"I guess, PE, but as it states, in the 2000 census, it applied to 48% of the population. Which part is in a bubble -- the 48% or the 52%?"

My guess is the rural 'half' (not sure if you're saying the rural or urban population is 48%). The reason for this is that rural communities do not interconnect their cultures like urban communities do, and so those 48% probably exist in more individualized cultural units which would more constitute a "bubble."

lol semck has the right idea.

anyway.

"How the fuck do I answer #8 if I'm not liberal or conservative? The writers can spend all this time thinking of a quiz about how to test my white privilege but can't be bothered to break the hilariously stupid left-right paradigm that's been exposed for the statism-statism "paradigm" sham it is? Come on."

If you are neither then you disagree with most of your friends so you should answer yes.

On the IQ one, you misinterpret. He means he didn't ask about IQ because rich people will assume the average is higher than it is. Like you'll think "well yeah duh Joey probably has an IQ of like 90" but because your own idea of what average is skewed he actually has like a 120.

That was the idea, not that people don't know what IQ means. Just that they would guess wrong about what average is.

Also the rural/urban question is obvious, no? If you live outside a city/suburb-bedroom community you are far more likely to be lower class.

Also, PE, personally not quite fitting into the quiz is not a refuation of the statistics the quiz is based on nor is it a refutation of the quiz's applicability to most white American adults.

lol semck. Like I said... wouldn't deny it. (I got a 2.)

Ended up with a 41.

"11–80: A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents. Typical: 33.

0–43: A second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot. Typical: 9."

For all the flaws in the quiz itself, the result is... right on target. I'm going to go with the latter because (a) both parents are middle-class that earned their way up to upper-middle-class; both of their households' breadwinners were military veterans (which should go to show you how dumb the insignia question is), and (b) as I by choice am incredibly insulated from pop culture, I probably scored lower than I *should* have for my position, which would account for the fact that I was just barely in the range for the second option.

tl;dr I'm a privileged fuck and I knew it so I'm not surprised I got that result, idk how the quiz goes from such flawed methodology to not-flawed results but whatever

66 but their most applicable description of me is one I don't fall in the range of. I am second generation upper middle class, but started in middle class when I was younger as my dad was true first generation upper and worked his way *too* UMC when I was growing up. But he was never working class when I was growing up. He, however, came from working class and even poverty at one point so he instilled a work ethic and desire to use my hands in my free time.

But I found some of the questions poorly worded. For instance, I spent five years in Hebron which most consider outside of the true metropolitan and is very rural with only 10,000-15,000 people now and less than 10,000 when I moved there. The growth was high-end homes on the river and the median household income went from 69K in 2000 to 87K in 2009 while the median for KY is only $40K. So I'm sure it viewed my time there as working class or middle class, but it was very much upper middle. Add to it the time I spent living with the majority of my neighbors not having a college education... My dad didn't believe in coddling us and so I lived where I could afford to on my own. Add to that the fact that I was in the service and paid my own way through college. Those questions have certain assumptions that say "upper middle class always gives their kids priviledge and no upper middle class kid would go in the service" which is total bullshit.

Guess why the scale for a first-gen middle class neighborhood is so big, extending from 42 to 100? Because you don't have to score high on every question.

Don't drink beer? That happens, regular Americans do.
Don't own a pickup? That happens, although Americans have more pickups than everyone else.
Don't watch movies? Not even DVD ones? You don't like to discuss the movies others could actually see instead of your privileged dose of Iranian documentaries?

Now let's look at the rural folk.
Cannot go to movies? Check.
No hard work? Check.
Don't go by bus? Check.
Who are you then? Probably someone office worker going to a big city for work by car. Lucky.

Plus, people are moving throughout their lives. In fact, Americans move quite a lot. A lot of those living in a city once lived in a small town. If you never lived in a town, how do you connect to farmers or tight-knit communities?

Try to answer the quiz as someone you think isn't the perennial middle class. Try out multiple personas. Only if the majority of those scores is lower than 50, you can say the quiz is total bullshit.

"idk how the quiz goes from such flawed methodology to not-flawed results but whatever"

Good, now you see the light :)

and tbh PE although some of them can miss certain kinds of people (young people, exceptions with the rural thing, or the army thing, or the beer thing (MEEEE)), i saw a lot of truth in a lot of them.

i didnt know who jimmy johnson was. nor did i know that NASCAR is as popular as the NBA. everyone i know who was in the military fought in korea or earlier, and they're dead now. i sure as hell only knew two of those insignia and that was from video games.

you are right to point out that this is really talking about white culture, but other than that... it's pretty close to the mark as you say, i think. i also got "rich kid who makes a point of getting out"

an example of that being the cigarettes. until about a year ago i would have said yeah i basically never see people smoking. its only because austin on the weekend is a wretched hive of scum and villainy and people who are "in a band" that I was able to say i do hang out with smokers.

anyway you see the point. the questions got the job done, no?

