I was thinking that Brooks as far as Scott represents him in this review doesn’t address potential cultural causes of the change in Ivy admissions. Space race and the Cold War seem very plausible!
It stands for Professional Managerial Class, as I recall.
That is, the class of people whose jobs fall into the general category of "administrative overhead". Middle managers, HR, PR, DIE, and so on. People who do not do object-level work or own the business (the latter are true capitalists, or in the case of government agencies politicians), but who give orders to the former and take orders from the latter and get paid for this.
The term "PMC" gets used a lot by people who don't like the Blue Tribe, because the power of the Blue Tribe comes in large part from the fact that these people lean *heavily* Blue and are *very*-well co-ordinated. If you try to oppose them from underneath, you get fired. If you try to oppose them from above, you *theoretically* can fire them, but there are several problems with that:
1) You get your information about what is going on *from* them, which means you'll see only what they want you to see (and their work is much harder to objectively check than that of people doing things "on the line")
2) If you don't have tight control of HR, the replacements will be just as bad
3) These are people who know everything about your operations, are well-coordinated, and are well-aligned ideologically with mainstream journalists, so you'll get a steady stream of leaks and horror stories hitting the press.
I wouldn't count that particular chicken until it's hatched. Also, note how hard Elon is having to work at it and that he's got a lot more room than usual to risk blowing up his own company as collateral damage due to literally being the richest private citizen in the world (he bought Twitter apparently-purely as a social project). But I did grant that it's *theoretically* possible.
A DevOps engineer is most definitely NOT PMC. You are conflating values (the "twitter engineer" vs the "engineer") with production and class role. I don't think your argument can stand.
Meh. I've met plenty who are. Their status depends more on their membership in the class than on their actual competence as programmers. Your argument has merit I think only if you have crossed your fingers behind your back and privately added "the highly competent ones, that is" as a footnote to the phrase "DevOps engineer."
Engineers are mostly underpaid relative to the value they bring. It can’t really be any other way on average because the owners won’t bother unless they can extract value from labor. The capitalist ideal is where everyone involved is still doing better than they would apart even though capital wins the most. But the alternative is worker-owners where not only is everyone better off together but also compensation is fairer and the marginal utility of that compensation is higher.
This isn’t actually the definition of professional managerial class. The PMC is basically just the same thing as what’s now known as more commonly as a “knowledge worker”. The original essay explicitly describes engineers, journalists, and teachers as members of the PMC. The idea as I understand it is that the PMC *should* be allied with the working class since they’re workers too but they are in fact mentally / spiritually / socially aligned with capitalists. There’s obviously a large overlap between the PMC and Brooks’s Bobos.
The essay itself is so steeped in 1970s cultural contexts and Marxist ideological frameworks that it's not incredibly easy to understand for a 30something layperson like me. For this reason, I also found this New Yorker interview with one of the authors helpful for understanding the context behind the piece and why she wrote it:
I find it really amusing how people keep rediscovering the same concepts. Any marxist worth its salt could have told you in 1922 about the petite bourgeoisie, the salaried white collar workers who embrace the ideals and esthetics of the bourgeoisie, without being part of it. It is actually interesting that after the higher paid parts of it merged with the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, etc...), the latter were pushed one step down the ladder and pauperized.
One of the wonderful things about Marxism is that when two classes are wanted, there are only two classes, (bourgeois and proletarians) but when you want more, there are as many as you want.
They are similar, but I think the idea is that the petite bourgeoise are chiefly self-employed / small business owners, whereas the PMC are chiefly a professionalized class of employees.
Correct. The PMC is corporate and government employees generally who despise small business owners and the rural poor, (can never connect with the truly disadvantaged) and pull in the urban poor for attack or defense - bodies between them and their enemies - for better or worse.
I think there's some merit in what you say, but it wasn't the space race per se, if we mean Project Apollo and such, it was nuclear weapons and the V-2, because those happened in 1945 and the Space Race got started later (and for that matter, a significant motivation in the Space Race was the fear of The Best And The Brightest that Soviet missile technology would surpass the USAF as a strategic threat multiplier).
It's no coincidence this was signed the year after Sputnik, but the fear of Sputnik wasn't fear that the Soviets would win civilian gold medals in space, plant the red flag on the Moon first, it was fear of Soviet missiles -- if they could put a dog into orbitt they could certainly land a 1Mt nuke on Miami -- and indeed the notorious "missile gap" helped JFK defeat Eisenhower's VP two years later.
The space race was valuable for academic science, but I think a larger, slightly earlier, and extremely similar event was also involved: the Baby Boom hitting college. My father was born just before the Depression's baby bust, and became a professor around 1957, and my reflections on his career showed the power of timing. Colleges were hit, first, with the GI Bill students, followed by the Baby Boomers. There were financed by the government, a booming economy, and a new trendiness of college education.
But the supply of new professors was very limited; you're not going to make a baby and turn it into a professor in much less than 26 years, so anyone who was a professor from 1946 to about 1975 was doing great. And given academia's tenure system, once you got established as a professor, you were generally protected from competition with newcomers.
All of this reversed in the 1980s, when the Baby Bust generation went to college and the Baby Boomers were trying to get professorial jobs. As one university said, "We don't lower wages any more out of humanitarian considerations." But the rise of part-time adjunct professors disconnected them from those considerations.
If Paul Fussell's book "Class" is in play (and it is a fun read!), the older "The Status Seekers" by Vance Packard must be considered. A lot of Paul Fussell's information came from "The Status Seekers." Paul's book is a more fun (and snarky!) read. Vance's book has more information.
I've noted, bought and sold several copies in the last 20 years. Finally, I built a database with topics like "television commercials are psycho-dramas," "television creates disinformation," and "written word is easier to test." When I'm reading Zamyatin or Orwell, I can cross-reference ideas. Definitely required reading for anyone interested in linguistics, I should think.
From briefly dipping into it, I just vaguely recall Fussell mocking unworthy targets [my grandparents] who covered their living room "suite" (pronounced suit) in plastic when not in use. (Admittedly, sitting on plastic is very uncomfortable.) My grandparents were not materialistic and yet valued their things*. Now of course no one makes fun of people for buying junky microfiber furniture and sending it to the landfill when they move, starting the process all over again ....
But in this vein I want to plug a forgotten 1955 book "The Tastemakers - the Shaping of Popular Taste" by Russell Lynes. It's equal-opportunity catty towards pretty much everyone, including all the betters of my grandparents. In a way, you want to resurrect the author and say, you thought the built landscape was ersatz and ridiculous then?! - well, behold what lay ahead! It is not a great book by any means, but is full of little details for people who are into looking at physical America as it used to be.
*I knew about my mother's beloved first '40s childhood home, which I've seen on a drive-by, still painted the then-customary white (sign neighborhood has not gentrified, presumably the reverse), bereft of landscaping apart from the stump of a tree, a snarly dog tethered out front. I once thought to ask my mother where my grandparents lived in the '30s, with my uncle, before she was born. "They didn't live anywhere" - mother and brother followed her father around the central US as he strung the phone lines.
Paul mocked ALL the classes. And had a few nice things to say about most of them, too, but the book was mostly making fun of categories of people. Again, fairly evenhandedly.
And then it appears that Paul go to the end of the book and realized that HE didn't want to have to fit into any of the class buckets he described, so he wrote a chapter on "Category X." I can't say that this what actually happened, but it looks like this would be a leading hypothesis :-)
In any event the lower middle class would be mocked for things such as buying nice couches and then covering them in plastic so they were unpleasant to use. The middle class would be mocked for going to endless 'classes' on self improvement or career advancement and the uppers would be mocked for never thinking anything new or original. Going from memory, the upper proles (skilled blue collar workers) got off pretty easily. Paul didn't think they had any taste, but he also thought that they were much more honest and authentic about who they were and spent a lot less time trying to climb the social ladder than, say, the middle and upper middle classes.
The Tastemakers sounds like a fun read. I'll try to find it.
You've made me curious about Category X, so I went to Wikipedia, which tells me that Xers drink wine, gin, and vodka without reference to label; and wear comfortable LL Bean or Lands' End clothing; are writers, musicians, creatives, unabombers, etc.
Not really, as Paul would describe them. Things change over time and class markers change, too :-)
I'll quote from the book:
"What kind of people are Xs? The old-fashioned term bohemians gives some idea; so does the term 'the talented.' Some Xs are intellectuals, but a lot are not: they are actors, musicians, artists, sports stars, 'celebrities,' well-to-do former hippies, confirmed residers abroad, and the more gifted journalists, those whose by-lines intelligent readers recognize with pleasant anticipation. X people can be describes as (to use C. Wright Mills's term) 'self-cultivated.' They tend to be self-employed, doing what social scientists call autonomous work. If, as Mills has said, the middle-class person is 'always somebody's man,' the X person is nobody', and his freedom from supervision is one of his most obvious characteristics. X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do, and they do it until they are finally carried out, 'retirement' being a concept meaningful only to hired personnel or wage slaves who despise their work. Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper-class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy."
Yeah. Fussell's Class X is just bohemians, or what we were calling "hipsters" 5-15 years ago. His cultural signifiers tend to borrow a lot from the northeast version in the time it was written, but the general idea of it is more recognizable in different times and places.
He sets them apart for praise and spares them the mocking tone in most of the book, which tells you something about where his sympathethies lie. This is reinforced by the period we went through where modern bohemians were relentless mocked to the point that the term "hipster" functions more as a pejorative than anything most people who fit the stereotype would see themselves in. It's not for lack of available material that he spared them. It's because he venerates their lifestyle preferences and attitudes.
Fussell clearly 'venerates their lifestyle preferences and attitudes' and, I think, also saw himself as a member of Category X rather than a member of the middle or upper-middle class. He didn't want to think of himself living in any of the class bins he was writing about.
But ... the book Class was published in 1983. The term "hipster" as we use it today seems to have entered the lexicon around 2000.
So Fussell would have needed material from the 1970s to make fun of these folks. Aaaand ... I think Fussell would likely have pulled out the "No True Category X" card as needed. The folks who behaved in ways that could be mocked were mere *posers* pretending to be Category X rather than the rather sad middle and upper-middle class folks they really were.
I'm oriented more towards the west coast than to the northeast, but I think of people such as Salli Raspberry:
as being 'true' Category X people. The actual "Whole Earth Catalog" crowd probably count, too. And one can mock these people, but making fun of the Mondo 2000 crowd is a whole lot easier and also more fun :-)
My experience of such people is that while they may not advertise it, there is usually some money - if not pedigree - behind them, however well-camouflaged; the Buddenbrooks dynamic holds ...
Townes Van Zandt, locally famous bohemian, springs to mind.
Interesting conjectures, but seems like an awful lot of curve-fitting. Many of the phenomena could equally well be attributed to Les Trente Glorieuses, and the post-WWII GI Bill, as well as leaded gasoline. It's all over-indexed.
I think Edwardoo is making an analogy to things like:
"Racism is real and huge, because African-Americans do poorly on IQ tests"
"Misogyny is real and huge, because women earn less money per year than men on average"
There are obvious alternate explanations for these phenomena (most obviously in the latter case, "women's relative valuation of money vs. stress, when considered statistically, tends more toward avoiding stress than men's").
It definitely was high-temperature, and if vorkosigan1 doesn't believe those "establishment narratives" then he's hardly making "an isolated demand for rigour", but there's some content there.
Yes, but it sounds like the parent comment was saying "this is wrong", and Edwardoo's contribution was "Yes, just like liberals are wrong". I don't think you can rescue this being a valuable contribution by arguing that liberals really are wrong about things.
Yes, it seems like it'll be very difficult to disentangle cause and effect too - maybe it's one guy changes the admissions policy and that changes everything, but then again, maybe instead it's that technology is gradually becoming more important to making money (you can see the largest firms in the stock market gradually change from oil and banking to tech), and intelligence is therefore more prized vs social skills like deal making. Or it could be that culture is shifting and there are more films about the nerd winning and that changes culture which leads to admissions policies changing. Especially the fact that it didn't take long for this change to get picked up by other elite schools suggests that it was a result of a change in culture rather than a driver of change in culture.
Interesting point. That said, oil and railroads and factories and whatnot were high tech in their day.
Banking also has transformed, and the business of banking, has less and less in common with the banks of yore, at least for money center banks and banks whose shares trade on The Big Board.
I note the GI Bill seems like a complementary cause rather than an alternative one - it massively changed the population who went to university, and thus the make-up of the upper-middle class
Is it? Can we not compare other societies (most obviously the UK) or did essentially every important nation on earth change how it’s gatekeeper colleges admitted people in the 60s?
"But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?"
I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years.
Sharecroppers don't care if the soil is depleted in 20 years. A family that has farmed the same land for 200 years is more likely to care.
This is very insightful. I had a vague feeling for quite some time, that a lot of the "things going wrong" seem to have something to do with more widespread short-term thinking.
Maybe it is not just about b), but other factors too with possible similar effects: More childlessness, less family cohesion, smaller families, more stress on individuality vs. community - basically all the other factors that many commentators bring up about the current generations.
Another factor I'd maybe add is "rootedness", except that apparently bottomed out a few decades ago and Americans move a bit less often now (though this seems less true of elites, who still usually move once for college and then to a third city post-college, if not more times than that). A lack of movement is usually regarded as a negative in terms of lower economic dynamism. But it can also mean that people are given to a more long-term view.
My wife's parents both live in the town they were born in, only a few counties over from where at least one known ancestor was among the earliest English settlers in the state, and I can tell they're a lot more invested in local issues than my family, which has been highly mobile for generations and also has shallower roots in North America.
But it seems it's not really a coincidence that the heart of the old establishment was the Northeast and not anywhere further west. I.e., the place where English settlement in North America had some of the deepest roots. These were people who never went far from where their ancestors first made landfall and consequently were highly invested in the same places and institutions, generation after generation.
"Not moving" is not the same thing as "rootedness". A person can live in a place and not have a lot of connection to it. Don't belong to any local organizations, don't know or care much about local politics (and vote based on national signifiers), don't know your neighbors, have most of your connections online. It seems to me that all the latter have increased even as people have moved less.
I think there is something to this, though I wonder how much you can isolate the effect of meritocracy here as opposed to the simple fact that as the world moves more quickly, it becomes harder to convince ourselves that it is even possible to create and maintain institutions whose form will last long enough for our children to inherit.
Another thought I had about the meritocracy debate point is how Brooks' thesis may intersect with the elite overproduction hypothesis. The old aristocracy created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites our country produced. Meritocracy flung the doors open. This is good insofar as it means that more competent people may replace the "arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting," but perhaps the resulting culture of intra-elite competition and resentment ends up undermining elite institutions in ways that negate those benefits.
If an aristocratic couple.have more than two children , that's elite over production in a sense. But it was understood that the third and fourth sons would have to become army officers.or clergymen,.so the element of resentment was.missing.
I don't have a citation at hand, but if I'm not misremembering or misinterpreting, this sounds similar to 18th-century arguments for government by landed aristocracy. That argument being that landowners (particularly the very wealthy ones) were highly invested in their country, and being the most invested had the greatest incentive to keep it stable and going. Democracies or even mercantile oligarchies, on the other hand, being dominated by classes with relatively little investment (or investments that were easily transportable), were much more likely to let things go to hell, to the bad of all, because they had relatively little to lose. Even monarchs, with a transnational interest, were untrustworthy because they could easily mix up their personal interests with the national interests if they weren't kept firmly in check by something like a parliament.
More generally, the 18th-century argument looks like it's aware of and groping toward a solution to the principal-agent problem. It imagines the aristocrats as the principal "investors" in the country, and argues that they ought to be running things directly, because if they delegate to an agent—a king, a democratic assembly, even a commission of very clever men who aced a set of examinations—they risk delegating to someone who is disincentivized to look out for their interests, and if you neglect the interests of the principal investors you run a much greater risk of crashing the investment vehicle (the country).
Those arguments had a point, there are a number of examples of monarchs with multiple crowns being very exploitative towards the 'lesser' ones.
I think that there's an error in assuming small landholders have 'less to lose' because their landholding is small, the fraction of the person's wealth is what matters; merchants, on the other hand, have definitely been known to cut their losses and run in situations where people whose wealth was primarily in the land stayed and fought instead.
Something that seems to start happening in the 18th C, and becomes common in the 19th C, is elite children insisting on marrying for love rather than as their parents wish. (This is most visible in royalty, eg the endlessly repeated story of Sissi.) Along with similar ideas like “doing what you love” rather than the family business.
One could argue that landed aristocracy and royalty did, in fact, work reasonably well right up until they were infected by these bobs ideas like marrying for love, at which point
- they did their job worse and
- they were no different in kind from everyone else, so why should they be treated differently?
Even when it's not a pure meritocracy (which never happens in the real world), the first generation nouveau riche haven't grown up in the long-term thinking-oriented culture and so don't have aristocratic mindset. They still have middle class sensibilities, which they'll pass onto their kids, along with the billions.
Meritocrats shouldn't have the aristocratic mindset, because they need to re-prove their credentials.with each generation. They may be worse.at preserving , but they are better at adapting.
To push back on this a little bit, it's true that first-generation nouveau riche don't grow up in an aristocratic culture. but it's hard to become nouveau riche without being longterm-thinking-oriented (sacrifice now to become rich later). So the SECOND-generation nouveau riche arguably often DO grow up in a longterm-thinking-oriented culture, at least to the extent they get culture from their parents, who would at least theoretically model their own values to their kids.
For better or worse, today's meritocrats don't have much attachment to any one place or activity.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the professional managerial class and its principal class adversary, the Local Gentry. Local Gentry are very much tied to a geographic location and a specific business, often inherited. That guy who, together with his brother, owns a successful chain of muffler shops in the Omaha region can't just up sticks and move his businesses to South Carolina, nor would he likely be successful if he sold everything and changed his business to electrical contracting.
More to the point, your children will have to pass the tests to join the ruling class, and regression to the mean means that often they have a lot less talent than you do.
Also, when your right to rule is justified by your alleged personal superiority to everyone else rather than a well-established practice of hereditary succession, any sign that you aren't really infallible becomes a reason to overthrow you, and hence it's harder to admit a policy isn't working and reverse course. If a medieval king invaded his neighbour, got beaten, and had to sign a peace treaty, this would be embarrassing, but it wouldn't threaten his or his dynasty's position; if Vladimir Putin loses in Ukraine and has to seek peace, the best-case scenario is that he gets forced into ignominious retirement, and the worst-case scenario is that he gets straight out assassinated.
This is (roughly) a point made by Tocqueville in Democracy in America: aristocracies have a longer time horizon than democracies. (Which, as usual with Tocqueville, he sees has having both positive & negative effects.)
You raise a crucial point, but I think your conclusion overlooks the fact that the aristocrats ARE in charge, and so can be expected to rejigger the meritocratic system as necessary to ensure that their children will be in charge as well. Brooks could make a fine sequel out of the effort to reintroduce the hereditary principle which the WASP aristocracy had and the meritocratic aristocracy originally lacked. (The bloat of the universities, for example, can be seen as a way to provide cognitive-elite positions for the dull-normal children of the previous generation of the cognitive elite.)
But this really isn’t true anymore. Wealthy and powerful people seem much more likely to be the first of their line to achieve their position than a few generations ago. I don’t think the notion that we’re just being ruled by new Rockefellers and DuPonts holds water. Familial turnover really is quite high in elites these days by historical standards.
One way to interpret the push for test optional / no test admissions to elite schools is that this is intended to protect slots in the elite from encroaching Asians and other non-elite competitors.
>old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.
This pretty much describes my mom's family: Exeter, Yale, and Princeton (which is where my parents met). My uncle still regularly attends Episcopalian church.
My dad got into Princeton on purely meritocratic grounds: he's from a working-class family of Polish immigrants. So you can say I'm a product of both admissions systems. There's definitely a big cultural divide among my relatives though. (And religious: my Dad's parents were shocked that he didn't marry a Catholic.)
Of course, I wasn't "well rounded" enough to get into Princeton when I applied. I still think I turned out alright though.
The new aristocracy, in my opinion, will likely be people who got in on bitcoin early.
Almost nobody wants to believe the dollar can fail. Lots of stupid people gambled huge amounts on “crypto.” Lots of intelligent people fell for Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum scam. To most supporters of the current aristocracy, and even many detractors - Bitcoin seems far too simple to be believable.
It's far too volatile on a short term basis for anyone except really confident, anti establishment people who are confident in their long-term prospects to buy into. Bitcoin is perfectly coded for a more meritocratically selected elite than “getting into the ivy leagues”, since all you have to do is buy some, and hold on while ignoring the old elites screaming at you they you’re an idiot. That takes a combination of confidence in yourself + distrust in the current elites + financial wherewithal to at least weather the storm.
I can't think of any group that's as confident about the future as bitcoiners, until you start getting into the territory of religions. Which is probably the right way to see bitcoin maximalism.
This, incidentally, is why bitcoin will fail eventually -- because society can't tolerate the idea that their new aristocracy is a bunch of unwashed geeks who happened to be interested in cryptocurrency in 2013 and were bull-headed enough not to sell in the following twenty years.
Society would rather tear itself apart than submit to the dictatorship of the crypto-nerd, I'm afraid.
Alternatively: while some form of cryptocurrency may be inevitable, why on earth should The Powers That Be choose Bitcoin to be that cryptocurrency? That's giving away money to all the wrong sorts of people (i.e., everyone who has supported Bitcoin so far). Instead, they could just start a new cryptocurrency and make Bitcoin illegal.
Why would the powers that be have any say in the matter? They are in the process of trashing the dollar, which underlies all their power. If the global south follows the lead of El Salvador and much of Africa, the powers that be can only watch as their empire melts.
This isn't a prediction of the immediate future, but of the long term. That's why I didn't specify any particular government or organization.
I think it's inevitable that at some point, a major world power will decide that some form of cryptocurrency would be useful for it's goals. (Unless the whole project turns out to be technically flawed.)
At that point, I think they will choose to create one of their own, rather than using Bitcoin. Why use a clunky prototype? Why reward all the then-current holders of Bitcoin, rather than being able to send that value to their own constituents and power sources?
Having chosen one of their own, why allow the competitors?
I don't think the Nigerian government remotely counts as a major world power.
I actually agree with your 2nd paragraph. But to me, the key word is "choose".
[Edit due to mobile interface glitch:] What I'm saying is that no will be allowed to make that choice. Hence the part about a sufficiently powerful government.
> They are in the process of trashing the dollar, which underlies all their power. If the global south follows the lead of El Salvador and much of Africa, the powers that be can only watch as their empire melts.
Inflation peaked at 9% annualized. Over the last year, the dollar has gained 6% on the Euro and even more on the Yuan. Inflation is expected to average 2.5% per year over the nexts 5 years.
In what sense is the dollar being "trashed"? And how is a year of 9% inflation supposed to cause an empire to "melt"?
From the treasury bond and TIPS bond markets - i.e. an almost ideal prediction aggregating the expertise of thousands of experts with significant skin in the game
What you mean here is "the regime said that inflation peaked at 9% annualized."
Lot of problems with that. One is that there's no reason to trust them to tell the truth. Two, lots of people might think it mean something like "The regime only debased the currency to the tune of 9%," which is terrible already and in fact understates the problem.
> One is that there's no reason to trust them to tell the truth
So, I've had conversations like this a number of times. The one time I got someone to actually provide concrete evidence, they gave three specific goods from receipts they had saved that showed price increases above the official inflation rate. However, when I checked the CPI subindices, they matched this person's lived experience, suggesting this person only disagreed with the weights the CPI uses. Shockingly, this person did not change their mind at all and gave literally zero reason to think the weights used in the CPI are biased. Given this experience, I'm extremely skeptical of people like you claiming the government is lying and inflation is dramatically higher than officially stated. Slightly higher? Maybe, there are a variety of methodological issues still being debated. But dramatically higher? Please give evidence.
You say it is "terrible already". According to what metric? The performance of the Federal Reserve in the last couple decades has been an enormous improvement over the previous several decades and are significantly better than most other central banks in the world. You mean terrible compared to perfection... sure, I agree. And? How is that either fair or useful?
Finally, except insofar as you are assuming (with no evidence) that the government is lying about inflation, in what sense is the problem being understated?
So, that recent SEC ruling that effectively said that Bitcoin was different from other cryptocoins, was not something I was expecting. Possibly the world is a little less grim than I'd thought. :-)
MODERATOR HAT ON: "lots of intelligent people fell for Vitalik's Ethereum scam" is a low-content, high-temperature comment - you're drive-by asserting a really controversial, potentially inflammatory thing and not backing it up. If you hated all crypto I would let it pass, because everyone knows the generic anti-crypto arguments by now. As it is I am officially chiding you.
MODERATOR HAT OFF: I still find this comment baffling. Bitcoin is up 10,000x and it hasn't produced anything like a new aristocracy. I can't think of any notable pure Bitcoin billionaires or multimillionaires besides Satoshi. Even though there have to be some, they've made so little imprint on the culture that even I, who pay attention to the tech social world, can't think of them. The only people from crypto who I think are even part of the tech aristocracy, let alone the general aristocracy, are Vitalik Buterin and maybe some of the Coinbase people, and maybe a few others I forget (and until recently SBF, RIP). And this is less because of their fortunes than because Vitalik, Balaji, etc seem intellectually interesting.
Even if Bitcoin went up another 10x, it would produce, what, another couple billionaires and another crop of multimillionaires. So what? That's like as many as Google has produced, and Google hasn't become a new US aristocracy. But even if it produced many many more billionaires, I don't think they would have the networkedness, clout, and intellectual reach necessary to become a new ruling class - again, even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.
I am thoroughly fascinated by this moderation input here. I’m sure that you are simply par for the course as far as your normal boundaries of moderation go, but that it’s over ethereum/crypto (or rather perhaps the imputed insult to someone who did/didn’t ‘fall’ for how ethereum is structured or what happened to it, or something along those lines, or the imputed insult to Vitalik) is what’s so very interesting.
I’ve been following the crypto collapse closely, but hadn’t followed the industry since I thought it left reality somewhere after bitcoin went over $1k. So I don’t know every jot, swerve, and history of the past ten years and only picked it back up in February.
I’m a jail cop who loves economics, but my circle doesn’t have many people in it who are into crypto as you may have guessed. Hence my curiosity and this question: if you feel it has to be moderated, I’m sure you’re right and that kind of thing is stirring up animosity, but is it that bad out in the Bay Area? Or maybe more among your readers/commentators?
The reason I even mentioned it is I could imagine saying something I think is obvious about any given topic, ….and then do to my ignorance about what people are sensitive about now, I am then warned/given the evil eye/permanent poor grade mark on my report card as a decent chap who doesn’t say nasty or insensitive things to strangers he’s having a conversation with.
I could see the line you are officially chiding as being a throwaway comment by the poster (I of course don’t know that it was), but yes I could see someone who is sensitive about that topic getting very up in arms and defensive if they’ve staked their life savings in assets that had recently lost a lost of value.
But compare it to what I’m sure most people on this forum would consider another throwaway line; ‘lots of otherwise intelligent people fell for that line in the Bible about Noah bringing two of every kind on the ark and seven of a few kinds’ and if I said it around half the people I know and am friends with, I would have a major controversy and have started half a dozen fights. I’d have to worry about my kids being allowed to play with other kids because their interpretation of that would lead them to think I don’t believe in the Bible and am on the slippery slope to atheism. (And about ten percent of the parents would think, ‘how many conversations that my ultra literal interpretive friends are going to insist on having do I now have to have with them?’)
I am of course not questioning/challenging your moderating or or the issue here at all. One of the reasons I like reading here is there is non-insulting engagement going on across many topics and I’m genuinely interested in following the conversations. It’s great! I’m also sure that it requires a decent amount of moderation, but whatever the exact philosophy is seems to be working.
That said, What if I am simply not plugged in enough to know that I’m insulting or considered baiting? Do I get a ‘Yokel pass’? ‘I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to sound dismissive about X action occurring in Y topic! I didn’t notice that trend because I only meet up with that crowd who would know that allowing my to figure it out through conversational osmosis once a year, twice if I’m super lucky! I have to be careful about how I phrase which elections were stolen and by whom at work for God’s sake! I just taught these people that there was more than one crypto currency a month ago!’
You get my point I’m sure. I want to take part in these conversations on occasion, but oy please be gentle as i sometimes possibly bring my own and sometimes other’s very different cultural outlooks in with me.
Also postscript I think you’re dead on about moderator-off comment on crypto not really changing the face of who the ruling class it. A few new entries, nothing other of real note any time soon.
I think we should all expect to stumble across norms we weren't aware of, or use words that imply things we didn't intend, fairly regularly as we interact with a broad community of internet folks.
Getting a warning (from a sane moderator, which I believe Scott to be) isn't so much a "permanent poor grade mark on your report card" as a way of making you aware of your mistake so that you can learn from it. If you repeat the mistake after being warned it may become a permanent poor grade mark.
Mild negative feedback is, in general, a *good* thing - it means you are learning new things, have a chance to improve, and the person giving you the feedback still has hope for a positive relationship with you.
I think it's in general easy to tell the difference between someone obliviously blundering over battle lines in a conflict they are unaware of and someone deliberately engaging in an ongoing political conflict.
And what exactly has happened to ethereum, apart from the general crypto crash which doesn't seem to have had affected it disproportionately? The eth/btc chart has been ~flat for over a year.
Perhaps that could be adopted as a specific warning: ‘you don’t appear to understand what you violated, but here is why I’m warning you. This is a Yokel Warning, level 1. You really didn’t know you stepped on toes.’ As opposed to a ‘level 5’ where you truly didn’t know you are wrong and there is ample, culturally wide, easily accessible evidence contradicting what you believe. ‘I truly didn’t know that slavery was bad and happened in this country and the holocaust wasn’t just made up!’ This Yokel warning comes with a ban that includes a list of evidentiary books, articles, and links to news that would convince any rational person that the thing being referenced is settled beyond all reasonable conversation.
“I don't think they would have the networkedness, clout, and intellectual reach necessary to become a new ruling class - again, even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.”
That sounds like it could have been written by a New York Times columnist playing defense for the Bluecheck crowd. It is not clear to me at all that the East Coast meritocrats have forever beaten the West Coast STEM nerds and their allies.
For instance, what if one of the tech elite (Elon?) pivots to use their wealth and social media platforms to authentically speak for flyover-land against East Coast meritocracy?
I don't see anywhere near the significant cultural difference between Silicon Valley STEM nerds and PMC managerial types that so many people here seem to.
In particular, I've seen vanishingly little evidence that tech types are any less convinced that their intellectual superiority to the rest of the population gives them a natural right to higher status.
The vast majority of Silicon Valley STEM types have *exactly* the same 'Blue Tribe' meritocratic political and cultural views and attitudes as their PMC counterparts. And the minority who don't--the 'Grey Tribe'--seem even *less* inclined toward populism or noblesse oblige, as shown by, e.g, their inclination toward right-libertarianism or their frequent emphasis on IQ as the greatest source of an individual's value.
I don't really where to put this, but, to my experience, crypto-fans are not techies. About 80% of my friends work in IT, and none of them has ever had any interest in crypto, even when they were required by their employers to work on that. Crypto-fans are mostly... normal people. I mean, SBF and his friends are not techies: they were junior traders and bankers, something quite far culturally removed from "techies", and quite into the "traditional elites" space. I do not see how crypto-fans can be an alternative elites, since they are not separate from the traditional elites.
I would agree that crypto-fans and tech are disjoint groups. But the one thing they have in common is that they both chafe against the institutional powers jealously guarded by East Coast bluecheck meritocrat wordcel elite.
I can see how this is different from saying 'all of crypto is a scam', and I can see why most people haven't internalized the argument that all of crypto _except for bitcoin_ is a scam.
Thank you for articulating a general principle i can abide by: it is wise to understand which arguments are known, even if not accepted, by the audience you are speaking to, and to have a reasonable model of anticipating what will be inflammatory by the standards of that specific community.
I think that this community is not _aware_ of bitcoin maximalist or the arguments made by bitcoin maximalists. I'll attempt to share that perspective here.
We believe that all of cryptocurrency is a scam, with the sole exception of bitcoin.
Fortunately there's even a new York times article about this perspective
Hopefully having the NYT describe the movement without saying we are racist doesn't wreck your trust in this movement as credible. If it will help, there are plenty of arguments by the NYT saying bitcoin is evil elsewhere.
Here's the key bit: “Bitcoin is decentralized, digitally scarce money. Everything else is centralized.”
Bitcoin was a breakthrough in theoretical computer science. Proof of work + longest chain solved the byzantine generals problem in a way that didn't require trusting in some set of third parties. I don't think most people have the technical background to really understand the details of this. That means they are left to evaluate arguments based upon their level of trust, which i think comes down simply to shared values.
They get hints of these values based upon the following properties that are unique to bitcoin.
Bitcoin has the following properties that no other coin does:
- no one in charge of it
- circulated in the wild for about a year with zero value
- no 'premine' where the founders kept coins for themselves
No other coin has these properties. Someone is in charge of all of them, which means they are all effectively centralized and subject to decision making by some central party. In the vast majority of cases, these pre-mines made the founders incredibly wealthy.
I'm more than happy to explain why Ethereum, in particular is a scam, in particular.
Ethereum has the following properties:
- It has been sold as decentralized, but there is clearly a group in charge.
- 71% of all Ethereum were created in a 'premine', which included 10% given to the ethereum foundation, and 60% given to intial investors in ethereum. This is THE SAME MODEL that every other ICO scam does: initial investors get most of the tokens, price goes up, they dump on bag-holders later. See details here:
- They used phrases like 'code is law.' Once the DAO hack happened, they decided that code _wasn't_ law, so they reached out to exchanges and said 'stop all trading on Ethereum'. This is making a promise and then breaking it. Code isn't law if the people in charge of ethereum can stop all trading in ethereum.
- The move to ethereum 2.0 and proof of work hinges on how secure proof of stake is. Vitalik argued that proof of work is secure, >>>>>so long as we re-define secure to not solve the single most important problem bitcoin solves<<<<
The experience of being in the field of distributed computing, deeply understanding distributed systems, and seeing what is happening here is frustrating because it's damn near impossible to communicate to outsiders how bad these lies are. They hinge on seemingly arcane technical details like what, precisely a 'security model' is.
If 0 is 'knowingly telling lies in order to raise money' and 1 is 'you honestly believe what you are saying to be true, but you've suborned your commitment to the truth to your desire to succeed in your project', i think ethereum is close to one.
If it's fair to call FTT, the FTX token with a huge preime and only 3% of the tokens actually circulating a scam, then i think it's also fair to call ETH a scam.
Sorry for not making this more clear earlier. I'll try to do better to say something like, 'there's a longer argument to be made here', and make it clear that I'm espousing beliefs that are not yet considered reasonable inside the community.
What a fantastic response to mod pushback. Thanks for the clearly articulated response, and for the education. I trend generally skeptical about crypto, but vaguely lumped ETH and BTC together as comparatively stable and trustworthy. I hadn't really thought about the fact that BTC is unusual in having no public leaders.
Thank you! Yes, the bitcoin community sees itself as fundamentally apart from the rest of “crypto”, which we see as a series of inferior copies of bitcoin made by people who don’t understand why bitcoin was a theoretical breakthrough, sold to unwitting people who don’t know the difference.
Solid argument for that part. However all bitcoin is a just a crypto token. You can create unlimited amount of these( well technically limited by computational and energy resources).
It does not have any fundamental value. And fundamentals even in 21st century. Even in pure AI future will still be same - space and energy. Aka land and resources. Plus power to exert actual control over them
Crypto secured distributed token on essentially unforgeable ledger
Is a great piece of technology. However its just that. And not even nearly as monumental as nuclear power. Or Internet. Or flight
Well, additional bitcoin is impossible to create in the same way that your home printer can't print American dollars.
People can make as many *new* cryptocurrencies as they want, but that has about as much effect on Bitcoin as your home-printed MaxDollars do on the US Dollar
Quite late here, but I think Monero mostly passes your criteria (not sure what the initial value was, but there was no premine and no central control), and it even has a clear use case and is actively used as a medium of exchange. It's an antisocial technology and will probably never be adopted as a store of value, but I'm comfortable saying it's not a scam.
The only way to make sense of this perspective is to put on the bitcoin maximalist perspective. It's far too difficult to share that perspective and argue for its validity, so i'll mostly focus on the former.
Bitcoin maximalists will think bitcoin is still in early stages until it is globally accepted by basically every investor that bitcoin is a better store of value than gold, and that fiat currencies are doomed to inflation forever. The gains that you are describing, we think are still likely to come. I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of al particpants lie. Bitcoin maximalists see bitcoin as a game theoretic black hole that eventually will suck in everyone.
This probably sounds crazy. So maybe it helps to mention Moloch here. Bitcoin maximalists think the dollar is currently being eaten by Moloch. Bitcoin maximalists think fiat money is Moloch money, and that sound money helps to keeps Moloch at bay by allowing Moloch to devour smaller systems before they get too big. Bitcoin Maximalists believe that fiat money has the effect of allowing corrupt systems to grow faster than non-corrupt systems, because growth can be sustained forever by getting closer to the money printer and convincing the money printer that you share its values.
Bitcoin Maxiamlists are betting that Moloch will eat the dollar system alive, as its participants all follow their incentives, which leads to the infinite creation of dollars, because printing more money is always better in the short term, but incurs some illegible long term cost and risk.
(Aside: Me, personally, i view trade networks as being distributed AGI's, and I view fiat money as an AGI figuring out how to wirehead itself. If I can do $10 worth of good, i can do $20 worth of good by printing another $10!)
Bitcoin maximalists believe that all fiat currencies will collapse in value, and the world will return to the kind of sound money system that dominate the world _before_ world war 1.
We think sound money was hated by governments (because it limited their power) and bankers (because it exposed them as lying when they printed receipts for gold in excess of the gold they actually held.) We think the transition into fiat money was done by a series of fraud and theft:
- Banks printed receipts for gold in excess of their reserves, because it was literally printing money. We consider this to be fraud, not too different from what SBF did.
- The instability of bank runs was a result of bankers telling lies (issuing receipts in excess of their true holdings). Given the choice between 'stop lying' and 'build a system to make the lie true by forcing everyone to play along with it', both politicians and big bankers chose the later. They conspired to form the federal reserve bank, to keep the game going.
- When world war 1 broke out (hello again, Moloch!) the UK issued bonds to fund the war, but investors said, no thanks. So the bank of England engaged in the first QE ever, printing money to cover 2/3 of the value of this bond. They lied about it for ~100 years, and it only recently came to lighit: https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-england-covered-up-war-bond-failure-in-1914-2017-8
Do you see why we think fiat money helps moloch? World war 1 would not have happened with honest money. It required banks lying, and working with mass media to tell lies.
- printing all that money put the bank of england at risk of being found out, so the bankers reached out to their american friends, who were more than happy to help print more money too, causing the boom of the 1920's and the, of course, eventually crash
- the crash was blamed on 'the gold standard' rather than the fact that everyone was lying about how much gold there actually was
- privately held gold was then stolen from citizens by Executive Order 6102, in order to 'mark the gold price to market'. If citizens could actually hold onto their gold, there would have been price discovery showing how bad the printed money had gotten.
- after world war 2 the US promised everyone at bretton woods they would back the dollar by gold, and then immediately started printing in excess of their reserves. The worlds was now on a 'gold standard' but it was only accessible to nation states, and the US was already lying about their reserve ratio.
- When nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971, he said this was 'temporary.' Why?
I grew up in history class being told that the gold standard was bad because it prevented banks from lowering interest rates to stave off depressions. But if that's true, why didn't we leave the gold standard until 1971? Why did nixon lie when we did it?
From our perspective, Every aspect of the dollar system produces incentives for its participants, and the short term incentives for elites are always to print more money. We have been betting hard on inflation for years. In 2018 when i tried to sell people at Google on bitcoin, a lot of people said, 'why are you worried about inflation?'
In 2020, I left Google, a giant profitable company, for snapchat, an unprofitable company. Yet my compensation doubled, and the comp was entirely liquid. Does that make ANY sense? To get paid twice as much to leave a profitable company for an unprofitable company, without taking on risk like, 'what if the company fails'?
From the bitcoin maximalist perspective, what SBF did has much more in common with the global financial system for the past ~100 years than it does with bitcoin. The aristocracy that i expect to rise won't happen until the following events that i expect:
- giant economic crash hits, probably in 2023, due to the fed raising rates faster than ever before despite more revolving debt than ever
- CBDC's are offered as the solution. "We need to keep rates high to fight inflation, but here's some free money so you don't riot, the only catch is that we monitor all your transactions and limit what you can spend it on to socially approved causes"
- people ditch the BidenBucks as quickly as they can ,for whatever goods they can resell on the black market for 'real dollars', and soon the price of the two diverges so bad that nobody is willing to pretend that CBDC's are worth the same as 'real dollars'
- inflation doesn't actually go away because the federal government has so much revolving debt, they'll need to print money to keep themselves solvent with interest rates at 5%
- thus the dollar keeps losing value over time, other fiat currencies get worse, and eventually foreign central banks follow El Salvador's lead in a bid to stabilize their currency
> even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.
It kind of has. Nobody in human history has ever had the kind of reach of Joe Rogan + Elon Musk. I think that trend will continue. I think we will see absolute chaos for a while, and the people that come out of that chaos doing well are going to to be people huge followings. If nothing except for bitcoin can hold value over time, bitcoiners will likely use their bitcoin to buy people's loyalty, just like what happened in Rome with the system of patronage.
It may be worth adding that if the 'bobo' thesis is true, it's not like the old elite _died_. They're still around, and the bush family still has power and influence. There are simply two elites jockeying for power with each other. Maybe a third comes in, and absorbs some of the old elite with more libertarian leanings. Like the winkelvoss twins, i expect to see the trend of 'bitcoin is money for libertarians and some republicans' get amplified, until eventually you have the GOP saying america needs to go on a bitcoin standard.
This is a wild ride you've got us all pegged for. I have zero technical expertise in this area and so won't dispute anything in particular you've said, but in my experience, predictions that require a precise chain of events like this usually don't come true.
Come back to this thread in a few years and let’s see how well it ages.
The piece that most people seem to be unable to grasp is that the dollar is likely to fail.
Ray Dalio, who runs the world’s largest hedge fund, foresees a similar chain of events but he thinks nation states will ban bitcoin.
From my perspective, I’m simply looking at something like a chessboard. There are only so many moves a central banker can make. Raising rates too high makes revolving debt too expensive. Lowering them too soon triggers inflation. Not lowering them soon enough triggers a crash. No reason to think it’s possible to somehow stick the landing.
> I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of al particpants lie. Bitcoin maximalists see bitcoin as a game theoretic black hole that eventually will suck in everyone.
[...] Bitcoin maximalists think fiat money is Moloch money,
This "black hole" metaphor makes it sounds like bitcoin is Moloch money rather than fiat...
Moloch is all about screwing people over by convincing them to act in their short term interest while igonring long term consequences.
Bitcoin tells people, 'just save for the future. Don't worry about anything else.'
Bitcoin enables freedom from oppressive regimes. It's used by people to safeguard themselves and their families in countries with dictatorships. Does that sound like moloch to you?
Bitcoin requires every user transacting with it to burn value in a tallest-trees competition for places in blocks, and every miner to continuously burn value in a tallest-trees competition to create blocks. Even if you think everything else is worse, this is very much Moloch.
(Moloch is about screwing people over by convincing them to act in their local interest, not (only) short-term interest, while ignoring negative global, not (only) long-term, consequences. It only becomes what you describe when Moloch has someone play the game against their past/future selves rather than other people.)
You are ignoring the lighting network and the enormous cost of maintaining fist money.
Bitcoin is far faster and cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the fiat networks., which need the US military to prop them up.
Meanwhile, bitcoin makes renewable energy more economically feasible by acting as a buyer with infinite demand below market price. The world’s oldest hydroelectric plant was brought back online because bitcoin mining made it it feasible.
Moloch makes politicians in every country play against their opponents to deliver value to voters now. If you create systemic risk by doing so… well… the other guy will, so what choice do you really have? This is why deficits kept going up every year.
Bitcoin is also WILDLY volatile; it's gone through several boom-and-bust cycles already. Don't you think that this volatility would have an impact on its use as a store of value? If you have $100,000 USD saved up in BTC, it might be worth $25k next year and $200k (inflation-adjusted!) five years from now.
Do you think its volatility is an intrinsic property of bitcoin?
My perspective is that it’s only volatile because it’s a tiny, tiny asset class with deeply inelastic supply. I expect that it will be less volatile as it’s market cap grows over time.
I was mainly remarking that 'getting sucked into a game theoretic black hole' sounds exactly like Moloch to me. I guess your point is that once everybody is sucked in we'll be in an awesome utopia thanks to the sound financial system (rather than some kind of dystopian hellspace which is the usual Molochian destination). I'm skeptical about this, but I was also skeptical that bitcoin would ever go past ~$0 initially, so it's not like I have any kind of track record to boast of here.
> Bitcoin maximalists believe that all fiat currencies will collapse in value, and the world will return to the kind of sound money system that dominate the world _before_ world war 1.
All of the following theorizing is severely undermined by the frequency and severity of panics in this time period in contrast to what has happened since, as well as by observing the political situation in Europe (there was a lot more that caused WWI than banking).
Money generally serves 3 purposes: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a standard measure of price. Anything which can vary wildly in price is obviously not reliable for any of these purposes: If you store it, you might lose everything; if you try to exchange it or compare prices, then what you can exchange it for won't be reliable. So far, bitcoins has this extreme volatility in spades.
More fundamentally, I don't think the problems that BTC fixes were very large, and the way it does so is very costly. Most transactions don't require you to be able to verify the entire history of the currency from both parties; I can be fairly confident that most of my business is not performed with stolen money. The cost to the economy of theft is much lower than the energy cost of mining bitcoin. It's certainly an innovative CS solution to the question of "how do you ensure that exchanges are legitimate?" But social trust and basic policing accomplishes the same thing for much cheaper.
The instability was due to bankers lying about their deposits. They’d issue far more reciepts than they had. This is lying.
The gold standard doesn’t work, for that reason. It’s impossible to tell if the banks are “pulling a Sam Bankman Fried” and gambling with customer deposits. It’s far too hard to call BS on a bank that’s lying because taking custody of gold is costly and expensive.
Bitcoin fixes this by making it much easier to verify a bank’s assets and for people calling BS to take custody of their assets directly.
Bitcoin’s volatility is just a function of it being new and tiny. You can see it’s gone done over time. I think it’s intellectually honest, when considering the volatility to also consider that it’s almost entirely ~upside~ volatility.
You are ignoring the main benefit of bitcoin: can’t be inflated away. If you think “theft” is the problem is solves, you might consider doing more research.
There was a lot more to 19th century recessions than just bankers lying. Anyone finding a new deposit of gold or silver would cause problems. If there had been a sufficiently large change in the supply of either when the gold-standard and silver-standard parts of the world depended on France to keep them in balance, then international trade would have become vastly more difficult. High volatility in a currency is absolutely horrible; there is no "good" or "upside" volatility in this context. Bitcoin rising in price is good for early investors; similarly, hyperinflation is good for people who owe money denominated in the inflated currency, but it's overall bad for the economy. Deflation--which is what inevitably will happen if the amount of the currency is capped but its use, and therefore demand, increases--is very very bad.
"You are ignoring the main benefit of bitcoin: can’t be inflated away. If you think “theft” is the problem is solves, you might consider doing more research."
Ensuring that transactions are happening with legitimate money is a real thing that a bitcoin-like system could theoretically do. In contrast, "cap the money supply at X" is a solution to inflation the same way that a leaky pipe in your house can be solved by blowing the house up. If this is really the goal of bitcoin, then in my mind it has gone from "interesting and novel but overhyped" to "all-time bad ideas in economics."
There are no “bitcoin mines” to be discovered, so we don’t have to worry about that. Bubbles come from huge sudden bursts in supply, which do not exist in bitcoin.
Deflation is only bad if you think the credit-induced bubbles are good. If economic activity gets to an unsustainable pitch, what do you think should happen? The current systems says, “keep the game going at all costs regardless of how unsustainable it is!”
I left a job at Google for one at Snapchat, and doubled my compensation while taking on zero risk. Why should I earn more money leaving an deeply profitable company for one that’s burning cash? How does they make sense?
> I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of all participants lie.
The total wealth of all the world's bitcoin maximalists, or even bitcoin highly-enthusiasts, is way less than $21 trillion. Therefore, in order for bitcoin to hit $1,000,000, someone who isn't a bitcoin maximalist/enthusiast/whatever will have to part with one million actual US dollars to buy one bitcoin. That person, really a whole lot of people like that, is a necessary participant in the system.
How is it in *their* interest for the price of bitcoin to be $1E6? I have a million dollars. Hypothetically, I want to buy bitcoin. Why would I want my money to buy one bitcoin when it could buy ten or a hundred? There are scenarios where I am *indifferent* to the dollar value of a bitcoin, but I'm not seeing one where it would be in my hypothetical interest for my megabuck to buy me one bitcoin instead of ten,
You're arguing in circles. You claim the market price of bitcoin will be one million dollars, and when asked why you say because everybody will want to buy and sell bitcoins for one million dollars. When asked why they'll want to do that (obvious for the sellers, not so much the buyers), your answer is "suppose that's the market price of bitcoin"?
For my part, I suppose that the market price of bitcoin *isn't* one million dollars, and I don't see enough people wanting to change that to matter.
The easiest way to answer this question is to turn it around.
Why do you think the price is $16,000 today, instead of zero?
Could you argue reasons that this might happen to someone in 2012 with only evidence available then? Back then the highest bitcoin had ever gotten was $30 during a crazy bubble in summer 2011. At mid 2012, it was hovering around $10. Why would it possibly go up to some absurd number like $10,000?
I agree the future of the current monetary system looks pretty bleak and uncertain, I also hadn't really considered that blockchain creates a whole new game-board for game-theoretic games to play out on (nut sure how how to judge how significant that will turn out to be, not very is my first guess).
But isn't the dollar ultimately backed by the US military (petro dollar, reserve currency etc.)? wouldn't it require the US state to lose the monopoly on violence for the dollar to collapse?
Also what about states that just don't have much patience for these money games. I could easily see China just taking direct command of the economy if the monetary system failed, they've already cracked down on bitcoin.
I also think bitcoin creating a stable economy after the collapse (or ever) seems pretty unlikely, more likely you'd just get anarchy or the great depression x100.
And come on, no way bitcoin is anti-Moloch, that's just silly.
>wouldn't it require the US state to lose the monopoly on violence for the dollar to collapse?
You can't use violence to convince people to accept something that doesn't hold its value.
Your battleships mean nothing to people who are determined not to starve or lose everything they have.
> Could easily see China just taking direct command of the economy if the monetary system failed, they've already cracked down on bitcoin.
China's government is more authoritarian and competent than America. They already have the great firewall. Yet _even they_ haven't been able to stop bitcoin mining in china! If China can't stop mining, and republican politicians are already coming out as pro bitcoin, what chances does America have to stop bitcoin transactions?
> also think bitcoin creating a stable economy after the collapse (or ever) seems pretty unlikely, more likely you'd just get anarchy or the great depression x100.
The way i think this will play out is small local groups will use federated chaumian mints to issue local currencies. In red areas, these will be backed by bitcoin. Blue areas will go bankrupt before realizing they can't run forever without a functioning federal government, and the federal government won't be able to keep functioning without depending on seignorage.
Local governments that successfully maintain law and order will become way way more powerful, and the federal government will become increasingly irrelevant. They've already stopped enforcing the border as well as drug prohibition, basically because the incentives for people to break these laws vastly outweigh the cost of enforcing them. I think more things will move in that direction, and the feds will resort to taxing cities and states _directly_, rather than trying to tax an increasingly resentful and technology savvy population.
Not in America, because we are politically stable and have a sound financial system. But in Lebanon and Nigeria, this is totally a thing. People in lebanon hold up banks to get their own money out.
I wouldn't say the dollar is backed by the military, so much as it's backed by three connected factors: (1) the enormous size of the US economy, which makes US citizens pretty well off, especially compared to the rest of the world, and which also makes the US market highly attractive for many foreign firms, (2) the enormous slice of US production (25% of GDP) that citizens are willing to allow to be siphoned off by the Federal government as taxes, meaning basically 25 cents of every $1 that changes hands domestically passes through government possession in the form of taxes, and (3) that you can only pay taxes in dollars.
The combination of (2) and (3) mean there is intrinsically and always a huge demand for dollars inside the US economy, come hell or high water, because 1/4 of the economic activity simply *must* be transacted in dollars. What (1) adds is the fact that a great deal of word economic activity also ends up being transacted in dollars, because people want to sell into the world's biggest market, and the people in the world's largest market have a strong need for dollars (to pay their taxes).
I mean, imagine Amazon all of a sudden would only take payment in BTC, and then suppose for some strange reason a law is passed saying you can *only* buy toilet paper and soap from Amazon. Imagine the sustained and permanent demand for BTC! That's basically the shtick the Federal Government has set up.
Yeah, the MMT people say taxes are how currencies get established in the first place, and drives demand for the currency etc., that seems correct.
I'm not sure you can say the size of the US economy drives demand for dollars though, since the size of the economy (compared to other national economies) is measured in dollars in the first place. Basically "the US economy is bigger than other national economies" means US products /services have a higher dollar value, i.e. they exchange for a lot of dollars on international markets, so can trade against a lot of goods/services from non-dollar economies.
If the value of the dollar fell the US economy wouldn't be as big anymore, I think that's basically how international exchange works, definitely the relative GDP would go down, so "the size of the US economy drives demand for dollars" seems circular (unless you measure the size of economies in population or something, but the US isn't especially big by those measures).
Well, I would say *your* argument is circular. I'm saying the dollar is held up by the size of the American economy -- all the goods and services traded within it, something which is measureable without referring to dollars[1] -- and you're saying "well but if the dollar went to zero all those goods and services would be valued at $0."
I mean, that's technically true, but how does that happen? If the value of the dollar is derived from the size of the real economy, how does it go to zero unless the economy itself implodes? Generally speaking, the values of currencies are derived from the size and health of the economy, and not the other way around. It feels to me like you're mistaking price for value, and overlooking the fact that the former is derived from the latter, and not vice versa.
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[1] You touch on this in your comment about measuring economies by population, but what you miss is that you can measure economic activity independent of population -- and independent of dolllars. Population certainly matters, but it's population times economic productivity, roughly, that you can measure. I can determine how many man-hours it takes to plant and harvest a bushel of wheat, or smelt a ton of iron, or synthesize 100g of amoxicillin, and I can measure how man-hours are going into those things.
> (1) the enormous size of the US economy, which makes US citizens pretty well off, especially compared to the rest of the world,
How much of this prosperity is due to us producing lots of useful goods and services, and how much is because we're the global reserve currency, so we have been able to borrow really cheaply for decades to fund an unsustainable system?
> because 1/4 of the economic activity simply *must* be transacted in dollars.
Why?
What stops people from doing underground transactions, especially if they can avoid paying taxes? If the dollar keeps losing value, bitcoin keeps getting more stable over time, and governments try to phase our cash for their surveillance money CBDC, what's to stop the "organized retail crime" rings from fencing their stolen goods for satoshis instead of central bank surveilance money?
My friend did work in entrepeneurial for a while. He told me that with business deals, he'd be asked about "how much coffee, how much cream". A typical deal was 80% coffee, 20% cream, which means 'how much of the money is taxable'. What would stop that from happening here?
It's my belief that this is already happening, as the labor force participation rate dropping indicates. I doubt these people aren't working; my guess is that more people are working under the table for cash because you get paid more AND you don't have to pay taxes.
> That's basically the shtick the Federal Government has set up.
People actually _want_ toilet paper.
What exactly is the fed selling? Protection, but from whom? China? People don't pay any more taxes than they have to. Once people start to earn money without paying taxes on that income, why would they ever go back?
*All* of the prosperity is due to people selling goods and services to willing buyers. How else? I certainly agree an artificially low cost of capital leads to foolish investments and economic inefficiencies -- which is reflected in crappy real economic growth -- but I don't see how it leads to fake prosperity. How would that work, exactly?
What stops most people from working off the books is the forest of laws that prohibit and punish it. Yes, I can hire an illegal to cut down a tree and pay him $500 in cash, and that works -- for a guy on the economic fringe, who is just scraping by. People in the illegal drug business can also earn fabulous sums, for a time usually much shorter than they think, by taking huge risks. Retirees can earn pin money babysitting, or tween selling lemonade, and nobody reports expense or income to the IRS.
But it doesn't work for most regular people who need regular-sized incomes and income security, and who aren't willing to risk committing crimes that can send you to pokey for a decade. A business with even modest revenue will file a tax return because otherwise the IRS comes knocking, and you can easily be put in jail for tax evasion and even longer for keeping two sets of books. Naturally the business wants to pay the least possible taxes, so they're going to deduct all the employee salaries from their gross revenues -- which means they're going to issue W-2s. And now the IRS knows about the money the employees make.
That doesn't mean it's not possible for the black market (in jobs and goods) from exceeding the size of the open market, it certainly is, but that represents an economy on the ropes, a citizenry at war with their own government, and it can only generally happen when the citizens can't change the government peacefully -- you don't have a democracy. I'm not saying the United States *can't* become a dictatorship with its economy in ruin -- but then if that does happen, I don't see the Internet working smoothly enough to enable blockhain transactions easily, and I particularly don't see that dictatorship being fine with a giant chunk of real wealth locked up in private hands that are within their physical reach.
What the Federal government these days is selling is largely income security. Socal Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and ACA spending, the EITC and various other Federal income assistance programs all together add up to about 57% of spending. An additional 13% goes to defense, 7% to interest on the debt, 7% to retirement benefits for Federal workers, 3% on education, and the rest is noise. In short, the Federal government is in the business of transferring enormous amounts of money from citizens who produce more than they consume to citizens who consume more than they produce.
Why the citizens as whole continue to vote to support this enormous interfering superstructure I have no good idea, except for Juvenal's acidic observation about bread and circuses, but as long as we live in a republic where the ants can outvote the grasshoppers, this is what we will have, and it has enormous power.
At some point the consensus breaks and everyone wants out, preferably before the coin loses all value. Or alternatively , it slowly declines into irrelevance while bleeding % every month.
This seems to contradict current evidence. The Fed is raising interest rates right now, as it has at many points in history, while you're predicting that every political interest would race to debase the currency as quickly as possible. Surely if that were true it would have played out that way? For that matter if these systems are so unstable, why have they persisted through so many of the most economically successful first world countries in human history?
“As quickly as possible” is always constrained by political reality. Nixon lied when he took America off the gold standard in 1971. Why did he do that, instead of saying, “good news everyone, we all know the gold standard is bullshit so now we can just stop pretending.”
As for “why have these systems persisted?” Any historical timeframe of less than 100 years is something I consider to be short term. It’s barely encompassing a single generation!
Viewed through this lens, it seems strange to pin one's hopes on a cryptocurrency created in 2008/09, which in turn relies on a scaffolding (the internet) that didn't exist in any form in 1950 and not in the form recognizable today until the 90s or so.
I'm one of those who believes the intrinsic value of crypto is zero, but one of the least critical things I can say about it is that its real-world application has not been road-tested for any of the scenarios for which it is supposed to hold the greatest promise.
This is a first world perspective. Bitcoin has already been used by people to preserve their wealth from oppressive regimes in Lebanon, Venezuela, Nigeria and Belarus.
I'm certainly not one to say that politicians should lie, but "populists are weirdly enamored with gold" seems like a rather simple explanation for why someone might lie. If merely telling people that the gold standard is known to bullshit worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation!
Your implied explanation is also possible, but this is very far from a knock-down argument.
In other words, whether the reality is "hard money limits the state's ability to steal from the people and is therefore good" or "hard money limits the state's ability to mitigate the disastrous effects of recessions and is therefore bad", you should expect a politician to lie about moving away from hard money because:
- the people who want to move away are happy with the reality
- the people who are unhappy with the change can be somewhat satisfied with the lie
i would imagine we should see this dynamic play out all over the place.... when there's a tricky, complex reality, expect politicians to ~practically~ select one side of a tradeoff, while rhetorically claiming that they are selecting the other side, as a way of satisfying as man people as possible
Not only your chain of future events is highly speculative, but frankly I do not accept even the previous, past steps. There isn't and there has not been any consensus on the idea that fractional reserve and fiat money are "a fraud".
Sure, that sequence of events is so specific that it’s unlikely to play out.
The broader, simpler prediction is that fiat money will lose its value because there is no inherent limit to its supply, and creating more of it satisfies immediate demands while posing only illegible risks for some unspecified future.
There WAS consensus that pure fiat money was a fraud but this consensus was eliminated around a hundred years ago with the rise of progressivism and a resulting state/academic alliance.
IMO, the bitcoin price is a function of two distinct groups. Bitcoin maximalists buy at any price, but they buy more when it’s recently crashed, like now. Some will not sell as a matter of principle, as they seem themselves as engaged in a Jihad against the status quo. Others will sell when the price gets “too high”, based on long term trends. I think this group is tiny and has the effect of putting a long term price floor on bitcoin . That floor rises over time as this group grows in size, and as halvenings reduce new supply of bitcoin. These people love it when bitcoin’s price drops because it means they can buy more cheaply. Again, this group is tiny.
The second group is “cryptocurrency speculators” who buy when the price is rising and sell when they think it’s low. This second group causes huge blowups and drawdowns, as these buyers aren’t sold on bitcoin as the future and are hoping to profit in dollars. These people a panic when bitcoin’s price drops.
The key dynamic that confuses everyone here is that bitcoin’s fixed total supply and decaying issuance schedule means that over time, coins migrate towards the true believers and mostly stay there. More true believers are born slowly, both every crash that doesn’t destroy bitcoin, and with people going down the rabbit hole that starts with “what is money” and ends with people realize that dollars have effectively unlimited supply and are likely to follow the path of every other form of unbacked, pure fist money in history.
You can find evidence for this theory looking at metrics like “coin data destroyed.” Lots of bitcoin haven’t moved in a year, which means that they are held by long term holders.
Ask yourself: what evidence has a true believer seem to make them doubt? What evidence have they seem to convince them their theory is right?
The use bitcoins have is in storing value over long periods of time.
The fact that bitcoins aren't moving is evidence that they are doing what the design intended to: acting as a store of value that can't be corrupted by theft or inflation.
But Bitcoin value so far goes down with inflation, and in the end will be deflationary by design. I am still not sure that in the long term it will turn out as you say.
No, bitcoin's value has not gone down with inflation. This is confusion.
Bitcoin's value went down, along with stocks, as cheap money went away. Inflation is tiny, just 10% a year. Stocks and bitcoin aren't falling 'because of inflation'. They are falling because the fed is raising rates, and raising rates cuts off the flow of money creation, which has the effect of reducing the number of speculative buyers.
So the price of bitcoin falling isn't people like me losing faith. It's miners selling at the rate they mine coins, and wave of new buyers drying. The reason the price isn't falling to zero is that there are some people who are happy to buy bitcoin at any price.
Honestly, if you think BTC can become the de facto currency of almost everybody *and yet* almost everybody will allow the first movers to become trillionaires because, welp, they got there first and fair's fair -- you haven't really thought through the nature of a republic and the nature of human beings.
If BTC ever *were* to become that important, you can be 100% sure The People will expropriate the wealth of anyone who happens to have gotten in so early his stake represents a massive share of the new currency. Certainly that expropriation will be swathed in a lot of noble talk about the good of the many, for what that's worth.
Here’s what I see happening: as fiat currencies fail with increasingly bad inflation, large scale holders will buy local political support with bitcoin. I expect lots of bitcoin donations to local police officer pension funds, for example.
So, suppose you have a bitcoin baron who has kept the local providers of law and order fed and paid. Say it’s the winkelvoss twins.
Who is going to take their bitcoin and how do they do that?
Carl, thank you for saying this. I've been thinking this for years but never run into anyone who agreed. Clearly I haven't been talking with the right people.
(Mark, I'm sorry that this will ping you. I don't want to pile on any more than I already have.)
Honestly, an even simpler solution would be to just copy the code, make a new crypto called PeoplesRepublicOfCrapistanCoin or whatever, and declare that the new currency. Money has value as long as people believe that it does; nothing would force them to use BTC specifically.
But even if that happened, why would anyone switch to a system that leaves them penniless while creating a handful of trillionaires. Even going back to the barter system sounds better than that.
Bitcoin incentives people to buy it because it can’t be faked. People still trust the dollar to hold value over long periods of time. That trust is eroding.
Individuals will choose to adopt bitcoin privately, to protect themselves from inflation.
Your argument is interesting, but I don't see why we should expect the number of bitcoin maximalists to experience net growth over time.
Gold is a similar asset to bitcoin: restricted supply, with antigovernment gold enthusiast investors ("goldbugs") who sing its praises. Goldbugs have lost mindshare over the past 10-20 years in my estimation. I remember seeing more goldbug libertarian memes when I was younger. The S&P 500 has been outperforming gold over the past 10 years, at least.
Like gold, BTC is not a wealth-producing asset.
2008 produced cynicism about the mainstream financial system. FTX collapse etc. will tar the reputation of a crypto alternative. Outsiders either don't understand the "not your keys not your coin" point, or else don't trust themselves to manage their keys securely / can't be bothered to deal with the hassle. DeFi will continue appealing to a niche audience, similar to gold.
IMO most price action is/will be driven by whales and institutions. Even if bitcoin maximalism as an ideology gains adherents, that may not matter, if whales & institutions are what control the supply and demand curves.
My general impression is that bitcoin pretends to be a hedge but in reality most price movements are driven by social media hype. That makes it a bad safe haven asset. Gold seems better in this regard.
I also think bitcoin has a decent chance of being displaced by a different coin that's technologically superior.
Try comparing stock market growth to the money supply growth.
There is going to be a monetary schelling point. If all fiat currencies are losing value to inflation and run by nation states that want to spy on everyone and censor their oppositions, bitcoin is your out.
A bitcoin, you actually own. Everything else is a piece of paper with your name on it, dependent on the good graces of a nation state to let you have what’s yours.
Perhaps you trust your political leaders not to scree you. This is a decreasingly popular opinion.
"Almost nobody wants to believe the dollar can fail."
Actually, a lot of people are aware that the dollar can fail; they've seen a lot of other currencies fail. But as a friend of mine said, "The US has been on a roll for 300 years and it's not likely to end any time soon." And as long as the US government demands taxes paid in dollars, there will be a market for them.
Isn't it the case that a bitcoin standard would make life worse for everyone but the rich? Economic activity would slow down as everyone hoards rather than spend or invest. Unprecedented inequality, with most people being slaves to an untouchable elite. A significant fraction of the world's energy output burned for proof of work.
If you're not a big holder, a bitcoin future is not in your self-interest. But if you think it's game-theoretically inevitable, you can make your future slightly less terrible by buying bitcoin now, thereby accelerating the slide down to hell.
