60 years ago, when I was coming of age, there was a fairly well-defined class system even in America. The working class was characterized, not precisely by its income and certainly not by having to work for a living, but by various cultural stigmata. There was, as the term "blue collar" suggests, a difference in clothing: those people's pants did not have creases. They had very little interaction with the banking system; almost all their monetary transactions were in cash. Their sexual morality was not bourgeois, but was constricted in its own way; young men were expected to whore around, but foreplay was considered perverted.

There was a lower middle class, which paid the most for respectability & got the least out of it; it was therefore tight-assed and fearful. There was an upper middle class (I was in it), which had its own anxieties; I heard it said that the hardest income to live on was $10,000 a year: you were tempted to a lot of things, such as private schools for your children, that you couldn't well afford.

Since then it seems things have gotten mixed up a good deal.