It is a public school that is patronized in large numbers by "the Ivy League type", those who went to the traditional New England prep schools (St. Paul's, Andover, Exeter, Groton, etc.) favored by the American upper class instead of high school. The traditional path for Eastern upper class students was to enroll as a legacy to whichever of the Big Three (Harvard, Yale, or Princeton) their family usually attended, or to the local Ivy favorite, which was usually whichever Ivy League school was local to their state, or maybe one of the Little Three (Amherst, Wesleyan, or Williams). If they found themselves unable to get into any of those schools due to academic or behavioral problems, then they would get a more personalized education at one of the other NESCAC small colleges. Originally, there was only one Public Ivy, the University of Virginia. Getting a law degree at UVA was seen as an acceptable graduate route for those interested in a public service career. (Those with more interest in international relations or the humanities would get a postsecondary degree overseas at Oxford or Cambridge). Over time, this halo effect caused a rise in status for UVA undergrads as well. I'm not sure when things started to change... maybe during the 70s? In addition to the NESCAC, less academically inclined prep schoolers were ending up at the "ski colleges" like the University of Colorado or the University of Vermont. Then came the Public Ivy book, which redefined public ivy as meaning a rigorous public education at an affordable price. I think now any public university that thinks it can get away with it wants to be known as a Public Ivy, as it does not have a strict definition, yet increases the perceived desirability of the school.

For getting hired, GED avoidance is usually part of a Principal-Agent problem. HR isn't rewarded for putting forward an ambiguous candidate, even if they end up being fantastic. However, they may be blamed for forwarding someone who turns out to be a bad match. This tends to bias the forwarding process in favor of "safe" candidates; those who are credentialed beyond criticism, regardless of their actual qualifications. While this is bad for the business in the long-term, it is good for individual HR employees in the short-term, so it leads to certain things having irrational stigmas, such as GEDs or job-hopping. I would be surprised if a GED prevented someone from getting into community college, provided that they did well enough on the SAT. From a cultural perspective, the stigma around GEDs is usually a social class issue. For various reasons, working class people often find that GEDs are the best choice for them, so having one in some places becomes a marker of being working class. The marker alone does not inherently cause a social stigma -- the stigma is from the "anxious middle class", those upwardly mobile individuals who fear that if they allow working class people or working class culture into their lives, they will be prevented from joining the upper class. "Beer Street and Gin Lane", William Hogarth, 1751 This is an irrational fear, of course -- the upper class often enjoys working class things, sometimes to the point where the thing itself changes social class. Gin, for instance, before it was associated with an elegant lifestyle, was quite strongly a working class drink; it was rejected by the British middle class of the time as an immoral beverage, compared to wholesome beer. The British upper class took a liking to it while rubbing shoulders with the working class in the navy, and while slumming it at boxing matches. :)

Religious freedom for communities is often dependent on others recognizing the community as a self-governing body distinct from the viewer. If Italy suddenly decided that Vatican City was too small to be a real country, that really it was just a group of wrong-headed Italians, then it would seem like simple social welfare to correct those Vatican City residents when their norms differed from Italian ones (even if that simple social welfare ultimately involved threats of punishment for noncompliance). For individuals, I think Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he noted that forced compliance may bring the illusion of harmony, but "tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness", since the reason for compliance isn't a change of heart but just to avoid the punishment. There is also the problem of turning norms into laws. Norms are dynamic and community-based. Laws are specific and based on the consensus of the drafter and signers. So attempts to turn norms into laws always leave a little to be desired.

For the electoral college, imagine if something like the EU were started today in a Europe that had never had one. Maybe someone suggests that things ought to be decided by a simple popular majority. Ireland and Portugal would immediately complain, because even if everyone in Ireland or Portugal wanted a certain thing, they would be ignored -- they have only a fraction of the population of France or Germany. On the other hand, France or Germany would complain if a "one country, one vote" system were implemented -- under a system like that, a complex initiative involving millions of people could all come apart just because Malta suddenly had an issue with something. So, let's imagine the EU tries to develop a system where there is a baseline number of votes per country, regardless of population, but that still acknowledges the population of the countries in a meaningful way. Now set this conversation in 18th century America rather than modern Europe, and you have the development of the electoral college. :) I think part of what makes it harder to understand today is that the context is removed. The groups that really believed in and promoted state sovereignty in the U.S. (which the electoral college was designed to respect) were mostly concentrated in the South; after the South lost the Civil War, that particular view of how America was going to work became very unpopular.

