Do You Live in a Bubble?

[jducoeur]

Today's fascinating link comes via Aaron, and is closely related to yesterday's screed about dumb things rich people say. It's a quiz on the PBS site, titled "Do You Live In a Bubble?" It's 25 questions, and gets quite nicely to the core of what makes up the experience of the typical white, educated and wealthy upper-middle-class person as opposed to the typical middle class. Simply going through the questions is fascinating food for thought -- it's really about culture, not politics or wealth per se -- and it pegged me pretty accurately at the end. (I scored 28.)

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I scored a 52, but I think that is highly unrealistic. Largely because most of the items that I think lead to that elevated score were from a short isolated period of my life, 30 years ago.

I may try again and see what I score, ignoring that period. Hmm: 45. My dad was a physician, upper-middle-class (first generation) and I am a second generation upper-middle-class. Fascinating.

[unicornpearlz.livejournal.com]

I scored a 56 and fall staunchly between:
A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits.
and
A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents.

[mermaidlady]

I'm pretty darn bubbly.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

I score a 39 -- and I suspect a large chunk of that is that I just plain don't have either the time or the desire to watch TV or go to the movies. {: Too many other things I'd rather be doing.

And there is no mass-market beer in my fridge. He's allergic to alcohol and beer gives me a headache.

[dreda.livejournal.com]

I am sort of fascinated by the idea that the bubble would necessarily indicate wealth. Many of those bubble-denoting answers neatly encapsulated my childhood - and so did the answers denoting life below the technical poverty line.

My beloved introduced me to Paul Fussell's concept of the "velvet underclass" - lots of education, little money, and so forth - that seems to apply here reasonably well.

[jducoeur]

Hadn't heard the term, but I can easily see it. Jane's situation was quite interesting, since her parents were sort of aspirational Britophiles: they never had any money to speak of, but considered education to be absolutely pre-eminent and were quite cultured in many ways. Jane had some definite adjustment to my lifestyle, which is pretty solidly upper-middle-class -- she already had many of the cultural touchstones, but had to get used to the ones that came with actually having money. (Although she picked all of that up quite quickly.)

Overall, though, what I love about the quiz is that it is mainly about culture instead of wealth per se. There is a *correlation* with wealth, but it's far from consistent...

[etherial.livejournal.com]

I found the first several questions baffling in their vagueness.

[laurion]

Really? What parts were vague?

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

Heh. I got a 61.

Unfortunately, I think the really telling scores will be from my kids' generation.

[hungrytiger]

As someone who works in training development. I found this interesting as a potential warning to developers to watch out for their assumptions as their cultural bias may be inadvertently showing.

[jducoeur]

Yep. What I found fascinating here wasn't just the number of questions to which I answered "no", but the number to which I suspect many of my friends would answer, "Of *course* not! Duh." The description of it as a "bubble" is probably more accurate than most folks would like to admit...

[laurion]

I scored a 58. This doesn't surprise me too much. I grew up in a military family which was also often a single income family. My father's life was in some ways a step down from his middle-to-upper-middle class family, but a step up for my Mom from her lower-class family. Since high school I've been in a thicker bubble because of the advantages of getting into a good school and having had consistent employment in higher ed.

[marysdress.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Not at all surprised to find that I landed in the middle.

[fangirl715.livejournal.com]

I scored a 49, although some of that's no doubt due to not drinking beer at all and not really bothering w/most TV shows and popular movies (know about them, yes; watch them, no.). My family is definitely working class (which I only realized after I left home for college & then moved to Boston; we were fairly middle-class in my small, rural hometown), but with a fair amount of middle-class aspirations: once we got cable TV, we watched quite a lot of PBS, and my parents put a lot of emphasis on doing well in school, behaving well, and going to college. Working-class w/some middle-class attitudes, perhaps? I still feel as if I don't fit in w/a lot of the people I know, most of whom went to private colleges (small state school for me), have traveled overseas (does Canada count?), and generally don't worry as much about money as I've had to over the years...and that's not even getting into the differences between a small-town rural upbringing and one in the city or the suburbs...

[queenortart.livejournal.com]

33 although I think being from the UK may have slewed things a bit

I tried to go for the context rather than the letter of the question.

[laurion]

Oh my, yes. Especially on the expectations that you might recognize any of the US Military insignia. (Well, I wouldn't be surprised if -you- did, but the average Brit?) But also geography. It's just far easier to be in 'the middle of nowhere' when you have more of it.

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

57. Not too surprising.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

36. Interesting.

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.

[kls-eloise.livejournal.com]

Interesting, although I had trouble with the questions about the status of the communities I've lived in. I'm from New England and upstate NY - I don't KNOW my neighbors, so how can I know what their education status is? It's only been six years - you shouldn't rush these things...

I just chose to answer what I thought he was getting at. It did nail the fact that my family isn't that far from the farm...

