Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, and The Layers of Social Class

In 2016, Anna Delvey went looking for a 25-million-dollar loan to open a high-class Art Club in New York. A club that serves high-class drinks, catering to social elites. Anna sent an email to a Silicon Valley publisher that she knew, “If you think this is something you could help us with and have anyone in mind who would be a good culture fit for this project.”

I want to stress that phrase for a moment, “a good cultural fit," because it's essential to note Anna had a lot of high culture friends in her pocket as a wealthy German Harris, partying with Macaulay Culkin and listen to exclusive rap albums with Martin Shkreli.

When she went looking for potential club locations, she reached out to Joel Coen, the man who prosecuted The Wolf of Wall Street himself, and she got him to sign on her as a client of his real-estate firm. When Cohen's firm filled out the intake form to bring in Anna as a client, they skipped the checkboxes that confirmed Anna had money.  The box has stated she was flush, and she wouldn't embarrass The Firm. That's how high-class Anna was.

Once the firm took on Anna and her Art Club, she was given access to even bigger lenders, like City National Bank and Fortress Investment Group. That's what being an upper-class did for Anna. Like a credit card you receive in the mail, Anna was pre-approved culturally because she has the right friends. She moved the right circles. She treated money like it was an afterthought. She had $100 bills to concierges, Uber drivers, and bellhops, which is why when Anna forgot to pay back up a few thousand bucks for a private plane trip or an expensive meal, it was easy for high-class friends to forgive her because Anna was wealthy.

Which is funny, because Anna was never wealthy, and her high-class act was precisely that, an act. Despite acting like a flighty, pampered 25-year-old socialite, Anna was always keenly aware of the gap between her and her rich friends; the friends who would have never called Anna a good cultural fit. If they knew her real identity, Anna, under her luxury sunglasses and Alexander Wang Lanes, was really Anna Sorokin, a penniless daughter of a Russian trucker, and Anna almost got her 25-million-dollar Art Club.

In America, we can't help but convolute class and wealth. We mix the two up and use class and wealth interchangeably because most of us think that when we finally have enough money, it'll mean we have class. But the social leads who hung around Anna would never hang out with a plumber who also happened to be worth 70 million dollars, which was Martin Shkreli's net worth before his conviction. In America, class virtually goes unnoticed until it prevents you from getting something, like being denied an apartment, rejected from a job, or turned away from the college of your choice. Do you remember Anna's phrasing when she was looking for her loan? She didn't say she was looking for $25 million. She said she was looking for a good cultural fit.

Well, if you're wondering if classism exists in America, ask yourself, how often have you heard the terms “workplace culture” or “good social fit” after a job interview? So, today we're busting those myths about the American class system.

Myth 1: Class isn't really important. Right? I mean, as long as I have food and health coverage, who cares which side of the plate my fork goes on.

I used to think about it like this: Imagine being in a classroom and a teacher points out one of the kids and says that kid’s family makes $120,000 a year and the other makes $40,000. That teacher would be lynched. There's no way they could get away with that. But we generally don't talk about class in America because it's not only taboo, it goes against our roots. Instead, we hold bootstrapping up instead of class, the idea that everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or that we all have it in us to be wealthy. We look at it as the people who make more money are simply working harder than us. That's what I've always believed right up until these articles for this episode.

I always thought I was middle class, and now I feel a little bit more like a lower class. Once we get to our third or second section, we're going to identify class and markers to sort yourself. If you're listening to this, we're going to do like that Harry Potter website where we sort you into a house, except it's going to be more depressing. It's going to be sorting you into a class, and you're not going to like us for it.

So first off, most Americans are in the lower class. 75% of Americans have less than a 100k saved, which is why most Americans are able to retire by 66 with so little wealth, simply because of social security. Reports state that 41% of retirees have an annual income of less than $25,000. If you feel a little bit bad about being lower class during our episode, you are not alone.

The big takeaway from what we're going to be getting at today is it should only be about how much money you have and how qualified you are for whatever job, house, or interview you're doing. It should only ever be about what's on paper, but what ends up happening is almost all interviews end up like Anna, where somebody wants to speak to you. And like Anna, they want to make sure you’re of the same proper class and fit, and that's problematic, as there is a language difference in classes.

I remember reading an economist article that said it's the difference between saying “thanks” when somebody gives you something and saying, “thank you so much.” So, a lot of it comes down to how much effort you put into language. It's micro stuff. To illustrate why this is so important, I’m going to talk about a Yale study that came out in 2019, and they spoke about how speech pattern is your first significant identifier for your class when you get hired is your speech. I'm going to quote the article here: “devoid of any information about the candidate’s actual qualifications. The hiring managers judge the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assign applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates from lower social classes.”

We talked during our villainy episode that wealth insulates you as a human. You can't get that wealthy without pausing yourself somewhat, so you can tell people no. Now, affluent people are trained by their parents to ask more questions, such as questioning the doctors and staying curious about their own health. So, when we talk high-class, we don't just mean they get away with anything. We are really talking about being willing to challenge authority, whereas the lower class tends to stay away from challenging language. If you are from a higher class, you were likely trained to challenge people in a friendly way.

We're going to talk about the actual tiers of classism. Because America's class systems are a little less visible, I’m going to pull from an article by Slate Star Codex called Staying Classy. It came out in 2016, and it is a primer for understanding class. They list four classes: 

1.      The generationally poor, the parts of America where people have not held jobs for several generations (10% of people).