I've never really figured out how to see G.T. Dave. I think when I'm an optimist, I veer towards deluded or perhaps overly hopeful, when I'm a pessimist, towards someone who no longer feels anything for others. The L.A. Times did a write-up on him in 2008: That's not to say that kombucha is just vinegar-water -- Paul Stamets mentioned in his article sending a kombucha culture to a pharmaceutical company that was looking for mushroom extracts to patent after having no luck with his other samples. They were very excited about its potential, at least until they realized that Stamets had no clue how the kombucha SCOBY worked:

It seems like there was also a Northwest group that predated the Californians; mycologist Paul Stamets writes about being baffled by a hippie friend who in 1980 gave him a kombucha mother in a mason jar along with a tall tale about its mystical origins. From The Manchurian Mushroom: My Adventures with the Blob, an article in the Winter 1994 edition of Mushroom:

A bit more digging leads to an update. :) The November 1994 issue of New Age Journal did a feature on kombucha that traced the connection back to an article in the August 1994 issue of Positive Living, the newsletter of the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, titled "Reborn on the 4th of July". The article was a profile of AIDS survivor Joe Lustig, a Long Island man who insisted that kombucha was the secret to his renewed lease on life. This created a local boom that helped fuel the growth of the early American kombucha groups.

Gaining a balanced view is a tedious process; sites like rationalwiki are often in it for the rush of the debunk, and it can show in their tone. :) (Gustav Lindau, the German mycologist who introduced kombucha to the West) Kombucha is a folk beverage first discovered in the Courland region of Latvia about 100 years ago. Despite its name, it is not Japanese. Most likely it is Russian or Manchurian. The organisms used are not a random mish-mash, but their precise makeup has not been studied much by the scientific community; most brewers rely on folk knowledge to produce it, much like beer brewing before Pasteur and the other brewer microbiologists. This has sometimes lead to high-profile accidents, as people try to make it without training or knowing what to look for. The cancer cure part is related to the modern American revival -- GT Dave, the first commercial manufacturer of ready-to-drink kombucha, used that as part of the marketing for his brand before the FDA told him to knock it off. The origin of the AIDS claim is a little murkier -- ads for kombucha culture started quietly showing up in the classified section of The Advocate (a popular LGBT-interest magazine) in the mid-90s, but the roots of the idea are more obscure. In 1994, the New York Times tried to get to the root of the revival. According to Molly O'Neill's December 28th article, "A Magic Mushroom or a Toxic Fad?", it arrived in America by way of Austria, and quickly became a "California thing". :) Supposedly GT's kombucha mother was indirectly from Laurel Farms -- the founder, Betsy Prior, shared it with Beverley Hills juice shop owner David Otto (or perhaps more likely he purchased a starter), who in turn shared it with GT Dave's father. :) The Independent in the UK also had an article on kombucha a few months after the New York Times, "Grow Your Own Miracle Cure" by Edward Hellmore, that goes into more info on the provenance of the LA kombucha mother: The "got it from Manchuria" part seems a little far-fetched -- I'm not really sure how kombucha fared in the region after the Sino-Soviet split and the Soviet collapse. (Personally, I would guess that they got the mother from Germany.)

This might actually suggest that they are small-c conservative -- before the change in definitions caused by the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, Republican in the U.S. meant something more similar to Libertarian, in that folks were socially liberal (for the time) and fiscally conservative.

That's true. In practice, a patronage-free lifestyle is very difficult in a usurious society, as there is always another patron waiting in line behind the last one. One reason I mentioned the hypothetical farmer owning their own well is that a common hidden patron is the water company -- a house without running water can be condemned (and therefore legally seized) in many areas. An event that I found helpful for improving my understanding of the dynamics of this was the bankruptcy of Detroit -- many people who owned their own homes and thought they could sit tight through the disaster even though they didn't have any money coming in were proven wrong by various normally harmless mechanisms that became dangerous when the money stopped.

