[arethuza]

Out of interest, what do you see as the link between classes and capitalism or are you equating social class with a level of income (or ownership of assets) - it's really much more complex than that in the UK due to the remarkable amount of historical baggage we have.

[hcho]

Not the OP, but concentration of wealth in the hands of a class and concentration of capital in the hands of capitalists sound awfully similar.

[arethuza]

Having loads of money is neither necessary or sufficient for belonging to the UK Upper Class, traditionally at least:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...

[NB I'm really not defending this state of affairs - just pointing out that "Upper Class" traditionally meant "aristocracy" not "rich" in the UK].

[hcho]

I don't think anybody is disputing that. But there was a time upper class meant rich, no? That's considered proto-capitalism by many.

[patrickk]

PG has an interesting bit about this in an essay:

"This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class. Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.

Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. [10] Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich."

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html