Temporarily Embarrassed Capitalists

My father drove a truck for 40 years and never once called himself working class.

Pop came home smelling like grease and hard work. He cursed New York drivers with creative flourishes that would make Andrew Dice Clay blush. I used to laugh hysterically while my appalled mother prepared our dinner.

But if you’d asked Philosopher-Truck Driver John Ring what he was, he wouldn’t have said “labor.” He’d have said, “A guy who’s doing all right, and whose kid is going to do better.”

He was right. His kid went from a kitchen table in New Jersey to teaching bankers in America, Europe, and Asia. Nobody in DC ensured my destiny. “Da Union” didn’t vote on it. A country that didn’t care who my father was let his son swing for the fences.

So when that Steinbeck quote came across my screen this weekend, the one about “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” I smiled, as I always do when I see it.

Then I checked it for the first time. Much to my sadness, he was misquoted.

The Quote That Isn’t

In June 1960, Steinbeck published an essay in Esquire called “A Primer on the Thirties.” He was describing the comfortable, middle-aged Communists he’d met during the Depression. They played at revolution the way other people played bridge. He concluded that America had no self-admitted proletarians. He wrote that everyone was a “temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

Capitalist. Not millionaire.

And while Steinbeck was poking fun at those Communists, he’d also put his finger on something uniquely American: the utter refusal to accept a permanent place on the societal totem pole.

It’s such a shame it’s so frequently misquoted, because, of course, Steinbeck’s original is far superior. (I’m disheartened in the same way every time I think Jefferson sacrificed “private property” for “the pursuit of happiness.” It may not have been literary, but “private property” would have settled the argument for socialism before it started.)

The version of Steinbeck’s quote on your Facebook feed comes from Ronald Wright, a Canadian writer, in a 2004 book called A Short History of Progress. Wright paraphrased Steinbeck from memory, swapped “capitalist” for “millionaire,” and bolted on a line about socialism never taking root. As always, the internet did the rest.

That edit matters because Steinbeck described a people who refused to accept a caste. Wright turned it into a people too dumb to know their place.

I’m with Steinbeck, and so are the numbers.

The Waiting Room

Of course, America doesn’t have a class system.

In a class system, where you’re born is where you die. The door is locked from the inside.

Then what is America? It’s a waiting room.

In a waiting room, you sit for a while, sometimes a long while, and then your name gets called. Or perhaps, as my friend and colleague James Altucher would say, you choose yourself.

Two economists, Mark Rank of Washington University and Thomas Hirschl of Cornell, tested this. They followed 44 years of income data on the same American households, from age 25 to 60.

By age 60, about 70% of Americans had spent at least one year in the top 20% of earners. More than half had spent a year in the top 10%. And one in nine - that’s over 11% of those Americans - had spent at least a year in the top 1%.

One in nine. Not bad. Not bad at all…

Now the other half of the story, the half that makes it a waiting room and not a club. Fewer than 1 in 160 Americans stayed in the top 1% for 10 straight years.

The rich get called in, and then most of them get called back out. The door swings both ways. Perhaps that’s the real problem people have with social mobility.

So my father wasn’t deluded. He was reading the odds correctly.

Is It Still Possible?

But does that door still swing open? That’s the question.

UBS counted 23.6 million American millionaires at the end of 2025. That’s over 40% of the world’s total, in a country with about 4% of its people. The US added 440,000 new ones last year alone. That’s about 1,200 a day.

But UBS also found that median American wealth, the middle guy, fell about 20% after inflation since 2020. The top of the ladder got taller. The bottom rungs got more expensive. That’s the price inflation most people suffer.

And yet. Americans filed over half a million new business applications in August. They’ve done that nearly every month since 2021. People file for an EIN because they think they’re a capitalist whose turn is about to come.

Mises said the consumer is sovereign and the entrepreneur serves him. He never said the entrepreneur had to come from anywhere in particular. Hayek added that no planner can know who the next winner is, which is exactly why the system has to stay open to everyone. The guy who builds the next great American company is in a waiting room right now. We just don’t know who that person is. Yet.

The Virtue in the Joke

Delusional self-confidence, unfounded optimism, or even plain stupidity don’t account for why this belief never dies.

Aquinas defined hope as the desire for a future good that is hard, but possible, to get.

Not easy or guaranteed, but possible. He said hope has two enemies: despair, which says it can’t happen, and presumption, which says it already has.

The “temporarily embarrassed” American sits right between them. He knows he hasn’t made it, but knows he might. “Yet” is a big word. As in “He hasn’t made it yet.” That’s what keeping the faith is all about.

Taleb would call it optionality. A country full of people who think they’re one good idea away from wealth keeps buying cheap options on itself. Most expire worthless, but the few that pay, pay for everything. (As Elon Musk has paid over $10 billion in tax in a single year, this isn’t hyperbole.)

And boy, do the politicians know it!

Whatever party they wear, their coalition is huge and restless. They tax, regulate, and inflate the ladder.

But any leader who tried to padlock the door would lose the only thing that keeps the whole arrangement standing: the belief that the next name called might be yours. The envy pitch has been tried in America for a century. It keeps losing to a guy in a work shirt who thinks he’s doing all right.

Wrap Up

Steinbeck watched the worst decade in American economic history, the Dust Bowl, the bread lines, and the Okies he put in his own novels. He saw a people who still wouldn’t sign the class card. He thought that was the most American thing about them.

He was right then, and the data corroborates his view now. Sure, the door’s price of admission is more expensive than it was, and I’ll keep writing about who made it so. But it still opens, and it still swings both ways.

My father never became a millionaire. He never thought he was one, nor did he care. He just knew the room he was sitting in had a door, and that his kid would walk through it.

He was right about that, too.