You can be broke and upper class; rich and 'working'. Economists/historians/et al. call it socioeconomic class: I think the latter dominates in the US, and the former in the UK. If I (British) thought of or described someone as being of a particular class, it would be far more a comment on their actions or behaviour than their job or salary. To the point that it's weird to me how it's discussed here when we basically don't know either of them; if anything we know more about DJ D-Sol and it's a slightly (but certainly not definite) downward hint.
Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class. I should have specified I'm talking about American-style economic class.
In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.
The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.
My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.
> Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class.
I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.
Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.
