musing on the subject of this John Scalzi article.

Ok, class is a weird thing. From observation, my English friends giggle whenever North Americans discuss class. We in the U.S. think money = class; the English have a completely different view of the matter.

An example: Kate Middleton, and her family, in the U.S. would have been considered upper class, due to their wealth.

In England, Kate's family are firmly middle class, due to not having titles, land, etc. They're shopkeepers, not matter their money.

Similarly: Paul McCartney may have a sir attached to his name now, and billions to go along with it. The title dies with him, however, and money will not buy his children membership in the upper classes. Unless, like Kate, they marry into it. Or hold onto their property and money long enough to drift in on indifference.

So, U.S. considerations of class are different. Using middle, working, upper, poor, may be necessary in some sense, but the uses are colloquial, and vanish on looking too close, as fog in our fingers.

That said, there are serious upper classes in the U.S. and Canada. (Mexico is a different category; the Hispanic countries of the Western Hemisphere have a class legacy that lives in a much different category. Similar but different enough so as to be dangerous if you get it wrong. 'El Jefe', as one example, has many different connotations. Using what might be a familiar jibe between friends with someone you don't know very well can be troublesome.)

The Roosevelts were one example. The Hearsts, briefly. The Fords. In South Texas, the King Ranch, in south Louisiana the various families that established what used to be Hibernia Bank and the Calcasieu Marine Bank.

I know of one family in Louisiana that owns a stretch of land that is difficult to describe, in terms of extent. When they work cattle, they move their herds from close to a beach on the Gulf almost all the way to I-10.

Without once crossing out of their own land. Or, for that matter, opening a gate in a fence on their own property.

And the King Ranch makes them look like dilletantes. And there's the Parker Ranch on Hawaii. We're talking true wealth here, self-perpetuating, and on a scale that's almost unimaginable, except by the very peak of the dot-com crowd.

If, for example, Microsoft or Amazon were to crater tomorrow, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would still be personally wealthy, by any measure. But their ability to pass a self-perpetuating cycle of wealth to their children would be significantly decreased. Simply because it takes a fairly impressive amount of heavy lifting to turn the stock wealth in a single company into a broad-based, bullet-proof wealth system across all types of markets. I would imagine those two have, simply because they've had plenty of time to do so.

But is that the same thing as owning 100,000 acres of working ranch? And banks and construction firms and... Time will have to tell.

And this type of upper class has, contrary to common belief, existed in North America since the beginning. Consider the Brahmin class, in Boston. I've seen only the briefest glimpses of this group, via friends and acquaintances, and they too are, for the most part, a self-perpetuating class of wealth and privilege. Not necessarily the kind of wealth you'd associate with Ferraris and trips to Monaco, mind.

But their kids don't have to worry about college; they've been "Down for Harvard" since birth and don't have to worry about how to pay for it. When they get out, even if they don't go into the family business, which may or may not exist in a concrete sense, wherever they move, they won't have to worry about a down payment on a house, or a car note.

These aren't bad things. Think about it this way: given the opportunity, wouldn't you want to make sure your children and grandchildren don't have to worry about how to pay for college? Whether they'll be able to afford a house note? A car, health care, the basics?

Not kept in style, but the basics taken care of. That's what, at the heart of it, many of us, I observe, consider the American Dream to be. Not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but rather being settled. Able to back up our kids when they screw up, give them that little bit that lets them get started.

In current terms then: Working class means that, if you had the grades to get into college, then you had to either earn a half scholarship, or pay for it yourself. Maybe you took community college first, saved up a little money stocking groceries at night, and went to A&M or UT when you hit your junior year.

Maybe you got lucky and hit an apprenticeship as a plumber, took your master chit and started your own business with a line of credit from the credit union, held against your retirement fund from the union.

Upper class means that you went to a good college. But you didn't have to work, the parents had it covered, including the apartment off campus and the car, except you worked a little just to have a little extra cash on hand.

Middle class? Scholarship kids, the full-ride type, on campus all through because that's what the scholarship would pay for. Medical school or law school, maybe architecture, a grad school that got you paid right away, the day you walked out with the ticket in your hand. If engineering, you took the right internships and walked into a job waiting for you the day you graduated.