One thing that might help is to pull it apart a bit -- there is global beer culture, national beer culture, and then beer subcultures within it. Even though it is the same beer, in different places it plays a different role. A fun place that helped me start thinking about the subject was a short book called Passport to the Pub on the sociology of British pub drinking, designed with the foreign tourist in mind. :) One possible reason might have to do with gender norms. In many places, men are socialized to see excessive chattiness as a weakness, even among friends. So when they find themselves in a situation where conversation is appropriate, somehow nobody seems to know how to begin. Beer acts as a social lubricant that loosens that inhibition. Why people go from chatty drunk to under-the-table drunk is maybe a more complicated question.

​​ He was a Scottish economist -- definitely worth a read if that is an area that interests you. (His books, like The Wealth of Nations, are now all in the public domain.) Maybe my understanding of him is flawed; he was fairly well-read for his time. ​Here's the part I was thinking of: ​

What interests me about this is that it seems to contradict Adam Smith's idea that risky or unpleasant jobs will always pay more than safe or pleasant jobs (that there will be a compensating differential). ​ ​I guess the question I am curious about is why that would be so...

That does sound tough... a subdivision covenant sounds kind of like a social contract; maybe Jean-Jacques Rousseau will have better advice than me. :) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46333/46333-h/46333-h.htm#CONTENTS

That will definitely be an interesting scenario. My guess is that those with East Coast ties will be absorbed into the Eastern Establishment -- if the company was founded by an Ivy League dropout, populated by MIT grads, and financed through NYC venture capital, there will be a steady pull back East, even if the company is based in the West. The really interesting ones will be those without East Coast ties -- companies founded by Stanford dropouts, populated by Caltech grads, financed through Silicon Valley venture capital. Will they still strive for the soft power markers of the Eastern upper class, or will they create their own mythology? As far as unheard of money, I think it's important to keep in mind inflation -- sometimes it's hard to describe just how rich the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age really were.

The fun answer would be Huaqiangbei (åŽå¼ºåŒ—), one of the world's largest electronics markets 10 miles outside of Hong Kong. :) The Guardian did a photo-tour of a small part of it recently. The realistic answer is probably Ebay. Just make sure you purchase from a reputable seller, to avoid counterfeits and stolen goods.

A book that really helped me was Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, about his life and thoughts on the future. Your mileage may vary -- I think it's in the public domain now, though, so the cost of the read would only be your time. (A copy is up on the Internet Archive.)

Upper class if they started out upper class. They would simply change the definition of what was considered a successful lifestyle to aspire towards. Most likely being a street-sweeper would be seen as bohemian, a "cool" rejection of norms rather than a mark of poverty, sort of like working as a barista was once seen. A similar thing happened in the 70s with carpentry, if I recall correctly, with upper class kids taking the "Jesus was a carpenter" line and deciding that the perfect place to find themselves was working in carpentry. This was part of a larger "blue collar chic" movement that Tom Wolfe described fairly well in his Rolling Stone essay, "Funky Chic": It also might be worth pointing out that there is a connection between the British-style class system and the American upper-class; remember, they have historically been Anglophiles. This is a long-standing divide that goes back to the roots of the country -- J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur noticed the roots of this divide way back in his 18th century Letters from an American Farmer: In New England there was a core group who were really more-or-less fine with Old England in a new place, with maybe a one-time redo. As one headed South and West, you ended up with more melting pot ideologues. So the two ideologies have existed in the U.S. since almost its founding. Why the old New England view became more dominant over time is a more complex question.

