"For most upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money will be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it."
I think of myself as upper middle class. My parents are divorced and my father is dead so I know how that inheritance played out. My mom will be leaving me very little (partially because her second husband has a child that will benefit from the money much more than any of his siblings or my siblings and I). The inheritance won't be even CLOSE to the biggest financial event of my life. I don't think I'm unusual. Maybe I am?
Or ... maybe my definition of upper middle class is off (but then I'd be rich, rather than middle-middle class ...). Or maybe my situation is unusual? I'd like to see any vaguely reasonable numbers for Scott's claim (and maybe clarification about who qualifies for upper middle class).
Neither of my grandmothers left any substantial inheritance their kids (and grandpas went first).
Nursing home care is very expensive and the government won’t cover it until you’re basically destitute. My guess is that will eat away any typical middle class inheritance pretty quickly.
Please note that you can place your house in a trust so that you do not legally own it for Medicaid eligibility purposes. My (upper-middle class) grandparents (middle-middle class) have done this.
The average savings for boomers is ~200k. Even the 99th percentile is under 3M. Add in stuff like retirement consumption, rest home costs, and the fact that most people have more than one child and you realize that not even the richest 1% are getting seven figures from their parents.
EDIT: Fair enough, this isn't total net worth. Apparently the 1% level for net worth is around $10M. But the 10% level (i.e. upper middle class) is ~$1M and a source on inheritances (link below in thread) claims that a 90th percentile inheritance is around 200k so I think my general point mostly holds - a typical upper middle class person doesn't have their lifestyle affected much by inherited wealth.
But presumably if the average savings is $200,000, and the average Boomers have two kids, then the average Millennial will inherit $100,000, which is a pretty upper middle class annual income. Presumably the actual upper middle class are quite a bit above the average, and while the inheritance isn’t likely to be seven figures, it’s still likely to be the largest financial event in one’s life (getting several years income in a single chunk).
Yeah, as best I can tell from simple web searches, a typical upper middle class person might get something like a year's salary via inheritance. Which is nice and all, but not life changing and certainly not behind any sort of wealth-gap of the sort hinted at by the comment Scott was replying to there.
You're looking at "retirement savings", not net worth.
According to this page https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net-worth-of-the-1.aspx, the cutoff net worth to be in the top 1% in the US is $11.1 million, while the cutoff net worth to be in the top 10% is $1.2 million. That, honestly, sounds more plausible to me than your numbers (given that a lot of houses are worth over a million dollars these days in HCOL and even MCOL areas). And bear in mind this is across all age groups, so the average net worth of the top 10% at their time of death is probably higher.
Fair enough, the data that I used didn't count total net worth. But according to this (can't vouch for the data, it was just the first google hit): https://www.annuity.org/retirement/estate-planning/average-inheritance , "The average for the most wealthy 1% reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200." I dunno if the discrepancy between your numbers and these is methodological or if there are big end-of-life costs not accounted for. Also according to this: https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/ top 10% by net worth is 850k (5% is only 1 mil).
So I dunno. The data seem somewhat fuzzy, but these two links back up my intuition that most upper-middle class folks don't inherit seven figures.
At the risk of really getting into the weeds here, that seems to be the average size of an inheritance, not an estate. Inheritances of course get split between children, but they may also include token amounts given to other relatives. If you give a million bucks to each of your two children, but also leave a token $5000 to your six nieces and nephews and five grandchildren, then that's ... well, I can't be bothered doing the maths right now, but you get the idea. The average will be brought down by small inheritances given to "lesser" relatives.
Yeah, I think this idea that there are huge sums of money passing over generations for non-elites assumes that people continue working long after they have the means to retire, and/or don't adjust their lifestyle in proportion to their retirement funds.
I would also describe myself as middle (maybe upper middle) class, but don't expect a huge windfall inheritance, either.
I feel like my family is a counterpoint, at least of sorts. Great grandparents were the immigrant success story of coming to America, working in the factory, eventually owning the factory. Then kids (my grandparents) realized that factories weren't such a hot prospect, took the intergenerational wealth and built it up through investing (stocks, real estate). They were not fantastically rich, just sort of regular rich, and they did indeed burn a lot of what they earned in end-of-life care. But not all of it, leaving my professional parents suddenly wealthier at end of life. And at some point my parents will leave professional me suddenly wealthier.
There is a lot of variation here across grandparents, cousins, etc. A branch of my family is crazy rich, most are normal comfortable, some are working class. But, yeah, inheritance is kind of a big deal.
Oh for sure it is if you get it, I think the question is more how many actually get it. I am for sure upper middle class these days, my father was in the air force but then disappeared from my life. Mother was a drunk on welfare. I won’t be inheriting anything. Even had various relatives who were fairly well off, never got anything from them other than mostly useless, but sometimes presents. I doubt my wife gets anything from her parents either.
Economic class isn’t fixed by bloodline. You may be upper middle class by wealth and income, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like your father or mother were.
Well sure it is not fixed by bloodline. But despite what you might hear, the US is actually fairly socially mobile by class. Lots of people go up and down the scales. So the thesis that the upper middle class is perpetuating their grip through the uber power of inheritances looses a little bit of teeth when you have people like myself who climbed there with fairly little fuss through just being bright and working a bit hard.
I was bottom quintile probably all through youth, in income, maybe 4th quintile by "family culture" (my single mother's father had been a schoolteacher), and likely even into my 20s that was my eocnomic station in life.
But then I started applying myself in the professional world, and quickly outpaced my peers. And by my mid thirties I would guess I was living a solidly median lifetyle, and now by my early 40s my family is definitely upper-middle-class. And this is no tech start-up magic or anything. I had standard office monkey paper pusher jobs (mor eor less) until 33 when I quit and started my own thing.
Another issue with the "inherit their parent's money" issue is that most people are going to be well past fifty by the time their parents die. At that point their habits, beliefs, and lifestyles are pretty much set. If they were currently in paycheck-to-paycheck land then probably now they don't worry so much about money, but they probably also don't do anything all that different than when they were living on the edge because fifty years of habits die hard.
Nor can you use "I will inherit bignum dollars in my fifties" to justify increased spending in your twenties and thirties, because it's very easy for your parents to wind up with approxinately zero net worth at death even if they were UMC all their working lives.
I just surveyed my 4 closest friends. We were all raised middle to upper-middle class.
1 person's dad died when they were 12, they will never inherit anything of substance.
I, and my three other friends, each expect to inherit $1-4 million in 2020 dollars, based on reasonable estimates of elder care costs and current assets (we're unusually happy to discuss finances with our parents, I realize; partly that's because somehow we're all executors of our parents' estates and trusts).
We're all wealthy enough that that amount of money isn't going to impact our lifestyles at all, but it is DEFINITELY going to be the most significant individual financial event in any of our lives.
One interesting (to me) commonality about our various situations is that all of our parents continued to live very frugal lives during our childhoods and after kids left the house, and have basically just saved most of their money and invested in moderately successful businesses or just index funds since then, expenses remaining much less than wage/investment income.
It's easy for me to agree that this is not typical (I didn't pick my math geek friends at random).
But I also am willing to believe that the phenomenon is real, at some margin.
I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't.
Scott's confusion is itself a little confusing. Most people aren't going to inherit anything from their parents until they are in their 50s, 60s, or even later. (Look at Warren Buffett's children who still haven't inherited anything.)
I doubt Scott spends a lot of time around people that age to hear the conversations.
In my limited experience those inheritances tend to be generation skipping. The money goes to grandchildren. And it suffers the eternal problem of wealth partitioning. 2 kids with 2 kids each means 4 grandchildren. $3 million is pretty great for a couple but split four ways it becomes $750,000 which becomes a lot less life-changing.
"I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't."
Thus my initial request for clarification on the term :-)
Can one be in the top 2% - 3% for both income and wealth in the US and accurately score one's self as middle class (not even upper middle class)? I'm fine with a definition of middle class that goes from maybe the bottom 5% to the top 2%, but if that is what we are going to use I think it important that this be made clear :-)
My grandparents would be middle class, but not upper middle class. My parents would be middle class or upper middle class. I score myself as economically upper middle class or at the low end or rich (because in a VHCOL area the rich often drive Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas ...). My son grew up being told that (by me) that his parents were rich. Which is true, but then 'rich' doesn't mean what it seems it should mean in a VHCOL area.
*Socially* I'm middle class of some sort, with some outlier behaviors maybe (I'm signed up with Alcor for cryonic suspension, my wife and I home schooled our child K-12). My wife and I have Planet Fitness memberships, which is pretty middle (but not upper middle) class, I think.
The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
My family story is this: my wife and I are only children. My kids are the only great-grandchildren of my 4 grandparents. We also picked up inheritances from a childless aunt (with probably another on the way) and even a childless first cousin.
All of these people are middle-class to maybe bottom-end of upper-middle but I think we’re generally thrifty, good investors (I’m a professional), there are a number of life insurance policies involved that naturally accumulated value. So it all amounts to several million most likely coming our way.
Skipping a generation is common enough in how this is set up, but far from universal. It’s most likely how I’ll look to structure inheritance though, but partly because wife and I would both like to maximize grandchildren before we die and I’d like if money weren’t seen as an obstacle to that.
> The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
I spent some time at China's immensely prestigious Fudan University and made contacts with various people you might term (pre-)meritocrats there.
I also met someone studying nursing at an affiliated school. To go to nursing school, you need a standardized test score _below_ the threshold that makes you eligible for admittance to a second-rate university. (Chinese universities are formally divided into 一本 "first-rate" and 二本 "second-rate" schools. When I was looking at test scores by province [a project that didn't get very far, but was nevertheless interesting], the second-rate cutoff was at about the 40th percentile, and the first-rate cutoff was at about the 80th. But you study nursing at a 大专, a technical school, not a university.)
So we may assume that this nursing student had scored below the 40th percentile for Xinjiang (already a low-performing province) on a rigorous standardized test.
She is doing the best of any of my acquaintances, though; braggy posts on wechat show off the title to her apartment, her new Tesla, and her baby. When I asked her how she was affording these things, she reported to me that her husband is a "driver", presumably making very little money - but his parents are happy to buy things for their son's family.
I find this an interesting example of "inheritance concentration" leading irresponsible lower-class splurging behavior to result in better life outcomes than responsible upper-class prudent self-reliance.
Relevant to some other comments on this post, it also illustrates that you can easily receive a significant part of your inheritance before your parents actually die.
It's interesting that there are, so far, zero comments reporting something like "yes, my parents/grandparents passed away and left my me/my parents enough money that it changed our lives, this is definitely how it works."
I do have the opposite story -- my Family Lore is rooted in the fact that, 150 years ago, our family was "wealthy." Through intermittent occurrences of frivolous spending, alcoholism, and having >2 children at every generation, the only remainder of that wealth is the tall tales and some land holdings that are owned jointly by 30+ descendants. In other words, the lesson of my personal narrative is that wealth dilutes and dissipates over time. The counterfactual world where I inherited an "aristocratic" position instead of a middle-class-professional lifestyle seems very very far away.
Here's another more well-known narrative: John D. Rockefeller accumulated a fortune of >$1 billion in the late 19th century. The Rockefeller family wealth is now allegedly over $360 billion, which provides an example of a family that seems to have actually grown their joint wealth. However, we are now 7 generations down the line, and there are 250 direct descendants of John D. Rockefeller. If you were to simply split that pot between the 250 descendents, and then factor in inflation, it would be evident that while the Rockefeller fortune has grown remarkably, it has actually not grown fast enough to make each individual Rockefeller descendent any richer than John D. Rockefeller was. In other words, the Rockefellers have essentially only managed to break even, at best. And the Rockefellers are often touted as an example of success at the art of sustaining family wealth!