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

Interesting. My score was 48. Not too surprising, though. Some of the questions were a little hard to answer because both answers could be considered true depending on *when*. My first iteration through the quiz yielded the Ultimate Answer (42), though, because I answered the edge questions differently than the second time through.

The factory floor question was a problem. I've walked the factory floor as a intrtoduction to what my job affects and what we produce. It wasn't routine or part of my regular job function, but it was required by my employer. And not a bad requirement at that, I think.

Based on your score, you need to get out more... ;^D

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

I got a 17 (I don't live in a bubble; evidently they wrap me in cotton-wool and put me in a box every night :->), and most of those points came from summer jobs I worked in college.

When I first took this test, I quibbled over some of the questions (most evenings we eat at home; if we went out, it wouldn't be to an Appleby's--and most Noo Yawkers get their cheap eats at diners or coffeeshops, in any case), but the jist of the quiz isn't about how much money one spends, or how much one knows about poverty, but how much one is attuned to the "Middle American" way of life.

[cellio]

I scored 23, though wasn't sure how to count some corner cases. And two of those movies are in my Netflix queue, for what that's worth. :-)

What, no books? Newspapers? Bar scene? If this is about exposure to life around you, those all seem like vectors.

[aneirin-awenyd.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I scored a 43, though if I understand the restaurants question right, my string of "0"s was taken to mean I must eat at posher places -- rather than that I'm generally too poor to eat at restaurants, period.

I grew up working-class in an upper-middle-class town. Very interesting juxtaposition, and it made for an uncomfortable experience in a very class-conscious social environment. But the town services and school standards were solidly upper-middle-class.

And now...I'm a single mom of four living an unconventional, rural, barely-middle-class life requiring a lot of opt-outs to allow the luxuries we favor (homeschooling, extracurricular activities for the kids, a solidly running car, large house, healthy local/organic/etc food). I don't fit the profiles they are drawing here. It's interesting that my score just brushes the bottom of upper middle class. I have a college degree, but my dad and ex do not and I don't expect my kids will.

It will be interesting to see how the class markers, or at least demographics, will evolve with the changing economic climate.

[la-peregrina.livejournal.com]

I got 24, but that's because my folks were upper-middle-class Cubans who lost it all and came here, drumming it into their children that an education was the most valuable thing in the world to have, that no one could take away from you.

Upper-middle-class sensibilities on a middle-class budget until my father got his MBA (top 5% of his class). I will not begrudge that he worked full time while going to NYU and bringing up two kids with my mom.

He then had to pay off some loans, and I needed extensive braces (railroad tracks) on my teeth, so we never really lived the high life, but we were not suffering, either.

Of course, with the perfect storm of back luck that happened to me in the last three years, my bubble is nigh to bursting.

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

I got a 47, mostly (I expect) from a childhood as a pastor's kid in rural Wisconsin. An intriguing set of questions, and I think they do a good job of testing that line between different US cultures.

Your comment about how many friends might say "of course not" resonated with me. Smoking? Beer? Yep, I live in a bubble that doesn't include those things much.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to see the numbers of people inside and outside that 'bubble'. Is it a bubble, or a neighborhood?

I scored in the low 40s; answering for my sister, however, netted a...2. Interesting how going to school in Upstate NY changed my outlook and direction so significantly.

[sichling.livejournal.com]

Wow - I got a 13. I suspect not having seen any of the movies or TV shows was a serious factor - but you know, if they'd put any kids' shows in (Dora, Diego, Backyardigans), I'd have had them all covered.

Of course, I grew up in Baltimore with middle-class parents and probably upper-class grandparents. I didn't count living in Allston in the college ghetto as more than 50% of neighbors had no college degree - it seemed the letter of the question, but not the spirit.

And, well, I do rather live in a bubble these days... I suppose I should get out more.

[eudociainboston.livejournal.com]

hmmm... 43. Granted I grew up in a rural Maine town of 5000 and my mom was the only mother in my public first grade class to graduate from college and we mostly attended private schools after third grade. When I was a teenager I ended up helping out on a lobster boat owned by a friend's dad one day in January in ten foot waves pulling traps and let's just say those guys are so not paid enough for what they do.
The bubble is very real- I got smacked over the head with it constantly when I transferred from community college in FL to Tufts. The family expectation was university was non optional but my mother's medical bills got in the way and I had to work for years first. The two years I worked in a restaurant were telling, I knew it was just a temporary stop on the way to bigger and better things but for many of the people I worked with it was the pinnacle of their career.

[unicornpearlz.livejournal.com]

Peter scored an 11

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

31. I accept the degree of bubble-tude that implies, while asserting that the answers felt just as "yes, but not really" as many of the questions did. (For instance, I grew up in a small town, but it was a college town, but it wasn't the college *I* went to; Yes or No?)