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It is possible that the America of, say, 1870 to 1970 was an extraordinarily unique place in world history in which, for a great many reasons, three things were simultaneously true for ordinary people:
The rewards for ambition, competence, and conscientousness were extraordinarily great
The price for personal failure was still very high
It was possible for many to rise well above their station in life due to very rapid economic growth
I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true. The few examples I can think of (the four 'Asian Tiger' economies from the 1960s to 1990s, maybe) were also temporary, and true for a much shorter period than the US.
But in such a society, propriety, boldness, ambition and self-respect would likely be more common among those who had great hopes of participating in that ongoing boom.
Don' be so epoch-parochial!
E.g. during the Yamnaya expansions into Europe, rewards for ambition & competence were extremely high, price for failure was absolute and it was certainly possible to rise well above your station by conquering and putting to service enough peasants.
I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?
It's a niche subject, and I don't expect to be able to track down much on the topic itself. I did at least bother to ask GPT-4, but it had little to share on the matter.
The wikipedia article ?
This isn't any secret or obscure history, save maybe in India where the local idiots-in-charge like to pretend Brahmins and other higher castes aren't a small remnant of northern conquerors but were actually indigenous to the region. (The genetic data is always a good way of riling up Hindu nationalists on twitter)
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On 3, it’s surely also a part of the story that a person who got rich became upper class, whereas in many societies a lower class person who gets rich is just a rich lower class person.
I’m thinking about someone I know in particular, who went from (literally)a drug addicted orphan to working as an HVAC tech to owning his own HVAC company. He is not elite today despite his very high income; in 1900 he would have been. It’s still possible he could become elite- spend his free time giving motivational speeches at private high schools, go to charity fundraisers at the opera instead of his church, etc- but in Victorian America he would already be there by virtue of his wealth, and in medieval Japan there’d be no hope of joining the elite no matter how wealthy and well mannered he became.
Perhaps not? He would have been "lower-class rich guy" but his son could get into the elite by going to the right schools and university, and his grandson would certainly have been included and now classed as a gentleman.
Hence all the historical jokes about the sons of guys who had made it responding to their fathers' attempts to discipline them with "You, the son of a farmer/peasant/merchant/whatever cannot speak so to me, the son of a gentleman/nobleman/king".
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To take it a step further: I happen to know someone who is either a billionaire or quite close to it (I believe he recently complained that his net worth had fallen just under the billion mark due to some supply chain issue) and is still absolutely not elite in any way. His money is in agriculture, and he is very 'country' in his mannerisms. I do think a world where he'd get to be 'in the room where it happens' would be a better one, but he doesn't act the part of the right sort of person, so he's just wealthy and subject to the whims of the worthless social-gamers.
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