"If you are neither then you disagree with most of your friends so you should answer yes."

Do I? (You're correct in saying I should answer yes, but the assumption doesn't logically hold on its own.)

"On the IQ one, you misinterpret. He means he didn't ask about IQ because rich people will assume the average is higher than it is. Like you'll think "well yeah duh Joey probably has an IQ of like 90" but because your own idea of what average is skewed he actually has like a 120.

That was the idea, not that people don't know what IQ means. Just that they would guess wrong about what average is."

No, I get that. I'm saying that assumption is bogus.

"Also the rural/urban question is obvious, no? If you live outside a city/suburb-bedroom community you are far more likely to be lower class."

Yes... and isolated from "mainstream" American culture. The premise (as it seemed to be presented) was that those who are isolated from "mainstream" American culture are likely to be very privileged and living in a bubble of prosperity that makes them oblivious to the goings-on of the "common" man. Think Buddha prior to leaving the castle walls, though not as exaggerated (I assume). But that isolation could easily be the result instead of being in a poor rural community - and the perspective could easily be instead that the city-goers with their city amenities are in a bubble, isolated from the toil of lower-class rural life.

In fact, I find it fascinating that the focus is on "middle-class" America as the less-privileged standard by which the ultra-wealthy ought be judged. Middle-class America is in the biggest prosperity bubble of all: the prosperity bubble separating all but the poorest of Americans from the realities of global poverty.

"Also, PE, personally not quite fitting into the quiz is not a refuation of the statistics the quiz is based on nor is it a refutation of the quiz's applicability to most white American adults."

Perhaps not, but it is a refutation of the logic behind the quiz. My objection based on the pickup truck, for example, could just as easily be "I have had the chance to buy a pickup truck, but I don't want a pickup truck"; I could just as well say "I have seen an episode of The Laugh Track Theory, but found the one-trick pony not to be worth the time spent on an entire season," neither of which would be tied to my socioeconomic status.

And though I will acknowledge, again, that the quiz DID turn out an accurate result, I once again have to say that the manner in which it is presented is unduly contrarian and that the questions do not logically tie back to the concept of privilege; the data may match such that the answers to the questions turn out correct results, but the questions are still logically very flawed. I think the connection lies with something else; what, I cannot say, only that it's clear this doesn't work.

"Try to answer the quiz as someone you think isn't the perennial middle class. Try out multiple personas. Only if the majority of those scores is lower than 50, you can say the quiz is total bullshit."

I don't think that's fair to the quiz. It should actually *have* people take it with different perspectives instead of me trying to guess. I think I could simulate the answers to the questions well, but I would need the entire (and irreplaceable, unguessable) perspective of someone who lived it to do so accurately.

"anyway you see the point. the questions got the job done, no?"

I guess. Like I said, the results are undeniably accurate, even if the process is making me scratch my head in complete confusion.

OK, so I stripped off the bus question and the military things and the score came down to 9.

0–43: A second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot. Typical: 9.

Matches me pretty good. Why the fact that I took a band trip to Florida on a Greyhound bus and was in the Marine Corps (where I road Greyhound busses all the time). Oh, and I stripped off the Yes to the majority not college eduicated question seeing as a grew up in farm country in a 165 year old farm house (my dad loves gardening and farming and fishing and woodworking, a passion I share). So I do have middle class tastes (hell, I used to bowl in a league).

Observation: Because I am in a room on the corner of one of the ends of my dormitory at LSU - a dormitory which, inside and out, is painted white on my end - I am literally sitting in an ivory tower as I have this discussion.

This amuses me greatly.

hes a better quiz:
Are you white?
a) yes
b) no

Do you think the PBS quiz is total crap?
a) yes
b) no

Do you complain about it?
a) yes
b) no

Are you president eden?
a) yes
b) no
if you answered yes to every question then you live in a bubble

"I don't think that's fair to the quiz. It should actually *have* people take it with different perspectives instead of me trying to guess. I think I could simulate the answers to the questions well, but I would need the entire (and irreplaceable, unguessable) perspective of someone who lived it to do so accurately."

Undoubtedly. But as I said, the quiz measures you complexly as whole, so picking on any singular question is meaningless. Just because you cannot see a correlation between a question and it's relation to privilege doesn't mean it's wrong, it might work statistically (beer/pickup/smoking). If the quiz holds in the whole then it's valid – at some point, even an outlier from a working class has to score something, whereas some from upper-middle-class does not.