This brings about an alternative take about something else: Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons (divorces, elderly healthcare costs). It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair.
"Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons..."
I may not have been clear. I *did* get an inheritance from my father, but the inheritance wasn't the single largest financial event of my life.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair."
Maybe? My grandparent on both sides were middle class. I would score my parents as upper middle class, though maybe just more solidly middle class than my grandparents. I dunno. *I* think of myself as upper middle class, but not "rich" (even though because of living and working in a VHCOL area I probably AM rich).
The next step "up" would be "rich" as in partner in a law firm or corporate vice president or something like that. There do seem to be a limited number of slots for those positions, though, so for my son to be rich (a) he'd need to move up relative to me, and (b) a rich someone else would need their kid to miss on continuing in the rich strata.
But I'm not seeing how, to pick an example, giving my kid $500K would help him become a law partner or VP or whatever. The limiter here really seems to be more his talent and interest rather than a lack of money due to inheritance.
We could pay to send him to Harvard MBA school. But he isn't interested and neither is Harverd.
Social mobility isn't about inheriting wealth, it's about creating wealth by virtue of the greater opportunities provided by the preceding generation's incremental move up the social ladder, e.g. generation 1 is a laborer who barely makes enough to feed his family, gen 2 is a simple store owner who scraps to make sure his kid can go to college, gen 3 is a white-collar worker who sends his kid to Harvard.
Also, social mobility means moving beyond your parents' economic class. If your wealth is obtained from inheritance, then it's definitionally not going to be more than what your parents had.
A well timed inheritance from my grandmother made it possible for my parents to send me to an elite university. My parents at that time were a teacher and a journalist, and the grandmother had been a professor. It wouldn’t exactly have been “never work again” money but in combination with my parents’ savings and need based aid, it was life changing for me.
The crypto bros becoming the idea is really weird. There’s nothing that will change the mind of the Crypto bros but you will not be the new ruling class.
I remember a line from a Norman mailer book: a rich guy had died and the protagonist was enquiring about him. Why was the sendoff not better? A local dignity answered that there what are two types of millionaires. “A million dollars can buy you power and influence, or a million dollars can buy you lots of groceries. This guy was the latter. “
Well the million is dated, think 100s of millions today. Mostly crypto is lots of money without power, although SBF was trying to change that I suppose.
There is no meritocracy in Britain.
There was an increase in social mobility post war, often driven by grammar schools, but the elite positions in Britain are now back in the hands of the fee paying privately educated, more firmly than before even with the city and journalism - historically both conduits to relative wealth or comfort from the working or lower middle classes now in the hands of the elites. Heck even pop is elitist now.
The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
>The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
Even if you don't agree with them, I don't think the reasons are unexplained, or even obscure: grammar schools were and are state-run whereas private schools aren't, and "the State should not do X" is much more compatible with liberalism than "the State should forbid anyone from doing X".
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the next Labour government strip private schools of their charitable status.
Local authorities were allowed to keep them open if they wanted to. Only conservative ones, ie. ones
with wealthier voters, did. That means the system became *more* unequal, because it was no longer the case that everyone had access to the grammar schools,
and only people in wealthier areas did.
On the other hand...academies.
"An academy is an independent state school governed by the Academy Agreement it makes with the Department for Education, and at that point it severs connections with the local education authority. The current advisory text is the Academy and free school: master funding agreement dated March 2018.[22][23] The governors of the academy are obliged to publish an annual report and accounts, that are open to scrutiny and inspections.[24]
All academies are expected to follow a broad and balanced curriculum but many have a particular focus on, or formal specialism in, one or more areas such as science; arts; business and enterprise; computing; engineering; mathematics; modern foreign languages; performing arts; sport; or technology. Although academies are required to follow some aspects of the National Curriculum,[25] they are otherwise free to innovate; however, as they participate in the same Key Stage 3 and GCSE exams as other English schools, they teach a curriculum very similar other schools, with only small variations.[26]"
The Labour Government under Tony Blair established academies through the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
The old joke was that the Labour Party did it for equality - for the teachers. The secondary modern teachers didn't like the grammar teachers looking down on them.
In real terms, meritocracy isn't egalitarian, and the justification was partly that everyone was starting to look down on the secondary modern kids, partly that the middle class kids were playing the system in order to stuff the grammar schools with their own kids and defeating the whole point of the system.
It’s interesting that people took only the last sentence to task - the end of British meritocracy not causing any ire.
The answer is that the State could reduce subsidies to the extent that nearly everybody is priced out. However my preference would be keeping both private schools and grammars. The last ship has sailed.
Being American, I have no notion of a meritocracy emerging from *anything other than* private school, or its functional equivalent, the "top public high school".
In the American context, the idea that competitive schools would ever lift substantial numbers of those at the bottom, or in the bottom half, or perhaps in the bottom three-quarters - is not supported. Competitive schools would either be expensive and private; or located in an area of expensive homes to which you would be zoned, so while not competitive to get into based on merit, would be quite competitive once in; or occasionally, "magnet" schools that require (or did) testing would be located in a lower SE area in the interest of geographic equity. One such school was in my town, housed in the normal (badly performing) high school - a sign of the latter's performance was that it was renamed several times. The kids in the magnet were indeed bused from areas that had better high schools - but the magnet, to some parents, was better still, being selective. This magnet "side" sailed along, winning prizes, no need for a name change, well-regarded - until, ultimately, there were complaints that the two schools were strictly in parallel and had no commonality, and the magnet school was kicked out.
Competitive schools will certainly lift a few individuals, that is surely true. It depends on whether one can tolerate that something can be more to one, than it is to a hundred.
Working class families do sometimes get their kids into the selective schools--famously, this happens among first-generation East Asian immigrants whose parents are both working some shit job.
Or, alternatively, I guess my view is that the meritocracy is the word we use for the churn within a rather small slice of humanity. Thus, I vaguely recall - notwithstanding the slaughter of some of their members, and whatever losses they sustained, lots of the families on top and on the make in the reign of Louis XVI, had quite miraculously recovered their position by the 1850s.
I feel like I read something similar re the Cultural Revolution but I do sometimes get things exactly backward.
This was the old argument from "The Rise of the Meritocracy" (which coined the term): even if you had a meritocracy, you'd end up creating a quasi-hereditary regime with a small amount of movement up and down because general intelligence is hereditary.
I would have thought that this was the most anti American ideology. The ideology of the US, in opposition to Europe, was that anybody could make. The president could be born in a log cabin.
It's less black and white than the end of meritocracy. The comprehensives were supposed to subsume the function of the grammars, hence the name. In areas that held on to grammars, that didn't happen, but they still had grammars.
Why were the comprehensives unsuccessful at replacing the grammars exactly? (This is all as baffling as cricket to me.) And if the grammars should have been left alone, who exactly was the enemy of this postwar meritocracy?
The grammars were academically selective. The comprehensives are not.
There are some very good comprehensive schools, but they now select by wealth (house prices), which is perhaps a less accurate and more unfair proxy for academic ability.
In areas without grammars, the best comp becomes a pseudo gramamr. In areas with survive grammars, comps become pseudo secondary moderns. There are a lot of organic effects and unintended consequences here.
Some local authorities ignored the dept of education and kept their grammars because they were popular with voters. Central government could only influence them via funding. The grammar I went to was noticeably not well funded.
Scott writes: "You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened."
There seem to be lots of people frustrated with not being able to get ahead to the degree they expected, especially in the PMC. There's a general mood of social pessimism, which Turchin usually says corresponds to elite overproduction.
Suppose that calibration is possible, in the sense that an external observer can observe different people, gauge their intelligence/competence, make predictions about their future earning+status potential, and have those predictions borne out on average. But suppose further that people's self-evaluations are overly optimistic, so that even if they apply the same downstream prediction architecture, their inputs are skewed so as to predict an unrealistic level of success. Does this indicate elite overproduction? For that matter, does it even require an explanation, or is it as simple as everyone thinking they're an above-average driver?
I do wonder just how many people can actually sit down and say to themselves "I'm in the top 5% but not the top 1%" and be accurate.
The more likely universal response is "I'm better than this." Which leads to Turchin's overproduction - a lot of people with a lot of education, but not educated to do the jobs that need doing.
When I was in high school (early 2000s, UK), the government had a policy of getting 50% (!) of young people into university, and I remember being regularly propagandised about how getting a degree would be great, it would open so many doors, I'd be able to shoot straight to the top in any business area of my choice, etc.
Of course, this all turned out to be BS, and the reality is that I ended up doing basically the same sorts of jobs as my parents had done with their A-levels (the qualifications you get from school at age 18). The mismatch between what I'd been sold and what I actually got is, I will admit, somewhat frustrating.
(And no, I don't think "You should have realised, at age 16/17, that society in general and your schools and teachers in particular were lying to you" is a reasonable response. Schoolchildren just don't generally have to sort of life experience to recognise that sort of thing.)
Honestly just the shitty messaging we have 80s and on kids about their life prospects. You can be anything you want even if you are a midwit if you just apply yourself.
Which you know isn’t true. I think way too many people who were fundamentally just bog standard Americans were raised thinking they were future somebodies.
The feeling when I was a girl was that there was pretty much a two-tier hierarchy of things to do - with the 60s over and done with, essentially no thought given to a well-lived life except that motherhood and household management were indisputably the lowest - essentially shameful, in one of those interesting inversions. However, there was no hierarchy of ability, of course; so the result was a sort of homogenization of outcome really. Perhaps a very small contributor to the way the world seems overall grayer with the passage of time, a phenomenon difficult to separate from one's own aging of course, so tending to get a discussion-stopping retort of "you think there was a good old days?", etc.
A lot of schools tell their students to "Go out and change the world!" as some kind of empowerment attempt, but I just think it's true. Statistically, only a tiny number of people will ever change the world in any meaningful way; if you encourage children to think of that as the baseline for living a successful life, you condemn the vast majority of them to frustration and disappointment.
It is true that the correlation between wealth and partisanship has weakened in the past decades, due to rising educational polarisation, and it wouldn't amaze me if it vanished or even reversed in the future, but it hasn't done so yet.
The more plausible claim is that Democrats are the party of the professional/managerial class while the Republicans are the party of the petit bourgeois small business people. Both of these groups have six figure salaries, but the latter don’t feel as rich as the former and don’t donate $200 to their favored candidates.
P(Democrat) = (Education) + (Extent of prejudice against your demographic) + (# people living within a mile of you) - (Wealth) -(Age)
At first glance, this would imply that being Republican would correlate strongly with being rich, but because wealth correlates strongly with education, the correlation between being Republican and being rich, while positive, is actually only weak.
This would imply that retired professional sportsmen would be mostly Republican: they are rich, older (note the "retired") and not well-educated.
And, if you look at white professional sportsmen, they don't face lots of prejudice, and they are mostly Republicans. Even African-Americans are a lot more Republican than other African-Americans.
Yeah, seems pretty solid.
I guess the exception is largely people working entertainment: lots of rich popstars and actors and the like are Democrats in spite of their poor educations and wealth.
Entertainment seems to be a job area where most people are in it for non-monetary rewards.
In the movie Idiocracry, there's a running joke about a really popular actor whose thing is to get kicked in the groin a lot. If you asked him (when he's rolling around) why he doesn't quit, he would probably say something like "What? And give up show business?"
The Democrats are also the party of African Americans and Hispanic Americans, so that's going to have a huge impact on average incomes. You'd need to specifically look at White Democrats vs White Republicans.