Do you disagree and claim that a bitcoin future would actually make most people better off than they are now? Or do you believe that it will indeed make most people worse off, but it's inevitable anyway because people won't be able to coordinate to avoid it?
Yes, I disagree. I think hard money works far harder for everyday people because they can just spend less than they earn and save reliably, rather than being forced to participate in a complex system of politics that nobody understands and is controlled by the elites, ie modern financial markets.
The 19th century had mostly gold as money, and exhibited more growth on average than the 20th century.
Right now, with fiat money, elites can borrow against their stocks, at low interest rates. Concentration of wealth is therefore way worse under printed money, as the value of assets just grows indefinitely.
You say "concentration of wealth is therefore way worse under printed money, as the value of assets just grows indefinitely". My reading is that you're implicitly claiming that printed money is a primary cause of assets growing indefinitely (which I interpret as "existing in a regime of net asset appreciation across the whole economy rather than net asset depreciation") - this I disagree with - and that concentration of wealth is a consequence of net asset appreciation - this I agree with.
To provide a quick counterexample, there was a lot of concentration of wealth during the time leading up to the Great Depression, which was only really solved with abandonment of the gold standard, among other government interventions. I think the standard narrative is that the Great Depression couldn't really have been solved without eliminating the gold standard (or I suppose with some modern ideas like a wealth tax and/or universal basic income that have more or less the same impact). Certainly, this seems to argue against the idea that the gold standard protected against concentration of wealth.
My explanation for why hard money doesn't solve concentration of wealth goes back to Thomas Piketty's explanation for concentration of wealth: when the rate of growth of investments is greater than the rate of economic growth, then concentration of wealth necesarily results. Hard money doesn't really solve that, since people can still make leveraged investments, do high-frequency trading, etc., to invest in the stock market but grow faster than the market as a whole (and the stock market as a whole should grow about as fast as the economy in the long term, unless something funny and temporary is happening like decreasing dividends). As Piketty points out, these methods tend to work better for people who have a larger fortune to begin with, since things like leveraged investment funds and high-frequency trading houses themselves have upkeep costs, and people who are already rich get better economies of scale on them.
So I don't think fiat money is the primary cause of concentration of wealth. It might contribute to it, but at some point someone still has to come up with a better long-term way of managing concentration of wealth, so moving back to hard money doesn't seem to have an advantage in that respect.
(I have an implicit assumption that economic growth will continue in the long term, which I won't address because it seems pretty safe.)
I dunno, I think in order to become an aristocracy, the group needs to win CONSISTENTLY, not just win big one time. Early crypto folks seem to mostly be contrarian libertarians whose worldview allowed them to spot an opportunity when others were indifferent to it. If crypto had never happened, I don't see much of a chance they would have ended up vastly wealthy.
That just means that nerds that bought $100 worth of Bitcoin in 2010 and HODLd it are the new aristocrats. These seem to be related to the WSB "apes" that pumped GameStop to the moon.
I read "Bobos in Paradise" probably about 15 years ago. It's an interesting book with some good ideas, particularly in the first section, as you've noted.
The discussion about how the modern elite is just as money-grubbing as the old one, but pretends not to be, matches my observations here in Silicon Valley, where everyone talks about how they "innovate" all the time, as if innovation were inherently a good thing regardless of what you're actually doing. Me, I just work here. I don't sit around thinking about whether the software I'm developing now is "innovative" or just a sensible application of established principles to solve a problem. The constant pretensions of Silicon Valley to being meaningful or cultured (an absurdity, since most people around here don't read anything but technical books and bad science fiction) have annoyed me for a long time. I'll be glad to retire somewhere in the next decade and never have to deal with it again.
Newton was at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, before the cult of Progress asserted itself. The traditional mindset is that the past was wise and glorious, and every new generation is lesser than the previous one. Aristotle was considered to be on the cutting edge of knowledge about the world 1500 years after his death!
"The discussion about how the modern elite is just as money-grubbing as the old one, but pretends not to be, matches my observations here in Silicon Valley, where everyone talks about how they 'innovate' all the time, as if innovation were inherently a good thing regardless of what you're actually doing. Me, I just work here. I don't sit around thinking about whether the software I'm developing now is 'innovative' or just a sensible application of established principles to solve a problem."
I think there are a lot of us in Silicon Valley who "just work here." I'm willing to be innovative if that is what it takes to solve my problem, but it an old/understood technology or solution gets the job done that is what I'm going to use. This isn't *terribly* unusual, but also doesn't give the folks who do this much to blog about. So the chatter is from the folks being innovative, even if they shouldn't be.
The lower classes often try to ape the behavior of the upper classes, with disastrous results. Another good example of this is the Bobo "free love" approach. While elites could have sex and get contraception and abortions easily, the sexual revolution actually hurt the working class and is responsible for the massive uptick in single parenthood starting from the 1960s.
And while elites say one doesn't need to get married, most college-educated people will eventually get married. It's the ones that are trying to copy them that suffer.
Murray's thesis isn't that the upper class/high IQ set engage in free love and then get abortions or whatever, it's that they preach free love / find your own bliss kinds of hippie values in public, but live and raise their kids according to something a lot more like traditional WASP values. One wife, kids leaned on hard to study and do well in school, well-maintained home(s), strong work ethic, etc.
Why should we assume this is based on the plebs copying the elites? Sex feels good, technology facilitated easier access to it (cars) and less penalties (abortion, contraception). Plebs do all sorts of self destructive hedonic stuff (fentanyl, fast food) without elites modeling it for them.
It's an attractive argument for social conservatives elites because it lets them blame major social problems on their peers not following social conservative norms, but there are much simpler explanations.
Agreed. I'd argue that part of the dry fuel that enabled the Sexual Revolution was penicillin. Syphilis was the AIDS of its time, except worse: there was no real reliable test for it, it took as long as thirty years to kill the sufferer, and it spread more easily than HIV does. When cheap penicillin killed syphilis dead, chastity wasn't quite as valuable anymore.
It can also be argued that some of the purity movement in the 1990s and 2000s was a result of the spread of HIV; imagine what might have happened if there was no reliable test or treatment for the disease...
I think the sophisticated argument is that "middle class morality" elites used to push the message that you should resist temptation. But that since the sixties, the public message of the elites has been, "if it feels good, do it." Or at least, don't feel guilty about doing it.
And, yes, that doesn't just lead to unmarried births, but to obesity and people getting f***ed by drugs. At a time when temptations are more and more tempting (Nacho Cheese Doritos), the message of the cultural leaders makes resisting harder and harder. "No fat shaming."
I completely agree that the health establishment says obesity is bad. However, media, elites, and at least part of the health establishment say that you should never make fun of anyone for being fat, that you should never shame. Lizzo recently won a number of music awards and the media spin seemed to be "Isn't it wonderful that she triumphed over weight prejudice."
My father was in advertising and I developed a fascination with ads. The two biggest changes in the last four years have been a significant increase in non-white people and a significant number of people who in the previous century would have been considered fat but are now (at least statistically) completely normal. Mainstreaming of teh fat?
The funny thing is that if the lower classes were to imitate the behavior of Bobos as opposed to their rhetoric, we'd be in pretty good shape. Bobos like to engage in a weird sort of inverted hypocrisy, preaching vice publicly while practicing virtue on the sly: they marry more, divorce less, and generally avoid self-destructive temptation better than just about anyone else.
Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass said that well-off people could afford to do stupid things for a while but relatives and friends would bring them back. People who weren't well off and imitated them were more likely to permanently f*** up their lives. I don't think he'd be surprised by the ballooning of "the homeless".
Consider Canada. Or any other country really. They don't have ultra-selective universities that shape the elites.
How does this explain the rise of the checkmarks in other countries...
Edit:
This is what I mean by "ultra-selective". The Ivy League is more selective than the top universities of other developed democratic countries. I can't judge the claims of what a "top university" is in other countries but feel free to check other countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
Ivy League: 136,856 students; US pop: 333 million; fraction: 410 per million
Uni Toronto + UWaterloo: 104,731 students; Can pop: 39 million; fraction: 2685 per million
Oxbridge: 48,965 students; UK pop: 67 million; fraction: 730 per million
Now that I've had time to think: prior to WW2 old money probably really did more or less control society, after the war however forces like mass media wrested control towards "the crowd", where no-one consciously directs things, and this is reflected as a loss of old money control over the universities as well as basically every other important institution. That is the makeup of universities is a reflection of the social change not the determiner.
>France has École normale supérieure (Ecole Normal Superior).
Kind of a tangent but what was the thought process behind translating the two words with extremely direct English cognates but not the third that's a little less obvious?
Because I absolutely love the name "Normal Superior" as part of a school name. Seriously. I have a former co-worker who spent a few years in Paris doing a post-doc and he told me about the school and how amazingly elite the student body (and, presumably, the staff) is. But I find the name hilarious.
My parents, who went to college to become teachers, met at Illinois State Normal University, in the town of Normal, Illinois. So I have always been abnormal by knowing this now obsolete meaning of normal. The University dropped Normal from their name in 1964. I was not aware of the French equivalent.
Can't resist - my brother Norman was born there ;-)
I don't think Waterloo is particularly prestigious outside of very specific niches like computer science. Usually the top three schools of (English-speaking) Canada are considered to be UofT, UBC, and McGill. But my impression is that they aren't that comparable to the Ivy League, for instance in terms of student numbers.
"Usually the top three schools of (English-speaking) Canada are considered to be UofT, UBC, and McGill. But my impression is that they aren't that comparable to the Ivy League, for instance in terms of student numbers."
University of Toronto has almost 45,000 undergraduate students. UBC has about 45,000 at Vancouver (and another 9,000 at Okanagan). McGill has 26,000 undergraduate students. So about 116,000 - 125,000 between the three of them.
Cornell has around 16,000 undergrads, Harvard around 10,000 ... Dartmouth about 5,000. The Ivy League as a whole seems to have around 80,000 undergrads.
So, yeah, the student numbers are quite different. And Canada has a population about 10% that of the US so getting into those three should be relatively easier than getting into an Ivy League college.
They are nowhere NEAR as selective as the Ivy League.
Or at least weren't back when I was looking at places to apply for university. McGill's probably the most competitive of those three, and even it is perfectly possible to go to.
Depends on the programs. A quick Google shows Ivy schools at 5-10%. Waterloo engineering, where I studied, shows up as 5-15%. Other programs at Waterloo have higher admission rates, but Waterloo also isn't really the place you would go in Canada for most non-STEM programs.
Not as competitive as Ivies, but not nowhere NEAR as selective.
While you're right the Canada model is more "normal" there are a few other countries that have ultra-selective universities like America. The most notable is China.
That doesn't mean they don't have elite universities. Oxford, Cambridge, U. of Toronto, etc. But they're much less competitive to get into. (Many then have special clubs future elites compete to get into though. The Bullingdon Club and all that.)
Malcom Gladwell did an interesting podcast, part of which compared US elite schools to Canada's best schools. In it he slammed the LSAT and other high pressure, low time tests as favoring Hares over Tortoises. Good stuff.
As usual with Gladwell, he gestured in some interesting directions for investigation, but didn't even try to offer empirical evidence for his thesis.
For instance, he criticizes the LSAT for having timed sections without providing any evidence that harder, untimed tests correlate more with any concrete outcomes, let alone that they correlate better than timed tests when conditioned on undergrad GPA, which is the more relevant question.
This short-coming is probably due to absent literature, but it makes it really hard for me to tell how seriously to take his musings :(
He offered anecdotes instead of data, true. But he did lay out a decent argument that we should at least investigate different ways of evaluating students. Right now, it is all about the hares.
This was going to be my comment. I'm sure that in the United States it's possible to write a whole book about a global trend without remembering the existence of other countries, but when read from another country
Britain is a good example; not because it's the most illustrative, but just because it's the only country with whose popular culture the average American might be expected to be somewhat familiar. And it's a similar story, old moneyed elite getting kicked down by a new and supposedly-more-meritocratic elite. The process was perhaps a bit slower and a bit less complete (e.g. the new Prime Minister might be an Indian but he still went to Winchester).
Among the many trends explaining this, I don't think admissions at Oxford/Cambridge are really close to the top, nor even admissions at Eton etc.
One thing that _would_ seem to be important is new money. For centuries, the only way to be rich was to own a lot of land, and the only way to own a lot of land was to inherit it. The Industrial Revolution started a phenomenon of non-U people suddenly becoming rich, which made life complicated for the old upper class, but at first they could absorb these new money richers slowly into their ranks (and more importantly, the new money richers aspired to emulate the old money). But eventually the rate of wealth creation got so out of hand that new millionaires were being minted faster than the upper class could co-opt them, and the wealth of the unassimiliated non-U rich started to outweigh the wealth of the true Upper Class. And eventually the whole thing came tumbling down and everyone is lining up to get a glimpse of the Beatles instead of the Queen.
The counter-argument is that it's US cultural hegemony.
Britain's a good place to see this. The 19th Century created a lot of new "millionaires," but they tried their hardest to ape the aristocracy then intermarried with them (changing them slightly in the process - mid-Victorian aristocrats were notably bourgousified compared to the 18th century). This is why public schools and Oxbridge became important in the first place vs. a purely hereditary system.
It could only be sustained by the aristocracy being the only centre of prestige though. Once a new class had risen up in the post-war US, the cool kids wanted to be like them, as opposed to the 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, leading to the Blairite class and the "New Establishment." It's not a coincidence that Blair was the first [British?] politician to use the word "meritocracy" unironically to refer to something good.
"Total number of students divided by population of country" isn't a very good measure of "selectiveness", there are plenty of less-selective universities in the US with student bodies smaller than 100,000.
The most famous colleges in the world today are Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale rather than, say, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, or Parma.
Why?
Because the graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale won the Big One in 1939-1945. In contrast, the graduates of Continental universities had a bad 1940s, and so their colleges were forced to become more egalitarian and unselective to testify to their non-fascist bona fides.
Russian intelligentsia was gutted by Stalin, and Chinese by Mao. They've recovered to some extent - particularly in the Chinese case - but you can't magic prestige up very quickly.
Russia and China are also much poorer on a per-person basis than the West (this wasn't *entirely* socialism's fault; Russia and China were very poor already when the communists took over).
Disagree about China recovering. Most of the great Chinese discoveries/innovations are done outside mainland China, and the brain drain is getting worse due to zero Covid.
Karolinska in Stockholm is one of the highest-ranking non-Anglosphere universities (global ranking 37), but in smaller countries like this, you get scaling problems. Sweden is only so big - it can't sustain institutions that are both large:ish and educationally elite.
I'm pretty sure that graduates from the French equivalent of HYPS/Oxbridge run most of France and most of French industry. We just don't hear about them much in the English-speaking world. I was going to say look up “les énarques” but I had trouble finding a succinct summary (maybe https://blogs.transparent.com/french/what-is-an-enarque/ works).
Agree (*especially* in France), but there's a *huge* difference between "produces the local elites" and "produces quality education and research". Presumably most every country has one or a couple of the former.
I mean, sure, but I've not seen much evidence that the Ivy League is the latter category. Harvard takes in smart rich people and outputs well-connected smart rich people. You want quality education in the technical sense, and MIT or Berkeley is probably the best in the USA.
There's a pretty-fair argument that post-WWII Anglospheric and even general Western culture has largely come from the USA - that looking at other Western countries' intrinsic factors is kind of missing the point since there's the huge extrinsic factor of Uncle Sam's foibles.
Canada has a *particularly*-bad case of importing northern-US culture for reasons of literal proximity, so there's not a whole lot to explain there.
But the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion simply finished the gentrification of the music of American blacks, something that Elvis' generation hadn't quite managed on its own.
In my youth when I first watched Yes, Minister, I'd been familiar with Oxford and Cambridge'd reputations but was otherwise unfamiliar with the LSE. It took me a while to realize that these jokes were the equivalent to American shows where e.g. Yale or Harvard graduates deride Princeton as "clown college".
In this case, it's also that Sir Humphrey and Bernard have classical educations and can drop Greek quotes at the drop of a hat, while Hacker is (presumably) an economist.
Per the article it's been around since 1920, but obviously you don't go from "newly-established course" to "source of most of the Establishment" overnight.
Yes, you are probably right. Another commenter mentioned the two I used so I'm going to blame them. I really only have a rough idea of prestigious universities in 3 countries: the US, the UK, and my own NZ (where I would say 4 of our 9 universities are prestigious, the model doesn't really work here).
It's hard to be sure for other countries as you have to view them holistically and not just base it some that are highly specialised.
I just did a quick survey of the Alma Maters of Canadian PMs to see if the same universities came up over and over again, as a quick and dirty proxy for universities whose graduates constitute a big part of the candidate pool for national elites.
It felt a little less concentrated than US Presidents over the same period (Harvard and Yale coming up over an over again there), but Canadian PMs did seem to commonly have attended University of Toronto, Laval, Oxford, or Harvard (the latter two being old elite universities borrowed from countries with whom Canada shares a lot of history, trade, and culture). Unless I overlooked someone, Justin Trudeau's the only McGill alumnus on the list, which surprised me because McGill's where my mind first went when trying to think of prestigious Canadian universities.
This reminds me of another review you did on Fussell's book, "Class". That book seemed humorous. It was laughing at the people it was analyzing. This one seems serious, even a bit similar to Fussell's book in the abstractions it uses.
Which one did you like better?
Also, Whit Stillman made four or five affectionate movies in defense of WASP culture.
> The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.
Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.
I think something simpler happened. Harvard became more exclusive. Prior to the mid-20th century almost anyone with the proper educational credentials could get into Harvard. The acceptance rate was around 80-90%. Now, some of this was because you had to prove you had certain aristocratic class markers like knowing Greek. But if you had them you basically got in. This is exactly how the Jews got in: they just studied the class markers. And that wasn't a problem until there were "too many" of them.
The post-war restrictions SHARPLY cut the acceptance rate down to about a third of applicants. And it's declined ever since. It was 15%-ish by the 1980s-90s and is about 5% today. This has set off an intense competition where getting into Harvard is a status symbol.
In 1930 going to Harvard was something you did because you were a WASP. If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard. Partly because of racial discrimination to be sure. But partly because going to Harvard was not a prestigious trophy. Simply having a college degree marked you out as elite. So why not go to the college your community built? Where you'd see the elites of your own community?
You saw the same thing with white Catholics. Even ones from very old American families who didn't have to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment. As late as the mid-20th century you had some Virginians going to places like William & Mary because they weren't New Englanders.
Post-war all colleges organized themselves into a hierarchy. Harvard came out on top, as the "best." Elites had found a new competition: to get into the best schools. And Harvard restricted its membership because selectiveness (and the education it conferred) was a status symbol. A meritocratic ideology sprung up about "whiz kids", especially around Johnson and Kennedy's time. And college access greatly expanded. But at the same time as college access was expanded access to these elite spaces contracted. In effect the mid-century turned what had been a pretty open system into a series of sorting tests.
I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.
- the applicant pool in some of those schools may be self-sorting to a greater extent than in the US,
- (often more importantly) universities outside the US often care less about retention rates than universities in the US. An extreme case is given by places like EPFL or ETHZ in Switzerland, or (to a lesser extent) the tougher programs in the Paris university system (excluding of course the grandes écoles): anybody with a college-oriented high-school diploma (not a triviality to obtain) can get in, but what happens in the first two years is absolute slaughter, deliberately so.
Last I'd looked the University of Tokyo has a 35% acceptance rate and a roughly 99% graduation rate. Oxford has about a 20% acceptance rate and a 99% graduation rate. They both have about half as many applications as Harvard in countries much smaller than the US. (Though the U. of Tokyo statistics I found online were a bit dodgy.) So your theories at least don't look accurate at a glance.
I see no reason to discount the most obvious explanation. The main difference is both are much larger institutions on a per capita basis. Both have about 30,000 students. Which makes them bigger than Harvard in absolute terms. But the population of their respective countries is about a third and a fifth of the US respectively. If you have more seats you reject less people.
Well, don't forget that what kind of degree you get from a UK university (first class, 2:1, 2:2, third-class, etc.) affects your employment opportunities tremendously. It's unlikely that you will find many "doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc." who got third-class degrees at Oxbridge or elsewhere.
Sure, there are plenty of dull or uninterested people at Harvard (and at Princeton, where I went to grad school). The point is that (it is my perception that) people outside academia pay much more attention to whether someone got a first-class or at least a 2:1 at Oxbridge than they do to whether someone got a magna cum laude at Princeton. (Inside academia, where you went for undergrad is much less important than where you went to grad school, which is in turn less important than what work you do; but I digress.) Thus, in effect, selection *is* happening within the university.
Some form of selection, sure. My point is that paying attention to such things is a different selection filter than the one in the US. And arguably a better one. I don't know why a dullard with a Harvard stamp should be held high. Better to let them fall down to being a Harvard third or some equivalent. Plus it means rigging admissions means less.
Oxford (or Cambridge) is kind of like the Ivy League or U. of California -- a collection of semi-independent colleges. In the English case, however, the colleges are right next to each other. (Claremont Colleges are a small scale American imitation.)
As far as I'm aware Oxford is a single university, not a collection of semi-independent colleges. Unless you want to argue Oxford's faculty of liberal arts and engineering are independent in a way that (say) Harvard's faculty of liberal arts and engineering are not.
It's two things at the same time: a place where you get your lectures, the syllabus and the final examinations (the University); and a place where you get your "tutorials" (one-on-one or small-N-on-one group meetings), your dinners, and your day-to-day social life (the College you've been admitted to).
Colleges govern the admissions, and attempt to construct a class for themselves each year very much in the same way Harvard admissions does. But it happens on a much smaller, federated scale. The History Boys is a film that captures some of the dynamics — altered by time, but not by as much as you'd think.
Another difference between Oxbridge and the elite US system is the extent to which faculty are involved in undergraduate affairs, including admissions. A prof in the US has no influence on who comes in, but because of how your duties as a member of a college work, if you're a prof at Oxbridge, you end up being much more involved in work that has been delegated to the professionals in the US.
Europe and Japan have gone to "university as civil service job" model. WIth few exceptions, they're not functioning on the British or American model. They're in the business of training students for industry, the workforce, etc on behalf of the government. My guess is that this is a post-war thing, and part of the larger turn towards technocracy in the European Union.
That is only true at the undergraduate level, by the way. At the graduate level in the US applicants are generally sorted and admitted, or not, directly by the department faculty.
"College" in the context of Oxbridge (and I think Durham) means something rather different to in the context of other universities - those universities are divided up into a number of socio-administrative subunits called "Colleges" with pastoral and accomodation responsibilities, orthogonally to being divided up into academic departments.
For example, I studied maths at St John's College, Cambridge. My lectures were organised by the department of mathematics (actually by the two departments of mathematics, one pure and one applied, but they were basically one organisation), but selection, accommodation, and the two-to-one teaching sessions ("supervisions") which are one of Cambridge's main selling points were organised by the college.
With a 99% graduation rate Oxford has a much higher rate of graduation than the engineering course I studied in a college in Cork. I’ve not been overly impressed by Oxford graduates I’ve met in real life, not saying they were stupid but neither were they an obvious cognitive elite. On the other hand Stanford graduates in the US were clearly intelligent.
I've not been overly impressed by the Harvard or Stanford graduates I've met. Some of them are quite smart and I'd say median quality was higher. But I've also met some real idiots. Same for Oxford, Cambridge, Tokyo U, Tsinghua, etc.
My general impression is that Japanese universities frontload a hellish admissions exam but then then the actual coursework is nominal. If you can get in you're assumed to be smart enough to graduate and roll into a good job.
That would explain what's going on with Todai. Only students willing to go through an infamously-difficult exam (or whose mothers are pushing them hardest) apply in the first place, which means generally they're going to be the most prepared. If a student isn't already doing the Todai study hell they'll just apply for an easier university to get into. Fewer students apply, but those that do are heavily self-sorting.
It would also cut down on Japanese students applying to every possible university, when that just means more exam hell. It seems Japanese students prefer to study really hard for one or two university's exams, and if they fail one year to study hard and come back again the next. US students prefer shotgunning applications and going to whoever will have them. Both of them make decisions based on how the universities accept students - I bet Harvard application rates would drop and acceptance rates would soar if they adopted Japanese-style entrance exams (and vice versa for Todai adopting US-style holistic admissions).
Another difference in the UK is that you're not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge; you have to pick one. So that probably halves the applicant pool for each university and hence doubles the acceptance rate for each.
I assume this is the most important thing causing differences in acceptance rates, and makes comparing them pretty much useless at least across different systems.
The easiness of applying + allowing applications to several places at once without costs + having even a tiny chance of getting in, I would argue, without any true evidence for sure, are the main reasons for different acceptance rates in elite institutions. There are quite surely huge amount of people who would have taken a place in Harvard or Oxford etc. if someone would offered them one, but who still did not apply to them. The amount of those people is the number to which we should compare, not the amount of applicants.
For example when the entrance exams of different Uni's in my home country was combined as a single one, the amount of applicants predictably increased and the acceptance rate dropped. Nothing else had changed but the easiness of applying.
>I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.
This is heavily confounded by the number of applications a school gets, which can be affected by a lot of different things. Harvard has a high application rate (which leads to a low % acceptance rate for given number of admissions), partly because affirmative action means that vast numbers of intellectually unremarkable students actually have a chance of being admitted.
> Harvard has a high application rate (which leads to a low % acceptance rate for given number of admissions)
Yes, I've heard this theory before. Unfortunately it doesn't actually bear out. On a per capita basis Oxford gets more applications than Harvard, for example.
I'm not sure what affirmative action has to do with the other part of the comment.
Care to back up why we should think of it that way? In my case I'm simply comparing the one top school. In your case you're saying the top college of another country should be compared to eight schools in the US. That might be so but bears significant justification.
Cambridge is somewhere in between Harvard and the entire UC system. e.g., Trinity College Cambridge probably counts as "Harvard" — it's where you meet the other people who will run the world/academy/finance. King's College as "Berkeley", perhaps. Gonville Caius (etc) as the SLACs like Williams and Amherst — smaller, more inward-looking cultures. But then there's also a large UCLA/Davis/Irvine-level system that works in tandem (Robinson etc) and students at any of the colleges can always opt into that larger, more American-style world.
Cambridge and Oxford are completely exceptional, historically, in that the college system survived. Other countries had them too, e.g., France, but they were eventually tamed and reduced to administrative units of the central bureaucracy.
One reason why thinking this way might make sense is because each college handles its own admissions - there is no `Cambridge admissions office' - you apply to a specific college within the university and they decide whether they want you or not. And if they do and you go, then all of your residential experience and much of your teaching is `internal' to the college (although the big lectures are university wide)
That's an oversimplification. The colleges handle the admissions, but they also co-ordinate with each other to try and make sure the standards are the same no matter which college you apply to, and it's quite common to get "pooled" and end up assigned to a college different to the one you applied to.
In addition to what The original Mr. X said: that's also somewhat the case with Harvard. Now, it might be MORE the case with Oxford. But simply saying you apply to specific programs and then spend most of your time there (though not your residential experience) doesn't separate it out.
Though I'll admit I didn't apply to Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate. So perhaps the differences aren't obvious to me.
They have mechanisms for this like the Bullingdon club (or various other examples) which serve the same sort of elite social club function without denying poor but talented students access to top professors.
One other wrinkle here is that what is meant by `Ivy league' in such conversations is not the literal Ivy league, but rather the set of half dozen universities at the top of the prestige ladder which educates the national elite - a set that surely includes johnny come latelies like MIT and Stanford, but may not include Dartmouth or Brown. Which goes to show that it is not simply a story of the unbreakable power of a small number of elite institutions but rather a larger phenomenon whereby there arises a small set of elite institutions with this kind of power (but individual universities can ascend into the elite set, or slip out of it).
> but rather the set of half dozen universities at the top of the prestige ladder which educates the national elite - a set that surely includes johnny come latelies like MIT and Stanford, but may not include Dartmouth or Brown
Well, yes and no, it depends which elite you want to join. There's multiple competing elites in US society, and while the Silicon Valley elite might respect MIT/Stanford more than Dartmouth/Brown, there's other elites out there who would still rank the _actual_ Ivy League ahead of any overgrown shape-rotation college.
I specifically talked about Harvard because, I think we can agree, Harvard is the "top" university in some nebulous prestige sense. (I only brought up the Ivy League to say they all have legacy admissions and anti-meritocratic practices. Which, afaik, they do.)
I'm not sure that universities can jump in or out. I can't think of any that fell out or joined. Keep in mind this status was largely set in the 1950s-60s. MIT and Stanford were already big technical universities while Dartmouth and Cornell were already lower ranked. I'd say the Big ones are: Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and MIT. And I can't say any of them have joined or slipped down since the 1950s.
But you're right simply being old or Ivy League or even pedigree is not enough. William and Mary is very old and has a lot of prominent people from it historically but is definitely not up there. Nor is the University of Delaware.
So this might be my bubble talking, but it seems to me that Upenn and Yale at least are at risk of falling out of the elite pack, and Stanford is at least credibly challenging Harvard for the top spot, neither of which was presumably on the cards in 1960.
Yale retains high prestige in the humanities, and seems to be cultivating that. Many of their STEM departments are rather mediocre. (Also worth noting that Princeton Engineering is very mid-tier, compared to its science powerhouse.)
UPenn was known (disparagingly) as the "Asian Ivy" because it was willing to take high-achieving Asian (-American) students when the other East coast schools were trying to maintain a veneer of white-elite status.
Cornell has done very well in recent years by building on its science and computer engineering. Reports I get suggest that the "Ivy league" culture — meaning a certain wealth and snobbery — persists. But it is lower tier; I remember an old post by Scott Aaronson talking about how he went to Cornell after getting rejected by what he saw as "better" schools as an undergrad.
Looking into the future, it's unclear what will happen to the East Coast elite schools.
I've heard UPenn and Yale are falling behind scientifically. But UPenn's humanities and business and Yale's humanities, arts, and law are all top tier. And it's not certain to me you need to be top tier in science if you can get half the justices on the Supreme Court. After all, Harvard's sciences are not spectacular as far as I've heard.
That said, I agree there's nothing in principle that prevents it. It's entirely possible you're better informed than I on this.
Harvard is extremely good in some science, particularly those related to medicine and health. It tends to be less good in sciences more closely related to engineering.
Fair cop. I'm not a doctor or anything like one so that's not really my specialty. What I often point out is that "I got a compsci degree from Harvard" said as if that's supposed to impress me says a lot of mostly negative things about the speaker.
That's fair. And I'm not necessarily better informed.I think a lot of `prestige' in everyday life comes from professional schools (Business/Law/Medicine) which are sort of a parallel universe. I'm only familiar with the `scholarship' part of the academy (basically, the parts that would live in the faculty of arts and sciences, and to some extent in the college of engineering).
I thought it was widely accepted that given their resources, the Ivy League colleges could increase their student body size many times, but they deliberately choose not to to keep the exclusivity marker?
So did I. But I've gotten pushback on this including people who say being so selective is necessary to get high quality graduates. Which is a bit ridiculous when you consider something like two thirds of people in Harvard didn't get in on pure merit anyway. And it's even more ridiculous when so many other countries have well functioning systems without this feature.
Harvard has a total enrollment of ~20,000. There a few dozen universities in the US with enrollments of 40-60,000 and I think none over 80,000. That this remains true even in an era of massively increasing demand for university education, suggests that ~50,000 is the maximum practical size for a traditional university. And it's not at all surprising that a university trying to maintain maximal prestige, would not want to push close to any merely qualitative limit - whatever magic causes the system to break down above ~50K, probably starts to degrade it well before then.
My point is that, firstly, nobody has proven tight admissions produces better graduates. Secondly, admissions isn't meritocratic anyway so any appeal to it being "skimming the cream" of the best is undercut. And, thirdly, larger universities with looser admissions seem to work really well in a lot of places.
You cannot respond to that by assuming that quantity decreases quality. That's just begging the question.
You haven't gotten the details right either. American universities commonly have hundreds of thousands of students spread out across different campuses. Your limit is only per campus. (And before you say you apply to them separately: not in all states. And in a lot of colleges you apply to specific departments anyway. So that's not a meaningful difference.)
My claim isn't that tight admissions produces better graduates. My claim is that not trying to educate too many people on the same campus produces better graduates. With "too many people" being more than 50,000 or so for high-quality universities in general, and so plausibly no more than 25.000 or so for the best and/or most prestigious universities. It doesn't matter *how* Harvard decides which students to admit; if they have more than 25,000 or so at once then we will have zero students getting what is presently considered a Harvard education, not >>25,000.
Another claim that I hadn't made but will now since you bring it up: Yes, you can build a "system" of universities, but that doesn't produce better graduates than building the same number of independent universities. If you want to build another campus that is as capable of producing high-quality graduates as Harvard presently does, there is no benefit to naming it "Harvard" or having it part of the same administrative structure as Harvard, and nobody will be fooled by the name if you do.
And a third claim: If you try to build another campus that is as capable of producing high-quality graduates as Harvard presently does, you will almost certainly fail. In the United States at least, we seem to have lost the knack for building really high-quality universities about fifty years ago; we can at best build mediocre ones. Not even the Harvard regents, know how to build another Harvard.
This comment only increased my certainty that you're begging the question that quantity decreases quality here. Your first point (I think, there's a few confusing points I think are typos) is basically saying that. If so, feel free to actually make the argument.
Your second point, that universities with multiple campuses will not produce better graduates than a bunch of universities, seems strange to me. This is not how anything else in the world works. Why would it be true for universities? Would Harvard be a better school if it closed its separate campuses? Again, you're just asserting here.
Your third point: I agree I'd fail at building a second Harvard. However, Harvard has succeeded at building a second Harvard. It's called Yale. Likewise both do expand their class sizes without too much issue. And numerous other systems have opened up new campuses. Again, you just seem to assert we can't do this.
If you want to make an argument as to why any of this is I'm willing to listen. But you're not really providing anything I can follow.
Nonsense. The University of California has >250,000 students, and the Cal State system has nearly half a million. They just open more branch campuses when they need to expand. There's no reason Harvard couldn't do the same -- except that they do indeed want to remain selective for prestige purposes.
The "University of California" is a *system* of universities, none of which enroll more than 50,000 students. I don't think anyone has yet figured out the trick of expanding a *single* residential university much past that level. And I don't think anybody has figured out the trick of building a system of universities where each campus has the prestige or the quality of the flagship campus - UC Merced is not a substitute for UC Berkely.
There's no reason that Harvard couldn't license out its name to a new university, except that there's no point because that's *not* the same thing as >20,000 people receiving anything like what is considered a Harvard education. The students at University of Harvard at Merced (or wherever) will not be receiving the benefits that the students at Harvard/Cambridge do, they will drag down the name of "Harvard", and neither they nor anyone else will benefit from the fact that their university has "Harvard" in its name.
We can create new universities of approximately the quality of UC Merced. Really, that's about the biggest success story you can find for "hey, let's create a new university!" in the past generation in the United States. This is not considered a solution to the higher education bubble/crisis, because UC Merced is mostly considered a safety school for losers who couldn't even get into Riverside or Irvine.
It is entirely proper for Harvard to not want to be a part of this process. That's what state university systems are *for*.
Well, no, technically it's not. The University of California is *one* university, with one President, a single board of regents, and a large variety of uniform policies.
The distinction isn't specious, either: there are plenty of examples of associations between independent universities, at varying levels of formality and interdependence (the simplest being cross-registration rights, e.g. between MIT and Wellesley). There's a difference between two equals that have at any time an equal right to abandon the cooperation, and the branch campuses of UC which absolutely do need to do what the Regents and President say they have to do.
You're certainly correct that the branch campuses have a considerable degree of at least academic independence, and they vary significantly in their prestige -- but so what? Each department within a single campus also has a considerable degree of academic independence, and they vary significantly in their prestige. A Yale law degree is (apparently) awesome, a Yale physics degree kind of ho-hum.
There certainly is a good reason for Harvard to open branch campuses: to make a lot more money in tuition. They could open Harvard-Indianapolis, take students in the next 5% after the top 5% who got into Harvard-Cambridge, and double their tuition revenue at very modest cost to their reputation. No, nobody would mistake a Harvard-I degree for a Harvard-C degree, but people have no real problem distinguishing between a UC Berkeley degree and a UC Riverside degree -- and the existence of the latter doesn't bring down the former's reputation.
But you're right, they definitely want to preserve the reputation extreme exclusivity gives them, and they want that *more* than they want the extra revenue they could get by opening branch campuses[1]. But why? The reason, I suggest, lies in the fact that Harvard gets only a small part of its income from tuition. The bulk of it is from Federal research grants, and while they could easily get 20,000 more pretty darn good students to fork over Harvard-level tuitions, they could *not* so easily persuade NSF and NIH program officers that funding grants from Harvard-I is just as good, or even almost as good[2], as funding one from Harvard-C.
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[1] This is always a major puzzle to the purely economic viewpoint on higher education. Surely with such a fantastic demand the natural expectation is that the supply would expand. Harvard has the resources and experience necessary to open enough branch campuses to serve 5x as many students as it doesn, and earn 5x the tuition money. Why don't they?
[2] In this the winner-take-all nature of funding decisions tends to be important. Funding decisions are not a market, they are decided by a small number of Federal bureaucrats (and faculty on loan), and probably their biggest concern, like bureacrats everywhere, is Not Screwing Up. That means funding a Harvard application is to some extent always safe, because even if it goes pear-shaped people will say well Harvard, who could have expected that? But this means you get a very lopsided result, with enormous amounts of money going to the top handful of institutions, the "safe" bets, and mere scraps to the remainder. A hypothetical Harvard-I would probably get scraps, at least at first, and that probably turns it into a money-losing proposition, because tuition isn't nearly enough to compensate (you can't very well charge *more* fuitiion or a Harvard-I degree than a Harvard-C degree).
But of those 20k, about 5k are undergraduates. It is realistic to imagine that number could double, and maybe quadruple, and if similar numbers are true for the top 20 US universities...
The issue here is that David Brooks seems to use "bobo" incorrectly (caviar left seems more fitting). In France, bobos are low-key bourgeois. They're not economic elites, they're PMC, journalists, writers or teachers. They don't own 20k square-feet houses on lake Tahoe, they have, for the most part, at most a 120m² condo in Paris (and often less). Not a trend-making class (or at least, not directly), but ther number amongst the upper-middle class makes them the primary public of actual caviar-left elites.
A true aristocracy like this sounds like a dream compared to what America is and where it is heading. As you note, techies were the one big chance to overturn the modern establishment but they aren't likely to succeed (anytime soon).
In what sense are techies really a competing aristocracy? They are mostly also drawn from the same set of elite universities. At most, it is a faction fight *within* the aristocracy, between the `numbers' meritocrats and the `words' meritocrats.
Techies are not broadly drawn from the same set of elite universities.
The Google founders went to Stanford for graduate school but they went to U. of Michigan and U. of Maryland undergraduate.
Amazon's Bezos went to Princeton which is kind of on the margins. And Bezos had an elite career before quitting to found Amazon.
Facebook was founded by a bunch of Harvard students. The most clear example though being a dropout is certainly a different choice than most aristocrats.
Microsoft was founded by another Harvard dropout and a graduate of the University of Washington.
The founders of Apple went to Reed College (Jobs) and U. of Colorado then UCal Berkeley. (Wozniak)
So we have literally one Ivy League graduate, a few Ivy League dropouts, and two Stanford graduates. And the only reason more than half aren't non-elite is because Facebook had like six founders. There's a lot of people from decent but not top tier universities. Compare this to the Supreme Court (for example) where literally everyone is either a Harvard or Yale alumni except one. Or any number of other big institutions. Tech is notably non-elite university heavy.
I don't think techies can (or even aim to) "overrun the modern establishment." But they are definitely a different elite subculture with different class markers and status symbols. And a whole lot of money to back that up. Whether that money translates into power is another question.
You're talking founders though. If you looked at recent hiring at FAANMG I would guess (does someone know?) that it would be disproportionately Ivy-plus. Which might be part of the `current aristocracy eating the tech competition' thesis.
Also FWIW USNWR ranks Princeton (undergrad college) higher than Harvard College. Harvard is higher on the overall prestige ladder because of stuff like Harvard business school, law school, medical school, (Pton doesn't have any professional schools at all), but for undergrad to claim Princeton is on the margins is...a stretch.
(There is also the other aspect of things where different universities seem to be built to primarily serve different populations. Princeton seems to revolve around its undergrads, MIT around its graduate students, and Harvard around its professional school students. Faculty I know at Oxford like to joke that Oxford revolves around its secretaries).
Disproportionately maybe. But the top universities for the big tech companies are (according to LinkedIn): U. of Washington, UCal Berkeley, Stanford, UT Austin, U. of Southern California, Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon, GIT, UCal LA, and U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I don't find that surprising since most of those are respected for computer science. But only Stanford is an Ivy plus. Maybe Carnegie Mellon could be argued to be close to it. But it seems more like a tier two school from my perception. (Though obviously much better than that in engineering!)
I agree Princeton is an excellent undergraduate school. But I don't think Princeton dominates any broad category of the elite the way the other schools do. Though I might be wrong. We could at any rate resolve it by a definitive list of Ivy plus schools. Though you also have to consider things like the service academies. West Point is not an Ivy League school but is certainly a kind of elite.
And that's kind of where I'm gesturing. Going to UT Austin is, unless you're going into Texas politics or tech, a mid ranked school. But if you care about either of those things it arguably serves you better than Harvard. Since these are social network effects there is an Ivy Plus network that's very prominent in government-media-etc. And there's a... Tech Elite Plus network that's very prominent in tech-science-engineering. And only Stanford and MIT really straddle both. (Though I'm not even sure they do. How often does Stanford or MIT get someone onto the Supreme Court or even into Congress?)
This doesn't mean we're about to have a wordcel vs shape rotator civil war or anything. But it does mean tech is to some extent a different kind of elite.
Yeah this ties into the point I made in some other comment about the role of professional schools. MIT will never get anyone onto the Supreme court...because they don't have a law school.
I agree that there can be different elite filters for different kinds of elites. (And this is a good thing, it is the only remnant of the old `diffuse federated elite' that I gestured at somewhere else). And the Acela corridor elite schools do seem to dominate the government/media ecosystem.
My proposed list of Ivy plus (in roughly geographic order): Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Duke, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley). This list may be non-standard...but interestingly, the majority of schools on it are not actually Ivies.
Actually the assumption you need a law degree at all is reasonably recent. Every justice having a law degree has only been the case since 1958. And the Harvard-Yale dominance is even more recent. All of this is actually a very new system.
But yeah, I think specialization a good thing too. One of those reforms I'd like to see is more dispersal. I think we should avoid a situation where Harvard and Yale have the entire Supreme Court or where individual Ivy League schools have as many Senators as all the schools in entire regions of the country. This is one reason I was heartened by a Notre Dame alum getting onto the Supreme Court and was somewhat annoyed at Biden for not nominating someone from Howard.
Actually, Notre Dame and Howard are interestingly in that they both sit at the top of alternative systems. Catholic universities and HBCUs respectively. Survivors of an older time where elite members of certain identities would have their own systems. Except unlike William & Mary or U. of Miami they're still chugging along even on the national stage, if barely.
"If you looked at recent hiring at FAANMG I would guess (does someone know?) that it would be disproportionately Ivy-plus."
Not true at all. I was a hiring manager at Google for many years and most hires were not Ivy. In fact a prestigious education only mattered for inexperienced folks. And even for those, it only got you to a screener interview. From them on the decision was taken almost exclusively based on interview performance (a semi-standardised competence test).
"I think a lot of people are totally ignorant of the background dynamic driving the drama around the checkmarks.
But what happened is that a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage.
Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.
Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential.
This was a very deliberate top-down decision.
They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry.
Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits.
They also just tend to overstate the role of the tech beat within the larger zone of "the media" and started being very angry at "the media."
Because news is a very important part of Twitter, when Twitter set up their verification system they ended up treating journalists as a kind of special class.
All kinds of people *can* be verified, but you usually need to be pretty prominent to get that check.
But if you're a working journalist on staff at a publication, you will end up getting the check just as a routine part of your job — like how you'll probably get a laptop and some business cards or whatever.
As a longtime working journalist, longtime check-haver, and someone who knows lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of media professionals I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.
But Twitter is, among other things, a war zone where tech people and the tech press fight.
And from the side of the tech people, the way totally random journalists would be casually granted their checkmarks was a source of annoyance and resentment.
What's happened is that they have mistaken their own resentment at journalists' unearned checkmark privilege for something that journalists themselves care deeply about and are either willing to pay for or are mad that other people will be able to buy.
I think the Sacks/Andreesen crew should take a deep breath and try to enjoy life as rich and powerful businesspeople and be a little less annoyed by the haters.
And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector.
But for now.
[Dominoes meme showing "A.G. Sulzerberg decides to take a highly oppositional approach to covering tech" knocking over a series leading to "Elon Musk believes people will pay $8/year for a pointless checkmark"]
You can see how deranged this has become by looking at all the people QTing this accusing me of lying that nobody derives status or esteem from their checkmarks.
But I promise you I am telling the truth, this is a big dumb misunderstanding.
[Subtweet: "As a longtime working journalist, longtime check-haver, and someone who knows lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of media professionals I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.]
I should also say @elonmusk doesn’t need to wait for the rollout of some new system — he should just de-verify me right now, I got the check years ago when I had a staff job and probably couldn’t get one today just like I no longer have a proper press pass.
It's worth noting that while there are a few corroborating secondary sources, Matt *did* delete his tweet in the face of pushback and I haven't been able to find any primary sources specifically speaking to a top-down decision at the Times. Have any come forward?
It would be interesting to go through every tech article published by the NYT, and see if you can find some exact point in time where all positive coverage of anything tech related suddenly stopped.
To the extent that American progressivism/reform = Yankee women, I think you miss something about 20th century WASPs. They surely held the seeds of their own destruction?
Plus there are a lot of sanatorium stays interspersed with the flightier do-good efforts, in the memoirs I've read. Occasionally some real eccentricity. A book called "The Big House" describes such a family. A lighter recent WASP, or almost-WASP, memoir was by Charles (?) McGrath - critic and golf writer - but I can't remember the title ... games and pranks and boats and emotional continence are paramount. It actually was a nice book perhaps to gift if you've a conventional Boomer father whose unexamined politics have brought forth a world so bewildering that only a privileged summer dacha makes it tolerable.
Yankee women were pushing for a number of reforms, and the first wave of feminism succeeded in granting suffrage... but they overreached with prohibition and the side of the culture war representing less feminist immigrant cultures won, setting back feminism for a while:
>[The meritocrats’] efforts to tear down the old customs and habits of the previous elite was not achieved without social cost. Old authorities and restraints were delegitimized. There was a real, and to millions of people catastrophic, breakdown in the social order,
>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they [WASPs] seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?
>Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes.
Couldn't the simple answer to this be that people with high IQs who succeed in testtaking-based meritocracies just have worse social skills, some autism spectrum etc.?
Not to label it as an objectively bad thing, but when we as Society hand billions of dollars in spending power to a guy who is bad at following mainstream social expectations and 'fitting in', good at taking tests, bad at talking to people, and very good at writing computer code instead of a born and bred WASP whos entire life has revolved around fitting into an intricate Trad social setting, we end up with a society that's less good at social skills and related institutions?
This book seems to harp on 'meritocracy' without unpacking the assumption that merit is derived from test scores alone. While people with high test scores probably do have high IQ, I'm skeptical they have the highest merit as defined by a vague sense of personal quality or socialization-ness that enables them to foster strong cultural healthy institutions under traditional values. I think the best person for that would probably be a WASPy rich kid, and once we stopped setting the WASPy rich kids up for success it's expected the institutions they were literally raised to maintain suffered.
For an example, compare Elon Musk (sorry, lazy example) to a hypothetical 10th century upper east side old money elite. I don't know what Mr. Wasp would be doing with his fortune, but I'm sure we'd all consider it to be quite refined, classy, and trad.
I don't think old institutions needed to be torn down as some form of class resentment or revenge, we just accidentally ended up with a class of elites with so much ""merit"" that they were incapable of keeping them going.
„I don't know what Mr. Wasp would be doing with his fortune, but I'm sure we'd all consider it to be quite refined, classy, and trad. „
Maybe but what his ancestors did to acquire that money was almost certainly worse than whatever Musk is doing by buying twitter. Also I’m fairly sure that Musk was considered a great icon of the left a few years ago. Electric cars etc.
Of course, but that correlation seems to point to a scenario (I have not seen hard numbers) where there more jocks, if you pass me the term, than nerds, on the spectrum, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers. But they are not glamorous, they are not in narrative, and we don't talk about them.
I like the theory I've seen somewhere, that nerds attract attention because their ability to gain status in recent times through work in relatively asocial STEM jobs is a historical anomaly. The order of things used to be that jocks, even dumb ones, could keep them down all their life, and are now very confused at this disruption.
...The order of things used to be that jocks, even dumb ones, could keep them down all their life.
I don't know about that; the nerds would seem to be better at being skilled artisans (although maybe not at selling their services) although the jocks would probably beat them in a brawl. Depends on how dumb the jock is and how smart or how much of a useful tool the nerd is.
The correlation isn't perfect, so it breaks down for extreme cases. Whoever does the absolute best on IQ tests will probably still have above-average social skills, and vice-versa, but going from "highly trained expert with institutional support" to "enthusiastic amateur with above-average potential" can still be an alarming step down.
Are you sure about that? Almost every skill correlates weakly with IQ, but I'm not aware of research finding IQ is strongly correlated with social skills. I know IQ correlates only weakly with Baron-Cohen's Empathy Test, sometimes called a social intelligence test, which is generally respected. (It's here, if you want to take it: http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/). I believe the correlation is 0.2 which means that IQ accounts for only 4% of the variance in empathy.
I wonder if there's a spotlight effect going on, as well. To get a good university degree and rise to a high rank in business, government, or the civil service, you need to be above average in IQ and agreeableness and below average in time preference. If you spend all your time with such people, it's easy to assume that people in general are like this, and consequently to adopt various utopian ideologies which work well with unusually intelligent, agreeable, forward-thinking people, but not with average people. (This is, I would suggest, why intellectuals tend to be more prone to supporting ideas like communism.) Maybe, from a point of view of keeping elites grounded, it is better to have a genetic-lottery-chosen elite, whose average member can be trusted to know about human folly and short-sightedness because one of his idiot classmates died leading a cavalry charge into an erupting volcano and another blew the family fortune on gambling and prostitutes.
One of my favorite bits in HPMOR (from memory) is Harry (high-status American) saying that status means you don't have to care what people think and Draco (I think of him as having been raised to be a Renaissance prince) saying that status means you have to care about what people think *all* *the* *time*. It might have been power rather than status.
Surely an important part of the dynamic - not captured in this analysis - is the nationalization (even globalization) of the aristocracy? It seems to me (and maybe you (Scott) even wrote about it sometime) that in ye goode olde days `power' (both economic and cultural) was more diffuse, and local elites in Oklahoma or whatever were unlikely to be Ivy educated or acculturated. And the local newspaper in Des Moines (say) was more important to Iowans than the NYT. Whereas now power is more concentrated in a handful of national (even global) institutions, all of which are overwhelmingly staffed by Ivy plus graduates, producing a kind of ideological monoculture among the elites which was formerly absent.
I suppose you could see a parallel here to `seeing like a state' as well, as in that local but comparatively illegible aristocracies got torn down and replaced by a single national aristocracy (which relies heavily on credentials precisely because of how legible they are).
Why is an interesting question. Improvements in communication technology and greater integration of the economy is surely part of it, but accumulation of regulations favoring large organizations over smaller ones might be part of it also.
That book was great, understated for a polemic; the key sentence for me:, "I gave them all those jobs, didn't I?" -- uttered by a cranky elderly glass plant owner*, childless, as his estate planner gingerly broaches the topic - what will you leave the town - a hospital, a school, a park?
Of course now it would be considered gauche to suggest that jobs were in one's gift, while all admiration is for philanthropy towards the maintenance of the needy. At least, an economist would laugh at the notion. But then economists are neither men of business, nor communitarians ...
*Whose life's work would ultimately be dismantled by Bain Capital or the like.
Indeed it was. Prior to the 20th century basically all the Harvard men in government came from New England or connected regions like New York or Ohio. The only presidents to go to Harvard prior to the 20th century were from Massachusetts. This is also why William and Mary is the second most common college for a president to have attended: all those Virginian elites. (Yale will probably overtake it reasonably soon.) Ivy League dominance really only comes to being post-WW2.
As for why, I have guesses but nothing I'm certain about.
Another book that seems relevant to this observation is Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." A key part of his thesis being that in the old days, local elites were much more integrated with local populations. But now they're the same everywhere, watch the same shows, drink the same coffee, while living in their own zip codes, sending kids to their own schools. It's only the working class that retains local characteristics.
A basic observation I can make: I live in the Deep South, and if I meet a lawyer, doctor, dentist, etc. here who has more than a hint of a Southern accent, it probably means he's older than 50, and his accent still isn't all that strong. But you'd better believe the guy who sprays my house for bugs has an accent that's almost incomprehensible (and he, of course, answers to the name "Bubba").
Re: Ivy League admissions policy, doesn't Brooks also note that Harvard and Co. felt threatened by the GI bill and the post-war economic boom creating much greater demand for higher education, and thus increased competition from non-Ivy league schools? I read this book probably 15 years ago, so I might be misremembering.
Re: architecture, I remember reading somebody discussing this Tartaria phenomenon, and the class component was part of it, for sure. To sum up what I remember: the mid 20th century was a period of tremendous techno-optimism. Mid century modern and brutalist architecture tapped into that optimism, because it seemed futuristic and scientific, with all the right angles and whatnot, which gave it a cool factor, plus the fact that these buildings could be built quickly because a lot of it was just poured concrete and steel was evidence of technological progress and the increasing productivity that was going to lead us to a glorious future of wealth and prosperity. At the same time, old Victorian style or classical buildings, though perhaps pretty, were associated with the bad old days of chamber pots, choking on the smoke from the massive fireplaces needed on every floor to keep them habitably warm, and other practical concerns, but also the bad old days of aristocratic class prejudices, where the scullery maid wasn't allowed out of the basement and one didn't speak to a footmen or valet except to bark orders or rebuke him for some perceived shortcoming.
To add to that, in architecture, there's a lot of generational competition. It can take decades to work your way up to the big money projects, so younger architects had incentives to compose manifestos about how revolting were the old buildings that the senior architects knew how to design and the only true beauty now is the new style invented by the 4 young architects signing this manifesto.
Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" is amusing on this subject.
A lot of this check out, I think, though as explanations go it seems a little complicated (and at points ad hoc). I think an alternative explanation for how we've ended up where we're currently at is that people started inheriting money.
This, I think, is the dark matter of the US economy- we know it's everywhere, but nobody can point to it. And I'm not talking about eight figure windfalls coming down from dead shipping scions; I'm talking about the kind of money you'd expect to see run through a family if, since WW II, each generation kept putting away low-mid six figures. You get to the end of the 20th century, and with compounding interest you've suddenly got a lot of people tripping into low seven figure bonanzas when their parents die.
So- imagine you're a reasonably self-aware, college educated Democrat, both you and your spouse have solid-but-not-great jobs, and you're making $180k-$210k a year gross. That's not bad, but that does NOT cover:
1) The mortgage on a $450k house.
2) Payments/insurance on two Infinity crossovers.
3) Club sports fees for the two kids.
4) Annual vacations that require air travel.
5) College expenses when the kids get out of high school...
And so on. Yet there are millions of Americans who are living that life on these kinds of incomes. So where's the money coming from? And, to the point of this book review, how would coming into that money affect your worldview? Again, assuming the beneficiary is reasonably self-aware, we might expect them to carry some vague sense of guilt and shame at having their lifestyles-- in middle age, no less-- subsidized by monies that they did not year. Which, in turn, could lead to......
1) a lot of mumbling about 'privilege' (while doing nothing tangible to mitigate its cultural/economic influence),.
2) the pursuit of class signifiers which aren't 'too' grotesque, but which still relay the appropriate message.
3) a desire to use education and 'intellect', as opposed to wealth, as a primary status signifier (since we have both, but only the former was earned)
4) an insistence of minimizing the importance of personal agency in life outcomes (since you 'can't be blamed' for living a life that you haven't really earned)
And so on. We talk a lot about the basically uninterrupted spell of economic progress that we've seen since the post-war years, but not (it seems to me) much about how that generational accrual of wealth has affected social standings. My feeling is that its probably driven more of our social outcomes than the people who think the most about these kinds of issues would like to admit.
In the 19th century, novels frequently were about the broad topic of inheritances. Dickens novels often end with the plucky hero being rescued from poverty by an unexpected bequest.
These days, few novels or movies are about this topic even though, as you rightly say, it's a big one in real life, especially among the novel-writing and screen-writing classes.
Maybe increased average lifespans among the upper class are partly to blame? If a centenarian dies, their heirs are likely to be middle-aged themselves rather than young people struggling to get by.
Did you leave off a digit or something? If your house is only worth $450K then $180-210K a year gives you plenty left over for all those sorts of other things.
I would think that the sort of person you're talking about lives in much more expensive places/houses than that.
Yeah the example is off. Wife and I have average earnings over the last 10 years per annum right in that range. And we have $450k in real estate paid off (only one CRV, also paid off), put we also took 4 vacations involving air travel this year. And we spend another $10k easy on youth sports and another $10k easy on adult sports/clubs.
And we have inherited exactly zero dollars. In fact I have probably spent another $5k/year subsidizing various family. Family has cost me money in my lifetime not been a source of it. I was working close to full time by 14.
The numbers may be off- I'm just spitballing-- but the larger question is this:
Assuming that a higher percentage of families have accrued significant amounts of generational wealth in the past 80 years than at any prior point in history (and this assumption could be wrong, but for the sake of argument let's go with it), then:
a) What would we expect the effects of that to be on socio-cultural dynamics, and
b) Are those expected effects consistent with what we currently see?
Yeh. And actually there’s no way to reduce the average wealth discrepancy between white and black people without greater inheritance tax, but that’s rarely mentioned. There’s a lot of shouting about white supremacy guaranteeing that the average white person has y net worth while the average black person has x net worth where y is significantly greater than x.
Often this is the mean not the median, and the people doing the shouting are the people doing the inheriting.
> And actually there’s no way to reduce the average wealth discrepancy between white and black people without greater inheritance tax.
I have a dog in this fight, as a Black man; I'm not quite so sure about this. There are things (such as culture) that lead to increased income and wealth attainment; these things, like inheritance, are highly heritable. It may be possible that over generations, cultural changes occur such that Black people are able to acquire more wealth independent of tax structures.
Note that Woke does nothing to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
To give one example - if large companies would stop putting up roadblocks to unionization, this would result in a transfer of concrete material benefits to black, and brown, and yellow, and red and white working class people greater than all the corporate diversity committees ever formed, all the Twitter manifestos ever penned, all the unisex bathroom signs ever to be hung.
It will happen as soon as techies learn the codes, protocols, and requirements of elite behavior.
Or, us nerds need to follow the law of eliteness (not elitism): Rule not with overwhelming force, but with attractive power.
The incessant need to be seen as smarter than, and the obnoxious competitions that we succumb to to demonstrate our ability actually counteract whatever authority we wish to establish.
Now, you may think yachting or polo obnoxious. But you’d be wrong. The silly hobbies of the old elite remained hidden from the masses. A nu-elite, posting on twitter, however, broadcasts their weaknesses (and strengths). And this, while entertaining, sows division. Fame and infamy, two sides of the same coin. Entertainers have haters.
As tech continues to expand into “softer” fields, like with AI-generated art and literature, soon it will be cool to understand exactly how the machines that influence our culture operate.
In the meantime, engaging playfully with the humanities will continue to pay dividends to us geeks who have the energy to invest in such non-practical pursuits.
On this note, I do hope that Scott and his readers will take another look at contemporary architecture (art too, but arch, at the nexus of art and tech, would be a good starting point). You may wish to review the book “Learning from Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. It does a good job of explaining how to appreciate the banality of middle America.
And the works of Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid may shine light on why brutalism (see: Corbusier), as ugly as it may be, has value if only to inspire its successor styles.
In general, the split between STEM and Liberal Arts may be chalked up to a difference between convergent and divergent thinking. While engineering problems have a right answer, and arbitrary chains of right answers compose into gigantic towers, the process of evolution in the arts seeks to discover new questions, and this necessitates constant critique (deconstruction) of the status quo, making things worse before we accumulate the will and insight to make them better.
One minor correction: James B. Conant was no longer president of Harvard in 1955. He'd left in 1953 to become the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Nathan Pusey became president in 1953. His Wikipedia article says:
"During his presidency of Harvard, Pusey overhauled the admissions process, which had been biased heavily in favor of the alumni of New England-based boarding schools, and began admitting public school graduates based on scores obtained on standardized tests such as the SAT. This was highly controversial with the school's alumni population but set the stage for diversifying the student body and faculty."
I read Nicholas Lemann's book on standardized testing about 25 years ago, in which Conant plays a large role, so I too took away the impression that Conant (who played giant roles in mid-century America - e.g., Conant was on the committee that picked Hiroshima for the first A-bomb) did it, but the timelines don't match up. On the other hand, Conant might well have gotten to the same point at the same time as Pusey did. Conant ardently believed in meritocracy as crucial to the Cold War.
Alternative explanations (among many) to explain The Sixties, which didn't start until around the assassination of JFK on 11/22/63 and the Beatles going on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964.
- Somebody suggested to me that the world moving so far to the left culturally over the course of 60s was due to the Vatican 2 council of 1962-1965 liberalizing the Roman Catholic Church, the chief institutional bulwark of reaction for centuries. The Catholic Church was riding high at the time, especially in America, so Pope John XXIII's decision out of the blue to call a council to modernize the church might serve best as the unmoved mover behind The Sixties.
- The invention of The Pill used to be cited all the time as the cause of The Sixties. I don't hear it much anymore, but that's because fewer people can remember back that far.
"Although it is rarely stated explicitly, the traditional family rests on a basic assumption: that in the vast majority of cases, a woman needs (or at least benefits greatly from having) a man to provide for her. And for most of human history, that was simply true, because much of the business of survival involved physically strenuous activities--first hunting, later agriculture, and even, fairly recently, heavy industry--to which men were significantly more suited, and which were incompatible with maternal care of infants.
"By the late twentieth century, however, technology and its attendant prosperity together allowed women to be more or less fully competitive with men at the majority of reasonably well-paying occupations. Meanwhile, medical advances have vastly reduced the amount of time a woman has to spend caring for infants in order to be confident of raising a small number of them to adulthood. Thus, for the first time in history, a critical mass of women have truly come to need men, as the old feminist saying goes, 'like a fish needs a bicycle'.
"And it is this newfound independence that has brought about the destruction of the traditional family, not vice versa. While the conventional wisdom characterizes men as reveling in their sexual freedom while women still pine for a stable marriage and family, it is in fact women who have shifted their position on marriage most dramatically. Well over half of divorces, for example, are instigated by women, and the surge in extramarital sexual partnerships, from casual relationships to long-term unmarried cohabitations, would be impossible without women's consent to them--something that would have been simply unheard-of fifty years ago, when most women's economic stability was dependent on marital stability. Today's women, freed by the prospect of financial independence, can now structure their personal relationships the way men have long preferred to: based on emotional preference, rather than material need. And as it turns out--for many of them, though certainly not all of them--emotional preference is less conducive to stable, lifelong marital commitment than material need used to be."
This is all correct, and it does need to be accounted for in any explanation. While it did have some reinforcement mechanisms, patriarchy didn't really take much effort to keep in place when technology ensured that a woman was literally an economic liability, one that her father was prepared to pay a dowry to get off his hands. And so this patriarchal model is the way that most societies went about reproducing themselves.
Though it's worth noting that there have been historical societies in which women with children were generally able to provide for their own and their offspring's caloric needs, and those societies took on a matrilocal form, with weak marriages and men normally not living with their wives and children.
What's happening currently is that, while our social norms are changing and patriarchy has been overthrown, single motherhood is still considered low-status and undesirable. And with birth control and abortion, it's now easily avoidable. So instead people spend most of their youth in a quasi-matrilocal lifestyle of low-commitment sexual relationships, but without the children that historically accompanied them.
Yeah. By 1960 we had stomped infant mortality, killed the AIDS of its time (syphilis) nearly dead, and upper-middle-class men weren't working with heavy machinery and ships but in office buildings.
Also notable is the industrialisation of fabric production. Probably 90% of female labour through history was in spinning and weaving fabric as a near-constant activity. This was itself also a vital activity on par with farming for supporting a family.
> for most of human history, that was simply true, because much of the business of survival involved physically strenuous activities--first hunting, later agriculture, and even, fairly recently, heavy industry
Plough agriculture, yes. That relied on men to till the soil that allowed more intensive farming and produced the deeply patriarchal societies that dominated the greater Mediterranean and Europe. But in places like Sub Saharan Africa, Polynesia and North America there was a different subsistance pattern (hoe farming or horticulture) where most of the work was of the sort that could be done by a mother at the same time as she watched her child. Men would slash and burn to somewhat prepare an area of soil before buggering off to hunt (supplementing what the women harvested) or make war. Presumably a similar relationship existed in many hunter-gatherer societies.
Studies have found that the different gender relations produced by these two types of farming persist in modern attitudes towards women in e.g. the workplace or politics.
I'm not sure how pastoralists such as the Maasai of E. Africa fit into this.
It probably sounds weird, but all of your "mysteries and concepts" seem completely un-mysterious to me. To wit:
Tartaria: Big plain boxes are easier and cheaper to build than old-fashioned buildings, so the for-profit businesses that build most modern buildings for practical purposes--and want to save money for their shareholders--prefer them. (Similarly, once basic manufactured clothing became vastly cheaper and easier to wear than hand-tailored outfits, practical people flocked to the former.)
Partisan polarization: it's no worse than it was in the past--it's just become more uniform because modern media have unified the political playing field. 100 years ago, local Democrats and Republicans hated each other, but their representatives could do business in Washington (or the state house) on matters of common interest because the local enmities were far away. Today, everyone back home knows exactly what their representatives are up to at all times, so the latter must keep up the appearance of bitter partisan hostility even in Congress.
High modernism: the old upper class was industrial, so its members at least paid lip service to industry (while pining, as all wealthy moderns do, for the simpler pleasures and grander glories of the pre-modern aristocracy: country estates, servants, contempt for the filthy masses of starving peasants). The meritocrats, on the other hand, earned their wealth as managers and professionals, so they're freer to disdain industry completely, and openly profess their hatred for the industrialism that raised non-elites to comfortable lifestyles complete with a basic dignity far closer to their own.
Meritocracy: Ruling classes aren't by nature more or less competent in a general sense--rather, they're more or less heedful of the needs and concerns of those they rule. Over time, their concern and understanding for those beneath them inevitably decays, and they get replaced by a new ruling class less remote from, and hence more aware of, the rest of the population.
