Posted on 08/15/2005 7:34:36 AM PDT by Molly Pitcher
Has a fairer America also become an America with less social mobility? That is the uncomfortable question raised by John Parker's long American survey in The Economist last month.
"A decline in social mobility would run counter to Americans' deepest beliefs about their country," Parker writes. "Unfortunately, that is what seems to be happening. Class is reappearing in a new form."
This was the conclusion, as well, of a recent series of articles in The New York Times -- although, as the Times and Parker both note, polls show that Americans think their chances of moving up are better than a generation ago. Statistics tell a different story: There is a higher correlation today between parents' and children's income than in the 1980s, and the income gap between college graduates and non-graduated doubled between 1979 and 1997.
"America," concludes Parker, "is becoming a stratified society based on education: a meritocracy."
Parker's view parallels that of another Brit, Ferdinand Mount, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, in his 2004 book, "Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain." Mount notes that income inequality has been increasing in Britain, not just during the Thatcherite 1980s, but since Tony Blair's New Labor government took office in 1997 -- much to the dismay of many Labor ministers. He notes also that Britons are not converging on one lifestyle -- Uppers and Downers, as he calls them, still dress differently and speak with different accents -- and that Britain, more open to upward mobility in the past than popular legend would have it, is becoming less so.
This he partly blames on the abolition by equality-minded Laborites years ago of the academically demanding grammar schools that were the routes out of the working class for so many Labor politicians themselves.
"We cannot help noticing," Mount concludes, "that the old class system has been reconstituted into a more or less meritocratic upper tier and a lower tier which is defined principally by its failure to qualify for the upper tier."
Which is exactly what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray predicted for America in their controversial book "The Bell Curve," published 11 years ago. Herrnstein and Murray noted that intelligence is both measurable and in some large but unquantifiable part hereditary, an unexceptionable finding for experimental psychologists but maddening to social engineers. As college education becomes open to all with the requisite intelligence, graduates will tend to marry graduates and produce children with similar intelligence, while others will tend to produce children without it.
"Unchecked, these trends," Herrnstein and Murray wrote, "will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top."
Which leads to the question children ask on long car trips: Are we there yet? Mount says Britain is and Parker says America may well be. And maybe so.
Yet should we be so gloomy about this? The British have tended to see their society as a one-ladder system, with Oxford and Cambridge graduates at the top and lavatory cleaners at the bottom. Yet in America (and I think in Britain, too), there are many ladders upward, with many intermediate rungs. Not everyone has an emotional need to be on top: How many people, if they thought seriously about it, would really want the burdens of a CEO, however lavish the pay?
Meritocracy may leave people with no one to blame for failure. But, as Herrnstein and Murray argued, almost all Americans have the ability "to find valued places in society."
And that depends not so much on intelligence as on personal behavior. Here, perhaps, we are coping with meritocracy already. New York Times columnist David Brooks points out that since 1993, we have seen declines in violent crime, family violence, teenage births, abortions, child poverty, drunken driving, teenage sex, teenage suicide and divorce. We are seeing increases in test scores and, as Parker notes, in membership in voluntary associations.
As Murray has written, all you need to do to avoid poverty in this country is to graduate from high school, get and stay married, and take any job. The intelligence needed to get a place in the cognitive elite may become more concentrated in a fair meritocratic society, but the personal behaviors needed to find a valued place in society are available to everyone.
Meritocracy may mean less mobility, but that is bearable if, as Brooks says, "America is becoming more virtuous."
Actually, IIRC H/M said that Americans might be able to find valued places in society, but not as long as there is a massive centralized welfare state working against the purposes of local community. It's been awhile since I read their book, but they were gloomy about the ability of a highly meritocratic society to get along unless significant changes were made in that society.
My wife was surprised, when she immigrated here, at how hard Americans have to work for everything.
I explained to her that America doesn't promise to make anyone rich. What you get is opportunity.
Not everyone makes the most of it, and alot of folks fail. But they get the chance, and that's a damn sight more than most places offer.
Never under-estimate Jesse Jackson.