It says that according to IRS data, in 1990, Republican districts were richer than Democrat districts. Today it's reversed: "Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more".
Not really sure how to square these dueling stats, but obviously the threshold is different ($500k household income) and the data collection method is different.
I think the thing about /districts/ is probably true but misleading - I've seen it from several sources. But stats on individuals pretty consistently point the other way, except possibly in the far right tail, so I guess it's an urban/rural thing where cities have lots of poor people and a few super-rich ones and vote Democratic, and the country is lower variance and votes Republican.
Edit: I'm wondering if the difference is household vs individual income. If Republican voters tend to have more traditional, single-income households, you'd expect to see a smaller proportion of rich Republicans on studies that look at household income and a larger proportion for studies that use individual income. E.g. if you and your spouse vote Democrat and both earn $80k, you'd be included in the $100k+ household income group, but not the $100k individual income group.
The way incomes are distributed makes this effect much stronger. There are a lot more individuals earning $50k-$100k than there are people earning over $100k. Therefore a lot of two-income households will clear a $100k household income threshold and a lot of single-income households won't.
The Democrats are the party of the upper middle classes and the lower classes. But there are more of the latter than the former so they average out to poorer. The Republicans are the party of the middle classes so they're somewhat above average. You add in age polarization and that's how you get to a wealthier Republican base despite winning the poorer parts of the country. And the very wealthy might lean one way or another overall but mostly it's a case by case basis. Lots of Republican and Democrat billionaires.
This is actually a pretty normal pattern. It dates back at least to the 17th century where the middle classes and lower aristocrats fought against an alliance of the crown and its bureaucrats plus the lower classes. And the nobles split into factions. So while the statement might be technically false it's gesturing in a true-ish direction. It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
>It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
That's certainly true of the way the word is used here in the UK - the classic example of someone super-rich who parses as lower-class to UK eyes is Donald Trump - but a decade ago my impression was that when Americans use the word money is a larger part of it. I think that may have changed a bit in the past ten or twenty years, though?
I think that Americans are much more conscious of the difference between the guy who makes $400,000 a year because he owns five carlots in an exurb somewhere and the woman who makes $400,000 a year because she is a corporate lawyer.
I don't think they really get that the rich guy who behaves like he's lower-class is lower-class (like, as you say, Trump).
Americans mostly don't have a proper concept of social vs economic class. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in their society, it means they're not aware of it and it causes all sorts of problems.
They have contempt for a man who has a lot of money but exhibits lower-class tastes but they're not quite sure why. They guess it must be some kind of moral failing on his part.
There is an old British style American aristocracy, mostly on the east coast. But they began their slide into irrelevance with the American Revolution when much of their structural support was removed. Nowadays they're barely relevant even in their local regions.
Americans are less aware of class for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves middle class. And class has less impact on day to day preferences than in places like Europe. For example, there's no American equivalent to fox hunting or horse racing. Most upper class and lower class Americans have relatively similar habits in terms of entertainment, dress, etc. Richer Americans have nicer suits or bigger tvs. But it's a different of degree rather than kind.
But lastly, the American class system is vastly more fluid and complicated than the British one. Unlike most class systems that you have to be born into the American class system is based on education, profession, wealth, and mannerisms. And what matters depends on where you are. For example, wealth is relatively more important in New York City and fame relatively more important in LA. Engineers are relatively low status in much of the country but that's not true on the West Coast. Midwest, and the South. (This isn't recent either: Hoover was an engineer and came from California.) And so on.
The system does exist. Donald Trump is the same over here: a rich lower class guy (or at least that's his pose). But he's that way not because of his birth but because of his mannerisms and profession. (He had wealth and education which is why he coded as nouveau riche instead of a lower class slob.)
Likewise the system is relatively open. An American can simply join the upper classes if they adopt the right mannerisms, have enough money, etc. The Clintons are probably the closest the American left has to royalty at this point. But one of them was the son of a single mother and the other the daughter of a small business owner. Likewise you have a lot of elites who protest they came from a poor background. And it's often true. But Americans have accurately divined the poor kid who goes to the right schools, has the right mannerisms, and makes a lot of money IS part of the upper class without reservation in the US.
PS: This is all modulo the success of specific classes at reproducing themselves by passing along education, social customs, wealth, etc.
He probably should have said "rich normalizing for age, sex, and race." My impression is that for a given race, sex, and age, the richer you are the more you think Democrats speak to you, and the poorer you are the more tuned in to the Republican message you are.
Around here youngish brown female City Council members and NGO lawyers with good salaries think our top priorities should be rooting out prejudice and subsidizing higher education, but the brown middle-age male gardeners and drywall biz owners who live and die by deals and contracts want the government to stop fucking with their livelihood via pandemic ukases or licensing and environmental requirements, and they're not especially excited about allowing Mexican gangs to import street enforcers by just having them walk across an open border.
But when you mix together income, age, sex. and race, it's a big muddle, because younger people (who are almost always left) are usually poorer, black people are almost always poorer, brown people are sometimes poorer, brown and black people get special treatment by Democratic policies, and when it comes to men and women...well, who can explain *that* weird decision by The Creator?
Because it definitely isn't true for education - controlling for education strengthens the correlation between being rich and Republican - and I'm deeply sceptical about most of the other controls weakening it.
I think this isn't a hard phenomenon to explain - the obvious answer is the correct one.
Democrats favour policies which advance the economic interests of the poor, and are thus a majority among poorer-than-average people, and do less badly with people rich enough that they no longer care than they do with people richer than average but not ludicrously rich, while Republicans favour policies that advance the economic interests of the rich, and are thus a majority among richer-than-average people, especially but not exclusively those who aren't super rich.
But, because those facts are embarrassing to Republicans, there's a cottage industry that's sprung up around trying to deny or obfuscate them and claim the politically-valuable underdog card.
Sure, I just told you it was my experience. So that's 50+ years of observing a few hundred people and getting to know their attitudes. Whether it would hold up if we interviewed hundreds of thousands of people in a carefully controlled nationwide study I don't know, but obviously my priors would be that it does, because otherwise I have to believe my experience is weirdly idiosyncratic. Similarly, to seriously consider an alternative hypothesis, I would need some persuasive evidence.
It's been a long time in my experience since Democrat top policy preferences have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the poor -- at least, of the working poor. Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, affirmative action, unrestricted immigration, environmental regulation that makes pushes up the prices of utilities, transportation, or household appliances, are all things that negatively impact the economic interests of the working poor -- and the latter know that very well. That's why those policies are not popular among people who are trying to scratch out a living and get a little bit ahead, and why Democrats find it always necessary to couple their policy proposals with increasingly grandiose proposals for subsidies and class warfare FUD. I mean, go ahead and find some Central Valley immigrant family trying to save up to buy a little farmland of their own who are thrilled about the CARB mandate to only buy EVs after 2035 if you can. They can be (and if it comes to pass undoubtably will be) bought off by a subsidy sufficiently generous, but if the underlying policy were popular they wouldn't have to be.
It's also been a long time since the Republican policies have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the rich. The rich these days generally want a heavy regulatory state that raises the costs of entry of potential competitors, so they can stay atop the heap. The rich enjoy unequal access to the writers of law, so these days they prefer a big powerful government that can write law that freezes in place their domination. They're fine with high taxes -- which they can readily afford -- so long as what the government funds with those taxes benefits them, e.g. comes back as subsidies for the industries in which they work, or salaries for jobs they or their Stanford JD or Harvard MBA kids might take.
> Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position.
I recently listened to a good chunk of the Revolutions podcast, which I'm guessing many people here are familiar with. One of the points the author makes is that revolutions do require the complicity of part of the ruling class. Basically, a united ruling class will generally be able to smack down any threat to its hegemony. If the regime in power becomes too sclerotic to respond to changing circumstances, a united ruling class will stage a coup, which is not the same as a revolution. True revolutions happen when there is a fissure in the ruling class, and one faction unites with a mass movement to restructure the system. There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
I don't want to over-analogize the French Revolution to the Harvard admissions office. But I think the general point stands that the interests of the "ruling class" can be cross-pressured.
It might not be "over-analogizing" so much as seeing the Harvard stuff as at a much later point in an unfolding chain that (sort of) begins with the French Revolution/Industrial Revolution/capitalism. What I took away from the Revolutions podcast is that it was the first real attack launched by the nascent professional managerial class (look how many of the leaders were lawyers! Liberal democrat parliaments & legislatures = still dominated by lawyers). Brooks unwittingly (or lazily, imho) gives the impression that the WASPs were an "aristocracy" overthrown by the PMC, but they were haute bourgeoise, not aristocrats.
>There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
It's worth noting here as an illustration that Napoleon Bonaparte's family had been officially classified as noble (nobility was a fuzzy concept in 18th century Corsica, but the Buonaparte family made the list when France took over and had to figure out who belonged to which estate), and had received his military education thanks to a scholarship for children of impecunious noble families.
>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
There was also a step change in inheritance tax, meaning that British landowners would see their assets shrinking each generation...unless they found something more profitable than agriculture to invest in. So it was a two way process... successful industrialists would be given titles, but successful aristocrats would invest in industry. By no means all were successful: a number of great families could not adapt, and withered away.
>Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their positio
They don't entirely sit in their hands, but they don't entirely adapt either.
I'm sure it is real. I was questioning Scott's (initial) claim for common-ness.
Googling keeps coming up with this: "The average for the most wealthy [*] 1% [in the USA] reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200."
I'm going to assert a useful definition is that the most wealthy 1% in the US are not upper middle class, but are rich :-)
So we have an average of a bit under $200K for the next block that seem reasonable to consider as containing the upper middle class. And the bottom of this is probably "just" middle class?
So ... we don't particularly care about the average here as the curve is very skewed ...
So ... maybe we care about the top 4 percentage points of the 1% - 10% range and then want to know the median? Or the number inheriting more than $250K? Or $500K?
*Typical* cannot realistically be over $1M for that group, there just isn't enough money to go around.
[*] I cannot tell if the 1% here are the 1% most wealthy (dead) parents or the most 1% most wealthy people getting an inheritance. There is probably moderately high correlation in any event, but ???
"In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good)."
Interestingly, seniority (like primogeniture) also has a solution to this! If you're son #3, you do not expect to inherit, and probably have a downward mobility job lined up from family tradition ("we send our third sons to the navy"), and absent murdering your elder brothers, there's not a way to succeed by sacrificing more.
[Some monasteries assign status by seniority, a little because older people are wiser, and mostly because people can't affect how quickly they age, and so a potential source of conflict is out of their hands.]
I can't wait for a latter-day Carmina Burana to be written by the tonsured second sons of SV elites. Unless we send them with a monthly remittance to colonise Mars.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
The one time I remember hearing about this was when a family member got divorced, and it happened to be right before their spouse's parent died and left them millions of dollars. (So if the divorce had happened a bit later, they would have gotten half of the inheritance, which was the point people talked about; I imagine it would have gone unmentioned otherwise.)
It's been a topic of conversation between myself and my parents (not just their will, but also inheritances from my grandparents)--blunted in importance, from my perspective, by the high probability that they and I die at the same time.
Why do you expect that they and you will die at the same time? Given where we are commenting, I presume because you believe in some kind of imminent AI apocalypse?
In almost every state in the US, inheritances left to one spouse are typically *not* subject to being split in divorces. So the timing probably didn’t matter.
Probably a static number when Scott wrote that part of this post. If I were putting together a "Highlights from the Comments" post for something, I expect I'd compile it gradually as I read interesting or otherwise notable comments, not write it all at once right before posting it.