Culture wars: The cultural "flip" that created the Bobos was perhaps larger than most, but it was hardly unique--we've witnessed several since then. The tension among adjacent layers of society seeking to signal their superiority to those below them and similarity to those above them ensures that class signals will be in a constant state of flux, with every signal ceasing to become effective the moment a lower class figures out how to emulate it.
College admissions: All elites begin as meritocracies by some criterion--whether industrial/mercantile success or academic ranking. But in seeking to pass their elite status on to their children, they inevitably shift towards rejecting meritocracy in favor of hereditary or cultural traits that they can pass down to their rapidly-regressing-to-the-mean descendants. That's what we're seeing today, as the children of the meritocrats of the 1960s eviscerate the standards of merit that once elevated their parents, in favor of new definitions of merit defined by crude, politicized cultural signals that are easy for the mediocre scions of the elite to learn and absorb.
I'll stop there (mostly because I don't know anything about Fussell), but if anybody's still reading, congratulations to you...
I recently ran across an explanation for “the stunning rise in divorce, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy rates” that is so powerful that I am shocked that I wasn’t aware of it before. In short, it was changes in a few laws (specifically welfare and divorce law), just the sort of subtle thing that is described in the review book: https://fireflydove.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-libertarian-view-of-gay-marriage/
So the libertarian argument against gay marriage is that people should be forced to do things for the good of society -- and it's a libertarian argument because "things" doesn't include taxation.
No, that's the conservative argument. The titular libertarian in the linked review is just arguing for epestimic humility about it, i.e., at least considering that it might be true that gay marriage could possibly be bad for society.
Ah, seems that the original title was "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other" (see http://web.archive.org/web/20120531065313/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html). Calion's link goes a conservative's blog where it was reposted as "A Libertarian View of Gay Marriage" (since the original author was a libertarian).
Are you saying that considering the consequences of changes in the law, even while explicitly denying that you are weighing in one way or the other about the desirability of those changes, is ipso facto arguing against those changes???
Why wouldn’t it? Again, are you saying that considering possible negative outcomes from a change indicates that one opposes that change? That in order to be in favor of (or, indeed, neutral toward) a change requires that one only list its *positive* effects?
Changes,to a few laws can be the result of years of grass roots pressure (as with female suffrage), or can defend from on high , reflecting only elite concerns. I think that an important distinction.
Architecture: I did a popular long Twitter thread on the change in architecture for city halls before and after 1945, comparing apples to apples: e.g., San Diego's various city halls.
Styles were already changing in the 1930s. E.g., San Diego's 19th Century city hall was ornate, but its 1938 city hall was relatively streamlined, but still elegant and nicely detailed. It's 1964 city hall looks like worker housing in Sao Paulo, judging from the lone picture of it I could find online (unlike the many pictures of the two previous city halls.
One thing to note: coal-powered cities were so sooty that old buildings had gone dark and ugly and it seemed easier to just tear them down and put up something made of glass and steel. But in 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started having Paris's grand old buildings washed, with spectacular results.
Who builds worker housing? Nebbishy bureaucrats with a budget. Since D-FDR got a lock on the federal bureaucracy it's been a D patronage system for unfireable nebbish bureaucrats. As the federal bureaucracy has expanded with the morals of a cancer cell for ninety years, they have built everything like worker housing.
Anyone who stuck their neck out and built something pretty and classy would lose their budget fight. Tasteless worker housing wins budget fights.
Who can be crazy in their private life? Who wants to be? Unfireable nebbishes with a patronage system. Drugs, sterile sex outside work, no problem. Since D-LBJ made the D patronage system federal law around 1963 and accelerated its expansion with the morals of Long Binh Jail, we've seen sex drugs rock and roll sacralized.
"So I was wondering if the right and left poles might just flip, over and over, in a long-term secular cycle."
Is spot on, and it's exactly what the philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate. There's been a constant swing back and forth between the right/left divides, each at times playing the "establishment" and the other the "rebel", pushing and pulling, while the entire thing trends/spirals in a more complex and evolutionarily appropriate direction for the complexities of the time.
Definitely something you should look into more if you haven't already. Ken Wilber, Clare Graves, Don Beck, Jeff Salzman, and especially currently Steve McIntosh's "Institute for Cultural Evolution".
A late friend of mine taught history at Yale when Yale junked it's Jewish quota for the class entering in the fall of 1965 (a decade behind Harvard). He said even being the grandson of Senator wouldn't have gotten George W. Bush in in 1965 rather than 1964. The intellectual atmosphere of the campus changed immediately in 1965, became much more electric, he recalled
Bobo, standing for "bourgeois-bohème", is pretty common in French (which may or may not have coined it, it's unclear on Wikipedia). It's used in France especially, I believe, to describe a certain kind of Parisian. We occasionally use it for the equivalent in Montreal too for the artsy, urbane social class that lives primarily in a specific neighborhood. It's gently derisive, and overall a pretty good (if vague) descriptor of the people it refers to. You English speakers should use it more!
I don't really buy the premise of the book, but I did wander in to this social circle once by accident in my youth. A friend of mine had by weird historical contingency ended up on one of their soccer youth teams, and got invited along to the parties every year by fiat. I was her plus one.
My overwhelming impression was of basically nice (but money-obsessed) noodleheads. During the secret santa (it was Christmas), gift values were all over the map because they didn't have a sense of the difference between $20 and $200, and something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason? Only one or two were employed in a traditional sense, and those were sinecures- part-time work that paid $400,000 a year, to 'tide them over' I think was the phrase; they were embarrassed about it. Another one cornered me pretty early on and started asking a bunch of unusual questions about my personal life, not just where I went to college or what my major was, but odd little details. I was rescued by my date who walked up and said (to both of us), "she's trying to figure out whether you're old money or new money." I just said, "Oh! I am not money." And then we had a little laugh about it and went back to a normal and mutually respectful conversation.
They were perfectly nice, really, but it was eye-opening how much it was clearly a social network first, where money just happened to flow very freely and was a primary topic of conversation; it was absolutely a 'class' barrier that I'd crossed, in the old-fashioned sense. I wasn't there nearly long enough to get a bead on the deeper mythologies of the set, but they definitely had a parallel understanding of money that made 'earning' it worse, not better. They were also pretty tryhard about being 'eccentric' and quirky, I guess because it was taboo to talk about accomplishments so they needed something else to talk about over dinner, and the ones winning the game were the ones who made the money seem like it just sort of rained down on them from the clouds.
In retrospect, the most interesting thing about it is that all of their wealth depended on internal and inward-facing connections to this group, or I guess being part of inherited/family wealth from it, and nothing depended on any reputation or actions outside of it; they lived on investment income and such, but hired other people to make the investments. So it seems like a sort of socioeconomic 'dark matter' where I have no idea how many people live like this or how much wealth overall they possess. It was just a few dozen at the party, anyway. I'm not sure it even *matters*; I think in economic terms, their function was mostly to be the name at the top of large currency reservoirs being exploited by the financial industry. Whether they're shrinking as a group or holding on in to the 21st century, I have no idea, and I can't imagine there being any broader social consequences either way.
> something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason?
Presumably some marketing consultant a couple of rungs of the socioeconomic ladder below said party-goers worked very hard to to make it that chrismas' fad, so that some company in Italy could soak lemon peel in vodka for six weeks then sell it at an astronomical markup.
See also: Jägermeister in the anglophone world; the invention of Baileys in 70's London; $SUPERFOOD_DU_JOUR; etc.
Have you seen the lead-crime meta-analysis which claimed to have found evidence of publication bias having exaggerated the effect of lead on crime by an order of magnitude?
How can it have exaggerated the effect by an order of magnitude if the meta-analysis concludes that lead is responsible for between 7% and 28% of the total fall in homicides?
It seems to me the meta-analysis is totally compatible with lead playing a major role, perhaps even the major role in the bump in violent crime between approximately 1960 and 2000. As the study notes:
> "It is possible that the large differences in our samples can be reconciled. For example, the large difference between the individual and area samples may be because crime has fallen at the extensive margin rather than the intensive margin. Tcherni-Buzzeo (2019) observe that around 5% of the population are responsible for 50% of crime, and that the fall in crime in the US is likely due to falls in this high-crime population, rather than less crimes per individual in that population. If less lead pollution only meant less probability of committing crime for this small slice in the population, it might nevertheless lead to a large fall in crime at the area level. A second possibility is that relatively small effects of lead at the individual level can be exacerbated by peer effects from other lead affected individuals. Recent work has found these peer effects can even affect those without elevated blood lead levels (Gazze et al., 2021). In areas with high levels of lead, the individual effects of lead may be compounded by peers also having high levels of lead, leading to a much larger impact at the area level."
If you push a dynamic system out of an attractor state is is not unlikely to enter a region with a gradient away from the attractor state in all sorts of different dimensions.
Your link seems to be a pre-publication discussion draft. So apparently significant corrections were made before publication (compare 0%-36% of fall in homicide rate to 7%-28%).
Bobos came out in the era of the "Stuff White People Like" website. It was certainly a moment, and Brooks captured it—not the reality, on the ground, but a way to look at things that made sense for people in it.
Perhaps it resonated because most of Brooks' facts were simply invented.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2004/04/01/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/ — worth a read not just for the careful "oh wait, your telling anecdote is literally not true, the opposite is true", but for Brooks' attempt to intimidate the journalist. 2004 was the end of a long era where you could just make stuff up.
Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books? They're not scholarship ("big synthetic theory inducted from data"); they're not journalism ("just the facts"). They seem to be GPT-3 prompts avant la lettre, where the commentariat is GPT-3. Put in a Brooks line, and out comes a million comments.
I'm guessing the consumer tastes stuff may be the focus of the five-sixths of the book Scott is ambivalent about reviewing? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the supposed differences in consumer tastes (liberals like arugula and lattes!) Brooks wrote about were shallow attempts to describe college/non-college and urban/rural cultural divides.
"Stuff White People Like" postdates Brooks' book by almost a decade. The central conceit of "Stuff White People like" is stereotyping all white people with the traits associated with particular subcultures of affluent, educated, mostly liberal and urban whites in the same way that other racial categories get stereotyped with the traits of particular subcultures. The overlap comes from the fact that they're both doing "avocado toast" bits. You can forgive the latter more than the former because the author is joking. That his stereotypes are funny, but flimsy if you treat them seriously is the point, whereas Brooks is serious even when his stereotypes don't actually hold up in reality.
"Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books?"
Can you elaborate? The point of these books for the authors is at least partially "to make money." Do you mean, why do people READ these books? In the case of Class, the answer is: Because it was funny.
This was a really interesting review that was a joy to read, but I feel like the lede was _still_ buried right at the end in the penultimate paragraph where Scott tries to sketch out the tech utopia failing in 2015. I can't imagine myself being remotely better qualified to make that call than Scott, but it seems to me that battle hasn't been won or lost yet. FTX and the collapse of whatever Web 3.0 was just set us all back a few years, too. But then Elon took twitter...I don't know, man. While both political parties are led by two Octogenarians it feels like we're still in a holding pattern. Lots of alpha in 2024.
> What would get printed in the New York Times - previously the WASP aristocracy’s mouthpiece, but now increasingly infiltrated by the more educated newcomers?
Hasn't the NYT been owned by Jews since the late 19th century when Adolph Ochs bought it? Admittedly, he was a German Jew rather than some later-arriving eastern European.
As for the demerits of "meritocracy" it's worth keeping in mind that the traits which lead to individual self-advancement, which Greg Cochran calls "moxie", sometimes are undesirable for everyone else:
The New York Times was a Republican partisan paper from roughly 1851 (when it was founded) to 1884. Abandoning its partisan readership accelerated the decline and Adolph Ochs (a media baron and the son of immigrants) bought it and reformed it into its current structure. He leaned into neutrality, decreased the price, and gave it a wider circulation. It grew steadily in the early 20th century and achieved international fame mainly in the Interwar Years. And ever since then it's been passed down to a child of the owner.
So yeah, it was never the WASP aristocracy's mouthpiece. It was a Republican rag (in a Democrat majority city) and then a long term play by a Jewish media tycoon that worked out spectacularly.
Ultimately I think all of these big social changes are overdetermined. If you find yourself asking "Which of these fifteen different totally plausible factors caused this massive social change?" then the answer is usually "All of them, plus a few dozen more". Anything that isn't massively overdetermined by dozens of different factors doesn't cause a massive social change.
I think that "replacement of one elite by a different elite" definitely isn't a bad lens to view the massive social changes of the mid 20th century through. I certainly don't think that the whims of the Harvard University Admissions Department are enough to explain it (these whims were themselves caused by some of the dozens of other social factors at play) but they're some part of it.
Economic factors seem like they should be pretty huge here. The idea of the US being ruled by a bunch of "Boston Brahmins" seems ridiculous now, simply because Boston isn't that important or wealthy any more. The Boston Brahmins couldn't possibly have held on to power in the face of changes that moved the economic centre of gravity of the country far to the south and west.
It's interesting to see all the changes in fashion, all the "this is now high-status, this is low-status", all the little morals of the little morality plays that make up most of our culture's fiction and news reporting, all as existing downstream of the signalling needs of a new elite. And of course elite rotation wasn't a one-time process, there's now a whole bunch of elite castes competing for our attention, and all culture is just elite-on-elite warfare now.
Yeah. I wonder how much of this was due to us having basically killed infectious disease dead. We went from most parents burying several children due to infant mortality c. 1880 to something like 98 percent of kids reaching 18 in 1960. Death in childbirth? Two orders of magnitude less common. Same for lots of other infectious disease.
Not really addressed elsewhere in the comments- the rise of socialism as an ideology among the influential elite of the US.
While a number of intellectual superstars were folded into the space race on the side of America, there was also a broad adoption of Communist ideals among newer strivers, as a part of the conflict with old money aristos. This had a negative (imo) impact on just about everything from social structures, publuc expenditures, economic management, and nationalism.
The failure of the USSR has not had as much of a muffling effect as I had hoped on the pursuit of those ideals.
"broad adoption of Communist ideals among newer strivers"
This is a big topic, but the number of sympathizers, fellow travelers, and outright agents in the oh-so-social class has been a problem for a long time.
The connections that Brooks makes between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy's power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture that first emerged in the 60s doesn't seem to stand up to even moderate historical scrutiny, in all honesty. Some issues that immediately come to mind off the top of my head:
-The idea that the cultural values that Brooks calls "bohemianism" became dominant in America for essentially parochial reasons limited to the US (a change in university admissions policies, the displacement of a previous aristocracy) doesn't track well with the fact that these social changes happened around the same time in basically every part of the western world (and to a lesser degree in Asia as well).
-The general phenomenon of the power of the WASP aristocracy being displaced by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing--there are books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man* and Burnham's *Managerial Revolution* that were already observing the trend. The decades before the 50s saw WWII, the New Deal, and the general enrichment and empowerment of the various ethnic immigrant groups--all of these were vastly more convincing causal factors of the decline of the WASP aristocracy than one individual university president deciding to admit a moderately larger amount of non-WASPs. The dominant social orthodoxy that the bohemians were challenging was *this* orthodoxy, which had already displaced the WASP aristocracy by the time that they emerged--he postwar social order features as something of a glaring missing link for all of Brooks' analysis.
-The idea of a clean break between WASP culture and bohemianism, with the former being a separate, distinct group of people that overthrew the latter doesn't make a lot of sense. The WASPs were heavily associated with set of a few denominations--episcopalianism, congregationalism, and unitarianism--and today all of these are generally considered some of the most liberal, bohemian-ish religious groups in the country. It's probably more accurate to say that many young members of the WASP aristocracy simply adopted some bohemian values (at least superficially)
Yeah I see Brooks as thinking Harvard led the way when it looks more like it followed along (and being more famous later, got the credit/blame as a result).
What if it's just aesthetic taste changing without any particular shift in underlying values? The main difference, it seems, between the "aristocratic elites" and the "meritocratic elites" is that they blanket themselves in different displays of wealth and charity.
I think it's a mistake to think of the modern elite "class" as being like an actual class division. You do have to jump through certain hoops and take on various cultural attitudes, but fundamentally it is a group that allows entry to outsiders.
Further, today's elites don't typically think of themselves as elites. I recall listening to a political speech decrying globalist elites with a man who had been accustomed to charging $450 an hour as a lawyer, who had previously been a member of parliament, and who was at the time the chief of staff to a Senator. And he wondered aloud "Who even are are these elites they keep talking about?" oblivious to the obvious reality that he was one.
I won't go so far as to say that today's wealthy and powerful have *earned* their position in society, but for the most part they haven't been born into it. People like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks, etc didn't grow up with famous names. They know what it's like to not be important, looking up at the important people from the outside. And while I don't think that necessarily makes them humble or empathetic, it does create a different worldview to someone who is born into power and privilege.
In comparison, "Old money" consciously resented "New money" because they might have been just as rich, but they weren't *like us* - there was an actual group identity among the elites. And even that wealthy "aristocracy" was a less exclusive version of the old fashioned actual aristocracy where you know that when your father dies you will become an Earl, etc.
In a real class system you are what you're born as, and the notion of "social mobility" is weird and confusing. The people at the bottom might dislike people at the top for one reason or another, but they never envy the position of the elites because there is no concept that they could take it for themselves. You might as well wish to steal someone else's parents for yourself - it just doesn't compute.
Lord of the Rings is an accessible example of this. The movies depicted the Frodo/Sam relationship as being personal devotion between two peers, and Sam's "Mr Frodo" is just something he says. But the book is written very much from an old class perspective, which obviously Tolkien was marinated in as an Englishman of his era. Frodo is older, much richer, and occupies a vastly higher social position than Sam. Sam calls Frodo "Mr Frodo" because he is in a lower class and he must always address his superiors respectfully. Frodo never tells Sam "Please, don't bother with the "Mr" thing," because although his personal regard for Sam is high the idea of waving away the class distinction between them is not even thinkable.
And of course it's that tension between the understanding of Frodo and Sam occupying very different social positions on one hand and yet becoming very close because of their shared adversity that makes their relationship dynamic interesting. But modern audiences have become so unfamiliar with class as a concept that it becomes widely perceived as homoerotic.
The class system failed because people outside of the elite gained power and wealth that couldn't be resisted and were able to supplant the elite class, despite not having a class identity of their own. I don't think that can happen so easily today - someone who is an "outsider" but gains wealth, status, and power just gets assimilated into the elite.
Though Sam became Master of Bag End, Mayor of Michel Delving, and patriarch to a clan that seems to have been to the Westmarch what the Brandybucks were to the eastern border. Not bad for someone born a servant.
The Shire was a very class based society (and Tolkien is on record in thinking that deference was good for the person practicing it, albeit maybe not for the one receiving it). But it was clearly somewhat open to social mobility, albeit not quickly. That was Lobelia Sackville-Baggins's driving goal, after all (complete with fancifying the family name), and she nearly managed it twice. Bilbo's own parents were a match between a middling if propertied squire and a daughter of the closest thing the Shire has to a noble family.
And it was a driver of Otho Sackville-Baggins' social ambitions, as well:
"Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. In the Took-family, since the headship was also connected with the title and (originally military) office of Thain, descent was strictly through the male line. In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
<i>I think it's a mistake to think of the modern elite "class" as being like an actual class division. You do have to jump through certain hoops and take on various cultural attitudes, but fundamentally it is a group that allows entry to outsiders.</i>
Most historical elites allowed entry to outsiders. Such entry might not have been common, and it might have taken a few generations for a poor family to rise to the top (though not always -- see Toyotomi Hideyoshi's career for an example), but it was very rare for it to be actually impossible.
On the topic of downplaying one's wealth, I think a big part of the reason Trump hasn't been assimilated is that he explicitly rejects the elite's aesthetic sensibilities. He has the money and the power, but he never got the memo that you're supposed to decorate with blankets woven by indigenous artists.
Trump is a wild mishmash of class markers. On the one hand he takes conspicuous consumption to extremes that even the old blue-bloods would find gauche. He has gold toilets and handmade suits and statues carved from Italian marble, along with gold leaf on every available surface. On the other hand he appears on WWE and enjoys fast food and well-done steaks with ketchup on them.
I honestly think that's a lot of his appeal, too. Trump in a 5-figure suit eating McDonalds on his private jet comes off as a lot more genuine than a Harvard-educated politician putting on a flannel shirt and cowboy boots for a photo op down at the BBQ place.
Back in the 80s and 90s and even some of the 00s, he certainly seemed to be assimilated.
Gauche, but able to fit in with the NYC elite, at least on the surface. Maybe it was just the NYC elite rolling their eyes behind his back while resigning themselves to having to put up with him and his children and maybe even his grandchildren. I dunno.
But then he decided to do something different, and ditched the NYC elite and the Democrats. He wasn't really on my radar at all in the late 00s and early 10s, so I don't know how much of this was being telegraphed. I'd love to see an impartial biography of him, but we'd probably need to contact some space aliens to get one.
Regarding Native American blankets, it is not surprising that as mass production increases hand made objects become more desirable (especially handmade by "talented" artisans using rare raw ingredients) precisely because pieces of art are a status symbol, this is a general reaction to abundance where we care more about the story behind an object than the object itself. I would urge caution when listening to critiques of changes in art that are overly simplified. Collecting "non western" items as part of an art collection is an extremely WASPy behavior with distinguished roots stretching back to at least the 15th century.
Also the reason a lodge in Tahoe (although I think Aspen is the better choice) is more desirable now is because 1. Electric/Gas heating 2. The rise in Alpine Skiing as a sport 3. The Airplane/Helicopter.
I suspect Brooks was heavily influenced by Fussell, and that bobos are an extension of class X. Unless I missed it, I was surprised Brooks didn’t cite Fussell -- even the humor is of similar style (though Fussell is much funnier).
Quote: “why [are] Ivies.. so unwilling to admit more Asians despite their supposed anti-racist principles. They consciously think of themselves as the gatekeeper of a US elite class, and having a 50% Asian ruling class in a 5% Asian country would be really jarring.”
Comment: But this is going to happen. Harvard and the rest of the Ivies can win some battles, but they cannot win the war against Asians. The same will happen as happened with Jewish admissions. The interesting question is rather: What happens next?
A fruitful starting point for predictions is to begin with Brook’s idea that the ruling class is the repository of values, and values change when there is a change in ruling classes. Combine this idea with the insight that in our societies, universities are the gatekeepers & selection mechanism for elites.
Armed with these twin insights, here are three predictions of what is in store for the future:
(1) The rise of Asians as the dominant elite group will mean a partial return to old WASP cultural ideals. Since the “Asian values” of discipline, hard work, and ruthlessness aligns better with the old-WASP elite culture than with the hippie-infected Bobo elite culture.
(2) In the longer term, We will see increased intermarriages at the elite level between Asians and Caucasians, creating a gradually larger mixed-ethnic ruling group. In particular a mixed Asian-North European type. Why? Because this is the only non-Asian group that Asians really respect as a culture. White-skinned North-Europeans (including Ashkenazi Jews) are almost regarded as “honorary Asians”. I am thinking in particular on Japanese, Chinese and Korean Asian ethnicities here, but it is likely even more general.
(3) A parallel development (under the radar for Brooks?) is the rise of women as an elite group in their own right, not as appendages to men's elite status. When it comes to university admissions, the percentage of women has risen even faster than the percentage of Asians during the last 50-70 years. This implies a gradual feminization of the elite culture. The present “woke” culture is an effect of this change. It is essentially the more caring attitude of women toward the not-so-successful in life, translated into elite language & elite culture.
All of this is inevitable, so let us just sit back and enjoy the unfolding of the show.
> (with the blue-blooded Bush dynasty playing Canute trying to hold back the waves)
Canute did not actually try to "hold back the waves". He wanted to demonstrate to his courtiers precisely the opposite: that he was, in fact, powerless to do so.
I suppose you know that, so is that your argument, that the Bushs consciously demonstrated that they are powerless to stop the decline of their own class?
A small note: Apparently Bobo did not stick in the US. But in Europe, french speaking part (France, part of Belgium and Switzerland) it did stick and will be used and understood by many. It stands for Bourgeois Bohème which is a litteral translation. You can even hear a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZzR7-apnKA
I'm surprised that, in a country where most have high-school Spanish lessons, nobody seems to notice a key reason why the very useful coinage "bobos" didn't stick. "Bobo" in Spanish means "dumb," which is something that I immediately realized would be a problem when David Brooks first wrote about the concept in The Atlantic a couple of decades back. I guess he should have asked me first. This is not irrelevant: among the upper and aspiring upper-middle class, knowledge of some basic Spanish is not so very uncommon, and bobo is a very simple, starter-level word. Then again, something similar happened when they launched the "Pajero" car in the US (meaning "Masturbator" in Spanish) to the great merriment of your Guatemalan maid.
Pretty sure the coinage was always meant to have at least a subtly negative connotation. Even if it has no specific meaning as a word in your language, "bobo" is still going to sound a bit silly and childish, like saying peepee for genitals or booboo for a minor injury. So if Brooks knew that the word means "dumb" in Spanish, he wouldn’t necessarily consider that a problem.
Indeed. In French, where bobo is widely used (and is a word for word translation of bourgeois bohemian (bourgeois bohème), to the point I was sure it was a native word, not something imported from English), the term is derogatory. it's not really a strong insult, but it convey some hypocrisy and fake, a trendy pose by people that are, if not stupid, at least unoriginal, and tend to see things with pink colored glasses.
So being associated with dumb is certainly not a problem: bobo's wants to be perceived as intelligent. They are not, at least not at the level they would like to be perceived.
"they stuck to a few standard rich people hobbies (yachting, horseback riding) and distrusted creativity or (God forbid) quirkiness."
This is interesting. Quirkiness has always been a hallmark of European nobility, a trait much overdone to, among other things, set oneself apart from boring, staid, predictable bourgeois. Who of course can't do quirkiness and are always mystified by the aristocrat's penchant for it.
I think it is important to note that the WASPs were culturally descended from the Puritans/Roundheads. This explains the lack of quirkiness and strong deference to the boring and staid.
> Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 - these are stratospheric scores.
A sidenote, but it's important to note that this book was written in the late 1990s and published in 2000. Back then, SAT scores near 700 were indeed stratospheric. There have been numerous rounds of "recentering" since then, and as such getting a perfect SAT score is no longer all that rare. By contrast, when Bill Gates took it, getting a perfect SAT score was incredibly uncommon. I think Bill got something like 1590 if memory serves. (Bill Ballmer had a perfect 1600).
One aspect that Scott barely mentions is the Jewish angle. A significant part of the new elite were comprised of Jews, often from middle-class and lower-middle class backgrounds. They formed a coalition with often poor whites like Bill Clinton who were previously excluded. I think late 20th century liberalism was largely shaped by this union.
What's ironic is that today's Ivy League establishment is substantially Jewish (look at their presidents) yet have increasingly returned to the old WASP elite's habits of "holistic admissions".
This seems pretty depressing, given it implies that keeping meritocracy constant is a rare feat and new elites tend to calcify, become more mediocre over time and then play defensive to keep their gains. Will there be a new Conant and Pusey in our era? I am skeptical. Whatever said about the old WASP elite, they had a certain idealism that the new elite lacks.
The first generation gets in by merit and work. They want their offspring to have an easier road than they did, so they try to make their position hereditary while allowing for the meritorious to rise.
This works until the top end gets top heavy, at which point the top end tries to pull up the ladder away.
This works until the society comes into a crisis. The top end cannot cope since they have long since excluded merit as much as they can. In the good case, you get more people rising by merit and hard work. In the bad case the society gets wiped out.
Actually he quite firmly mentions it, and in a way that really struck me -- I found your comment by ctrl-f "jews". Why? Because I read Bobos in Paradise almost 20 years ago now, and didn't notice any mentions of Jewish people. Perhaps with Kanye in the news I'm sensitized to it or something but were I not aware of Scott's being Jewish himself and wholeheartedly convinced of his integrity (in a "high in the top ten people on the internet" kind of integrity), I'd be kinda weirded out by "Jews entirely took over our elite institutions and cultural machinery, repelled uppity technocrats, still definitively in charge" as a conclusion.
I'm the better part of a week late to this post, though, so nobody will ever see this comment. I suppose it's for the best.
Good essay but it misses the actual key change: what happened in the second half of the 20th century was that the WASP/Harvard/moneyed elite class went from being *a* class to being a *ruling* class.
For most of American history college grads didn’t run the show and politics, journalism, entertainment, business etc were run by hard working normies who showed up one day in the mail room and grinded their way up. The professionalization of college admissions opened up college to this group and became a credentialization factory that took the best farmer kids etc and put them in Harvard, which became the ticket to elite levels of journalism, business, government, etc.
It also had them become more bohemian with all the Bobo class markers and associated cultural decline, which by the way us not been seen among this group of Bluechecks, as documented in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.
I rarely comment, but I wanted to see how many other people mentioned Coming Apart. The WASP class had a job that the Bobo class ignored: teaching by example. The obligation to behave correctly (or at least seem to behave correctly) got lost in "follow your bliss" bobo-ism. And as Charles Murray then documents, the social dysfunction which follows a lack of role models for *character* ensues.
The applications of Brooks's theory to "Tartaria" and "high modernism" seem contradictory to me.
Claim 1 is that the old elites loved classical buildings and the new elites reacted against this by going for concrete-and-glass cuboids.
Claim 2 is that High Modernism -- the thing whose architectural expression is concrete-and-glass cuboids -- was the legitimizing ideology of the old elite, and the new elite reacted against this by saying "down with concrete-and-glass cuboids".
I'm not sure how plausible I find either of those individually, but they can't _both_ be right.
Elites are usually conservative -- why not, they are benefiting from the status quo. The sixties were a time when , exceptionally, the elites started favouring modernism and progressive. The counter culture reacted by becoming backwards-looking, embracing folk music and Tolkienesque fantasy, etc.
I think what we're calling High Modernism tended to favor function over form, but it wasn't entirely averse to ornamentation and at least didn't purposefully make things uglier than they need to be -- i.e., brutalist architecture, the concrete-and-glass cuboid in its purest form. Though that actually arose a decade or so before the changeover we're discussing here and it was a global phenomenon, so I still have to doubt that the rise of the Bobos explains it.
Scott says that Brooks's theory is one of the best alternatives he's heard to the leaded-gasoline hypothesis for what happened to crime rates from ~1960 to ~1990. But I don't understand what the theory actually is. On Scott's account, Brooks doesn't give any sort of detailed causal story, he just "kind of drops that paragraph in there and runs". Maybe I'm missing some context that Brooks and Scott both find obvious and that isn't obvious to me; how does "old-money family elites replaced by meritocratic elites" naturally lead to "more violent crime"? What, according to this theory, _actually happened_?
I think the theory is something pretty straightforward like: Traditional 1950s patriotism/gender roles/religious confromity ensured a base level of human bortherhood societal buy-in and family participation.
The exchange of those values for "counter-cultural anti-patriotism", "divorce and free love", and "bohemian ethical/social values" (atheism) lead to a breakdown of some of the structures that kept things like family formation and social brothhood strong. So you see a skyrocketing of single parenthood, teen pregnancies, and then violent crime and the like.
I am not sure I would ascribe to that totally, but I am perosnally very struck by how my attitude has changed on say patriotism and the national anthem over the last 5-10 years.
From ages 10-36 or so I was vehmently anti-nationalist, and antipatriotic etc. Hated standing during the national anthem and often didn't do it, thought of that and the Peldge of Allegiance as "brainwashing". I even bristled when I sent my kids to a very good day care, but it did the Pledge (it's HQ is in Georgia and it is conservative a bit in outlook). As recently as ~5 years ago I saw that as a significant downside about the daycare and its culture.
But then from around then to today I have watched how corrosive such self-hatred has become on our society. People wanting to take down statues of fucking Lincoln and shit like that. The unrest in 2020 where police totally lost control of my city for a couple days and stores not very far from my home where being regularly looted during the middle of weekdays. Huge swaths of our youth and educational system seemingly thrown over to a coinception of our society that is both false, and paints it as fundementally bad and ill-gotten. Best selling books filled with idiocy and lies, and lapped up by a public steeped in seeing "colonialism" and "whiteness" and "oppression" as pretty much the totality of historical discourse. Which absolutely all those things should be a BIG part of the historical discourse (and were when I went to school in the 80s/90s). But they are not remotely the totalilty of it.
We went from a situation where I would reccomend people read Howard Zinn. I would buy it as a birthday gift because I felt people needed more contact with those perspectives, to now being like "holy shit, the last thing people need is more Zinn", lets find them some Chesterton or whatever.
I will admit all of this is incredibly crass and self aggrandizing and arrogant. I mostly see the masses as pretty stupid and beneath me, while at the same time not noticing how much I was pushed along and molded by the same cultural forces as everyone else.
But at the same time goddamn there is a lot of compelte and utter idiocy out there, and it is time to call a spade a spade. Anyway, I basically now think the general populace is simply too stupid to be fed too much anti-patriotic thinking because the society will not cohere.
EDIT: It is also making me see the downside of widespread atheism, as I am begining to see that people just replace the stupid, but essentially frivilous old religions with new surrogate ones which are much more socially disruptive.
I'm still not seeing much in the way of actual mechanism for how these social changes are supposed to give rise to violent crime. At the risk of reading too much into the single word "then", I think the idea is: breakdown of traditional social ideas -> many more people born into things that aren't the traditional family structure -> this screws those people up and they commit a lot of crimes. (If this _isn't_ what you have in mind, the following may well fail to be responsive to what you're saying.)
I find this very unconvincing -- again, I don't understand what the mechanism is meant to be, and find the handwavy kinda-explanations I've heard from social conservatives generally implausible. But obviously reality trumps intuitions and theories, so do the numbers actually fit? I don't think they do.
Take a look at Scott's graphs. Maaaaaybe they show unmarried parenthood starting to increase before violent crime does? But they definitely show violent crime starting to _decrease_ while unmarried parenthood is still increasing, albeit more slowly than before. And after the right-hand edge of those graphs, unmarried parenthood stays broadly constant but violent crime comes way down again. If the issue is that children not born to stable married couples are likely to be criminals, how is any of that possible? Shouldn't we see crime rates lagging unmarried-parenthood rates by, say, 15-25 years? Shouldn't sustained patterns of unmarried parenthood lead to sustained patterns of high crime?
As for education and public discourse being excessively anti-nationalistic and too negative about the past: could well be, but from where I'm sitting (which, for what it's worth, is in the UK) it doesn't look to me as if it's any further off in that direction now than it was in the exact opposite direction in, say, the 1970s.
Oh I agree with you that I would hesitate to draw too tight a conneciton between the rise of single motherhood and the rise in crime. But it is a story people tell and it does make some sense. Certainly as myself being raise din a single parent houshodl in public housing I suspect I was at much greater risk for a wide variety of socially undesirable behaviors than if I had a father. Of course the problem with that suposition is I wouldn't just have any "father", what about the shithead father who cheated on my mom constantly and was a drug addict? Would he have improved my life? Maybe not. So maybe the single aprenthood while not great, is better than him being around. Then again he was still out of our lives for another 20 years, and only took ~5 to clean up his act and start being a producitve member of society.
As for the errors of today being no owrse than the rrors of 1970 in a different direciton. perhpas, but I guess I expect more from society than that. Some of this might be because I was a realtively weel educated/read youth, but I find it very frustrating to sit through endless lectures and trainings about how we need the cirriculum to stop pretending slavery never happened and the US is exceptional etc. When literally the whole cirriculum of my youth in the 80s/90s was about how the US wans't exceptional and pretty much framed US history as "bad things happened to natives", "revolution", "pre-civil war slavery", "Civil war", "reconstruction and discrimination", "robber barons", "civil rights movement". Like the whole cirriculum was exactly what people now claim people were never taught.
Now some here who grew up in Missouri or Georgia or whatever says it was very different there in the 1980s, but growing up in the north the idea that kids born in the late 70s and early 80s and beyond are not well steeped in what the "motte" version of CRT is, is assinine. I was listening to the intro of a book (national best seller) a year or two ago where literally the thesis of the introduction was that all white people are liars, history as previously taught was all a lie, and the main and animating goal of the US was oppressing non-whites. Which is just a crazy reading of history.
Well, there's a famous book published in 1995 called "Lies my teacher told me" which, at least so its author claims, looks at a bunch of typical textbooks published between 1974 and 1991 and finds they're full of misrepresentations in the "old" direction. Full disclosure, I haven't read it and don't know whether the author cherry-picked or misrepresented the textbooks in question. But the book seems to have been pretty well received, which suggests that its picture of the US educational environment of its time was at least kinda-credible.
I don't think the author claims that the books he looks at pretend slavery literally never happened, only that they tend to portray it in a way that makes it look less bad than it was.
(Of course it's possible that the _textbooks_ of the 80s and the _teachers_ of the 80s had different sets of biases. Maybe the textbooks were full of whitewashing and American exceptionalism and the teachers were on the other side? Or, as you suggest, it might be a North/South thing.)
Oh yeah I know that book, solid book, probably read it a couple years after it came out. I don't remember much about slavery in it honestly, the biggest takeaway I had from it was the tendacy of textbooks to skip over anyone with communist beliefs, feelings in that area (for example Hellen Keller), and the tendancy to sort of generally steamroll over class disontents and class differences. Fairly marxist book in some ways, though I liked that sort of thing at the time.
Once again though maybe I just had progressive schooling (i went to a very run of the mill but poor public school in MN), but I don't remember it being very eye opening. Yes people in the educaitonal estbalishment weren't being open about the hsitory of commuism. Is that big news in 1995? Certainly we learn all about "Macarthyism" and how it was horrible in school.
Your "biggest takeaway" doesn't seem like it really matches (1) what other people say about the book or (2) what I get from reading the bits of it that Amazon will show me for free. It _does_ begin by mentioning that Helen Keller was a socialist, but in order to say not "see how they suppress the socialists?" but "see how they file off everyone's rough edges?". (The next example he gives is Woodrow Wilson's racism.) That chapter is about "heroification". The next chapter is about Columbus. The next is called "The truth about the first Thanksgiving" and I'm pretty confident guessing what sort of thing it says. The next is called "Red eyes" and a bit of googling suggests it's about neglect of the perspective of Native Americans (I assume the title is from the old term "Red Indians"). The next is about "the invisibility of racism in American textbooks", the one after that about "the invisibility of antiracism in American textbooks", the next about the idea of "the Land of Opportunity", etc.
Anyway, the point is that it does seem like the book is about errors pretty much exactly opposite to the ones you're saying are prevalent now; to whatever extent it's right (which I am not in a position to judge) it doesn't seem like it can be true that back in the 1980s everything was wrong in the direction you say it's wrong in now. If children then were 'well steeped in what the "motte" version of CRT is', then the steeping certainly wasn't done by textbooks like the ones Loewen is writing about.
(I say "... you're saying ..." etc. not in order to imply that you're wrong but in order not to imply anything one way or the other. I don't know enough about present-day US education to be confident trying to judge.)
Today I learned that: I champion traditional bourgeois values; have yesteryear's Harvard-level test scores; and would never make it into the elite anyway, not due to <s>racial animus</s> holistic admissions, but because there just aren't enough Asians in the country yet. Heavy is the minority head that wears the crown. Oh well, the school-chapter of life is done with, but I don't think having attended Rensselaer is too shabby either. It at least __sounds__ way more WASPy!
This alt-history hypothesis is plausible-sounding enough, and I have no idea if it's accurate...but the current end state certainly is. Found my bile rising reading about the New Meritocrats' Code of Conduct. One person's irony and detachment is another person's fakery and nihilism...not having the basic self-respect and humility to authentically own being rich and elite, makes that position even less admirable than it already is underneath the veneer of humanitarian values. I prefer blue-bloods for the same reasons I prefer outwardly bigoted ____ists: with them, I know very clearly exactly where I stand, whether it's good or bad. The patronizing condescencion of the Meritocrats, by contrast, strikes me as utterly contemptible and narcissistic. A farce put on to highlight and celebrate the largesse of the giver, not the recipient...whether it's in the guise of White Person With Coloured Friends, Cishet Allyship, Male Feminism, land acknowledgements, or whatever other new FOTM. Sorting people into little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
It's probably not in the other 5/6, but I'm real curious how the Brooks Theory would explain the Overproduction-of-Elites Theory, which also seems somewhat plausible. Maybe the Old Guard aristocracy had better internal guardrails against expanding the Strategic Classiness Reserve *too* fast, thus averting class inflation? Elite is a relative position, after all, not an absolute one...if everyone is elite, then no one is, and the whole mansion of cards falls down. There are only so many novel ridiculous ways to mint exclusivity (I'd like to hope).
Also, I know the Venn circles don't exactly overlap, but I think "PMC" is better at capturing the milieu-idea being framed rather than "bluecheck". (The Elon irony I guess is that "I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Using Prices" is a super-Meritocrat mindset. There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Amalgamated Bank.)
I’ll put in a good word for the best book about class and this issue. Old Money by Nelson Aldrich was written in 1988 and is an examination of the very phenomena of why the old ruling class died out.
It is a nuanced and deep examination of the history and the whole idea of an “elite” and why they lost their moral authority. Aldrich notes the many downsides, most obviously embodied in Tom Buchanan, the boorish and bigoted husband in Gatsby. But he also notes they had an actual ethos, whether they followed it or not, to value and preserve the best of civilization, to educate people on its enduring value, and to be above the scrum for money everyone else was involved in.
Interesting to note that Aldrich graduated from Harvard in 1955, and went on to be a bit of a Paris bohemian and one of the founding editors of the Paris Review. His musings about his own life and deeply WASPish family put the book right next to The Education of Henry Adams.
The other interesting book on the 50s is Auchincloss’s Rector of Justin, about a headmaster who believes very much in the civilizing ethos, but laments that all his students become bankers and lawyers.
I am always on the lookout for bobo wedge issues, i.e., controversies that set "bo" against "bo." For example, near where I live there is a small regional airport that has ambitions to greatly expand scheduled passenger service. The bourgeois bo loves this because it makes travel so much more convenient. The bohemian bo hates it because noise. You can likely think of more.
quote>>But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected.<<
How open is the admissions today in comparison to Conant/Pusey's time? Meritocracy is no true meritocracy, otherwise they'd be sorting by SAT and take the top of the applicants. I'm not from USA and no expert on admissions but as far as I know one needs to be doing some community work that would be viewed in a positive light by BoBos etc. and it's the primary filter. Out of the masses, they don't look for the brightest. They look for the next generation of keepers to keep BoBo values, and select the brightest among them so that they're good at keeping those values, and they heavily indoctrinate them in that. So it's not meritocracy as in the literal meaning of the word, which should be the antonym of aristocracy but it's like the mamelukes for the lack of a better term in my realm of words?
This explains the work displayed at Art Basel. Art was formerly transgressive and avant-garde. The greatest works illuminated conceptual, intellectual leaps ... merit.
The art world is currently drowning in coy, woke, conformist neo-naive art. The new "salon." Art trends are driven largely by collectors and the art advisors behind them, not just artists with radical new ideas.
This conformist, neo-naive irony started with Basquiat in the 1970's. His appropriation of street art by a street artist was a logical extrapolation of Warhol's appropriation of commercial art by a commercial artist, without a shred of the insight displayed in Warhol's diaries and daring works.
The 1970's timing is right for the new aristocracy to have enough wealth to become collectors.
Depends on how you define meritocracy. Arguably, 80 years ago it meant that you were able to build a company and make a lot of money. Now it means you do good at standardized testing - or to put it in a less neutral way, that you have high iq, high counsciousness and are good at working inside the system. It could be an inherent difference between them - and it probably is, it's frightening how the current elites are run ing from individual responsibility and prefer to blend into a system.
Or it could be just an artefact of the culture that got created from pure randomness when the tide changed. Partly a reaction to the establishment of the time, part common characteristics of the new guys, part just what books they happened to read.
>”The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting. But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?”
There’s reasonable sounding arguments that hereditary monarchs are a good form of government because the rulers have a built-in incentive to ensure the long-run success of the country when they know their grandkids will be running it. In contrast, other forms of government have less incentive for long-run success and more for short-term wins. E.g., If there’s a policy option that requires short-term pain for long-term gain, contrast the incentives of the president/PM (my part loses power next election that coincides with the pain and other party gets all the credit when the gain comes) vs. the king (me and my descendants rule no matter what I do, so I’ll make the highest expected value choices to maximize our dynasty’s long-run wealth and power, which is enhanced by ruling a richer country).
One hypothesis is that the WASP has similar long-term outlooks when making decisions. “Yes, if I prioritize the long-term over the short-term, Preston Fitzgerald Mayer III’s boy might beat me in the next election. But A few years later when my son is in office, the economy will be stronger.”
The meritocracy version of politics isn’t optimizing for “who can provide the best long-term outcomes” it’s optimizing for “who can win elections in the short-run.” Voters have a short memory so I suspect the current system has way less emphasis on the long-term than is optimal.
It seems reasonable to ask whether decisions made by actual hereditary monarchs have tended to be better for the countries they rule than decisions made by actual presidents and prime ministers. Unfortunately, this is badly confounded by the fact that modes of government shift over time, so that we're mostly contrasting more recent presidential decisions with older royal ones. But my impression is that the comparison isn't exactly a strong recommendation for hereditary monarchy.
(Which wouldn't be very surprising. Even if it's true that monarchs have better incentives to make good long-term decisions -- which is not at all obvious to me, for what it's worth -- there's also the fact that democratically elected leaders are _different people_, in ways that clearly affect what decisions they're likely to make, I think mostly for the better relative to hereditary monarchs.)
Historically speaking, hereditary monarchies tended to last longer than republics, whether ancient or modern. Obviously longevity isn't the be-all and end-all of government, and it's quite posible for a decision to be good for propping up the ruling class but bad for the country as a whole, but as a starting point, I think we could do worse than "Which system of government is best able to avoid collapsing?"
Ancient republics are plausibly somewhat different kinds of thing from modern democratic ones. Modern ones being a fairly recent innovation, estimates of their longevity will tend to be underestimates. Some have lasted pretty well; e.g., the US for ~250 years so far, the UK as only-notional-monarchy for ~300 years so far. I'd be interested to see a careful examination of the question of whether hereditary monarchies or democratic republics last better. (Maybe generalized a bit; e.g., I think I would want to include the UK in the "republics" bucket even though formally it's a monarchy, and the "Democratic" "People's" "Republic" of (North) Korea is hardly distinguishable from a monarchy even though formally it's a republic.)
250 or 300 years isn't all that good by monarchy standards; e.g., the Kingdom of England lasted 707 years (927-1707), the Kingdom of Scotland for 864 (843-1707). Perhaps significantly, countries which replace their monarchies with republics often find that the republics don't last nearly as long. The Kingdom of France, for example, lasted 805 years until the Revolution, but none of the five republics that followed it has managed better than 70 (the Third Republic, 1870-1940); the two Spanish Republics lasted for one and eight years, respectively, as opposed to the 394 years of the united Spanish monarchy; and the Soviet Union didn't even see out the twentieth century.
As for North Korea, I think under the classical definition it would count as a tyranny, and hence wouldn't be a good example of either a republic or a monarchy.
Saying that the Saxon Kingdom of England is the same as the Norman Kingdom, but the Fourth French Republic is substantially different than the Fifth French Republic kind of invalidates this chain of reasoning.
If you think that two of the comparanda aren't being compared properly, the proper course would be to see what would happen if they were compared properly, not to lazily say "Well, guess this chain of reasoning is invalidated."
Say that we decide post-Norman England is a different country to pre-Norman England, and that the French Fifth Republic is the same as the Fourth Republic (let's be generous and throw in the Third Republic as well). What do we find? The Kingdom of England lasts for 641 years (1066-1707), whereas the French Republic manages just 152 (1870-2022) -- less than a quarter of what the Kingdom of England managed, and less than a fifth of what the Kingdom of France managed. So the chain of reasoning still stands.
If you wish really really hard, you can hope to attempt to make an inference about this kind of thing. Ottinger and Voigtländer (2020, link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28297) find that if you put a monarch on a throne in charge of things, the individual monarchs matter: more inbred the hereditary monarch, worse land area change outcome for polity governed by the said monarch.
One could argue that ever-increasing land area is good for the monarch's dynasty but less so for ordinary citizens. On the other hand, Renaissaince Italy had many maritime republican city-states. (Think of Venice, Ragusa, ...). *Eventually* they all were all eaten by some kind of monarchy.
> The meritocracy version of politics isn’t optimizing for “who can provide the best long-term outcomes” it’s optimizing for “who can win elections in the short-run.”
Democracy means you can peacefully get rid of under achieving leaders, which is not a feature of monarchy. And the meritocratic part of government is the civil service, no the elected politicians.
The uselessness and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every modern democracy. Whilst democracy means you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it seems less effective at replacing them with leaders who can actually govern well.
The useless and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every pre-modern polity, often tempered with "if the higher ups only knew".
Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment, and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
>Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment, and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
>The useless and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every pre-modern polity, often tempered with "if the higher ups only knew".
Not really. There have been times when people griped about the quality of their government, of course, but there have also been monarchs widely regarded as good rulers, and it's difficult to see how they'd get such a reputation if all their appointees were corrupt and incompetent.
> Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment,
Many (all?) major western democracies have policies in areas such as crime and immigration that are unaligned with what the majority want, and have done so for decades now. As with getting rid of underachieving leaders, getting rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment doesn't do much good if the potential replacements are similarly unaligned.
> and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
That's a bit of a reach, and I think you know it.
More plausibly, the qualities needed to get to the top of a major political party are different to the qualities needed to run a country, so preselecting leaders based on the former doesn't guarantee their suitability for the latter.
This argument isn't quite so plausible when contrasting monarchies and democracies as it is when contrasting dictatorial republics to monarchies. There, things look much better for monarchies and the idea of an inter-generational stake in the system.
There was that recent piece by Ed West where he pointed out that at one point recently, every single Arab republic was under a State Dept. travel advisory and zero Arab monarchies were. This seems about right, and in the abstract, I don't think I'd rather live under an absolute monarch than a democracy, but I'm pretty confident I'd rather live under an absolute monarch than THE GLORIOUS EL PRESIDENTE, whoever that happens to be.
Meritocracy in a democratic system really optimizes for multiple things because it's tough to keep winning elections if the majority is unhappy with your governance, but in a dictatorial system of government, meritocracy means optimizing for who can seize power and keep his foes crushed beneath his heel and not much else.
>This argument isn't quite so plausible when contrasting monarchies and democracies as it is when contrasting dictatorial republics to monarchies. There, things look much better for monarchies and the idea of an inter-generational stake in the system.
A few weeks ago, there was a clip circulating on British social media, dating back to 2010, showing then-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying that nuclear power wasn't the solution to Britain's energy questions because the plants wouldn't come online until 2020 or even 2021. So it looks like the time horizon of British politics is somewhat less than ten years, and I've never seen anything to suggest that British politicians are notably more short-termist than their foreign counterparts.
>Meritocracy in a democratic system really optimizes for multiple things because it's tough to keep winning elections if the majority is unhappy with your governance,
Sometimes, though if a particular policy is unpopular with the general public but popular with the educated classes, it usually ends up being implemented anyway, regardless of which party is in power.
Re: the question of *why* the old aristocrats might have been good, I can think of couple reasons. Historically, the successful long-lived republics have all basically been oligarchies controlled by ancient, wealthy families that more or less controlled all the levers of power. You're rich and powerful in the Republic because of what your family represents, and similarly you need to live up to the family name. Also, you're a legitimately rich guy who owns a lot of stuff, not just a particularly well-compensated employee, so you generally want rules that help you build stuff and not rules that stop you from building stuff. Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals.
Cutthroat meritocratic bureaucracy is more of a mainstay of imperial administrations. The levers of power are held by the emperor's well-compensated, well-educated employees. Those employees have a lot of power in that they make a lot of important decisions, but they are really just custodians of someone else's authority, they have no stake in anything except looking good *within* the system. This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will, since all the employee-administrators will compete with each other to execute it best. But they don't have competing self-interests that make them interested in a pro-business, pro-investment climate. And without a single emperor to hand down the goal of the state, the administrators basically just pick up their cues from whatever they think will increase their social standing within the bureaucracy itself.
The nascent tech takeover was basically just an attempt to combine these two ideas by having wealthy, business-interested meritocrats, but it turns out that they do a better job combining the flaws of both systems than they do combining their positives.
Most people believe in meritocracy if it means that one's surgeon has to be qualified for his or her job. But there's a huge gap between that and believing that we need elitist institutions like Harvard to select a group of teenagers to train into a ruling class (and that this process is justified by the same idea as demanding a qualified surgeon). Not all countries have elite universities. Or believing that the CEO of a company has earned the salary that is so much above the salaries of the other employees.
In fields like physics some schools are going to be better than others because they will attract the best researchers or have better funding. But I don't really understand why in fields like law there is any benefit (to society in general) in having a very hierarchical system where some law students start out much better just because they were selected by a top institution and get to network with the other elite students, forming a privileged club from the beginning. People who are talented in law will demonstrate that in practice, they don't need to be pre-selected into an elite group.
Reading British newspapers, there seems to be a certain sense of shame among some circles about the dominance of Oxbridge (compared to other British universities) because it's seen as a remnant of aristocracy. In the US, ironically, there seems to be more acceptance of the idea that the people who get into Ivy League schools really are the best people, because, you know, meritocracy.
I think the timeline's wrong, in a "Does reality cause straight lines on graphs" sense, for this to be the key explanation for why progressives are in charge now.
The Tartaria effect starts earlier - if you google "[Year] in architecture," you get a wikipedia page that makes this easy to track. Comparing 1938 with 1948, in '38 buildings look like they're expected to be decorative, but trying to get away with doing as little ornament as possible; in '48 they've become proper "post-war" monstrosities.
The intelligentsia are both recognisable and powerful in the '30s - hence HG Wells being a household name, and Stalin-sympathisers writing in the New York Times. There are also WASP-y socialist/progressive groups - the Intercollegiate Socialist Society for example. They don't control academia, which is interesting in a modern sense, but they're there.
FDR surrounded himself with academics and communist-sympathisers in the 30s, and ran an administration that's clearly in the same clade as, say, Biden's.
I think this looks more like an expanding social movement in favour of state-led egalitarianism that gradually takes over different parts of the US/world, starting in the late 19th century. It takes Harvard in the 50s and Yale in the 60s.
Taking the Ivy League was probably a strategic mistake for the progressives, as it got them mired in credentialism. This also happened at the same time they were making the much larger strategic mistake of extending egalitarianism to include who's perspectives they should take seriously (a bit like if the Bolsheviks had picked a bunch of random factory workers to staff their central committee).
So far as the WASPs are concerned, they never had much of a grip on the post-civil-war democrats. They were only politically important because they had some control over the Republican Party (shared, weirdly, with bearded men from Ohio). The Ohioans fizzle out by about 1900, making the GOP solidly WASP. The WASPs then completely fucked up running it, making it a worthless husk of a party, until finally being booted out by people who actually wanted to stop the progressives. Any account of why the modern Republican Party is so ghastly has to take into account that from the perspective of stopping the Democrats, the old Republican Party was (per Tucker) as useless as a marzipan dildo, and its Rockefeller faction was intentionally purged for this reason. The Bush/Romney wing represent their continuation, but pretend to be conservative to hide how useless they are. The modern GOP is also useless, but that's mostly because their actual objection to the democrats is that "Jesus wants tax cuts for Israel," which is a stupid program.
TL;DR: Progressivism as a project was expanding anyway, and taking the Ivies was a step along the road, and the WASPs lost power after the GOP purged them for being crap at running it.
So far, not much discussion of the 1960s and its popularization of bohemian culture.
Ask a teenager in Mount Pleasant, Iowa in 1954 if he'd ever hear of Bird and you'd probably get a baffled response "you mean, birds, like, turkeys and chickens?"
Ask that teen's younger brother ten years later if he'd ever heard of The Beatles and he wouldn't have to discuss entomology.
>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?
My guess is this has to do with elite-cohesion being more important than elite-merit. Like you mentioned, the new admission criteria kind of just selected a haphazard group of geniuses that weren't culturally aligned. The WASPs on the other hand networked together in their elite boarding schools, built comradery on the lacrosse courts, and overall have a shared in-group identity that goes beyond "we're the elites".
<i>Brooks namedrops Seeing Like A State as the quintessential meritocrat book and high modernism as the quintessential meritocrat bogeyman. High Modernism was something like the legitimizing ideology of the WASP aristocracy: we are great because we have raised shining skyscrapers, blasted railways through mountains, and built giant eternally-churning factories. As part of their cultural revolt, the meritocrats had to ritually humiliate all of this, which made them adopt as their legitimizing ideology a James Scott / Jane Jacobs - esque perspective of “skyscrapers disrupt the social fabric and blasting tunnels sounds environmentally unfriendly, how about some nice locally-sourced organic food?”</i>
Not sure this explanation really holds up, TBH. For one thing, it's not obvious, at least not to me, that meritocrats really have rejected "high modernism" -- it's just that, instead of railways and giant factories, our current elites point to GDP figures and technology as evidence of their suitability for rule. For another, it's glaringly obvious, at least to me, that our current elites *don't* care about disrupting the social fabric, which is why they're fine with offshoring manufacturing jobs and promoting large-scale immigration.
1. One big difference between megaprojects and GDP figures is that Megaprojects are specific things that are designed by specific people, whereas GDP just sorta emerge. This distinciton is very important to whether something is high modernism or not.
2. Whether or not offshoring and immigration do disrupt social fabric, it seems clear that Bobos don't consider those things as very disruptive. Why is this? Probably in part becuase this class is very globalised, so globalisation not very risruptive to them at all.
<i>1. One big difference between megaprojects and GDP figures is that Megaprojects are specific things that are designed by specific people, whereas GDP just sorta emerge. This distinciton is very important to whether something is high modernism or not.</i>
I'm not convinced. Specific people have been designing specific things since Imhotep's time, so there's nothing distinctively high modern about that. Instead, the main distinguishing feature of high modernism is the willingness to bulldoze your way through a load of traditions and organic practices because obviously we're so much smarter and more rational than those benighted peasants and of course we can do a better job. This attitude, it seems to me, is still very much alive and kicking amongst our elites.
<i>2. Whether or not offshoring and immigration do disrupt social fabric, it seems clear that Bobos don't consider those things as very disruptive. Why is this? Probably in part becuase this class is very globalised, so globalisation not very risruptive to them at all.</i>
I think it's more that they do recognise that it's disruptive, they just think this is a good thing. For example, "radical" in modern politics (at least in the UK) is almost always used in a positive sense: "My party will deliver radical reforms to X, Y, and Z." I don't think the word would have such a positive valence among people who prioritised stability and bottom-up organisation.
The discussion is fascinating, but I have not so far seen a single mention of the decline of the middle class.
As the middle class in America (and elsewhere in the West) is picked clean and left to rot, while the 1% (or whatever you want to call them) flourish as never before, interelite competition needs must intensify, because there is the Very Rich and then there is Everyone Else, and Everyone Else is barely getting by.
I grew up middle class in the Netherlands (so not America, but certainly the West), and we were neither Very Rich nor Barely Getting By. I think most of the Home Owning class is doing very well for themselves.
Without disputing specifics, google the words "home buying impossible America" and you will see that even becoming a member of the Home Owning Class is increasingly out of reach for many.
Home Ownership has been very high in the US since at least WWII and I believe even before that. It still is despite posts like this.
Home ownership rate:
1945: 53%
1955: 60%
1965: 63%
1975: 65%
1985: 64%
1995: 65%
2005: 69%
2015: 64%
2021: 65%
A real crisis!
There are a few very expensive metros where homeownership is a lot less common and more difficult. But this has always to some extent been the case. This is a particular generation where people are having trouble with buying homes a bit, but some of that is they are also spending more money and time on education and less likely to be married and dual income.
No one "deserves" a home in the Bay Area. Certainly not bog standard Americans. It is perhaps the most attratcive job market in the world. The laws of supply and demand simply are not on your side.
Nobody has talked about "deserving" anything, but I have found that shared prosperity can keep a lot of people together who otherwise have little in common, and who may not even like each other all that much.
> As the middle class in America (and elsewhere in the West) is picked clean and left to rot
I have no idea where this "decline of the middle class" meme comes from, it doesn't seem to match the facts on the ground.
I'm middle class. My whole extended family is middle class. My friends are all middle class. My coworkers are all middle class. The cities seem to be filled with middle class houses and the streets with middle class cars. When I go to my middle class shops to buy middle class things I find there's a lot of other middle class people there too.
If the middle class is disappearing then who the heck is buying all this damn craft beer? If the middle class is under threat then who the heck is standing in that one hour long line to get brunch on a Sunday?
The modern college admission scheme did not lead to strict meritocracy.
Yes, most smart, conscentious driven people go get their degree, but then they go out to do whatever things they are driven towards - academic research, engineering, entrepreneurhood, medicine, finance, corporate law.
However, by an large, these people are driven by practical or personal goals, not by social-engineering goals, so they don't bother "being the elite" in the sense of making organizations to try and set policy. They are far more driven to make a better mousetrap, or airplane, or refrigerator door, or contract, or quantitive pricing algorithm, or futures trading to ensure that enough tomatoes will be grown this season, or sewer pipe, than in making an organization that will win Abortion War #99231.
The main goal of meritocracy is to ensure that the details of society are designed by these points of people, rather than by random people. That America manages to do so, is a large contributor to why America has so much wealth.
I've quipped that tech companies pay managers a lot because otherwise it would be impossible to find anyone good that is willing to be a manager and deal with politics rather than do Actual World Improvements.
Now, there's a different subset of people that would actually rather do politics and win Abortion War #99231 than Actual World Improvements. The problem is, because these people care about politics, they generally win in politics. But the problem with winning in politics, is that winning in politics doesn't mean that you are right, just that you are left.
There might even be a reverse correlation, people to first order want to be doing the right thing, but in the cases where politically-expedient thing is different from the right thing, then there will be a very strong drive to do it.
Therefore, it makes a lot sense that having the world managed by the best politicians won't produce better result than having the world managed by a set of elites chosen in some uncorrelated-with-political-merit way.
"And they were jocks - certainly good at lacrosse and crew, but their kids would be much less likely than modern elites’ to become a scientist, professor, doctor, or lawyer."
Well, of course not; doctors and lawyers are the professions, and professionals are who you have working for you. You might as well expect Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham II to be thrilled at the notion of Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III becoming a groundskeeper.
Part of the irony around the Ivies is that they started off as the equivalent of seminaries, or at least with strong denominational identities;
Harvard - "A 1643 publication defined the university's purpose: "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust". The college trained many Puritan ministers in its early years[28] and offered a classic curriculum that was based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but also conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. While Harvard never affiliated with any particular denomination, many of its earliest graduates went on to become Puritan clergymen."
Brown - seems to have started off as non-denominational, as the Baptists wanted a college of their own: "The Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches were also interested in establishing a college in Rhode Island—home of the mother church of their denomination. At the time, the Baptists were unrepresented among the colonial colleges; the Congregationalists had Harvard and Yale, the Presbyterians had the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), and the Episcopalians had the College of William and Mary and King's College (later Columbia) while their local University of Pennsylvania was specifically founded without direct association with any particular denomination. Isaac Backus, a historian of the New England Baptists and an inaugural trustee of Brown, wrote of the October 1762 resolution taken at Philadelphia:
The Philadelphia Association obtained such an acquaintance with our affairs, as to bring them to an apprehension that it was practicable and expedient to erect a college in the Colony of Rhode-Island, under the chief direction of the Baptists; ... Mr. James Manning, who took his first degree in New-Jersey college in September, 1762, was esteemed a suitable leader in this important work."
Columbia - "Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college. The period leading up to the school's founding was marked by controversy, with various groups competing to determine its location and religious affiliation. Advocates of New York City met with success on the first point, while the Church of England prevailed on the latter. However, all constituencies agreed to commit themselves to principles of religious liberty in establishing the policies of the College."
Cornell - later foundation (in the 19th century) and on purely secular educational grounds: "Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883, it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian school, but had to compete with church-sponsored institutions for gaining New York's land-grant status."
Dartmouth - "Although founded to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university primarily trained Congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized, emerging at the turn of the 20th century from relative obscurity into national prominence."
Princeton - "Princeton University was founded at Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1746 in order to train ministers dedicated to their views. The college was the educational and religious capital of Scottish-Irish America."
Pennsylvania - "In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time in which it was preached. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. …Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey—Franklin's new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service."
Yale - "Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", a would-be charter passed during a meeting in New Haven by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701. The Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. …Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, and the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as increasingly liberal, ecclesiastically lax, and overly broad in Church polity. The feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not."
A big source of American colleges, particular those that are strong in science and engineering, is the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which were the result of a perception that it was necessary to compete with Europe industrially -- that the Jeffersonian ideal agricultural utopia had no future. The so-called "land grant" universities were specifically chartered to educate in the practical sciences, as opposed to the liberal arts (or theology), and many of them -- e.g. MIT, Cornell, Minnesota, Berkeley, Texas A&M, UIUC, UW Madison, Purdue, Ohio State, Penn State -- developed into the big R1 science and engineering universities that turn out most of the top American scientists and engineers.
I read Brooks' book, actually a couple of his, a decade or so ago.
My uncle, a working-class public high school kid from a small city in Kansas, attended Harvard as a scholarship student starting in the late 1940s. He had a terrible time there which was entirely cultural, truly a fish out of water. Then he spent his entire adult life at various middling white-collar jobs in New England trying vainly to "live up to" all that he'd encountered at Harvard. He was never a very happy person and it seemed clear that a lot of that was that Harvard, when he went there, was a lot like what Brooks describes.
Then I, a middle-class public high school kid from the northern Midwest, got admitted to Yale in 1981 (and wait-listed by Harvard but I really wanted to go to Yale because my high school girlfriend/fiance was heading to NYU). I did attend Yale and had a generally good undergrad experience (with the girl not so much, cie la vie).
It is clear to me that I would not be seriously considered for admission today by either of those schools; my credentials were decent and quirky-enough-to-stand-out for the 1980s, would be quite pedestrian today. (My wife works in college admissions and I have through her gained a fairly deep understanding of how that whole thing has shifted in recent decades.)
I was much less a fish out of water than my uncle had been, partly because of the overall shift that Brooks describes. However I do think that the social change was not as abrupt as he describes -- when I was at New Haven the legacy admissions were still a visible plurality, and still in some ways dominated the social scene on campus. And that plurality was overwhelmingly male, which connects to my other point to make here....
Which is that Brooks seems to largely miss or ignore the other great shift in Ivy League admissions during the period he is writing about: the inclusion of women. Those schools went from all-male to co-ed pretty abruptly. By the time I got to New Haven the college was 55-45 male-female. By the 1990s it was basically even, and for a quarter-century now all of those institutions have actually struggled to keep their male percentages above 40%.(*)
As a 1980s undergrad writer and then editor of the college newspaper I interviewed various older male faculty members (for various articles) who were holdovers from the "old Yale"; every single one of them regarded the influence(s) of women students as by miles the greatest cultural change within the institution. They had a range of opinions about whether or to what degree that change was net-positive; but every single one of them thought it was the most dramatic change. They were clear and in some cases eloquent that they meant change beyond the obvious, they were talking about culture, and "the institution's core ethos" and stuff like that, not just things like mating habits.