Does Mr. Parket suggest that George Washington Carver was some kind of an intellectual fluke? That the children of crop dusters will produce only cropdusters? What a Darwinian crock!
Has anyone noticed that the systematic dumbing-down of our "educational" system is producing endless crops of spiritually crippled Elitist parrots without a shred of critical-thinking ability?
Those "tests" that are ostensibly devised to measure this ever increasing superiority have been modified to the point of banality for the purpose of turning out intellectually fatuous and morally vacant corporatites.
I thoroughly disagree and object to the tone and conclusions of this pathetic analysis.
Well said.
Since there will ALWAYS be some people with nothing... as a society becomes richer... isn't it inevitable that the gap between the rich and poor will grow?
And that's fine. The only thing we need to guarantee is that:
1) Anyone who is sufficiently self-motivated can educate him or herself at a reasonable cost through Internet courses and self-study options.
2) "Based on education" doesn't translate to "based on graduating from a select list of twenty schools."
Lower class emulates upper class -- empire is rising.
Upper class emulates lower class -- empire is declining.
Considering that the media and certain rich kids believe it's both cool and fun to be impoverished crime-ridden inner city minorities, the current state of "class" indicates we a nation in free-fall.
Yes. Also, I wonder if they are mistaking what we often call "success" or a high income with true intelligence. I know many people that could've gone onto very high paying jobs if they'd been born into the right circles - let's face it, in many instances it IS who you know and not what you know. You can learn the what very easily but getting in the door might require some effort. Also, there are plenty of rich and very high level people that produce children that grow up to be selfish, greedy and unwholesome. We had a very interesting story here in Cleveland over a year ago about a man that went through the most elite of private schools and he ended up screwing a bunch of people out of their investments (look up Frank Gruttaduria on Google) and he would have been considered in this upper tier, according to this article. They can HAVE their tier!
Denying that intelligence has a hereditary component doesn't make it so.
Of course this doesn't mean that every smart couple will birth nothing but smart kids nor that every stupid couple will birth nothing but stupid kids.
But lets say for the sake of argument that if 90% of all births to 2 intelligent people result in intelligent children, while only 10% of births to two stupid people result intelligent children... the guy would have a point, that meeting your spouse in college could result in a widening gap of intelligence.
At the rate they limit their own family size (and abort the rest), they may very well darwin-ize themselves right out of existence. One can hope :-))
Yeah - I agree. Just because the gap is growing is not a bad thing. It just means that wealth in America is growing.
Living in Mississippi, I have seen a great explosion of wealth in parts of the state (while living other poverty stricken areas in the dust).
Increased wealth in America is a good thing. And conservatives more than liberals are likely to be advantaged by this.
I've read the Bell Curve...liberals should be very afraid.
Intelligence doesn't denote honesty.
You can be both smart and a crook.
What part of the Great State? I grew up in Jackson...right down the street from North Park Mall.
Cropdusters? You have to be a pretty good stick (pilot) to be a successful cropduster. It's not a lower class job, IMHO. And yes, I know a pilot who's father was a "duster," and went another career path from spraying fields with needed chemicals so we can have healthier, more plentiful food.
This is not surprising. The universal availability of college education was first available to our parent's generation. So the smart ones, even from working class backgrounds, went to college.
Thus, my grandfather was a migrant farm worker and a hard rock miner. He was plenty smart but the result of being the child of very poor Italian immigrants in the 1890's--they didn't go to college. But my father was a rocket scientist. I'm a professional. High correlation between my father's income and mine. Low correlation between my grandfather and my father. High correlation between by grandfather and my great-grandfather.
Smart parents tend to have smart kids. Once the class barrier to college education was broken, the decorrelation between generations will last for about one generation and then reassert itself. It's not a sign of anything other than the fact that the effect of universal college education has now worked it's way thru the system.
The only way in which this may truly have changed is that with smarter boys and girs going to college, I suspect that smart boys and smart girls are more likely to end up married to each other and that the kids may be supersmart, on average. So in that sense, there is probably a larger class of very smart folks than existed before.
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