This is misinterpreting both the UK and the US in important ways. Wealth is germane to class in both, sure. But after that, most of what you said is incorrect.
Family status in the UK is less about history than shared context: not "what titles did your ancestors hold?" (that might be highly relevant for the fractional upper crust, but not so much for others), but "did you go to the same (exclusive) schools as others in your social class?" and "did your last generation or two originate from the same (exclusive) areas?"
The same is true in the US, ironically even more-so in some ways: while people certainly can change their status by becoming [mb]illionaires, that's both vanishingly rare and insufficient on its own.
Rare: in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent--so rare that many elite groups and institutions presume that none of their members transitioned into the elite by acquiring wealth. Whether mobility is greater in the US or the UK is a belabored and unclear argument I won't get into.
Insufficient: as the article mentioned, there is a massive set of social context and mores that are shared by elites that are not necessarily shared by someone who recently became wealthy. This works almost identically to that context in the UK, just with superficial differences.
That context amounts to an entire culture--which can be learned, or faked, but doesn't automatically switch on when you e.g. inherit money or sell a business to become wealthy. This isn't quite the same as the distinction between "old money" and "new money"; shared elite-culture context can be built in a single generation: a newly wealthy person is not automatically able to navigate and benefit from existing elite cultural structures, but if they research the shared background of people already in those cultures, they may put their children into e.g. the elites' schools or communities, at which point their children have a good chance at becoming "authentic" (really "passing", since authenticity is sort of a tautological quality here) members of the elite themselves.
Everyone can point to an outlier to these phenomena--someone that proves that you can "break into" or are falsely excluded from a class by some criteria. You point to Schwarzenegger, others point to various rags-to-riches stories, or stories of people who carefully research and dissemble to enter elite cultural circles. While those stories certainly exist, outliers are, by their nature, less relevant than the rules that govern the overwhelming majority of class dynamics in these societies.
> in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent
What? I personally know lots of people who went from zip to millionaire.
Even in the 1990s, it was estimated that Microsoft had minted over 10,000 millionaires, not including the value of their homes. And that's just Microsoft.
Maybe, but I think two things contraindicate that.
1. The first is a difference in degree. Millionaires (even in 1990s) money do not necessarily have cultural access to the kind of elite circles discussed in the article. Now, you might be right--I'm not going to no-true-scotsman the entire claim, as I have no way of deriving a particular asset value that makes access likely--but it does seem unlikely to me that "millionaire" has substantial overlap with the multiple-vacation-homes types of people attending the gathering in the article. Similarly, mobility fluctuates; the '90s were a time of both elevated economic prosperity and elevated opportunities to transition upward in economic class. Now not so much.
2. I think we can refute the statistical claim, that mobility is less scarce than I stated. That one we can verify with data--as others in this thread have pointed out, anecdotes are insufficient. Numerous analyses indicate that "upward mobility" (which, fair enough, is often a flawed measure) has decreased or remained stagnant since the '70s. Additionally, elite classes have widened the asset-value gap that needs to be crossed by someone looking to join those classes via wealth alone.
In short: zip to millionaire might not be relevant to the claim; even if so, it happens less frequently (per capita if not absolutely) now; when it does happen it is less likely to imbue the kind of cultural status/class change that I mentioned due to the increased economic "distance" that the people in that status/class have accumulated in the last decades.
You need to think in percentage and not in hard money.
How many of the people born in the first quintile of wealth in the 80s are still in the first quintile? How many people born in the last quintile are now in the first quintile?
If the answer is 20% to both, great, you have no predetermination of wealth at all. if you have 50%/10%, you have what is expected in a country with correct social mobility (Most western countries post WW2 until the 70s). If its 95%/2%, or less, you have an almost non-existant wealth mobility.
And I know none. I don't recall ever actually meeting a Microsoft employee either, and I've been in tech a long time ( albeit in another country )
But picking Microsoft as an example or any of the faangs feels wrong, because they are the outliers. Millions of companies don't get that big and millions more fail.
The fact that a very small percentage of people do move between wealth classes and possibly social classes doesn't actually negate the original statement.
Family status in the UK is less about history than shared context: not "what titles did your ancestors hold?" (that might be highly relevant for the fractional upper crust, but not so much for others), but "did you go to the same (exclusive) schools as others in your social class?" and "did your last generation or two originate from the same (exclusive) areas?"
The same is true in the US, ironically even more-so in some ways: while people certainly can change their status by becoming [mb]illionaires, that's both vanishingly rare and insufficient on its own.
Rare: in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent--so rare that many elite groups and institutions presume that none of their members transitioned into the elite by acquiring wealth. Whether mobility is greater in the US or the UK is a belabored and unclear argument I won't get into.
Insufficient: as the article mentioned, there is a massive set of social context and mores that are shared by elites that are not necessarily shared by someone who recently became wealthy. This works almost identically to that context in the UK, just with superficial differences.
That context amounts to an entire culture--which can be learned, or faked, but doesn't automatically switch on when you e.g. inherit money or sell a business to become wealthy. This isn't quite the same as the distinction between "old money" and "new money"; shared elite-culture context can be built in a single generation: a newly wealthy person is not automatically able to navigate and benefit from existing elite cultural structures, but if they research the shared background of people already in those cultures, they may put their children into e.g. the elites' schools or communities, at which point their children have a good chance at becoming "authentic" (really "passing", since authenticity is sort of a tautological quality here) members of the elite themselves.
Everyone can point to an outlier to these phenomena--someone that proves that you can "break into" or are falsely excluded from a class by some criteria. You point to Schwarzenegger, others point to various rags-to-riches stories, or stories of people who carefully research and dissemble to enter elite cultural circles. While those stories certainly exist, outliers are, by their nature, less relevant than the rules that govern the overwhelming majority of class dynamics in these societies.