Decent article in The Awl on Class & the 80s, from an American perspective. Despite the disclaimer early on about manners and shared interests being the class gatekeepers for a culture lacking a monarchy to hand down honours, I don't think the situation was or is much different anywhere else.
Towards the end is a paragraph that I found distressingly resonant:
Those of us who cringe at the thought of offending our bosses and slipping off the career track and being unable to pay interest on our student loans are just as trapped and scared and middle class as the legions of company men Paul Fussell described being shuffled around the country in 1983.
The 'career track' doesn't bother me, but I and many others I know find ourselves constrained in unexpected ways by, if not the trappings of class, at least by the fabled lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. "Why don't you go back to freelancing, take it easy?" people sometimes say to me, making the common mistake of assuming that freelance writing is a barrel of laughs.
The fact is, I would, but my wife's permission to stay in Hong Kong depends on me having a work visa sponsored by a Hong Kong company, so I have to keep working for The Man. And one or both of us would struggle to get residency permission anywhere else in the world. Visa questions seem pretty common in determining the life choices of university graduates who fly economy.
So does money, of course. Move to Thailand or Bali? Yeah, why not. It's idyllic(ish), and cheap. But you'll have to stay there or thereabouts, because you won't have the money to move anywhere outside ASEAN once you've settled in. Since, oh let's say the 1950s, class mobility worldwide has been reduced, and so has actual physical mobility for people below a certain income bracket.
The solution, of course, is to be born into money.