> I am less sure about this one. “Elite overproduction” means there are more aspiring elites than elite positions. But what is an “aspiring elite”?
We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out. The archetypical coffee barista with a degree in media studies.
I think if your ever looking for "elite overproduction" look for that mismatch between what people were raised to expect and what they got and you'll find it.
> 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.
This strikes me as utterly wrong. If you have a small group who a) all know each other, b) all can benefit from rent seeking, and c) are protected from threats outside their clique. They won't stop each other rent seeking because of rivalries. They'll collude to rent seek on an unimaginable scale.
> We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out.
This; and also the fraction of people who go to universities is growing, and there is grade inflation. So the kids not only got to universities, but they are often straight A students... and still can't find a good job.
(At some moment they may realize that a plumber makes more than 2x the money they do. Then they might start screaming that it is not fair that the system does not reward intelligent people who spent lot of time and money getting their education.)
Theoretically, the government/accrediting organisations should impose minimum standards, although they have various incentives not to (putting people into more education keeps them off the unemployment lists, for example).
I mean, to the extent that slave-owning is an economic rent (and literal rent is an economic rent), then yes. I wouldn't oversell the making money from politics angle though - you could squeeze people a bit, in the lower and sub-magistracy offices your patron would finance you, but higher up you'd spend so much money on games and bribes you'd probably make a loss. Grain captains could do a lot better for themselves, but weren't elite positions.
In a healthy, open oligarchy society will be set up in such a way as to benefit the oligarchs but personal enrichment through the state is comparatively rare - your fellow oligarchs have all the money, so it's more like agreeing to sit on a homeowners' association to manage the country for your peers. The modern world is different, because everything has to be squashed into the shape as a fake democratic republic even when that's totally unnatural for the society in question.
Obviously there are questions of bias, but literary sources from the Late Republican period suggest that governors could be extremely corrupt, and that this was widely recognised as a problem. Supposedly Gaius Verres said that a governor needed three years in office: one to pay back his creditors, one to bribe the jurors in the inevitable corruption trial, and one to get rich.
It also probably didn't help that the Roman government tended to subcontract out the gathering of taxes to private companies, which were incentivised to squeeze the provincials for all they were worth. (Basically, the companies would pay for the right to collect taxes from a certain province, and then have to make up the sum by collecting them. Any extra was taken as profit.) There's a reason why the Gospels use "sinners and tax collectors" almost as a hendiadys.
Erusian's comment misses some basic facts about British applications (that I know because experienced them). I had to go through all the replies to it, because I couldn't quite believe that nobody had said anything.
In the UK, you can only apply to five universities. That's it, that's what you can do in a year. There are very limited exceptions if all of those five reject you, but every kid who in America would be applying to fifteen or more schools (AKA almost everyone from an elite background seriously looking at Ivies without a legacy or a truly absurd application) can only apply to five. So if you want a safety school, three uncertain unis, and Oxbridge, you can go for that. But it's *risky* in a way that it isn't in the US.
On top of that, UK applications are much more test-score dependent, and test scores are known in advance. In the US, I can tell someone I think they're a weak applicant relative to the standard that I expect Harvard has, but there's a lot of variation for what Harvard's standard happens to be depending on who reads the application, what the rest of the incoming class looks like, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. In the UK, you can count. They will tell you explicitly on the website what numbers they want, and if you don't have the numbers you don't bother, because you only have five schools.
To compare the acceptance rate of two schools under these wildly different systems is pointless. I'd also reference Tanner Greer's point that, as US political and business power have nationalized, becoming prominent among the national elite at an Ivy is now much more important than building a strong network and connections in your community at the local or state Good Enough University. To this day, if you want to do politics in Alabama the advice is to go to the University of Alabama and join the right fraternity. But in most of the country that has shattered, increasing demand by the elites to go to the nationally best-connected and best-regarded schools.
The other difference with the US is that nobody knows going in if the applicant is going to walk out with a degree in astrophys or medieval lit. This means that the physics departments over there don't get to handle their own admissions but rather have to deal with who the university as a whole picks.
That depends on the university. At my undergraduate Alma Mater (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, part of the California State University system), each "College' of the University had its own separate admissions criteria. You had to declare a first and second choice major when applying, and you'd be assigned one of these if admitted. Once you're in, it was usually pretty easy to change majors within a College, but there was a really high bar to switching to a different College.
"Colleges" in this context being administrative subdivisions of the University, each consisting of several thematically-related departments. The Colleges at Cal Poly being Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering, Math and Science, Liberal Arts, and Business.
Clearing is a heck of a long-shot though, so no-one's going to put in a hopeless Oxbridge application on the basis that they might get in through clearing.
Sorry, my comment was unclear. I meant that I don't think many people think about relying on clearing (to get in anywhere) when picking their five, so it probably doesn't lead to many more people applying to universities that are obviously out of reach.
Back when I was applying, Oxford didn't even do clearing (not sure about Cambridge, though I imagine they'd be the same). Instead, they'd make slightly more offers than they had places, to make up for students who did unexpectedly badly in their exams.
It's also not clear what the "acceptance rate" for a UK university would be, as the offers are all conditional (simplifying a bit, UK students to one set of exams at 16, and another at 18). You apply to five based on your 16-year-old grades, who then make you a conditional offer that they'll take you if you get so-and-so 18-year old grades. The offer has to be conditional, but if they really want you they'll set it at 2 Es (out of 3-4 exams at 18) - a friend of mine had this for Cambridge (but, of course, got 4 As anyway). That's pretty rare though, and the standard offer was 3 As back then.
So the acceptance rate is either the number of people who got an offer vs applicants, or the number of people who achieved their offer vs applicants. There won't be a huge difference at Oxford and Cambridge, but there'll be a chunk every year.
People keep on trying to bring this point up. Yes, there are differences, but the vast majority of the acceptance difference is due to simple numbers. There are more spots for less people.
The average number of applications an American puts out is a little under 7. So while this would skew the numbers it would only be a little. There's also countervailing skews like the much larger number of US universities. US applications are also highly test score dependent to the point where people at my school were directed into bands based on what they scored on the SAT. It's not strictly required you stay within your band... but it isn't in the UK either. And no, it's not pointless to compare the same statistic under two systems.
There are legitimate differences, such as the fact UK degrees are less uniform, but those don't go against my overall point that it's less arbitrary and less selective to get in.
"the average number of applications an American puts out" and "the average number of applications someone who gets into Harvard makes" are two numbers that bear some sort of relationship to each other, but I don't see why I should expect them to be particularly similar. Most Americans go to schools that accept most applicants: students going to schools with acceptance rates under 10% are a very unusual bunch. Honestly, I'm very surprised that the average you give is so *high*: what's the source?
I'm confused. You seem to have just switched back and forth between comparing Harvard to Oxford and then the entire British system to the entire American system. For example, the five limit doesn't just apply to Oxford but universally, so the general American statistic is the relevant comparator. If you want just Oxford I expect you'll find it's more than 5 on the British side because those limits only apply to native British. And don't apply to native British apply overseas, as they more often do at that level.
What is the specific point you're trying to make? Are you really going to claim that Oxford is not significantly less selective than Harvard? Because that seems fully unsupportable to me. Simply the graduates per capita number proves it.
As for the number being high: There's about 50 American schools more selective than Oxford in the US and significantly more that accept a minority of applicants. If you combine those two numbers together there's more selective universities in the US than universities, period, in the entire UK. So while not the majority of American universities it is a large and significant number are. This is one of my points: if they were comparatively sized systems then the larger number of applications per person might matter for the selectivity of the top position. But the US system also has more colleges which pushes statistics in the opposites direction.
For Brits who are accepted at Oxford, the limit is five applications. For Americans who are accepted at Harvard, the average number of applications is unknown to me, but fifteen is a plausible number. And I don't have hard numbers to back this claim, but I can say with 75% confidence, from my time studying there, that 70% of British students at Oxford did not apply to foreign universities. Their options are extremely expensive (American schools), non-English-speaking, or not competitive with Oxbridge (Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada). Perhaps more of them *should*, but at least in 2013-2015 they didn't.
25,000 undergraduates at Oxbridge, 8,000 admitted per year or so (vast majority do three-year degrees), three quarters of Oxford's are domestic students https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/full-version-facts-and-figures, on a population of 60 million, so 1/10,000. Harvard admits 1,250 a year on a population of 333 million. If you think that the right comparison is Harvard, that's a conclusive answer, and no amount of adjustment is realistically going to get a factor of 25 difference. On the other hand, I would add at least Yale, MIT, and UChicago.
> For Americans who are accepted at Harvard, the average number of applications is unknown to me, but fifteen is a plausible number.
Coincidentally, I happen to know someone who applied to Harvard in 2014. They put out nine applications and were discouraged from putting out more. Two safety schools, two stretch schools, and two middle of the road schools was considered enough for a total of six. Now, this doesn't mean it's a good average. But nor does your "I think it's plausible" standard. In fact I only know one person, out of the dozens I do know, who put in 15+ applications and a lot of people made fun of them for it. Anecdata but still.
> 70% of British students at Oxford did not apply to foreign universities.
This is the wrong statistic to begin with. The number of people who got in who applied elsewhere is not trivially the same as the number of people who applied who applied elsewhere. The former excludes almost three quarters of the sample.
> If you think that the right comparison is Harvard, that's a conclusive answer, and no amount of adjustment is realistically going to get a factor of 25 difference. On the other hand, I would add at least Yale, MIT, and UChicago.
Even adding them you still don't get the 25x adjustment factor you'd need. And I don't think you get similar effects in terms of uniform prestige or entire elite classes coming out of (say) UChicago.
More to the point, admitting the impossibility of your position does seem pretty close to admitting I'm right and that the American system is much more selective. If you combine that with my assertion British education still makes you pretty good at most things then you end up at my conclusion: the selectivity is not inherently necessary. And then to my speculation it's done to create a narrow elite and not because it's educationally necessary.
I'm actually quite sympathetic to the University of Paris for refusing to publish its acceptance rate on the grounds that people will think the school is bad because it's relatively high to American or Chinese schools. And I have not said anything bad about Oxbridge as far as I'm aware. Being less selective is not a bad thing, after all.
> For centuries [in England], 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
Largely true, but not entirely. Even by the 1200s, merchants in several British cities were becoming increasingly wealthy and more assertive as a result.
When summoning his first Parliament, in 1265, Simon de Montfort (the de facto regent of England at the time) acknowledged this by including burgesses, i.e. merchant representatives, as a small group of humble guys sitting at the back, so to speak. These were included in subsequent parliaments, and over time evolved into the House of Commons, which today runs the whole show!
Also, once a law called the Statute of Quia Emptores was passed in 1290, rich merchants could purchase and obtain good title to land. So for many that was a major goal in itself, to obtain a source of "settled" income rather than what was called "precarious" income.
>But what is an “aspiring elite”? In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good). In a meritocracy, it’s less clear. Smart people? Graduates of top colleges?
In a meritocracy, I thinks it's still the "children of the last set of elites" (+ambitious social climbers, as always). People generally feel like they deserve the same lifestyle and status as their parents.
Ambitious social climbers are brutally kept in check in the old system, but encouraged in the new system.
There seems to be a confusion between “elite” and “meritocracy”.
In particular almost every comment seems to assume that the only thing worth doing in life is to become a mover and shaker. If you’re not a Fortune 100 CEO or a Senator you’re worthless. Ie the only goal is to enter the true elite.
I see things differently. A you can have an incredible life in America based on merit, as an engineer, lawyer, doctor, accountant or suchlike. And the gate to these jobs is essentially your skill and hard work, not your college. Whether you have a degree from MIT or Howard or Ohio State, you can get an engineering job commensurate with your skill.
