Masters of Mediocrity

Last Christmas, my family stumbled on the “living room scale,” a test devised by Paul Fussell in 1983 to sort Americans by social class. The idea is that you can assess your status simply by studying your household. You gain points for parquet floors, overflowing bookcases, and real Tiffany lamps. You lose points for vinyl floors, a television display, and imitation Tiffany lamps. The quiz is a bit dated (Fussell has a special fixation on the Egypt craze of the early Eighties), but that didn’t stop my family from loudly going about to our friends’ and relatives’ houses and rating their living rooms—only to find, not much to our surprise, that we are all decidedly middle class in taste.