Old aristocrats sometimes had less money than the merchants below them
For much of history, belonging to the upper class had less to do with cash than with birth. An aristocrat living off inherited land might hold less actual money than a successful merchant, yet still outrank him completely. By the old view, no fortune or fame could buy a place in the class.
Traditionally, upper-class status came from family position, not personal achievement. Its ranks were filled by aristocrats, ruling dynasties, titled families and senior clergy, many of whom lived on investments, often land, without working. Movement across class lines was rare. In many pre-industrial societies political power rested with landowners even where the law did not bar others from buying land. Titles were not essential everywhere; the szlachta, the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was largely untitled.
Britain's story shows how porous the top could be over time. Most post-medieval aristocratic families began as merchants and were ennobled between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, intermarrying with older landed families. After 1945 the label has broadened to include wealthy managers and professionals. In Ireland, by contrast, the traditional upper class all but vanished after independence in 1922, and Irish peerages granted by British monarchs have no standing in the Irish constitution.
The United States defines the class mainly by wealth. It is estimated at under 1 percent of the population, while in Gallup polling from 2001 to 2012 roughly half of Americans called themselves middle class. The defining feature is earning very large incomes from wealth itself, through investment, though most members now also hold some kind of job. Sociologists such as James Henslin and Dennis Gilbert count entrepreneurs, chief executives, venture capitalists, heirs and celebrities in this group, with differences of prestige inside it: a film star may not rank alongside a former president.
The very top has grown dramatically. In the early 1980s the average net worth of people on the Forbes 400 list was 400 million dollars; it later reached 2.8 billion, and Forbes counted 374 American billionaires. Upper-class families also display unusually strong solidarity, a sense of shared kind that crosses national borders.
Source: Upper class
