Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you might be overestimating how much money pg's family had; I'm pretty sure they were squarely middle-class (e.g. the next sentence reads "The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough," and that took "years of nagging"). Strictly from a class point of view his background would have been risk-averse. But your point about the intellectual environment seems solid.
I think people have different definitions of "upper class". Maybe "Upper-middle class" would have been a better term, since pretty much everyone in the U.S. calls themselves some flavor of middle class. But my point is is that most people are not doing nearly as well financially as a mathematician/manager working at Westinghouse modeling nuclear reactors[1][2]. For example, 70% of americans have less than $1,000 of s…
The proliferation of high-yield checking accounts in particular has significantly reduced the use of savings accounts for a lot of people who have quite a lot of "savings".
I keep seeing people cite scary-looking numbers like this (the other good example being the "half of Americans don't have $400 in cash on hand", which is ... not quite true; see https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/19/kamala-har... ), but each time I dig into the actual data it turns out the actual question asked was not what people seem to think it was and the answers don't mean what they seem to mean, in the context of the actual question.