More broadly, that seems to me like a huge shift in the composition of the U.S.'s (Western Europe's) establishment or elite classes during the period that Brooks writes about. And a historically-unique one by the way. So it seems like a factor which must be considered more than he seems interested in.
* My wife, who's worked in multiple places in college admissions at high levels, has explained that today's college admissions offices fear going below the 40 percent gender threshold in either direction. That is because they believe that few young people today want to attend a single-gender college or one which seems very close to that, and if your ratio is higher than 60-40 you will strike a lot of kids as too unbalanced.
For maybe 20 years now this fear has worked mostly in the favor of 17-year-old males....the wisecracks which my wife and her peers exchange about this point, and some others too, get pretty pointed and pretty damned funny. I have told her many times that she could write a book which would be both entertaining and enlightening but it would have to be after she's left the field.
"George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II - the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan."
This was a powerful line. The military is one of the most formative institutions we have, so shifting from an élite where military service in youth was common, to one where such service is rare, would likely result in all sorts of shifts in mindset.
Granted, in the WW2 generation, military service was very common at all levels of society, élite or otherwise. It's good that we haven't *needed* that level of mobilization recently. But it does change the mindset of a class quite a bit when military service is normal versus abnormal.
This is entirely based on my own subjective intuition, but I've often thought that the overall quality of the European aristocracies underwent a heavy decline from the late 17th century onwards, when they ceased to be a military aristocracy and became just a bunch of people who happened to have inherited lots of stuff. (Obviously individual aristocrats kept joining the military, and indeed provided the officer corps for most countries, but this was no longer expected as a matter of course.)
This reminds me of several of author W.E.B. Griffin's series, in which capable young men from very rich families choose a military career over staying in the family business.
I wonder to what extent Griffin's characters were modelled on the Bushes and Kennedys.
I don't have a wide enough pool of potential Category X people to draw upon.
Having money is certainly a help in most things. One can take more risks. But I don't think having the money would disqualify one from being Category X for Paul.
I knew (very casually ...) some Silicon Valley types who tend to work at small companies pursuing some radical idea: Lucid Dreaming technology aids, or anonymous computation. A bunch were signed up for cryonic suspension.
Would Paul have classified them as Category X? I dunno. I think of them as mostly being upper-middle class in outlook, but middle class folks who take ideas much more seriously than most people and are willing to take ideas to a logical conclusion even if that conclusion isn't mainstream. But still middle class.
Does homeschooling count towards being Category X? Homeschooling still seems pretty independent-minded to me, but maybe this isn't quite what Paul had in mind?
Category X really doesn't fit Paul's model well and if one was rigorous about definitions it might even vanish -- most/all Category X people could be neatly binned in one of the existing classes. Or maybe not.
Piece about wealthy university students of elite class who pretend to be poor, abdicate the responsibility inherent in their lucky situation, and the author would like them to not do this (something like that). Quick scan of comments and I didn't see this op-ed posted, so I thought I'd add it.
I feel mostly resigned to the idea that some smaller number of people/families will always have more money (power) than the larger remainder of the population, with minimal space for new "blood" to move into that highest echelon. In this case, I would prefer that upper crust people both 1.) do obnoxiously stereotypical rich people things because if they don't, who can? and 2.) feel some amount of weight from their crowns in the form of an obligation to do big, great things in society (even if this is mostly so that they can brag about it on the polo field (pitch? grounds?)).
The thing I ponder after reading Scott's piece and the linked article above: Is there an actionable way to influence the culture of wealthy families to nudge them back towards that aforementioned noblesse oblige? Could we just ask those 0.1%'ers to please stop with the white water rafting and get back to cultivating the next generation of powerful philosopher kings? Is EA this nudge? Or, based on the texts Scott referenced, should I understand that this process will just sort of happen as a result of natural fluctuations in signaling, taste-making, etc. and I should just relax and enjoy the yacht races?
Considering the extent to which the 19th century Ivy League were primarily still provincial finishing schools for future clergymen and schoolmasters, I wonder to what extent they in turn were following the lead of the new class of boys' schools, like Groton (1884) and St. Paul's (1856). Which were in turn aping Rugby. Never underestimate the power of Anglophilia in shaping a nation's governing elite. Maybe the collapse of British Empire is what finally did in the WASPs! Timing lines up. Though Vietnam's "best and brightest" may be a better account. In either case, complete loss of self-confidence.
I’m sorry I haven’t read the 314 comments before mine, but I think the most interesting thing about “Ivy League creates the upper class” is what’s been happening to college admissions since the mid-nineties.
Specifically, the Scholastic Aptitude Test of yesteryear became the Scholastic Achievement Test. Today, SAT stands for nothing. The math was gutted. Check out the old numerical reasoning and compare it to the modern math section. Currently, remembering the sin/cos/tan of 30, 60, and 90° angles will do wonders for one’s score. Is that really reflective of a facility with math?
On verbal, the analogies were eliminated because they were too hard to study for. Analogies have one of the highest g-loadings of IQ subtests. There were other changes to the verbal, like all the read-and-match-by-scanning-the-passage questions are less indicative of intelligence than figuring out “what’s the analogy.”
Scoring is ridiculously easy these days. Remember when 0-3 people scored 1600 on the SAT? Now, thousands of people score 1600, at least, they got an 800 on each section of the test in the 10 times they took the test.
Scoring is much less dedicated to preventing false positives. There are now four answer choices on each question, down from five. Instead of penalizing wrong answers more than blank ones, both are scored equally. Penalizing wrong answers reduces false positives, people with high scores but low ability.
I wrote a long comment on iSteve about this, complete with more details and links.
This must have a huge impact on who gets into college. Colleges were big on bragging about “this is our most diverse class ever with our highest SAT average, but they never reported the mean percentile scores, which were certainly lower than in earlier years.
As bad as this is for letting competitive ambitious people into the upper class instead of y’know, smart people, it’s rough for high schoolers. The SAT used to be a stressful day. The norm for upper-middle class+ kids and social climbing Asian immigrants spend years practicing for the test. I have heard to Korean kids have summer schools where all they do is practice gaming the test. A test that has intentionally become much easier to game.
I’m curious about what employers think of people coming out of the Ivy League. Do they think recent graduates today are as smart as the ones thirty years ago? What do they think about the Asians, especially? Does anyone know?
Anyway, people who took the SAT in 1995 are 43 or so today. These people are coming into influential positions in institutions. Institutions that are not covering themselves in glory. Is that because the people running things are ambitious, competitive, and ruthless, but a lot less intelligent than the people they replaced?
I don’t know about employers generally. But I have over the past 20 years relished absolutely smoking and crushing the Ivy League peers I have encountered in professional contexts involving intellectual tasks. I was a kid who grew up in public housing ducked around in HS and went to a directional land grant university.
I love when I have a work trip to NY and get paid train/consult a bunch of people with better educations who have jobs I could never get, but I get brought in because I am just better at their jobs than they are with a BA in philosophy. Their confusion heals my soul.
And then I get to leave with my couple grand and leave all their problems behind and have some confidence boost in seeing what lame mentally weak posers they are.
Personally, I see changes in Western leadership more a function of decadence than meritocracy or aristocracy (either feudal or Ivy League).
I do think it is important to differentiate between a small group of inbred wealthy that are mostly playboys/playgirls/society types - that spits out a few who want to be leaders of their nations/societies vs. a professional managerial class in which every single one believes that they are simply hair splitting difference from being leaders of society/nation.
There are likely also substantive differences between a group of people who are already wealthy and stable in their position vs. a different group of people who are constantly jockeying for position and who are, by and large, still in search of permanent wealth and/or position.
The "bluecheck" thing never made all that much sense even pre-Musk, since for example, Trump himself had the blue check. It seems to be a right-wing code word for "journalist" (since historically, journalism was the most common way to get the check), in which case you might as well just *say* journalist unless the purpose is in-group signaling rather than communication.
Presumably left-wing politicians, right? I don't think anyone who uses the term "bluecheck" would consider Donald Trump to be one, even though he literally had the blue check.
The little I saw on Twitter, it was duelling groups of opinions and the blue-check possessors were treated as oracles or founts of The Real True Facts or unbiased and so on, while The Other Lot are all just partisans and slanted. Blue checks didn't have to be journalists, either; a smattering of activist types had their blue checks on show to demonstrate that they were the Real True Experts on whatever the topic was.
I understand that it started off as simply a way to verify that if someone is posting tweets claiming to be from George Washington, this is indeed the real and correct George Washington not an impostor using the name. But it seemed to morph into something more, as a badge or signal of 'being on the right side of history'. That's why Musk thought that charging for it was worth it - people who wanted their bragging rights would pay to keep the status.
I see a *lot* of downplaying of the significance since Musk took over, that it was "only" journalists who used the blue check system and they didn't care about it or treat it as anything special, that it came with the job, and nobody thought it meant anything anyhow. There seems to be some re-writing of history going on; according to the Wikipedia page, there was a ranking system in place as to who got a blue check or not. So at least in the beginning, it was a sought-after marker of status - you were a Celeb if you had one and a Nobody if you didn't:
"Twitter stated that an account with a "blue tick" verification badge indicates "we've been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved". After the beta period, the company stated in their FAQ that it "proactively verifies accounts on an ongoing basis to make it easier for users to find who they're looking for" and that they "do not accept requests for verification from the general public". Originally, Twitter took on the responsibility of reaching out to celebrities and other notable to confirm their identities in order to establish a verified account.
In July 2016, Twitter announced a public application process to grant verified status to an account "if it is determined to be of public interest" and that verification "does not imply an endorsement". In 2016 the company began accepting requests for verification, but it was discontinued the same year. Twitter explained that the volume of requests for verified accounts had exceeded its ability to cope; rather, Twitter determines on its own whom to approach about verified accounts, limiting verification to accounts which are "authentic, notable, and active"."
And if it's 'just' a verification system with no endorsements or political associations, why try to get some people banned or have it taken away from them? The opponents here seemed to think a blue check conveyed important (approved) status on the bad guy:
"Twitter's practice and process for verifying accounts came under scrutiny in 2017 after the company verified the account of white supremacist and far-right political activist, Jason Kessler. Many who criticized Twitter's decision to verify Kessler's account saw this as a political act on the company's behalf. In response, Twitter put its verification process on hold. The company tweeted, "Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. We have paused all general verifications while we work and will report back soon."
Yes. People had to apply for a blue check and it involved sending documentation and getting calls to employers or other sorts of verifications. Therefore it clearly wasn’t just something that happened to journalists but something they or their employers demanded. Which is why musk suggested paying for the blue check - he was tweaking noses. It probably won’t happen
You can say that, but is there any evidence for it? It sounds like for journalists at established news companies, it was something the employer did automatically on their behalf.
In any case, even if it *did* take effort to obtain, that still doesn't show that they considered it a status symbol. As an analogy, think of security clearances. If I need one for my job, I'll get one (with help from the employer), but that doesn't mean that it is a status symbol or that I'd pay to get one just for the hell of it.
In the Country i live in a fairly obscure local journalist I know personally, with fewer followers than me when I was on twitter, had a blue check and a nationally famous tv personality and journalist did not. He just didn’t care.
The local Journalist, with her 150 followers, clearly applied to twitter somehow, twitter didn’t search her out. They might have done that with some major US celebs but it doesn’t scale.
I think you're still confusing cause and effect. Did anyone ever "treat Trump as an oracle" because of his blue check?
Also, how would you tell if there was "rewriting of history" going on? Are there any cases of journalists who publicly said they cared a lot about their blue check in the past who are saying it was always meaningless now?
My new model: There are five (count 'em) sets of elites in American society:
1. Wall Street
2. Hollywood
3. Silicon Valley
4. Washington DC
5. The media (which is the only one that doesn't have a neat geographical synecdoche)
Other wealthy and/or respected sectors like oil, medicine, academia, and the military, don't really have power on their own, only what can be borrowed from government or media. This is why you won't catch the children of powerful people going off to work in them; only in one of the big five.
The emergence of Silicon Valley as a power centre on its own is very recent; Silicon Valley was rich long before it was powerful; they only became powerful once the social media age began and they started to control the flow of information. This, not coincidentally, the point at which the industry got co-opted by the left side of politics, kicking out or silencing the libertarian-leaning old guard.
Anyway, there's five elites, and each has different characteristics. Each has slightly different characteristics in terms of the sort of people who rule it. Some can still be broken into by outsiders, others are extremely closed off. Some are centrist, others are far left (none is conservative). Some worship Harvard, others worship Stanford, and some worship random liberal arts colleges that I've never even heard of. They're all chummy with each other, and they're all at low-level war with each other. And of course there's internal conflicts in each of these institutions too.
Anyway, I think that thinking about the modern elite class makes more sense once it's considered as a weird multipolar blob riven by internal conflicts.
No, I don't think so, if it ever was. The military-industrial complex has no power of its own, only what it can beg from the Government. That's why children of powerful parents don't go into the military (unless they think it will look good for an eventual political run) and why they certainly don't go into Lockheed-Martin or Raytheon. That's why I can't name any prominent (current) Generals or Admirals or defence-contractor CEOs.
The issue, I think, is that the military-industrial complex doesn't actually have any real-world source of usable power. Hollywood, the media and Silicon Valley can control what people think. Wall Street can control what projects get funded or unfunded, and Government can do all sorts of things. But the Military-Industrial Complex has no way of exercising its own power _except_ to stage a coup, and since nobody believes they would ever do that it means they have no power over anything. (In countries like Pakistan or Indonesia where the threat of a military coup is not just theoretical, the military does indeed form an important part of the elite.)
I've wondered whether the change in Ivy League admissions was really an uncaused cause. It seems that Harvard has always had a deep attitude that it graduates the future leaders of society (particularly in the "high social status" sense of "leader"), going back to when it graduated Puritan ministers. And the 1950s and early 1960s would be when it would start becoming apparent that there were ways to become a leader in Boston and its hinterlands that didn't depend on being from a moneyed WASP background. That would have been the point where businesses would start to be driven by understanding and harnessing new technologies as much as the traditional hard work and ruthlessness. ("Route 128" was Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.) So Harvard's change may have been as much a reaction to the changing times as a driver of it.
Which may also explain some of the affirmative action wars. As Scott says, even if an East-Asian-American has sterling academic credentials and comes from high-status roots in the old country (as many do), currently there they're at an ethnic disadvantage for reaching positions of high status due to their shallow roots in the US. So loading up the class with high-performing East-Asian-Americans doesn't optimize "the social status of our graduates at age 50".
"Your particular Native American blanket might have been made by the most famous Native artisan, using only heirloom wool sustainably harvested from free-range sheep raised on traditional farms run by indigenous people of color. If your guests have any class, they will see the blanket, recognize it, and know all of that."
- it can't actually be true that guests ever recognize these attributes in blankets?
Was the old WASP aristocracy really all that...ostentatious? My father is an old-line WASP (my grandmother frittered her inheritance away on racehorses, so the money--but not all the antiques--are gone) and takes great pains **not** to look like he's spent a lot of money--the family car has never been bought new, for example. At the same time, his tastes are unmistakably upper-class ones...
I don't know how it was with the WASPs, but in the British system, old-money types generally considered it vulgar to flaunt your wealth too much. Only the nouveau riches needed to spend money to prove they weren't poor; a proper gentlemen's status was obvious from his deportment, even if he was wearing an old, shabby coat.
I can't help but wonder if Musk's doing-away-with the blue check as a status symbol will lead to the usurpation of the Meritocrat aristocracy, just as Conant/Pusey's alterations to Harvard's admissions policy supposedly led to the usurpation of the WASPs'.
And if so, who will replace the Meritocrats? Will the pendulum swing reactionary and a sort lineage-based status system will return? We're all obsessed with Downton Abbey and The Crown anyways, and among all other status markers, birthright has the most daunting proof-of-work algorithm.
Or will we see a kind of doubling of the current meritocracy, where the Bohemians are once again briefly wheeled out as props by those seeking to unseat the Meritocrats, only to be used as a foil for the latter's supposed "inauthenticity," leaving us doomed to muddle our way through a new loop of irony/detachment/misdirection?
The blue checkmark was never meant literally, in this context. People who had literal blue checks because they were e.g. famous athletes, weren't in the group, but any vaguely recognizable thinkfluencer was part of the group without anyone actually checking their tweets for the blue.
It's possible that Musk's changes to Twitter will change the colloquial meaning of the term. I think it's pretty likely in the long term. But then, the "save file" icon on most of my software still looks like a 3.5" floppy disk.
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead seems like it aligns perfectly with the idea that Meritocrats derided ornate architecture as a relic of the decadent past. The most interesting thing about the book is the way it uses architecture as a proxy for Rand's ideological divide in society. In one section Roark gets absolutely pissed when a customer comes and asks him to add decorative columns to the front of his design:
"Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope--not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it."
"Well," said Mr. Janss, "I’ve never thought of it that way." He added, without great conviction: "But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty."
"What who calls what beauty?"
"Well-l-l..."
"Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?"
"I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another," Mr. Janss confessed, "but I guess that’s what the public wants."
"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."
Well, that's a dumb argument. People have always ornamented themselves, be that sticking plugs in their ears, bones in their noses, tattoos, hairstyles, makeup, and the rest of it.
I don't know enough about Ms. Rand's personal life but did she go to the hairdresser to have her hair done? Wear makeup? Dress fashionably? Wear jewellery? Why do so, when the simple bare human body would be just as good if she wore a potato sack and chopped her hair off with the breadknife?
Did her heroes and heroines dress well? Does Howard Roark shave instead of growing a beard like Grizzly Adams? We ornament all that is around us and that we use, as we ornament ourselves, for the sake of not having a bare metal box that is one of a series of bare metal boxes.
Zig-zag lines on clay pots don't contribute a thing to their functionality, but our ancestors decorated even those simple pots in that simple way because we have an instinct for beauty. Even Howard Roark's profession arises out of more than "just put one stick on top of another for shelter", that's how we get modern steel office buildings as the end result of "how do we do this better?"
I don't think anyone would disagree with the sentiment that Rand was often a hypocrite, but her ideas can be fun regardless.
In general, as I recall, Roark's aesthetic is something like "Not only should we pursue Function over Form, highlighting Function should be the Form." So he shaves, because it is impractical to have a beard in your way, and further to highlight the stark lines of a clean jaw. When he is hired to design a sort of unitarian universalist temple, he puts his energies into how his design might draw the viewer's eye to the earth instead of the sky, to highlight its Humanitarian nature.
If I were to steelman him fully, I think I'd argue that he's not opposed to beauty, he's opposed to waste. Decorative columns make sense when your engineering requires the columns to be there in the first place, but why slap them on the front of a skyscraper when they serve no purpose? Why place your intricately carved sculptures high above the masses, where their beauty can scarcely be made out? It's obeisance to a Tradition and a God that Roark doesn't believe in.
For contrast, the antagonist of the book is a spiteful philanthropist who misapplies charity as a way of destroying people's lives by convincing them to throw their life's passion and work into fruitless donations. An Ineffective Altruist, which always makes me laugh.
I'm trying to imagine a UU 'temple' built by a Rand hero and it makes me wince. He might as well design an office block or industrial warehouse for it.
Instead of sculptures on high, mirrors at eye-level so he (and the participants) can gaze their fill on the new god, "Me, me, glorious wonderful Me!" Perhaps not even mirrors, but a pool, to emulate Narcissus his patron saint?
If he wants to draw attention down to the earth (as Humanism) instead of the sky (for the god he does not believe in) then instead of spires, I imagine caves and tunnels leading down into a vast underground excavation. Caves can be beautiful, too! But I wouldn't trust Roark not to make it look more like the ground floor of a multi-storey car park than anything like this:
"And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and the men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes curtains as fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in the grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is a chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stairs beyond stairs; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them!"
..."No you don't understand," said Gimli, "No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin's race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap - a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day - so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-Dûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return."
I get the feeling Roark would indeed cut down blossoming trees for firewood, and blow up the caves for diamonds and gold.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. If Rand ever positively portrayed a natural preservationist, I cannot remember them. Her heroes are nearly always industrialists.
I looked up the description of his Temple of the Human Spirit, and, if I were to envision it uncharitably, "Car Park" seems like a perfectly acceptable interpretation:
The Temple was to be a small building of gray limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.
There was no ornamentation inside, except the graded projections of the walls, and the vast windows. The place was not sealed under vaults, but thrown open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun--and to the skyline of the city in the distance, the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth. At the end of the room, facing the entrance, with the city as background, stood the figure of a naked human body.
(1) That does sound perfectly grim, and Mr. Roark would have had no problem getting a job designing Catholic churches in the period 50s-80s as they all went for bare concrete or stone and strip out all the ornamentation. Which is *fine* in a dry, sunny climate where the skies are blue and the air is not dripping with condensation and you have a constant exterior light source to contrast against the grey. It doesn't work so well in the west of Ireland where the rainstorms constantly blow in from the Atlantic and sitting in a grey concrete bare walls building leaves you freezing your feet off, I can tell you that from personal experience.
He might have grudgingly and reservedly approved of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, photos linked below. It was proposed in the late 90s and completed in 2002 and at least is not bare grey, they went for bare beige instead:
(2) This is sounding very much like the Religion of Humanity in R.H. Benson's "Lord of the World", especially with the naked human body statue:
"She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring; the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their sense was plain enough — the old human creed that man was all. Even Christ's, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said, lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity."
"There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter. Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary."
""Now here," he said, "we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from the floor. Behind the altar— extending almost to the old shrine of the Confessor— will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it; and— so far as I understand from the absence of directions— each such figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast."
"What kind of figure?" put in the girl.
Francis glanced at her husband. "I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted," he said. "He will design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for Paternity—-"
He paused again.
"Yes, Mr. Francis?"
"This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man."
"A kind of Apollo— or Jupiter, my dear," put in Oliver.
But the main plan is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is unmistakable in its main lesson—-"
"And that you take to be—?"
"I take it that it is homage offered to Life," said the other slowly. "Life under four aspects— Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective, generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on…. I understand it was a German thought."
Oliver nodded. "Yes," he said. "And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to explain all this."
"I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative plan— Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are subordinate to Life."
"Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human individuals, to develop larger ideas. ...Yet there had been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well; and Mr. Brand's passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind for the revelation.
...If there had not been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the thought had been Felsenburgh's, though a German name had been mentioned. It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice, too, was recognised— the instinct of oblation without the demand made by transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man"
(3) Finally, the emphasis on going down into the earth rather than raising spires to the sky reminds me of this extract from Chesterton:
"I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realize a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having traveled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though be had been charged with excess in telling travelers' tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburned face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: 'Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?' I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, 'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity!' Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goat like beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about like a dawn. 'Why, of course,' I said after a moment's reflection, 'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex!' I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont."
On point 1 -- of course you *can* design a building like that for Los Angeles and the parishioners won't suffer too much. But lines don't have to be straight to be clean, and the exterior of the California missions is in fact rather clean, with earthy clay courtyard walls extending out like lion's paws in a way I prefer to many more heavily decorated European cathedrals.
Newer Orthodox churches in the Southwest US have been blending Greek and Spanish Colonial designs, and are quite pleasing to look at, with nice gentle domes with whites and tans.
(I just looked up Los Angelas Orthodox churches out of curiosity, and the Russian cathedral looks like something out of Arabian Nights, but the Serbian one looks like old California in a good way)
"At the centre of the square is an ancient Egyptian obelisk, erected at the current site in 1586. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the square almost 100 years later, including the massive Doric colonnades, four columns deep, which embrace visitors in "the maternal arms of Mother Church".
That reminds me of my favorite quote on writing, from Strunk & White:
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
I'd steelman the Rand point as saying that our ideals for beauty should be related to function. A beautiful building could be beautiful specifically *because* it achieved its function so well.
That argument only gets you so far - some buildings are beautiful because they're interesting to look at, even in ways that are contrary to function.
To me, one of the largest pervasive feelings Rand put into her books (and I think really well) is the emotion of liking that which is great, like Nietzchian greatness but not through violence, and hatred of the small, nasty, petty, and mean. Dominique has it dialed up to 100 in the book. the specific judgments about columns or no columns, Ayn Rand's specific preferences of Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or whatever, are secondary and beside the point.
I really liked the Fountainhead (also gave me a great love of the Great American cities and skyscrapers), and the hate for columns didn't sit right with me, especially if taken literally, as "columns are always bad". I also don't love Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Roark was based on. But I think you have to broaden the view to enjoy this book and not read in the most literal "columns bad, glass boxes good". To me I get that feeling of disgust at certain mundane things, and that the building should make sense, I get and recognize the role a Roark plays in society (follows his own way, truly and deeply doesn't actually care about society or need anyone else, but provides value to society).
I read several of her novels, and it's just a very interesting picture to see the views progress and emerge. I think "We The Living", an earlier and lesser-known book, is actually good and can be read by a wider audience because it's both more historically based and less ideological.
"I get and recognize the role a Roark plays in society (follows his own way, truly and deeply doesn't actually care about society or need anyone else, but provides value to society)."
But Roark does need society, if Rand means that cities are the greatest achievement of mankind. I mean, he could always go live on a desert island and build models of his buildings out of bamboo, and not need anyone to see them or admire them because he doesn't need society. But if he wants to build those buildings, he needs the cities, he needs the money to build them - either corporations or individual wealthy people want this building - and he needs the workers to work on translating his blueprints into the physical buildings.
He may or may not provide value to society, and indeed he has a point about bad imitations of imitations of classical features. But if he is *too* insistent on doing things his own way, then nobody will want to hire him. If he builds you a house you can't live in, you can only get so much recognition for having a starchitect-designed house while you go find someplace that you can be comfortable in, built by a lesser name but more inclined to go "yeah, you sort of need to adjust The Vision here so people won't freeze or boil and it's not all stark bare minimalism".
It would seem that a house by a starchitect you can't live in is exactly not what Roark would build. One of the criticisms of Frank Lloyd Wright, and my sense from visiting his Robie House and seeing pictures of others, is that they're not livable and that there were also problems with the actual design.
I don't think it's about being an island unto yourself and literally never needing another person. It's the specific kind of social need - to be with people, to have their approval for its own sake, to make them feel better. If you've ever butted up against that type of person - that personality - in real life, they're frustrating, hard to talk to, and probably very hard to live with or date. But they don't need all that, and to me that's fine - I don't need to MAKE them like society or care about society, you know? I think some people fundamentally disagree with that, and think everyone should care. Maybe that's the target of the critique here? I don't know. Just shower thoughts (not really because that would ruin my computer and phone, haha).
Strange you should mention Lloyd Wright, since the photos I've seen of his houses do strike me as beautiful designs. But how *practical* they are is a different matter, and I've since read a lot of criticism about them on exactly the grounds you state: problems with the design, not being livable, needing a lot of upkeep and repairs, etc.
So if Roark designs buildings that are functional and they really are functional, that is on the credit side for him. But swinging to the opposite arc of the pendulum where it is *all* function and no form, and no beauty, is as bad. And if Roark is just as insistent on his Grand Vision and to hell with what the client wants, then that is on the debit side.
I think my attitude here has been coloured by work dealings where we had a building designed by a Dublin firm of architects, and between the designs being signed off on and the actual building happening, it was years later, the site was changed, and a lot of the original rooms needed to be re-purposed. For instance, the original site was meant to be by the harbour, so they designed the building to have a 'ship' style with 'sails' and so on. But the new site was on the outskirts of the town and nowhere near water, so that design element really meant nothing.
The firm wasn't one bit interested in co-operating with us, and from their side I can understand why: this was an old project, over and done with, and spending more time working on it for us wasn't getting them any more money. But it was really, really frustrating from our side, and coloured decisions for subsequent projects to go with local builders who may not have been fancy architects but who would damn well put in a room where you wanted it put 😁
One of the main reasons Frank Lloyd Wright houses aren't livable is that Wright was a control freak, and made the buyers sign contracts requiring them not to change things--the interior, the colors, the furniture, whatever. The contracts also forbid selling the house to someone who hasn't signed the same contract. (I don't know if that always stands up in court.) So for instance Wright usually (maybe always) built doorways too short for anyone 6 feet tall, because he was short and resented tall people; and he'd write into the contract that the doors couldn't be modified to let tall people in.
I find that Anthem is usually a fairly non objective book to recommend, if i think someone would like her work. The Fountainhead feels to me like her worst in many ways, but it's also by far the most memorable for me. I think about its characters and ideas much more often than Atlas Shrugged, and I think part of it is that she did successfully alter the way i think about both architecture and philanthropy. With her other work, my mind was not changed, I either continued to agree or disagree with the points she made.
I think this review is still giving too much credence to what's basically a monocausal explanation of 'kids these days are the problem' for everything. That is, even if we grant that there was a shift towards meritocracy in college admissions (some of the other comments talk about it being more complicated than that, but I'm not that familiar with the topic):
* The transition towards simplified art - that is, more or less, modernist art - started in ~1900, not 1955.
* Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe. Furthermore, the concept of a meritocracy determined by standardized testing is *much* closer to High Modernism than premodern elites, and some serious explanation would be needed for this meritocratic elite to be the ones that turned against meritocracy.
* Whether or not 'starving artists' have vanished as a class, Fussell wasn't among their number, and the concept doesn't seem to much overlap with 'Class X'. (I do think ACX has a tendency towards over-cynicism in assuming that everything is signaling and that people have no honest interests. The vast majority of 'new elite' members do not enjoy whitewater rafting, and so they don't participate in whitewater rafting.)
* Conservatives have complained about the new generation lacking 'values' for the entirety of human history. The fact that they're also complaining now really doesn't require explanation.
The connection with political polarization, though, does seem like it may be related - if the same elites ran both parties, it makes sense that their policies weren't that different. Of course, polarization very much is a cycle. Then again, the dominance of the Old Establishment wasn't eternal either, and the late 19th century seems like very much a period that also followed a different elite (the agrarian slaveholding elite, maybe corresponding to the 'Cavaliers') losing much of their elite status. So maybe there's something there - cycles of elite competition and all that. (Though searching for cycles in history is generally a matter of finding patterns in random noise, and I'm not entirely convinced Turchin's work is different.)
Apropos the connection to “Whither Tartaria?”, I was recently reading something about fascism that brought up Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism.” Eco devotes several of his 14 signs of fascism to a rejection of modernism and modern art. Prefer the old stuff? That’s your inner Nazi talking. I’m not sure this is as powerful an idea as it once was, but I suspect it was critically important.
I already knew there were entire movements in post-WWII European art that worried any representational art (art that depicts something recognizable in the physical world) had been tainted by fascism. It’s a hard thing to wrap my head around the idea that someone somewhere refused to paint, say, a nude or a bowl of fruit because it reminded them of Nazis, but I didn’t live through the war.
I recently realized the dominance of spare, unadorned, rectilinear “Brutalist” (an oft-misused term) buildings in the latter half of the 20th century could easily be due to a combination of perceived cost savings and the possibility that *everyone who mattered* might call you a fascist if you objected. The former might be enough on its own, but paired with the potential charge of crypto fascism, well, I bet that kept a lot of people in their seats at the town hall.
And it works both ways. Remember the minor freak-out when Trump declared that Neoclassical would be the standard style for new government buildings? Trump likes old-school things, and is old enough himself to have been building things in NYC when both its bobo and legit bohemian populations were at their peak. If anyone was on the receiving end of this theory it was him. We all knew who the Neoclassical requirement was supposed to stick it to in 2017, even if more recent generations can’t quite articulate their associations for traditional vs. modern architecture. So this pattern or something like it will probably persist.
If I recall correctly, a fondness for order and harmony was listed as a sign of fascism in The Authoritarian Personality. Order and harmony are, of course, two of the factors that make art beautiful, so it's no wonder the modern world can't produce beautiful art, when the impulse to do so is seen as somehow linked to a desire to commit genocide and start world wars.
>The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting.
Maybe, But didn't they also sponsor not-boorish artists to create masterpieces, akin to how European (first noble, then bourgeois) elites sponsored much of what fills the Louvre and a hundred other museums today?
A separation of tasks between the wealth-producer and the beauty-creator seems to produce better results than having your bobo install his own painting atelier in his 600m² lakeside chalet and make his own shitty -but oh so full of individuality- paintings.
Also, Yachting (and a lot of boorish old-money activity, like breeding horses or hunting castaways that trespass on your island) sounds hella fun, and I won't blame them for indulging on it.
I feel like if even half of this was true, The change in Harvard’s and other university’s admission policy would have been a much bigger deal. Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position. At the very least there would be legislative attempts to reverse the change. It’s possible the aristocracy didn’t realize how important the change was, but they should have realized it when the meritocrats became a thing, and when their kids stopped getting into top universities. There just wasn’t enough of a fight for something which supposedly toppled a virtual nobility. And it is highly unusual for an entire class of people to make an epistemic mistake about something which it is very important for them to get right, when the consequences of a mistake will be immediate and when the subject isn’t some obscure scientific field which requires expertise to understand. If David was smart enough to figure all of this out, why weren’t the aristocrats? It was far more important for them to get it right, and it doesn’t seem that David’s knowledge of the future was particularly useful for this inference, so the aristocrats had nearly all the relevant information David did.
This is assuming a united class of people. Add a faction within that class that thinks that many other members of the class don't deserve to be there, and it makes perfect sense; they're performing necessary maintenance work on the aristocratic class.
After all, meritocracy is good, and the natural aristocracy, including themselves, will naturally rise to the top. The only people who will sink are those who deserve to.
Not really you don’t need a unified aristocracy to put up a fight as history amply demonstrates. Even if only half the aristocracy was opposed to the change. They would not just roll over and let their opponents win and a faction in favour of meritocracy can only form if these people can actually put their children into the ivy league. Otherwise they will notice very quickly that the new system does not work for them when they and their friends can’t put their children into Harvard like they want.
You remember all those scandals that came out recently about people bribing schools to get their kids good grades and acceptance into universities? I think that hack was allowed to work for a lot of them until they'd lost enough power that we were suddenly able to pull the rug out from under them and accuse them of cheating.
I *wish* rich people nowadays just threw parties and bought expensive stuff. That's harmless. Mildly wasteful at worst.
Instead, we made them feel that that was bad and now they seek absolution for their perceived sins by trying to save the world, but actually increasing all kind of major risks (hello, nuclear war with Russia)
I wish SBF had done the drugs and the orgies without also feeling the need to be a productive member of society.
Given that the architecture changed before the enrollment process, and given that something prompted the enrollment process itself to change, I think it's worth noticing that, while who the elites are and what they value may be upstream of many things, something else is necessarily upstream of who the elites are and what they value.
"But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be."
This quote really struck me as not right. What it took to demolish that old WASP aristocracy was the rise of the world's first long-lasting republic, an industrial revolution, a race war in which the republic happened to be on the right side, and a small set of relatively independent institutions that were (a) key to the elite and (b) relatively easily changed from the inside... that's a startling set of circumstances.
Quite the contrary, if Brooks is right, this demonstrates just how hard it is to dislodge an aristocracy, especially given that the old WASP aristocracy never really went away. It just got pushed slightly to the side, and could easily come roaring back.
The meritocratic phase of the Ivies lasted only a few years, from 1960 to sometime around 1967 when full-tuition academic scholarships were eliminated at all Ivy League schools, using the justification that they were ruining football. This was a major blow to their selectivity; before then, there had been /many/ full-tuition scholarships at most of the ivy leagues.
In the 1970s, full-tuition merit scholarships offered by third parties began to appear, but not for white males (except for scholarships offered only for particular majors, usually for careers in what was considered charitable work). Financial aid operated on the principle that they would start giving you financial aid only after your parents sold all their assets and spent all their money, and screw your brothers and sisters if that made it impossible for them to go to college. By 1980, no one could afford ivy-league tuitions except the rich or the broke, and only people who weren't white males could get full-tuition merit scholarships.
Starting around 1970, people who hadn't gone to any Ivy League or equivalent school (eg MIT) suddenly were blocked from reaching positions of power, wealth, or prestige--in politics, law, finance, business, education, and science. I did a survey around 2010 of people who had Nobels in physics, and found that of those who attended college before 1970, most had either not attended an ivy, or attended an ivy or equivalent (in physics) on a full-tuition merit scholarship. After 1970, that number dropped to... a very small number, impossible to establish because I couldn't know whether non-white-male students had received a full-tuition scholarship, but possibly zero. By the 1980s (IIRC), the number of Supreme Court justices who hadn't attended an Ivy had dropped from "most of them" to zero or one. After 1990, the same could be said of elected US Presidents, and the number of new American industrialist billionaires who hadn't attended an ivy or equivalent had dropped from "most of them" to a few, owing to big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.
Also in the 1970s, the political parties were disrupted, with the Democrats losing the South, and starting to lose the working class. They flipped positions between then and now. The Democrats are now the party of the rich. Witness the fact that they're outspending the Republicans right now in the critical Georgia Senate race by 2 to 1. Check political-spending statistics, and it appears that roughly a third of the disposable wealth in America was transferred to Republicans to Democrats between 1980 and the present.
This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-branding the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party toward identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.
The alternative hypothesis, that the ivies & co. suddenly became so good at picking smart people in the 1960s that they scooped up literally everyone capable of success since then, is infeasible, because
1. they can only admit about 1/1000th to 2/1000th of America's college population each year, and standardized tests show the median Ivy attendee is only in the 98th percentile
2. middle-class white & Asian males can't /all/ suddenly be incapable of success
3. most or all of them don't require standardized tests anymore on an application, so they have no good means of identifying talented students
4. in earlier years, enough highly-successful people hadn't performed well in, or hadn't attended, high school (eg Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford) that there should be at least some such people today, but I'm not aware of any
Do you really mean that very few people who got a Nobel in physics after 1970 did not attend an Ivy *for college* (and, to boot, very few of those who did attend an Ivy did so on a merit-based scholarship), or that very few such people did not attend an Ivy or equivalent *at some point in their academic careers*? Admissions to graduate schools is (as I'd imagine you know if you have an interest in STEM) far more meritocratic in the US than college admissions, and also much less income-dependent - pretty much everybody who goes for a PhD in the sciences is on an assistantship or scholarship.
I was counting grad schools. I don't think grad schools are as meritocratic as undergrad admissions, except in not having the wealth-bandpass filter that eliminates the middle class, or used to.
Undergrad admissions relies more on standardized test scores, and on grades from teachers on standardized curriculums, with standardized grading policies, who aren't free to give students good or bad grades on a whim. Grad admissions relies more on what undergrad college you went to, whom you worked with there, how much funding they had, how much they liked you personally, and what publications you have. There's more cronyism and luck involved, and a much larger cultural advantage to kids coming from academic parents, or from an upper-upper-middle-class academic/management community like those in San Jose or Boston, who understand how grad school, academia, and business really work.
- undergrad admissions are need-blind only at the top places (and, for some populations, like "foreign" students, including residents who are not green-card-holders, only at a tiny handful of places)
- the standardized tests we have in place for undergrad admissions are actually quite weak (too easy in themselves, too easy to game, too non-specific), and so, even once you apply as a filter, you are going to end up with a population many times larger than that which could reasonably prosper at the top places;
- the choice within that population is then made by the admissions office, not by academics.
On luck, cultural advantage, understanding how academia works, etc.: those are key for undergraduate admissions, unless you have, well, the luck of being someone the admissions office decides it's looking for. Once you have got to university - any half-way reasonable place, which may be "less than" what you would have got had you had all the factors mentioned working in your favor - you have four years to get work done, acquire information, the general habitus, and what not. At least in the STEM fields I am most familiar with, if you are truly very good and keen to get ahead, you will manage to get to one of the top 10 grad schools. Connections may be particularly important to get to that one specific program people talk about, but less so if you are less specific.
Be noticed by their professors, who will encourage them to do independent study, take graduate classes, go to seminars, possibly look at some research questions, etc. (Hopefully they will also be hired to be undergraduate teaching assistants, and will no longer have to do data entry or wash dishes.)
This is all of course assuming that the student is at or near an institution with a PhD program or at least a strong master's program. If not, then it's harder. But in any event, the possibilities are much, much greater than at any high-school (barring extreme examples such as a truly forsaken place vs. Stuyvesant, say). The US (I take this is what we are discussing) has great depth of field; even deeply third-tier places often have a couple (or more than a couple) good research) who will show this young person the ropes.
I went to a liberal arts college, with no graduate students, teaching assistants, or research. I'd been advised that I'd get a more-rounded education there than at the state universities.
>That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party.
...Lead by a white male (who did not, in fact, attend an Ivy). They're so sneaky like that.
I just can't understand how anyone smart enough to come up with all the previous analysis can say that with a straight face. It makes everything else in your analysis harder to take at face value.
The Democrats aren't an "anti-white-male party" (even though they might look that way compared to the party that more explicitly favors white males), white men are still overrepresented among democratic candidates[1]. Something something, when you're used to privilege, everything else looks like oppression. (Trying to ascribe this to "it's only because they all went to Ivy-likes" borders on the conspiratorial, and completely ignores that the majority of non-white-males in this category are similarly credentialed - Obama went to Harvard. It has nothing to do with race.)
Even *if* you're talking about the democrats' token adoption of a "woke" platform in the past couple of decades, that's happened *way* too late to explain the time period we're talking bout here (when it was even more overwhelmingly white).
If you *really* want to get down to it and say that Democrat have decided on a social class to target, and that means they've stopped putting in effort to convince non-college-educated-white-males, then you'd have something closer to a Motte, but that's a far cry from the "anti-white-male except elite Ivys" Bailey.
They're not actually against white males, and perhaps not really against anything. As you noted, the leaders are white males. I meant they present themselves as anti-white-male at this moment in time. But the white males of Harvard and Yale are themselves never severely discriminated against. There are always many doors open to them. The recent demonization of white males may have begun as an alternative way of keeping Jews and Asians out of Harvard. But I frankly think race is not the issue; the issue is simply keeping money and power in America within a group that is coherent, cooperative, and small. If identity politics can create a new group, large enough to shift the balance of power, but not large enough to be a threat, who can be admitted into that group within a framework that guarantees their continued loyalty and cooperation, that's fine with them.
And I'm also not really talking about "The Democrats". The US Democratic Party is merely the current vehicle of a movement that goes back at least to the Puritan settlements of the Boston area. Its mission is still the same: to promulgate an idealistic, utopian philosophy based on essentialism and logic; to install people who follow that philosophy into positions of power and wealth; to reshape society to move it closer to perfection; and to spread their power whenever possible.
My father's father was an orphan. His father, also an orphan, had been sent to a religious commune in Wisconsin after his parents died. The commune imploded after the cult leader's death, and the commune members were cast out penniless because they didn't own any of the commune they'd built and paid for. Shortly after, that great-grandfather died, and that grandfather was sent away to work as a farmhand at age 7.
He lived in a log cabin with a dirt floor and 4 other people, and eventually became one of those roving hired farmhands like the one in that Robert Frost poem, travelling from place to place looking for work, until he was drafted and sent to fight in France in World War 1, where he almost died. After the war, he got a job sweeping factory floors, was laid off, became a tramp for a while, got his job sweeping floors back, and worked his way up from sweeper to tool grinder.
He saved enough to buy a farm, and then a car, and then lost both because he couldn't keep up the car payments and had used the farm as collateral for the loan to buy the car. So he went back to grinding tools at the factory, until he was disabled in a car crash. His pension was stolen by the Caterpillar company, which declared when it bought Moline Tractors that it wasn't going to honor Moline's pensioners. (This was the incident that led to the laws we have against this sort of corporate acquisition today.)
So he lived out the rest of his life at home, supported by his wife, my grandma, who cleaned other people's houses; and my dad, who delivered newspapers, and bought and sold rags and junk on the street.
My father's mother was also an orphan. She'd been a peasant in Ukraine, but after the Russian Revolution, some local commissariat wanted her father's vegetable garden; so he declared the entire family to be kulaks, took their house and garden, and sent them all to a labor camp, where most of them starved or froze to death. She was allowed to return years later, and worked her way to Germany, cleaning houses, until she eventually saved enough money to board a ship to America, to which she brought nothing but the clothes on her back.
My mother's father was also an orphan, in Poland. His father had had a job on the other side of town, which took hours to walk to and back, so he had to get up in the morning before the children rose, walk across town, work all day, walk back, and arrive home after the children were asleep. So my grandfather only saw his father on Sundays. But his father became sick, and was in the hospital a long time, where they weren't allowed to visit him.
Then one day they got a message that he was being sent home the next day. So the next day, the children all got dressed in their Sunday clothes and waited outside all day for their father to come home, until a cart pulled up. Some men hauled his father out of the cart and dumped him off. The hospital had neglected to tell the family that he was dead.
So my mother's father supported the entire family by working as an errand boy for a government official. Like his father, he had to get up before dawn and walk all the way across town, where he spent much of his childhood standing at attention in that official's office.
Fortunately, his parents had attended one of the only Baptist churches in Poland, and some Baptist congregations in England decided they would to pay for some promising young boy to go to a Baptist seminary and bring proper theology back to Poland. He was chosen, and sent to Rawdon College in England at age 17. Classes at Rawdon were in English, Greek, and Latin. He spoke only German and Polish. So he had to teach himself Greek, Latin, and English during his first year of college. After finishing seminary, he went back to Poland, where he married my mother's mother. She was the wealthiest of my ancestors. Her parents had a dirt floor and no running water, but they had a cow, some chickens, and at least two pigs.
My mother's father was sent to America to attend a Baptist conference in August of 1939, and World War 2 broke out while he was there. So my mother and her family had no father from 1939-1947. Near the end of the war, Russian soldiers "liberating" their town killed my mother's mother's father, and took his cow, the chickens, and the pigs.
There was never enough food after that. My mother, her sister, and their mother and grandmother fled across western Poland and Eastern Germany, and listened each night to the guns of the pursuing Russian Army. When my mom was 7, she watched Dresden burn. After a year in a UN refugee camp, they were able to take a boat to America and reunite with my grandfather in 1947. They spent their lives moving around Canada and the north of the US, from one temporary pastorship to another, as my grandfather's seminary training in Biblical criticism had made him too aware of the failings of the Bible to be a very motivating Baptist preacher. They didn't have running water or electricity until about 1955.
So now we get to my parents. My father was able to save up enough money doing odd jobs to send himself to college–this was in the days when tuition was in the hundreds of dollars–and got a PhD in engineering, over the objections of his parents. He got a job and kept it for the rest of his life, though sometimes it moved him around. My mother became a nurse, working in the downtown areas of Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Baltimore.
And then there's me. When it was time for me to go to college, my parents had saved a grand total of $3000 for my college fund, which was enough for about one month of college. There was no question of applying to an Ivy, or MIT, or Stanford, or Carnegie Mellon. If I hadn't been white, or hadn't been male, they would've have scholarships I could have applied to; but not one of them had any full-tuition merit scholarships available to white males. I couldn't even get a loan to go to those schools; the government's student loans maxed out at $10,000 / year.
I got to go to college only because I was able to get a full-tuition merit scholarship--in fact, I was offered one by every college I applied to, plus scholarships from the State of Maryland and a National Merit Scholarship. But in those first 4 years, all my scholarships put together still didn't cover the cost of food, so I had to work during school and in the summer. I couldn't afford to join my friends when they went out eating or drinking; I couldn't go to movies; I couldn't afford to date. Sometimes I still couldn't afford food, and got through the days before payday by surreptitiously spraying my roommate's spray starch down my throat.
I spent 15 years in college and earned a BS, an MS, and a PhD. But I've never yet gotten a job that required anything more than a BS. Those are reserved for the elites.
In my last year of grad school, I noticed that none of the people in my department who graduated a year before me got a good job. I mentioned it to my girlfriend, who shrugged and said, "I wondered why you were even in this program. Don't you know you can't get a job with a PhD from the University of __?" I pointed out that she was also getting a PhD from the U of __. She laughed and said, "I'm a woman. I can get a job anywhere I want."
I didn't believe her then, but she did get a job in academia, and I didn't. Years later, I checked, and found that, out of the 30 men and 4 women who'd studied artificial intelligence with me and gotten a PhD, 3 of the men and 3 of the women got jobs in academia. The 3 men all had at least a dozen publications before graduating, and two of them had organized and run international conferences. All of them had jobs in colleges I'd never heard of. The other 27 men had vanished. Google could find nothing about any of them. The 1 woman who didn't get an academic job had in fact flunked out of the program; but her husband, who worked for the school, pressured them into granting her a degree anyway.
Every college, every job, every grant I've ever applied to has had explicit language in the application form saying "White males go to the end of the line." I'm not talking about an imagined "the store detective was looking at me funny" prejudice; I'm talking about continual, explicitly-and-proudly-declared racism and sexism declaring me the least-desirable kind of person, for all of my adult life.
In 2016, I decided to give up on tech jobs, which were too aggressively affirmative-action for me to have any real hope of employment, and go to college yet again, for a master's in English Literature. We studied no English Literature. We studied Marx, Foucault, bell hooks, and why everything was the fault of the white male patriarchy that controlled everything. One day at the start of class, my professor said she'd just written a recommendation for the professor who had originally convinced her to major in literature, 20 or 30 (I forget) years earlier. He had never found a permanent position himself, but had been bouncing from one adjunct faculty position to another all those years. Then she laughed, and said, "But what did he expect as a white male?"
So I dropped out of the English Literature MS program. She'd just slipped up and told me that everything she'd taught us was a lie; that white males were at the bottom of the pole, not the top; and that I would never get a faculty job in English Literature.
I've now been unemployed for 9 years, and every job interview I've gotten has been at some firm that was trying to get a 50/50 male-female balance of engineers out of what was usually a 90/10 ratio of both their existing staff and their applicants. I have sent out hundreds of resumes, and gotten about 5 interviews, and not one job offer.
So tell me: Exactly when does my white or male privilege kick in?
I think this overestimates the role of elites in shaping culture, both under the old money aristocracy and the new money quasi-meritocracy. In a liberal, democratic, capitalist society, elites are strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses, at least on a surface level: Political elites need to appeal to voters, while corporate elites (including the media) need to appeal to consumers.
Instead, the Blue Tribe seems largely centered around the white-collar "professional-managerial" (and academic) upper middle class, bolstered by the support of blue-collar minorities, young but educated activists, and various corporations that deal with the public or the government directly and thus have to worry about maintaining good PR. The Red Tribe seems largely centered around a different subset of the upper middle class, mostly blue-collar "petit-bourgeoisie" independent contractors and small business owners, bolstered by support from rural Whites, disgruntled youths from Blue Tribe backgrounds who've defected, and companies in fields like manufacturing that don't need to be overly concerned with image and can comfortably default to supporting the more fiscally conservative party. The individual cultural preferences of the multi-millionaires and billionaires aren't an especially important driving factor here.
>I think this overestimates the role of elites in shaping culture, both under the old money aristocracy and the new money quasi-meritocracy. In a liberal, democratic, capitalist society, elites are strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses, at least on a surface level: Political elites need to appeal to voters, while corporate elites (including the media) need to appeal to consumers.
Most of the social changes of the last sixty years were popular with elites before they became popular with the masses.
Yes, but was that because the elites had access to new technologies first because of their wealth permitting them to by the new technology when it was scarce, and the new technology causing the social changes, or the elites causing the social changes? And that’s just the first explanation that springs to mind. And in other countries, people don’t just abandon their old habits just because the elites don’t like them eg colonial people largely keeping their culture, so why would the US be different. And the free market really should prevent the use of media for propaganda, because overly liberal news would get outcompeted by news which is more to the people’s taste. Realistically, it’s likely a combination of people getting influenced by the elites and social trends catching the elites first for a number of reasons.
If the elites were really "strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses", we'd expect their views to track those of the general public, which isn't the case. So the original claim is falsified, regardless of whether social change is being caused by the elites, or by new technology, or by something else (although a lot of social changes don't have any obvious technological drivers -- what new technology made, say, gay marriage such a cause celebre all of a sudden?).
> And in other countries, people don’t just abandon their old habits just because the elites don’t like them eg colonial people largely keeping their culture, so why would the US be different.
In lots of countries, people do end up adopting elite culture. E.g., most European countries have become linguistically more homogenous as the prestige dialect of their language replaces local variants. In some cases they even adopted entirely new languages -- how many Irish people speak Gaelic as a first language, for example?
> And the free market really should prevent the use of media for propaganda, because overly liberal news would get outcompeted by news which is more to the people’s taste.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing was ever made.
-Immanuel Kant
Each of these different types of people experience themselves as archetypal. Their attitudes seem to them to be common sense, not always noble but reasonable, understandable. Their speech has no accent. Their jokes pierce to the absurd underpinnings of just the things that most call for it. Other people’s points of view look malformed & misguided, and their speech sounds stretched here, tilted there.
We don't call it yachting anymore, it's "small boat sailing" with connotations of ruggedness, thrift (I oil the teak myself!), environmentalism (wind power), and connection to and immersion in nature. "Small" is defined as anything under 400ft (e.g. shorter than Jeff Bezos yacht). However, having a smaller boat does grant higher status, as it signals commitment to the principles above.
Also, Scott- your not realizing this makes you a suspected poseur, possibly even tragically uncool old money.
I haven't read the book, but it seems a too simple story. Many other things were changing in US society: baby boom, rapid expansion of wealth after WWII with US the dominant industrial power, expansion of television in many households, Viet Nam, migration of many Southern blacks to Northern cities, protest culture aided by TV (MLK, Viet Nam)...
Banned for this comment; if you are going to say someone (including me) is stupid, you also need to explain what they got wrong. In many other cases this would be a partial warning but I can't imagine this commenter really changing their ways and becoming a positive contributor.
"money-obsessed WASP capitalist who would buy the baroque gold altar"
No WASP capitalist would ever be so crude as to buy a baroque gold altar. Not sure if you missed the point about the WASPs or if David Brooks did. The whole idea was to be subtle but obvious about your money, like old boat shoes.
"All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy."
Who's kidding whom? All of your lacrosse / country club / WASP stories are happening now, but with a different set of characters--they are not old money, not WASP. I should know I live right in the middle of it.
A quick note that the adjective "bobo", for bohemian-bourgeoise, is (still) in use in francophone Québec. I initially misheard it as boho for bohemian until I disputed that description of a particular Montreal neighbourhood and had it explained to me.
It seems strange to call the current group the meritocrats when they're highly critical of meritocracy, although I suppose that would have made more sense back in 2000.
That Native American blanket example helped me understand something I saw in Australia: the aboriginal art that sells for the most is not the art that shows the most virtuosity. It's the stuff that looked "authentic" in a condescending way.
Of course, if this shift happened in Australia as well, as I suspect it did, it cannot be explained by changes in Harvard's admission policy alone.
I was thinking that Brooks as far as Scott represents him in this review doesn’t address potential cultural causes of the change in Ivy admissions. Space race and the Cold War seem very plausible!
"and I'd argue, the PMC."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMC
I'm going to assume this is referring to the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge.
It stands for Professional Managerial Class, as I recall.
That is, the class of people whose jobs fall into the general category of "administrative overhead". Middle managers, HR, PR, DIE, and so on. People who do not do object-level work or own the business (the latter are true capitalists, or in the case of government agencies politicians), but who give orders to the former and take orders from the latter and get paid for this.
The term "PMC" gets used a lot by people who don't like the Blue Tribe, because the power of the Blue Tribe comes in large part from the fact that these people lean *heavily* Blue and are *very*-well co-ordinated. If you try to oppose them from underneath, you get fired. If you try to oppose them from above, you *theoretically* can fire them, but there are several problems with that:
1) You get your information about what is going on *from* them, which means you'll see only what they want you to see (and their work is much harder to objectively check than that of people doing things "on the line")
2) If you don't have tight control of HR, the replacements will be just as bad
3) These are people who know everything about your operations, are well-coordinated, and are well-aligned ideologically with mainstream journalists, so you'll get a steady stream of leaks and horror stories hitting the press.
I wouldn't count that particular chicken until it's hatched. Also, note how hard Elon is having to work at it and that he's got a lot more room than usual to risk blowing up his own company as collateral damage due to literally being the richest private citizen in the world (he bought Twitter apparently-purely as a social project). But I did grant that it's *theoretically* possible.
What exactly did I say that makes you think I'm looking on too short a timeline?
Is it though? Link to the prediction market where you make a big investment on Elon's success?
Counting chickens is a valid point.
BUT it’s the “Twitter will collapse in two weeks” crowd that, so far, have been proven wrong (and yet have done nothing to update their priors).
A DevOps engineer is most definitely NOT PMC. You are conflating values (the "twitter engineer" vs the "engineer") with production and class role. I don't think your argument can stand.
Meh. I've met plenty who are. Their status depends more on their membership in the class than on their actual competence as programmers. Your argument has merit I think only if you have crossed your fingers behind your back and privately added "the highly competent ones, that is" as a footnote to the phrase "DevOps engineer."
Have you ever actually worked in corporate America?
Bret has explicitly stated that he never served.
Engineers are mostly underpaid relative to the value they bring. It can’t really be any other way on average because the owners won’t bother unless they can extract value from labor. The capitalist ideal is where everyone involved is still doing better than they would apart even though capital wins the most. But the alternative is worker-owners where not only is everyone better off together but also compensation is fairer and the marginal utility of that compensation is higher.
This isn’t actually the definition of professional managerial class. The PMC is basically just the same thing as what’s now known as more commonly as a “knowledge worker”. The original essay explicitly describes engineers, journalists, and teachers as members of the PMC. The idea as I understand it is that the PMC *should* be allied with the working class since they’re workers too but they are in fact mentally / spiritually / socially aligned with capitalists. There’s obviously a large overlap between the PMC and Brooks’s Bobos.
Interesting.
Could you link said essay?
Absolutely! It starts on page 7 of this PDF: https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf
The essay itself is so steeped in 1970s cultural contexts and Marxist ideological frameworks that it's not incredibly easy to understand for a 30something layperson like me. For this reason, I also found this New Yorker interview with one of the authors helpful for understanding the context behind the piece and why she wrote it:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/barbara-ehrenreich-is-not-an-optimist-but-she-has-hope-for-the-future
I find it really amusing how people keep rediscovering the same concepts. Any marxist worth its salt could have told you in 1922 about the petite bourgeoisie, the salaried white collar workers who embrace the ideals and esthetics of the bourgeoisie, without being part of it. It is actually interesting that after the higher paid parts of it merged with the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers, etc...), the latter were pushed one step down the ladder and pauperized.
One of the wonderful things about Marxism is that when two classes are wanted, there are only two classes, (bourgeois and proletarians) but when you want more, there are as many as you want.
They are similar, but I think the idea is that the petite bourgeoise are chiefly self-employed / small business owners, whereas the PMC are chiefly a professionalized class of employees.
Correct. The PMC is corporate and government employees generally who despise small business owners and the rural poor, (can never connect with the truly disadvantaged) and pull in the urban poor for attack or defense - bodies between them and their enemies - for better or worse.
I think there's some merit in what you say, but it wasn't the space race per se, if we mean Project Apollo and such, it was nuclear weapons and the V-2, because those happened in 1945 and the Space Race got started later (and for that matter, a significant motivation in the Space Race was the fear of The Best And The Brightest that Soviet missile technology would surpass the USAF as a strategic threat multiplier).
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Education_Act
It's no coincidence this was signed the year after Sputnik, but the fear of Sputnik wasn't fear that the Soviets would win civilian gold medals in space, plant the red flag on the Moon first, it was fear of Soviet missiles -- if they could put a dog into orbitt they could certainly land a 1Mt nuke on Miami -- and indeed the notorious "missile gap" helped JFK defeat Eisenhower's VP two years later.
The space race was valuable for academic science, but I think a larger, slightly earlier, and extremely similar event was also involved: the Baby Boom hitting college. My father was born just before the Depression's baby bust, and became a professor around 1957, and my reflections on his career showed the power of timing. Colleges were hit, first, with the GI Bill students, followed by the Baby Boomers. There were financed by the government, a booming economy, and a new trendiness of college education.
But the supply of new professors was very limited; you're not going to make a baby and turn it into a professor in much less than 26 years, so anyone who was a professor from 1946 to about 1975 was doing great. And given academia's tenure system, once you got established as a professor, you were generally protected from competition with newcomers.
All of this reversed in the 1980s, when the Baby Bust generation went to college and the Baby Boomers were trying to get professorial jobs. As one university said, "We don't lower wages any more out of humanitarian considerations." But the rise of part-time adjunct professors disconnected them from those considerations.
If Paul Fussell's book "Class" is in play (and it is a fun read!), the older "The Status Seekers" by Vance Packard must be considered. A lot of Paul Fussell's information came from "The Status Seekers." Paul's book is a more fun (and snarky!) read. Vance's book has more information.
Packard must certainly be stirring. Yikes.
Note to self: Steal This Packard Book.
I've noted, bought and sold several copies in the last 20 years. Finally, I built a database with topics like "television commercials are psycho-dramas," "television creates disinformation," and "written word is easier to test." When I'm reading Zamyatin or Orwell, I can cross-reference ideas. Definitely required reading for anyone interested in linguistics, I should think.
From briefly dipping into it, I just vaguely recall Fussell mocking unworthy targets [my grandparents] who covered their living room "suite" (pronounced suit) in plastic when not in use. (Admittedly, sitting on plastic is very uncomfortable.) My grandparents were not materialistic and yet valued their things*. Now of course no one makes fun of people for buying junky microfiber furniture and sending it to the landfill when they move, starting the process all over again ....
But in this vein I want to plug a forgotten 1955 book "The Tastemakers - the Shaping of Popular Taste" by Russell Lynes. It's equal-opportunity catty towards pretty much everyone, including all the betters of my grandparents. In a way, you want to resurrect the author and say, you thought the built landscape was ersatz and ridiculous then?! - well, behold what lay ahead! It is not a great book by any means, but is full of little details for people who are into looking at physical America as it used to be.
*I knew about my mother's beloved first '40s childhood home, which I've seen on a drive-by, still painted the then-customary white (sign neighborhood has not gentrified, presumably the reverse), bereft of landscaping apart from the stump of a tree, a snarly dog tethered out front. I once thought to ask my mother where my grandparents lived in the '30s, with my uncle, before she was born. "They didn't live anywhere" - mother and brother followed her father around the central US as he strung the phone lines.
Paul mocked ALL the classes. And had a few nice things to say about most of them, too, but the book was mostly making fun of categories of people. Again, fairly evenhandedly.
And then it appears that Paul go to the end of the book and realized that HE didn't want to have to fit into any of the class buckets he described, so he wrote a chapter on "Category X." I can't say that this what actually happened, but it looks like this would be a leading hypothesis :-)
In any event the lower middle class would be mocked for things such as buying nice couches and then covering them in plastic so they were unpleasant to use. The middle class would be mocked for going to endless 'classes' on self improvement or career advancement and the uppers would be mocked for never thinking anything new or original. Going from memory, the upper proles (skilled blue collar workers) got off pretty easily. Paul didn't think they had any taste, but he also thought that they were much more honest and authentic about who they were and spent a lot less time trying to climb the social ladder than, say, the middle and upper middle classes.
The Tastemakers sounds like a fun read. I'll try to find it.
You've made me curious about Category X, so I went to Wikipedia, which tells me that Xers drink wine, gin, and vodka without reference to label; and wear comfortable LL Bean or Lands' End clothing; are writers, musicians, creatives, unabombers, etc.
It appears Category X has ballooned.
"It appears Category X has ballooned".
Not really, as Paul would describe them. Things change over time and class markers change, too :-)
I'll quote from the book:
"What kind of people are Xs? The old-fashioned term bohemians gives some idea; so does the term 'the talented.' Some Xs are intellectuals, but a lot are not: they are actors, musicians, artists, sports stars, 'celebrities,' well-to-do former hippies, confirmed residers abroad, and the more gifted journalists, those whose by-lines intelligent readers recognize with pleasant anticipation. X people can be describes as (to use C. Wright Mills's term) 'self-cultivated.' They tend to be self-employed, doing what social scientists call autonomous work. If, as Mills has said, the middle-class person is 'always somebody's man,' the X person is nobody', and his freedom from supervision is one of his most obvious characteristics. X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do, and they do it until they are finally carried out, 'retirement' being a concept meaningful only to hired personnel or wage slaves who despise their work. Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper-class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy."
Yeah. Fussell's Class X is just bohemians, or what we were calling "hipsters" 5-15 years ago. His cultural signifiers tend to borrow a lot from the northeast version in the time it was written, but the general idea of it is more recognizable in different times and places.
He sets them apart for praise and spares them the mocking tone in most of the book, which tells you something about where his sympathethies lie. This is reinforced by the period we went through where modern bohemians were relentless mocked to the point that the term "hipster" functions more as a pejorative than anything most people who fit the stereotype would see themselves in. It's not for lack of available material that he spared them. It's because he venerates their lifestyle preferences and attitudes.
Fussell clearly 'venerates their lifestyle preferences and attitudes' and, I think, also saw himself as a member of Category X rather than a member of the middle or upper-middle class. He didn't want to think of himself living in any of the class bins he was writing about.
But ... the book Class was published in 1983. The term "hipster" as we use it today seems to have entered the lexicon around 2000.
So Fussell would have needed material from the 1970s to make fun of these folks. Aaaand ... I think Fussell would likely have pulled out the "No True Category X" card as needed. The folks who behaved in ways that could be mocked were mere *posers* pretending to be Category X rather than the rather sad middle and upper-middle class folks they really were.
I'm oriented more towards the west coast than to the northeast, but I think of people such as Salli Raspberry:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/salli-rasberry-a-counterculture-trailblazer-from-west-county-dies-at-the/
as being 'true' Category X people. The actual "Whole Earth Catalog" crowd probably count, too. And one can mock these people, but making fun of the Mondo 2000 crowd is a whole lot easier and also more fun :-)
My experience of such people is that while they may not advertise it, there is usually some money - if not pedigree - behind them, however well-camouflaged; the Buddenbrooks dynamic holds ...
Townes Van Zandt, locally famous bohemian, springs to mind.
But then, a counter example to my example: Ed Abbey.
All my favorite X-emplars are going to be from the environmental movement ;-).
> unabombers
Plural?
Ah, "The Status Seekers." One of my go-to books when I was young.
Interesting conjectures, but seems like an awful lot of curve-fitting. Many of the phenomena could equally well be attributed to Les Trente Glorieuses, and the post-WWII GI Bill, as well as leaded gasoline. It's all over-indexed.
No more so than the establishment narratives that dominate modern liberal american thought today, making this an isolated demand for rigour.
Maybe I'm missing the point here; if not, trivial warning (1%) for low content, high temperature comment.
I think Edwardoo is making an analogy to things like:
"Racism is real and huge, because African-Americans do poorly on IQ tests"
"Misogyny is real and huge, because women earn less money per year than men on average"
There are obvious alternate explanations for these phenomena (most obviously in the latter case, "women's relative valuation of money vs. stress, when considered statistically, tends more toward avoiding stress than men's").
