Posted on 05/29/2018 4:45:38 PM PDT by proxy_user
I’ve joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners. If you are a typical reader of The Atlantic, you may well be a member too. (And if you’re not a member, my hope is that you will find the story of this new class even more interesting—if also more alarming.) To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I’ll call—for reasons you’ll soon see—the 9.9 percent. We’ve dropped the old dress codes, put our faith in facts, and are (somewhat) more varied in skin tone and ethnicity. People like me, who have waning memories of life in an earlier ruling caste, are the exception, not the rule.
By any sociological or financial measure, it’s good to be us. It’s even better to be our kids. In our health, family life, friendship networks, and level of education, not to mention money, we are crushing the competition below. But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into.
The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I don’t read anything the lefty rag has to offer
He wants to do away with the $500k married couple capital gains exemption on primary residence but in typical liberal pea brain fashion does not understand this would exacerbate the housing unaffordability he laments.
I am a former subscriber to the Atlantic —I gave up before Obama. My judgement was that the magazine had become completely out of touch with reality. However, I found this article to be fascinating reading, despite the anti-Trump bias and conclusions. The author had Middle American roots, and he acknowledges that he is no longer a Middle American.
Well, it depends on how you look at it. If the upper-middle-classes have encouraged others to abandon the nuclear family, but have not done it themselves, that would really be very useful to their children’s prospects - less competition from below.
I should add, this is very much like using affirmative to prevent blacks from acquiring the skills that need to compete. “We pretend to help you, but in reality our ‘help’ prevents you from competing with us!”
They wouldn’t really do that, would they? That is not their intent, right? I honestly cannot say....
So you at least grasp the concept. Why is it so hard to believe these people haven't done the same with wealth and power to influence Washington DC?
The author makes mention of his early life where his family was living in some sort of ‘reduced circumstances’ relative to their forebears. Then he goes on to treat with, as he describes it, the burgeoning wealth of the “9.9%”. OK. But it isn’t forever. If you don’t instill values in the next generation, the wealth will eventually dissipate regardless the advantages. Families rise, families fall. It’s the story of America.
Families rise, families fall. It’s the story of America.
Precisely. In America, families (mostly) are not able to wield sufficient political power to stay on the top of society by force.
The dynasties seem to be self limiting to three or four generations.
First Generation makes the money,
Second Generation keeps the money,
Third Generation spends the money.
Or pretty close renditions of the above. The more I read of family histories in capitalist societies, the more this appears to be true.
I worked my way in the military to degrees in history and linguistics. I go back to my home in East Texas and most of the same “people” who were kings and queens in high school are still there in some back water job reliving the wonderful life they had in high school.
But I and my family are in Sierra Leone doing wonderful things. My children have been to most of the United States, Europe, West Africa and a ton of memories in places most Americans will never see or even think about.
I have no problem with a meritocracy.
Major flaws:
1. It assigns motives - about getting ahead of others - to groups, persisting in the myth that the motives are and must have been there because X did in fact get “ahead” of y. Any attribution of outcomes to motives is a lie.
2. It suggests what one lost was “taken” by another. Again, the reality is just changes over time, and using statistics of one time to compare it with a statistic at another time, suggesting that years ago X had 22% of something and at the later time had only 12%, while Y had 12% at the earlier time and 22% at the later time ERRORS massively in suggesting Y “took” from X, when the whole that is being measured has grown, and 12% of something larger is still less more than 12% of something smaller. All that really happened was X grew less than Y grew, but it is a lie that that was achieved by Y “taking” anything from X. All that you need to believe to believe any of it is Marxian class envy. With that it is not enough to be “better off”, you must be “as better off” as everyone else.
I waggishly suggest, in comments 24 and 25, that perhaps sexual freedom and affirmative action are evil plots to keep down potential competitors. They probably aren’t, but that’s what a conspiracy theorist would say.
I made my way through the whole thing. It’s a worthwhile read in that he’s identifying the blue state aristocracy that has emerged over the past half century or so. Unfortunately his political operating assumptions are entirely within the liberal bubble so there’s a lot of gratuitous crap there as well.
Yep. Because they are mostly leftists, contrary to the lies the Enemedia tell.
The pseudo-aristocracy all attend Marxist Ivy League schools.
Nice way to start.
The wealth gap, between the wealthy and even the upper middle class, has been GIGANTIC...for most of the history of this nation; it is NOT a "recent" development.
I was referring to the "academic achievement gap." And I was talking about a relatively recent development.
Schools like Harvard and Yale were largely reserved for graduates of a few prestigious prep schools until the 1950s when they made a conscious decision to open the schools up to public high school graduates who outscored the preppies on the SAT, so those schools were more open to upward mobility.
Then in the 1980s and 1990s, public schools declined, private schools acquired a greater academic advantage over them, and tuition rose dramatically, so such schools are once again an elite preserve, but a preserve for a new elite. That's all been documented.
Nothing against the G.I. Bill but it wasn't what I was talking about. The G.I. Bill opened up college to many who otherwise wouldn't have attended them, but the full tuition benefit didn't last very long. Colleges were impressed by the veteran's academic performance, but if the colleges hadn't made a conscious decision to seek non-elite students afterwards, they would have gone back to how they were in previous decades.
