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Judy Zweig lost almost everything in the Palisades fire: her children’s baby photos, her wedding album and all her expensive jewelry locked in a safe.

"By looking only at income or lifestyle, we see the results of class, but not the origins of class," writes economist Michael Zweig in his 2011 book "The Working Class Majority."

Zweig, now 74, talked to The Times about where the inner ageist comes from, and how we can begin to recognize it in ourselves and ultimately release it.

As she began to order free samples of food, presumably because she couldn’t afford to pay, Zweig noticed a feeling of disgust rising within her.

Think of it like renovating a house instead of building one from the ground up, says Mark Zweig, professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at the University of Arkansas Walton College of Business .