Caste , Class, and SSH

What you appear to be is what you attract

An updated observation concerning the way class in America has transformed into a sort of caste system.

Why, when *I* look around, everyone looks pretty much like me, so I don’t see this huge differentiation.

And yes, I agree! When I consider my friends, my family, the people I see when I walk the dogs or train at my gym, I largely only see people like myself, too.

But that’s a function of two things:

First, selection effects - as Scott has written about, the degree to which our workplaces, social circles, and families are selected is extreme - in his chosen example on a single metric, creationism, the odds against a “random draw” are 1 / 10^45 for him knowing zero creationists, an absolutely bonkers number. But, as all of us know, this is actually extremely common and the least of the extreme correlations we see in our social circles.

And then think of all the OTHER things your social circle is extraordinary on:

In our ACX commentariat circles, a lot of us have post-graduate STEM degrees (<4% of the population), make more than 6 figures (<15% of individuals), own homes in Tier 1 MSA’s (<10%), have friends that exercise regularly (<10%), don’t primarily eat fast and ultra-processed food (<30%), and so on.

The second reason “everyone looks pretty much like me” in our lives is salience. Much like when you buy a certain marque and model of car, suddenly you see it everywhere, you only really notice people you consider relevant to your own social domain. Even if you’re shopping or buying gas or spending time somewhere you usually don’t, so less filtered and selected, you largely only notice other people in your own caste.

This is because even if you see people unlike you driving around, shopping, buying gas, spending time at the water park with their family, you don’t notice them, or use them as a basis of comparison with yourself.

Just to use a fairly recondite example, I don’t even notice or look at cars that don’t have at least 500hp when I’m driving, because my fun car puts down 4 digits of power. This means I ignore probably 99.99% of cars on the road as completely irrelevant to me, and only really sit up when I see / hear an exotic, a seriously modified car, or a Hayabusa or something like that.

Well, similarly you just don’t notice people outside of your caste, even if you happen to (uncharacteristically) be somewhere that they exist.

Back in the 1983, Paul Fussell wrote a book called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. I happened to have read it in the late 1980s at my grandparents’ house, and the part that I found fascinating was the way in which it demonstrated that while there was a definite advantage to having a college degree, most of the significant advantage was actually connected to having a degree from a college or university founded prior to 1900.

He identified the following nine classes:

• Upper

• Upper middle: According to Fussell, the upper middle class earns most of its money rather than inherits it, and works in professions such as law, medicine, real estate, and business.

• Middle

• High Proletarian: According to Fussell, these are skilled workers. This class might earn as much money as the middle class, but they perform work that is more physically demanding.

• Mid-Proletarian

• Low Proletarian

• Destitute

• Bottom out-of-sight

Now, the SSH is not derivative of class, but it is not unaffected by it. The developing caste system, on the other hand, is derivative of it and is more directly connected to SSH for the obvious reason that one cannot mate and marry among people one does not meet.

One might think that Tinder and other social media dating services would tend to counteract this, except, of course, that the social media one uses, or doesn’t use, is itself dictated by one’s caste. And obviously, just as with racial arbitrage, caste arbitrage is another way that a man or a woman can attract a partner who is out of their league in one way or another.

In India, and in the USA as well, Brahmins don’t marry non-Brahmins. I suspect that as the US and European populations continue to differentiate due to their demographic adulterations, the Western class systems will tend to gradually harden into effective caste systems, to the extent they have not done so already.