In modern times the concept of Upper Middle and Lower Classes has rescinded. Many societies talk of being 'Classless'. However in Go the opposite seems to be true? Why should this be?

I had to look up what you were talking a bit, but after reading about classless societies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_society), isn't go still a classless society? Isn't your status determined by individual effort?

If you want respect, you can make the effort to become 9d, for example.

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Where is this ever true? The classes don't seem to be going anywhere.

Classless society? Where do you live?

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It's possible to draw classes on our current society, though I'm not sure where you'd draw the boundaries. However, I think that they are far far less separate than they used to be, and that to this extent the classes are receding by mixing.

Since success and prestige in Go are entirely 100% based on merit and strength, Go is a classless society. If people were born as 9 dans and were then able to dodge games with stronger players from different backgrounds there would be an issue.

In societies where merit and discipline are confounded by issues relating to historical/geographical/cultural/etc... factors class can be said to exist even if they are equal in legal terms.

My view on this is that classes in the old definition is not existant any more, at least not in Sweden, "workers" are not necessarily underpaid, in fact some handymen earns quite a lot.
This is not to say that classes don't exist though, but it's a little bit more complicated then how it was 100 or even 50 (maybe 20?) years ago.
I like to use "intelectual class" to help specify the "class" of a person. eg people from a traditional "working class", plumbers, car repairmen, nurses tends to not read many books, and this is "inherited" by their children.
This becomes really interesting when this child of a traditional working class ends up as, say a CEO of a IT company...
Then there is the income issue, where many people earn very little, but can sometimes have a very high status on the intelectual scale, immigrants from Russia with very good education working at minimum wage as cleaners or something.

As for Go, I'd say that it's the intelectual upper class that has the best chances, though the intelectually understimulated at least in theory could reach the same levels being used to reading books, knowing some foreign languages (for non english natives) etc probably helps a lot.
The matter of income is probably not so important, it's not very expensive to play Go.

/Mats

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Go is an egalitarian game. All stones are equal!

(There is only one world society. That classes are unevenly distributed in space doesn't mean they don't exist anymore.)

All stones may be equal, but that doesn't mean the starting positions are the same for all. eg. Some children have a starting advantage (being the children of highly motivated parents, from the extreme of children of pros to just a family that prizes education ) and that will often be passed onto their children. Classes still hold to some extent because we are not all born equal.

I think there can be some confusion because classes are only rarely conciously enforced these days (I don't think I'm better than my plumber).

My grandad came from a working class background and apparently he had a really hard time from his family when he became a manager instead of just working the assembly line. I think these kind of self-perpetuating handicaps are tragic.

At university, the physical differences between the students of different faculties were stunning. Science students have a different body type than engineers or arts students. I found this really creepy (Time Machine anyone?). Class distinctions are not going anywhere. People pursue their parents' area of work often enough, and marry people from similar backgrounds often enough, for statistically significant divisions to emerge.

This is something I've definitely never noticed - even disagree with. I haven't noticed a difference in general, and I also take issue with saying that engineering isn't a science (if not technically, then at least effectively - a lot of it ends up just being applied physics)

I suppose this may be regional. And the engineering faculty here is completely separate from the science faculty, with different expectations, different career paths and different kinds of people who study there.

Engineering definitely is a science. I think he was making the distinction in the different subject like Math, Science, Engineering, Art, and so forth.

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This is perhaps starting to stray OT, but I personally would say there is definitely a difference between engineers and scientists. Engineers often use science, and the scientific method, however there are many parts of engineering that are not what would be considered traditional science. Science is more about discovery, whereas engineering is typically problem solving. It goes back to the old joke: an engineer thinks his equations are a reasonable approximation of the real world, a physicist thinks the real world is a reasonable approximation of his equations.