So what I see in the US is two pathologies. The first is a sick measure of what counts as success in life; the second (consequence of the first) is an endless dissatisfaction with life (and endless whining over desserts, blame as to identity politics, etc) because people can’t accept that life as an engineer in Toledo making $80K a year is actually pretty good when society tells them the only life that counts is being VP of Hardware at Google and making $2M a year.
It’s a mildly interesting academic question as to who gets to occupy the .001% of slots that count as elite in the US. But it should not be an important question for most people; and if it is, well that obsession more than anything “the system” did or did not do to you is probably the cause of most of your life dissatisfaction.
> I would love to see a scholarly, well-thought out comparison between the Imperial Chinese meritocratic system and our own
Try "The Great Degeneration - How Institutions Decay and Economies Die", by Niall Ferguson (2013).
Re aristocrats running the country, that obviously works better if they are on their best behaviour and are not above the law.
In England this was ensured until the 19th century by the very harsh felony laws: Anyone convicted of a felony, praemunire, or treason faced not just death (for most offences) but forfeiture of all goods and chattels. Their dependents were literally turfed out onto the street!
Although harsh, this had a couple of beneficial effects. Firstly, it paid for the justice system, which meant taxes could be lower. Also, it meant there was less risk of favoritism, if anything the opposite because the prospect of an errant aristocrat's estate reverting to the Crown was an incentive for the Government to vigorously pursue and prosecute complaints made against aristocrats and rich people generally!
For example, one Earl with a large estate was out hunting and, either accidently or for a jolly jape, chased a deer some way into his neighbour's estate. A fairly trivial offence one might think, but his neighbour prosecuted him for poaching, and as a result upon conviction the poor guy was executed and his estate forfeited.
I'm sceptical of Ferguson on this - the Crown didn't prosecute felonies/misdemeanours (save for offences against the Crown) at all in England until the 1830s, and barely did until well into the second half of the 19th century. The justice system more than paid for itself with court fees (particularly covering judges for the Assizes - the only real expense given JPs presided at the Quarter Sessions and still aren't paid for this day; Borough Recorders were paid for by the borough in question).
I should have made clear that after the Ferguson reference at the start of my post, I went off on a tangent with my own somewhat related points, and these were not from Ferguson's book.
The income from forfeitures may not have been directly used to help pay for the justice system, but they were all funds thrown into the Government's pot. So in that sense they contributed indirectly.
Also, even where the Crown did not prosecute, what I meant was that no more obstacles were put in the way of proceedings stemming from private complaints, nor pardons and suchlike more often granted, than one might otherwise expect for aristos and the rich compared with the justice dished out to the hoi polloi! In other words, everyone was generally treated equally before the law.
> the wealth of the unassimilated non-U rich started to outweigh the wealth of the true Upper Class.
What really started killing the old class system, financially, in the UK was the "People's Budget" of 1909, set out by Chancellor of the Exchequer ("Finance Secretary") David Lloyd George. This introduced a 20% land tax on each change of land ownership, including inheritance (although death duties had already been introduced, in 1894).
This was hotly resisted and vetoed by the House of Lords (the "upper chamber"), but as a result their powers were all but eliminated by the Parliament Act 1911. Among other things, this act removed their power to reject money bills and in effect turned them into the mere talking shop or "revising chamber" they are today.
Obviously written by a very intelligent and perceptive young person, but as I reread it I think she doesn't make her main point as explicit as she could have. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say what I think she means here.
It seems to me Dashan's main objection to the woke Ivy kids is that they're deluding themselves. They're ashamed to acknowledge that they're members of America's current power elite, so they dive into political movements that call for a radical redistribution of power--even though, paradoxically, their activism is an exercise of the disproportionate power they already hold, and one that makes genuinely marginalized people feel even more alienated from the dominant discourse.
Dashan seems to feel that we'd be better off if progressive elites were more honest with themselves: if they started from the premise "I have privilege, there's no shame in that, and I intend to use it responsibly", rather than reaching for some semblance of oppressed status based on their skin color, sexuality, or what have you. (I think this is why she mentions the odd case of the Singaporeans.)
That seems right to me. One of the things I find admirable about elite progressives in the past is that they seemed comfortable wearing their privilege. I'm thinking of people like John Maynard Keynes: a male British Oxbridge graduate living in a time when that tiny class of people ruled much of the world, and when it must have been hard to imagine any other arrangement, except possibly having to share some power with male American Ivy League graduates.
As far as I can tell, Keynes never publicly agonized about how undeserving he was of all his advantages. That's a more contemporary style which hadn't yet caught on in Britain or America. He did what he could to make the world a better place without a lot of theatricality, and Dashan seems to be implying that's the best approach.
Isn't the problem more that you can't be a self-aware ruling elite without a theory of your own legitimacy, and the current elite just don't have one? They justified becoming an elite (whenever and however they managed it) on the basis of overthrowing the old elite for equality's sake, and haven't found a route to change tack (hence they have to justify continuing power in the name of "more equality," much as the Bolsheviks claimed they had to stay in power to root out counterrevolutionaries, kulaks etc). Meritocracy was their embryonic attempt to create one ("we're better than you because of how high our SAT scores are"), but now they've realised that'd force them to surrender to the Asiatic hordes.
You can have a theory saying you're legitimate because of your connection to those oppressed, no? Ie despite being part of the ruling elite you too are a queer woman of color, like many oppressed such.
I guess you could...? You'd need your whole elite to be queer women of colour (or at least one of the three, and I'm not totally sure women would be either diverse enough, or capable of forming a separate class). Things would get pretty interesting though.
But how do you avoid "I deserve to be an elite because I share many features with oppressed classes" from degenerating into "I deserve to be an elite because I am a member of an oppressed class" into "I deserve to be an elite because I myself am oppressed", i.e., what we've got already?
That works if you're as competent as Keynes. You can be an Elon Musk and build interesting electric cars, you can be a Jeff Bezos and invent e-commerce for the masses. Et cetera. But what if your only real talent is bullshit and only real resource class connections, so e.g. all you can do is talk a bunch of credulous class peers out of enough money to start a crypto exchange, which you cannot run competently at all, so it explodes and burns to the waterline in short order? One way to insulate yourself from criticism by those experiencing class envy is to pre-excuse your failures by adopting the principle that all you do is driven by exigent broad noble social purpose. It's harder condemn you for screwing a million people out of their life savings if it was For A Good Cause, however dumb and arrogant your decisions were.
I am reminded of my ex-wife's social work classmates, who thought they should wear jeans etc 'to be in solidarity with their clients.'
As a lawyer, I wear a suit because, among other things, you are renting a privileged privately-educated white man for the day, and I should damn well dress like it.
What this says about the kind of people who go into social work vs otherwise is left as an exercise for the reader.
Scott, I think the focus on *inheritance* (as literally the money one gets after their parents die) is a red herring. Much more important is the money children keep getting from parents while they are still alive.
As I see it, this basically comes in three forms: (1) direct gifts of money and things; (2) parents paying all kinds of expenses for their children; and (3) children getting well-paid bullshit jobs in their parents' companies. The second and third option are more difficult to notice, both to kids themselves and to people who know them.
As an example of the first option, I have a friend who seemed to be in the same social class as I. After finishing university I got my first job and started saving money to buy my own apartment, but then I noticed something confusing -- the prices of housing were growing so fast that the difference between one year and another was greater than my entire yearly salary. Which meant that regardless how long I would try saving money and how much I would save, I could never buy my own apartment. This didn't make sense to me. (Later the growth of prices slowed down a lot, and my salary increased 4x, so it became doable.) Then my friend got his own apartment. So I asked him, what was the secret, what is the part that I am missing, because it just did not make sense to me, mathematically. He said "well, my parents took money out of their bank account, and bought the apartment for me". That was quite a shock. I haven't seen any obvious signs of wealth from him or his family, and yet, a single transaction achieved the same that took me several years of saving every cent while doing side jobs.
As an example of the second option, I have a different friend whose father made tons of money but decided to not give any to his children, because they were supposed to make their own money; all the money he made he intended to spend on his luxurious retirement. However, this strict rule only applied to cash transfers and gifts. It did no apply to providing free food and accommodation. As a result, my friend never kept any job for more than three months (always followed by six to twelve months of unemployment). Because he had free accommodation and free food, so he only took a job temporarily when he ran out of pocket money. Then a decade or two later he finally started some online business that was profitable, so now he keeps doing that.
As an example of the third option, I knew a guy who was employed at his father's company, where I also worked. That guy probably did literally nothing; whenever there was a task assigned to the two of us, I did it completely alone. (I did not mind, because those tasks had no deadlines, so I just spent more days on that task.) I would not be surprised if he made more money that other people working at that company. And if he ever became good at something, he had an impressive CV to back that up.
Now in my experience these three things happened to three different people, but if I imagine them all happening to the *same* person... someone getting all their expenses paid, plus a free house, and a job that pays them lot of money for nothing... such person could be eligible for early retirement when they are 30, and a millionaire (just from investing half of their salary) when they are 35. The inheritance they get when they are 50 is just a cherry on the top of the sweet cake.
And if such person actually does something useful, that is *extra* money, plus they probably have a diploma from an expensive university (if they choose the employment path, probably management), and all the time they need, plus their parents can invest in their business, and if the business fails they can immediately start a new one with new investment (if they choose the business path).
Not at all surprised about your friend… actually something of a highly educated upper middle class marker to be low-key and avoid conspicuous consumption in most forms but then be astoundingly flush when it comes to real estate.
Another classic is the “backpacking across Europe” gap year for your teenager. Juuuust enough Bohemian-ness not to be gauche.
>big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.
Why would they do this? Do ivy grads actually have some characteristic that is needed now, which was not needed in the past, or are investors making an inefficient mistake?
Safety. You know the Ivy grad is intelligent, conscientious and socially competent enough to become an Ivy grad. The self-proclaimed autodidact might just be a delusional narcissist with a good sales patter, or an out-and-out conman (so might the Ivy grad, but I hear VCs all into Bayes' theorem now so they're still a safer option).
I'm not sure anyone's ever really been keen to invest in random people off the street, unless they've got an invention that you can literally see working (like a car, or vulcanised rubber). You might invest in someone with a proven track record as an employee in a field setting up their own business, but working at Bell Labs for 25 years isn't a thing any more.
Because in the past you could take bigger chances on hiring and funding, since you could just fire or otherwise cut off someone who didn't work out. It is much harder to do that these days, often a priori through assorted regulation, including notice and severance requirements, and also because of the threat of post-facto legal extortion. I mean, you can often still toss young white male workers out the door without risking any subsequent lawsuit, if you're also sure they're heterosexual, but also obviously if you prefer to hire (or fund) that type, or are more willing to take a risk on that type, you are just asking for trouble.
It used to be that any old college degree was a sufficient signal of intelligence, diligence, and conformity for most purposes. As more and more people started going to college, more discerning hirers started looking for filters along the same lines that gave stronger signals.
In addition, there was probably a snowball effect as graduates of highly prestigious universities got into positions of power. They naturally tended to see value in their own educational backgrounds and preferred hiring and promoting others of similar backgrounds. I know Google (founded by Stanford grad students) had a very strong preference for graduates of prestigious universities for a long time, at least until the late 2000s when they analyzed data and found little to no correlation among employee performance data with college prestige and made an effort to deemphasize it in hiring decisions.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
I doubt that paycheck-to-paycheck → seven-figure-bank-account happens as often as you suggest (even after the edit) – but not because I disagree about the magnitude of inherited wealth.
