[antt]

I find it odd how Americans try to convince themselves there are a lot of ways to be high class. A doctor might have slightly better standing than a plumber but ask yourself this, who would be served first in a restaurant, the doctor, the plumber, or the millionaire who just drove in on a Ferrari with a model on each arm?

[bigred100]

Millionaire in a Ferrari with a model on each arm to me indicates foreign oligarch or guy who somehow got rich recently, probably through a scam or something. Frankly my radar more picks up relaxed, civically active people with immaculately maintained 30 year old European cars who keep mentioning swimming and boating.

[dazilcher]

There are more American millionaires than you imagine. Heck, I bet half the people posting here qualify.

I'm not sure your point, as stated, makes sense.

[Terr_]

> There are more American millionaires than you imagine.

Mainly because the word means less-and-less wealth over time, due to inflation. The millionaires of 1959 were easily 6 times wealthier than the millionaires of 2019.

[geobmx540]

8.69x just by inflationary measures ($8,693,183.39, https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...)

[Terr_]

Whoops, I think I intended to write ~1969 to get it to 50 years (and was using a different estimator) but regardless of exact measure, the trend is clear: "Millionaire" has been undergoing continual debasement ever since it was coined around the 1820s, and means objectively different things within different generations.

[JohnFen]

> Americans try to convince themselves there are a lot of ways to be high class.

I don't think this way at all. I tend to lean toward "high class" being an essentially meaningless term.

[ionised]

Are you implying that America doesn't have 'classes'?

[JohnFen]

Not at all. I'm saying that the notion that the different classes has any meaning in terms of the value of the people in them is incorrect.