What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get
www.theatlantic.com
People with generational wealth control a society that they don’t understand.

… I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?

For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why…

Archive: https://archive.is/r42Ba

  • can
    22·
    12 hours ago

    America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.