idea.

Mark: I was making a comment on the nature of LJ. At the risk of telling you something you already know, one can list one's interests, those who have the same interests (as defined by an exact match of description, e.g. macro-photography will be grouped.

If someone has listed macro photography or micro photography etc., there will be no match.

So, for the three interests which have no match I will know when someone lists it, because LJ makes it plain when they are shared (and for some of the ones with only a few matches, I check on a semi-regular basis to see who may have added themselves to the list).

Terry: "If only I was able to easily disemvowell people (I can only truly do it to people who have posted anonymously)."

My own wish, both for LJ and other blogs, is to be able to killfile people. That kind of client-side manual tinkering with the signal-to-noise ratio is a big advantage to Usenet.

JvP: Harvard is a Class Conscious place to be sure (my Dad went there, I could tell sories)

As has been pointed out for other periods, your father's time is not today. This is especially true for Harvard; J.K. Galbraith spoke in 1975 of The Rules he was given in the 1930's by the vetting committee for one of the houses:
- St. Grottlesex graduates were in automatically;
- Exeter/Andover/... were accepted absent obvious defects;
- public-school graduates if numbers of the above were seriously short;
- Jews were Right Out.

The last was particularly amusing; in my time (early 70's) a good private school probably still gave you some edge at the admissions office simply because they could be more sure that an A there was a real A, but I heard an estimate that 1/3 of the undergraduates were Jewish.

There certainly is room for the snobs at Harvard, but I felt it was more of an isolation ward (cf final clubs) than a dominance. I could make snide comments about Yale with Skull&Bones -- but the litle I know suggests that's a minor thread.

Terry: I understand the phenomenon of being rich only in real estate; the question is what to do about it. Bush goes on about family businesses (especially farms), but has never proposed anything like entailment, or any other mechanism to ensure that the non-cash inheritance is continued in use instead of cashed in -- at which point I have little sympathy for the legatees. Not to mention that it's another of his statistical distortions, making use of the fact that very few people realize how few people were being taxed even before Bush's little present.

CHip:

I appreciate the update on Harvard. It was so antisemitic when my Dad went there, that he legally changed his name from "Pasternak" to "Post" to blend in, a pseudo-Wasp-Anglo-Saxon nomenclatural way. Then 3rd cousin Boris won his Nobel Prize in Literature, and the name changed looked lame for my Dad, who was working on an English Lit degree (and eventually, after WW II, got it, cum laude).

For a while my half-sister readopted Pasternak as a last name.

I agree with you on your comment on Terry. VERY few family farms or family businesses were lost to Estate Tax. It was ROVE's doublespeak genius that promulgated the intentional misnomer "death tax."

Due to the Real Estate Bubble in greater Los Angeles, I look comfortable, owing well under $200,000 in mortgage on a home worth roughly $500-600,000. But I'd be nuts to turn that into a home equity loan, or some other scheme to cash out, nor can I reasonably sell the place while my son lives here and goes to school. And where else can I get 2600+ square feet of floor space plus several hundred more of garage and storage shed, in a beautiful green neighborhood which has (on an unusually clear day) an ocean view, up above the smog, a short walk from a National Forest? I have net assets, but they are illiquid, and so I'm painfully cash-poor.

By the way, Emperor Bush II's bizarre nonsolution to the Social Security Nonproblem starts the benefit cuts for people born the year I was born. In a nearly fatal shooting of the victim, someone's got to be the entrance wound.

Switching back to our Democracy subthread...

Quick: before they pay-per-view archive this, see:

Think You Are Savvy About the [Los Angeles Mayoral] Election?

Here are the first 4 of 17 clever questions:

1. In national, state and local elections, it's good to throw the bums out now and then because:

A: Fresh ideas are always welcome.

B: We have to let politicians know who's in charge.

C: It's time for a new set of crooks.

2. When it comes to municipal corruption, Los Angeles:

A: Is clean as a whistle.

B: Is in the minor leagues.

C: Could kick Chicago's butt halfway to New York.

3. In Los Angeles, you've really struck it rich if you:

A: Have a screenplay aimed at the right demographic.

B: Invested in real estate 10 years ago.

C: Know somebody on the airport commission.

4. An L.A. mayor's primary function is to:

A: Instill trust and leadership.

B: Keep hope alive.

C: Ignore the San Fernando Valley.

D: Always keep a safe distance from his bag men.