The upper classes maybe didn't even need the job, but there's always one available when they need it.

The working classes don't know anyone, have to fight through the two-hundred to one ratio of applications to job openings. Scrape by, put it together, go from job to job and never quite know when the axe is going to fall.

Middle class, there's always a rumor of a good step up, maybe as a negotiating tactic, maybe just as a way to make sure you land well when this current one gets cut.

Upper class don't get cut from jobs. By this point, they're working for their family company. Or, teaching somewhere, working for an NGO, at a non-profit, somewhere the vicissitudes can't touch, and the little bit of family support means they can handle the poor salary by other means. Again, not massive wealth, just the kind of backup that makes things easier. Or maybe massive wealth, that can be there too, but it's the security that matters here. (Consider: 200k invested, roughly a thousand a month in interest: if your grandparents had put that in a trust for you, would a thousand a month matter to you? Would it have mattered when you were, like I and my wife were, struggling? I know for sure as hell how much a thousand a month would have meant. Would still mean, for that matter, because we've got a kid getting to the point where college bills are on the horizon. And let's face it, when you think of wealth, does 200k sound like 'wealth'? Another example, could you scrape up time and 80k against a 400k loan, to start a business that, if things went right, in 2 to 4 years would pay off the loan and generate something like 200k per year? I couldn't begin to afford this, and I doubt any of the people in that article could swing it. But that's the kind of thing that the upper class can afford to do: invest time and effort to perpetuate wealth, in what look like small ways; if you've conditioned yourself to think of a million dollars as what it takes to get into the upper class you'll miss the real thing when you see it.)

And notice: it's only the upper class that's self-perpetuating. The middle class is an accident of being in the right place at the right time. The working class is the default: always the poor schmuck getting pissed on and being told it's raining.

This is description, I could generalize to other connotations. The retail grind, farming, fishing, construction, each has variations that you can see. Who owns what, who signs the time cards, who shows up drunk on Thursday and gets shitcanned.

Wherefore the unnerving, then? Why would the upper-middle class then feel a little anxiety? Worry? Maybe the sand shifting beneath their feet, a little?

The verities, no longer solid?

It happens to every generation, I observe. Collectively, that moment when "Who, where, what, how?" percolates through the subconsciousness. The Boomers: 60s rebels, 70s disco, 80s yuppies and worries about interest rates and tax brackets, nineties gas prices and holy shit you mean our kids could get caught up in another war?

The greatest generation: the war, and the aftermath. The cold war and all its collective anxieties, turned up to 11 and yanking the knob off...

GenX, us: we will never see a dime of social security. The universal realization, I thought, when we were getting started. I never met a member of my rough age group who didn't know this, down deep in their bones.

Ah. Now I wonder: did some of us begin to believe again, just a little?

The GenX middle class, in my little categorization, above. The ones who'd skipped along, put all the anxieties aside. Maybe discounted them, since those who couldn't keep up were the ones voicing them (and forgetting how they'd once shared these concerns, if only academically).

And the clouds are on the horizon. The first hints that the leading edge will be at 80 percent of current social security benefit, when we retire, and from there it's all downhill.

Medicare's finances even worse. Most states barely scraping Medicaid now, Obamacare/ACA something something oh God how are we going to get to retirement? What happens if the stock market crashes again?

In other words, we seem to be about where the Boomers were in 1990, 1991, 1992, when the recession that kicked Bush the Elder out of office took hold. The Boomers had been through Black Friday, the recession and the war in combination, plus gas kicking up from 95 cents per gallon to a dollar and 25 cents or more, and staying there (25 percent jump essentially in one summer) and their anxieties kicked into high gear.

This settled. But how many dot-com revolutions, or similar, come along in a lifetime? My generation and that of those immediately following look to be starting to question the next phase of life, and where we go from here.

It's no surprise this would come in the NY Times, or that they'd interview the upper-middle class for the article. That's their audience, it's who they're speaking to.

I don't speculate in political terms here; these anxieties are far broader, deeper, quieter than the playing at politics can handle. How will it play out?

Now there's the question for the writer...