Is that not a manifestation of "the american dream", where "if you work enough, you too can be a millionaire"? It appears to me that too many people believe they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, blissfully unaware that by design the deck is stacked against them.
That's exactly one of the types of unawareness that GP talks about: just acquiring a lot of money will not get you to a higher class all by itself. The idea that a blue collar worker who wins the lottery would suddenly become a higher class would be laughable in (let's say) Britain. You would still be lacking all the mannerisms, connections, skills, etc that serve as the true barrier to moving between classes. It typically takes a generation or two between for a family that has acquired money to actually become "upper class", often longer.
In my experience Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds. It takes ages to relearn how to speak and how to behave.
> Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds.
That's not a result of the school system. It's how things naturally occur everywhere.
The British school system is explicitly classist. To the point that what they call "public schools" are actually among the most private and exclusive by any reasonable standard.
So? If you take a phenomenon that occurs everywhere, add a classist school system to it, and observe that it still occurs exactly the same way as before, how do you conclude "This is a result of the school system!"?
It doesn’t happen everywhere. People in Italy don’t talk about the “working class” like they do in the UK and I’ve never heard anybody claiming they were a member of the “working class”, let alone people claiming that as if it was something to celebrate or to be proud of. There isn’t a “working class” accent in Italian, the closest thing is marginally educated people that can’t use half of the verb moods and tenses. Romans speak more or less homogeneously, likewise in other cities. Children are not segregated by class, so the child of a doctor may be in the same class of the child of the mayor, of a child that gets free meals and of another that lives in a squatted flat. They mix and they don’t develop different accents.
Instead in the UK people debate this class idiocy ad nauseam almost daily. They spend a significant amount of time and money to ensure their children don’t go to the same school as children from lower social classes (and as soon as you make a child, they’ll bombard you with their insanity). This is of course never stated explicitly and I suspect they are not conscious of that.
This is a country where even the supermarket where you buy groceries will be used to infer your class status. For instance, while I don’t know what my class is supposed to be, I’ve been told that I’m at least middle class because Waitrose is the cheapest place where I buy food. I’m posh and whatnot class because I occasionally go to the opera. Once I recognised the Thieving Magpie and told a colleague the name of its composer, that earned me the accusation of being megaclass. Once I was rented a flat, the landlady told me, because she could tell from my manners that I must come from a rich family (in fact I don’t). My girlfriend (that earns minimum wage and whose parents are cleaners) was suspected of being from the upper middle class because of how she holds cutlery (not as well as she should, if you asked me).
> This is a country where even the supermarket where you buy groceries will be used to infer your class status.
This is routine in the United States. And pretty much anywhere else with more than one grocery store. Grocery demands are highly informative as to social class; where you buy groceries is one of the first places people will look to judge your status, not the last.
Fine, it happens also in the US, but it’s not a human universal. I don’t know what the posh supermarket (assuming such notion makes any sense) would be in Rome.
there are around 20 million millionaires in the united states, that's almost 10% of the population. It's not an unreachable status. To say that it is, in fact, is quantitatively delusional.
I don't believe I said it is unattainable, only that the deck is stacked against them. As we speak, the 20 million millionaires are just 6% of the population of the states. Being a millionaire alone doesn't really make you "upper class".
I know that regardless of how much I make, in my heart I will always be a prole, and that will never change because I lack the mannerisms and the connections said people. I grew up in a different world, and even if I were to spend every waking hour with them, things wouldn't change, and frankly I am not interested in it either.
The way it works (and has always worked if the historical novels are at all accurate) is that you make the money, and then put your kids in the "good schools" and donate a building or two, and their kids (your grandkids) will then be upper class. Part of this is often having enough money so your kids can marry into "upper class but destitute" families, of which there is always a steady supply.
It's worth observing that according to traditional Irish law, there was an explicit process for ascending to lordly status, and it required three generations to complete. So the three-generation model sees some replication cross-culturally.
If you didn't want to wait that long, traditional Irish law also allowed you to purchase an equivalent-to-lordly status for yourself. You held equal rank with actual lords, but there were two major downsides: (1) this was a tremendous ongoing expense, more than many actual lords could have afforded; and (2) unlike true lordship, your status was not hereditary.
A millionaire doesn't mean what it used to mean, and the number of millionaires is actually surprisingly low in the US.
In a Western country with mandatory pensions (such as Finland), a mid-income couple should have effective net worth over $1 million (excluding primary home) by the time they retire. They are just not counted as millionaires, because they have pensions instead of retirement savings. Had they been able to save for retirement instead of making pension contributions (which are mostly used to fund current pensions), their net worth would be twice as high.
A recent middle class retiree should be a millionaire. If most of them are not, there is probably something structural that prevents people from saving as much as they should.
Nobody's counting government benefits. The US also has a similar policy called Social Security and Medicare (for healthcare.) The average lifetime payout for someone retired today is about 1 million. For someone retiring in 2060, double that.
By your math, the US millionaire couple about to retire is actually 'worth' 3 million.
Also, your numbers are misleading. The average lifetime payout numbers include Medicare benefits in addition to Social Security. You should also use estimated present-day values instead of lifetime payouts if you want to compare benefits to savings.
Median full-time income in the US in about $55k. A quick estimate for Social Security payments for someone retiring today at the nominal age with that income is $1580/month. That becomes ~$38k/year for a couple, which is ~$750k using the 5% rule. Median household net worth, including primary residence, is ~$250k at retirement age.
My estimate was based on a median income of ~$40k and pensions that pay ~60% of income. That would become almost $1M for a couple using the 5% rule, in addition to ~$200k household net worth at retirement age.
By these very rough estimates, the median recent retiree is worth 9 years' income in the US and 15 years' income in Finland. That supports the idea that there is a shortage of millionaires in the US.
Yes, that's the problem your parent comment is pointing out.
You're not trying to count them either. The value of a pension isn't the payouts it provides. It's what an identical financial structure would cost. A pension that pays out $1 million over 15 years is worth less than $1 million.
You appear to be correct on the original point that US social security payments are pretty comparable to Finnish pension payments. As of March this year, the average Finnish payment was 1784 euros and the average American payment was 1537 dollars.
I’m actually more surprised by the number of millionaires in European countries with high income taxes that typically go north of 50% way before you hit “millionaire” status
You're confusing wealth with income, two very different things. Those are income taxes, not millionaire taxes.
Income taxes are paid by the working class, while millionaires are rich because they own valuable assets which are often tax free if inherited in most of Europe (the rent seeking class). They didn't become millionaires because they paid 50% tax on their €50k/year 9-5 job, but because someone down their family tree lucked out economically decades/centuries ago and left them a nice inheritance of appreciating assets or businesses.
Wich is why most of Europe's millionaires come from wealthy old money families with inter-generational wealth that has been rolled over for centuries, often tax free.
The richest families in Europe are rich since at least 50 years, to hundreds of years.
The US is a lot more progressive than Europe here since it has inheritance taxes on wealth to prevent the formation of such feudal families, wile most for Western Europe has policies to protect the wealth of the old rich families.
From the list, it seems like the top 3 are Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. Switzerland has low taxes relatively speaking but also offers deals to rich people that move there. Australia is more surprising.
Is that not a manifestation of "the american dream", where "if you work enough, you too can be a millionaire"? It appears to me that too many people believe they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, blissfully unaware that by design the deck is stacked against them.