0/10 wouldn't read again

Try harder troll-wannabe

that was @fasces

will reply soon ulytau

I would actually argue that there are two mainstream American cultures, an upper and lower class one - they are dimly aware of each other.

We have lots of subcultures but these are our two main ones. They also happen to be rich white and poor white culture. Which says as much about race as it does about class. So yeah.

I scored 18. I'll readily acknowledge that my community is an upper middle class white bubble. The questions are still stupid. Like the fishing one: yeah, I've been fishing recently, but it was charter boat fishing in Hawaii and the Caribbean, not in a rowboat with Bubba.

I think I've done this quiz before, and despite not being from America (not very important, many of the questions can be 'translated'), or being white I still got a high score. This quiz says more about class than race (or tries to, the questions are kinda stupid).

I love the pickup one. My dad has a GMC 3500. My brother has a GMC Sierra. I've never owned one, but I have had a Ford Explorer (F150 turned SUV) and am on my third Jeep. I have no beer in my fridge but I also have no wine in the pantry, just a bottle of scotch (and a bottle of vodka in the freezer) that will last me for at least a year because I rarely drink. But the bottom of the fridge is stocked with Coke Zero.

"Like the fishing one: yeah, I've been fishing recently, but it was charter boat fishing in Hawaii and the Caribbean, not in a rowboat with Bubba."

In statistics, providing an counterexample to the most common or probably outcome is not a refutation of the likelihood of the same. A lot of people are making this error this evening.

Oh, and my nephew, the civil engineer with a masters, drives a beater pickup to work at remote job sites where they are installing *his* water reclamation and cleaning system (designed for his thesis) and has a fridge full of beer cause he loves the stuff. Seeing as he works closely with construction crews and what not, he probably would score high indicating working or middle class, but his mom came from priviledge (her dad owns and is Chairman of the board at Belenky http://www.belenkyinc.com/meet-the-staff) and his dad is a VP/CFO with the Jewish Federation in Akron.

So either many of my blood and inlaws are outliers, or there are some bad assumptions made.

Statistics... Lies, damn lies, and statistics...

I scored a 40. Seems about right to me. Interesting questions on the movies and tv shows and such.

How I would make this quiz.

STEP 1: Round up few people from different classes and backgrounds, chat about their lives, whatever they came up with. Some differences are immediately apparent.
STEP 2: Based on these differences, make a vast questionnaire covering lifestyle & life experience, send it to a gazillion people.
STEP 3: Extract patterns from the answers. Based on these patterns, make a long quiz which upon filling should correctly match the person with his class.
STEP 4: People take this test. Analyze the results and adjust the number of questions to a manageable level without losing its descriptive powers. Make sure that all major outliers have been took care for – extract unnecessary questions or add other questions, repeat any previous step if you have large amount of outliers and you can't find the source for this trend.
STEP 5: You have a working test. It's a black box but it works and that's important.

Draug, if your nephew connects with the workers, chat with them about life, they go for a beer after the shift and what not, then his bubble is definitely thinner, which is the point of the quiz. While he doesn't live the same life as they, he knows what they experience and so he at least partially understands them. He is in touch, not in a thick bubble.

I am neither suggesting that the most common or probable outcome of an affirmative vote for fishing is an experience in a rowboat with Bubba, nor trying to refute the likelihood of same. I am pointing out that the lack of distinction in the question between very different fishing experiences reduces the value of the data gained by the question, in my opinion. If the question had distinguished between the two types of experiences, I could find plausible a hypothesis that people in upper middle class bubbles might be more likely to go deep sea fishing or that the "average Joe" might be more likely to go bass fishing in a lake.

Really, I think the whole concept is silly because the middle class is a meaningless term. There are really rich people and really poor people, and everybody else is in between. Nobody thinks of himself as "lower middle class." The middle class is just a nebulous fiction with some vague delineation of "upper middle class" for people who are doing better but wouldn't consider themselves rich -- although other "middle class" people might.

On the other hand, if he just checks the progress made, issues new orders and then drives back home, he would score pretty low. Good, he has a pick and beer nailed. 23 questions still stand, good luck with those :)

I scored 64.

THM, yes, the questions could be more nuanced. Presumably, if wasn't necessary though, the amount of deep sea fishers was low or they still fell neatly into the bubble categories. You could make more questions nuanced but you have to draw the line somewhere and the author did. He accounted for student summer jobs, for instance. I would say deep sea fishing was not noteworthy enough even though he could be simply lazy :)