Instead, I disagree about the *timing*. I believe that most people who reasonably expect to be able to leave seven-figure bequests don't wait until death to start transferring money to their heirs. This is partly for technical reasons (e.g., US tax law excludes annual gifts of up to $15k-60k+ (depending on structure/details) without triggering estate/gift taxes). And it's partly for non-tax, practical reasons (e.g., if someone knows they'll be leaving a lot of money to an adult child one day, they might decide to advance the gift so that that adult child can have the money now – perhaps *explicitly* to avoid the perceived stress of living paycheck to paycheck).
So the explanation for people not discussing inheritance as "one of the single biggest financial events of their lives" might just be that it wasn't a *single* event at all – just a lot of events over time.
I think there are two classes of non-elite adults who get substantial inheritances. First, people whose working class parents stayed in California's Bay Area--there may be other places where ordinary houses escalated in value, but this is the most famous one. But I wonder if more and more of these people are selling up early and getting the hell out of Dodge (often with their kids).
Second--and this is more common than people think--a really, really rich parent who achieved his wealth in his lifetime and had kids with ordinary UMC lives. This is the group Scott is imagining, I think. And as someone pointed out, a lot of the transfers happen long before the will is activated. I know people who get thousands of dollars a year from investments their parents put in place for them. That's actually what Joe Kennedy did for all his kids.
"I would love to see a scholarly, well-thought out comparison between the Imperial Chinese meritocratic system and our own (or else a discussion of why this is a false analogy and wouldn’t illuminate anything)."
Scott is asking for a monograph collapsing 2000 years of a highly varied and often dynamic governing system into some uniform reduction that can be compared to a diverse variety of American or Western "meritocratic systems." I think that book is unlikely to undertaken by a responsible scholar. I think we can draw many lessons from the traditional Chinese experience, but they will by and large be drawn from particular sets of circumstances.
Kade U. suggests, "Those employees [of an imperial meritocracy] 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."
I don't see how Kade's description fundamentally differs from meritocratic roles in contemporary government or most corporate systems, some privately-owned companies excepted, perhaps. No meritocratically appointed functionary, in government or enterprise, operates from her personal authority, and most have major stakes in looking good "outside" the system, in their family and community lives (as was decidedly true in traditional China).
He continues: "This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will . . ."
If the reference point is China, by far the longest sustained example of an imperial meritocracy, a very significant proportion of emperors were as much the instruments of their high minsters as the reverse. There was nothing exceptional about the eldest sons of emperors other than their position and access to an education--if they were intelligent enough for it to make much of a difference--which was delivered by members of the meritocratic bureaucracy. There were certainly strong emperors, for better or worse, whose often arbitrary inclinations had to be served in form or substance, but a great many were no better than, or much worse than, a moderately competent CEO dependent on, or content to follow without protest, the guidance of subordinates. And it was a strong norm that emperors should be subject to and welcome remonstrance. Much of the dynamic of governance concerned factional contestation within the bureaucracy (which was not necessarily a negative for the state, but certainly could be).
Interestingly (I think), the original Chinese theory of the meritocratic state, developed in the century prior to the full application of the meritocratic framework in 221 BCE, featured a model of the emperor as a cipher: a man without goals or ideas, whose possession of absolute power was completely based on affirming the operation of a cybernetic system wherein functional performance criteria were matched against closely monitored results, with rewards and punishments, promotions and demotions administered mechanically, without deviation from standards. Ideally, the emperor himself would do nothing other than physically occupy the throne at court and perform prescribed ritual functions. Didn't work out that way, but it seems an impressive concept two millennia before Weber's "ideal bureaucracy."
Quick note that Bourgeois Bohemians (Bobos) has been in use in the English language at least since 1918, -- in Wyndham Lewis' tremendous novel "Tarr" . His commentary therein seems to get at most of the characteristics of this upper class as it was found on the continent. This leads me to believe that this "development" of elites has less to do with a singular college admissions decision, and more to do with general currents
Phil Getz wrote: "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."
Per Opensecrets.org, counting both direct campaign expenses and the outside PACs/superPACS/etc, the Republicans outspent the Democrats in the 2000, 2004, and 2012 presidential elections; the reverse was true in the 2008, 2016, and 2020 ones. Looking back farther, the Dems outspent the GOP in 1996 and 1992, while the GOP outspent the Dems in 1980, 1984, and 1988.
In national midterm elections the Republicans outspent the Dems in 2022, 2014, 2010, 2006, 2002, and 1998. (The Georgia Senate runoff will not meaningfully change the 2022 national totals.)
The Democrats outspent the GOP in 2018.
Phil Getz wrote: "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." The "most of them" part is to some degree a side effect: for the Court's first 100+ years most of its justices did not have law-school degrees. Only starting after WW I did the Court come to be mostly peopled by law-school graduates, and entirely so only starting after WW II.
Phil Getz wrote: "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." Each of these statements is hilariously false. I ran them past my spouse who has had a lengthy career working at high levels in college admissions and...well she's able to breathe now but is still giggling quietly.
That Getz offers no sourcing for anything he asserts seems to be not coincidental.
The people who are in Lord's instead of the traditional aristocracy are life or working peers (They have non heritage titles). On the one hand, they could be said to depend on the the other place, because they are installed by the prime minister of the day...but they also have a job for life, so they can rebel.with impunity.
I've not read the 700 comments on the last article but I want to point out two things from a French perspective :
1) the term "bobo" is used a lot in France, generally to describes left-leaning elite Parisians.
2) In France, the concept of meritocracy dates back from the French Revolution were the new government decided that military officers needs not be from the aristocracy. Admissions to elite school such as Polytechnique, Centrale, Science Po or HEC (the French equivalent to Ivy League universities) have been based on (the French equivalent of) standardized tests since the 19th century.
> You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right.
The issue is that Harvard admissions aren't actually a meritocracy, they're a pseudo-meritocracy. Affirmative action is one obvious reason for this but it's actually still true even if we narrow our focus only to a single race. Admissions are just a crapshoot. Students with 1600s on the SAT will get rejected while students with 1400s will sometimes get accepted. Some students will get accepted by Harvard but rejected by Princeton and Yale, others the exact opposite. The number of students who are academically qualified for Harvard far outnumbers those who actually get in which in turn causes resentment.
I'm just a knucklehead with an eye on my country's politics, but it's worth mentioning that Phil Getz's comment buries an enormous lede. The note, "with the Democrats losing the South" does so much heavy lifting it should be on WWE. Both major parties underwent immense shifts, and the lack of any mention of, just to name a few things, The Southern Strategy and the identity politics-based shift amongst Republicans, colors the comment differently than I have to assume it was intended.
"I do think ACX has a tendency towards over-cynicism in assuming that everything is signaling and that people have no honest interests."
I wonder how mutually exclusive those two things are. Can't a person both enjoy something, yet enjoy it in a way which conforms to group belonging or status seeking? A person wants to wear jewelry and wearing jewelry is an "honest interest." Their group affiliation, however, determines whether they wear a Cross or Thor's Hammer or a Star of David or a skull from Hot Topic or a modern style of secular jewelry from Kay Jewelers. If you ask them, they may sincerely express an "honest interest" in their jewelry and protest that they are "signaling" anything. Their choice in jewelry is just a matter of personal self expression. But "personal self expression" basically *is* signaling for all practical purposes. Unless your personal self expression is private or hidden, it serves as a signal.
This seems like a common source of conflict between people when contextualizing situations.
Also, how do we distinguish "signaling" from "an honest interest that you want others to know that you have?" What prevents us from saying that any interest, if broadcast, is a kind of signaling? Do people signal to themselves as a form of internal consistency?
Also, if we talk about describing something as signaling are we just talking about translating activities into a particular paradigm? Do English speakers have a "bad habit" of translating "si, se puede" into "yes, we can" rather than engaging the phrase in the original Spanish that the speaker would use?
To what extent can we *objectively prove* that a desire to let others know about something you're doing is 'not signaling.' Or is demarcation between signaling and non-signaling just not subject to any objective criteria?
It would be very useful if people stopped mistaking "legacy admissions" for the only or even primary means through which money gets you entry into elite colleges.
> But what is an “aspiring elite”? In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good). In a meritocracy, it’s less clear.
But it's not a full meritocracy. Two parents that got into Harvard on merit expect their children to get into Harvard. (Or if they are obviously stupider than them, into another very high-ranked university, so they can remain in the upper middle class.) With the TFR of 1.5, you get:
- gen 0: 1000 Anglo-Dutch upper class admissions
- gen 1: 750 gen 0 legacy admissions, 250 merit admissions
- gen 2: 750 gen 1 legacy admissions, 250 merit admissions
- and so on
But that's for both parents being Harvard alumni. In reality, some of these merit alumni will marry non-Harvard alumni. And they will still want their children to get into Harvard. Or an Ivy. Or one of the good non-Ivies. But certainly not into something less prestigious than the alma mater of the other parent. And it's not like their children don't deserve a merit-based spot at one of the Ivies: they are not some upper-class twits that like dressage or vintage cars or sailing: they went to a good school and studied hard, they cultivated that "well-rounded" personality. Merit leads to prosperity, and prosperity enables merit.
4th constitution!
2nd is after civil war.
3rd is after new deal.
4th is after identity politics becomes government policy (via 60s civil rights laws)
"For most upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money will be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it."
I think of myself as upper middle class. My parents are divorced and my father is dead so I know how that inheritance played out. My mom will be leaving me very little (partially because her second husband has a child that will benefit from the money much more than any of his siblings or my siblings and I). The inheritance won't be even CLOSE to the biggest financial event of my life. I don't think I'm unusual. Maybe I am?
Or ... maybe my definition of upper middle class is off (but then I'd be rich, rather than middle-middle class ...). Or maybe my situation is unusual? I'd like to see any vaguely reasonable numbers for Scott's claim (and maybe clarification about who qualifies for upper middle class).
Neither of my grandmothers left any substantial inheritance their kids (and grandpas went first).
Nursing home care is very expensive and the government won’t cover it until you’re basically destitute. My guess is that will eat away any typical middle class inheritance pretty quickly.
Please note that you can place your house in a trust so that you do not legally own it for Medicaid eligibility purposes. My (upper-middle class) grandparents (middle-middle class) have done this.
Do they live in Massachusetts? I think this may be a unique arrangement there.
No, this is New York.
Yes but there is a 10 year clawback so you have to do it when you are healthy. Most people miss this window.
Actually my parents just recently did this, and this is the first time I've seen this trick mentioned anywhere.
You're right, this notion is complete nonsense. According to this:
https://dqydj.com/retirement-savings-by-age/
The average savings for boomers is ~200k. Even the 99th percentile is under 3M. Add in stuff like retirement consumption, rest home costs, and the fact that most people have more than one child and you realize that not even the richest 1% are getting seven figures from their parents.
EDIT: Fair enough, this isn't total net worth. Apparently the 1% level for net worth is around $10M. But the 10% level (i.e. upper middle class) is ~$1M and a source on inheritances (link below in thread) claims that a 90th percentile inheritance is around 200k so I think my general point mostly holds - a typical upper middle class person doesn't have their lifestyle affected much by inherited wealth.
But presumably if the average savings is $200,000, and the average Boomers have two kids, then the average Millennial will inherit $100,000, which is a pretty upper middle class annual income. Presumably the actual upper middle class are quite a bit above the average, and while the inheritance isn’t likely to be seven figures, it’s still likely to be the largest financial event in one’s life (getting several years income in a single chunk).
Yeah but by the time they inherit the dough it won't even buy a minivan to schlep around the teenagers, still less the fuel it burns in a year or two.