2.      The labor class, which is 65% of the population (higher now)

3.      Gentry, people who can survive off of their education and their family’s wealth (23% of the population).

4.      Elite class, their job is to stay invisible (1.5% of the population)

Myth 2: How much money or education does it take to become upper-class? Are celebrities considered upper class? Are athletes? Country singers? How do we even identify the upper class?

We are going to look at what will identify you as an upper class. It's three components, our income, education, and occupation. You will land in the lower classes if you fall short on one or all three of these. Now, if you lack money, you'll speak about money differently. You'll talk differently about restaurants. You'll speak differently to doctors. Everything you talk about will be couched in. If you lack credentials or don't have the education, you will speak with smaller words, or you won't reference things. You won’t reference philosophies and books. And even beyond that, you won't delve into subjects as readily or with the same sort of confidence. They simply won't look things up as they feel like they wouldn't have the depth for that.

Do you know who Miley Cyrus is? Is she upper, or lower, or Gentry class? Well, she did not finish high school, and her family comes from ivy league education. Miley Cyrus definitely has the cash and the credentials, but would not be considered upper class simply because she lacks education. So, the Elite Class would hire my Miley Cyrus to play at their kid's birthday party, but they won’t introduce her to their son to get married.

The next celebrity on our list is Natalie Portman. What do you think she is? I believe it would be an upper class because she came from Harvard, and she has good family credentials. And of course, she's very wealthy. So, here's the point we're making with this particular section: education means a lot to be in the upper class. It is the backbone of the upper-class. Education can pull you out of a lower class if you make money with it.  I remember a teacher once told me that colleges do not teach you a trade; they actually teach you culture.

We're going to go to sports now. With sports figures, they can be upper class. And again, this isn't financial. We're talking about culture. For Connor McGregor, he's classy because he wears suits, but he completed secondary school in Ireland, which ends at around the age of 16 to 19, depending on the test. So technically, he has the cash, he made like a 100M dollars one-night fighting, but he does not have the culture or credentials. The real point we're trying to make here is that when people think of the upper class, they think of celebrities, fame, or wealth. But what it really comes from is education, background, and money.

Myth 3: Okay, so you might need to pretend to be upper-class to ace a job interview or a college interview. But can you fake being upper class for 10 minutes? How hard could it be?

I want to talk about code-switching. This means that you are switching your language, for instance. The original use of the word was like switching from German to English. It is coming to understand both sides of the language while you speak with one.

In the 1970s, the British had something called received pronunciation, which means they decided on an upper-middle-class pronunciation for their television. It's kind of an act they decided on. They agreed that an educated accent would be what they speak in and then made other television performers conform to it. So, if you wanted to work at a news desk, you had to speak with that accent, and it became the standard.

So, this is something that is not just limited to white culture and mimicking it to get a good job interview or to be passable over the phone. This is all countries, and all people have this. You can identify someone of the lower class this way, by the way they speak. Another way that you can identify affluence and class is by our posture. Eye contact, asking the right questions, shared values, and emotional intelligence. Those all sound very no duh, but they all kind of come together to beat you up if you're in the lower class, and you're trying to get a good job. The Yale article literally says that we judge people of the lower class as lower competency. Looking for the best fit for the job means want somebody competent, and we bias ourselves to think lower classes are incompetent.

The University of Toronto did a study where they took pictures of people making a neutral face.  They said to make your face rest and don't make a face at us. Don't show any emotion, and they separated people into categories of income, whether their family made under $60,000 or whether they made above 100k. They categorize them as low income or above. They then took these rich and poor study groups and found out that just by quickly looking at the faces, people were able to guess correctly, which they were with 30% accuracy. It's the face lines, and it's also the muscles you use when you're stressed. A lifelong awareness of working dead-end jobs and not getting enough sleep or eating nutritious foods.

When talking code-switching, how do you fake being this? I'm starting to suspect that Anna had her “everywhere” accent through people and that maybe that might have led to how she was able to pull some of those appeals off.

You distract people with shiny objects and large wads of cash. If you show them money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else, and that's basically how to fake class. I found a quote from Anna herself: “Money. There's an unlimited amount of capital in the world, you know, but there's limited amounts of people who are talented.”

Final Thoughts

So, what is class? In a word, opportunity. Class is an opportunity. In fact, there is already a term for how the upper class has secured education and jobs for their children. It's called opportunity hoarding, and it is usually wholly legal and under the radar. If you want to grab some of that opportunity for yourself, you're going to have to tangle with the upper class at some point. Your children's education, your pay scale, even where you live, will depend on your ability to recognize and use class to your advantage. That can be tricky since we don't teach or even speak about America's class system in polite company, which serves the upper class just fine because recognizing class might just kick off our own French Revolution someday.

But for now, until we start seeing guillotines rolling down the street, we will have to focus on controlling our own class. Posture, eye contact, emotional stability, but most of all, language. Remember, your class's most significant indicator, and thus, your higher ability and competency is your command of language. Enroll in a class, take a public speaking course, grab a book on diction, or if you're too busy for speech coaching, you could always start handing out hundred-dollar bills and tell people you're a foreign Harris. Hey, it worked for Anna!