But why am I bothering to explain this to somebody who obviously doesn't care and isn't serious about the topic?
Don't like it? Not my "problem"!
You never did explicitly talk about the "education gap"; so stop being a weasel worder!
Oh goody goody...let us DO talk about academic institutions...especially "ELITE" boarding schools! :-)
Shall we start with Governor Dummer; a school I doubt you've ever heard of, let alone know the history of, nor anyone who has ever gone there !
As the oldest, extremely prestigious boarding school in this nation, many people, for centuries, went off too the likes of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, etc., without EVER having set foot inside that institution, nor it's two best known "offsprings"...Exeter and Andover!
Dartmouth was set up primarily as a college designed to educate AMERICAN INDIANS! Yes, indeedy, it really was basically an AFFIRMATIVE ACTION institution, though of course it took lots and lots of white boys.
Back in the 1950s,believe it or not, just going to a "feeder school" ( what quite a few POSH/ELITE boarding schools were and still are know as, by many colleges ! ) would NOT get you into many colleges! WHY? RELIGION! I had a good friend, whom I went to school with, who wanted to go to Williams, but he was *gasp* Jewish and was told outright to "forgetit"/try other colleges where he just might get in, due his stellar SATs and GPA.
Oh yooooooooooo hoooooooooooo..."...open the schools to public high school graduates who outscored the preppies on the SAT..."? And just WHERE did you pull THAT spurious, unalloyed shit stat from? LOL
Unless Yale et al were taking the very bottom of the barrel scions of the 0.0000001% ers who had gone to those colleges but had somehow managed to have had complete morons for progeny ( which I doubt ! ), you're blowing smoke!
The Ivies took tons of service men, right after WW II, due to the G.I. Bill and their own brains! That's starting in late 1946-early 1947, which as far as I know ( due to my education and the fact that I'm really good at simple addition and subtraction )is several years away from 1950!
Columbia had Quonset Huts set up on its campus to house these new, older students and their wives & children!
The Ivies and others have been taking AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, unqualified kids for far more decades than you have stated! You are damned dead WRONG about dates, timelines, and everything else! You don't even know that many of the "ELITE" boarding school have ALWAYS taken kids from all kinds of different backgrounds and races; yes, even prior to the PC/AA crap!
You've posted about a topic you neither know about nor understand, but took uncalled for umbrage, because I called you out! Pity that.......
Wow! No wonder your children don’t visit and your grandchildren won’t pick up the phone when you call!
My progeny adore me, as do their progeny, all of whom ( the adults ) I hear from not just DAILY, but several times a day on phone, email, and messages on the cell phone; the latter of which is preferred by the progeny's progeny. :-)
And as far as "visiting" is concerned, funnily enough, am preparing for just such a family visit, right now, which everyone is joyfully looking forward to.
Obviously you are incapable of even attempting to rebut the FACTS I posted to you, so have, instead, turned to insulting not only me, but my entire immediate family and thusly have mightily embarrassed yourself in the bargain.
The argument I made came from In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood. He took much of his data from The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicolas Lemann.
I can't claim that it was the whole story of social elites and inequality in America. I certainly would have welcomed other points of view and even corrections, but really, to argue that 1946-7 was light years away from the 1950s seems childish and picky.
The same people were running the major universities during that period and they were the one's who put the policies in place. I was referring to a process that began after the Second World War and was functioning by the 1960s.
A rational adult who wasn't acting out some emotional vendetta wouldn't have attacked anyone if she didn't quite agree with the rough timeline. Likewise to say that I didn't refer to an "education gap" when I used the phrase "academic gap" in my first sentence looks petty, malicious, and ignorant.
I'm sorry I assumed that your descendants had enough intelligence and sensibility to find you unbearable. Maybe they just aren't telling you what they really think. In any case, I feel sorry for what they must have had to put up with, and doubly sorry for them if they didn't see you for what you are.
"ANGER"?
That's just more of your PROJECTION COMPLEX!
The hard, cold, facts I've been posting comes from personal experience, many books, old newspaper articles, family stories ( from many different generations ), and observation. None of which you bothered to either accept nor take on.
Outside of a very few extremely well known ELITE boarding and day schools ( though I doubt that you know the names of ANY of those ), without now doing a search, you could list more than 2 or 3 of the boarding schools who were and still, to some extent, but a much lesser one, "FEEDER SCHOOLS" to the most colleges.
Me? I can easily name dozens of them, in quite a few different east coast and yes, midwest states.
Hell...I doubt that you even know about the numerous public/quai-private schools, in NYC, which until relatively recently produced students with the same kinds of education that the most ELITE private schools once and to some extent still DO. And many of these same students, were once accepted by the IVIES and such, without having to take the SAT, but rather, their REGENTS EXAMS scores. LOL
Have you ever read Buckley's "MAN AND GOD AT YALE", or heard him talk about his student days there?
Your ego is bruised and you are posting irrationally, yet you are pushing your problems off as mine. Wake up and just face it...you don't know nor understand the topic you are so wound up about. One book...one lousy book and you imagine that you are an "authority"! LOL...as we used to say ( in boarding school "slang" ), way back when...:"HOW GALOSH!"
Stand Watie in drag?
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