It definitely was high-temperature, and if vorkosigan1 doesn't believe those "establishment narratives" then he's hardly making "an isolated demand for rigour", but there's some content there.
Yes, but it sounds like the parent comment was saying "this is wrong", and Edwardoo's contribution was "Yes, just like liberals are wrong". I don't think you can rescue this being a valuable contribution by arguing that liberals really are wrong about things.
Fair enough, you're the boss. Was just trying to explain, since you asked if you'd missed something.
Yes, it seems like it'll be very difficult to disentangle cause and effect too - maybe it's one guy changes the admissions policy and that changes everything, but then again, maybe instead it's that technology is gradually becoming more important to making money (you can see the largest firms in the stock market gradually change from oil and banking to tech), and intelligence is therefore more prized vs social skills like deal making. Or it could be that culture is shifting and there are more films about the nerd winning and that changes culture which leads to admissions policies changing. Especially the fact that it didn't take long for this change to get picked up by other elite schools suggests that it was a result of a change in culture rather than a driver of change in culture.
Excellent point.
Interesting point. That said, oil and railroads and factories and whatnot were high tech in their day.
Banking also has transformed, and the business of banking, has less and less in common with the banks of yore, at least for money center banks and banks whose shares trade on The Big Board.
I note the GI Bill seems like a complementary cause rather than an alternative one - it massively changed the population who went to university, and thus the make-up of the upper-middle class
Perhaps it could be either complementary or alternative.
Is it? Can we not compare other societies (most obviously the UK) or did essentially every important nation on earth change how it’s gatekeeper colleges admitted people in the 60s?
How about France or Germany or Japan?
"But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?"
I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years.
Sharecroppers don't care if the soil is depleted in 20 years. A family that has farmed the same land for 200 years is more likely to care.
This is very insightful. I had a vague feeling for quite some time, that a lot of the "things going wrong" seem to have something to do with more widespread short-term thinking.
Maybe it is not just about b), but other factors too with possible similar effects: More childlessness, less family cohesion, smaller families, more stress on individuality vs. community - basically all the other factors that many commentators bring up about the current generations.
Meritocracy -> Red Queen's race -> constant goodharting of status metrics
Another factor I'd maybe add is "rootedness", except that apparently bottomed out a few decades ago and Americans move a bit less often now (though this seems less true of elites, who still usually move once for college and then to a third city post-college, if not more times than that). A lack of movement is usually regarded as a negative in terms of lower economic dynamism. But it can also mean that people are given to a more long-term view.
My wife's parents both live in the town they were born in, only a few counties over from where at least one known ancestor was among the earliest English settlers in the state, and I can tell they're a lot more invested in local issues than my family, which has been highly mobile for generations and also has shallower roots in North America.
But it seems it's not really a coincidence that the heart of the old establishment was the Northeast and not anywhere further west. I.e., the place where English settlement in North America had some of the deepest roots. These were people who never went far from where their ancestors first made landfall and consequently were highly invested in the same places and institutions, generation after generation.
"Not moving" is not the same thing as "rootedness". A person can live in a place and not have a lot of connection to it. Don't belong to any local organizations, don't know or care much about local politics (and vote based on national signifiers), don't know your neighbors, have most of your connections online. It seems to me that all the latter have increased even as people have moved less.
I think there is something to this, though I wonder how much you can isolate the effect of meritocracy here as opposed to the simple fact that as the world moves more quickly, it becomes harder to convince ourselves that it is even possible to create and maintain institutions whose form will last long enough for our children to inherit.
Another thought I had about the meritocracy debate point is how Brooks' thesis may intersect with the elite overproduction hypothesis. The old aristocracy created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites our country produced. Meritocracy flung the doors open. This is good insofar as it means that more competent people may replace the "arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting," but perhaps the resulting culture of intra-elite competition and resentment ends up undermining elite institutions in ways that negate those benefits.
If an aristocratic couple.have more than two children , that's elite over production in a sense. But it was understood that the third and fourth sons would have to become army officers.or clergymen,.so the element of resentment was.missing.
I don't have a citation at hand, but if I'm not misremembering or misinterpreting, this sounds similar to 18th-century arguments for government by landed aristocracy. That argument being that landowners (particularly the very wealthy ones) were highly invested in their country, and being the most invested had the greatest incentive to keep it stable and going. Democracies or even mercantile oligarchies, on the other hand, being dominated by classes with relatively little investment (or investments that were easily transportable), were much more likely to let things go to hell, to the bad of all, because they had relatively little to lose. Even monarchs, with a transnational interest, were untrustworthy because they could easily mix up their personal interests with the national interests if they weren't kept firmly in check by something like a parliament.
More generally, the 18th-century argument looks like it's aware of and groping toward a solution to the principal-agent problem. It imagines the aristocrats as the principal "investors" in the country, and argues that they ought to be running things directly, because if they delegate to an agent—a king, a democratic assembly, even a commission of very clever men who aced a set of examinations—they risk delegating to someone who is disincentivized to look out for their interests, and if you neglect the interests of the principal investors you run a much greater risk of crashing the investment vehicle (the country).
Those arguments had a point, there are a number of examples of monarchs with multiple crowns being very exploitative towards the 'lesser' ones.
I think that there's an error in assuming small landholders have 'less to lose' because their landholding is small, the fraction of the person's wealth is what matters; merchants, on the other hand, have definitely been known to cut their losses and run in situations where people whose wealth was primarily in the land stayed and fought instead.
Something that seems to start happening in the 18th C, and becomes common in the 19th C, is elite children insisting on marrying for love rather than as their parents wish. (This is most visible in royalty, eg the endlessly repeated story of Sissi.) Along with similar ideas like “doing what you love” rather than the family business.
One could argue that landed aristocracy and royalty did, in fact, work reasonably well right up until they were infected by these bobs ideas like marrying for love, at which point
- they did their job worse and
- they were no different in kind from everyone else, so why should they be treated differently?
Even when it's not a pure meritocracy (which never happens in the real world), the first generation nouveau riche haven't grown up in the long-term thinking-oriented culture and so don't have aristocratic mindset. They still have middle class sensibilities, which they'll pass onto their kids, along with the billions.
Meritocrats shouldn't have the aristocratic mindset, because they need to re-prove their credentials.with each generation. They may be worse.at preserving , but they are better at adapting.
To push back on this a little bit, it's true that first-generation nouveau riche don't grow up in an aristocratic culture. but it's hard to become nouveau riche without being longterm-thinking-oriented (sacrifice now to become rich later). So the SECOND-generation nouveau riche arguably often DO grow up in a longterm-thinking-oriented culture, at least to the extent they get culture from their parents, who would at least theoretically model their own values to their kids.
For better or worse, today's meritocrats don't have much attachment to any one place or activity.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the professional managerial class and its principal class adversary, the Local Gentry. Local Gentry are very much tied to a geographic location and a specific business, often inherited. That guy who, together with his brother, owns a successful chain of muffler shops in the Omaha region can't just up sticks and move his businesses to South Carolina, nor would he likely be successful if he sold everything and changed his business to electrical contracting.
Good point. And consider the differences in the messages:
(1) "You're a member of the ruling class because your father was, and his father before that. Don't fuck up and disgrace the family name."
(2) "You're a member of the ruling class because you're smarter and better than any of your peers. If you fuck up we might have to revise the tests."
More to the point, your children will have to pass the tests to join the ruling class, and regression to the mean means that often they have a lot less talent than you do.
But then North Korea should be the best maintained country in the world...
Except for c) "You can just have anyone who calls you out on your failures killed."
Kinda dampens the need to maintain conditions for anyone other than yourself and close followers...
Also, when your right to rule is justified by your alleged personal superiority to everyone else rather than a well-established practice of hereditary succession, any sign that you aren't really infallible becomes a reason to overthrow you, and hence it's harder to admit a policy isn't working and reverse course. If a medieval king invaded his neighbour, got beaten, and had to sign a peace treaty, this would be embarrassing, but it wouldn't threaten his or his dynasty's position; if Vladimir Putin loses in Ukraine and has to seek peace, the best-case scenario is that he gets forced into ignominious retirement, and the worst-case scenario is that he gets straight out assassinated.
This is (roughly) a point made by Tocqueville in Democracy in America: aristocracies have a longer time horizon than democracies. (Which, as usual with Tocqueville, he sees has having both positive & negative effects.)
You raise a crucial point, but I think your conclusion overlooks the fact that the aristocrats ARE in charge, and so can be expected to rejigger the meritocratic system as necessary to ensure that their children will be in charge as well. Brooks could make a fine sequel out of the effort to reintroduce the hereditary principle which the WASP aristocracy had and the meritocratic aristocracy originally lacked. (The bloat of the universities, for example, can be seen as a way to provide cognitive-elite positions for the dull-normal children of the previous generation of the cognitive elite.)
But this really isn’t true anymore. Wealthy and powerful people seem much more likely to be the first of their line to achieve their position than a few generations ago. I don’t think the notion that we’re just being ruled by new Rockefellers and DuPonts holds water. Familial turnover really is quite high in elites these days by historical standards.
One way to interpret the push for test optional / no test admissions to elite schools is that this is intended to protect slots in the elite from encroaching Asians and other non-elite competitors.
>old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.
This pretty much describes my mom's family: Exeter, Yale, and Princeton (which is where my parents met). My uncle still regularly attends Episcopalian church.
My dad got into Princeton on purely meritocratic grounds: he's from a working-class family of Polish immigrants. So you can say I'm a product of both admissions systems. There's definitely a big cultural divide among my relatives though. (And religious: my Dad's parents were shocked that he didn't marry a Catholic.)
Of course, I wasn't "well rounded" enough to get into Princeton when I applied. I still think I turned out alright though.
>"well rounded"
Maybe they could smell the Catholic on you.
The new aristocracy, in my opinion, will likely be people who got in on bitcoin early.
Almost nobody wants to believe the dollar can fail. Lots of stupid people gambled huge amounts on “crypto.” Lots of intelligent people fell for Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum scam. To most supporters of the current aristocracy, and even many detractors - Bitcoin seems far too simple to be believable.
It's far too volatile on a short term basis for anyone except really confident, anti establishment people who are confident in their long-term prospects to buy into. Bitcoin is perfectly coded for a more meritocratically selected elite than “getting into the ivy leagues”, since all you have to do is buy some, and hold on while ignoring the old elites screaming at you they you’re an idiot. That takes a combination of confidence in yourself + distrust in the current elites + financial wherewithal to at least weather the storm.
I can't think of any group that's as confident about the future as bitcoiners, until you start getting into the territory of religions. Which is probably the right way to see bitcoin maximalism.
This, incidentally, is why bitcoin will fail eventually -- because society can't tolerate the idea that their new aristocracy is a bunch of unwashed geeks who happened to be interested in cryptocurrency in 2013 and were bull-headed enough not to sell in the following twenty years.
Society would rather tear itself apart than submit to the dictatorship of the crypto-nerd, I'm afraid.
Alternatively: while some form of cryptocurrency may be inevitable, why on earth should The Powers That Be choose Bitcoin to be that cryptocurrency? That's giving away money to all the wrong sorts of people (i.e., everyone who has supported Bitcoin so far). Instead, they could just start a new cryptocurrency and make Bitcoin illegal.
Why would the powers that be have any say in the matter? They are in the process of trashing the dollar, which underlies all their power. If the global south follows the lead of El Salvador and much of Africa, the powers that be can only watch as their empire melts.
This isn't a prediction of the immediate future, but of the long term. That's why I didn't specify any particular government or organization.
I think it's inevitable that at some point, a major world power will decide that some form of cryptocurrency would be useful for it's goals. (Unless the whole project turns out to be technically flawed.)
At that point, I think they will choose to create one of their own, rather than using Bitcoin. Why use a clunky prototype? Why reward all the then-current holders of Bitcoin, rather than being able to send that value to their own constituents and power sources?
Having chosen one of their own, why allow the competitors?
The Nigerian government tried this. People rejected their CBDC in favor of bitcoin.
Why would people choose state controlled surveillance money that loses value over time when they can choose open permissionless money that doesn’t?
I don't think the Nigerian government remotely counts as a major world power.
I actually agree with your 2nd paragraph. But to me, the key word is "choose".
[Edit due to mobile interface glitch:] What I'm saying is that no will be allowed to make that choice. Hence the part about a sufficiently powerful government.
Because they have the guns.
> They are in the process of trashing the dollar, which underlies all their power. If the global south follows the lead of El Salvador and much of Africa, the powers that be can only watch as their empire melts.
Inflation peaked at 9% annualized. Over the last year, the dollar has gained 6% on the Euro and even more on the Yuan. Inflation is expected to average 2.5% per year over the nexts 5 years.
In what sense is the dollar being "trashed"? And how is a year of 9% inflation supposed to cause an empire to "melt"?
One year won’t, of course not.
But what about 5? Or 10? How many years can the dollar lose 9% of its value before something fundamental breaks?
Where are those expectations coming from? The same people who said inflation was transitory?
From the treasury bond and TIPS bond markets - i.e. an almost ideal prediction aggregating the expertise of thousands of experts with significant skin in the game
Edit: See, for instance, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIE
What you mean here is "the regime said that inflation peaked at 9% annualized."
Lot of problems with that. One is that there's no reason to trust them to tell the truth. Two, lots of people might think it mean something like "The regime only debased the currency to the tune of 9%," which is terrible already and in fact understates the problem.
> One is that there's no reason to trust them to tell the truth
So, I've had conversations like this a number of times. The one time I got someone to actually provide concrete evidence, they gave three specific goods from receipts they had saved that showed price increases above the official inflation rate. However, when I checked the CPI subindices, they matched this person's lived experience, suggesting this person only disagreed with the weights the CPI uses. Shockingly, this person did not change their mind at all and gave literally zero reason to think the weights used in the CPI are biased. Given this experience, I'm extremely skeptical of people like you claiming the government is lying and inflation is dramatically higher than officially stated. Slightly higher? Maybe, there are a variety of methodological issues still being debated. But dramatically higher? Please give evidence.
You say it is "terrible already". According to what metric? The performance of the Federal Reserve in the last couple decades has been an enormous improvement over the previous several decades and are significantly better than most other central banks in the world. You mean terrible compared to perfection... sure, I agree. And? How is that either fair or useful?
Finally, except insofar as you are assuming (with no evidence) that the government is lying about inflation, in what sense is the problem being understated?
So, that recent SEC ruling that effectively said that Bitcoin was different from other cryptocoins, was not something I was expecting. Possibly the world is a little less grim than I'd thought. :-)
Do you think most of society is aware of the aristocracies depicted here? Why would the bitcoin aristocracy be legible to the public?
MODERATOR HAT ON: "lots of intelligent people fell for Vitalik's Ethereum scam" is a low-content, high-temperature comment - you're drive-by asserting a really controversial, potentially inflammatory thing and not backing it up. If you hated all crypto I would let it pass, because everyone knows the generic anti-crypto arguments by now. As it is I am officially chiding you.
MODERATOR HAT OFF: I still find this comment baffling. Bitcoin is up 10,000x and it hasn't produced anything like a new aristocracy. I can't think of any notable pure Bitcoin billionaires or multimillionaires besides Satoshi. Even though there have to be some, they've made so little imprint on the culture that even I, who pay attention to the tech social world, can't think of them. The only people from crypto who I think are even part of the tech aristocracy, let alone the general aristocracy, are Vitalik Buterin and maybe some of the Coinbase people, and maybe a few others I forget (and until recently SBF, RIP). And this is less because of their fortunes than because Vitalik, Balaji, etc seem intellectually interesting.
Even if Bitcoin went up another 10x, it would produce, what, another couple billionaires and another crop of multimillionaires. So what? That's like as many as Google has produced, and Google hasn't become a new US aristocracy. But even if it produced many many more billionaires, I don't think they would have the networkedness, clout, and intellectual reach necessary to become a new ruling class - again, even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.
They were famously rich before entering crypto...
But they're still best known as the guys who got Zuckerberg'd
I am thoroughly fascinated by this moderation input here. I’m sure that you are simply par for the course as far as your normal boundaries of moderation go, but that it’s over ethereum/crypto (or rather perhaps the imputed insult to someone who did/didn’t ‘fall’ for how ethereum is structured or what happened to it, or something along those lines, or the imputed insult to Vitalik) is what’s so very interesting.
I’ve been following the crypto collapse closely, but hadn’t followed the industry since I thought it left reality somewhere after bitcoin went over $1k. So I don’t know every jot, swerve, and history of the past ten years and only picked it back up in February.
I’m a jail cop who loves economics, but my circle doesn’t have many people in it who are into crypto as you may have guessed. Hence my curiosity and this question: if you feel it has to be moderated, I’m sure you’re right and that kind of thing is stirring up animosity, but is it that bad out in the Bay Area? Or maybe more among your readers/commentators?
The reason I even mentioned it is I could imagine saying something I think is obvious about any given topic, ….and then do to my ignorance about what people are sensitive about now, I am then warned/given the evil eye/permanent poor grade mark on my report card as a decent chap who doesn’t say nasty or insensitive things to strangers he’s having a conversation with.
I could see the line you are officially chiding as being a throwaway comment by the poster (I of course don’t know that it was), but yes I could see someone who is sensitive about that topic getting very up in arms and defensive if they’ve staked their life savings in assets that had recently lost a lost of value.
But compare it to what I’m sure most people on this forum would consider another throwaway line; ‘lots of otherwise intelligent people fell for that line in the Bible about Noah bringing two of every kind on the ark and seven of a few kinds’ and if I said it around half the people I know and am friends with, I would have a major controversy and have started half a dozen fights. I’d have to worry about my kids being allowed to play with other kids because their interpretation of that would lead them to think I don’t believe in the Bible and am on the slippery slope to atheism. (And about ten percent of the parents would think, ‘how many conversations that my ultra literal interpretive friends are going to insist on having do I now have to have with them?’)
I am of course not questioning/challenging your moderating or or the issue here at all. One of the reasons I like reading here is there is non-insulting engagement going on across many topics and I’m genuinely interested in following the conversations. It’s great! I’m also sure that it requires a decent amount of moderation, but whatever the exact philosophy is seems to be working.
That said, What if I am simply not plugged in enough to know that I’m insulting or considered baiting? Do I get a ‘Yokel pass’? ‘I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to sound dismissive about X action occurring in Y topic! I didn’t notice that trend because I only meet up with that crowd who would know that allowing my to figure it out through conversational osmosis once a year, twice if I’m super lucky! I have to be careful about how I phrase which elections were stolen and by whom at work for God’s sake! I just taught these people that there was more than one crypto currency a month ago!’
You get my point I’m sure. I want to take part in these conversations on occasion, but oy please be gentle as i sometimes possibly bring my own and sometimes other’s very different cultural outlooks in with me.
Also postscript I think you’re dead on about moderator-off comment on crypto not really changing the face of who the ruling class it. A few new entries, nothing other of real note any time soon.
I think we should all expect to stumble across norms we weren't aware of, or use words that imply things we didn't intend, fairly regularly as we interact with a broad community of internet folks.
Getting a warning (from a sane moderator, which I believe Scott to be) isn't so much a "permanent poor grade mark on your report card" as a way of making you aware of your mistake so that you can learn from it. If you repeat the mistake after being warned it may become a permanent poor grade mark.
Mild negative feedback is, in general, a *good* thing - it means you are learning new things, have a chance to improve, and the person giving you the feedback still has hope for a positive relationship with you.
I think it's in general easy to tell the difference between someone obliviously blundering over battle lines in a conflict they are unaware of and someone deliberately engaging in an ongoing political conflict.
And what exactly has happened to ethereum, apart from the general crypto crash which doesn't seem to have had affected it disproportionately? The eth/btc chart has been ~flat for over a year.
I'm very glad Scott gave me the warning he did. I don't want to be a Yokel.
Perhaps that could be adopted as a specific warning: ‘you don’t appear to understand what you violated, but here is why I’m warning you. This is a Yokel Warning, level 1. You really didn’t know you stepped on toes.’ As opposed to a ‘level 5’ where you truly didn’t know you are wrong and there is ample, culturally wide, easily accessible evidence contradicting what you believe. ‘I truly didn’t know that slavery was bad and happened in this country and the holocaust wasn’t just made up!’ This Yokel warning comes with a ban that includes a list of evidentiary books, articles, and links to news that would convince any rational person that the thing being referenced is settled beyond all reasonable conversation.
“I don't think they would have the networkedness, clout, and intellectual reach necessary to become a new ruling class - again, even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.”
That sounds like it could have been written by a New York Times columnist playing defense for the Bluecheck crowd. It is not clear to me at all that the East Coast meritocrats have forever beaten the West Coast STEM nerds and their allies.
For instance, what if one of the tech elite (Elon?) pivots to use their wealth and social media platforms to authentically speak for flyover-land against East Coast meritocracy?
I don't see anywhere near the significant cultural difference between Silicon Valley STEM nerds and PMC managerial types that so many people here seem to.
In particular, I've seen vanishingly little evidence that tech types are any less convinced that their intellectual superiority to the rest of the population gives them a natural right to higher status.
The vast majority of Silicon Valley STEM types have *exactly* the same 'Blue Tribe' meritocratic political and cultural views and attitudes as their PMC counterparts. And the minority who don't--the 'Grey Tribe'--seem even *less* inclined toward populism or noblesse oblige, as shown by, e.g, their inclination toward right-libertarianism or their frequent emphasis on IQ as the greatest source of an individual's value.
I don't really where to put this, but, to my experience, crypto-fans are not techies. About 80% of my friends work in IT, and none of them has ever had any interest in crypto, even when they were required by their employers to work on that. Crypto-fans are mostly... normal people. I mean, SBF and his friends are not techies: they were junior traders and bankers, something quite far culturally removed from "techies", and quite into the "traditional elites" space. I do not see how crypto-fans can be an alternative elites, since they are not separate from the traditional elites.
I would agree that crypto-fans and tech are disjoint groups. But the one thing they have in common is that they both chafe against the institutional powers jealously guarded by East Coast bluecheck meritocrat wordcel elite.
Moderator comment response:
Thank you for the clear warning.
I can see how this is different from saying 'all of crypto is a scam', and I can see why most people haven't internalized the argument that all of crypto _except for bitcoin_ is a scam.
Thank you for articulating a general principle i can abide by: it is wise to understand which arguments are known, even if not accepted, by the audience you are speaking to, and to have a reasonable model of anticipating what will be inflammatory by the standards of that specific community.
I think that this community is not _aware_ of bitcoin maximalist or the arguments made by bitcoin maximalists. I'll attempt to share that perspective here.
We believe that all of cryptocurrency is a scam, with the sole exception of bitcoin.
Fortunately there's even a new York times article about this perspective
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/technology/crypto-bitcoin-maximalists.html
Hopefully having the NYT describe the movement without saying we are racist doesn't wreck your trust in this movement as credible. If it will help, there are plenty of arguments by the NYT saying bitcoin is evil elsewhere.
Here's the key bit: “Bitcoin is decentralized, digitally scarce money. Everything else is centralized.”
Bitcoin was a breakthrough in theoretical computer science. Proof of work + longest chain solved the byzantine generals problem in a way that didn't require trusting in some set of third parties. I don't think most people have the technical background to really understand the details of this. That means they are left to evaluate arguments based upon their level of trust, which i think comes down simply to shared values.
They get hints of these values based upon the following properties that are unique to bitcoin.
Bitcoin has the following properties that no other coin does:
- no one in charge of it
- circulated in the wild for about a year with zero value
- no 'premine' where the founders kept coins for themselves
No other coin has these properties. Someone is in charge of all of them, which means they are all effectively centralized and subject to decision making by some central party. In the vast majority of cases, these pre-mines made the founders incredibly wealthy.
I'm more than happy to explain why Ethereum, in particular is a scam, in particular.
Ethereum has the following properties:
- It has been sold as decentralized, but there is clearly a group in charge.
- 71% of all Ethereum were created in a 'premine', which included 10% given to the ethereum foundation, and 60% given to intial investors in ethereum. This is THE SAME MODEL that every other ICO scam does: initial investors get most of the tokens, price goes up, they dump on bag-holders later. See details here:
https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/10/vitalik-buterin-under-fire-over-ethereums-premine/
- They used phrases like 'code is law.' Once the DAO hack happened, they decided that code _wasn't_ law, so they reached out to exchanges and said 'stop all trading on Ethereum'. This is making a promise and then breaking it. Code isn't law if the people in charge of ethereum can stop all trading in ethereum.
- The move to ethereum 2.0 and proof of work hinges on how secure proof of stake is. Vitalik argued that proof of work is secure, >>>>>so long as we re-define secure to not solve the single most important problem bitcoin solves<<<<
The experience of being in the field of distributed computing, deeply understanding distributed systems, and seeing what is happening here is frustrating because it's damn near impossible to communicate to outsiders how bad these lies are. They hinge on seemingly arcane technical details like what, precisely a 'security model' is.
If 0 is 'knowingly telling lies in order to raise money' and 1 is 'you honestly believe what you are saying to be true, but you've suborned your commitment to the truth to your desire to succeed in your project', i think ethereum is close to one.
If it's fair to call FTT, the FTX token with a huge preime and only 3% of the tokens actually circulating a scam, then i think it's also fair to call ETH a scam.
Sorry for not making this more clear earlier. I'll try to do better to say something like, 'there's a longer argument to be made here', and make it clear that I'm espousing beliefs that are not yet considered reasonable inside the community.
What a fantastic response to mod pushback. Thanks for the clearly articulated response, and for the education. I trend generally skeptical about crypto, but vaguely lumped ETH and BTC together as comparatively stable and trustworthy. I hadn't really thought about the fact that BTC is unusual in having no public leaders.
Thank you! Yes, the bitcoin community sees itself as fundamentally apart from the rest of “crypto”, which we see as a series of inferior copies of bitcoin made by people who don’t understand why bitcoin was a theoretical breakthrough, sold to unwitting people who don’t know the difference.
Very useful and interesting comment, thanks.
Solid argument for that part. However all bitcoin is a just a crypto token. You can create unlimited amount of these( well technically limited by computational and energy resources).
It does not have any fundamental value. And fundamentals even in 21st century. Even in pure AI future will still be same - space and energy. Aka land and resources. Plus power to exert actual control over them
Crypto secured distributed token on essentially unforgeable ledger
Is a great piece of technology. However its just that. And not even nearly as monumental as nuclear power. Or Internet. Or flight
More like vhs vs CD
Well, additional bitcoin is impossible to create in the same way that your home printer can't print American dollars.
People can make as many *new* cryptocurrencies as they want, but that has about as much effect on Bitcoin as your home-printed MaxDollars do on the US Dollar
Quite late here, but I think Monero mostly passes your criteria (not sure what the initial value was, but there was no premine and no central control), and it even has a clear use case and is actively used as a medium of exchange. It's an antisocial technology and will probably never be adopted as a store of value, but I'm comfortable saying it's not a scam.
Response to non-moderate comment:
The only way to make sense of this perspective is to put on the bitcoin maximalist perspective. It's far too difficult to share that perspective and argue for its validity, so i'll mostly focus on the former.
Bitcoin maximalists will think bitcoin is still in early stages until it is globally accepted by basically every investor that bitcoin is a better store of value than gold, and that fiat currencies are doomed to inflation forever. The gains that you are describing, we think are still likely to come. I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of al particpants lie. Bitcoin maximalists see bitcoin as a game theoretic black hole that eventually will suck in everyone.
This probably sounds crazy. So maybe it helps to mention Moloch here. Bitcoin maximalists think the dollar is currently being eaten by Moloch. Bitcoin maximalists think fiat money is Moloch money, and that sound money helps to keeps Moloch at bay by allowing Moloch to devour smaller systems before they get too big. Bitcoin Maximalists believe that fiat money has the effect of allowing corrupt systems to grow faster than non-corrupt systems, because growth can be sustained forever by getting closer to the money printer and convincing the money printer that you share its values.
Bitcoin Maxiamlists are betting that Moloch will eat the dollar system alive, as its participants all follow their incentives, which leads to the infinite creation of dollars, because printing more money is always better in the short term, but incurs some illegible long term cost and risk.
(Aside: Me, personally, i view trade networks as being distributed AGI's, and I view fiat money as an AGI figuring out how to wirehead itself. If I can do $10 worth of good, i can do $20 worth of good by printing another $10!)
Bitcoin maximalists believe that all fiat currencies will collapse in value, and the world will return to the kind of sound money system that dominate the world _before_ world war 1.
We think sound money was hated by governments (because it limited their power) and bankers (because it exposed them as lying when they printed receipts for gold in excess of the gold they actually held.) We think the transition into fiat money was done by a series of fraud and theft:
- Banks printed receipts for gold in excess of their reserves, because it was literally printing money. We consider this to be fraud, not too different from what SBF did.
- The instability of bank runs was a result of bankers telling lies (issuing receipts in excess of their true holdings). Given the choice between 'stop lying' and 'build a system to make the lie true by forcing everyone to play along with it', both politicians and big bankers chose the later. They conspired to form the federal reserve bank, to keep the game going.
- When world war 1 broke out (hello again, Moloch!) the UK issued bonds to fund the war, but investors said, no thanks. So the bank of England engaged in the first QE ever, printing money to cover 2/3 of the value of this bond. They lied about it for ~100 years, and it only recently came to lighit: https://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-england-covered-up-war-bond-failure-in-1914-2017-8
Do you see why we think fiat money helps moloch? World war 1 would not have happened with honest money. It required banks lying, and working with mass media to tell lies.
- printing all that money put the bank of england at risk of being found out, so the bankers reached out to their american friends, who were more than happy to help print more money too, causing the boom of the 1920's and the, of course, eventually crash
- the crash was blamed on 'the gold standard' rather than the fact that everyone was lying about how much gold there actually was
- privately held gold was then stolen from citizens by Executive Order 6102, in order to 'mark the gold price to market'. If citizens could actually hold onto their gold, there would have been price discovery showing how bad the printed money had gotten.
- after world war 2 the US promised everyone at bretton woods they would back the dollar by gold, and then immediately started printing in excess of their reserves. The worlds was now on a 'gold standard' but it was only accessible to nation states, and the US was already lying about their reserve ratio.
- When nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971, he said this was 'temporary.' Why?
I grew up in history class being told that the gold standard was bad because it prevented banks from lowering interest rates to stave off depressions. But if that's true, why didn't we leave the gold standard until 1971? Why did nixon lie when we did it?
From our perspective, Every aspect of the dollar system produces incentives for its participants, and the short term incentives for elites are always to print more money. We have been betting hard on inflation for years. In 2018 when i tried to sell people at Google on bitcoin, a lot of people said, 'why are you worried about inflation?'
In 2020, I left Google, a giant profitable company, for snapchat, an unprofitable company. Yet my compensation doubled, and the comp was entirely liquid. Does that make ANY sense? To get paid twice as much to leave a profitable company for an unprofitable company, without taking on risk like, 'what if the company fails'?
From the bitcoin maximalist perspective, what SBF did has much more in common with the global financial system for the past ~100 years than it does with bitcoin. The aristocracy that i expect to rise won't happen until the following events that i expect:
- giant economic crash hits, probably in 2023, due to the fed raising rates faster than ever before despite more revolving debt than ever
- CBDC's are offered as the solution. "We need to keep rates high to fight inflation, but here's some free money so you don't riot, the only catch is that we monitor all your transactions and limit what you can spend it on to socially approved causes"
- people ditch the BidenBucks as quickly as they can ,for whatever goods they can resell on the black market for 'real dollars', and soon the price of the two diverges so bad that nobody is willing to pretend that CBDC's are worth the same as 'real dollars'
- inflation doesn't actually go away because the federal government has so much revolving debt, they'll need to print money to keep themselves solvent with interest rates at 5%
- thus the dollar keeps losing value over time, other fiat currencies get worse, and eventually foreign central banks follow El Salvador's lead in a bid to stabilize their currency
> even tech considered as a whole and including crypto hasn't done that.
It kind of has. Nobody in human history has ever had the kind of reach of Joe Rogan + Elon Musk. I think that trend will continue. I think we will see absolute chaos for a while, and the people that come out of that chaos doing well are going to to be people huge followings. If nothing except for bitcoin can hold value over time, bitcoiners will likely use their bitcoin to buy people's loyalty, just like what happened in Rome with the system of patronage.
It may be worth adding that if the 'bobo' thesis is true, it's not like the old elite _died_. They're still around, and the bush family still has power and influence. There are simply two elites jockeying for power with each other. Maybe a third comes in, and absorbs some of the old elite with more libertarian leanings. Like the winkelvoss twins, i expect to see the trend of 'bitcoin is money for libertarians and some republicans' get amplified, until eventually you have the GOP saying america needs to go on a bitcoin standard.
This is a wild ride you've got us all pegged for. I have zero technical expertise in this area and so won't dispute anything in particular you've said, but in my experience, predictions that require a precise chain of events like this usually don't come true.
Come back to this thread in a few years and let’s see how well it ages.
The piece that most people seem to be unable to grasp is that the dollar is likely to fail.
Ray Dalio, who runs the world’s largest hedge fund, foresees a similar chain of events but he thinks nation states will ban bitcoin.
From my perspective, I’m simply looking at something like a chessboard. There are only so many moves a central banker can make. Raising rates too high makes revolving debt too expensive. Lowering them too soon triggers inflation. Not lowering them soon enough triggers a crash. No reason to think it’s possible to somehow stick the landing.
Ok, let me make a note in my calendar for December 2nd, 2023
If precisely none of your predictions have come true by then, how will you update?
Dollar will fail. No doubt about it. But what is gonna replace it is cbdc. Or at least that's what will get serious push behind it
Other alternatives (distributed secured crypto tied to something actually valuable) are not present yet
> I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of al particpants lie. Bitcoin maximalists see bitcoin as a game theoretic black hole that eventually will suck in everyone.
[...] Bitcoin maximalists think fiat money is Moloch money,
This "black hole" metaphor makes it sounds like bitcoin is Moloch money rather than fiat...
Moloch is all about screwing people over by convincing them to act in their short term interest while igonring long term consequences.
Bitcoin tells people, 'just save for the future. Don't worry about anything else.'
Bitcoin enables freedom from oppressive regimes. It's used by people to safeguard themselves and their families in countries with dictatorships. Does that sound like moloch to you?
Bitcoin requires every user transacting with it to burn value in a tallest-trees competition for places in blocks, and every miner to continuously burn value in a tallest-trees competition to create blocks. Even if you think everything else is worse, this is very much Moloch.
(Moloch is about screwing people over by convincing them to act in their local interest, not (only) short-term interest, while ignoring negative global, not (only) long-term, consequences. It only becomes what you describe when Moloch has someone play the game against their past/future selves rather than other people.)
You are ignoring the lighting network and the enormous cost of maintaining fist money.
Bitcoin is far faster and cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the fiat networks., which need the US military to prop them up.
Meanwhile, bitcoin makes renewable energy more economically feasible by acting as a buyer with infinite demand below market price. The world’s oldest hydroelectric plant was brought back online because bitcoin mining made it it feasible.
Moloch makes politicians in every country play against their opponents to deliver value to voters now. If you create systemic risk by doing so… well… the other guy will, so what choice do you really have? This is why deficits kept going up every year.
Bitcoin is also WILDLY volatile; it's gone through several boom-and-bust cycles already. Don't you think that this volatility would have an impact on its use as a store of value? If you have $100,000 USD saved up in BTC, it might be worth $25k next year and $200k (inflation-adjusted!) five years from now.
Do you think its volatility is an intrinsic property of bitcoin?
My perspective is that it’s only volatile because it’s a tiny, tiny asset class with deeply inelastic supply. I expect that it will be less volatile as it’s market cap grows over time.
I was mainly remarking that 'getting sucked into a game theoretic black hole' sounds exactly like Moloch to me. I guess your point is that once everybody is sucked in we'll be in an awesome utopia thanks to the sound financial system (rather than some kind of dystopian hellspace which is the usual Molochian destination). I'm skeptical about this, but I was also skeptical that bitcoin would ever go past ~$0 initially, so it's not like I have any kind of track record to boast of here.
> Bitcoin maximalists believe that all fiat currencies will collapse in value, and the world will return to the kind of sound money system that dominate the world _before_ world war 1.
I can't say that I take this idea at all seriously. Monetary systems prior to WW1 were *awful*. The US and Europe experienced extremely frequent recessions and panics at this time, most notably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression which arguably lasted for *20 years*. A gold standard is among the most unpopular ideas among economists (https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard/), perhaps even worse than rent control, and for good reason. You can see how much worse it was in a graph like this one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=X3Vq
All of the following theorizing is severely undermined by the frequency and severity of panics in this time period in contrast to what has happened since, as well as by observing the political situation in Europe (there was a lot more that caused WWI than banking).
Money generally serves 3 purposes: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a standard measure of price. Anything which can vary wildly in price is obviously not reliable for any of these purposes: If you store it, you might lose everything; if you try to exchange it or compare prices, then what you can exchange it for won't be reliable. So far, bitcoins has this extreme volatility in spades.
Also, while hyperinflation is known to be bad, *deflation*, which is what you will get if the money supply is fixed, is also very bad, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
More fundamentally, I don't think the problems that BTC fixes were very large, and the way it does so is very costly. Most transactions don't require you to be able to verify the entire history of the currency from both parties; I can be fairly confident that most of my business is not performed with stolen money. The cost to the economy of theft is much lower than the energy cost of mining bitcoin. It's certainly an innovative CS solution to the question of "how do you ensure that exchanges are legitimate?" But social trust and basic policing accomplishes the same thing for much cheaper.
The instability was due to bankers lying about their deposits. They’d issue far more reciepts than they had. This is lying.
The gold standard doesn’t work, for that reason. It’s impossible to tell if the banks are “pulling a Sam Bankman Fried” and gambling with customer deposits. It’s far too hard to call BS on a bank that’s lying because taking custody of gold is costly and expensive.
Bitcoin fixes this by making it much easier to verify a bank’s assets and for people calling BS to take custody of their assets directly.
Bitcoin’s volatility is just a function of it being new and tiny. You can see it’s gone done over time. I think it’s intellectually honest, when considering the volatility to also consider that it’s almost entirely ~upside~ volatility.
You are ignoring the main benefit of bitcoin: can’t be inflated away. If you think “theft” is the problem is solves, you might consider doing more research.
There was a lot more to 19th century recessions than just bankers lying. Anyone finding a new deposit of gold or silver would cause problems. If there had been a sufficiently large change in the supply of either when the gold-standard and silver-standard parts of the world depended on France to keep them in balance, then international trade would have become vastly more difficult. High volatility in a currency is absolutely horrible; there is no "good" or "upside" volatility in this context. Bitcoin rising in price is good for early investors; similarly, hyperinflation is good for people who owe money denominated in the inflated currency, but it's overall bad for the economy. Deflation--which is what inevitably will happen if the amount of the currency is capped but its use, and therefore demand, increases--is very very bad.
"You are ignoring the main benefit of bitcoin: can’t be inflated away. If you think “theft” is the problem is solves, you might consider doing more research."
Ensuring that transactions are happening with legitimate money is a real thing that a bitcoin-like system could theoretically do. In contrast, "cap the money supply at X" is a solution to inflation the same way that a leaky pipe in your house can be solved by blowing the house up. If this is really the goal of bitcoin, then in my mind it has gone from "interesting and novel but overhyped" to "all-time bad ideas in economics."
There are no “bitcoin mines” to be discovered, so we don’t have to worry about that. Bubbles come from huge sudden bursts in supply, which do not exist in bitcoin.
Deflation is only bad if you think the credit-induced bubbles are good. If economic activity gets to an unsustainable pitch, what do you think should happen? The current systems says, “keep the game going at all costs regardless of how unsustainable it is!”
I left a job at Google for one at Snapchat, and doubled my compensation while taking on zero risk. Why should I earn more money leaving an deeply profitable company for one that’s burning cash? How does they make sense?
> I don't have any doubt bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 eventually, because i think this is where the incentives of all participants lie.
The total wealth of all the world's bitcoin maximalists, or even bitcoin highly-enthusiasts, is way less than $21 trillion. Therefore, in order for bitcoin to hit $1,000,000, someone who isn't a bitcoin maximalist/enthusiast/whatever will have to part with one million actual US dollars to buy one bitcoin. That person, really a whole lot of people like that, is a necessary participant in the system.
How is it in *their* interest for the price of bitcoin to be $1E6? I have a million dollars. Hypothetically, I want to buy bitcoin. Why would I want my money to buy one bitcoin when it could buy ten or a hundred? There are scenarios where I am *indifferent* to the dollar value of a bitcoin, but I'm not seeing one where it would be in my hypothetical interest for my megabuck to buy me one bitcoin instead of ten,
What am I missing?
Suppose that’s the market price of bitcoin, and inflation has been 10%+ for 5 years straight and they are still printing lots of money.
You're arguing in circles. You claim the market price of bitcoin will be one million dollars, and when asked why you say because everybody will want to buy and sell bitcoins for one million dollars. When asked why they'll want to do that (obvious for the sellers, not so much the buyers), your answer is "suppose that's the market price of bitcoin"?
For my part, I suppose that the market price of bitcoin *isn't* one million dollars, and I don't see enough people wanting to change that to matter.
The easiest way to answer this question is to turn it around.
Why do you think the price is $16,000 today, instead of zero?
Could you argue reasons that this might happen to someone in 2012 with only evidence available then? Back then the highest bitcoin had ever gotten was $30 during a crazy bubble in summer 2011. At mid 2012, it was hovering around $10. Why would it possibly go up to some absurd number like $10,000?
Well that was a wild read.
I agree the future of the current monetary system looks pretty bleak and uncertain, I also hadn't really considered that blockchain creates a whole new game-board for game-theoretic games to play out on (nut sure how how to judge how significant that will turn out to be, not very is my first guess).
But isn't the dollar ultimately backed by the US military (petro dollar, reserve currency etc.)? wouldn't it require the US state to lose the monopoly on violence for the dollar to collapse?
Also what about states that just don't have much patience for these money games. I could easily see China just taking direct command of the economy if the monetary system failed, they've already cracked down on bitcoin.
I also think bitcoin creating a stable economy after the collapse (or ever) seems pretty unlikely, more likely you'd just get anarchy or the great depression x100.
And come on, no way bitcoin is anti-Moloch, that's just silly.
>wouldn't it require the US state to lose the monopoly on violence for the dollar to collapse?
You can't use violence to convince people to accept something that doesn't hold its value.
Your battleships mean nothing to people who are determined not to starve or lose everything they have.
> Could easily see China just taking direct command of the economy if the monetary system failed, they've already cracked down on bitcoin.
China's government is more authoritarian and competent than America. They already have the great firewall. Yet _even they_ haven't been able to stop bitcoin mining in china! If China can't stop mining, and republican politicians are already coming out as pro bitcoin, what chances does America have to stop bitcoin transactions?
> also think bitcoin creating a stable economy after the collapse (or ever) seems pretty unlikely, more likely you'd just get anarchy or the great depression x100.
The way i think this will play out is small local groups will use federated chaumian mints to issue local currencies. In red areas, these will be backed by bitcoin. Blue areas will go bankrupt before realizing they can't run forever without a functioning federal government, and the federal government won't be able to keep functioning without depending on seignorage.
Local governments that successfully maintain law and order will become way way more powerful, and the federal government will become increasingly irrelevant. They've already stopped enforcing the border as well as drug prohibition, basically because the incentives for people to break these laws vastly outweigh the cost of enforcing them. I think more things will move in that direction, and the feds will resort to taxing cities and states _directly_, rather than trying to tax an increasingly resentful and technology savvy population.
>Your battleships mean nothing to people who are determined not to starve or lose everything they have.
Who is this? This describes almost no one. No one is starving or losing everything they have.
Not in America, because we are politically stable and have a sound financial system. But in Lebanon and Nigeria, this is totally a thing. People in lebanon hold up banks to get their own money out.
I wouldn't say the dollar is backed by the military, so much as it's backed by three connected factors: (1) the enormous size of the US economy, which makes US citizens pretty well off, especially compared to the rest of the world, and which also makes the US market highly attractive for many foreign firms, (2) the enormous slice of US production (25% of GDP) that citizens are willing to allow to be siphoned off by the Federal government as taxes, meaning basically 25 cents of every $1 that changes hands domestically passes through government possession in the form of taxes, and (3) that you can only pay taxes in dollars.
The combination of (2) and (3) mean there is intrinsically and always a huge demand for dollars inside the US economy, come hell or high water, because 1/4 of the economic activity simply *must* be transacted in dollars. What (1) adds is the fact that a great deal of word economic activity also ends up being transacted in dollars, because people want to sell into the world's biggest market, and the people in the world's largest market have a strong need for dollars (to pay their taxes).
I mean, imagine Amazon all of a sudden would only take payment in BTC, and then suppose for some strange reason a law is passed saying you can *only* buy toilet paper and soap from Amazon. Imagine the sustained and permanent demand for BTC! That's basically the shtick the Federal Government has set up.
Yeah, the MMT people say taxes are how currencies get established in the first place, and drives demand for the currency etc., that seems correct.
I'm not sure you can say the size of the US economy drives demand for dollars though, since the size of the economy (compared to other national economies) is measured in dollars in the first place. Basically "the US economy is bigger than other national economies" means US products /services have a higher dollar value, i.e. they exchange for a lot of dollars on international markets, so can trade against a lot of goods/services from non-dollar economies.
If the value of the dollar fell the US economy wouldn't be as big anymore, I think that's basically how international exchange works, definitely the relative GDP would go down, so "the size of the US economy drives demand for dollars" seems circular (unless you measure the size of economies in population or something, but the US isn't especially big by those measures).
> taxes are how currencies get established in the first place,
Can you share an historical instance of this happening, where a new currency comes into being specifically for the purpose of paying taxes?
Well, I would say *your* argument is circular. I'm saying the dollar is held up by the size of the American economy -- all the goods and services traded within it, something which is measureable without referring to dollars[1] -- and you're saying "well but if the dollar went to zero all those goods and services would be valued at $0."
I mean, that's technically true, but how does that happen? If the value of the dollar is derived from the size of the real economy, how does it go to zero unless the economy itself implodes? Generally speaking, the values of currencies are derived from the size and health of the economy, and not the other way around. It feels to me like you're mistaking price for value, and overlooking the fact that the former is derived from the latter, and not vice versa.
---------------
[1] You touch on this in your comment about measuring economies by population, but what you miss is that you can measure economic activity independent of population -- and independent of dolllars. Population certainly matters, but it's population times economic productivity, roughly, that you can measure. I can determine how many man-hours it takes to plant and harvest a bushel of wheat, or smelt a ton of iron, or synthesize 100g of amoxicillin, and I can measure how man-hours are going into those things.
> (1) the enormous size of the US economy, which makes US citizens pretty well off, especially compared to the rest of the world,
How much of this prosperity is due to us producing lots of useful goods and services, and how much is because we're the global reserve currency, so we have been able to borrow really cheaply for decades to fund an unsustainable system?
> because 1/4 of the economic activity simply *must* be transacted in dollars.
Why?
What stops people from doing underground transactions, especially if they can avoid paying taxes? If the dollar keeps losing value, bitcoin keeps getting more stable over time, and governments try to phase our cash for their surveillance money CBDC, what's to stop the "organized retail crime" rings from fencing their stolen goods for satoshis instead of central bank surveilance money?
My friend did work in entrepeneurial for a while. He told me that with business deals, he'd be asked about "how much coffee, how much cream". A typical deal was 80% coffee, 20% cream, which means 'how much of the money is taxable'. What would stop that from happening here?
It's my belief that this is already happening, as the labor force participation rate dropping indicates. I doubt these people aren't working; my guess is that more people are working under the table for cash because you get paid more AND you don't have to pay taxes.
> That's basically the shtick the Federal Government has set up.
People actually _want_ toilet paper.
What exactly is the fed selling? Protection, but from whom? China? People don't pay any more taxes than they have to. Once people start to earn money without paying taxes on that income, why would they ever go back?
*All* of the prosperity is due to people selling goods and services to willing buyers. How else? I certainly agree an artificially low cost of capital leads to foolish investments and economic inefficiencies -- which is reflected in crappy real economic growth -- but I don't see how it leads to fake prosperity. How would that work, exactly?
What stops most people from working off the books is the forest of laws that prohibit and punish it. Yes, I can hire an illegal to cut down a tree and pay him $500 in cash, and that works -- for a guy on the economic fringe, who is just scraping by. People in the illegal drug business can also earn fabulous sums, for a time usually much shorter than they think, by taking huge risks. Retirees can earn pin money babysitting, or tween selling lemonade, and nobody reports expense or income to the IRS.
But it doesn't work for most regular people who need regular-sized incomes and income security, and who aren't willing to risk committing crimes that can send you to pokey for a decade. A business with even modest revenue will file a tax return because otherwise the IRS comes knocking, and you can easily be put in jail for tax evasion and even longer for keeping two sets of books. Naturally the business wants to pay the least possible taxes, so they're going to deduct all the employee salaries from their gross revenues -- which means they're going to issue W-2s. And now the IRS knows about the money the employees make.
That doesn't mean it's not possible for the black market (in jobs and goods) from exceeding the size of the open market, it certainly is, but that represents an economy on the ropes, a citizenry at war with their own government, and it can only generally happen when the citizens can't change the government peacefully -- you don't have a democracy. I'm not saying the United States *can't* become a dictatorship with its economy in ruin -- but then if that does happen, I don't see the Internet working smoothly enough to enable blockhain transactions easily, and I particularly don't see that dictatorship being fine with a giant chunk of real wealth locked up in private hands that are within their physical reach.
What the Federal government these days is selling is largely income security. Socal Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and ACA spending, the EITC and various other Federal income assistance programs all together add up to about 57% of spending. An additional 13% goes to defense, 7% to interest on the debt, 7% to retirement benefits for Federal workers, 3% on education, and the rest is noise. In short, the Federal government is in the business of transferring enormous amounts of money from citizens who produce more than they consume to citizens who consume more than they produce.
Why the citizens as whole continue to vote to support this enormous interfering superstructure I have no good idea, except for Juvenal's acidic observation about bread and circuses, but as long as we live in a republic where the ants can outvote the grasshoppers, this is what we will have, and it has enormous power.
It's easier to change the dominant cryptocurrency through cultural fads, than change the periodic table.
As such, gold will always remain a boring but practical store of value. BTC can either moon or go -99% next year.
Can you explain how cultural fads would change the minds of bitcoiners?
If they weren’t willing to listen to cultural fads up until now, what would change that?
At some point the consensus breaks and everyone wants out, preferably before the coin loses all value. Or alternatively , it slowly declines into irrelevance while bleeding % every month.
This seems to contradict current evidence. The Fed is raising interest rates right now, as it has at many points in history, while you're predicting that every political interest would race to debase the currency as quickly as possible. Surely if that were true it would have played out that way? For that matter if these systems are so unstable, why have they persisted through so many of the most economically successful first world countries in human history?
“As quickly as possible” is always constrained by political reality. Nixon lied when he took America off the gold standard in 1971. Why did he do that, instead of saying, “good news everyone, we all know the gold standard is bullshit so now we can just stop pretending.”
As for “why have these systems persisted?” Any historical timeframe of less than 100 years is something I consider to be short term. It’s barely encompassing a single generation!
Viewed through this lens, it seems strange to pin one's hopes on a cryptocurrency created in 2008/09, which in turn relies on a scaffolding (the internet) that didn't exist in any form in 1950 and not in the form recognizable today until the 90s or so.
I'm one of those who believes the intrinsic value of crypto is zero, but one of the least critical things I can say about it is that its real-world application has not been road-tested for any of the scenarios for which it is supposed to hold the greatest promise.
This is a first world perspective. Bitcoin has already been used by people to preserve their wealth from oppressive regimes in Lebanon, Venezuela, Nigeria and Belarus.
https://reason.com/video/2021/02/05/bitcoin-is-protecting-human-rights-around-the-world/
I'm certainly not one to say that politicians should lie, but "populists are weirdly enamored with gold" seems like a rather simple explanation for why someone might lie. If merely telling people that the gold standard is known to bullshit worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation!
Your implied explanation is also possible, but this is very far from a knock-down argument.
This is a great point.
In other words, whether the reality is "hard money limits the state's ability to steal from the people and is therefore good" or "hard money limits the state's ability to mitigate the disastrous effects of recessions and is therefore bad", you should expect a politician to lie about moving away from hard money because:
- the people who want to move away are happy with the reality
- the people who are unhappy with the change can be somewhat satisfied with the lie
i would imagine we should see this dynamic play out all over the place.... when there's a tricky, complex reality, expect politicians to ~practically~ select one side of a tradeoff, while rhetorically claiming that they are selecting the other side, as a way of satisfying as man people as possible
Not only your chain of future events is highly speculative, but frankly I do not accept even the previous, past steps. There isn't and there has not been any consensus on the idea that fractional reserve and fiat money are "a fraud".
Sure, that sequence of events is so specific that it’s unlikely to play out.
The broader, simpler prediction is that fiat money will lose its value because there is no inherent limit to its supply, and creating more of it satisfies immediate demands while posing only illegible risks for some unspecified future.
There WAS consensus that pure fiat money was a fraud but this consensus was eliminated around a hundred years ago with the rise of progressivism and a resulting state/academic alliance.
Banned for making this comment in response to a moderation warning explaining why I wanted fewer comments like this, come on.
What market forces do you see pushing the price of Bitcoin upwards? DeFi seems like a solution in search of a problem.
What forces do you think have driven it thus far?
IMO, the bitcoin price is a function of two distinct groups. Bitcoin maximalists buy at any price, but they buy more when it’s recently crashed, like now. Some will not sell as a matter of principle, as they seem themselves as engaged in a Jihad against the status quo. Others will sell when the price gets “too high”, based on long term trends. I think this group is tiny and has the effect of putting a long term price floor on bitcoin . That floor rises over time as this group grows in size, and as halvenings reduce new supply of bitcoin. These people love it when bitcoin’s price drops because it means they can buy more cheaply. Again, this group is tiny.
The second group is “cryptocurrency speculators” who buy when the price is rising and sell when they think it’s low. This second group causes huge blowups and drawdowns, as these buyers aren’t sold on bitcoin as the future and are hoping to profit in dollars. These people a panic when bitcoin’s price drops.
The key dynamic that confuses everyone here is that bitcoin’s fixed total supply and decaying issuance schedule means that over time, coins migrate towards the true believers and mostly stay there. More true believers are born slowly, both every crash that doesn’t destroy bitcoin, and with people going down the rabbit hole that starts with “what is money” and ends with people realize that dollars have effectively unlimited supply and are likely to follow the path of every other form of unbacked, pure fist money in history.
You can find evidence for this theory looking at metrics like “coin data destroyed.” Lots of bitcoin haven’t moved in a year, which means that they are held by long term holders.
Ask yourself: what evidence has a true believer seem to make them doubt? What evidence have they seem to convince them their theory is right?
Doesn't the fact that most bitcoins never move proves that Bitcoins have no use?
The use bitcoins have is in storing value over long periods of time.
The fact that bitcoins aren't moving is evidence that they are doing what the design intended to: acting as a store of value that can't be corrupted by theft or inflation.
But Bitcoin value so far goes down with inflation, and in the end will be deflationary by design. I am still not sure that in the long term it will turn out as you say.
No, bitcoin's value has not gone down with inflation. This is confusion.
Bitcoin's value went down, along with stocks, as cheap money went away. Inflation is tiny, just 10% a year. Stocks and bitcoin aren't falling 'because of inflation'. They are falling because the fed is raising rates, and raising rates cuts off the flow of money creation, which has the effect of reducing the number of speculative buyers.
So the price of bitcoin falling isn't people like me losing faith. It's miners selling at the rate they mine coins, and wave of new buyers drying. The reason the price isn't falling to zero is that there are some people who are happy to buy bitcoin at any price.
Sounds like the end result is that all bitcoins are held by a small number of true believers and everyone else goes back to ignoring them.
That changes when inflation goes unfixed for a long enough period of time. Then more people become true believers.
Even right now, some true believers sell at the peaks because they have way more than they’ll ever spend.
Honestly, if you think BTC can become the de facto currency of almost everybody *and yet* almost everybody will allow the first movers to become trillionaires because, welp, they got there first and fair's fair -- you haven't really thought through the nature of a republic and the nature of human beings.
If BTC ever *were* to become that important, you can be 100% sure The People will expropriate the wealth of anyone who happens to have gotten in so early his stake represents a massive share of the new currency. Certainly that expropriation will be swathed in a lot of noble talk about the good of the many, for what that's worth.
How do you imagine that playing out?
Here’s what I see happening: as fiat currencies fail with increasingly bad inflation, large scale holders will buy local political support with bitcoin. I expect lots of bitcoin donations to local police officer pension funds, for example.
So, suppose you have a bitcoin baron who has kept the local providers of law and order fed and paid. Say it’s the winkelvoss twins.
Who is going to take their bitcoin and how do they do that?
Carl, thank you for saying this. I've been thinking this for years but never run into anyone who agreed. Clearly I haven't been talking with the right people.
(Mark, I'm sorry that this will ping you. I don't want to pile on any more than I already have.)
Honestly, an even simpler solution would be to just copy the code, make a new crypto called PeoplesRepublicOfCrapistanCoin or whatever, and declare that the new currency. Money has value as long as people believe that it does; nothing would force them to use BTC specifically.
But even if that happened, why would anyone switch to a system that leaves them penniless while creating a handful of trillionaires. Even going back to the barter system sounds better than that.
Incentives.
Bitcoin incentives people to buy it because it can’t be faked. People still trust the dollar to hold value over long periods of time. That trust is eroding.
Individuals will choose to adopt bitcoin privately, to protect themselves from inflation.
Your argument is interesting, but I don't see why we should expect the number of bitcoin maximalists to experience net growth over time.
Gold is a similar asset to bitcoin: restricted supply, with antigovernment gold enthusiast investors ("goldbugs") who sing its praises. Goldbugs have lost mindshare over the past 10-20 years in my estimation. I remember seeing more goldbug libertarian memes when I was younger. The S&P 500 has been outperforming gold over the past 10 years, at least.
Like gold, BTC is not a wealth-producing asset.
2008 produced cynicism about the mainstream financial system. FTX collapse etc. will tar the reputation of a crypto alternative. Outsiders either don't understand the "not your keys not your coin" point, or else don't trust themselves to manage their keys securely / can't be bothered to deal with the hassle. DeFi will continue appealing to a niche audience, similar to gold.
IMO most price action is/will be driven by whales and institutions. Even if bitcoin maximalism as an ideology gains adherents, that may not matter, if whales & institutions are what control the supply and demand curves.
My general impression is that bitcoin pretends to be a hedge but in reality most price movements are driven by social media hype. That makes it a bad safe haven asset. Gold seems better in this regard.
I also think bitcoin has a decent chance of being displaced by a different coin that's technologically superior.
You can’t send a million dollars worth of gold through an internet connection for free.
You can’t spend $500 worth of gold without carrying around a chunk of metal that the other person has to measure and weight.
You can’t store $10,000,000 worth of gold without significant cost and expense and risk.
The supply of gold actually has some elasticity to it.
To understand where maximalists are coming from you have to beleive the current system is totally unsustainable and it will die an inflationary death.
>“what is money” and ends with people realize that dollars have effectively unlimited supply
Ever heard of inflation-adjusted bonds? Stocks? Real estate? Commodities? Why would I prefer bitcoin to any of those?
Try comparing stock market growth to the money supply growth.
There is going to be a monetary schelling point. If all fiat currencies are losing value to inflation and run by nation states that want to spy on everyone and censor their oppositions, bitcoin is your out.
A bitcoin, you actually own. Everything else is a piece of paper with your name on it, dependent on the good graces of a nation state to let you have what’s yours.
Perhaps you trust your political leaders not to scree you. This is a decreasingly popular opinion.
"Almost nobody wants to believe the dollar can fail."
Actually, a lot of people are aware that the dollar can fail; they've seen a lot of other currencies fail. But as a friend of mine said, "The US has been on a roll for 300 years and it's not likely to end any time soon." And as long as the US government demands taxes paid in dollars, there will be a market for them.
Why does the US being on a roll mean inflation will remain a non-issue?
Isn't it the case that a bitcoin standard would make life worse for everyone but the rich? Economic activity would slow down as everyone hoards rather than spend or invest. Unprecedented inequality, with most people being slaves to an untouchable elite. A significant fraction of the world's energy output burned for proof of work.
If you're not a big holder, a bitcoin future is not in your self-interest. But if you think it's game-theoretically inevitable, you can make your future slightly less terrible by buying bitcoin now, thereby accelerating the slide down to hell.
Do you disagree and claim that a bitcoin future would actually make most people better off than they are now? Or do you believe that it will indeed make most people worse off, but it's inevitable anyway because people won't be able to coordinate to avoid it?
Yes, I disagree. I think hard money works far harder for everyday people because they can just spend less than they earn and save reliably, rather than being forced to participate in a complex system of politics that nobody understands and is controlled by the elites, ie modern financial markets.
The 19th century had mostly gold as money, and exhibited more growth on average than the 20th century.
Right now, with fiat money, elites can borrow against their stocks, at low interest rates. Concentration of wealth is therefore way worse under printed money, as the value of assets just grows indefinitely.
You say "concentration of wealth is therefore way worse under printed money, as the value of assets just grows indefinitely". My reading is that you're implicitly claiming that printed money is a primary cause of assets growing indefinitely (which I interpret as "existing in a regime of net asset appreciation across the whole economy rather than net asset depreciation") - this I disagree with - and that concentration of wealth is a consequence of net asset appreciation - this I agree with.
To provide a quick counterexample, there was a lot of concentration of wealth during the time leading up to the Great Depression, which was only really solved with abandonment of the gold standard, among other government interventions. I think the standard narrative is that the Great Depression couldn't really have been solved without eliminating the gold standard (or I suppose with some modern ideas like a wealth tax and/or universal basic income that have more or less the same impact). Certainly, this seems to argue against the idea that the gold standard protected against concentration of wealth.
My explanation for why hard money doesn't solve concentration of wealth goes back to Thomas Piketty's explanation for concentration of wealth: when the rate of growth of investments is greater than the rate of economic growth, then concentration of wealth necesarily results. Hard money doesn't really solve that, since people can still make leveraged investments, do high-frequency trading, etc., to invest in the stock market but grow faster than the market as a whole (and the stock market as a whole should grow about as fast as the economy in the long term, unless something funny and temporary is happening like decreasing dividends). As Piketty points out, these methods tend to work better for people who have a larger fortune to begin with, since things like leveraged investment funds and high-frequency trading houses themselves have upkeep costs, and people who are already rich get better economies of scale on them.
So I don't think fiat money is the primary cause of concentration of wealth. It might contribute to it, but at some point someone still has to come up with a better long-term way of managing concentration of wealth, so moving back to hard money doesn't seem to have an advantage in that respect.
(I have an implicit assumption that economic growth will continue in the long term, which I won't address because it seems pretty safe.)
I dunno, I think in order to become an aristocracy, the group needs to win CONSISTENTLY, not just win big one time. Early crypto folks seem to mostly be contrarian libertarians whose worldview allowed them to spot an opportunity when others were indifferent to it. If crypto had never happened, I don't see much of a chance they would have ended up vastly wealthy.
That just means that nerds that bought $100 worth of Bitcoin in 2010 and HODLd it are the new aristocrats. These seem to be related to the WSB "apes" that pumped GameStop to the moon.
Just pinging to see if yah saw my post in the most recent OT: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-253/comment/10928960
yup, replied there.
I read "Bobos in Paradise" probably about 15 years ago. It's an interesting book with some good ideas, particularly in the first section, as you've noted.
The discussion about how the modern elite is just as money-grubbing as the old one, but pretends not to be, matches my observations here in Silicon Valley, where everyone talks about how they "innovate" all the time, as if innovation were inherently a good thing regardless of what you're actually doing. Me, I just work here. I don't sit around thinking about whether the software I'm developing now is "innovative" or just a sensible application of established principles to solve a problem. The constant pretensions of Silicon Valley to being meaningful or cultured (an absurdity, since most people around here don't read anything but technical books and bad science fiction) have annoyed me for a long time. I'll be glad to retire somewhere in the next decade and never have to deal with it again.
I was discussing this with someone today.
It appears that Isaac Newton thought he'd only rediscovered what the ancients knew! Innovation was not considered a great thing at all, then.
Newton was at the very beginning of the Enlightenment, before the cult of Progress asserted itself. The traditional mindset is that the past was wise and glorious, and every new generation is lesser than the previous one. Aristotle was considered to be on the cutting edge of knowledge about the world 1500 years after his death!
"The discussion about how the modern elite is just as money-grubbing as the old one, but pretends not to be, matches my observations here in Silicon Valley, where everyone talks about how they 'innovate' all the time, as if innovation were inherently a good thing regardless of what you're actually doing. Me, I just work here. I don't sit around thinking about whether the software I'm developing now is 'innovative' or just a sensible application of established principles to solve a problem."
I think there are a lot of us in Silicon Valley who "just work here." I'm willing to be innovative if that is what it takes to solve my problem, but it an old/understood technology or solution gets the job done that is what I'm going to use. This isn't *terribly* unusual, but also doesn't give the folks who do this much to blog about. So the chatter is from the folks being innovative, even if they shouldn't be.
The lower classes often try to ape the behavior of the upper classes, with disastrous results. Another good example of this is the Bobo "free love" approach. While elites could have sex and get contraception and abortions easily, the sexual revolution actually hurt the working class and is responsible for the massive uptick in single parenthood starting from the 1960s.
And while elites say one doesn't need to get married, most college-educated people will eventually get married. It's the ones that are trying to copy them that suffer.
Murray's thesis isn't that the upper class/high IQ set engage in free love and then get abortions or whatever, it's that they preach free love / find your own bliss kinds of hippie values in public, but live and raise their kids according to something a lot more like traditional WASP values. One wife, kids leaned on hard to study and do well in school, well-maintained home(s), strong work ethic, etc.
Have you read any of Rob Henderson's work? He writes a lot about this phenomenon (he calls it "Luxury Beliefs").
Yes I have. And I see the theory all over Bobos in Paradise.
Why should we assume this is based on the plebs copying the elites? Sex feels good, technology facilitated easier access to it (cars) and less penalties (abortion, contraception). Plebs do all sorts of self destructive hedonic stuff (fentanyl, fast food) without elites modeling it for them.
It's an attractive argument for social conservatives elites because it lets them blame major social problems on their peers not following social conservative norms, but there are much simpler explanations.
Agreed. I'd argue that part of the dry fuel that enabled the Sexual Revolution was penicillin. Syphilis was the AIDS of its time, except worse: there was no real reliable test for it, it took as long as thirty years to kill the sufferer, and it spread more easily than HIV does. When cheap penicillin killed syphilis dead, chastity wasn't quite as valuable anymore.
It can also be argued that some of the purity movement in the 1990s and 2000s was a result of the spread of HIV; imagine what might have happened if there was no reliable test or treatment for the disease...
