The Agony of the Elite - no comments

This, from Sebastian Cresswell-Turner, via PooterGeek, is apparently not a joke:

A popular member of White's, the St James's club to which many of the old landowners belong, knows plenty of well-educated professionals who have fallen by the wayside. "First, they can’t afford to eat out," he told me, "then they pull their children out of [fee-paying] school, and you just stop seeing them." Brian Gill, a London-based debt counsellor, told me: "The poverty line is definitely creeping upwards."

As a result, socio-economic classes that used to be entirely immune from hardship are no longer safe; and if they do not have to contend with actual poverty, they are nevertheless plagued by a constant sense of precariousness. "Everyone we saw was utterly stressed-out over work and school fees,” said the wife of a best-selling British author now based in Italy, after a brief visit to England last summer.

Without wanting to seem uncharitable, or to advocate "levelling-down" as an end in itself, my instinct is to laugh mockingly at the phoney plight of the top percentiles of British society.

Chris Dillow believes these are the symptoms of being born to rich parents:

A household income of £140,000, even with two children, is more than 97% of the population gets. Even on £60,000, you're doing better than 75% of people in the UK. So how can someone in such a position think themselves poor?

This is where the curse comes in. Coming from a rich family raises your expectations; you expect to have (as Seb does) second homes, expensive meals out and private schools for your kids. And you often feel the need either to compete with your father, or to live up to his high expectations for you.
The upshot is that even if you do very well economically, you feel bad.

That this provides a psychological opportunity for ambitious people from ordinary families to progress at the expense of the rich doesn't leave me entirely satisfied. The ability of the rich to feed stories of their sham plight into mainstream newspapers under the cover of "Life & Style" tells us something more about inequalities of power and access.