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“Upper class” is defined, in most modern usages I’ve seen, as someone who does not so much work to earn money as they work to earn favor, where “favor” is the ability to access various sorts of line-of-credit drawn from wealthy people’s bank accounts because of your connection to them. In est: the upper class are courtiers. Courtiers for investments, placements onto boards of directors, management roles of other people’s wealth, and so on. All upper-class people are inherently both grantors, and recipients, of such favor. And once you have such favor, money becomes kind of irrelevant. You can access huge pools of other people’s money, to do whatever you want to do, so why would you need your own money? (Even if, sometimes, you do. There are such things as “starving nobles”, who have the ability to command others’ fortunes but who have no personal fortune. Usually because they’ve already put their personal fortune to work in some way.) If you’ve ever read the Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the “whuffie” currency from that book is basically already reality for the upper class. (The only difference is that whuffie puts a legible number on aggregate total favor, which is intentionally made as illegible as possible in reality.) |
That's by Cory Doctorow, not Charlie Stross.