I think the sophisticated argument is that "middle class morality" elites used to push the message that you should resist temptation. But that since the sixties, the public message of the elites has been, "if it feels good, do it." Or at least, don't feel guilty about doing it.
And, yes, that doesn't just lead to unmarried births, but to obesity and people getting f***ed by drugs. At a time when temptations are more and more tempting (Nacho Cheese Doritos), the message of the cultural leaders makes resisting harder and harder. "No fat shaming."
I completely agree that the health establishment says obesity is bad. However, media, elites, and at least part of the health establishment say that you should never make fun of anyone for being fat, that you should never shame. Lizzo recently won a number of music awards and the media spin seemed to be "Isn't it wonderful that she triumphed over weight prejudice."
My father was in advertising and I developed a fascination with ads. The two biggest changes in the last four years have been a significant increase in non-white people and a significant number of people who in the previous century would have been considered fat but are now (at least statistically) completely normal. Mainstreaming of teh fat?
The funny thing is that if the lower classes were to imitate the behavior of Bobos as opposed to their rhetoric, we'd be in pretty good shape. Bobos like to engage in a weird sort of inverted hypocrisy, preaching vice publicly while practicing virtue on the sly: they marry more, divorce less, and generally avoid self-destructive temptation better than just about anyone else.
Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass said that well-off people could afford to do stupid things for a while but relatives and friends would bring them back. People who weren't well off and imitated them were more likely to permanently f*** up their lives. I don't think he'd be surprised by the ballooning of "the homeless".
Consider Canada. Or any other country really. They don't have ultra-selective universities that shape the elites.
How does this explain the rise of the checkmarks in other countries...
Edit:
This is what I mean by "ultra-selective". The Ivy League is more selective than the top universities of other developed democratic countries. I can't judge the claims of what a "top university" is in other countries but feel free to check other countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
Ivy League: 136,856 students; US pop: 333 million; fraction: 410 per million
Uni Toronto + UWaterloo: 104,731 students; Can pop: 39 million; fraction: 2685 per million
Oxbridge: 48,965 students; UK pop: 67 million; fraction: 730 per million
Now that I've had time to think: prior to WW2 old money probably really did more or less control society, after the war however forces like mass media wrested control towards "the crowd", where no-one consciously directs things, and this is reflected as a loss of old money control over the universities as well as basically every other important institution. That is the makeup of universities is a reflection of the social change not the determiner.
"Consider Canada. Or any other country really. They don't have ultra-selective universities that shape the elites."
Britain has Oxford and Cambridge.
France has École normale supérieure (Ecole Normal Superior).
>France has École normale supérieure (Ecole Normal Superior).
Kind of a tangent but what was the thought process behind translating the two words with extremely direct English cognates but not the third that's a little less obvious?
Because I absolutely love the name "Normal Superior" as part of a school name. Seriously. I have a former co-worker who spent a few years in Paris doing a post-doc and he told me about the school and how amazingly elite the student body (and, presumably, the staff) is. But I find the name hilarious.
He's asking why you didn't translate "École" as "school".
Oh. Because I thought the ecole meant school but wasn't sure and didn't want to take the trouble to look it up.
"Normal school" in English (and its French equivalent, I believe) is an old term for "teachers' college".
It had that meaning in Italian too, but it was lost more than a century ago. Now it means "elite school"
China also has a bunch of "Normal Universities" (again, originally teacher training colleges, but now just universities).
Oh, sure.
And shrimp is just a type of animal, but the phrase "Jumbo Shrimp" is still funny.
As is "Real Xerox".
My parents, who went to college to become teachers, met at Illinois State Normal University, in the town of Normal, Illinois. So I have always been abnormal by knowing this now obsolete meaning of normal. The University dropped Normal from their name in 1964. I was not aware of the French equivalent.
Can't resist - my brother Norman was born there ;-)
Canada has U of T and UWaterloo.
I don't think Waterloo is particularly prestigious outside of very specific niches like computer science. Usually the top three schools of (English-speaking) Canada are considered to be UofT, UBC, and McGill. But my impression is that they aren't that comparable to the Ivy League, for instance in terms of student numbers.
"Usually the top three schools of (English-speaking) Canada are considered to be UofT, UBC, and McGill. But my impression is that they aren't that comparable to the Ivy League, for instance in terms of student numbers."
University of Toronto has almost 45,000 undergraduate students. UBC has about 45,000 at Vancouver (and another 9,000 at Okanagan). McGill has 26,000 undergraduate students. So about 116,000 - 125,000 between the three of them.
Cornell has around 16,000 undergrads, Harvard around 10,000 ... Dartmouth about 5,000. The Ivy League as a whole seems to have around 80,000 undergrads.
So, yeah, the student numbers are quite different. And Canada has a population about 10% that of the US so getting into those three should be relatively easier than getting into an Ivy League college.
They are nowhere NEAR as selective as the Ivy League.
Or at least weren't back when I was looking at places to apply for university. McGill's probably the most competitive of those three, and even it is perfectly possible to go to.
Partly because McGill is huge: 40,000 undergrads. That's way more than Harvard/Yale/Princeton combined, and in a nation one tenth the population.
Depends on the programs. A quick Google shows Ivy schools at 5-10%. Waterloo engineering, where I studied, shows up as 5-15%. Other programs at Waterloo have higher admission rates, but Waterloo also isn't really the place you would go in Canada for most non-STEM programs.
Not as competitive as Ivies, but not nowhere NEAR as selective.
While you're right the Canada model is more "normal" there are a few other countries that have ultra-selective universities like America. The most notable is China.
That doesn't mean they don't have elite universities. Oxford, Cambridge, U. of Toronto, etc. But they're much less competitive to get into. (Many then have special clubs future elites compete to get into though. The Bullingdon Club and all that.)
Malcom Gladwell did an interesting podcast, part of which compared US elite schools to Canada's best schools. In it he slammed the LSAT and other high pressure, low time tests as favoring Hares over Tortoises. Good stuff.
Do you have a link?
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/puzzle-rush
Thank you!
As usual with Gladwell, he gestured in some interesting directions for investigation, but didn't even try to offer empirical evidence for his thesis.
For instance, he criticizes the LSAT for having timed sections without providing any evidence that harder, untimed tests correlate more with any concrete outcomes, let alone that they correlate better than timed tests when conditioned on undergrad GPA, which is the more relevant question.
This short-coming is probably due to absent literature, but it makes it really hard for me to tell how seriously to take his musings :(
He offered anecdotes instead of data, true. But he did lay out a decent argument that we should at least investigate different ways of evaluating students. Right now, it is all about the hares.
The spark was what happened in American unviersities, and the culture spread. Are you saying that Canada has aristocratic unviersity admissions?
This was going to be my comment. I'm sure that in the United States it's possible to write a whole book about a global trend without remembering the existence of other countries, but when read from another country
Britain is a good example; not because it's the most illustrative, but just because it's the only country with whose popular culture the average American might be expected to be somewhat familiar. And it's a similar story, old moneyed elite getting kicked down by a new and supposedly-more-meritocratic elite. The process was perhaps a bit slower and a bit less complete (e.g. the new Prime Minister might be an Indian but he still went to Winchester).
Among the many trends explaining this, I don't think admissions at Oxford/Cambridge are really close to the top, nor even admissions at Eton etc.
One thing that _would_ seem to be important is new money. For centuries, the only way to be rich was to own a lot of land, and the only way to own a lot of land was to inherit it. The Industrial Revolution started a phenomenon of non-U people suddenly becoming rich, which made life complicated for the old upper class, but at first they could absorb these new money richers slowly into their ranks (and more importantly, the new money richers aspired to emulate the old money). But eventually the rate of wealth creation got so out of hand that new millionaires were being minted faster than the upper class could co-opt them, and the wealth of the unassimiliated non-U rich started to outweigh the wealth of the true Upper Class. And eventually the whole thing came tumbling down and everyone is lining up to get a glimpse of the Beatles instead of the Queen.
The counter-argument is that it's US cultural hegemony.
Britain's a good place to see this. The 19th Century created a lot of new "millionaires," but they tried their hardest to ape the aristocracy then intermarried with them (changing them slightly in the process - mid-Victorian aristocrats were notably bourgousified compared to the 18th century). This is why public schools and Oxbridge became important in the first place vs. a purely hereditary system.
It could only be sustained by the aristocracy being the only centre of prestige though. Once a new class had risen up in the post-war US, the cool kids wanted to be like them, as opposed to the 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire, leading to the Blairite class and the "New Establishment." It's not a coincidence that Blair was the first [British?] politician to use the word "meritocracy" unironically to refer to something good.
"Total number of students divided by population of country" isn't a very good measure of "selectiveness", there are plenty of less-selective universities in the US with student bodies smaller than 100,000.
The most famous colleges in the world today are Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale rather than, say, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, or Parma.
Why?
Because the graduates of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale won the Big One in 1939-1945. In contrast, the graduates of Continental universities had a bad 1940s, and so their colleges were forced to become more egalitarian and unselective to testify to their non-fascist bona fides.
Why no French or Russian equivalent to HYPS/Oxbridge then? Or heck, what about Spain or Scandinavia?
It helps for English to have eaten the world.
Russian intelligentsia was gutted by Stalin, and Chinese by Mao. They've recovered to some extent - particularly in the Chinese case - but you can't magic prestige up very quickly.
Russia and China are also much poorer on a per-person basis than the West (this wasn't *entirely* socialism's fault; Russia and China were very poor already when the communists took over).
Disagree about China recovering. Most of the great Chinese discoveries/innovations are done outside mainland China, and the brain drain is getting worse due to zero Covid.
They're doing better than Russia off less time since the big purge, from what I understand. I did say "to some extent".
Karolinska in Stockholm is one of the highest-ranking non-Anglosphere universities (global ranking 37), but in smaller countries like this, you get scaling problems. Sweden is only so big - it can't sustain institutions that are both large:ish and educationally elite.
I'm pretty sure that graduates from the French equivalent of HYPS/Oxbridge run most of France and most of French industry. We just don't hear about them much in the English-speaking world. I was going to say look up “les énarques” but I had trouble finding a succinct summary (maybe https://blogs.transparent.com/french/what-is-an-enarque/ works).
Agree (*especially* in France), but there's a *huge* difference between "produces the local elites" and "produces quality education and research". Presumably most every country has one or a couple of the former.
I mean, sure, but I've not seen much evidence that the Ivy League is the latter category. Harvard takes in smart rich people and outputs well-connected smart rich people. You want quality education in the technical sense, and MIT or Berkeley is probably the best in the USA.
Harvard has the largest number of Nobel Prize laureates out of them all, so it demonstrably delivers the goods in research.
https://zims-en.kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/wikipedia_en_all_nopic/A/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_Harvard_University
https://ceoworld.biz/2020/09/19/top-10-universities-with-the-most-nobel-prize-winners/
The French built elite Ecole institutions after WW2 to train their leaders, but they maintain a low profile, perhaps deliberately.
There's a pretty-fair argument that post-WWII Anglospheric and even general Western culture has largely come from the USA - that looking at other Western countries' intrinsic factors is kind of missing the point since there's the huge extrinsic factor of Uncle Sam's foibles.
Canada has a *particularly*-bad case of importing northern-US culture for reasons of literal proximity, so there's not a whole lot to explain there.
And American culture-imitating Brits like the Beatles.
But the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion simply finished the gentrification of the music of American blacks, something that Elvis' generation hadn't quite managed on its own.
I think you're seriously underestimating the extent to which British public life is dominated by Oxbridge graduates, and in particular by graduates of Oxford's Politics, Philosophy and Economics course: https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
"Government needs to support the universities. Both of them."
—Sir Humphrey Appleby
(The standing joke is that Jim Hacker went to the LSE.)
In my youth when I first watched Yes, Minister, I'd been familiar with Oxford and Cambridge'd reputations but was otherwise unfamiliar with the LSE. It took me a while to realize that these jokes were the equivalent to American shows where e.g. Yale or Harvard graduates deride Princeton as "clown college".
In this case, it's also that Sir Humphrey and Bernard have classical educations and can drop Greek quotes at the drop of a hat, while Hacker is (presumably) an economist.
I did actually recall that very article while I was writing my comment. I don't recall PPE being around before WW2 though.
Per the article it's been around since 1920, but obviously you don't go from "newly-established course" to "source of most of the Establishment" overnight.
I thought that the University of Toronto and McGill were the Canadian equivalents?
Yes, you are probably right. Another commenter mentioned the two I used so I'm going to blame them. I really only have a rough idea of prestigious universities in 3 countries: the US, the UK, and my own NZ (where I would say 4 of our 9 universities are prestigious, the model doesn't really work here).
It's hard to be sure for other countries as you have to view them holistically and not just base it some that are highly specialised.
I just did a quick survey of the Alma Maters of Canadian PMs to see if the same universities came up over and over again, as a quick and dirty proxy for universities whose graduates constitute a big part of the candidate pool for national elites.
It felt a little less concentrated than US Presidents over the same period (Harvard and Yale coming up over an over again there), but Canadian PMs did seem to commonly have attended University of Toronto, Laval, Oxford, or Harvard (the latter two being old elite universities borrowed from countries with whom Canada shares a lot of history, trade, and culture). Unless I overlooked someone, Justin Trudeau's the only McGill alumnus on the list, which surprised me because McGill's where my mind first went when trying to think of prestigious Canadian universities.
Interesting.
This reminds me of another review you did on Fussell's book, "Class". That book seemed humorous. It was laughing at the people it was analyzing. This one seems serious, even a bit similar to Fussell's book in the abstractions it uses.
Which one did you like better?
Also, Whit Stillman made four or five affectionate movies in defense of WASP culture.
> The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.
Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.
I think something simpler happened. Harvard became more exclusive. Prior to the mid-20th century almost anyone with the proper educational credentials could get into Harvard. The acceptance rate was around 80-90%. Now, some of this was because you had to prove you had certain aristocratic class markers like knowing Greek. But if you had them you basically got in. This is exactly how the Jews got in: they just studied the class markers. And that wasn't a problem until there were "too many" of them.
The post-war restrictions SHARPLY cut the acceptance rate down to about a third of applicants. And it's declined ever since. It was 15%-ish by the 1980s-90s and is about 5% today. This has set off an intense competition where getting into Harvard is a status symbol.
In 1930 going to Harvard was something you did because you were a WASP. If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard. Partly because of racial discrimination to be sure. But partly because going to Harvard was not a prestigious trophy. Simply having a college degree marked you out as elite. So why not go to the college your community built? Where you'd see the elites of your own community?
You saw the same thing with white Catholics. Even ones from very old American families who didn't have to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment. As late as the mid-20th century you had some Virginians going to places like William & Mary because they weren't New Englanders.
Post-war all colleges organized themselves into a hierarchy. Harvard came out on top, as the "best." Elites had found a new competition: to get into the best schools. And Harvard restricted its membership because selectiveness (and the education it conferred) was a status symbol. A meritocratic ideology sprung up about "whiz kids", especially around Johnson and Kennedy's time. And college access greatly expanded. But at the same time as college access was expanded access to these elite spaces contracted. In effect the mid-century turned what had been a pretty open system into a series of sorting tests.
I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.
One thing to be careful about:
- the applicant pool in some of those schools may be self-sorting to a greater extent than in the US,
- (often more importantly) universities outside the US often care less about retention rates than universities in the US. An extreme case is given by places like EPFL or ETHZ in Switzerland, or (to a lesser extent) the tougher programs in the Paris university system (excluding of course the grandes écoles): anybody with a college-oriented high-school diploma (not a triviality to obtain) can get in, but what happens in the first two years is absolute slaughter, deliberately so.
Last I'd looked the University of Tokyo has a 35% acceptance rate and a roughly 99% graduation rate. Oxford has about a 20% acceptance rate and a 99% graduation rate. They both have about half as many applications as Harvard in countries much smaller than the US. (Though the U. of Tokyo statistics I found online were a bit dodgy.) So your theories at least don't look accurate at a glance.
I see no reason to discount the most obvious explanation. The main difference is both are much larger institutions on a per capita basis. Both have about 30,000 students. Which makes them bigger than Harvard in absolute terms. But the population of their respective countries is about a third and a fifth of the US respectively. If you have more seats you reject less people.
Well, don't forget that what kind of degree you get from a UK university (first class, 2:1, 2:2, third-class, etc.) affects your employment opportunities tremendously. It's unlikely that you will find many "doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc." who got third-class degrees at Oxbridge or elsewhere.
There are also such people in Harvard though.
Sure, there are plenty of dull or uninterested people at Harvard (and at Princeton, where I went to grad school). The point is that (it is my perception that) people outside academia pay much more attention to whether someone got a first-class or at least a 2:1 at Oxbridge than they do to whether someone got a magna cum laude at Princeton. (Inside academia, where you went for undergrad is much less important than where you went to grad school, which is in turn less important than what work you do; but I digress.) Thus, in effect, selection *is* happening within the university.
Some form of selection, sure. My point is that paying attention to such things is a different selection filter than the one in the US. And arguably a better one. I don't know why a dullard with a Harvard stamp should be held high. Better to let them fall down to being a Harvard third or some equivalent. Plus it means rigging admissions means less.
Oxford (or Cambridge) is kind of like the Ivy League or U. of California -- a collection of semi-independent colleges. In the English case, however, the colleges are right next to each other. (Claremont Colleges are a small scale American imitation.)
As far as I'm aware Oxford is a single university, not a collection of semi-independent colleges. Unless you want to argue Oxford's faculty of liberal arts and engineering are independent in a way that (say) Harvard's faculty of liberal arts and engineering are not.
It's two things at the same time: a place where you get your lectures, the syllabus and the final examinations (the University); and a place where you get your "tutorials" (one-on-one or small-N-on-one group meetings), your dinners, and your day-to-day social life (the College you've been admitted to).
Colleges govern the admissions, and attempt to construct a class for themselves each year very much in the same way Harvard admissions does. But it happens on a much smaller, federated scale. The History Boys is a film that captures some of the dynamics — altered by time, but not by as much as you'd think.
Another difference between Oxbridge and the elite US system is the extent to which faculty are involved in undergraduate affairs, including admissions. A prof in the US has no influence on who comes in, but because of how your duties as a member of a college work, if you're a prof at Oxbridge, you end up being much more involved in work that has been delegated to the professionals in the US.
Europe and Japan have gone to "university as civil service job" model. WIth few exceptions, they're not functioning on the British or American model. They're in the business of training students for industry, the workforce, etc on behalf of the government. My guess is that this is a post-war thing, and part of the larger turn towards technocracy in the European Union.
That is only true at the undergraduate level, by the way. At the graduate level in the US applicants are generally sorted and admitted, or not, directly by the department faculty.
"College" in the context of Oxbridge (and I think Durham) means something rather different to in the context of other universities - those universities are divided up into a number of socio-administrative subunits called "Colleges" with pastoral and accomodation responsibilities, orthogonally to being divided up into academic departments.
For example, I studied maths at St John's College, Cambridge. My lectures were organised by the department of mathematics (actually by the two departments of mathematics, one pure and one applied, but they were basically one organisation), but selection, accommodation, and the two-to-one teaching sessions ("supervisions") which are one of Cambridge's main selling points were organised by the college.
That's also what "college" tends to mean in Australia, although the American usage is creeping in.
With a 99% graduation rate Oxford has a much higher rate of graduation than the engineering course I studied in a college in Cork. I’ve not been overly impressed by Oxford graduates I’ve met in real life, not saying they were stupid but neither were they an obvious cognitive elite. On the other hand Stanford graduates in the US were clearly intelligent.
I've not been overly impressed by the Harvard or Stanford graduates I've met. Some of them are quite smart and I'd say median quality was higher. But I've also met some real idiots. Same for Oxford, Cambridge, Tokyo U, Tsinghua, etc.
My general impression is that Japanese universities frontload a hellish admissions exam but then then the actual coursework is nominal. If you can get in you're assumed to be smart enough to graduate and roll into a good job.
That would explain what's going on with Todai. Only students willing to go through an infamously-difficult exam (or whose mothers are pushing them hardest) apply in the first place, which means generally they're going to be the most prepared. If a student isn't already doing the Todai study hell they'll just apply for an easier university to get into. Fewer students apply, but those that do are heavily self-sorting.
It would also cut down on Japanese students applying to every possible university, when that just means more exam hell. It seems Japanese students prefer to study really hard for one or two university's exams, and if they fail one year to study hard and come back again the next. US students prefer shotgunning applications and going to whoever will have them. Both of them make decisions based on how the universities accept students - I bet Harvard application rates would drop and acceptance rates would soar if they adopted Japanese-style entrance exams (and vice versa for Todai adopting US-style holistic admissions).
Another difference in the UK is that you're not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge; you have to pick one. So that probably halves the applicant pool for each university and hence doubles the acceptance rate for each.
This is important point, and I would expand it:
I assume this is the most important thing causing differences in acceptance rates, and makes comparing them pretty much useless at least across different systems.
The easiness of applying + allowing applications to several places at once without costs + having even a tiny chance of getting in, I would argue, without any true evidence for sure, are the main reasons for different acceptance rates in elite institutions. There are quite surely huge amount of people who would have taken a place in Harvard or Oxford etc. if someone would offered them one, but who still did not apply to them. The amount of those people is the number to which we should compare, not the amount of applicants.
For example when the entrance exams of different Uni's in my home country was combined as a single one, the amount of applicants predictably increased and the acceptance rate dropped. Nothing else had changed but the easiness of applying.
>I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.
This is heavily confounded by the number of applications a school gets, which can be affected by a lot of different things. Harvard has a high application rate (which leads to a low % acceptance rate for given number of admissions), partly because affirmative action means that vast numbers of intellectually unremarkable students actually have a chance of being admitted.
> Harvard has a high application rate (which leads to a low % acceptance rate for given number of admissions)
Yes, I've heard this theory before. Unfortunately it doesn't actually bear out. On a per capita basis Oxford gets more applications than Harvard, for example.
I'm not sure what affirmative action has to do with the other part of the comment.
Think of it like this: Oxford isn't Harvard, Oxford is the entire Ivy League. Cambridge isn't Berkeley, it's the entire U. of California system.
Care to back up why we should think of it that way? In my case I'm simply comparing the one top school. In your case you're saying the top college of another country should be compared to eight schools in the US. That might be so but bears significant justification.
Cambridge is somewhere in between Harvard and the entire UC system. e.g., Trinity College Cambridge probably counts as "Harvard" — it's where you meet the other people who will run the world/academy/finance. King's College as "Berkeley", perhaps. Gonville Caius (etc) as the SLACs like Williams and Amherst — smaller, more inward-looking cultures. But then there's also a large UCLA/Davis/Irvine-level system that works in tandem (Robinson etc) and students at any of the colleges can always opt into that larger, more American-style world.
Cambridge and Oxford are completely exceptional, historically, in that the college system survived. Other countries had them too, e.g., France, but they were eventually tamed and reduced to administrative units of the central bureaucracy.
>Other countries had them too, e.g., France, but they were eventually tamed and reduced to administrative units of the central bureaucracy.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
This doesn't explain why we shouldn't treat it as simply one college though. Different departments have different cultures at all universities.
One reason why thinking this way might make sense is because each college handles its own admissions - there is no `Cambridge admissions office' - you apply to a specific college within the university and they decide whether they want you or not. And if they do and you go, then all of your residential experience and much of your teaching is `internal' to the college (although the big lectures are university wide)
That's an oversimplification. The colleges handle the admissions, but they also co-ordinate with each other to try and make sure the standards are the same no matter which college you apply to, and it's quite common to get "pooled" and end up assigned to a college different to the one you applied to.
Also, on a pedantic note -- https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/
In addition to what The original Mr. X said: that's also somewhat the case with Harvard. Now, it might be MORE the case with Oxford. But simply saying you apply to specific programs and then spend most of your time there (though not your residential experience) doesn't separate it out.
Though I'll admit I didn't apply to Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate. So perhaps the differences aren't obvious to me.
> I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way
It's not really about the quality of the graduates, it's about the quality of the graduates' social circles.
They have mechanisms for this like the Bullingdon club (or various other examples) which serve the same sort of elite social club function without denying poor but talented students access to top professors.
One other wrinkle here is that what is meant by `Ivy league' in such conversations is not the literal Ivy league, but rather the set of half dozen universities at the top of the prestige ladder which educates the national elite - a set that surely includes johnny come latelies like MIT and Stanford, but may not include Dartmouth or Brown. Which goes to show that it is not simply a story of the unbreakable power of a small number of elite institutions but rather a larger phenomenon whereby there arises a small set of elite institutions with this kind of power (but individual universities can ascend into the elite set, or slip out of it).
> but rather the set of half dozen universities at the top of the prestige ladder which educates the national elite - a set that surely includes johnny come latelies like MIT and Stanford, but may not include Dartmouth or Brown
Well, yes and no, it depends which elite you want to join. There's multiple competing elites in US society, and while the Silicon Valley elite might respect MIT/Stanford more than Dartmouth/Brown, there's other elites out there who would still rank the _actual_ Ivy League ahead of any overgrown shape-rotation college.
I specifically talked about Harvard because, I think we can agree, Harvard is the "top" university in some nebulous prestige sense. (I only brought up the Ivy League to say they all have legacy admissions and anti-meritocratic practices. Which, afaik, they do.)
I'm not sure that universities can jump in or out. I can't think of any that fell out or joined. Keep in mind this status was largely set in the 1950s-60s. MIT and Stanford were already big technical universities while Dartmouth and Cornell were already lower ranked. I'd say the Big ones are: Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and MIT. And I can't say any of them have joined or slipped down since the 1950s.
But you're right simply being old or Ivy League or even pedigree is not enough. William and Mary is very old and has a lot of prominent people from it historically but is definitely not up there. Nor is the University of Delaware.
So this might be my bubble talking, but it seems to me that Upenn and Yale at least are at risk of falling out of the elite pack, and Stanford is at least credibly challenging Harvard for the top spot, neither of which was presumably on the cards in 1960.
If we're talking bubbles:
Yale retains high prestige in the humanities, and seems to be cultivating that. Many of their STEM departments are rather mediocre. (Also worth noting that Princeton Engineering is very mid-tier, compared to its science powerhouse.)
UPenn was known (disparagingly) as the "Asian Ivy" because it was willing to take high-achieving Asian (-American) students when the other East coast schools were trying to maintain a veneer of white-elite status.
Cornell has done very well in recent years by building on its science and computer engineering. Reports I get suggest that the "Ivy league" culture — meaning a certain wealth and snobbery — persists. But it is lower tier; I remember an old post by Scott Aaronson talking about how he went to Cornell after getting rejected by what he saw as "better" schools as an undergrad.
Looking into the future, it's unclear what will happen to the East Coast elite schools.
I've heard UPenn and Yale are falling behind scientifically. But UPenn's humanities and business and Yale's humanities, arts, and law are all top tier. And it's not certain to me you need to be top tier in science if you can get half the justices on the Supreme Court. After all, Harvard's sciences are not spectacular as far as I've heard.
That said, I agree there's nothing in principle that prevents it. It's entirely possible you're better informed than I on this.
Harvard is extremely good in some science, particularly those related to medicine and health. It tends to be less good in sciences more closely related to engineering.
Fair cop. I'm not a doctor or anything like one so that's not really my specialty. What I often point out is that "I got a compsci degree from Harvard" said as if that's supposed to impress me says a lot of mostly negative things about the speaker.
That's fair. And I'm not necessarily better informed.I think a lot of `prestige' in everyday life comes from professional schools (Business/Law/Medicine) which are sort of a parallel universe. I'm only familiar with the `scholarship' part of the academy (basically, the parts that would live in the faculty of arts and sciences, and to some extent in the college of engineering).
MIT was more meritocratic than the Ivies from the beginning.
https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-history-of-early
It was intended to train workers in industry, not to select political leaders.
I thought it was widely accepted that given their resources, the Ivy League colleges could increase their student body size many times, but they deliberately choose not to to keep the exclusivity marker?
So did I. But I've gotten pushback on this including people who say being so selective is necessary to get high quality graduates. Which is a bit ridiculous when you consider something like two thirds of people in Harvard didn't get in on pure merit anyway. And it's even more ridiculous when so many other countries have well functioning systems without this feature.
Harvard has a total enrollment of ~20,000. There a few dozen universities in the US with enrollments of 40-60,000 and I think none over 80,000. That this remains true even in an era of massively increasing demand for university education, suggests that ~50,000 is the maximum practical size for a traditional university. And it's not at all surprising that a university trying to maintain maximal prestige, would not want to push close to any merely qualitative limit - whatever magic causes the system to break down above ~50K, probably starts to degrade it well before then.
My point is that, firstly, nobody has proven tight admissions produces better graduates. Secondly, admissions isn't meritocratic anyway so any appeal to it being "skimming the cream" of the best is undercut. And, thirdly, larger universities with looser admissions seem to work really well in a lot of places.
You cannot respond to that by assuming that quantity decreases quality. That's just begging the question.
You haven't gotten the details right either. American universities commonly have hundreds of thousands of students spread out across different campuses. Your limit is only per campus. (And before you say you apply to them separately: not in all states. And in a lot of colleges you apply to specific departments anyway. So that's not a meaningful difference.)
My claim isn't that tight admissions produces better graduates. My claim is that not trying to educate too many people on the same campus produces better graduates. With "too many people" being more than 50,000 or so for high-quality universities in general, and so plausibly no more than 25.000 or so for the best and/or most prestigious universities. It doesn't matter *how* Harvard decides which students to admit; if they have more than 25,000 or so at once then we will have zero students getting what is presently considered a Harvard education, not >>25,000.
Another claim that I hadn't made but will now since you bring it up: Yes, you can build a "system" of universities, but that doesn't produce better graduates than building the same number of independent universities. If you want to build another campus that is as capable of producing high-quality graduates as Harvard presently does, there is no benefit to naming it "Harvard" or having it part of the same administrative structure as Harvard, and nobody will be fooled by the name if you do.
And a third claim: If you try to build another campus that is as capable of producing high-quality graduates as Harvard presently does, you will almost certainly fail. In the United States at least, we seem to have lost the knack for building really high-quality universities about fifty years ago; we can at best build mediocre ones. Not even the Harvard regents, know how to build another Harvard.
This comment only increased my certainty that you're begging the question that quantity decreases quality here. Your first point (I think, there's a few confusing points I think are typos) is basically saying that. If so, feel free to actually make the argument.
Your second point, that universities with multiple campuses will not produce better graduates than a bunch of universities, seems strange to me. This is not how anything else in the world works. Why would it be true for universities? Would Harvard be a better school if it closed its separate campuses? Again, you're just asserting here.
Your third point: I agree I'd fail at building a second Harvard. However, Harvard has succeeded at building a second Harvard. It's called Yale. Likewise both do expand their class sizes without too much issue. And numerous other systems have opened up new campuses. Again, you just seem to assert we can't do this.
If you want to make an argument as to why any of this is I'm willing to listen. But you're not really providing anything I can follow.
Nonsense. The University of California has >250,000 students, and the Cal State system has nearly half a million. They just open more branch campuses when they need to expand. There's no reason Harvard couldn't do the same -- except that they do indeed want to remain selective for prestige purposes.
The "University of California" is a *system* of universities, none of which enroll more than 50,000 students. I don't think anyone has yet figured out the trick of expanding a *single* residential university much past that level. And I don't think anybody has figured out the trick of building a system of universities where each campus has the prestige or the quality of the flagship campus - UC Merced is not a substitute for UC Berkely.
There's no reason that Harvard couldn't license out its name to a new university, except that there's no point because that's *not* the same thing as >20,000 people receiving anything like what is considered a Harvard education. The students at University of Harvard at Merced (or wherever) will not be receiving the benefits that the students at Harvard/Cambridge do, they will drag down the name of "Harvard", and neither they nor anyone else will benefit from the fact that their university has "Harvard" in its name.
We can create new universities of approximately the quality of UC Merced. Really, that's about the biggest success story you can find for "hey, let's create a new university!" in the past generation in the United States. This is not considered a solution to the higher education bubble/crisis, because UC Merced is mostly considered a safety school for losers who couldn't even get into Riverside or Irvine.
It is entirely proper for Harvard to not want to be a part of this process. That's what state university systems are *for*.
Well, no, technically it's not. The University of California is *one* university, with one President, a single board of regents, and a large variety of uniform policies.
The distinction isn't specious, either: there are plenty of examples of associations between independent universities, at varying levels of formality and interdependence (the simplest being cross-registration rights, e.g. between MIT and Wellesley). There's a difference between two equals that have at any time an equal right to abandon the cooperation, and the branch campuses of UC which absolutely do need to do what the Regents and President say they have to do.
You're certainly correct that the branch campuses have a considerable degree of at least academic independence, and they vary significantly in their prestige -- but so what? Each department within a single campus also has a considerable degree of academic independence, and they vary significantly in their prestige. A Yale law degree is (apparently) awesome, a Yale physics degree kind of ho-hum.
There certainly is a good reason for Harvard to open branch campuses: to make a lot more money in tuition. They could open Harvard-Indianapolis, take students in the next 5% after the top 5% who got into Harvard-Cambridge, and double their tuition revenue at very modest cost to their reputation. No, nobody would mistake a Harvard-I degree for a Harvard-C degree, but people have no real problem distinguishing between a UC Berkeley degree and a UC Riverside degree -- and the existence of the latter doesn't bring down the former's reputation.
But you're right, they definitely want to preserve the reputation extreme exclusivity gives them, and they want that *more* than they want the extra revenue they could get by opening branch campuses[1]. But why? The reason, I suggest, lies in the fact that Harvard gets only a small part of its income from tuition. The bulk of it is from Federal research grants, and while they could easily get 20,000 more pretty darn good students to fork over Harvard-level tuitions, they could *not* so easily persuade NSF and NIH program officers that funding grants from Harvard-I is just as good, or even almost as good[2], as funding one from Harvard-C.
------------
[1] This is always a major puzzle to the purely economic viewpoint on higher education. Surely with such a fantastic demand the natural expectation is that the supply would expand. Harvard has the resources and experience necessary to open enough branch campuses to serve 5x as many students as it doesn, and earn 5x the tuition money. Why don't they?
[2] In this the winner-take-all nature of funding decisions tends to be important. Funding decisions are not a market, they are decided by a small number of Federal bureaucrats (and faculty on loan), and probably their biggest concern, like bureacrats everywhere, is Not Screwing Up. That means funding a Harvard application is to some extent always safe, because even if it goes pear-shaped people will say well Harvard, who could have expected that? But this means you get a very lopsided result, with enormous amounts of money going to the top handful of institutions, the "safe" bets, and mere scraps to the remainder. A hypothetical Harvard-I would probably get scraps, at least at first, and that probably turns it into a money-losing proposition, because tuition isn't nearly enough to compensate (you can't very well charge *more* fuitiion or a Harvard-I degree than a Harvard-C degree).
But of those 20k, about 5k are undergraduates. It is realistic to imagine that number could double, and maybe quadruple, and if similar numbers are true for the top 20 US universities...
"Bobo" caught on in French, oddly enough.
Yeah I have always liked and used bobo. It works.
At least in English, Bobo is an old cliche name for a monkey or a clown. I suspect that made it hard to redirect to a putative aristocracy.
Looks like France had more interest in naming the particular class Scott talks about here. Bobo is the top contender but I'm fond of "caviar left".
Limousine Liberal?
The issue here is that David Brooks seems to use "bobo" incorrectly (caviar left seems more fitting). In France, bobos are low-key bourgeois. They're not economic elites, they're PMC, journalists, writers or teachers. They don't own 20k square-feet houses on lake Tahoe, they have, for the most part, at most a 120m² condo in Paris (and often less). Not a trend-making class (or at least, not directly), but ther number amongst the upper-middle class makes them the primary public of actual caviar-left elites.
A true aristocracy like this sounds like a dream compared to what America is and where it is heading. As you note, techies were the one big chance to overturn the modern establishment but they aren't likely to succeed (anytime soon).
In what sense are techies really a competing aristocracy? They are mostly also drawn from the same set of elite universities. At most, it is a faction fight *within* the aristocracy, between the `numbers' meritocrats and the `words' meritocrats.
Presumably the technical universities are more merit based in acceptance and graduation.
Techies are not broadly drawn from the same set of elite universities.
The Google founders went to Stanford for graduate school but they went to U. of Michigan and U. of Maryland undergraduate.
Amazon's Bezos went to Princeton which is kind of on the margins. And Bezos had an elite career before quitting to found Amazon.
Facebook was founded by a bunch of Harvard students. The most clear example though being a dropout is certainly a different choice than most aristocrats.
Microsoft was founded by another Harvard dropout and a graduate of the University of Washington.
The founders of Apple went to Reed College (Jobs) and U. of Colorado then UCal Berkeley. (Wozniak)
So we have literally one Ivy League graduate, a few Ivy League dropouts, and two Stanford graduates. And the only reason more than half aren't non-elite is because Facebook had like six founders. There's a lot of people from decent but not top tier universities. Compare this to the Supreme Court (for example) where literally everyone is either a Harvard or Yale alumni except one. Or any number of other big institutions. Tech is notably non-elite university heavy.
I don't think techies can (or even aim to) "overrun the modern establishment." But they are definitely a different elite subculture with different class markers and status symbols. And a whole lot of money to back that up. Whether that money translates into power is another question.
You're talking founders though. If you looked at recent hiring at FAANMG I would guess (does someone know?) that it would be disproportionately Ivy-plus. Which might be part of the `current aristocracy eating the tech competition' thesis.
Also FWIW USNWR ranks Princeton (undergrad college) higher than Harvard College. Harvard is higher on the overall prestige ladder because of stuff like Harvard business school, law school, medical school, (Pton doesn't have any professional schools at all), but for undergrad to claim Princeton is on the margins is...a stretch.
(There is also the other aspect of things where different universities seem to be built to primarily serve different populations. Princeton seems to revolve around its undergrads, MIT around its graduate students, and Harvard around its professional school students. Faculty I know at Oxford like to joke that Oxford revolves around its secretaries).
Disproportionately maybe. But the top universities for the big tech companies are (according to LinkedIn): U. of Washington, UCal Berkeley, Stanford, UT Austin, U. of Southern California, Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon, GIT, UCal LA, and U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I don't find that surprising since most of those are respected for computer science. But only Stanford is an Ivy plus. Maybe Carnegie Mellon could be argued to be close to it. But it seems more like a tier two school from my perception. (Though obviously much better than that in engineering!)
I agree Princeton is an excellent undergraduate school. But I don't think Princeton dominates any broad category of the elite the way the other schools do. Though I might be wrong. We could at any rate resolve it by a definitive list of Ivy plus schools. Though you also have to consider things like the service academies. West Point is not an Ivy League school but is certainly a kind of elite.
And that's kind of where I'm gesturing. Going to UT Austin is, unless you're going into Texas politics or tech, a mid ranked school. But if you care about either of those things it arguably serves you better than Harvard. Since these are social network effects there is an Ivy Plus network that's very prominent in government-media-etc. And there's a... Tech Elite Plus network that's very prominent in tech-science-engineering. And only Stanford and MIT really straddle both. (Though I'm not even sure they do. How often does Stanford or MIT get someone onto the Supreme Court or even into Congress?)
This doesn't mean we're about to have a wordcel vs shape rotator civil war or anything. But it does mean tech is to some extent a different kind of elite.
Yeah this ties into the point I made in some other comment about the role of professional schools. MIT will never get anyone onto the Supreme court...because they don't have a law school.
I agree that there can be different elite filters for different kinds of elites. (And this is a good thing, it is the only remnant of the old `diffuse federated elite' that I gestured at somewhere else). And the Acela corridor elite schools do seem to dominate the government/media ecosystem.
My proposed list of Ivy plus (in roughly geographic order): Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Duke, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley). This list may be non-standard...but interestingly, the majority of schools on it are not actually Ivies.
Actually the assumption you need a law degree at all is reasonably recent. Every justice having a law degree has only been the case since 1958. And the Harvard-Yale dominance is even more recent. All of this is actually a very new system.
But yeah, I think specialization a good thing too. One of those reforms I'd like to see is more dispersal. I think we should avoid a situation where Harvard and Yale have the entire Supreme Court or where individual Ivy League schools have as many Senators as all the schools in entire regions of the country. This is one reason I was heartened by a Notre Dame alum getting onto the Supreme Court and was somewhat annoyed at Biden for not nominating someone from Howard.
Actually, Notre Dame and Howard are interestingly in that they both sit at the top of alternative systems. Catholic universities and HBCUs respectively. Survivors of an older time where elite members of certain identities would have their own systems. Except unlike William & Mary or U. of Miami they're still chugging along even on the national stage, if barely.
"If you looked at recent hiring at FAANMG I would guess (does someone know?) that it would be disproportionately Ivy-plus."
Not true at all. I was a hiring manager at Google for many years and most hires were not Ivy. In fact a prestigious education only mattered for inexperienced folks. And even for those, it only got you to a screener interview. From them on the decision was taken almost exclusively based on interview performance (a semi-standardised competence test).
Big tech is extremely meritocratic on hiring.
The source tweets (tweets referenced in the tweet you link here) about the NYT editorial decision to smear Tech have been deleted.
Does anyone happen to have a record of it?
Wayback machine has it ( https://web.archive.org/web/20221104004538/twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 ). Quoting:
Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias:
"I think a lot of people are totally ignorant of the background dynamic driving the drama around the checkmarks.
But what happened is that a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage.
Instead of covering the industry with a business press lens or a consumer lens they started covering it with a very tough investigative lens — highly oppositional at all times and occasionally unfair.
Almost never curious about technology or in awe of progress and potential.
This was a very deliberate top-down decision.
They decided tech was a major power center that needed scrutiny and needed to be taken down a peg, and this style of coverage became very widespread and prominent in the industry.
Tech executives and investors mostly did not like this change, for understandable reasons. And I mostly agree with them on the merits.
They also just tend to overstate the role of the tech beat within the larger zone of "the media" and started being very angry at "the media."
Because news is a very important part of Twitter, when Twitter set up their verification system they ended up treating journalists as a kind of special class.
All kinds of people *can* be verified, but you usually need to be pretty prominent to get that check.
But if you're a working journalist on staff at a publication, you will end up getting the check just as a routine part of your job — like how you'll probably get a laptop and some business cards or whatever.
As a longtime working journalist, longtime check-haver, and someone who knows lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of media professionals I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.
But Twitter is, among other things, a war zone where tech people and the tech press fight.
And from the side of the tech people, the way totally random journalists would be casually granted their checkmarks was a source of annoyance and resentment.
What's happened is that they have mistaken their own resentment at journalists' unearned checkmark privilege for something that journalists themselves care deeply about and are either willing to pay for or are mad that other people will be able to buy.
I think the Sacks/Andreesen crew should take a deep breath and try to enjoy life as rich and powerful businesspeople and be a little less annoyed by the haters.
And the press should try to normalize coverage of the tech industry as just another business sector.
But for now.
[Dominoes meme showing "A.G. Sulzerberg decides to take a highly oppositional approach to covering tech" knocking over a series leading to "Elon Musk believes people will pay $8/year for a pointless checkmark"]
You can see how deranged this has become by looking at all the people QTing this accusing me of lying that nobody derives status or esteem from their checkmarks.
But I promise you I am telling the truth, this is a big dumb misunderstanding.
[Subtweet: "As a longtime working journalist, longtime check-haver, and someone who knows lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of media professionals I can promise you that working journalists derive zero value, social status, or self-esteem from this.]
I should also say @elonmusk doesn’t need to wait for the rollout of some new system — he should just de-verify me right now, I got the check years ago when I had a staff job and probably couldn’t get one today just like I no longer have a proper press pass.
#deverifyyglesias"
Thanks. That was... uh, something.
It's worth noting that while there are a few corroborating secondary sources, Matt *did* delete his tweet in the face of pushback and I haven't been able to find any primary sources specifically speaking to a top-down decision at the Times. Have any come forward?
It would be interesting to go through every tech article published by the NYT, and see if you can find some exact point in time where all positive coverage of anything tech related suddenly stopped.
It could be pretty damning evidence.
People use it in the Netherlands as well
To the extent that American progressivism/reform = Yankee women, I think you miss something about 20th century WASPs. They surely held the seeds of their own destruction?
Plus there are a lot of sanatorium stays interspersed with the flightier do-good efforts, in the memoirs I've read. Occasionally some real eccentricity. A book called "The Big House" describes such a family. A lighter recent WASP, or almost-WASP, memoir was by Charles (?) McGrath - critic and golf writer - but I can't remember the title ... games and pranks and boats and emotional continence are paramount. It actually was a nice book perhaps to gift if you've a conventional Boomer father whose unexamined politics have brought forth a world so bewildering that only a privileged summer dacha makes it tolerable.
Yankee women were pushing for a number of reforms, and the first wave of feminism succeeded in granting suffrage... but they overreached with prohibition and the side of the culture war representing less feminist immigrant cultures won, setting back feminism for a while:
http://takimag.com/article/prohibition_twin_sister_of_womens_suffrage_steve_sailer/print
_The Feminization of American Culture_ is the best read on this, and traces the process back to the 1850s or so.
>[The meritocrats’] efforts to tear down the old customs and habits of the previous elite was not achieved without social cost. Old authorities and restraints were delegitimized. There was a real, and to millions of people catastrophic, breakdown in the social order,
>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they [WASPs] seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?
>Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes.
Couldn't the simple answer to this be that people with high IQs who succeed in testtaking-based meritocracies just have worse social skills, some autism spectrum etc.?
Not to label it as an objectively bad thing, but when we as Society hand billions of dollars in spending power to a guy who is bad at following mainstream social expectations and 'fitting in', good at taking tests, bad at talking to people, and very good at writing computer code instead of a born and bred WASP whos entire life has revolved around fitting into an intricate Trad social setting, we end up with a society that's less good at social skills and related institutions?
This book seems to harp on 'meritocracy' without unpacking the assumption that merit is derived from test scores alone. While people with high test scores probably do have high IQ, I'm skeptical they have the highest merit as defined by a vague sense of personal quality or socialization-ness that enables them to foster strong cultural healthy institutions under traditional values. I think the best person for that would probably be a WASPy rich kid, and once we stopped setting the WASPy rich kids up for success it's expected the institutions they were literally raised to maintain suffered.
For an example, compare Elon Musk (sorry, lazy example) to a hypothetical 10th century upper east side old money elite. I don't know what Mr. Wasp would be doing with his fortune, but I'm sure we'd all consider it to be quite refined, classy, and trad.
I don't think old institutions needed to be torn down as some form of class resentment or revenge, we just accidentally ended up with a class of elites with so much ""merit"" that they were incapable of keeping them going.
„I don't know what Mr. Wasp would be doing with his fortune, but I'm sure we'd all consider it to be quite refined, classy, and trad. „
Maybe but what his ancestors did to acquire that money was almost certainly worse than whatever Musk is doing by buying twitter. Also I’m fairly sure that Musk was considered a great icon of the left a few years ago. Electric cars etc.
Social skills strongly correlate with IQ. A smart person is in general a charming person, stereotypes nothwistanding.
Maybe stereotypes point to a bimodal distribution? There can be both a majority of charming glad-handers and a minority of nerds on the spectrum.
Of course, but that correlation seems to point to a scenario (I have not seen hard numbers) where there more jocks, if you pass me the term, than nerds, on the spectrum, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers. But they are not glamorous, they are not in narrative, and we don't talk about them.
I like the theory I've seen somewhere, that nerds attract attention because their ability to gain status in recent times through work in relatively asocial STEM jobs is a historical anomaly. The order of things used to be that jocks, even dumb ones, could keep them down all their life, and are now very confused at this disruption.
...The order of things used to be that jocks, even dumb ones, could keep them down all their life.
I don't know about that; the nerds would seem to be better at being skilled artisans (although maybe not at selling their services) although the jocks would probably beat them in a brawl. Depends on how dumb the jock is and how smart or how much of a useful tool the nerd is.
The correlation isn't perfect, so it breaks down for extreme cases. Whoever does the absolute best on IQ tests will probably still have above-average social skills, and vice-versa, but going from "highly trained expert with institutional support" to "enthusiastic amateur with above-average potential" can still be an alarming step down.
Are you sure about that? Almost every skill correlates weakly with IQ, but I'm not aware of research finding IQ is strongly correlated with social skills. I know IQ correlates only weakly with Baron-Cohen's Empathy Test, sometimes called a social intelligence test, which is generally respected. (It's here, if you want to take it: http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/). I believe the correlation is 0.2 which means that IQ accounts for only 4% of the variance in empathy.
I wonder if there's a spotlight effect going on, as well. To get a good university degree and rise to a high rank in business, government, or the civil service, you need to be above average in IQ and agreeableness and below average in time preference. If you spend all your time with such people, it's easy to assume that people in general are like this, and consequently to adopt various utopian ideologies which work well with unusually intelligent, agreeable, forward-thinking people, but not with average people. (This is, I would suggest, why intellectuals tend to be more prone to supporting ideas like communism.) Maybe, from a point of view of keeping elites grounded, it is better to have a genetic-lottery-chosen elite, whose average member can be trusted to know about human folly and short-sightedness because one of his idiot classmates died leading a cavalry charge into an erupting volcano and another blew the family fortune on gambling and prostitutes.
One of my favorite bits in HPMOR (from memory) is Harry (high-status American) saying that status means you don't have to care what people think and Draco (I think of him as having been raised to be a Renaissance prince) saying that status means you have to care about what people think *all* *the* *time*. It might have been power rather than status.
Helpful read by Tanner Greer (Scholar's Stage) on the same subject https://scholars-stage.org/economies-of-scale-killed-the-american-dream/
Surely an important part of the dynamic - not captured in this analysis - is the nationalization (even globalization) of the aristocracy? It seems to me (and maybe you (Scott) even wrote about it sometime) that in ye goode olde days `power' (both economic and cultural) was more diffuse, and local elites in Oklahoma or whatever were unlikely to be Ivy educated or acculturated. And the local newspaper in Des Moines (say) was more important to Iowans than the NYT. Whereas now power is more concentrated in a handful of national (even global) institutions, all of which are overwhelmingly staffed by Ivy plus graduates, producing a kind of ideological monoculture among the elites which was formerly absent.
I suppose you could see a parallel here to `seeing like a state' as well, as in that local but comparatively illegible aristocracies got torn down and replaced by a single national aristocracy (which relies heavily on credentials precisely because of how legible they are).
Why is an interesting question. Improvements in communication technology and greater integration of the economy is surely part of it, but accumulation of regulations favoring large organizations over smaller ones might be part of it also.
"Glass House" includes useful information about elite centralization of the sort you describe and its effect on small to midsize towns.
That book was great, understated for a polemic; the key sentence for me:, "I gave them all those jobs, didn't I?" -- uttered by a cranky elderly glass plant owner*, childless, as his estate planner gingerly broaches the topic - what will you leave the town - a hospital, a school, a park?
Of course now it would be considered gauche to suggest that jobs were in one's gift, while all admiration is for philanthropy towards the maintenance of the needy. At least, an economist would laugh at the notion. But then economists are neither men of business, nor communitarians ...
*Whose life's work would ultimately be dismantled by Bain Capital or the like.
Indeed it was. Prior to the 20th century basically all the Harvard men in government came from New England or connected regions like New York or Ohio. The only presidents to go to Harvard prior to the 20th century were from Massachusetts. This is also why William and Mary is the second most common college for a president to have attended: all those Virginian elites. (Yale will probably overtake it reasonably soon.) Ivy League dominance really only comes to being post-WW2.
As for why, I have guesses but nothing I'm certain about.
Another book that seems relevant to this observation is Charles Murray's "Coming Apart." A key part of his thesis being that in the old days, local elites were much more integrated with local populations. But now they're the same everywhere, watch the same shows, drink the same coffee, while living in their own zip codes, sending kids to their own schools. It's only the working class that retains local characteristics.
A basic observation I can make: I live in the Deep South, and if I meet a lawyer, doctor, dentist, etc. here who has more than a hint of a Southern accent, it probably means he's older than 50, and his accent still isn't all that strong. But you'd better believe the guy who sprays my house for bugs has an accent that's almost incomprehensible (and he, of course, answers to the name "Bubba").
Eric Kaufman's book "whiteshift" has some stuff on WASP formation/culture.
https://willyreads.substack.com/p/whiteshift-book-summary
Re: Ivy League admissions policy, doesn't Brooks also note that Harvard and Co. felt threatened by the GI bill and the post-war economic boom creating much greater demand for higher education, and thus increased competition from non-Ivy league schools? I read this book probably 15 years ago, so I might be misremembering.
Re: architecture, I remember reading somebody discussing this Tartaria phenomenon, and the class component was part of it, for sure. To sum up what I remember: the mid 20th century was a period of tremendous techno-optimism. Mid century modern and brutalist architecture tapped into that optimism, because it seemed futuristic and scientific, with all the right angles and whatnot, which gave it a cool factor, plus the fact that these buildings could be built quickly because a lot of it was just poured concrete and steel was evidence of technological progress and the increasing productivity that was going to lead us to a glorious future of wealth and prosperity. At the same time, old Victorian style or classical buildings, though perhaps pretty, were associated with the bad old days of chamber pots, choking on the smoke from the massive fireplaces needed on every floor to keep them habitably warm, and other practical concerns, but also the bad old days of aristocratic class prejudices, where the scullery maid wasn't allowed out of the basement and one didn't speak to a footmen or valet except to bark orders or rebuke him for some perceived shortcoming.
To add to that, in architecture, there's a lot of generational competition. It can take decades to work your way up to the big money projects, so younger architects had incentives to compose manifestos about how revolting were the old buildings that the senior architects knew how to design and the only true beauty now is the new style invented by the 4 young architects signing this manifesto.
Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" is amusing on this subject.
A lot of this check out, I think, though as explanations go it seems a little complicated (and at points ad hoc). I think an alternative explanation for how we've ended up where we're currently at is that people started inheriting money.
This, I think, is the dark matter of the US economy- we know it's everywhere, but nobody can point to it. And I'm not talking about eight figure windfalls coming down from dead shipping scions; I'm talking about the kind of money you'd expect to see run through a family if, since WW II, each generation kept putting away low-mid six figures. You get to the end of the 20th century, and with compounding interest you've suddenly got a lot of people tripping into low seven figure bonanzas when their parents die.
So- imagine you're a reasonably self-aware, college educated Democrat, both you and your spouse have solid-but-not-great jobs, and you're making $180k-$210k a year gross. That's not bad, but that does NOT cover:
1) The mortgage on a $450k house.
2) Payments/insurance on two Infinity crossovers.
3) Club sports fees for the two kids.
4) Annual vacations that require air travel.
5) College expenses when the kids get out of high school...
And so on. Yet there are millions of Americans who are living that life on these kinds of incomes. So where's the money coming from? And, to the point of this book review, how would coming into that money affect your worldview? Again, assuming the beneficiary is reasonably self-aware, we might expect them to carry some vague sense of guilt and shame at having their lifestyles-- in middle age, no less-- subsidized by monies that they did not year. Which, in turn, could lead to......
1) a lot of mumbling about 'privilege' (while doing nothing tangible to mitigate its cultural/economic influence),.
2) the pursuit of class signifiers which aren't 'too' grotesque, but which still relay the appropriate message.
3) a desire to use education and 'intellect', as opposed to wealth, as a primary status signifier (since we have both, but only the former was earned)
4) an insistence of minimizing the importance of personal agency in life outcomes (since you 'can't be blamed' for living a life that you haven't really earned)
And so on. We talk a lot about the basically uninterrupted spell of economic progress that we've seen since the post-war years, but not (it seems to me) much about how that generational accrual of wealth has affected social standings. My feeling is that its probably driven more of our social outcomes than the people who think the most about these kinds of issues would like to admit.
And so on.
Edit-- 'earn', not 'year'.
This seems like a big part of what’s going on.
In the 19th century, novels frequently were about the broad topic of inheritances. Dickens novels often end with the plucky hero being rescued from poverty by an unexpected bequest.
These days, few novels or movies are about this topic even though, as you rightly say, it's a big one in real life, especially among the novel-writing and screen-writing classes.
Maybe increased average lifespans among the upper class are partly to blame? If a centenarian dies, their heirs are likely to be middle-aged themselves rather than young people struggling to get by.
Right. The lady across the street died at 101 and her 70-something kids inherited the house.
It's more interesting when a younger person inherits.
Did you leave off a digit or something? If your house is only worth $450K then $180-210K a year gives you plenty left over for all those sorts of other things.
I would think that the sort of person you're talking about lives in much more expensive places/houses than that.
Yeah the example is off. Wife and I have average earnings over the last 10 years per annum right in that range. And we have $450k in real estate paid off (only one CRV, also paid off), put we also took 4 vacations involving air travel this year. And we spend another $10k easy on youth sports and another $10k easy on adult sports/clubs.
And we have inherited exactly zero dollars. In fact I have probably spent another $5k/year subsidizing various family. Family has cost me money in my lifetime not been a source of it. I was working close to full time by 14.
The numbers may be off- I'm just spitballing-- but the larger question is this:
Assuming that a higher percentage of families have accrued significant amounts of generational wealth in the past 80 years than at any prior point in history (and this assumption could be wrong, but for the sake of argument let's go with it), then:
a) What would we expect the effects of that to be on socio-cultural dynamics, and
b) Are those expected effects consistent with what we currently see?
I guess, but those numbers are _way_ off for most of the US. Makes the broader point kind of hard to engage with.
Yeh. And actually there’s no way to reduce the average wealth discrepancy between white and black people without greater inheritance tax, but that’s rarely mentioned. There’s a lot of shouting about white supremacy guaranteeing that the average white person has y net worth while the average black person has x net worth where y is significantly greater than x.
Often this is the mean not the median, and the people doing the shouting are the people doing the inheriting.
> And actually there’s no way to reduce the average wealth discrepancy between white and black people without greater inheritance tax.
I have a dog in this fight, as a Black man; I'm not quite so sure about this. There are things (such as culture) that lead to increased income and wealth attainment; these things, like inheritance, are highly heritable. It may be possible that over generations, cultural changes occur such that Black people are able to acquire more wealth independent of tax structures.
I have often wondered about why we don’t hear much about inheritance in modern pop culture and this is a great explanation.
It also explains how people living seemingly middle-class lives can afford to live in very expensive cities.
Those number seem a bit off and seem very NY/SF/DC focused.
In much of the country that lifestyle really is possible even if you “only” make 180-210k a year as long as you are reasonable about things.
Note that Woke does nothing to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
To give one example - if large companies would stop putting up roadblocks to unionization, this would result in a transfer of concrete material benefits to black, and brown, and yellow, and red and white working class people greater than all the corporate diversity committees ever formed, all the Twitter manifestos ever penned, all the unisex bathroom signs ever to be hung.
Running the numbers on that budget:
1. The mortgage on a 450k house: Let's say 45k/year at current 30yr rates, but until recently it would have been like half that.
2. 100k of cars every 10 years: 10k/yr + liability insurance 2k/yr
3. Club sports fees for the two kids: 2k/yr
4. 2 week annual vacation ~6k
5. College for 2 kids amortized over 21 years: 20k/yr
Total: 45+10+2+2+6+20 = 85k/yr
Umm yeah that's totally doable on a 200k combined income
Re techies becoming nu elites:
It will happen as soon as techies learn the codes, protocols, and requirements of elite behavior.
Or, us nerds need to follow the law of eliteness (not elitism): Rule not with overwhelming force, but with attractive power.
The incessant need to be seen as smarter than, and the obnoxious competitions that we succumb to to demonstrate our ability actually counteract whatever authority we wish to establish.
Now, you may think yachting or polo obnoxious. But you’d be wrong. The silly hobbies of the old elite remained hidden from the masses. A nu-elite, posting on twitter, however, broadcasts their weaknesses (and strengths). And this, while entertaining, sows division. Fame and infamy, two sides of the same coin. Entertainers have haters.
As tech continues to expand into “softer” fields, like with AI-generated art and literature, soon it will be cool to understand exactly how the machines that influence our culture operate.
In the meantime, engaging playfully with the humanities will continue to pay dividends to us geeks who have the energy to invest in such non-practical pursuits.
On this note, I do hope that Scott and his readers will take another look at contemporary architecture (art too, but arch, at the nexus of art and tech, would be a good starting point). You may wish to review the book “Learning from Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. It does a good job of explaining how to appreciate the banality of middle America.
And the works of Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid may shine light on why brutalism (see: Corbusier), as ugly as it may be, has value if only to inspire its successor styles.
In general, the split between STEM and Liberal Arts may be chalked up to a difference between convergent and divergent thinking. While engineering problems have a right answer, and arbitrary chains of right answers compose into gigantic towers, the process of evolution in the arts seeks to discover new questions, and this necessitates constant critique (deconstruction) of the status quo, making things worse before we accumulate the will and insight to make them better.
One minor correction: James B. Conant was no longer president of Harvard in 1955. He'd left in 1953 to become the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Nathan Pusey became president in 1953. His Wikipedia article says:
"During his presidency of Harvard, Pusey overhauled the admissions process, which had been biased heavily in favor of the alumni of New England-based boarding schools, and began admitting public school graduates based on scores obtained on standardized tests such as the SAT. This was highly controversial with the school's alumni population but set the stage for diversifying the student body and faculty."
I read Nicholas Lemann's book on standardized testing about 25 years ago, in which Conant plays a large role, so I too took away the impression that Conant (who played giant roles in mid-century America - e.g., Conant was on the committee that picked Hiroshima for the first A-bomb) did it, but the timelines don't match up. On the other hand, Conant might well have gotten to the same point at the same time as Pusey did. Conant ardently believed in meritocracy as crucial to the Cold War.
Alternative explanations (among many) to explain The Sixties, which didn't start until around the assassination of JFK on 11/22/63 and the Beatles going on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964.
- Somebody suggested to me that the world moving so far to the left culturally over the course of 60s was due to the Vatican 2 council of 1962-1965 liberalizing the Roman Catholic Church, the chief institutional bulwark of reaction for centuries. The Catholic Church was riding high at the time, especially in America, so Pope John XXIII's decision out of the blue to call a council to modernize the church might serve best as the unmoved mover behind The Sixties.
- The invention of The Pill used to be cited all the time as the cause of The Sixties. I don't hear it much anymore, but that's because fewer people can remember back that far.
There are quite a few other plausible theories.
I always thought it was LSD
Yep, that and PoMo definitely played their part. An insightful article along these lines: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
To quote myself from 12 years ago:
"Although it is rarely stated explicitly, the traditional family rests on a basic assumption: that in the vast majority of cases, a woman needs (or at least benefits greatly from having) a man to provide for her. And for most of human history, that was simply true, because much of the business of survival involved physically strenuous activities--first hunting, later agriculture, and even, fairly recently, heavy industry--to which men were significantly more suited, and which were incompatible with maternal care of infants.
"By the late twentieth century, however, technology and its attendant prosperity together allowed women to be more or less fully competitive with men at the majority of reasonably well-paying occupations. Meanwhile, medical advances have vastly reduced the amount of time a woman has to spend caring for infants in order to be confident of raising a small number of them to adulthood. Thus, for the first time in history, a critical mass of women have truly come to need men, as the old feminist saying goes, 'like a fish needs a bicycle'.
"And it is this newfound independence that has brought about the destruction of the traditional family, not vice versa. While the conventional wisdom characterizes men as reveling in their sexual freedom while women still pine for a stable marriage and family, it is in fact women who have shifted their position on marriage most dramatically. Well over half of divorces, for example, are instigated by women, and the surge in extramarital sexual partnerships, from casual relationships to long-term unmarried cohabitations, would be impossible without women's consent to them--something that would have been simply unheard-of fifty years ago, when most women's economic stability was dependent on marital stability. Today's women, freed by the prospect of financial independence, can now structure their personal relationships the way men have long preferred to: based on emotional preference, rather than material need. And as it turns out--for many of them, though certainly not all of them--emotional preference is less conducive to stable, lifelong marital commitment than material need used to be."
This is all correct, and it does need to be accounted for in any explanation. While it did have some reinforcement mechanisms, patriarchy didn't really take much effort to keep in place when technology ensured that a woman was literally an economic liability, one that her father was prepared to pay a dowry to get off his hands. And so this patriarchal model is the way that most societies went about reproducing themselves.
Though it's worth noting that there have been historical societies in which women with children were generally able to provide for their own and their offspring's caloric needs, and those societies took on a matrilocal form, with weak marriages and men normally not living with their wives and children.
What's happening currently is that, while our social norms are changing and patriarchy has been overthrown, single motherhood is still considered low-status and undesirable. And with birth control and abortion, it's now easily avoidable. So instead people spend most of their youth in a quasi-matrilocal lifestyle of low-commitment sexual relationships, but without the children that historically accompanied them.
Yeah. By 1960 we had stomped infant mortality, killed the AIDS of its time (syphilis) nearly dead, and upper-middle-class men weren't working with heavy machinery and ships but in office buildings.
Also notable is the industrialisation of fabric production. Probably 90% of female labour through history was in spinning and weaving fabric as a near-constant activity. This was itself also a vital activity on par with farming for supporting a family.
> for most of human history, that was simply true, because much of the business of survival involved physically strenuous activities--first hunting, later agriculture, and even, fairly recently, heavy industry
Plough agriculture, yes. That relied on men to till the soil that allowed more intensive farming and produced the deeply patriarchal societies that dominated the greater Mediterranean and Europe. But in places like Sub Saharan Africa, Polynesia and North America there was a different subsistance pattern (hoe farming or horticulture) where most of the work was of the sort that could be done by a mother at the same time as she watched her child. Men would slash and burn to somewhat prepare an area of soil before buggering off to hunt (supplementing what the women harvested) or make war. Presumably a similar relationship existed in many hunter-gatherer societies.
Studies have found that the different gender relations produced by these two types of farming persist in modern attitudes towards women in e.g. the workplace or politics.
I'm not sure how pastoralists such as the Maasai of E. Africa fit into this.
Source: https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/09/13/hoe-culture.html
It probably sounds weird, but all of your "mysteries and concepts" seem completely un-mysterious to me. To wit:
Tartaria: Big plain boxes are easier and cheaper to build than old-fashioned buildings, so the for-profit businesses that build most modern buildings for practical purposes--and want to save money for their shareholders--prefer them. (Similarly, once basic manufactured clothing became vastly cheaper and easier to wear than hand-tailored outfits, practical people flocked to the former.)
Partisan polarization: it's no worse than it was in the past--it's just become more uniform because modern media have unified the political playing field. 100 years ago, local Democrats and Republicans hated each other, but their representatives could do business in Washington (or the state house) on matters of common interest because the local enmities were far away. Today, everyone back home knows exactly what their representatives are up to at all times, so the latter must keep up the appearance of bitter partisan hostility even in Congress.
High modernism: the old upper class was industrial, so its members at least paid lip service to industry (while pining, as all wealthy moderns do, for the simpler pleasures and grander glories of the pre-modern aristocracy: country estates, servants, contempt for the filthy masses of starving peasants). The meritocrats, on the other hand, earned their wealth as managers and professionals, so they're freer to disdain industry completely, and openly profess their hatred for the industrialism that raised non-elites to comfortable lifestyles complete with a basic dignity far closer to their own.
