Upper class

• 1. Introduction

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  The upper class is a social category defined not just by wealth but by the power to pass that wealth across generations, intact, as though it were a birthright rather than an achievement. Across modern societies, the people who occupy this position hold the highest social status and wield the greatest political influence. Yet the full picture is more complicated than a simple ranking by income. What does it actually take to belong to this group? What separates old inherited standing from newly acquired fortune? And how does a class that makes up less than one percent of the population in the United States come to own roughly a third of the nation's wealth? The answers reach back centuries, into aristocracies and landed estates, and forward into the boardrooms of corporate America and the donor networks that fund political campaigns.

• 2. Inheritance Over Achievement

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  Before the twentieth century, the marker that mattered most was not a bank balance but a title. Aristocracy placed the emphasis on generations of inherited noble status, a lineage that money alone could not buy. Upper-class standing derived from the social position of one's family rather than from personal achievement or self-made wealth. Merchants could accumulate more actual money than nobles, yet still fall outside the upper class by this older reckoning.

  Historically, members of this class often had no need to work for a living at all. Earned or inherited investments, frequently in real estate, sustained them. The people who made up this stratum were typically aristocrats, ruling families, titled persons, and religious hierarchs who were born into their position. Movement across class boundaries was rare.

  That boundary was understood to be cultural as much as financial. According to the traditional upper-class view, no amount of individual wealth or fame could grant entry to someone from an undistinguished background. A person had to be born into a family of that class and raised in a particular manner to absorb upper-class values, traditions, and cultural norms. This gatekeeping logic meant that the newly rich were often seen as outsiders by those who inherited their standing, no matter how spectacular the fortune they had assembled.

• 3. Land, Titles, and Power

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  In many countries, hereditary land ownership was so closely tied to upper-class identity that the two were nearly synonymous. Political power in pre-industrial societies frequently rested with landowners, even where no legal barrier prevented other classes from acquiring land themselves. Owning the land conferred the influence; the law did not have to say so explicitly.

  In Europe, upper-class landowners were often also members of the titled nobility, though the relationship between the two varied considerably by country. Some upper classes operated almost entirely without titles. The Szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a notable case: a large and legally defined noble class whose members were mostly untitled yet held recognized status.

  Great Britain and Ireland offer a particularly well-documented example of how this system worked and evolved. There, the upper class traditionally comprised the landed gentry and the aristocracy of families with hereditary titles. The vast majority of post-medieval aristocratic families had actually originated in the merchant class, later ennobled between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries through a combination of royal favor and strategic intermarriage with the old nobility and gentry.

  After Irish independence in 1922, the picture shifted sharply in the Republic of Ireland. The upper class effectively disappeared there. Aristocratic titles within the Peerage of Ireland, granted by the British monarch, carry no recognition in the Irish Constitution. Contemporary Ireland is generally perceived to operate with a two-tier social class system of working class and middle class, with the exception of a small number of wealthy billionaires.

• 4. Wealth Without Work

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  In the United States, the upper class is estimated to make up less than one percent of the population, yet the economic gap it occupies is striking. The top one percent of Americans own around thirty-four percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom eighty percent own only approximately sixteen percent. William Domhoff's book Who Rules America? identifies this wealth distribution as the primary indicator of upper-class influence.

  The central feature of the American upper class today is the ability to generate enormous income from wealth itself, through money management and investing, rather than through wage labor or salaried employment. Most upper-class individuals still hold some form of employment, which marks a shift from historical patterns, but the income derived from assets dwarfs what a salary could produce.

  Contemporary sociologists such as James Henslin and Dennis Gilbert include successful entrepreneurs, chief executive officers, investment bankers, venture capitalists, heirs to fortunes, and celebrities within this group. Prestige distinctions exist even within the class. A former U.S. President, for example, carries a different kind of standing than an A-list actor, yet both would be counted as members of the upper class by virtue of their wealth and influence.

  At the very top, 2004 brought a sharp increase in the number of billionaires. Forbes Magazine counted 374 U.S. billionaires at that point. The change since the early 1980s is telling: individuals on the Forbes 400 list averaged a net worth of 400 million dollars then; the average had climbed to 2.8 billion dollars by the time of those figures.

• 5. Political Reach and the Donor Class

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  Upper-class families in the United States dominate corporate America and hold a disproportionate influence over the nation's political, educational, religious, and other institutions. Among all social classes, members of the upper class also share a distinctive sense of solidarity and what sociologists call a "consciousness of kind" that stretches not just across the country but across the globe.

  In 1998, journalist Bob Herbert of The New York Times gave a specific name to the most politically active slice of this group. Herbert called them "The Donor Class" and defined the term for the first time as a tiny group, just one-quarter of one percent of the population, whose money buys access to political decision-making far beyond what their numbers would suggest. Herbert noted that this group is not representative of the rest of the nation.

  Alarm about the widening gap at the top has come from unexpected quarters. Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, described the trend of rising income inequality as a "very disturbing trend" with consequences for society as a whole. Since the 1970s, income inequality in the United States has grown steadily, with the top one percent, driven largely by gains within the top one-tenth of one percent, pulling away from the rest of society at an accelerating rate.

  A Gallup Poll conducted between 2001 and 2012 found that ninety-eight percent of Americans identify with one of the five class terms below upper class, with forty-eight to fifty percent identifying as middle class. Self-identification, in other words, places almost the entire population outside the group that holds such concentrated wealth and power.