Yeah, as best I can tell from simple web searches, a typical upper middle class person might get something like a year's salary via inheritance. Which is nice and all, but not life changing and certainly not behind any sort of wealth-gap of the sort hinted at by the comment Scott was replying to there.
You're looking at "retirement savings", not net worth.
According to this page https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net-worth-of-the-1.aspx, the cutoff net worth to be in the top 1% in the US is $11.1 million, while the cutoff net worth to be in the top 10% is $1.2 million. That, honestly, sounds more plausible to me than your numbers (given that a lot of houses are worth over a million dollars these days in HCOL and even MCOL areas). And bear in mind this is across all age groups, so the average net worth of the top 10% at their time of death is probably higher.
Fair enough, the data that I used didn't count total net worth. But according to this (can't vouch for the data, it was just the first google hit): https://www.annuity.org/retirement/estate-planning/average-inheritance , "The average for the most wealthy 1% reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200." I dunno if the discrepancy between your numbers and these is methodological or if there are big end-of-life costs not accounted for. Also according to this: https://www.thekickassentrepreneur.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-usa/ top 10% by net worth is 850k (5% is only 1 mil).
So I dunno. The data seem somewhat fuzzy, but these two links back up my intuition that most upper-middle class folks don't inherit seven figures.
At the risk of really getting into the weeds here, that seems to be the average size of an inheritance, not an estate. Inheritances of course get split between children, but they may also include token amounts given to other relatives. If you give a million bucks to each of your two children, but also leave a token $5000 to your six nieces and nephews and five grandchildren, then that's ... well, I can't be bothered doing the maths right now, but you get the idea. The average will be brought down by small inheritances given to "lesser" relatives.
Yeah, I think this idea that there are huge sums of money passing over generations for non-elites assumes that people continue working long after they have the means to retire, and/or don't adjust their lifestyle in proportion to their retirement funds.
I would also describe myself as middle (maybe upper middle) class, but don't expect a huge windfall inheritance, either.
Thanks, I've slightly toned down my wording in the post due to this.
I feel like my family is a counterpoint, at least of sorts. Great grandparents were the immigrant success story of coming to America, working in the factory, eventually owning the factory. Then kids (my grandparents) realized that factories weren't such a hot prospect, took the intergenerational wealth and built it up through investing (stocks, real estate). They were not fantastically rich, just sort of regular rich, and they did indeed burn a lot of what they earned in end-of-life care. But not all of it, leaving my professional parents suddenly wealthier at end of life. And at some point my parents will leave professional me suddenly wealthier.
There is a lot of variation here across grandparents, cousins, etc. A branch of my family is crazy rich, most are normal comfortable, some are working class. But, yeah, inheritance is kind of a big deal.
Oh for sure it is if you get it, I think the question is more how many actually get it. I am for sure upper middle class these days, my father was in the air force but then disappeared from my life. Mother was a drunk on welfare. I won’t be inheriting anything. Even had various relatives who were fairly well off, never got anything from them other than mostly useless, but sometimes presents. I doubt my wife gets anything from her parents either.
Economic class isn’t fixed by bloodline. You may be upper middle class by wealth and income, I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like your father or mother were.
Well sure it is not fixed by bloodline. But despite what you might hear, the US is actually fairly socially mobile by class. Lots of people go up and down the scales. So the thesis that the upper middle class is perpetuating their grip through the uber power of inheritances looses a little bit of teeth when you have people like myself who climbed there with fairly little fuss through just being bright and working a bit hard.
I was bottom quintile probably all through youth, in income, maybe 4th quintile by "family culture" (my single mother's father had been a schoolteacher), and likely even into my 20s that was my eocnomic station in life.
But then I started applying myself in the professional world, and quickly outpaced my peers. And by my mid thirties I would guess I was living a solidly median lifetyle, and now by my early 40s my family is definitely upper-middle-class. And this is no tech start-up magic or anything. I had standard office monkey paper pusher jobs (mor eor less) until 33 when I quit and started my own thing.
Another issue with the "inherit their parent's money" issue is that most people are going to be well past fifty by the time their parents die. At that point their habits, beliefs, and lifestyles are pretty much set. If they were currently in paycheck-to-paycheck land then probably now they don't worry so much about money, but they probably also don't do anything all that different than when they were living on the edge because fifty years of habits die hard.
Nor can you use "I will inherit bignum dollars in my fifties" to justify increased spending in your twenties and thirties, because it's very easy for your parents to wind up with approxinately zero net worth at death even if they were UMC all their working lives.
I just surveyed my 4 closest friends. We were all raised middle to upper-middle class.
1 person's dad died when they were 12, they will never inherit anything of substance.
I, and my three other friends, each expect to inherit $1-4 million in 2020 dollars, based on reasonable estimates of elder care costs and current assets (we're unusually happy to discuss finances with our parents, I realize; partly that's because somehow we're all executors of our parents' estates and trusts).
We're all wealthy enough that that amount of money isn't going to impact our lifestyles at all, but it is DEFINITELY going to be the most significant individual financial event in any of our lives.
One interesting (to me) commonality about our various situations is that all of our parents continued to live very frugal lives during our childhoods and after kids left the house, and have basically just saved most of their money and invested in moderately successful businesses or just index funds since then, expenses remaining much less than wage/investment income.
It's easy for me to agree that this is not typical (I didn't pick my math geek friends at random).
But I also am willing to believe that the phenomenon is real, at some margin.
I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't.
Scott's confusion is itself a little confusing. Most people aren't going to inherit anything from their parents until they are in their 50s, 60s, or even later. (Look at Warren Buffett's children who still haven't inherited anything.)
I doubt Scott spends a lot of time around people that age to hear the conversations.
In my limited experience those inheritances tend to be generation skipping. The money goes to grandchildren. And it suffers the eternal problem of wealth partitioning. 2 kids with 2 kids each means 4 grandchildren. $3 million is pretty great for a couple but split four ways it becomes $750,000 which becomes a lot less life-changing.
"I'd say you are pretty clearly not upper middle class then. Or, perhaps you are but your parents and grandparents weren't."
Thus my initial request for clarification on the term :-)
Can one be in the top 2% - 3% for both income and wealth in the US and accurately score one's self as middle class (not even upper middle class)? I'm fine with a definition of middle class that goes from maybe the bottom 5% to the top 2%, but if that is what we are going to use I think it important that this be made clear :-)
My grandparents would be middle class, but not upper middle class. My parents would be middle class or upper middle class. I score myself as economically upper middle class or at the low end or rich (because in a VHCOL area the rich often drive Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas ...). My son grew up being told that (by me) that his parents were rich. Which is true, but then 'rich' doesn't mean what it seems it should mean in a VHCOL area.
*Socially* I'm middle class of some sort, with some outlier behaviors maybe (I'm signed up with Alcor for cryonic suspension, my wife and I home schooled our child K-12). My wife and I have Planet Fitness memberships, which is pretty middle (but not upper middle) class, I think.
The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
My family story is this: my wife and I are only children. My kids are the only great-grandchildren of my 4 grandparents. We also picked up inheritances from a childless aunt (with probably another on the way) and even a childless first cousin.
All of these people are middle-class to maybe bottom-end of upper-middle but I think we’re generally thrifty, good investors (I’m a professional), there are a number of life insurance policies involved that naturally accumulated value. So it all amounts to several million most likely coming our way.
Skipping a generation is common enough in how this is set up, but far from universal. It’s most likely how I’ll look to structure inheritance though, but partly because wife and I would both like to maximize grandchildren before we die and I’d like if money weren’t seen as an obstacle to that.
For some reason can’t edit: along with life insurance policies, I meant homes that naturally accumulated value.
> The flip side of this is that in an era of collapsing fertility, inheritances become more relevant.
I spent some time at China's immensely prestigious Fudan University and made contacts with various people you might term (pre-)meritocrats there.
I also met someone studying nursing at an affiliated school. To go to nursing school, you need a standardized test score _below_ the threshold that makes you eligible for admittance to a second-rate university. (Chinese universities are formally divided into 一本 "first-rate" and 二本 "second-rate" schools. When I was looking at test scores by province [a project that didn't get very far, but was nevertheless interesting], the second-rate cutoff was at about the 40th percentile, and the first-rate cutoff was at about the 80th. But you study nursing at a 大专, a technical school, not a university.)
So we may assume that this nursing student had scored below the 40th percentile for Xinjiang (already a low-performing province) on a rigorous standardized test.
She is doing the best of any of my acquaintances, though; braggy posts on wechat show off the title to her apartment, her new Tesla, and her baby. When I asked her how she was affording these things, she reported to me that her husband is a "driver", presumably making very little money - but his parents are happy to buy things for their son's family.
I find this an interesting example of "inheritance concentration" leading irresponsible lower-class splurging behavior to result in better life outcomes than responsible upper-class prudent self-reliance.
Relevant to some other comments on this post, it also illustrates that you can easily receive a significant part of your inheritance before your parents actually die.
It's interesting that there are, so far, zero comments reporting something like "yes, my parents/grandparents passed away and left my me/my parents enough money that it changed our lives, this is definitely how it works."
I do have the opposite story -- my Family Lore is rooted in the fact that, 150 years ago, our family was "wealthy." Through intermittent occurrences of frivolous spending, alcoholism, and having >2 children at every generation, the only remainder of that wealth is the tall tales and some land holdings that are owned jointly by 30+ descendants. In other words, the lesson of my personal narrative is that wealth dilutes and dissipates over time. The counterfactual world where I inherited an "aristocratic" position instead of a middle-class-professional lifestyle seems very very far away.
Here's another more well-known narrative: John D. Rockefeller accumulated a fortune of >$1 billion in the late 19th century. The Rockefeller family wealth is now allegedly over $360 billion, which provides an example of a family that seems to have actually grown their joint wealth. However, we are now 7 generations down the line, and there are 250 direct descendants of John D. Rockefeller. If you were to simply split that pot between the 250 descendents, and then factor in inflation, it would be evident that while the Rockefeller fortune has grown remarkably, it has actually not grown fast enough to make each individual Rockefeller descendent any richer than John D. Rockefeller was. In other words, the Rockefellers have essentially only managed to break even, at best. And the Rockefellers are often touted as an example of success at the art of sustaining family wealth!
This brings about an alternative take about something else: Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons (divorces, elderly healthcare costs). It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair.
"Suppose you are correct and it is not only you, but many people won't get inheritance because of various reasons..."
I may not have been clear. I *did* get an inheritance from my father, but the inheritance wasn't the single largest financial event of my life.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder, because collecting enough capital to rise to the next social strata (or several) often is a multi-generational affair."
Maybe? My grandparent on both sides were middle class. I would score my parents as upper middle class, though maybe just more solidly middle class than my grandparents. I dunno. *I* think of myself as upper middle class, but not "rich" (even though because of living and working in a VHCOL area I probably AM rich).
The next step "up" would be "rich" as in partner in a law firm or corporate vice president or something like that. There do seem to be a limited number of slots for those positions, though, so for my son to be rich (a) he'd need to move up relative to me, and (b) a rich someone else would need their kid to miss on continuing in the rich strata.
But I'm not seeing how, to pick an example, giving my kid $500K would help him become a law partner or VP or whatever. The limiter here really seems to be more his talent and interest rather than a lack of money due to inheritance.
We could pay to send him to Harvard MBA school. But he isn't interested and neither is Harverd.
"It makes social mobility quite much harder"
Social mobility isn't about inheriting wealth, it's about creating wealth by virtue of the greater opportunities provided by the preceding generation's incremental move up the social ladder, e.g. generation 1 is a laborer who barely makes enough to feed his family, gen 2 is a simple store owner who scraps to make sure his kid can go to college, gen 3 is a white-collar worker who sends his kid to Harvard.