Meritocracy: Ruling classes aren't by nature more or less competent in a general sense--rather, they're more or less heedful of the needs and concerns of those they rule. Over time, their concern and understanding for those beneath them inevitably decays, and they get replaced by a new ruling class less remote from, and hence more aware of, the rest of the population.
Culture wars: The cultural "flip" that created the Bobos was perhaps larger than most, but it was hardly unique--we've witnessed several since then. The tension among adjacent layers of society seeking to signal their superiority to those below them and similarity to those above them ensures that class signals will be in a constant state of flux, with every signal ceasing to become effective the moment a lower class figures out how to emulate it.
College admissions: All elites begin as meritocracies by some criterion--whether industrial/mercantile success or academic ranking. But in seeking to pass their elite status on to their children, they inevitably shift towards rejecting meritocracy in favor of hereditary or cultural traits that they can pass down to their rapidly-regressing-to-the-mean descendants. That's what we're seeing today, as the children of the meritocrats of the 1960s eviscerate the standards of merit that once elevated their parents, in favor of new definitions of merit defined by crude, politicized cultural signals that are easy for the mediocre scions of the elite to learn and absorb.
I'll stop there (mostly because I don't know anything about Fussell), but if anybody's still reading, congratulations to you...
There's an idea for a substack: ACX in a witty/flippant nutshell. Mark me as a subscriber (also 1% of your profits, if you make it).
I recently ran across an explanation for “the stunning rise in divorce, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy rates” that is so powerful that I am shocked that I wasn’t aware of it before. In short, it was changes in a few laws (specifically welfare and divorce law), just the sort of subtle thing that is described in the review book: https://fireflydove.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-libertarian-view-of-gay-marriage/
So the libertarian argument against gay marriage is that people should be forced to do things for the good of society -- and it's a libertarian argument because "things" doesn't include taxation.
I’m sorry, what??
No, that's the conservative argument. The titular libertarian in the linked review is just arguing for epestimic humility about it, i.e., at least considering that it might be true that gay marriage could possibly be bad for society.
I can see it's a conservative argument. I just don't see why it would be labeled as libertarian.
Ah, seems that the original title was "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other" (see http://web.archive.org/web/20120531065313/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html). Calion's link goes a conservative's blog where it was reposted as "A Libertarian View of Gay Marriage" (since the original author was a libertarian).
Are you saying that considering the consequences of changes in the law, even while explicitly denying that you are weighing in one way or the other about the desirability of those changes, is ipso facto arguing against those changes???
Does epistemic humility require libertarians to consider left wing arguments like "inequality is bad for society"? Apparently not.
Why wouldn’t it? Again, are you saying that considering possible negative outcomes from a change indicates that one opposes that change? That in order to be in favor of (or, indeed, neutral toward) a change requires that one only list its *positive* effects?
I think he's saying that libertarians never (or hardly ever?) consider/talk about the left wing arguments in favour of gay marriage.
Which would be…?
Changes,to a few laws can be the result of years of grass roots pressure (as with female suffrage), or can defend from on high , reflecting only elite concerns. I think that an important distinction.
And so the intention of a change in the law is the only meaningful consideration, not its outcomes?
Architecture: I did a popular long Twitter thread on the change in architecture for city halls before and after 1945, comparing apples to apples: e.g., San Diego's various city halls.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1226758411653545984
Styles were already changing in the 1930s. E.g., San Diego's 19th Century city hall was ornate, but its 1938 city hall was relatively streamlined, but still elegant and nicely detailed. It's 1964 city hall looks like worker housing in Sao Paulo, judging from the lone picture of it I could find online (unlike the many pictures of the two previous city halls.
One thing to note: coal-powered cities were so sooty that old buildings had gone dark and ugly and it seemed easier to just tear them down and put up something made of glass and steel. But in 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started having Paris's grand old buildings washed, with spectacular results.
Who builds worker housing? Nebbishy bureaucrats with a budget. Since D-FDR got a lock on the federal bureaucracy it's been a D patronage system for unfireable nebbish bureaucrats. As the federal bureaucracy has expanded with the morals of a cancer cell for ninety years, they have built everything like worker housing.
Anyone who stuck their neck out and built something pretty and classy would lose their budget fight. Tasteless worker housing wins budget fights.
Who can be crazy in their private life? Who wants to be? Unfireable nebbishes with a patronage system. Drugs, sterile sex outside work, no problem. Since D-LBJ made the D patronage system federal law around 1963 and accelerated its expansion with the morals of Long Binh Jail, we've seen sex drugs rock and roll sacralized.
What you describe here:
"So I was wondering if the right and left poles might just flip, over and over, in a long-term secular cycle."
Is spot on, and it's exactly what the philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate. There's been a constant swing back and forth between the right/left divides, each at times playing the "establishment" and the other the "rebel", pushing and pulling, while the entire thing trends/spirals in a more complex and evolutionarily appropriate direction for the complexities of the time.
Definitely something you should look into more if you haven't already. Ken Wilber, Clare Graves, Don Beck, Jeff Salzman, and especially currently Steve McIntosh's "Institute for Cultural Evolution".
A late friend of mine taught history at Yale when Yale junked it's Jewish quota for the class entering in the fall of 1965 (a decade behind Harvard). He said even being the grandson of Senator wouldn't have gotten George W. Bush in in 1965 rather than 1964. The intellectual atmosphere of the campus changed immediately in 1965, became much more electric, he recalled
Bobo, standing for "bourgeois-bohème", is pretty common in French (which may or may not have coined it, it's unclear on Wikipedia). It's used in France especially, I believe, to describe a certain kind of Parisian. We occasionally use it for the equivalent in Montreal too for the artsy, urbane social class that lives primarily in a specific neighborhood. It's gently derisive, and overall a pretty good (if vague) descriptor of the people it refers to. You English speakers should use it more!
I don't really buy the premise of the book, but I did wander in to this social circle once by accident in my youth. A friend of mine had by weird historical contingency ended up on one of their soccer youth teams, and got invited along to the parties every year by fiat. I was her plus one.
My overwhelming impression was of basically nice (but money-obsessed) noodleheads. During the secret santa (it was Christmas), gift values were all over the map because they didn't have a sense of the difference between $20 and $200, and something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason? Only one or two were employed in a traditional sense, and those were sinecures- part-time work that paid $400,000 a year, to 'tide them over' I think was the phrase; they were embarrassed about it. Another one cornered me pretty early on and started asking a bunch of unusual questions about my personal life, not just where I went to college or what my major was, but odd little details. I was rescued by my date who walked up and said (to both of us), "she's trying to figure out whether you're old money or new money." I just said, "Oh! I am not money." And then we had a little laugh about it and went back to a normal and mutually respectful conversation.
They were perfectly nice, really, but it was eye-opening how much it was clearly a social network first, where money just happened to flow very freely and was a primary topic of conversation; it was absolutely a 'class' barrier that I'd crossed, in the old-fashioned sense. I wasn't there nearly long enough to get a bead on the deeper mythologies of the set, but they definitely had a parallel understanding of money that made 'earning' it worse, not better. They were also pretty tryhard about being 'eccentric' and quirky, I guess because it was taboo to talk about accomplishments so they needed something else to talk about over dinner, and the ones winning the game were the ones who made the money seem like it just sort of rained down on them from the clouds.
In retrospect, the most interesting thing about it is that all of their wealth depended on internal and inward-facing connections to this group, or I guess being part of inherited/family wealth from it, and nothing depended on any reputation or actions outside of it; they lived on investment income and such, but hired other people to make the investments. So it seems like a sort of socioeconomic 'dark matter' where I have no idea how many people live like this or how much wealth overall they possess. It was just a few dozen at the party, anyway. I'm not sure it even *matters*; I think in economic terms, their function was mostly to be the name at the top of large currency reservoirs being exploited by the financial industry. Whether they're shrinking as a group or holding on in to the 21st century, I have no idea, and I can't imagine there being any broader social consequences either way.
> something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason?
Presumably some marketing consultant a couple of rungs of the socioeconomic ladder below said party-goers worked very hard to to make it that chrismas' fad, so that some company in Italy could soak lemon peel in vodka for six weeks then sell it at an astronomical markup.
See also: Jägermeister in the anglophone world; the invention of Baileys in 70's London; $SUPERFOOD_DU_JOUR; etc.
Have you seen the lead-crime meta-analysis which claimed to have found evidence of publication bias having exaggerated the effect of lead on crime by an order of magnitude?
https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf
How can it have exaggerated the effect by an order of magnitude if the meta-analysis concludes that lead is responsible for between 7% and 28% of the total fall in homicides?
It seems to me the meta-analysis is totally compatible with lead playing a major role, perhaps even the major role in the bump in violent crime between approximately 1960 and 2000. As the study notes:
> "It is possible that the large differences in our samples can be reconciled. For example, the large difference between the individual and area samples may be because crime has fallen at the extensive margin rather than the intensive margin. Tcherni-Buzzeo (2019) observe that around 5% of the population are responsible for 50% of crime, and that the fall in crime in the US is likely due to falls in this high-crime population, rather than less crimes per individual in that population. If less lead pollution only meant less probability of committing crime for this small slice in the population, it might nevertheless lead to a large fall in crime at the area level. A second possibility is that relatively small effects of lead at the individual level can be exacerbated by peer effects from other lead affected individuals. Recent work has found these peer effects can even affect those without elevated blood lead levels (Gazze et al., 2021). In areas with high levels of lead, the individual effects of lead may be compounded by peers also having high levels of lead, leading to a much larger impact at the area level."
If you push a dynamic system out of an attractor state is is not unlikely to enter a region with a gradient away from the attractor state in all sorts of different dimensions.
EDIT: Oh wait! It seems we are referring to two different versions of the study. I am referring to the published version here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667
Your link seems to be a pre-publication discussion draft. So apparently significant corrections were made before publication (compare 0%-36% of fall in homicide rate to 7%-28%).
Bobos came out in the era of the "Stuff White People Like" website. It was certainly a moment, and Brooks captured it—not the reality, on the ground, but a way to look at things that made sense for people in it.
Perhaps it resonated because most of Brooks' facts were simply invented.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2004/04/01/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/ — worth a read not just for the careful "oh wait, your telling anecdote is literally not true, the opposite is true", but for Brooks' attempt to intimidate the journalist. 2004 was the end of a long era where you could just make stuff up.
Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books? They're not scholarship ("big synthetic theory inducted from data"); they're not journalism ("just the facts"). They seem to be GPT-3 prompts avant la lettre, where the commentariat is GPT-3. Put in a Brooks line, and out comes a million comments.
Someone should write that phenomenon up.
I'm guessing the consumer tastes stuff may be the focus of the five-sixths of the book Scott is ambivalent about reviewing? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the supposed differences in consumer tastes (liberals like arugula and lattes!) Brooks wrote about were shallow attempts to describe college/non-college and urban/rural cultural divides.
Good catch, thank you for sharing.
Steven Colbert had a word for this - "truthiness." For things that feel true in the gut regardless of if they're actually true.
"Stuff White People Like" postdates Brooks' book by almost a decade. The central conceit of "Stuff White People like" is stereotyping all white people with the traits associated with particular subcultures of affluent, educated, mostly liberal and urban whites in the same way that other racial categories get stereotyped with the traits of particular subcultures. The overlap comes from the fact that they're both doing "avocado toast" bits. You can forgive the latter more than the former because the author is joking. That his stereotypes are funny, but flimsy if you treat them seriously is the point, whereas Brooks is serious even when his stereotypes don't actually hold up in reality.
"Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books?"
Can you elaborate? The point of these books for the authors is at least partially "to make money." Do you mean, why do people READ these books? In the case of Class, the answer is: Because it was funny.
“Stuff white people like” was also pretty funny if you were there at the time. But somehow people want Brooks to be more than a clown.
This was a really interesting review that was a joy to read, but I feel like the lede was _still_ buried right at the end in the penultimate paragraph where Scott tries to sketch out the tech utopia failing in 2015. I can't imagine myself being remotely better qualified to make that call than Scott, but it seems to me that battle hasn't been won or lost yet. FTX and the collapse of whatever Web 3.0 was just set us all back a few years, too. But then Elon took twitter...I don't know, man. While both political parties are led by two Octogenarians it feels like we're still in a holding pattern. Lots of alpha in 2024.
Wait, Web 3.0 collapsed? When did this happen?
peaked, at least, so they say https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1568717675614044160
I don’t understand. The last news I heard on this subject was Tim Berners-Lee bitching that Web3 was not Web 3.0, and kind of a fraud.
I'm guessing that that is the "collapse" - that it wasn't different, just marketed as being so.
Web 3.0 was and is a marketing term. Largely snake oil driven.
Really? TBL seems pretty serious about it.
Well, yeh. But his ideas are different from the marketing guff which is mostly what I get subjected to.
He makes a distinction between Web3 and Web 3.0.
Yeh. So Web 3.0 is the stuff I’m sceptical about. I respect TBL of course.
> What would get printed in the New York Times - previously the WASP aristocracy’s mouthpiece, but now increasingly infiltrated by the more educated newcomers?
Hasn't the NYT been owned by Jews since the late 19th century when Adolph Ochs bought it? Admittedly, he was a German Jew rather than some later-arriving eastern European.
As for the demerits of "meritocracy" it's worth keeping in mind that the traits which lead to individual self-advancement, which Greg Cochran calls "moxie", sometimes are undesirable for everyone else:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/natural-aristocracy/
The New York Times was a Republican partisan paper from roughly 1851 (when it was founded) to 1884. Abandoning its partisan readership accelerated the decline and Adolph Ochs (a media baron and the son of immigrants) bought it and reformed it into its current structure. He leaned into neutrality, decreased the price, and gave it a wider circulation. It grew steadily in the early 20th century and achieved international fame mainly in the Interwar Years. And ever since then it's been passed down to a child of the owner.
So yeah, it was never the WASP aristocracy's mouthpiece. It was a Republican rag (in a Democrat majority city) and then a long term play by a Jewish media tycoon that worked out spectacularly.
Ultimately I think all of these big social changes are overdetermined. If you find yourself asking "Which of these fifteen different totally plausible factors caused this massive social change?" then the answer is usually "All of them, plus a few dozen more". Anything that isn't massively overdetermined by dozens of different factors doesn't cause a massive social change.
I think that "replacement of one elite by a different elite" definitely isn't a bad lens to view the massive social changes of the mid 20th century through. I certainly don't think that the whims of the Harvard University Admissions Department are enough to explain it (these whims were themselves caused by some of the dozens of other social factors at play) but they're some part of it.
Economic factors seem like they should be pretty huge here. The idea of the US being ruled by a bunch of "Boston Brahmins" seems ridiculous now, simply because Boston isn't that important or wealthy any more. The Boston Brahmins couldn't possibly have held on to power in the face of changes that moved the economic centre of gravity of the country far to the south and west.
It's interesting to see all the changes in fashion, all the "this is now high-status, this is low-status", all the little morals of the little morality plays that make up most of our culture's fiction and news reporting, all as existing downstream of the signalling needs of a new elite. And of course elite rotation wasn't a one-time process, there's now a whole bunch of elite castes competing for our attention, and all culture is just elite-on-elite warfare now.
Nice. Well said.
Yeah. I wonder how much of this was due to us having basically killed infectious disease dead. We went from most parents burying several children due to infant mortality c. 1880 to something like 98 percent of kids reaching 18 in 1960. Death in childbirth? Two orders of magnitude less common. Same for lots of other infectious disease.
Not really addressed elsewhere in the comments- the rise of socialism as an ideology among the influential elite of the US.
While a number of intellectual superstars were folded into the space race on the side of America, there was also a broad adoption of Communist ideals among newer strivers, as a part of the conflict with old money aristos. This had a negative (imo) impact on just about everything from social structures, publuc expenditures, economic management, and nationalism.
The failure of the USSR has not had as much of a muffling effect as I had hoped on the pursuit of those ideals.
"broad adoption of Communist ideals among newer strivers"
This is a big topic, but the number of sympathizers, fellow travelers, and outright agents in the oh-so-social class has been a problem for a long time.
The connections that Brooks makes between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy's power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture that first emerged in the 60s doesn't seem to stand up to even moderate historical scrutiny, in all honesty. Some issues that immediately come to mind off the top of my head:
-The idea that the cultural values that Brooks calls "bohemianism" became dominant in America for essentially parochial reasons limited to the US (a change in university admissions policies, the displacement of a previous aristocracy) doesn't track well with the fact that these social changes happened around the same time in basically every part of the western world (and to a lesser degree in Asia as well).
-The general phenomenon of the power of the WASP aristocracy being displaced by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing--there are books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man* and Burnham's *Managerial Revolution* that were already observing the trend. The decades before the 50s saw WWII, the New Deal, and the general enrichment and empowerment of the various ethnic immigrant groups--all of these were vastly more convincing causal factors of the decline of the WASP aristocracy than one individual university president deciding to admit a moderately larger amount of non-WASPs. The dominant social orthodoxy that the bohemians were challenging was *this* orthodoxy, which had already displaced the WASP aristocracy by the time that they emerged--he postwar social order features as something of a glaring missing link for all of Brooks' analysis.
-The idea of a clean break between WASP culture and bohemianism, with the former being a separate, distinct group of people that overthrew the latter doesn't make a lot of sense. The WASPs were heavily associated with set of a few denominations--episcopalianism, congregationalism, and unitarianism--and today all of these are generally considered some of the most liberal, bohemian-ish religious groups in the country. It's probably more accurate to say that many young members of the WASP aristocracy simply adopted some bohemian values (at least superficially)
Yeah I see Brooks as thinking Harvard led the way when it looks more like it followed along (and being more famous later, got the credit/blame as a result).
What if it's just aesthetic taste changing without any particular shift in underlying values? The main difference, it seems, between the "aristocratic elites" and the "meritocratic elites" is that they blanket themselves in different displays of wealth and charity.
I think it's a mistake to think of the modern elite "class" as being like an actual class division. You do have to jump through certain hoops and take on various cultural attitudes, but fundamentally it is a group that allows entry to outsiders.
Further, today's elites don't typically think of themselves as elites. I recall listening to a political speech decrying globalist elites with a man who had been accustomed to charging $450 an hour as a lawyer, who had previously been a member of parliament, and who was at the time the chief of staff to a Senator. And he wondered aloud "Who even are are these elites they keep talking about?" oblivious to the obvious reality that he was one.
I won't go so far as to say that today's wealthy and powerful have *earned* their position in society, but for the most part they haven't been born into it. People like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks, etc didn't grow up with famous names. They know what it's like to not be important, looking up at the important people from the outside. And while I don't think that necessarily makes them humble or empathetic, it does create a different worldview to someone who is born into power and privilege.
In comparison, "Old money" consciously resented "New money" because they might have been just as rich, but they weren't *like us* - there was an actual group identity among the elites. And even that wealthy "aristocracy" was a less exclusive version of the old fashioned actual aristocracy where you know that when your father dies you will become an Earl, etc.
In a real class system you are what you're born as, and the notion of "social mobility" is weird and confusing. The people at the bottom might dislike people at the top for one reason or another, but they never envy the position of the elites because there is no concept that they could take it for themselves. You might as well wish to steal someone else's parents for yourself - it just doesn't compute.
Lord of the Rings is an accessible example of this. The movies depicted the Frodo/Sam relationship as being personal devotion between two peers, and Sam's "Mr Frodo" is just something he says. But the book is written very much from an old class perspective, which obviously Tolkien was marinated in as an Englishman of his era. Frodo is older, much richer, and occupies a vastly higher social position than Sam. Sam calls Frodo "Mr Frodo" because he is in a lower class and he must always address his superiors respectfully. Frodo never tells Sam "Please, don't bother with the "Mr" thing," because although his personal regard for Sam is high the idea of waving away the class distinction between them is not even thinkable.
And of course it's that tension between the understanding of Frodo and Sam occupying very different social positions on one hand and yet becoming very close because of their shared adversity that makes their relationship dynamic interesting. But modern audiences have become so unfamiliar with class as a concept that it becomes widely perceived as homoerotic.
The class system failed because people outside of the elite gained power and wealth that couldn't be resisted and were able to supplant the elite class, despite not having a class identity of their own. I don't think that can happen so easily today - someone who is an "outsider" but gains wealth, status, and power just gets assimilated into the elite.
Though Sam became Master of Bag End, Mayor of Michel Delving, and patriarch to a clan that seems to have been to the Westmarch what the Brandybucks were to the eastern border. Not bad for someone born a servant.
The Shire was a very class based society (and Tolkien is on record in thinking that deference was good for the person practicing it, albeit maybe not for the one receiving it). But it was clearly somewhat open to social mobility, albeit not quickly. That was Lobelia Sackville-Baggins's driving goal, after all (complete with fancifying the family name), and she nearly managed it twice. Bilbo's own parents were a match between a middling if propertied squire and a daughter of the closest thing the Shire has to a noble family.
And it was a driver of Otho Sackville-Baggins' social ambitions, as well:
"Customs differed in cases where the 'head' died leaving no son. In the Took-family, since the headship was also connected with the title and (originally military) office of Thain, descent was strictly through the male line. In other great families the headship might pass through a daughter of the deceased to his eldest grandson (irrespective of the daughter's age). This latter custom was usual in families of more recent origin, without ancient records or ancestral mansions. In such cases the heir (if he accepted the courtesy title) took the name of his mother's family – though he often retained that of his father's family also (placed second). This was the case with Otho Sackville-Baggins. For the nominal headship of the Sackvilles had come to him through his mother Camellia. It was his rather absurd ambition to achieve the rare distinction of being 'head' of two families (he would probably then have called himself Baggins-Sackville-Baggins) : a situation which will explain his exasperation with the adventures and disappearances of Bilbo, quite apart from any loss of property involved in the adoption of Frodo."
<i>I think it's a mistake to think of the modern elite "class" as being like an actual class division. You do have to jump through certain hoops and take on various cultural attitudes, but fundamentally it is a group that allows entry to outsiders.</i>
Most historical elites allowed entry to outsiders. Such entry might not have been common, and it might have taken a few generations for a poor family to rise to the top (though not always -- see Toyotomi Hideyoshi's career for an example), but it was very rare for it to be actually impossible.
> someone who is an "outsider" but gains wealth, status, and power just gets assimilated into the elite.
That noticeably didn't happen to Trump!
On the topic of downplaying one's wealth, I think a big part of the reason Trump hasn't been assimilated is that he explicitly rejects the elite's aesthetic sensibilities. He has the money and the power, but he never got the memo that you're supposed to decorate with blankets woven by indigenous artists.
Trump is a wild mishmash of class markers. On the one hand he takes conspicuous consumption to extremes that even the old blue-bloods would find gauche. He has gold toilets and handmade suits and statues carved from Italian marble, along with gold leaf on every available surface. On the other hand he appears on WWE and enjoys fast food and well-done steaks with ketchup on them.
I honestly think that's a lot of his appeal, too. Trump in a 5-figure suit eating McDonalds on his private jet comes off as a lot more genuine than a Harvard-educated politician putting on a flannel shirt and cowboy boots for a photo op down at the BBQ place.
It's signals genuineness if you assume no one could like blue tribe stuff, I suppose.
Back in the 80s and 90s and even some of the 00s, he certainly seemed to be assimilated.
Gauche, but able to fit in with the NYC elite, at least on the surface. Maybe it was just the NYC elite rolling their eyes behind his back while resigning themselves to having to put up with him and his children and maybe even his grandchildren. I dunno.
But then he decided to do something different, and ditched the NYC elite and the Democrats. He wasn't really on my radar at all in the late 00s and early 10s, so I don't know how much of this was being telegraphed. I'd love to see an impartial biography of him, but we'd probably need to contact some space aliens to get one.
"But modern audiences have become so unfamiliar with class as a concept that it becomes widely perceived as homoerotic."
Nah, it's perceived as homoerotic because Peter Jackson is a bad filmmaker.
Regarding Native American blankets, it is not surprising that as mass production increases hand made objects become more desirable (especially handmade by "talented" artisans using rare raw ingredients) precisely because pieces of art are a status symbol, this is a general reaction to abundance where we care more about the story behind an object than the object itself. I would urge caution when listening to critiques of changes in art that are overly simplified. Collecting "non western" items as part of an art collection is an extremely WASPy behavior with distinguished roots stretching back to at least the 15th century.
Also the reason a lodge in Tahoe (although I think Aspen is the better choice) is more desirable now is because 1. Electric/Gas heating 2. The rise in Alpine Skiing as a sport 3. The Airplane/Helicopter.
This reminds me of Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995), where quite a lot of time is spent on class descriptions...
I suspect Brooks was heavily influenced by Fussell, and that bobos are an extension of class X. Unless I missed it, I was surprised Brooks didn’t cite Fussell -- even the humor is of similar style (though Fussell is much funnier).
Check again; there's at least one paragraph discussing Fussell by name.
Quote: “why [are] Ivies.. so unwilling to admit more Asians despite their supposed anti-racist principles. They consciously think of themselves as the gatekeeper of a US elite class, and having a 50% Asian ruling class in a 5% Asian country would be really jarring.”
Comment: But this is going to happen. Harvard and the rest of the Ivies can win some battles, but they cannot win the war against Asians. The same will happen as happened with Jewish admissions. The interesting question is rather: What happens next?
A fruitful starting point for predictions is to begin with Brook’s idea that the ruling class is the repository of values, and values change when there is a change in ruling classes. Combine this idea with the insight that in our societies, universities are the gatekeepers & selection mechanism for elites.
Armed with these twin insights, here are three predictions of what is in store for the future:
(1) The rise of Asians as the dominant elite group will mean a partial return to old WASP cultural ideals. Since the “Asian values” of discipline, hard work, and ruthlessness aligns better with the old-WASP elite culture than with the hippie-infected Bobo elite culture.
(2) In the longer term, We will see increased intermarriages at the elite level between Asians and Caucasians, creating a gradually larger mixed-ethnic ruling group. In particular a mixed Asian-North European type. Why? Because this is the only non-Asian group that Asians really respect as a culture. White-skinned North-Europeans (including Ashkenazi Jews) are almost regarded as “honorary Asians”. I am thinking in particular on Japanese, Chinese and Korean Asian ethnicities here, but it is likely even more general.
(3) A parallel development (under the radar for Brooks?) is the rise of women as an elite group in their own right, not as appendages to men's elite status. When it comes to university admissions, the percentage of women has risen even faster than the percentage of Asians during the last 50-70 years. This implies a gradual feminization of the elite culture. The present “woke” culture is an effect of this change. It is essentially the more caring attitude of women toward the not-so-successful in life, translated into elite language & elite culture.
All of this is inevitable, so let us just sit back and enjoy the unfolding of the show.
On #3 Tyler Cowen has written numerous posts on feminization:
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=feminization
Richard Hanania has also written a significant amount about it.
Short version: Tone was set by Jews instead of Calvinists. I think everything else is just a corollary.
> (with the blue-blooded Bush dynasty playing Canute trying to hold back the waves)
Canute did not actually try to "hold back the waves". He wanted to demonstrate to his courtiers precisely the opposite: that he was, in fact, powerless to do so.
I suppose you know that, so is that your argument, that the Bushs consciously demonstrated that they are powerless to stop the decline of their own class?
> Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering.
What does "trad" mean? Traditional?
Yes, that is what "trad" is short for. I think I first heard the term used to describe "trad rock", which meant pre-British Invasion.
Please note that the word bobo did catch in France.
See this 2006 song by a well known singer:
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Bobos_(chanson)
A small note: Apparently Bobo did not stick in the US. But in Europe, french speaking part (France, part of Belgium and Switzerland) it did stick and will be used and understood by many. It stands for Bourgeois Bohème which is a litteral translation. You can even hear a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZzR7-apnKA
I'm surprised that, in a country where most have high-school Spanish lessons, nobody seems to notice a key reason why the very useful coinage "bobos" didn't stick. "Bobo" in Spanish means "dumb," which is something that I immediately realized would be a problem when David Brooks first wrote about the concept in The Atlantic a couple of decades back. I guess he should have asked me first. This is not irrelevant: among the upper and aspiring upper-middle class, knowledge of some basic Spanish is not so very uncommon, and bobo is a very simple, starter-level word. Then again, something similar happened when they launched the "Pajero" car in the US (meaning "Masturbator" in Spanish) to the great merriment of your Guatemalan maid.
Pretty sure the coinage was always meant to have at least a subtly negative connotation. Even if it has no specific meaning as a word in your language, "bobo" is still going to sound a bit silly and childish, like saying peepee for genitals or booboo for a minor injury. So if Brooks knew that the word means "dumb" in Spanish, he wouldn’t necessarily consider that a problem.
Indeed. In French, where bobo is widely used (and is a word for word translation of bourgeois bohemian (bourgeois bohème), to the point I was sure it was a native word, not something imported from English), the term is derogatory. it's not really a strong insult, but it convey some hypocrisy and fake, a trendy pose by people that are, if not stupid, at least unoriginal, and tend to see things with pink colored glasses.
So being associated with dumb is certainly not a problem: bobo's wants to be perceived as intelligent. They are not, at least not at the level they would like to be perceived.
"they stuck to a few standard rich people hobbies (yachting, horseback riding) and distrusted creativity or (God forbid) quirkiness."
This is interesting. Quirkiness has always been a hallmark of European nobility, a trait much overdone to, among other things, set oneself apart from boring, staid, predictable bourgeois. Who of course can't do quirkiness and are always mystified by the aristocrat's penchant for it.
I think it is important to note that the WASPs were culturally descended from the Puritans/Roundheads. This explains the lack of quirkiness and strong deference to the boring and staid.
Hence the common joke/observation that the difference between "crazy" and "eccentric" is how much money you have.
Bobos are not necessarily on the left, politically.
> Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 - these are stratospheric scores.
A sidenote, but it's important to note that this book was written in the late 1990s and published in 2000. Back then, SAT scores near 700 were indeed stratospheric. There have been numerous rounds of "recentering" since then, and as such getting a perfect SAT score is no longer all that rare. By contrast, when Bill Gates took it, getting a perfect SAT score was incredibly uncommon. I think Bill got something like 1590 if memory serves. (Bill Ballmer had a perfect 1600).
> (Bill Ballmer had a perfect 1600).
Steve Ballmer, you mean?
One aspect that Scott barely mentions is the Jewish angle. A significant part of the new elite were comprised of Jews, often from middle-class and lower-middle class backgrounds. They formed a coalition with often poor whites like Bill Clinton who were previously excluded. I think late 20th century liberalism was largely shaped by this union.
What's ironic is that today's Ivy League establishment is substantially Jewish (look at their presidents) yet have increasingly returned to the old WASP elite's habits of "holistic admissions".
This seems pretty depressing, given it implies that keeping meritocracy constant is a rare feat and new elites tend to calcify, become more mediocre over time and then play defensive to keep their gains. Will there be a new Conant and Pusey in our era? I am skeptical. Whatever said about the old WASP elite, they had a certain idealism that the new elite lacks.
The first generation gets in by merit and work. They want their offspring to have an easier road than they did, so they try to make their position hereditary while allowing for the meritorious to rise.
This works until the top end gets top heavy, at which point the top end tries to pull up the ladder away.
This works until the society comes into a crisis. The top end cannot cope since they have long since excluded merit as much as they can. In the good case, you get more people rising by merit and hard work. In the bad case the society gets wiped out.
Turchin has much to recommend him.
Actually he quite firmly mentions it, and in a way that really struck me -- I found your comment by ctrl-f "jews". Why? Because I read Bobos in Paradise almost 20 years ago now, and didn't notice any mentions of Jewish people. Perhaps with Kanye in the news I'm sensitized to it or something but were I not aware of Scott's being Jewish himself and wholeheartedly convinced of his integrity (in a "high in the top ten people on the internet" kind of integrity), I'd be kinda weirded out by "Jews entirely took over our elite institutions and cultural machinery, repelled uppity technocrats, still definitively in charge" as a conclusion.
I'm the better part of a week late to this post, though, so nobody will ever see this comment. I suppose it's for the best.
Good essay but it misses the actual key change: what happened in the second half of the 20th century was that the WASP/Harvard/moneyed elite class went from being *a* class to being a *ruling* class.
For most of American history college grads didn’t run the show and politics, journalism, entertainment, business etc were run by hard working normies who showed up one day in the mail room and grinded their way up. The professionalization of college admissions opened up college to this group and became a credentialization factory that took the best farmer kids etc and put them in Harvard, which became the ticket to elite levels of journalism, business, government, etc.
It also had them become more bohemian with all the Bobo class markers and associated cultural decline, which by the way us not been seen among this group of Bluechecks, as documented in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.
I rarely comment, but I wanted to see how many other people mentioned Coming Apart. The WASP class had a job that the Bobo class ignored: teaching by example. The obligation to behave correctly (or at least seem to behave correctly) got lost in "follow your bliss" bobo-ism. And as Charles Murray then documents, the social dysfunction which follows a lack of role models for *character* ensues.
Yeah, I find "Coming Apart" a better touchstone/ (set of ideas) for our current society. I'd like to see a review of that book.
The applications of Brooks's theory to "Tartaria" and "high modernism" seem contradictory to me.
Claim 1 is that the old elites loved classical buildings and the new elites reacted against this by going for concrete-and-glass cuboids.
Claim 2 is that High Modernism -- the thing whose architectural expression is concrete-and-glass cuboids -- was the legitimizing ideology of the old elite, and the new elite reacted against this by saying "down with concrete-and-glass cuboids".
I'm not sure how plausible I find either of those individually, but they can't _both_ be right.
Elites are usually conservative -- why not, they are benefiting from the status quo. The sixties were a time when , exceptionally, the elites started favouring modernism and progressive. The counter culture reacted by becoming backwards-looking, embracing folk music and Tolkienesque fantasy, etc.
I think what we're calling High Modernism tended to favor function over form, but it wasn't entirely averse to ornamentation and at least didn't purposefully make things uglier than they need to be -- i.e., brutalist architecture, the concrete-and-glass cuboid in its purest form. Though that actually arose a decade or so before the changeover we're discussing here and it was a global phenomenon, so I still have to doubt that the rise of the Bobos explains it.
Scott says that Brooks's theory is one of the best alternatives he's heard to the leaded-gasoline hypothesis for what happened to crime rates from ~1960 to ~1990. But I don't understand what the theory actually is. On Scott's account, Brooks doesn't give any sort of detailed causal story, he just "kind of drops that paragraph in there and runs". Maybe I'm missing some context that Brooks and Scott both find obvious and that isn't obvious to me; how does "old-money family elites replaced by meritocratic elites" naturally lead to "more violent crime"? What, according to this theory, _actually happened_?
I think the theory is something pretty straightforward like: Traditional 1950s patriotism/gender roles/religious confromity ensured a base level of human bortherhood societal buy-in and family participation.
The exchange of those values for "counter-cultural anti-patriotism", "divorce and free love", and "bohemian ethical/social values" (atheism) lead to a breakdown of some of the structures that kept things like family formation and social brothhood strong. So you see a skyrocketing of single parenthood, teen pregnancies, and then violent crime and the like.
I am not sure I would ascribe to that totally, but I am perosnally very struck by how my attitude has changed on say patriotism and the national anthem over the last 5-10 years.
From ages 10-36 or so I was vehmently anti-nationalist, and antipatriotic etc. Hated standing during the national anthem and often didn't do it, thought of that and the Peldge of Allegiance as "brainwashing". I even bristled when I sent my kids to a very good day care, but it did the Pledge (it's HQ is in Georgia and it is conservative a bit in outlook). As recently as ~5 years ago I saw that as a significant downside about the daycare and its culture.
But then from around then to today I have watched how corrosive such self-hatred has become on our society. People wanting to take down statues of fucking Lincoln and shit like that. The unrest in 2020 where police totally lost control of my city for a couple days and stores not very far from my home where being regularly looted during the middle of weekdays. Huge swaths of our youth and educational system seemingly thrown over to a coinception of our society that is both false, and paints it as fundementally bad and ill-gotten. Best selling books filled with idiocy and lies, and lapped up by a public steeped in seeing "colonialism" and "whiteness" and "oppression" as pretty much the totality of historical discourse. Which absolutely all those things should be a BIG part of the historical discourse (and were when I went to school in the 80s/90s). But they are not remotely the totalilty of it.
We went from a situation where I would reccomend people read Howard Zinn. I would buy it as a birthday gift because I felt people needed more contact with those perspectives, to now being like "holy shit, the last thing people need is more Zinn", lets find them some Chesterton or whatever.
I will admit all of this is incredibly crass and self aggrandizing and arrogant. I mostly see the masses as pretty stupid and beneath me, while at the same time not noticing how much I was pushed along and molded by the same cultural forces as everyone else.
But at the same time goddamn there is a lot of compelte and utter idiocy out there, and it is time to call a spade a spade. Anyway, I basically now think the general populace is simply too stupid to be fed too much anti-patriotic thinking because the society will not cohere.
EDIT: It is also making me see the downside of widespread atheism, as I am begining to see that people just replace the stupid, but essentially frivilous old religions with new surrogate ones which are much more socially disruptive.
I'm still not seeing much in the way of actual mechanism for how these social changes are supposed to give rise to violent crime. At the risk of reading too much into the single word "then", I think the idea is: breakdown of traditional social ideas -> many more people born into things that aren't the traditional family structure -> this screws those people up and they commit a lot of crimes. (If this _isn't_ what you have in mind, the following may well fail to be responsive to what you're saying.)
I find this very unconvincing -- again, I don't understand what the mechanism is meant to be, and find the handwavy kinda-explanations I've heard from social conservatives generally implausible. But obviously reality trumps intuitions and theories, so do the numbers actually fit? I don't think they do.
Take a look at Scott's graphs. Maaaaaybe they show unmarried parenthood starting to increase before violent crime does? But they definitely show violent crime starting to _decrease_ while unmarried parenthood is still increasing, albeit more slowly than before. And after the right-hand edge of those graphs, unmarried parenthood stays broadly constant but violent crime comes way down again. If the issue is that children not born to stable married couples are likely to be criminals, how is any of that possible? Shouldn't we see crime rates lagging unmarried-parenthood rates by, say, 15-25 years? Shouldn't sustained patterns of unmarried parenthood lead to sustained patterns of high crime?
As for education and public discourse being excessively anti-nationalistic and too negative about the past: could well be, but from where I'm sitting (which, for what it's worth, is in the UK) it doesn't look to me as if it's any further off in that direction now than it was in the exact opposite direction in, say, the 1970s.
Oh I agree with you that I would hesitate to draw too tight a conneciton between the rise of single motherhood and the rise in crime. But it is a story people tell and it does make some sense. Certainly as myself being raise din a single parent houshodl in public housing I suspect I was at much greater risk for a wide variety of socially undesirable behaviors than if I had a father. Of course the problem with that suposition is I wouldn't just have any "father", what about the shithead father who cheated on my mom constantly and was a drug addict? Would he have improved my life? Maybe not. So maybe the single aprenthood while not great, is better than him being around. Then again he was still out of our lives for another 20 years, and only took ~5 to clean up his act and start being a producitve member of society.
As for the errors of today being no owrse than the rrors of 1970 in a different direciton. perhpas, but I guess I expect more from society than that. Some of this might be because I was a realtively weel educated/read youth, but I find it very frustrating to sit through endless lectures and trainings about how we need the cirriculum to stop pretending slavery never happened and the US is exceptional etc. When literally the whole cirriculum of my youth in the 80s/90s was about how the US wans't exceptional and pretty much framed US history as "bad things happened to natives", "revolution", "pre-civil war slavery", "Civil war", "reconstruction and discrimination", "robber barons", "civil rights movement". Like the whole cirriculum was exactly what people now claim people were never taught.
Now some here who grew up in Missouri or Georgia or whatever says it was very different there in the 1980s, but growing up in the north the idea that kids born in the late 70s and early 80s and beyond are not well steeped in what the "motte" version of CRT is, is assinine. I was listening to the intro of a book (national best seller) a year or two ago where literally the thesis of the introduction was that all white people are liars, history as previously taught was all a lie, and the main and animating goal of the US was oppressing non-whites. Which is just a crazy reading of history.
Well, there's a famous book published in 1995 called "Lies my teacher told me" which, at least so its author claims, looks at a bunch of typical textbooks published between 1974 and 1991 and finds they're full of misrepresentations in the "old" direction. Full disclosure, I haven't read it and don't know whether the author cherry-picked or misrepresented the textbooks in question. But the book seems to have been pretty well received, which suggests that its picture of the US educational environment of its time was at least kinda-credible.
I don't think the author claims that the books he looks at pretend slavery literally never happened, only that they tend to portray it in a way that makes it look less bad than it was.
(Of course it's possible that the _textbooks_ of the 80s and the _teachers_ of the 80s had different sets of biases. Maybe the textbooks were full of whitewashing and American exceptionalism and the teachers were on the other side? Or, as you suggest, it might be a North/South thing.)
Oh yeah I know that book, solid book, probably read it a couple years after it came out. I don't remember much about slavery in it honestly, the biggest takeaway I had from it was the tendacy of textbooks to skip over anyone with communist beliefs, feelings in that area (for example Hellen Keller), and the tendancy to sort of generally steamroll over class disontents and class differences. Fairly marxist book in some ways, though I liked that sort of thing at the time.
Once again though maybe I just had progressive schooling (i went to a very run of the mill but poor public school in MN), but I don't remember it being very eye opening. Yes people in the educaitonal estbalishment weren't being open about the hsitory of commuism. Is that big news in 1995? Certainly we learn all about "Macarthyism" and how it was horrible in school.
Your "biggest takeaway" doesn't seem like it really matches (1) what other people say about the book or (2) what I get from reading the bits of it that Amazon will show me for free. It _does_ begin by mentioning that Helen Keller was a socialist, but in order to say not "see how they suppress the socialists?" but "see how they file off everyone's rough edges?". (The next example he gives is Woodrow Wilson's racism.) That chapter is about "heroification". The next chapter is about Columbus. The next is called "The truth about the first Thanksgiving" and I'm pretty confident guessing what sort of thing it says. The next is called "Red eyes" and a bit of googling suggests it's about neglect of the perspective of Native Americans (I assume the title is from the old term "Red Indians"). The next is about "the invisibility of racism in American textbooks", the one after that about "the invisibility of antiracism in American textbooks", the next about the idea of "the Land of Opportunity", etc.
Anyway, the point is that it does seem like the book is about errors pretty much exactly opposite to the ones you're saying are prevalent now; to whatever extent it's right (which I am not in a position to judge) it doesn't seem like it can be true that back in the 1980s everything was wrong in the direction you say it's wrong in now. If children then were 'well steeped in what the "motte" version of CRT is', then the steeping certainly wasn't done by textbooks like the ones Loewen is writing about.
(I say "... you're saying ..." etc. not in order to imply that you're wrong but in order not to imply anything one way or the other. I don't know enough about present-day US education to be confident trying to judge.)
This.
Speculation is fine and helpful as long as it is flagged as speculation. But this post doesn't even wave its hands in a coherent way.
Today I learned that: I champion traditional bourgeois values; have yesteryear's Harvard-level test scores; and would never make it into the elite anyway, not due to <s>racial animus</s> holistic admissions, but because there just aren't enough Asians in the country yet. Heavy is the minority head that wears the crown. Oh well, the school-chapter of life is done with, but I don't think having attended Rensselaer is too shabby either. It at least __sounds__ way more WASPy!
This alt-history hypothesis is plausible-sounding enough, and I have no idea if it's accurate...but the current end state certainly is. Found my bile rising reading about the New Meritocrats' Code of Conduct. One person's irony and detachment is another person's fakery and nihilism...not having the basic self-respect and humility to authentically own being rich and elite, makes that position even less admirable than it already is underneath the veneer of humanitarian values. I prefer blue-bloods for the same reasons I prefer outwardly bigoted ____ists: with them, I know very clearly exactly where I stand, whether it's good or bad. The patronizing condescencion of the Meritocrats, by contrast, strikes me as utterly contemptible and narcissistic. A farce put on to highlight and celebrate the largesse of the giver, not the recipient...whether it's in the guise of White Person With Coloured Friends, Cishet Allyship, Male Feminism, land acknowledgements, or whatever other new FOTM. Sorting people into little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
It's probably not in the other 5/6, but I'm real curious how the Brooks Theory would explain the Overproduction-of-Elites Theory, which also seems somewhat plausible. Maybe the Old Guard aristocracy had better internal guardrails against expanding the Strategic Classiness Reserve *too* fast, thus averting class inflation? Elite is a relative position, after all, not an absolute one...if everyone is elite, then no one is, and the whole mansion of cards falls down. There are only so many novel ridiculous ways to mint exclusivity (I'd like to hope).
Also, I know the Venn circles don't exactly overlap, but I think "PMC" is better at capturing the milieu-idea being framed rather than "bluecheck". (The Elon irony I guess is that "I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Using Prices" is a super-Meritocrat mindset. There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Amalgamated Bank.)
I’ll put in a good word for the best book about class and this issue. Old Money by Nelson Aldrich was written in 1988 and is an examination of the very phenomena of why the old ruling class died out.
It is a nuanced and deep examination of the history and the whole idea of an “elite” and why they lost their moral authority. Aldrich notes the many downsides, most obviously embodied in Tom Buchanan, the boorish and bigoted husband in Gatsby. But he also notes they had an actual ethos, whether they followed it or not, to value and preserve the best of civilization, to educate people on its enduring value, and to be above the scrum for money everyone else was involved in.
Interesting to note that Aldrich graduated from Harvard in 1955, and went on to be a bit of a Paris bohemian and one of the founding editors of the Paris Review. His musings about his own life and deeply WASPish family put the book right next to The Education of Henry Adams.
The other interesting book on the 50s is Auchincloss’s Rector of Justin, about a headmaster who believes very much in the civilizing ethos, but laments that all his students become bankers and lawyers.
I am always on the lookout for bobo wedge issues, i.e., controversies that set "bo" against "bo." For example, near where I live there is a small regional airport that has ambitions to greatly expand scheduled passenger service. The bourgeois bo loves this because it makes travel so much more convenient. The bohemian bo hates it because noise. You can likely think of more.
quote>>But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected.<<
How open is the admissions today in comparison to Conant/Pusey's time? Meritocracy is no true meritocracy, otherwise they'd be sorting by SAT and take the top of the applicants. I'm not from USA and no expert on admissions but as far as I know one needs to be doing some community work that would be viewed in a positive light by BoBos etc. and it's the primary filter. Out of the masses, they don't look for the brightest. They look for the next generation of keepers to keep BoBo values, and select the brightest among them so that they're good at keeping those values, and they heavily indoctrinate them in that. So it's not meritocracy as in the literal meaning of the word, which should be the antonym of aristocracy but it's like the mamelukes for the lack of a better term in my realm of words?
This explains the work displayed at Art Basel. Art was formerly transgressive and avant-garde. The greatest works illuminated conceptual, intellectual leaps ... merit.
The art world is currently drowning in coy, woke, conformist neo-naive art. The new "salon." Art trends are driven largely by collectors and the art advisors behind them, not just artists with radical new ideas.
This conformist, neo-naive irony started with Basquiat in the 1970's. His appropriation of street art by a street artist was a logical extrapolation of Warhol's appropriation of commercial art by a commercial artist, without a shred of the insight displayed in Warhol's diaries and daring works.
The 1970's timing is right for the new aristocracy to have enough wealth to become collectors.
> or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?
Depends on how you define meritocracy. Arguably, 80 years ago it meant that you were able to build a company and make a lot of money. Now it means you do good at standardized testing - or to put it in a less neutral way, that you have high iq, high counsciousness and are good at working inside the system. It could be an inherent difference between them - and it probably is, it's frightening how the current elites are run ing from individual responsibility and prefer to blend into a system.
Or it could be just an artefact of the culture that got created from pure randomness when the tide changed. Partly a reaction to the establishment of the time, part common characteristics of the new guys, part just what books they happened to read.
>”The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting. But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?”
There’s reasonable sounding arguments that hereditary monarchs are a good form of government because the rulers have a built-in incentive to ensure the long-run success of the country when they know their grandkids will be running it. In contrast, other forms of government have less incentive for long-run success and more for short-term wins. E.g., If there’s a policy option that requires short-term pain for long-term gain, contrast the incentives of the president/PM (my part loses power next election that coincides with the pain and other party gets all the credit when the gain comes) vs. the king (me and my descendants rule no matter what I do, so I’ll make the highest expected value choices to maximize our dynasty’s long-run wealth and power, which is enhanced by ruling a richer country).
One hypothesis is that the WASP has similar long-term outlooks when making decisions. “Yes, if I prioritize the long-term over the short-term, Preston Fitzgerald Mayer III’s boy might beat me in the next election. But A few years later when my son is in office, the economy will be stronger.”
The meritocracy version of politics isn’t optimizing for “who can provide the best long-term outcomes” it’s optimizing for “who can win elections in the short-run.” Voters have a short memory so I suspect the current system has way less emphasis on the long-term than is optimal.
It seems reasonable to ask whether decisions made by actual hereditary monarchs have tended to be better for the countries they rule than decisions made by actual presidents and prime ministers. Unfortunately, this is badly confounded by the fact that modes of government shift over time, so that we're mostly contrasting more recent presidential decisions with older royal ones. But my impression is that the comparison isn't exactly a strong recommendation for hereditary monarchy.
(Which wouldn't be very surprising. Even if it's true that monarchs have better incentives to make good long-term decisions -- which is not at all obvious to me, for what it's worth -- there's also the fact that democratically elected leaders are _different people_, in ways that clearly affect what decisions they're likely to make, I think mostly for the better relative to hereditary monarchs.)
Historically speaking, hereditary monarchies tended to last longer than republics, whether ancient or modern. Obviously longevity isn't the be-all and end-all of government, and it's quite posible for a decision to be good for propping up the ruling class but bad for the country as a whole, but as a starting point, I think we could do worse than "Which system of government is best able to avoid collapsing?"
Ancient republics are plausibly somewhat different kinds of thing from modern democratic ones. Modern ones being a fairly recent innovation, estimates of their longevity will tend to be underestimates. Some have lasted pretty well; e.g., the US for ~250 years so far, the UK as only-notional-monarchy for ~300 years so far. I'd be interested to see a careful examination of the question of whether hereditary monarchies or democratic republics last better. (Maybe generalized a bit; e.g., I think I would want to include the UK in the "republics" bucket even though formally it's a monarchy, and the "Democratic" "People's" "Republic" of (North) Korea is hardly distinguishable from a monarchy even though formally it's a republic.)
[EDITED slightly to fix a typo.]
250 or 300 years isn't all that good by monarchy standards; e.g., the Kingdom of England lasted 707 years (927-1707), the Kingdom of Scotland for 864 (843-1707). Perhaps significantly, countries which replace their monarchies with republics often find that the republics don't last nearly as long. The Kingdom of France, for example, lasted 805 years until the Revolution, but none of the five republics that followed it has managed better than 70 (the Third Republic, 1870-1940); the two Spanish Republics lasted for one and eight years, respectively, as opposed to the 394 years of the united Spanish monarchy; and the Soviet Union didn't even see out the twentieth century.
As for North Korea, I think under the classical definition it would count as a tyranny, and hence wouldn't be a good example of either a republic or a monarchy.
Saying that the Saxon Kingdom of England is the same as the Norman Kingdom, but the Fourth French Republic is substantially different than the Fifth French Republic kind of invalidates this chain of reasoning.
If you think that two of the comparanda aren't being compared properly, the proper course would be to see what would happen if they were compared properly, not to lazily say "Well, guess this chain of reasoning is invalidated."
Say that we decide post-Norman England is a different country to pre-Norman England, and that the French Fifth Republic is the same as the Fourth Republic (let's be generous and throw in the Third Republic as well). What do we find? The Kingdom of England lasts for 641 years (1066-1707), whereas the French Republic manages just 152 (1870-2022) -- less than a quarter of what the Kingdom of England managed, and less than a fifth of what the Kingdom of France managed. So the chain of reasoning still stands.
If you wish really really hard, you can hope to attempt to make an inference about this kind of thing. Ottinger and Voigtländer (2020, link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28297) find that if you put a monarch on a throne in charge of things, the individual monarchs matter: more inbred the hereditary monarch, worse land area change outcome for polity governed by the said monarch.
One could argue that ever-increasing land area is good for the monarch's dynasty but less so for ordinary citizens. On the other hand, Renaissaince Italy had many maritime republican city-states. (Think of Venice, Ragusa, ...). *Eventually* they all were all eaten by some kind of monarchy.
> The meritocracy version of politics isn’t optimizing for “who can provide the best long-term outcomes” it’s optimizing for “who can win elections in the short-run.”
Democracy means you can peacefully get rid of under achieving leaders, which is not a feature of monarchy. And the meritocratic part of government is the civil service, no the elected politicians.
The uselessness and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every modern democracy. Whilst democracy means you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it seems less effective at replacing them with leaders who can actually govern well.
So it's the worst system apart from all the others. There's nothing about monarchy or dictatorship that guarantees good leaders either.
The ability to get rid of bad leaders is only an advantage if you can find good leaders to replace them with. Otherwise, what's the point?
So there has never been a good leader in a democracy
"The overall quality of leaders in democratic countries is low" =/= "There has never been a good leader in a democracy".
The useless and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every pre-modern polity, often tempered with "if the higher ups only knew".
Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment, and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
>Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment, and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
The preference ordering is more like:-
Competent+On own side
Incompetent+On ownside
Incompetent+On other sid
competent+On other side
>The useless and mendacity of political leaders is a meme in basically every pre-modern polity, often tempered with "if the higher ups only knew".
Not really. There have been times when people griped about the quality of their government, of course, but there have also been monarchs widely regarded as good rulers, and it's difficult to see how they'd get such a reputation if all their appointees were corrupt and incompetent.
> Democracy does not mean that you can get rid of underachieving leaders, it means that you can get rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment,
Many (all?) major western democracies have policies in areas such as crime and immigration that are unaligned with what the majority want, and have done so for decades now. As with getting rid of underachieving leaders, getting rid of leaders unaligned with majority sentiment doesn't do much good if the potential replacements are similarly unaligned.
> and the majority might want leaders "underachieving" under a lot of otherwise perfectly objective and valid metrics.
That's a bit of a reach, and I think you know it.
More plausibly, the qualities needed to get to the top of a major political party are different to the qualities needed to run a country, so preselecting leaders based on the former doesn't guarantee their suitability for the latter.
This argument isn't quite so plausible when contrasting monarchies and democracies as it is when contrasting dictatorial republics to monarchies. There, things look much better for monarchies and the idea of an inter-generational stake in the system.
There was that recent piece by Ed West where he pointed out that at one point recently, every single Arab republic was under a State Dept. travel advisory and zero Arab monarchies were. This seems about right, and in the abstract, I don't think I'd rather live under an absolute monarch than a democracy, but I'm pretty confident I'd rather live under an absolute monarch than THE GLORIOUS EL PRESIDENTE, whoever that happens to be.
Meritocracy in a democratic system really optimizes for multiple things because it's tough to keep winning elections if the majority is unhappy with your governance, but in a dictatorial system of government, meritocracy means optimizing for who can seize power and keep his foes crushed beneath his heel and not much else.
>This argument isn't quite so plausible when contrasting monarchies and democracies as it is when contrasting dictatorial republics to monarchies. There, things look much better for monarchies and the idea of an inter-generational stake in the system.
A few weeks ago, there was a clip circulating on British social media, dating back to 2010, showing then-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saying that nuclear power wasn't the solution to Britain's energy questions because the plants wouldn't come online until 2020 or even 2021. So it looks like the time horizon of British politics is somewhat less than ten years, and I've never seen anything to suggest that British politicians are notably more short-termist than their foreign counterparts.
>Meritocracy in a democratic system really optimizes for multiple things because it's tough to keep winning elections if the majority is unhappy with your governance,
Sometimes, though if a particular policy is unpopular with the general public but popular with the educated classes, it usually ends up being implemented anyway, regardless of which party is in power.
Re: the question of *why* the old aristocrats might have been good, I can think of couple reasons. Historically, the successful long-lived republics have all basically been oligarchies controlled by ancient, wealthy families that more or less controlled all the levers of power. You're rich and powerful in the Republic because of what your family represents, and similarly you need to live up to the family name. Also, you're a legitimately rich guy who owns a lot of stuff, not just a particularly well-compensated employee, so you generally want rules that help you build stuff and not rules that stop you from building stuff. Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals.
Cutthroat meritocratic bureaucracy is more of a mainstay of imperial administrations. The levers of power are held by the emperor's well-compensated, well-educated employees. Those employees have a lot of power in that they make a lot of important decisions, but they are really just custodians of someone else's authority, they have no stake in anything except looking good *within* the system. This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will, since all the employee-administrators will compete with each other to execute it best. But they don't have competing self-interests that make them interested in a pro-business, pro-investment climate. And without a single emperor to hand down the goal of the state, the administrators basically just pick up their cues from whatever they think will increase their social standing within the bureaucracy itself.
The nascent tech takeover was basically just an attempt to combine these two ideas by having wealthy, business-interested meritocrats, but it turns out that they do a better job combining the flaws of both systems than they do combining their positives.
Most people believe in meritocracy if it means that one's surgeon has to be qualified for his or her job. But there's a huge gap between that and believing that we need elitist institutions like Harvard to select a group of teenagers to train into a ruling class (and that this process is justified by the same idea as demanding a qualified surgeon). Not all countries have elite universities. Or believing that the CEO of a company has earned the salary that is so much above the salaries of the other employees.
In fields like physics some schools are going to be better than others because they will attract the best researchers or have better funding. But I don't really understand why in fields like law there is any benefit (to society in general) in having a very hierarchical system where some law students start out much better just because they were selected by a top institution and get to network with the other elite students, forming a privileged club from the beginning. People who are talented in law will demonstrate that in practice, they don't need to be pre-selected into an elite group.
Reading British newspapers, there seems to be a certain sense of shame among some circles about the dominance of Oxbridge (compared to other British universities) because it's seen as a remnant of aristocracy. In the US, ironically, there seems to be more acceptance of the idea that the people who get into Ivy League schools really are the best people, because, you know, meritocracy.
Even though Oxbridge is probably more meritocratic.
I think the timeline's wrong, in a "Does reality cause straight lines on graphs" sense, for this to be the key explanation for why progressives are in charge now.
The Tartaria effect starts earlier - if you google "[Year] in architecture," you get a wikipedia page that makes this easy to track. Comparing 1938 with 1948, in '38 buildings look like they're expected to be decorative, but trying to get away with doing as little ornament as possible; in '48 they've become proper "post-war" monstrosities.
The intelligentsia are both recognisable and powerful in the '30s - hence HG Wells being a household name, and Stalin-sympathisers writing in the New York Times. There are also WASP-y socialist/progressive groups - the Intercollegiate Socialist Society for example. They don't control academia, which is interesting in a modern sense, but they're there.
FDR surrounded himself with academics and communist-sympathisers in the 30s, and ran an administration that's clearly in the same clade as, say, Biden's.
I think this looks more like an expanding social movement in favour of state-led egalitarianism that gradually takes over different parts of the US/world, starting in the late 19th century. It takes Harvard in the 50s and Yale in the 60s.
Taking the Ivy League was probably a strategic mistake for the progressives, as it got them mired in credentialism. This also happened at the same time they were making the much larger strategic mistake of extending egalitarianism to include who's perspectives they should take seriously (a bit like if the Bolsheviks had picked a bunch of random factory workers to staff their central committee).
So far as the WASPs are concerned, they never had much of a grip on the post-civil-war democrats. They were only politically important because they had some control over the Republican Party (shared, weirdly, with bearded men from Ohio). The Ohioans fizzle out by about 1900, making the GOP solidly WASP. The WASPs then completely fucked up running it, making it a worthless husk of a party, until finally being booted out by people who actually wanted to stop the progressives. Any account of why the modern Republican Party is so ghastly has to take into account that from the perspective of stopping the Democrats, the old Republican Party was (per Tucker) as useless as a marzipan dildo, and its Rockefeller faction was intentionally purged for this reason. The Bush/Romney wing represent their continuation, but pretend to be conservative to hide how useless they are. The modern GOP is also useless, but that's mostly because their actual objection to the democrats is that "Jesus wants tax cuts for Israel," which is a stupid program.
TL;DR: Progressivism as a project was expanding anyway, and taking the Ivies was a step along the road, and the WASPs lost power after the GOP purged them for being crap at running it.
If the art piece at the head of this is from AI, then it has improved greatly, very nice adaptation of Rousseau's style!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Rousseau#/media/File:Henri_Rousseau_-_Le_R%C3%AAve_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
EDIT: Never mind, I am an idiot; it's the cover art from the book, so done by a human.
So far, not much discussion of the 1960s and its popularization of bohemian culture.
Ask a teenager in Mount Pleasant, Iowa in 1954 if he'd ever hear of Bird and you'd probably get a baffled response "you mean, birds, like, turkeys and chickens?"
Ask that teen's younger brother ten years later if he'd ever heard of The Beatles and he wouldn't have to discuss entomology.
>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?
My guess is this has to do with elite-cohesion being more important than elite-merit. Like you mentioned, the new admission criteria kind of just selected a haphazard group of geniuses that weren't culturally aligned. The WASPs on the other hand networked together in their elite boarding schools, built comradery on the lacrosse courts, and overall have a shared in-group identity that goes beyond "we're the elites".
10x teams are better than 10x engineers. https://avichal.com/2011/12/16/focus-on-building-10x-teams-not-on-hiring-10x-developers/
<i>Brooks namedrops Seeing Like A State as the quintessential meritocrat book and high modernism as the quintessential meritocrat bogeyman. High Modernism was something like the legitimizing ideology of the WASP aristocracy: we are great because we have raised shining skyscrapers, blasted railways through mountains, and built giant eternally-churning factories. As part of their cultural revolt, the meritocrats had to ritually humiliate all of this, which made them adopt as their legitimizing ideology a James Scott / Jane Jacobs - esque perspective of “skyscrapers disrupt the social fabric and blasting tunnels sounds environmentally unfriendly, how about some nice locally-sourced organic food?”</i>
Not sure this explanation really holds up, TBH. For one thing, it's not obvious, at least not to me, that meritocrats really have rejected "high modernism" -- it's just that, instead of railways and giant factories, our current elites point to GDP figures and technology as evidence of their suitability for rule. For another, it's glaringly obvious, at least to me, that our current elites *don't* care about disrupting the social fabric, which is why they're fine with offshoring manufacturing jobs and promoting large-scale immigration.
1. One big difference between megaprojects and GDP figures is that Megaprojects are specific things that are designed by specific people, whereas GDP just sorta emerge. This distinciton is very important to whether something is high modernism or not.
2. Whether or not offshoring and immigration do disrupt social fabric, it seems clear that Bobos don't consider those things as very disruptive. Why is this? Probably in part becuase this class is very globalised, so globalisation not very risruptive to them at all.
<i>1. One big difference between megaprojects and GDP figures is that Megaprojects are specific things that are designed by specific people, whereas GDP just sorta emerge. This distinciton is very important to whether something is high modernism or not.</i>
I'm not convinced. Specific people have been designing specific things since Imhotep's time, so there's nothing distinctively high modern about that. Instead, the main distinguishing feature of high modernism is the willingness to bulldoze your way through a load of traditions and organic practices because obviously we're so much smarter and more rational than those benighted peasants and of course we can do a better job. This attitude, it seems to me, is still very much alive and kicking amongst our elites.
<i>2. Whether or not offshoring and immigration do disrupt social fabric, it seems clear that Bobos don't consider those things as very disruptive. Why is this? Probably in part becuase this class is very globalised, so globalisation not very risruptive to them at all.</i>
I think it's more that they do recognise that it's disruptive, they just think this is a good thing. For example, "radical" in modern politics (at least in the UK) is almost always used in a positive sense: "My party will deliver radical reforms to X, Y, and Z." I don't think the word would have such a positive valence among people who prioritised stability and bottom-up organisation.
The discussion is fascinating, but I have not so far seen a single mention of the decline of the middle class.
As the middle class in America (and elsewhere in the West) is picked clean and left to rot, while the 1% (or whatever you want to call them) flourish as never before, interelite competition needs must intensify, because there is the Very Rich and then there is Everyone Else, and Everyone Else is barely getting by.
I grew up middle class in the Netherlands (so not America, but certainly the West), and we were neither Very Rich nor Barely Getting By. I think most of the Home Owning class is doing very well for themselves.
Without disputing specifics, google the words "home buying impossible America" and you will see that even becoming a member of the Home Owning Class is increasingly out of reach for many.
Home Ownership has been very high in the US since at least WWII and I believe even before that. It still is despite posts like this.
Home ownership rate:
1945: 53%
1955: 60%
1965: 63%
1975: 65%
1985: 64%
1995: 65%
2005: 69%
2015: 64%
2021: 65%
A real crisis!
There are a few very expensive metros where homeownership is a lot less common and more difficult. But this has always to some extent been the case. This is a particular generation where people are having trouble with buying homes a bit, but some of that is they are also spending more money and time on education and less likely to be married and dual income.
No one "deserves" a home in the Bay Area. Certainly not bog standard Americans. It is perhaps the most attratcive job market in the world. The laws of supply and demand simply are not on your side.
Nobody has talked about "deserving" anything, but I have found that shared prosperity can keep a lot of people together who otherwise have little in common, and who may not even like each other all that much.
> As the middle class in America (and elsewhere in the West) is picked clean and left to rot
I have no idea where this "decline of the middle class" meme comes from, it doesn't seem to match the facts on the ground.
I'm middle class. My whole extended family is middle class. My friends are all middle class. My coworkers are all middle class. The cities seem to be filled with middle class houses and the streets with middle class cars. When I go to my middle class shops to buy middle class things I find there's a lot of other middle class people there too.
If the middle class is disappearing then who the heck is buying all this damn craft beer? If the middle class is under threat then who the heck is standing in that one hour long line to get brunch on a Sunday?
One could google the words "decline middle class" and find a wealth of sources.
The modern college admission scheme did not lead to strict meritocracy.
Yes, most smart, conscentious driven people go get their degree, but then they go out to do whatever things they are driven towards - academic research, engineering, entrepreneurhood, medicine, finance, corporate law.
However, by an large, these people are driven by practical or personal goals, not by social-engineering goals, so they don't bother "being the elite" in the sense of making organizations to try and set policy. They are far more driven to make a better mousetrap, or airplane, or refrigerator door, or contract, or quantitive pricing algorithm, or futures trading to ensure that enough tomatoes will be grown this season, or sewer pipe, than in making an organization that will win Abortion War #99231.
The main goal of meritocracy is to ensure that the details of society are designed by these points of people, rather than by random people. That America manages to do so, is a large contributor to why America has so much wealth.
I've quipped that tech companies pay managers a lot because otherwise it would be impossible to find anyone good that is willing to be a manager and deal with politics rather than do Actual World Improvements.
