Social Class:

Rob Henderson:

>For people near the bottom, Fussell says, social class is indeed defined by money ... The middle class, though, believes it’s not just about money; equally important is education. “In the absence of hereditary ranks and titles,” Fussell writes, “Americans have had to depend for their mechanism of snobbery...on their college and university hierarchy.”

Still, Fussell notes, money and education aren’t enough to climb all the way up the ladder. That is because the highest tiers of society assign great importance to taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior — what the renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as habitus. My updated term is "luxury beliefs."

These ephemeral qualities are harder to obtain or quantify than a large bank account or a college diploma. This, according to Bourdieu, is why the upper class uses habitus as a filtering mechanism. It’s a method to know who was born and raised as a member of the elite and who was not.<