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The term upper class refers to a group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Often members of an upper class do not have to work for a living, as they are supported by earned or inherited investments. Members of an upper class often have power over other people as employers or landlords, or sometimes as members of a government. The term "upper class" has had a complex range of meanings and usages, and in the 21st century many people are uncomfortable with it as a term and as a concept. In many traditional societies, membership of the upper class was hard or even impossible to acquire by any means other than being born into it. Nowadays a high income can be enough on its own for a person to be considered upper class in some countries, especially United States. Other factors such are attitudes, tastes, education, occupation and accents are also often relevant.
In many countries the term "upper class" was long intimately associated with land ownership. Political power was in the hands of landowners in many pre-Industrial societies, often to the exclusion of other rich people (which was one of the causes of the French Revolution). Upper class landowners in Europe were often also members of the titled nobility, though not necessarily: the prevalence of titles of nobility varied widely from country to country. Some upper classes (or noble classes) were almost entirely untitled, for example, the szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In the United Kingdom and Australia, the term "upper class" is now almost always used pejoratively, as in the stereotypical term, "upper class twit", and British and Australian people are much more anxious to avoid being labelled "upper class" (or even "upper middle class") than their American or Canadian counterparts. For more on this phenomenon, see reverse snobbery, Australian mateship, and class consciousness.
In the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries, the term "upper class" referred to an elite which combined wealth and social power, but the connexion with landownership was far weaker than in Europe; in the Northern states it was almost non-existent. This usage of "upper class" lingered into the 20th century to some degree, associated with the WASP elite and the power of the graduates of the Ivy League. The U.S. is now arguably more socially- stratified than most European societies, albeit that some individuals move up a class by making money. This reflects the absence in America of the embarrassment that many Europeans feel about their societies' socially-stratified pasts. Social class in Canada, as an observable phenomenon, though more subtle perhaps than in the U.S., is also not as entrenched as in Europe nor as taboo a topic as it is in Britain and Australia, though it remains a matter of controversy (see for example, the debate over the granting of a life peerage to former Canadian citizen, Conrad Black, 1st Baron Black of Crossharbour, and the remarks of then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about creating an aristocracy in Canada, and his insistence on upholding the Nickle Resolution).
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