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Status ❧ Dept. of Knobbery
What we can learn from the English aristocrats hiding in plain sight.
Sam Friedman is the rare Brit comfortable making fellows Brits uncomfortable. The incoming chair of the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics, Friedman is sneakily, incrementally rewriting the book on the English class system. With 2019’s The Class Ceiling (written with Daniel Laurison), he documented a persistent, heritable pay gap. With 2024’s Born to Rule (with Aaron Reeves), he demonstrated that Britain’s current hobnobbers are largely inheritors of the ancien régime otherwise known as the “old corruption.”
Friedman’s whole bit – and it’s a great, scholarly bit – is describing a society moving (grudgingly) toward equality, but not towards equity. Often, his job is to point out that England’s true currency is a stutteringly Hugh Grant-ian social competence that takes generations and access to acquire.
Friedman spoke to Upper Middle from London, where is (naturally) working upon a book about taste.
You aren’t a theater critic, but, in many ways, you write about performance. What does the performance of earned success look like and does it vary from England to America?
A lot of my work probes a real weirdness in British culture: Even though working-class entrants to elite occupations face disadvantages, people in elite positions from elite backgrounds often claim a working-class origin. To tell a meritocratic story, you need to describe an upward trajectory and people go to quite implausible lengths to do so. People find something in their extended family history that allows them to describe a struggle against the odds.
You've written about how the behavioral codes that dominate elite occupations get mistaken for talent. How does that happen?
Accents and self-presentation are hard habits to break. They're formed in children’s early socialization and misrecognized as talent in schools. If you ask any British person whether speaking with received pronunciation – as I do – is a marker of intelligence, they'd say: ‘That's ridiculous.’ But what you see over and over is that in key settings you get these bywords — polish, gravitas — attached to a package of self-presentation in which received pronunciation is key.
What happens to the outsiders who get polished?
Upwardly mobile people have mixed feelings about the requirement to culturally assimilate. ‘Why should I have to change fundamental aspects of who I am in order to fit in?’ That’s doubly true when assimilation dislocates them from important relationships: family, community of origin, friends. It leaves them in a liminal third space. I call it cultural homelessness. That ends up being a driver of the class ceiling, because people self-eliminate from elite worlds that require them to change who they are. They opt for middle-management jobs where they can go in, play a role, get out, and go home to a community of origin where they can just be themselves.
It's a clear manifestation of the cost not just of social mobility but of high inequality. People have to make really vertiginous journeys to get ahead.
As you describe it, after hard-won elite assimilation comes the irony of having to perform liking McDonalds or, more likely, Tesco. That’s a tough pivot.
Once you rise to the very top of large organizations, or to professions accountable to wider publics, you're always battling the suspicion you’re out of touch or elitist. So you forge a sense of cultural connection by performing ordinariness. The key is to engage in cultural consumption synonymous with working-class culture.
British elites are conscious of the charge of snobbery so they demonstrate that they are culturally dextrous and sophisticated by behaving differently in different contexts. In the five minutes before a board meeting starts, they signal sophistication by discussing the latest West End show or the Royal Ballet. In other environments, they do not.
You said the economic shift you think will dominate the next decade is the rise of intergenerational wealth transfers, and what that does to the meritocratic story in places like the United States, which purports not to have a class system. Why that? Why now?
Our societies are changing around the centrality of wealth and the power of intergenerational transfers. It's only going to play out more in the coming decades — threatening people's narratives around meritocracy. You can already see that in some of the work we've done around the discomfort people have with acknowledging these transfers publicly.
The bank of Mom and Dad, is shaping cultural dynamics because it’s shaping peoples’ lives.
Using Who's Who data, Friedman's Born to Rule follows the lives and careers of 125,000 elites. You'll "never" guess what what happened to their kids.
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