"You can't tell a millionaire's son from a billionaire's"
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Class is supposed to announce itself, yet Packard’s line lands because it points to a newer kind of invisibility: the rich blending into each other so completely that the ladder’s top rungs become indistinguishable. “You can’t tell” isn’t just about clothes or manners; it’s about how wealth, past a certain threshold, stops functioning as money and starts functioning as a private climate. Millionaire, billionaire: different numbers, same insulation.
Packard wrote in an America newly fluent in mass consumption, where status could be purchased off the shelf and where advertising taught people to read identity through products. The joke is that once everyone learns those codes, the elite can hide in plain sight. A millionaire’s son can look like a billionaire’s because the culture has standardized the aesthetic of advantage: the right schools, the right ease, the right sense that consequences are for other people. The visual markers compress; the power gap doesn’t.
The subtext is a critique of how inequality survives scrutiny. When wealth becomes normalized as “successful lifestyle,” distinctions that matter politically get reframed as minor differences in taste. Packard is also needling the myth of merit: if you can’t tell the heir of a very large fortune from the heir of an obscene one, the story we tell ourselves about earned status collapses into heredity and access.
It’s a one-line autopsy of the American class system: legible at the bottom, blurry at the top, and designed that way.
Packard wrote in an America newly fluent in mass consumption, where status could be purchased off the shelf and where advertising taught people to read identity through products. The joke is that once everyone learns those codes, the elite can hide in plain sight. A millionaire’s son can look like a billionaire’s because the culture has standardized the aesthetic of advantage: the right schools, the right ease, the right sense that consequences are for other people. The visual markers compress; the power gap doesn’t.
The subtext is a critique of how inequality survives scrutiny. When wealth becomes normalized as “successful lifestyle,” distinctions that matter politically get reframed as minor differences in taste. Packard is also needling the myth of merit: if you can’t tell the heir of a very large fortune from the heir of an obscene one, the story we tell ourselves about earned status collapses into heredity and access.
It’s a one-line autopsy of the American class system: legible at the bottom, blurry at the top, and designed that way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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