The traditional picture of Old Money does change -- some have argued this has already happened demographically, if not culturally. However, much like the One Ring from Tolkein's stories, soft power as a tool typically just changes hands rather than being destroyed. :) Success in America may no longer be defined by an Ivy League degree, an Anglophile attitude, and a preference for the arts rather than the trades, but success as a cultural concept hasn't gone away; if you find who controls it in the popular imagination without being controlled by it themselves, you've found the new upper class. I suppose the reason I focus on land rather than income or job ownership is because it is tied to all three inelastic demands: food, water, and shelter. A person can't eat money when they are starving, even if they own the printing press. So in any sort of bargaining situation, whoever controls the inelastic demand will always have the upper hand. The way we usually first see this in the States is through housing costs. The fantastical housing costs in certain places like San Francisco or New York City show that even making quite a bit of money does not necessarily make someone immune to their landlord; the landlord can always raise housing costs to match the new salary. With ownership of the job, it goes back to patronage; if a farmer holds an unpopular opinion and his neighbors refuse to buy his crops, he can simply eat them himself and remain a poor farmer living on his own land. If a business-operator holds an unpopular opinion and his neighbors refuse to buy his products, the landlord and debt-collectors will soon be on his tail. The business owner's livelihood depends on patronage -- his landlord's patronage directly, his customers indirectly. That makes him working-class, no matter how rich.

Thanks for the catch -- I always typo his name for some reason. :-) I think the reason I saw it as a parody was the over-serious tone combined with the silly illustrations:

Another good source for historical context might be The Middle-Class Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) by Molière, which talks about this issue from a 17th century French perspective. Maybe a fun play to watch or read if you are looking for more points of view.

A couple interesting books on the subject: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Flussell. Written as a "ha ha only serious" parody, which seems like a good way to approach a sensitive subject. The particular sociological markers are dated, of course, and were exaggerated for parody's sake, but still a good introduction to different ways to think about social class in a "classless" society, provided you can see it as a point-of-view rather than a guidebook. Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America by Nelson W. Aldrich. An obtuse writing style, but the best book I have ever read on the distinction between upper class and upper middle class from an American perspective. A good mix of the personal and intellectual, as Mr. Aldrich uses examples from his own upbringing and family history to help explain the larger system.

Has he checked out MIT OpenCourseWare? Some of the more prestigious tech universities now have endowments large enough that they are willing to provide some very positive public services, like OpenCourseWare. The thing to remember with learning computer languages is that the career path for them is distinct from normal languages. For a normal language, you'd maybe learn French, and then spend your time deepening your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary while keeping an eye on the latest slang and jargon. With computer languages that will likely lead to career stagnation -- there is limited demand for even the most expert Pascal developer. The way careers with computer languages work is more by the family -- sort of like if instead of learning everything about French, you studied the principles of Romance Languages, and hopped between a working but non-exhaustive knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese depending on which country happened to have the most political power at the time; then when Esperanto unexpectedly bursts on the scene, you can be the Esperanto "expert" too without much difficulty, using that as a stepping-stone into Slavic languages.

Putting an upper limit on the upper middle class seems misleading to me, because the difference between the upper class and the middle class isn't money -- it's soft power. They used to call this the Old Money / New Money divide. The Old Money upper class wasn't necessarily richer than the New Money upper middle class, but they had more power, because they controlled things money couldn't buy. Marxists would say that they had "cultural hegemony" -- they controlled the definition of success. Consider accents -- in America, people with British accents are often seen as more educated than foreigners with other accents, regardless of their actual educations. This is because the American upper class has historically been Anglophile. Or travel -- migrant laborers and refugees who move from country to country do quite a bit of travel, but they are never called globe-trotters or adventurers, even if they visit the same countries as globe-trotters or adventurers. A person might gladly post photos on social media of drinking Campari at a cafe in Rome, but would be ashamed to post photos washing dishes in the kitchen of that same cafe. The travel is the same, but not the same -- the difference is in soft power. The same is true with a lower limit, as the floor of the middle class is being a landowner debt-free. The poor farmer who has no money whatsoever to his name but who owns where he sleeps unconditionally, owns their own well, and grows enough food that hunger is never a concern, is middle class, even though their lifestyle would be one of middle-class poverty. The reason they still count as middle class is because fundamentally they can always afford to say no -- their basic life needs are already met. They have food, water, and shelter that cannot be taken away from them legally. So when they come to the bargaining table, they have the ability to walk away if the terms are unfavorable; they'll work for money, not for peanuts -- they can grow their own. If they lose that land, they become working class. This is true even if they are quite wealthy -- their existence depends on the patronage of others, and if that patronage goes away, there is nothing to fall back on.

Maybe interesting for historical context, here's an audio lecture from 1972 debating the advantages and disadvantages of Britain entering the European Union (Brentrance?): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h64zg