Now, there's a different subset of people that would actually rather do politics and win Abortion War #99231 than Actual World Improvements. The problem is, because these people care about politics, they generally win in politics. But the problem with winning in politics, is that winning in politics doesn't mean that you are right, just that you are left.
There might even be a reverse correlation, people to first order want to be doing the right thing, but in the cases where politically-expedient thing is different from the right thing, then there will be a very strong drive to do it.
Therefore, it makes a lot sense that having the world managed by the best politicians won't produce better result than having the world managed by a set of elites chosen in some uncorrelated-with-political-merit way.
"And they were jocks - certainly good at lacrosse and crew, but their kids would be much less likely than modern elites’ to become a scientist, professor, doctor, or lawyer."
Well, of course not; doctors and lawyers are the professions, and professionals are who you have working for you. You might as well expect Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham II to be thrilled at the notion of Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III becoming a groundskeeper.
Part of the irony around the Ivies is that they started off as the equivalent of seminaries, or at least with strong denominational identities;
Harvard - "A 1643 publication defined the university's purpose: "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust". The college trained many Puritan ministers in its early years[28] and offered a classic curriculum that was based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but also conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. While Harvard never affiliated with any particular denomination, many of its earliest graduates went on to become Puritan clergymen."
Brown - seems to have started off as non-denominational, as the Baptists wanted a college of their own: "The Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches were also interested in establishing a college in Rhode Island—home of the mother church of their denomination. At the time, the Baptists were unrepresented among the colonial colleges; the Congregationalists had Harvard and Yale, the Presbyterians had the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), and the Episcopalians had the College of William and Mary and King's College (later Columbia) while their local University of Pennsylvania was specifically founded without direct association with any particular denomination. Isaac Backus, a historian of the New England Baptists and an inaugural trustee of Brown, wrote of the October 1762 resolution taken at Philadelphia:
The Philadelphia Association obtained such an acquaintance with our affairs, as to bring them to an apprehension that it was practicable and expedient to erect a college in the Colony of Rhode-Island, under the chief direction of the Baptists; ... Mr. James Manning, who took his first degree in New-Jersey college in September, 1762, was esteemed a suitable leader in this important work."
Columbia - "Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college. The period leading up to the school's founding was marked by controversy, with various groups competing to determine its location and religious affiliation. Advocates of New York City met with success on the first point, while the Church of England prevailed on the latter. However, all constituencies agreed to commit themselves to principles of religious liberty in establishing the policies of the College."
Cornell - later foundation (in the 19th century) and on purely secular educational grounds: "Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883, it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian school, but had to compete with church-sponsored institutions for gaining New York's land-grant status."
Dartmouth - "Although founded to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university primarily trained Congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized, emerging at the turn of the 20th century from relative obscurity into national prominence."
Princeton - "Princeton University was founded at Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1746 in order to train ministers dedicated to their views. The college was the educational and religious capital of Scottish-Irish America."
Pennsylvania - "In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time in which it was preached. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. …Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey—Franklin's new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service."
Yale - "Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", a would-be charter passed during a meeting in New Haven by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701. The Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. …Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, and the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as increasingly liberal, ecclesiastically lax, and overly broad in Church polity. The feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not."
White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, indeed!
Everybody else is just visiting.
A big source of American colleges, particular those that are strong in science and engineering, is the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which were the result of a perception that it was necessary to compete with Europe industrially -- that the Jeffersonian ideal agricultural utopia had no future. The so-called "land grant" universities were specifically chartered to educate in the practical sciences, as opposed to the liberal arts (or theology), and many of them -- e.g. MIT, Cornell, Minnesota, Berkeley, Texas A&M, UIUC, UW Madison, Purdue, Ohio State, Penn State -- developed into the big R1 science and engineering universities that turn out most of the top American scientists and engineers.
E.g., why Cornell prominently features a Morrill Hall on its Arts Quad.
I read Brooks' book, actually a couple of his, a decade or so ago.
My uncle, a working-class public high school kid from a small city in Kansas, attended Harvard as a scholarship student starting in the late 1940s. He had a terrible time there which was entirely cultural, truly a fish out of water. Then he spent his entire adult life at various middling white-collar jobs in New England trying vainly to "live up to" all that he'd encountered at Harvard. He was never a very happy person and it seemed clear that a lot of that was that Harvard, when he went there, was a lot like what Brooks describes.
Then I, a middle-class public high school kid from the northern Midwest, got admitted to Yale in 1981 (and wait-listed by Harvard but I really wanted to go to Yale because my high school girlfriend/fiance was heading to NYU). I did attend Yale and had a generally good undergrad experience (with the girl not so much, cie la vie).
It is clear to me that I would not be seriously considered for admission today by either of those schools; my credentials were decent and quirky-enough-to-stand-out for the 1980s, would be quite pedestrian today. (My wife works in college admissions and I have through her gained a fairly deep understanding of how that whole thing has shifted in recent decades.)
I was much less a fish out of water than my uncle had been, partly because of the overall shift that Brooks describes. However I do think that the social change was not as abrupt as he describes -- when I was at New Haven the legacy admissions were still a visible plurality, and still in some ways dominated the social scene on campus. And that plurality was overwhelmingly male, which connects to my other point to make here....
Which is that Brooks seems to largely miss or ignore the other great shift in Ivy League admissions during the period he is writing about: the inclusion of women. Those schools went from all-male to co-ed pretty abruptly. By the time I got to New Haven the college was 55-45 male-female. By the 1990s it was basically even, and for a quarter-century now all of those institutions have actually struggled to keep their male percentages above 40%.(*)
As a 1980s undergrad writer and then editor of the college newspaper I interviewed various older male faculty members (for various articles) who were holdovers from the "old Yale"; every single one of them regarded the influence(s) of women students as by miles the greatest cultural change within the institution. They had a range of opinions about whether or to what degree that change was net-positive; but every single one of them thought it was the most dramatic change. They were clear and in some cases eloquent that they meant change beyond the obvious, they were talking about culture, and "the institution's core ethos" and stuff like that, not just things like mating habits.
More broadly, that seems to me like a huge shift in the composition of the U.S.'s (Western Europe's) establishment or elite classes during the period that Brooks writes about. And a historically-unique one by the way. So it seems like a factor which must be considered more than he seems interested in.
* My wife, who's worked in multiple places in college admissions at high levels, has explained that today's college admissions offices fear going below the 40 percent gender threshold in either direction. That is because they believe that few young people today want to attend a single-gender college or one which seems very close to that, and if your ratio is higher than 60-40 you will strike a lot of kids as too unbalanced.
For maybe 20 years now this fear has worked mostly in the favor of 17-year-old males....the wisecracks which my wife and her peers exchange about this point, and some others too, get pretty pointed and pretty damned funny. I have told her many times that she could write a book which would be both entertaining and enlightening but it would have to be after she's left the field.
"George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II - the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan."
This was a powerful line. The military is one of the most formative institutions we have, so shifting from an élite where military service in youth was common, to one where such service is rare, would likely result in all sorts of shifts in mindset.
Granted, in the WW2 generation, military service was very common at all levels of society, élite or otherwise. It's good that we haven't *needed* that level of mobilization recently. But it does change the mindset of a class quite a bit when military service is normal versus abnormal.
This is entirely based on my own subjective intuition, but I've often thought that the overall quality of the European aristocracies underwent a heavy decline from the late 17th century onwards, when they ceased to be a military aristocracy and became just a bunch of people who happened to have inherited lots of stuff. (Obviously individual aristocrats kept joining the military, and indeed provided the officer corps for most countries, but this was no longer expected as a matter of course.)
This reminds me of several of author W.E.B. Griffin's series, in which capable young men from very rich families choose a military career over staying in the family business.
I wonder to what extent Griffin's characters were modelled on the Bushes and Kennedys.
I'm waiting for the day when we get a Rationalist's review of The Joys of Sex .
Ask Ozy at https://thingofthings.substack.com/, I bet they'd love to write that, and they sometimes take reader requests.
Excellent!
I don't have a wide enough pool of potential Category X people to draw upon.
Having money is certainly a help in most things. One can take more risks. But I don't think having the money would disqualify one from being Category X for Paul.
I knew (very casually ...) some Silicon Valley types who tend to work at small companies pursuing some radical idea: Lucid Dreaming technology aids, or anonymous computation. A bunch were signed up for cryonic suspension.
Would Paul have classified them as Category X? I dunno. I think of them as mostly being upper-middle class in outlook, but middle class folks who take ideas much more seriously than most people and are willing to take ideas to a logical conclusion even if that conclusion isn't mainstream. But still middle class.
Does homeschooling count towards being Category X? Homeschooling still seems pretty independent-minded to me, but maybe this isn't quite what Paul had in mind?
Category X really doesn't fit Paul's model well and if one was rigorous about definitions it might even vanish -- most/all Category X people could be neatly binned in one of the existing classes. Or maybe not.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/
Piece about wealthy university students of elite class who pretend to be poor, abdicate the responsibility inherent in their lucky situation, and the author would like them to not do this (something like that). Quick scan of comments and I didn't see this op-ed posted, so I thought I'd add it.
I feel mostly resigned to the idea that some smaller number of people/families will always have more money (power) than the larger remainder of the population, with minimal space for new "blood" to move into that highest echelon. In this case, I would prefer that upper crust people both 1.) do obnoxiously stereotypical rich people things because if they don't, who can? and 2.) feel some amount of weight from their crowns in the form of an obligation to do big, great things in society (even if this is mostly so that they can brag about it on the polo field (pitch? grounds?)).
The thing I ponder after reading Scott's piece and the linked article above: Is there an actionable way to influence the culture of wealthy families to nudge them back towards that aforementioned noblesse oblige? Could we just ask those 0.1%'ers to please stop with the white water rafting and get back to cultivating the next generation of powerful philosopher kings? Is EA this nudge? Or, based on the texts Scott referenced, should I understand that this process will just sort of happen as a result of natural fluctuations in signaling, taste-making, etc. and I should just relax and enjoy the yacht races?
Considering the extent to which the 19th century Ivy League were primarily still provincial finishing schools for future clergymen and schoolmasters, I wonder to what extent they in turn were following the lead of the new class of boys' schools, like Groton (1884) and St. Paul's (1856). Which were in turn aping Rugby. Never underestimate the power of Anglophilia in shaping a nation's governing elite. Maybe the collapse of British Empire is what finally did in the WASPs! Timing lines up. Though Vietnam's "best and brightest" may be a better account. In either case, complete loss of self-confidence.
Bobo really took off in France, where the word is very common.
"Metropolitan" is an excellent movie about the dynamics you describe.
I’m sorry I haven’t read the 314 comments before mine, but I think the most interesting thing about “Ivy League creates the upper class” is what’s been happening to college admissions since the mid-nineties.
Specifically, the Scholastic Aptitude Test of yesteryear became the Scholastic Achievement Test. Today, SAT stands for nothing. The math was gutted. Check out the old numerical reasoning and compare it to the modern math section. Currently, remembering the sin/cos/tan of 30, 60, and 90° angles will do wonders for one’s score. Is that really reflective of a facility with math?
On verbal, the analogies were eliminated because they were too hard to study for. Analogies have one of the highest g-loadings of IQ subtests. There were other changes to the verbal, like all the read-and-match-by-scanning-the-passage questions are less indicative of intelligence than figuring out “what’s the analogy.”
Scoring is ridiculously easy these days. Remember when 0-3 people scored 1600 on the SAT? Now, thousands of people score 1600, at least, they got an 800 on each section of the test in the 10 times they took the test.
Scoring is much less dedicated to preventing false positives. There are now four answer choices on each question, down from five. Instead of penalizing wrong answers more than blank ones, both are scored equally. Penalizing wrong answers reduces false positives, people with high scores but low ability.
I wrote a long comment on iSteve about this, complete with more details and links.
This must have a huge impact on who gets into college. Colleges were big on bragging about “this is our most diverse class ever with our highest SAT average, but they never reported the mean percentile scores, which were certainly lower than in earlier years.
As bad as this is for letting competitive ambitious people into the upper class instead of y’know, smart people, it’s rough for high schoolers. The SAT used to be a stressful day. The norm for upper-middle class+ kids and social climbing Asian immigrants spend years practicing for the test. I have heard to Korean kids have summer schools where all they do is practice gaming the test. A test that has intentionally become much easier to game.
I’m curious about what employers think of people coming out of the Ivy League. Do they think recent graduates today are as smart as the ones thirty years ago? What do they think about the Asians, especially? Does anyone know?
Anyway, people who took the SAT in 1995 are 43 or so today. These people are coming into influential positions in institutions. Institutions that are not covering themselves in glory. Is that because the people running things are ambitious, competitive, and ruthless, but a lot less intelligent than the people they replaced?
Here’s a fairly detailed comment with links.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-to-get-into-harvard/#comment-5324778
I don’t know about employers generally. But I have over the past 20 years relished absolutely smoking and crushing the Ivy League peers I have encountered in professional contexts involving intellectual tasks. I was a kid who grew up in public housing ducked around in HS and went to a directional land grant university.
I love when I have a work trip to NY and get paid train/consult a bunch of people with better educations who have jobs I could never get, but I get brought in because I am just better at their jobs than they are with a BA in philosophy. Their confusion heals my soul.
And then I get to leave with my couple grand and leave all their problems behind and have some confidence boost in seeing what lame mentally weak posers they are.
Personally, I see changes in Western leadership more a function of decadence than meritocracy or aristocracy (either feudal or Ivy League).
I do think it is important to differentiate between a small group of inbred wealthy that are mostly playboys/playgirls/society types - that spits out a few who want to be leaders of their nations/societies vs. a professional managerial class in which every single one believes that they are simply hair splitting difference from being leaders of society/nation.
There are likely also substantive differences between a group of people who are already wealthy and stable in their position vs. a different group of people who are constantly jockeying for position and who are, by and large, still in search of permanent wealth and/or position.
The "bluecheck" thing never made all that much sense even pre-Musk, since for example, Trump himself had the blue check. It seems to be a right-wing code word for "journalist" (since historically, journalism was the most common way to get the check), in which case you might as well just *say* journalist unless the purpose is in-group signaling rather than communication.
Somewhat disagree - it's not just journalists, it's also academics / experts (eg epidemiologists) and politicians.
Presumably left-wing politicians, right? I don't think anyone who uses the term "bluecheck" would consider Donald Trump to be one, even though he literally had the blue check.
The little I saw on Twitter, it was duelling groups of opinions and the blue-check possessors were treated as oracles or founts of The Real True Facts or unbiased and so on, while The Other Lot are all just partisans and slanted. Blue checks didn't have to be journalists, either; a smattering of activist types had their blue checks on show to demonstrate that they were the Real True Experts on whatever the topic was.
I understand that it started off as simply a way to verify that if someone is posting tweets claiming to be from George Washington, this is indeed the real and correct George Washington not an impostor using the name. But it seemed to morph into something more, as a badge or signal of 'being on the right side of history'. That's why Musk thought that charging for it was worth it - people who wanted their bragging rights would pay to keep the status.
I see a *lot* of downplaying of the significance since Musk took over, that it was "only" journalists who used the blue check system and they didn't care about it or treat it as anything special, that it came with the job, and nobody thought it meant anything anyhow. There seems to be some re-writing of history going on; according to the Wikipedia page, there was a ranking system in place as to who got a blue check or not. So at least in the beginning, it was a sought-after marker of status - you were a Celeb if you had one and a Nobody if you didn't:
"Twitter stated that an account with a "blue tick" verification badge indicates "we've been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved". After the beta period, the company stated in their FAQ that it "proactively verifies accounts on an ongoing basis to make it easier for users to find who they're looking for" and that they "do not accept requests for verification from the general public". Originally, Twitter took on the responsibility of reaching out to celebrities and other notable to confirm their identities in order to establish a verified account.
In July 2016, Twitter announced a public application process to grant verified status to an account "if it is determined to be of public interest" and that verification "does not imply an endorsement". In 2016 the company began accepting requests for verification, but it was discontinued the same year. Twitter explained that the volume of requests for verified accounts had exceeded its ability to cope; rather, Twitter determines on its own whom to approach about verified accounts, limiting verification to accounts which are "authentic, notable, and active"."
And if it's 'just' a verification system with no endorsements or political associations, why try to get some people banned or have it taken away from them? The opponents here seemed to think a blue check conveyed important (approved) status on the bad guy:
"Twitter's practice and process for verifying accounts came under scrutiny in 2017 after the company verified the account of white supremacist and far-right political activist, Jason Kessler. Many who criticized Twitter's decision to verify Kessler's account saw this as a political act on the company's behalf. In response, Twitter put its verification process on hold. The company tweeted, "Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance. We recognize that we have created this confusion and need to resolve it. We have paused all general verifications while we work and will report back soon."
Yes. People had to apply for a blue check and it involved sending documentation and getting calls to employers or other sorts of verifications. Therefore it clearly wasn’t just something that happened to journalists but something they or their employers demanded. Which is why musk suggested paying for the blue check - he was tweaking noses. It probably won’t happen
You can say that, but is there any evidence for it? It sounds like for journalists at established news companies, it was something the employer did automatically on their behalf.
In any case, even if it *did* take effort to obtain, that still doesn't show that they considered it a status symbol. As an analogy, think of security clearances. If I need one for my job, I'll get one (with help from the employer), but that doesn't mean that it is a status symbol or that I'd pay to get one just for the hell of it.
In the Country i live in a fairly obscure local journalist I know personally, with fewer followers than me when I was on twitter, had a blue check and a nationally famous tv personality and journalist did not. He just didn’t care.
The local Journalist, with her 150 followers, clearly applied to twitter somehow, twitter didn’t search her out. They might have done that with some major US celebs but it doesn’t scale.
I think you're still confusing cause and effect. Did anyone ever "treat Trump as an oracle" because of his blue check?
Also, how would you tell if there was "rewriting of history" going on? Are there any cases of journalists who publicly said they cared a lot about their blue check in the past who are saying it was always meaningless now?
My new model: There are five (count 'em) sets of elites in American society:
1. Wall Street
2. Hollywood
3. Silicon Valley
4. Washington DC
5. The media (which is the only one that doesn't have a neat geographical synecdoche)
Other wealthy and/or respected sectors like oil, medicine, academia, and the military, don't really have power on their own, only what can be borrowed from government or media. This is why you won't catch the children of powerful people going off to work in them; only in one of the big five.
The emergence of Silicon Valley as a power centre on its own is very recent; Silicon Valley was rich long before it was powerful; they only became powerful once the social media age began and they started to control the flow of information. This, not coincidentally, the point at which the industry got co-opted by the left side of politics, kicking out or silencing the libertarian-leaning old guard.
Anyway, there's five elites, and each has different characteristics. Each has slightly different characteristics in terms of the sort of people who rule it. Some can still be broken into by outsiders, others are extremely closed off. Some are centrist, others are far left (none is conservative). Some worship Harvard, others worship Stanford, and some worship random liberal arts colleges that I've never even heard of. They're all chummy with each other, and they're all at low-level war with each other. And of course there's internal conflicts in each of these institutions too.
Anyway, I think that thinking about the modern elite class makes more sense once it's considered as a weird multipolar blob riven by internal conflicts.
So the military-industrial complex isn't an elite any more?
Good point, maybe the five factor model is still ok if you consider the MIC part of Washington. A lot of people who talk about the ‘Blob’ seem to.
No, I don't think so, if it ever was. The military-industrial complex has no power of its own, only what it can beg from the Government. That's why children of powerful parents don't go into the military (unless they think it will look good for an eventual political run) and why they certainly don't go into Lockheed-Martin or Raytheon. That's why I can't name any prominent (current) Generals or Admirals or defence-contractor CEOs.
The issue, I think, is that the military-industrial complex doesn't actually have any real-world source of usable power. Hollywood, the media and Silicon Valley can control what people think. Wall Street can control what projects get funded or unfunded, and Government can do all sorts of things. But the Military-Industrial Complex has no way of exercising its own power _except_ to stage a coup, and since nobody believes they would ever do that it means they have no power over anything. (In countries like Pakistan or Indonesia where the threat of a military coup is not just theoretical, the military does indeed form an important part of the elite.)
Sounds plausible to me. Not sure if Hollywood is still an elite power center though. The other four, yes.
I've wondered whether the change in Ivy League admissions was really an uncaused cause. It seems that Harvard has always had a deep attitude that it graduates the future leaders of society (particularly in the "high social status" sense of "leader"), going back to when it graduated Puritan ministers. And the 1950s and early 1960s would be when it would start becoming apparent that there were ways to become a leader in Boston and its hinterlands that didn't depend on being from a moneyed WASP background. That would have been the point where businesses would start to be driven by understanding and harnessing new technologies as much as the traditional hard work and ruthlessness. ("Route 128" was Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.) So Harvard's change may have been as much a reaction to the changing times as a driver of it.
Which may also explain some of the affirmative action wars. As Scott says, even if an East-Asian-American has sterling academic credentials and comes from high-status roots in the old country (as many do), currently there they're at an ethnic disadvantage for reaching positions of high status due to their shallow roots in the US. So loading up the class with high-performing East-Asian-Americans doesn't optimize "the social status of our graduates at age 50".
"Your particular Native American blanket might have been made by the most famous Native artisan, using only heirloom wool sustainably harvested from free-range sheep raised on traditional farms run by indigenous people of color. If your guests have any class, they will see the blanket, recognize it, and know all of that."
- it can't actually be true that guests ever recognize these attributes in blankets?
Was the old WASP aristocracy really all that...ostentatious? My father is an old-line WASP (my grandmother frittered her inheritance away on racehorses, so the money--but not all the antiques--are gone) and takes great pains **not** to look like he's spent a lot of money--the family car has never been bought new, for example. At the same time, his tastes are unmistakably upper-class ones...
I don't know how it was with the WASPs, but in the British system, old-money types generally considered it vulgar to flaunt your wealth too much. Only the nouveau riches needed to spend money to prove they weren't poor; a proper gentlemen's status was obvious from his deportment, even if he was wearing an old, shabby coat.
I can't help but wonder if Musk's doing-away-with the blue check as a status symbol will lead to the usurpation of the Meritocrat aristocracy, just as Conant/Pusey's alterations to Harvard's admissions policy supposedly led to the usurpation of the WASPs'.
And if so, who will replace the Meritocrats? Will the pendulum swing reactionary and a sort lineage-based status system will return? We're all obsessed with Downton Abbey and The Crown anyways, and among all other status markers, birthright has the most daunting proof-of-work algorithm.
Or will we see a kind of doubling of the current meritocracy, where the Bohemians are once again briefly wheeled out as props by those seeking to unseat the Meritocrats, only to be used as a foil for the latter's supposed "inauthenticity," leaving us doomed to muddle our way through a new loop of irony/detachment/misdirection?
The blue checkmark was never meant literally, in this context. People who had literal blue checks because they were e.g. famous athletes, weren't in the group, but any vaguely recognizable thinkfluencer was part of the group without anyone actually checking their tweets for the blue.
It's possible that Musk's changes to Twitter will change the colloquial meaning of the term. I think it's pretty likely in the long term. But then, the "save file" icon on most of my software still looks like a 3.5" floppy disk.
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead seems like it aligns perfectly with the idea that Meritocrats derided ornate architecture as a relic of the decadent past. The most interesting thing about the book is the way it uses architecture as a proxy for Rand's ideological divide in society. In one section Roark gets absolutely pissed when a customer comes and asks him to add decorative columns to the front of his design:
"Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope--not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it."
"Well," said Mr. Janss, "I’ve never thought of it that way." He added, without great conviction: "But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty."
"What who calls what beauty?"
"Well-l-l..."
"Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?"
"I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another," Mr. Janss confessed, "but I guess that’s what the public wants."
"Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man."
Well, that's a dumb argument. People have always ornamented themselves, be that sticking plugs in their ears, bones in their noses, tattoos, hairstyles, makeup, and the rest of it.
I don't know enough about Ms. Rand's personal life but did she go to the hairdresser to have her hair done? Wear makeup? Dress fashionably? Wear jewellery? Why do so, when the simple bare human body would be just as good if she wore a potato sack and chopped her hair off with the breadknife?
Did her heroes and heroines dress well? Does Howard Roark shave instead of growing a beard like Grizzly Adams? We ornament all that is around us and that we use, as we ornament ourselves, for the sake of not having a bare metal box that is one of a series of bare metal boxes.
Zig-zag lines on clay pots don't contribute a thing to their functionality, but our ancestors decorated even those simple pots in that simple way because we have an instinct for beauty. Even Howard Roark's profession arises out of more than "just put one stick on top of another for shelter", that's how we get modern steel office buildings as the end result of "how do we do this better?"
I don't think anyone would disagree with the sentiment that Rand was often a hypocrite, but her ideas can be fun regardless.
In general, as I recall, Roark's aesthetic is something like "Not only should we pursue Function over Form, highlighting Function should be the Form." So he shaves, because it is impractical to have a beard in your way, and further to highlight the stark lines of a clean jaw. When he is hired to design a sort of unitarian universalist temple, he puts his energies into how his design might draw the viewer's eye to the earth instead of the sky, to highlight its Humanitarian nature.
If I were to steelman him fully, I think I'd argue that he's not opposed to beauty, he's opposed to waste. Decorative columns make sense when your engineering requires the columns to be there in the first place, but why slap them on the front of a skyscraper when they serve no purpose? Why place your intricately carved sculptures high above the masses, where their beauty can scarcely be made out? It's obeisance to a Tradition and a God that Roark doesn't believe in.
For contrast, the antagonist of the book is a spiteful philanthropist who misapplies charity as a way of destroying people's lives by convincing them to throw their life's passion and work into fruitless donations. An Ineffective Altruist, which always makes me laugh.
I'm trying to imagine a UU 'temple' built by a Rand hero and it makes me wince. He might as well design an office block or industrial warehouse for it.
Instead of sculptures on high, mirrors at eye-level so he (and the participants) can gaze their fill on the new god, "Me, me, glorious wonderful Me!" Perhaps not even mirrors, but a pool, to emulate Narcissus his patron saint?
If he wants to draw attention down to the earth (as Humanism) instead of the sky (for the god he does not believe in) then instead of spires, I imagine caves and tunnels leading down into a vast underground excavation. Caves can be beautiful, too! But I wouldn't trust Roark not to make it look more like the ground floor of a multi-storey car park than anything like this:
"And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and the men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes curtains as fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in the grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is a chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stairs beyond stairs; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them!"
..."No you don't understand," said Gimli, "No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin's race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap - a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day - so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-Dûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return."
I get the feeling Roark would indeed cut down blossoming trees for firewood, and blow up the caves for diamonds and gold.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. If Rand ever positively portrayed a natural preservationist, I cannot remember them. Her heroes are nearly always industrialists.
I looked up the description of his Temple of the Human Spirit, and, if I were to envision it uncharitably, "Car Park" seems like a perfectly acceptable interpretation:
The Temple was to be a small building of gray limestone. Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down. It was scaled to human height in such a manner that it did not dwarf man, but stood as a setting that made his figure the only absolute, the gauge of perfection by which all dimensions were to be judged. When a man entered this temple, he would feel space molded around him, for him, as if it had waited for his entrance, to be completed. It was a joyous place, with the joy of exaltation that must be quiet. It was a place where one would come to feel sinless and strong, to find the peace of spirit never granted save by one’s own glory.
There was no ornamentation inside, except the graded projections of the walls, and the vast windows. The place was not sealed under vaults, but thrown open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun--and to the skyline of the city in the distance, the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s achievement on earth. At the end of the room, facing the entrance, with the city as background, stood the figure of a naked human body.
(1) That does sound perfectly grim, and Mr. Roark would have had no problem getting a job designing Catholic churches in the period 50s-80s as they all went for bare concrete or stone and strip out all the ornamentation. Which is *fine* in a dry, sunny climate where the skies are blue and the air is not dripping with condensation and you have a constant exterior light source to contrast against the grey. It doesn't work so well in the west of Ireland where the rainstorms constantly blow in from the Atlantic and sitting in a grey concrete bare walls building leaves you freezing your feet off, I can tell you that from personal experience.
He might have grudgingly and reservedly approved of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, photos linked below. It was proposed in the late 90s and completed in 2002 and at least is not bare grey, they went for bare beige instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Our_Lady_of_the_Angels#/media/File:CathedralOfOurLadyOfTheAngels.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Our_Lady_of_the_Angels#/media/File:Our_Lady_of_Angels,_LA,_CA,_jjron_22.03.2012.jpg
The *one* thing they got right about the interior of this modern stack of blocks was the tapestries on the wall:
https://olacathedral.org/tapestries
(2) This is sounding very much like the Religion of Humanity in R.H. Benson's "Lord of the World", especially with the naked human body statue:
"She glanced down the verses, that from the Humanitarian point of view had been composed with both skill and ardour. They had a religious ring; the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their sense was plain enough — the old human creed that man was all. Even Christ's, words themselves were quoted. The kingdom of God, it was said, lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity."
"There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter. Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary."
""Now here," he said, "we have the old sanctuary of the abbey. In the place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from the floor. Behind the altar— extending almost to the old shrine of the Confessor— will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it; and— so far as I understand from the absence of directions— each such figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast."
"What kind of figure?" put in the girl.
Francis glanced at her husband. "I understand that Mr. Markenheim has been consulted," he said. "He will design and execute them. Each is to represent its own feast. This for Paternity—-"
He paused again.
"Yes, Mr. Francis?"
"This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man."
"A kind of Apollo— or Jupiter, my dear," put in Oliver.
But the main plan is magnificent. It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is unmistakable in its main lesson—-"
"And that you take to be—?"
"I take it that it is homage offered to Life," said the other slowly. "Life under four aspects— Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness. Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate. Sustenance in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective, generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on…. I understand it was a German thought."
Oliver nodded. "Yes," he said. "And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to explain all this."
"I take it so. It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative plan— Citizenship, Labour, and so forth. These, after all, are subordinate to Life."
"Briefly, there was no use in disputing the fact that the inauguration of Pantheistic worship had been as stupendous a success in England as in Germany. France, by the way, was still too busy with the cult of human individuals, to develop larger ideas. ...Yet there had been extraordinary scenes the day before. A great murmur of enthusiasm had rolled round the Abbey from end to end as the gorgeous curtains ran back, and the huge masculine figure, majestic and overwhelming, coloured with exquisite art, had stood out above the blaze of candles against the tall screen that shrouded the shrine. Markenheim had done his work well; and Mr. Brand's passionate discourse had well prepared the popular mind for the revelation.
...If there had not been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to invent one. He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult had been framed. It moved round no disputable points; there was no possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were secretly individualistic and idle. Life was the one fount and centre of it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship. Of course the thought had been Felsenburgh's, though a German name had been mentioned. It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity worship without its inadequacy. It was not man that was worshipped but the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle. Sacrifice, too, was recognised— the instinct of oblation without the demand made by transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man"
(3) Finally, the emphasis on going down into the earth rather than raising spires to the sky reminds me of this extract from Chesterton:
"I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realize a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later and more esoteric stage to discover the beginnings of thought. My companion was the most amusing of them, for however he may have stood towards thought, he was at least very much their superior in experience, having traveled beyond the tropics while they were meditating in the suburbs; though be had been charged with excess in telling travelers' tales. In spite of anything said against him, I preferred him to his companions and willingly went with him through the wood; where I could not but feel that his sunburned face and fierce tufted eyebrows and pointed beard gave him something of the look of Pan. Then we sat down in the meadow and gazed idly at the tree-tops and the spire of the village church; while the warm afternoon began to mellow into early evening and the song of a speck of a bird was faint far up in the sky and no more than a whisper of breeze soothed rather than stirred the ancient orchards of the garden of England. Then my companion said to me: 'Do you know why the spire of that church goes up like that?' I expressed a respectable agnosticism, and he answered in an off-hand way, 'Oh, the same as the obelisks; the Phallic Worship of antiquity!' Then I looked across at him suddenly as he lay there leering above his goat like beard; and for the moment I thought he was not Pan but the Devil. No mortal words can express the immense, the insane incongruity and unnatural perversion of thought involved in saying such a thing at such a moment and in such a place. For one moment was in the mood in which men burned witches; and then a sense of absurdity equally enormous seemed to open about like a dawn. 'Why, of course,' I said after a moment's reflection, 'if it hadn't been for phallic worship, they would have built the spire pointing downwards and standing on its own apex!' I could have sat in that field and laughed for an hour. My friend did not seem offended, for indeed he was thin-skinned about his scientific discoveries. I had only met him by chance and I never met him again, and I believe he is now dead; but though it has nothing to do with the argument, it may be worth while to mention the name of this adherent of Higher Thought and interpreter of primitive religious origins; or at any rate the name by which he was known. It was Louis de Rougemont."
On point 1 -- of course you *can* design a building like that for Los Angeles and the parishioners won't suffer too much. But lines don't have to be straight to be clean, and the exterior of the California missions is in fact rather clean, with earthy clay courtyard walls extending out like lion's paws in a way I prefer to many more heavily decorated European cathedrals.
San Diego: https://roadtrippingcalifornia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/San-Diego-Mission.jpg
San Miguel in Santa Fe: http://sanmiguelchapel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SMC_Outside.jpg
Newer Orthodox churches in the Southwest US have been blending Greek and Spanish Colonial designs, and are quite pleasing to look at, with nice gentle domes with whites and tans.
Santa Barbara: https://orthodox-world.org/images/lighten/Saint_Barbara_Orthodox_Church_Santa_Barbara_California.jpg
Santa Fe: https://steliasnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/IMG_1721.jpg
Tucson (Antiochian): https://holyresurrectiontucson.org/images/hroc.jpg
(I just looked up Los Angelas Orthodox churches out of curiosity, and the Russian cathedral looks like something out of Arabian Nights, but the Serbian one looks like old California in a good way)
I also don't imagine Roark or his Temple of the Human Spirit ever doing anything as fun and as beautiful as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlBKdizKgSY
"It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder-height, palms down, in great, silent acceptance. "
Oh my gosh, the building is T-posing! 😁
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/human-man-reference-3d-illustration-260nw-1047541294.jpg
Re: religious buildings and outstretched arms, the guy who did the colonnade of St. Peter's Square got there first and did it better, Howard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter%27s_Square
"At the centre of the square is an ancient Egyptian obelisk, erected at the current site in 1586. Gian Lorenzo Bernini designed the square almost 100 years later, including the massive Doric colonnades, four columns deep, which embrace visitors in "the maternal arms of Mother Church".
That reminds me of my favorite quote on writing, from Strunk & White:
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
I'd steelman the Rand point as saying that our ideals for beauty should be related to function. A beautiful building could be beautiful specifically *because* it achieved its function so well.
That argument only gets you so far - some buildings are beautiful because they're interesting to look at, even in ways that are contrary to function.
To me, one of the largest pervasive feelings Rand put into her books (and I think really well) is the emotion of liking that which is great, like Nietzchian greatness but not through violence, and hatred of the small, nasty, petty, and mean. Dominique has it dialed up to 100 in the book. the specific judgments about columns or no columns, Ayn Rand's specific preferences of Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or whatever, are secondary and beside the point.
I really liked the Fountainhead (also gave me a great love of the Great American cities and skyscrapers), and the hate for columns didn't sit right with me, especially if taken literally, as "columns are always bad". I also don't love Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Roark was based on. But I think you have to broaden the view to enjoy this book and not read in the most literal "columns bad, glass boxes good". To me I get that feeling of disgust at certain mundane things, and that the building should make sense, I get and recognize the role a Roark plays in society (follows his own way, truly and deeply doesn't actually care about society or need anyone else, but provides value to society).
I read several of her novels, and it's just a very interesting picture to see the views progress and emerge. I think "We The Living", an earlier and lesser-known book, is actually good and can be read by a wider audience because it's both more historically based and less ideological.
"I get and recognize the role a Roark plays in society (follows his own way, truly and deeply doesn't actually care about society or need anyone else, but provides value to society)."
But Roark does need society, if Rand means that cities are the greatest achievement of mankind. I mean, he could always go live on a desert island and build models of his buildings out of bamboo, and not need anyone to see them or admire them because he doesn't need society. But if he wants to build those buildings, he needs the cities, he needs the money to build them - either corporations or individual wealthy people want this building - and he needs the workers to work on translating his blueprints into the physical buildings.
He may or may not provide value to society, and indeed he has a point about bad imitations of imitations of classical features. But if he is *too* insistent on doing things his own way, then nobody will want to hire him. If he builds you a house you can't live in, you can only get so much recognition for having a starchitect-designed house while you go find someplace that you can be comfortable in, built by a lesser name but more inclined to go "yeah, you sort of need to adjust The Vision here so people won't freeze or boil and it's not all stark bare minimalism".
It would seem that a house by a starchitect you can't live in is exactly not what Roark would build. One of the criticisms of Frank Lloyd Wright, and my sense from visiting his Robie House and seeing pictures of others, is that they're not livable and that there were also problems with the actual design.
I don't think it's about being an island unto yourself and literally never needing another person. It's the specific kind of social need - to be with people, to have their approval for its own sake, to make them feel better. If you've ever butted up against that type of person - that personality - in real life, they're frustrating, hard to talk to, and probably very hard to live with or date. But they don't need all that, and to me that's fine - I don't need to MAKE them like society or care about society, you know? I think some people fundamentally disagree with that, and think everyone should care. Maybe that's the target of the critique here? I don't know. Just shower thoughts (not really because that would ruin my computer and phone, haha).
Strange you should mention Lloyd Wright, since the photos I've seen of his houses do strike me as beautiful designs. But how *practical* they are is a different matter, and I've since read a lot of criticism about them on exactly the grounds you state: problems with the design, not being livable, needing a lot of upkeep and repairs, etc.
So if Roark designs buildings that are functional and they really are functional, that is on the credit side for him. But swinging to the opposite arc of the pendulum where it is *all* function and no form, and no beauty, is as bad. And if Roark is just as insistent on his Grand Vision and to hell with what the client wants, then that is on the debit side.
I think my attitude here has been coloured by work dealings where we had a building designed by a Dublin firm of architects, and between the designs being signed off on and the actual building happening, it was years later, the site was changed, and a lot of the original rooms needed to be re-purposed. For instance, the original site was meant to be by the harbour, so they designed the building to have a 'ship' style with 'sails' and so on. But the new site was on the outskirts of the town and nowhere near water, so that design element really meant nothing.
The firm wasn't one bit interested in co-operating with us, and from their side I can understand why: this was an old project, over and done with, and spending more time working on it for us wasn't getting them any more money. But it was really, really frustrating from our side, and coloured decisions for subsequent projects to go with local builders who may not have been fancy architects but who would damn well put in a room where you wanted it put 😁
One of the main reasons Frank Lloyd Wright houses aren't livable is that Wright was a control freak, and made the buyers sign contracts requiring them not to change things--the interior, the colors, the furniture, whatever. The contracts also forbid selling the house to someone who hasn't signed the same contract. (I don't know if that always stands up in court.) So for instance Wright usually (maybe always) built doorways too short for anyone 6 feet tall, because he was short and resented tall people; and he'd write into the contract that the doors couldn't be modified to let tall people in.
I find that Anthem is usually a fairly non objective book to recommend, if i think someone would like her work. The Fountainhead feels to me like her worst in many ways, but it's also by far the most memorable for me. I think about its characters and ideas much more often than Atlas Shrugged, and I think part of it is that she did successfully alter the way i think about both architecture and philanthropy. With her other work, my mind was not changed, I either continued to agree or disagree with the points she made.
"Bobos" absolutely caught on in French, and is still used to this day.
I think this review is still giving too much credence to what's basically a monocausal explanation of 'kids these days are the problem' for everything. That is, even if we grant that there was a shift towards meritocracy in college admissions (some of the other comments talk about it being more complicated than that, but I'm not that familiar with the topic):
* The transition towards simplified art - that is, more or less, modernist art - started in ~1900, not 1955.
* Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe. Furthermore, the concept of a meritocracy determined by standardized testing is *much* closer to High Modernism than premodern elites, and some serious explanation would be needed for this meritocratic elite to be the ones that turned against meritocracy.
* Whether or not 'starving artists' have vanished as a class, Fussell wasn't among their number, and the concept doesn't seem to much overlap with 'Class X'. (I do think ACX has a tendency towards over-cynicism in assuming that everything is signaling and that people have no honest interests. The vast majority of 'new elite' members do not enjoy whitewater rafting, and so they don't participate in whitewater rafting.)
* Conservatives have complained about the new generation lacking 'values' for the entirety of human history. The fact that they're also complaining now really doesn't require explanation.
The connection with political polarization, though, does seem like it may be related - if the same elites ran both parties, it makes sense that their policies weren't that different. Of course, polarization very much is a cycle. Then again, the dominance of the Old Establishment wasn't eternal either, and the late 19th century seems like very much a period that also followed a different elite (the agrarian slaveholding elite, maybe corresponding to the 'Cavaliers') losing much of their elite status. So maybe there's something there - cycles of elite competition and all that. (Though searching for cycles in history is generally a matter of finding patterns in random noise, and I'm not entirely convinced Turchin's work is different.)
Apropos the connection to “Whither Tartaria?”, I was recently reading something about fascism that brought up Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism.” Eco devotes several of his 14 signs of fascism to a rejection of modernism and modern art. Prefer the old stuff? That’s your inner Nazi talking. I’m not sure this is as powerful an idea as it once was, but I suspect it was critically important.
I already knew there were entire movements in post-WWII European art that worried any representational art (art that depicts something recognizable in the physical world) had been tainted by fascism. It’s a hard thing to wrap my head around the idea that someone somewhere refused to paint, say, a nude or a bowl of fruit because it reminded them of Nazis, but I didn’t live through the war.
I recently realized the dominance of spare, unadorned, rectilinear “Brutalist” (an oft-misused term) buildings in the latter half of the 20th century could easily be due to a combination of perceived cost savings and the possibility that *everyone who mattered* might call you a fascist if you objected. The former might be enough on its own, but paired with the potential charge of crypto fascism, well, I bet that kept a lot of people in their seats at the town hall.
And it works both ways. Remember the minor freak-out when Trump declared that Neoclassical would be the standard style for new government buildings? Trump likes old-school things, and is old enough himself to have been building things in NYC when both its bobo and legit bohemian populations were at their peak. If anyone was on the receiving end of this theory it was him. We all knew who the Neoclassical requirement was supposed to stick it to in 2017, even if more recent generations can’t quite articulate their associations for traditional vs. modern architecture. So this pattern or something like it will probably persist.
If I recall correctly, a fondness for order and harmony was listed as a sign of fascism in The Authoritarian Personality. Order and harmony are, of course, two of the factors that make art beautiful, so it's no wonder the modern world can't produce beautiful art, when the impulse to do so is seen as somehow linked to a desire to commit genocide and start world wars.
>The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting.
Maybe, But didn't they also sponsor not-boorish artists to create masterpieces, akin to how European (first noble, then bourgeois) elites sponsored much of what fills the Louvre and a hundred other museums today?
A separation of tasks between the wealth-producer and the beauty-creator seems to produce better results than having your bobo install his own painting atelier in his 600m² lakeside chalet and make his own shitty -but oh so full of individuality- paintings.
Also, Yachting (and a lot of boorish old-money activity, like breeding horses or hunting castaways that trespass on your island) sounds hella fun, and I won't blame them for indulging on it.
I feel like if even half of this was true, The change in Harvard’s and other university’s admission policy would have been a much bigger deal. Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position. At the very least there would be legislative attempts to reverse the change. It’s possible the aristocracy didn’t realize how important the change was, but they should have realized it when the meritocrats became a thing, and when their kids stopped getting into top universities. There just wasn’t enough of a fight for something which supposedly toppled a virtual nobility. And it is highly unusual for an entire class of people to make an epistemic mistake about something which it is very important for them to get right, when the consequences of a mistake will be immediate and when the subject isn’t some obscure scientific field which requires expertise to understand. If David was smart enough to figure all of this out, why weren’t the aristocrats? It was far more important for them to get it right, and it doesn’t seem that David’s knowledge of the future was particularly useful for this inference, so the aristocrats had nearly all the relevant information David did.
This is assuming a united class of people. Add a faction within that class that thinks that many other members of the class don't deserve to be there, and it makes perfect sense; they're performing necessary maintenance work on the aristocratic class.
After all, meritocracy is good, and the natural aristocracy, including themselves, will naturally rise to the top. The only people who will sink are those who deserve to.
Not really you don’t need a unified aristocracy to put up a fight as history amply demonstrates. Even if only half the aristocracy was opposed to the change. They would not just roll over and let their opponents win and a faction in favour of meritocracy can only form if these people can actually put their children into the ivy league. Otherwise they will notice very quickly that the new system does not work for them when they and their friends can’t put their children into Harvard like they want.
You remember all those scandals that came out recently about people bribing schools to get their kids good grades and acceptance into universities? I think that hack was allowed to work for a lot of them until they'd lost enough power that we were suddenly able to pull the rug out from under them and accuse them of cheating.
I *wish* rich people nowadays just threw parties and bought expensive stuff. That's harmless. Mildly wasteful at worst.
Instead, we made them feel that that was bad and now they seek absolution for their perceived sins by trying to save the world, but actually increasing all kind of major risks (hello, nuclear war with Russia)
I wish SBF had done the drugs and the orgies without also feeling the need to be a productive member of society.
Oh, look, it's another double-barelled contributor to science and the betterment of society: https://www.statnews.com/2022/11/30/stanford-president-altered-images/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter_organic
Given that the architecture changed before the enrollment process, and given that something prompted the enrollment process itself to change, I think it's worth noticing that, while who the elites are and what they value may be upstream of many things, something else is necessarily upstream of who the elites are and what they value.
"But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be."
This quote really struck me as not right. What it took to demolish that old WASP aristocracy was the rise of the world's first long-lasting republic, an industrial revolution, a race war in which the republic happened to be on the right side, and a small set of relatively independent institutions that were (a) key to the elite and (b) relatively easily changed from the inside... that's a startling set of circumstances.
Quite the contrary, if Brooks is right, this demonstrates just how hard it is to dislodge an aristocracy, especially given that the old WASP aristocracy never really went away. It just got pushed slightly to the side, and could easily come roaring back.
There is a zero % chance the WASP aristocracy comes roaring back.
""Bobos”, stood for bourgeois bohemians. It was cute but never caught on" -> actually it did catch on in French! Quite a common expression
There's a Bo Bo Chinese Food restaurant here, and that's my first association.
The meritocratic phase of the Ivies lasted only a few years, from 1960 to sometime around 1967 when full-tuition academic scholarships were eliminated at all Ivy League schools, using the justification that they were ruining football. This was a major blow to their selectivity; before then, there had been /many/ full-tuition scholarships at most of the ivy leagues.
In the 1970s, full-tuition merit scholarships offered by third parties began to appear, but not for white males (except for scholarships offered only for particular majors, usually for careers in what was considered charitable work). Financial aid operated on the principle that they would start giving you financial aid only after your parents sold all their assets and spent all their money, and screw your brothers and sisters if that made it impossible for them to go to college. By 1980, no one could afford ivy-league tuitions except the rich or the broke, and only people who weren't white males could get full-tuition merit scholarships.
Starting around 1970, people who hadn't gone to any Ivy League or equivalent school (eg MIT) suddenly were blocked from reaching positions of power, wealth, or prestige--in politics, law, finance, business, education, and science. I did a survey around 2010 of people who had Nobels in physics, and found that of those who attended college before 1970, most had either not attended an ivy, or attended an ivy or equivalent (in physics) on a full-tuition merit scholarship. After 1970, that number dropped to... a very small number, impossible to establish because I couldn't know whether non-white-male students had received a full-tuition scholarship, but possibly zero. By the 1980s (IIRC), the number of Supreme Court justices who hadn't attended an Ivy had dropped from "most of them" to zero or one. After 1990, the same could be said of elected US Presidents, and the number of new American industrialist billionaires who hadn't attended an ivy or equivalent had dropped from "most of them" to a few, owing to big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.
Also in the 1970s, the political parties were disrupted, with the Democrats losing the South, and starting to lose the working class. They flipped positions between then and now. The Democrats are now the party of the rich. Witness the fact that they're outspending the Republicans right now in the critical Georgia Senate race by 2 to 1. Check political-spending statistics, and it appears that roughly a third of the disposable wealth in America was transferred to Republicans to Democrats between 1980 and the present.
This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-branding the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party toward identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.
The alternative hypothesis, that the ivies & co. suddenly became so good at picking smart people in the 1960s that they scooped up literally everyone capable of success since then, is infeasible, because
1. they can only admit about 1/1000th to 2/1000th of America's college population each year, and standardized tests show the median Ivy attendee is only in the 98th percentile
2. middle-class white & Asian males can't /all/ suddenly be incapable of success
3. most or all of them don't require standardized tests anymore on an application, so they have no good means of identifying talented students
4. in earlier years, enough highly-successful people hadn't performed well in, or hadn't attended, high school (eg Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford) that there should be at least some such people today, but I'm not aware of any
Do you really mean that very few people who got a Nobel in physics after 1970 did not attend an Ivy *for college* (and, to boot, very few of those who did attend an Ivy did so on a merit-based scholarship), or that very few such people did not attend an Ivy or equivalent *at some point in their academic careers*? Admissions to graduate schools is (as I'd imagine you know if you have an interest in STEM) far more meritocratic in the US than college admissions, and also much less income-dependent - pretty much everybody who goes for a PhD in the sciences is on an assistantship or scholarship.
I was counting grad schools. I don't think grad schools are as meritocratic as undergrad admissions, except in not having the wealth-bandpass filter that eliminates the middle class, or used to.
Undergrad admissions relies more on standardized test scores, and on grades from teachers on standardized curriculums, with standardized grading policies, who aren't free to give students good or bad grades on a whim. Grad admissions relies more on what undergrad college you went to, whom you worked with there, how much funding they had, how much they liked you personally, and what publications you have. There's more cronyism and luck involved, and a much larger cultural advantage to kids coming from academic parents, or from an upper-upper-middle-class academic/management community like those in San Jose or Boston, who understand how grad school, academia, and business really work.
I can't possibly agree for many reasons:
- undergrad admissions are need-blind only at the top places (and, for some populations, like "foreign" students, including residents who are not green-card-holders, only at a tiny handful of places)
- the standardized tests we have in place for undergrad admissions are actually quite weak (too easy in themselves, too easy to game, too non-specific), and so, even once you apply as a filter, you are going to end up with a population many times larger than that which could reasonably prosper at the top places;
- the choice within that population is then made by the admissions office, not by academics.
On luck, cultural advantage, understanding how academia works, etc.: those are key for undergraduate admissions, unless you have, well, the luck of being someone the admissions office decides it's looking for. Once you have got to university - any half-way reasonable place, which may be "less than" what you would have got had you had all the factors mentioned working in your favor - you have four years to get work done, acquire information, the general habitus, and what not. At least in the STEM fields I am most familiar with, if you are truly very good and keen to get ahead, you will manage to get to one of the top 10 grad schools. Connections may be particularly important to get to that one specific program people talk about, but less so if you are less specific.
... and, of course, then there's the filter you mentioned.
What is an undergrad who is truly very good and keen to get ahead supposed to do, in order to get ahead?
Be noticed by their professors, who will encourage them to do independent study, take graduate classes, go to seminars, possibly look at some research questions, etc. (Hopefully they will also be hired to be undergraduate teaching assistants, and will no longer have to do data entry or wash dishes.)
This is all of course assuming that the student is at or near an institution with a PhD program or at least a strong master's program. If not, then it's harder. But in any event, the possibilities are much, much greater than at any high-school (barring extreme examples such as a truly forsaken place vs. Stuyvesant, say). The US (I take this is what we are discussing) has great depth of field; even deeply third-tier places often have a couple (or more than a couple) good research) who will show this young person the ropes.
I went to a liberal arts college, with no graduate students, teaching assistants, or research. I'd been advised that I'd get a more-rounded education there than at the state universities.
>That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party.
...Lead by a white male (who did not, in fact, attend an Ivy). They're so sneaky like that.
I just can't understand how anyone smart enough to come up with all the previous analysis can say that with a straight face. It makes everything else in your analysis harder to take at face value.
The Democrats aren't an "anti-white-male party" (even though they might look that way compared to the party that more explicitly favors white males), white men are still overrepresented among democratic candidates[1]. Something something, when you're used to privilege, everything else looks like oppression. (Trying to ascribe this to "it's only because they all went to Ivy-likes" borders on the conspiratorial, and completely ignores that the majority of non-white-males in this category are similarly credentialed - Obama went to Harvard. It has nothing to do with race.)
Even *if* you're talking about the democrats' token adoption of a "woke" platform in the past couple of decades, that's happened *way* too late to explain the time period we're talking bout here (when it was even more overwhelmingly white).
If you *really* want to get down to it and say that Democrat have decided on a social class to target, and that means they've stopped putting in effort to convince non-college-educated-white-males, then you'd have something closer to a Motte, but that's a far cry from the "anti-white-male except elite Ivys" Bailey.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/26/white-male-minority-rule-us-politics-research
They're not actually against white males, and perhaps not really against anything. As you noted, the leaders are white males. I meant they present themselves as anti-white-male at this moment in time. But the white males of Harvard and Yale are themselves never severely discriminated against. There are always many doors open to them. The recent demonization of white males may have begun as an alternative way of keeping Jews and Asians out of Harvard. But I frankly think race is not the issue; the issue is simply keeping money and power in America within a group that is coherent, cooperative, and small. If identity politics can create a new group, large enough to shift the balance of power, but not large enough to be a threat, who can be admitted into that group within a framework that guarantees their continued loyalty and cooperation, that's fine with them.
And I'm also not really talking about "The Democrats". The US Democratic Party is merely the current vehicle of a movement that goes back at least to the Puritan settlements of the Boston area. Its mission is still the same: to promulgate an idealistic, utopian philosophy based on essentialism and logic; to install people who follow that philosophy into positions of power and wealth; to reshape society to move it closer to perfection; and to spread their power whenever possible.
Now, about my privilege.
My father's father was an orphan. His father, also an orphan, had been sent to a religious commune in Wisconsin after his parents died. The commune imploded after the cult leader's death, and the commune members were cast out penniless because they didn't own any of the commune they'd built and paid for. Shortly after, that great-grandfather died, and that grandfather was sent away to work as a farmhand at age 7.
He lived in a log cabin with a dirt floor and 4 other people, and eventually became one of those roving hired farmhands like the one in that Robert Frost poem, travelling from place to place looking for work, until he was drafted and sent to fight in France in World War 1, where he almost died. After the war, he got a job sweeping factory floors, was laid off, became a tramp for a while, got his job sweeping floors back, and worked his way up from sweeper to tool grinder.
He saved enough to buy a farm, and then a car, and then lost both because he couldn't keep up the car payments and had used the farm as collateral for the loan to buy the car. So he went back to grinding tools at the factory, until he was disabled in a car crash. His pension was stolen by the Caterpillar company, which declared when it bought Moline Tractors that it wasn't going to honor Moline's pensioners. (This was the incident that led to the laws we have against this sort of corporate acquisition today.)
So he lived out the rest of his life at home, supported by his wife, my grandma, who cleaned other people's houses; and my dad, who delivered newspapers, and bought and sold rags and junk on the street.
My father's mother was also an orphan. She'd been a peasant in Ukraine, but after the Russian Revolution, some local commissariat wanted her father's vegetable garden; so he declared the entire family to be kulaks, took their house and garden, and sent them all to a labor camp, where most of them starved or froze to death. She was allowed to return years later, and worked her way to Germany, cleaning houses, until she eventually saved enough money to board a ship to America, to which she brought nothing but the clothes on her back.
My mother's father was also an orphan, in Poland. His father had had a job on the other side of town, which took hours to walk to and back, so he had to get up in the morning before the children rose, walk across town, work all day, walk back, and arrive home after the children were asleep. So my grandfather only saw his father on Sundays. But his father became sick, and was in the hospital a long time, where they weren't allowed to visit him.
Then one day they got a message that he was being sent home the next day. So the next day, the children all got dressed in their Sunday clothes and waited outside all day for their father to come home, until a cart pulled up. Some men hauled his father out of the cart and dumped him off. The hospital had neglected to tell the family that he was dead.
So my mother's father supported the entire family by working as an errand boy for a government official. Like his father, he had to get up before dawn and walk all the way across town, where he spent much of his childhood standing at attention in that official's office.
Fortunately, his parents had attended one of the only Baptist churches in Poland, and some Baptist congregations in England decided they would to pay for some promising young boy to go to a Baptist seminary and bring proper theology back to Poland. He was chosen, and sent to Rawdon College in England at age 17. Classes at Rawdon were in English, Greek, and Latin. He spoke only German and Polish. So he had to teach himself Greek, Latin, and English during his first year of college. After finishing seminary, he went back to Poland, where he married my mother's mother. She was the wealthiest of my ancestors. Her parents had a dirt floor and no running water, but they had a cow, some chickens, and at least two pigs.
My mother's father was sent to America to attend a Baptist conference in August of 1939, and World War 2 broke out while he was there. So my mother and her family had no father from 1939-1947. Near the end of the war, Russian soldiers "liberating" their town killed my mother's mother's father, and took his cow, the chickens, and the pigs.
There was never enough food after that. My mother, her sister, and their mother and grandmother fled across western Poland and Eastern Germany, and listened each night to the guns of the pursuing Russian Army. When my mom was 7, she watched Dresden burn. After a year in a UN refugee camp, they were able to take a boat to America and reunite with my grandfather in 1947. They spent their lives moving around Canada and the north of the US, from one temporary pastorship to another, as my grandfather's seminary training in Biblical criticism had made him too aware of the failings of the Bible to be a very motivating Baptist preacher. They didn't have running water or electricity until about 1955.
So now we get to my parents. My father was able to save up enough money doing odd jobs to send himself to college–this was in the days when tuition was in the hundreds of dollars–and got a PhD in engineering, over the objections of his parents. He got a job and kept it for the rest of his life, though sometimes it moved him around. My mother became a nurse, working in the downtown areas of Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Baltimore.
And then there's me. When it was time for me to go to college, my parents had saved a grand total of $3000 for my college fund, which was enough for about one month of college. There was no question of applying to an Ivy, or MIT, or Stanford, or Carnegie Mellon. If I hadn't been white, or hadn't been male, they would've have scholarships I could have applied to; but not one of them had any full-tuition merit scholarships available to white males. I couldn't even get a loan to go to those schools; the government's student loans maxed out at $10,000 / year.
I got to go to college only because I was able to get a full-tuition merit scholarship--in fact, I was offered one by every college I applied to, plus scholarships from the State of Maryland and a National Merit Scholarship. But in those first 4 years, all my scholarships put together still didn't cover the cost of food, so I had to work during school and in the summer. I couldn't afford to join my friends when they went out eating or drinking; I couldn't go to movies; I couldn't afford to date. Sometimes I still couldn't afford food, and got through the days before payday by surreptitiously spraying my roommate's spray starch down my throat.
I spent 15 years in college and earned a BS, an MS, and a PhD. But I've never yet gotten a job that required anything more than a BS. Those are reserved for the elites.
In my last year of grad school, I noticed that none of the people in my department who graduated a year before me got a good job. I mentioned it to my girlfriend, who shrugged and said, "I wondered why you were even in this program. Don't you know you can't get a job with a PhD from the University of __?" I pointed out that she was also getting a PhD from the U of __. She laughed and said, "I'm a woman. I can get a job anywhere I want."
I didn't believe her then, but she did get a job in academia, and I didn't. Years later, I checked, and found that, out of the 30 men and 4 women who'd studied artificial intelligence with me and gotten a PhD, 3 of the men and 3 of the women got jobs in academia. The 3 men all had at least a dozen publications before graduating, and two of them had organized and run international conferences. All of them had jobs in colleges I'd never heard of. The other 27 men had vanished. Google could find nothing about any of them. The 1 woman who didn't get an academic job had in fact flunked out of the program; but her husband, who worked for the school, pressured them into granting her a degree anyway.
Every college, every job, every grant I've ever applied to has had explicit language in the application form saying "White males go to the end of the line." I'm not talking about an imagined "the store detective was looking at me funny" prejudice; I'm talking about continual, explicitly-and-proudly-declared racism and sexism declaring me the least-desirable kind of person, for all of my adult life.
In 2016, I decided to give up on tech jobs, which were too aggressively affirmative-action for me to have any real hope of employment, and go to college yet again, for a master's in English Literature. We studied no English Literature. We studied Marx, Foucault, bell hooks, and why everything was the fault of the white male patriarchy that controlled everything. One day at the start of class, my professor said she'd just written a recommendation for the professor who had originally convinced her to major in literature, 20 or 30 (I forget) years earlier. He had never found a permanent position himself, but had been bouncing from one adjunct faculty position to another all those years. Then she laughed, and said, "But what did he expect as a white male?"
So I dropped out of the English Literature MS program. She'd just slipped up and told me that everything she'd taught us was a lie; that white males were at the bottom of the pole, not the top; and that I would never get a faculty job in English Literature.
I've now been unemployed for 9 years, and every job interview I've gotten has been at some firm that was trying to get a 50/50 male-female balance of engineers out of what was usually a 90/10 ratio of both their existing staff and their applicants. I have sent out hundreds of resumes, and gotten about 5 interviews, and not one job offer.
So tell me: Exactly when does my white or male privilege kick in?
I think this overestimates the role of elites in shaping culture, both under the old money aristocracy and the new money quasi-meritocracy. In a liberal, democratic, capitalist society, elites are strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses, at least on a surface level: Political elites need to appeal to voters, while corporate elites (including the media) need to appeal to consumers.
Instead, the Blue Tribe seems largely centered around the white-collar "professional-managerial" (and academic) upper middle class, bolstered by the support of blue-collar minorities, young but educated activists, and various corporations that deal with the public or the government directly and thus have to worry about maintaining good PR. The Red Tribe seems largely centered around a different subset of the upper middle class, mostly blue-collar "petit-bourgeoisie" independent contractors and small business owners, bolstered by support from rural Whites, disgruntled youths from Blue Tribe backgrounds who've defected, and companies in fields like manufacturing that don't need to be overly concerned with image and can comfortably default to supporting the more fiscally conservative party. The individual cultural preferences of the multi-millionaires and billionaires aren't an especially important driving factor here.
>I think this overestimates the role of elites in shaping culture, both under the old money aristocracy and the new money quasi-meritocracy. In a liberal, democratic, capitalist society, elites are strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses, at least on a surface level: Political elites need to appeal to voters, while corporate elites (including the media) need to appeal to consumers.
Most of the social changes of the last sixty years were popular with elites before they became popular with the masses.
Yes, but was that because the elites had access to new technologies first because of their wealth permitting them to by the new technology when it was scarce, and the new technology causing the social changes, or the elites causing the social changes? And that’s just the first explanation that springs to mind. And in other countries, people don’t just abandon their old habits just because the elites don’t like them eg colonial people largely keeping their culture, so why would the US be different. And the free market really should prevent the use of media for propaganda, because overly liberal news would get outcompeted by news which is more to the people’s taste. Realistically, it’s likely a combination of people getting influenced by the elites and social trends catching the elites first for a number of reasons.
If the elites were really "strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses", we'd expect their views to track those of the general public, which isn't the case. So the original claim is falsified, regardless of whether social change is being caused by the elites, or by new technology, or by something else (although a lot of social changes don't have any obvious technological drivers -- what new technology made, say, gay marriage such a cause celebre all of a sudden?).
> And in other countries, people don’t just abandon their old habits just because the elites don’t like them eg colonial people largely keeping their culture, so why would the US be different.
In lots of countries, people do end up adopting elite culture. E.g., most European countries have become linguistically more homogenous as the prestige dialect of their language replaces local variants. In some cases they even adopted entirely new languages -- how many Irish people speak Gaelic as a first language, for example?
> And the free market really should prevent the use of media for propaganda, because overly liberal news would get outcompeted by news which is more to the people’s taste.
It really should, but it doesn't.
Epigraph of this book should be:
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing was ever made.
-Immanuel Kant
Each of these different types of people experience themselves as archetypal. Their attitudes seem to them to be common sense, not always noble but reasonable, understandable. Their speech has no accent. Their jokes pierce to the absurd underpinnings of just the things that most call for it. Other people’s points of view look malformed & misguided, and their speech sounds stretched here, tilted there.
We don't call it yachting anymore, it's "small boat sailing" with connotations of ruggedness, thrift (I oil the teak myself!), environmentalism (wind power), and connection to and immersion in nature. "Small" is defined as anything under 400ft (e.g. shorter than Jeff Bezos yacht). However, having a smaller boat does grant higher status, as it signals commitment to the principles above.
Also, Scott- your not realizing this makes you a suspected poseur, possibly even tragically uncool old money.
I realise I am tragically uncool, and there's no money old or new in my family, but I do associate "yachting" with this:
https://www.bavariayachts.com/fileadmin/_processed_/2/7/csm_bavaria-sy-cruiserline-overview-cruiser37_61eaa58f0b.jpg
Not this:
https://nasco-yachts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Miami-Super-yacht-rental-at-sea.jpg
So - am I hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch, or do I have the instincts/taste, if not the class/wealth, of the upper-middle/upper class? 😁
This was a really fun read, but I find Brooks' argument a little silly. I picked on it a bit here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/causal-explanations-considered-harmful
I haven't read the book, but it seems a too simple story. Many other things were changing in US society: baby boom, rapid expansion of wealth after WWII with US the dominant industrial power, expansion of television in many households, Viet Nam, migration of many Southern blacks to Northern cities, protest culture aided by TV (MLK, Viet Nam)...
Can you elaborate?
Banned for this comment; if you are going to say someone (including me) is stupid, you also need to explain what they got wrong. In many other cases this would be a partial warning but I can't imagine this commenter really changing their ways and becoming a positive contributor.
"money-obsessed WASP capitalist who would buy the baroque gold altar"
No WASP capitalist would ever be so crude as to buy a baroque gold altar. Not sure if you missed the point about the WASPs or if David Brooks did. The whole idea was to be subtle but obvious about your money, like old boat shoes.
"All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy."
Who's kidding whom? All of your lacrosse / country club / WASP stories are happening now, but with a different set of characters--they are not old money, not WASP. I should know I live right in the middle of it.
A quick note that the adjective "bobo", for bohemian-bourgeoise, is (still) in use in francophone Québec. I initially misheard it as boho for bohemian until I disputed that description of a particular Montreal neighbourhood and had it explained to me.
It seems strange to call the current group the meritocrats when they're highly critical of meritocracy, although I suppose that would have made more sense back in 2000.
That Native American blanket example helped me understand something I saw in Australia: the aboriginal art that sells for the most is not the art that shows the most virtuosity. It's the stuff that looked "authentic" in a condescending way.
Of course, if this shift happened in Australia as well, as I suspect it did, it cannot be explained by changes in Harvard's admission policy alone.
But possibly Sam Bankman-Fried (& Caroline) are leading indicators of the end of the "meritocratic families" and their hold on power.
If you're worried about signalling that you've read Moldbug you can use Sailer's "megaphone" instead.