DeLong Smackdown Watch: Nominal GDP Targeting Via Index Futures
Origins of the American Civil War

George Orwell on Belonging to England's Lower Upper Middle Class in the 1920s

George Orwell:

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier - Chapter 8: I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class... the layer of society lying between L2000 and L300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom.... Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be.... People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting, 'Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law'.... To belong to this class when you were at the L400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money... they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.