Also, social mobility means moving beyond your parents' economic class. If your wealth is obtained from inheritance, then it's definitionally not going to be more than what your parents had.
A well timed inheritance from my grandmother made it possible for my parents to send me to an elite university. My parents at that time were a teacher and a journalist, and the grandmother had been a professor. It wouldn’t exactly have been “never work again” money but in combination with my parents’ savings and need based aid, it was life changing for me.
The crypto bros becoming the idea is really weird. There’s nothing that will change the mind of the Crypto bros but you will not be the new ruling class.
I remember a line from a Norman mailer book: a rich guy had died and the protagonist was enquiring about him. Why was the sendoff not better? A local dignity answered that there what are two types of millionaires. “A million dollars can buy you power and influence, or a million dollars can buy you lots of groceries. This guy was the latter. “
Well the million is dated, think 100s of millions today. Mostly crypto is lots of money without power, although SBF was trying to change that I suppose.
There is no meritocracy in Britain.
There was an increase in social mobility post war, often driven by grammar schools, but the elite positions in Britain are now back in the hands of the fee paying privately educated, more firmly than before even with the city and journalism - historically both conduits to relative wealth or comfort from the working or lower middle classes now in the hands of the elites. Heck even pop is elitist now.
The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
>The grammars were closed by the Labour Party for reasons of ensuring more equality, but the private schools were not, for reasons unexplained.
Even if you don't agree with them, I don't think the reasons are unexplained, or even obscure: grammar schools were and are state-run whereas private schools aren't, and "the State should not do X" is much more compatible with liberalism than "the State should forbid anyone from doing X".
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the next Labour government strip private schools of their charitable status.
The Grammar Schools weren't entirely closed in the 1960s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_10/65)
Local authorities were allowed to keep them open if they wanted to. Only conservative ones, ie. ones
with wealthier voters, did. That means the system became *more* unequal, because it was no longer the case that everyone had access to the grammar schools,
and only people in wealthier areas did.
On the other hand...academies.
"An academy is an independent state school governed by the Academy Agreement it makes with the Department for Education, and at that point it severs connections with the local education authority. The current advisory text is the Academy and free school: master funding agreement dated March 2018.[22][23] The governors of the academy are obliged to publish an annual report and accounts, that are open to scrutiny and inspections.[24]
All academies are expected to follow a broad and balanced curriculum but many have a particular focus on, or formal specialism in, one or more areas such as science; arts; business and enterprise; computing; engineering; mathematics; modern foreign languages; performing arts; sport; or technology. Although academies are required to follow some aspects of the National Curriculum,[25] they are otherwise free to innovate; however, as they participate in the same Key Stage 3 and GCSE exams as other English schools, they teach a curriculum very similar other schools, with only small variations.[26]"
The Labour Government under Tony Blair established academies through the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
The old joke was that the Labour Party did it for equality - for the teachers. The secondary modern teachers didn't like the grammar teachers looking down on them.
In real terms, meritocracy isn't egalitarian, and the justification was partly that everyone was starting to look down on the secondary modern kids, partly that the middle class kids were playing the system in order to stuff the grammar schools with their own kids and defeating the whole point of the system.
Not being familiar with it, and given the casualness of your last sentece: would the UK have the authority to outlaw private education?
It’s interesting that people took only the last sentence to task - the end of British meritocracy not causing any ire.
The answer is that the State could reduce subsidies to the extent that nearly everybody is priced out. However my preference would be keeping both private schools and grammars. The last ship has sailed.
Being American, I have no notion of a meritocracy emerging from *anything other than* private school, or its functional equivalent, the "top public high school".
So you think that meritocracy is paid for? I’m not sure what you are saying here.
In the American context, the idea that competitive schools would ever lift substantial numbers of those at the bottom, or in the bottom half, or perhaps in the bottom three-quarters - is not supported. Competitive schools would either be expensive and private; or located in an area of expensive homes to which you would be zoned, so while not competitive to get into based on merit, would be quite competitive once in; or occasionally, "magnet" schools that require (or did) testing would be located in a lower SE area in the interest of geographic equity. One such school was in my town, housed in the normal (badly performing) high school - a sign of the latter's performance was that it was renamed several times. The kids in the magnet were indeed bused from areas that had better high schools - but the magnet, to some parents, was better still, being selective. This magnet "side" sailed along, winning prizes, no need for a name change, well-regarded - until, ultimately, there were complaints that the two schools were strictly in parallel and had no commonality, and the magnet school was kicked out.
Competitive schools will certainly lift a few individuals, that is surely true. It depends on whether one can tolerate that something can be more to one, than it is to a hundred.
Ok. Whatever that is, it isn’t meritocratic.
Working class families do sometimes get their kids into the selective schools--famously, this happens among first-generation East Asian immigrants whose parents are both working some shit job.
Or, alternatively, I guess my view is that the meritocracy is the word we use for the churn within a rather small slice of humanity. Thus, I vaguely recall - notwithstanding the slaughter of some of their members, and whatever losses they sustained, lots of the families on top and on the make in the reign of Louis XVI, had quite miraculously recovered their position by the 1850s.
I feel like I read something similar re the Cultural Revolution but I do sometimes get things exactly backward.
This was the old argument from "The Rise of the Meritocracy" (which coined the term): even if you had a meritocracy, you'd end up creating a quasi-hereditary regime with a small amount of movement up and down because general intelligence is hereditary.
I would have thought that this was the most anti American ideology. The ideology of the US, in opposition to Europe, was that anybody could make. The president could be born in a log cabin.
It's less black and white than the end of meritocracy. The comprehensives were supposed to subsume the function of the grammars, hence the name. In areas that held on to grammars, that didn't happen, but they still had grammars.
Also, academies
Why were the comprehensives unsuccessful at replacing the grammars exactly? (This is all as baffling as cricket to me.) And if the grammars should have been left alone, who exactly was the enemy of this postwar meritocracy?
The grammars were academically selective. The comprehensives are not.
There are some very good comprehensive schools, but they now select by wealth (house prices), which is perhaps a less accurate and more unfair proxy for academic ability.
In areas without grammars, the best comp becomes a pseudo gramamr. In areas with survive grammars, comps become pseudo secondary moderns. There are a lot of organic effects and unintended consequences here.
Some local authorities ignored the dept of education and kept their grammars because they were popular with voters. Central government could only influence them via funding. The grammar I went to was noticeably not well funded.
Scott writes: "You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right. I’m not sure why that hasn’t happened."
What makes you think this hasn't happened?
There seem to be lots of people frustrated with not being able to get ahead to the degree they expected, especially in the PMC. There's a general mood of social pessimism, which Turchin usually says corresponds to elite overproduction.
Suppose that calibration is possible, in the sense that an external observer can observe different people, gauge their intelligence/competence, make predictions about their future earning+status potential, and have those predictions borne out on average. But suppose further that people's self-evaluations are overly optimistic, so that even if they apply the same downstream prediction architecture, their inputs are skewed so as to predict an unrealistic level of success. Does this indicate elite overproduction? For that matter, does it even require an explanation, or is it as simple as everyone thinking they're an above-average driver?
I do wonder just how many people can actually sit down and say to themselves "I'm in the top 5% but not the top 1%" and be accurate.
The more likely universal response is "I'm better than this." Which leads to Turchin's overproduction - a lot of people with a lot of education, but not educated to do the jobs that need doing.
When I was in high school (early 2000s, UK), the government had a policy of getting 50% (!) of young people into university, and I remember being regularly propagandised about how getting a degree would be great, it would open so many doors, I'd be able to shoot straight to the top in any business area of my choice, etc.
Of course, this all turned out to be BS, and the reality is that I ended up doing basically the same sorts of jobs as my parents had done with their A-levels (the qualifications you get from school at age 18). The mismatch between what I'd been sold and what I actually got is, I will admit, somewhat frustrating.
(And no, I don't think "You should have realised, at age 16/17, that society in general and your schools and teachers in particular were lying to you" is a reasonable response. Schoolchildren just don't generally have to sort of life experience to recognise that sort of thing.)
Honestly just the shitty messaging we have 80s and on kids about their life prospects. You can be anything you want even if you are a midwit if you just apply yourself.
Which you know isn’t true. I think way too many people who were fundamentally just bog standard Americans were raised thinking they were future somebodies.
The feeling when I was a girl was that there was pretty much a two-tier hierarchy of things to do - with the 60s over and done with, essentially no thought given to a well-lived life except that motherhood and household management were indisputably the lowest - essentially shameful, in one of those interesting inversions. However, there was no hierarchy of ability, of course; so the result was a sort of homogenization of outcome really. Perhaps a very small contributor to the way the world seems overall grayer with the passage of time, a phenomenon difficult to separate from one's own aging of course, so tending to get a discussion-stopping retort of "you think there was a good old days?", etc.
A lot of schools tell their students to "Go out and change the world!" as some kind of empowerment attempt, but I just think it's true. Statistically, only a tiny number of people will ever change the world in any meaningful way; if you encourage children to think of that as the baseline for living a successful life, you condemn the vast majority of them to frustration and disappointment.
Phil Getz's claim that "The Democrats are now the party of the rich" is just false.
For example, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/ finds that the D/R split among voters with incomes:
:- under $50k was 57%/42%
:- between $50k and $100k was 56%/43%
:- over $100k was 43%/54%
What about the very rich? Well, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/10/20/even-americas-billionaires-are-tilting-toward-biden-in-the-2020-presidential-race/ finds that billionaires are more likely to be Republicans than the average American, and more likely to be Republicans than Democrats (although slightly more voted for Biden than Trump - I suspect because there will be a significant Never-Trump-Republican contingent among them).
It is true that the correlation between wealth and partisanship has weakened in the past decades, due to rising educational polarisation, and it wouldn't amaze me if it vanished or even reversed in the future, but it hasn't done so yet.
The more plausible claim is that Democrats are the party of the professional/managerial class while the Republicans are the party of the petit bourgeois small business people. Both of these groups have six figure salaries, but the latter don’t feel as rich as the former and don’t donate $200 to their favored candidates.
My rough formula is that
P(Democrat) = (Education) + (Extent of prejudice against your demographic) + (# people living within a mile of you) - (Wealth) -(Age)
At first glance, this would imply that being Republican would correlate strongly with being rich, but because wealth correlates strongly with education, the correlation between being Republican and being rich, while positive, is actually only weak.
This would imply that retired professional sportsmen would be mostly Republican: they are rich, older (note the "retired") and not well-educated.
And, if you look at white professional sportsmen, they don't face lots of prejudice, and they are mostly Republicans. Even African-Americans are a lot more Republican than other African-Americans.
Yeah, seems pretty solid.
I guess the exception is largely people working entertainment: lots of rich popstars and actors and the like are Democrats in spite of their poor educations and wealth.
Entertainment seems to be a job area where most people are in it for non-monetary rewards.
In the movie Idiocracry, there's a running joke about a really popular actor whose thing is to get kicked in the groin a lot. If you asked him (when he's rolling around) why he doesn't quit, he would probably say something like "What? And give up show business?"
The Democrats are also the party of African Americans and Hispanic Americans, so that's going to have a huge impact on average incomes. You'd need to specifically look at White Democrats vs White Republicans.
> Phil Getz's claim that "The Democrats are now the party of the rich" is just false.
I don't know if this is as obvious as you state because stats are hard and there's always someone who has stats that can prove the opposite position.
Here's an article from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-19/democrats-tax-hike-bet-relies-on-their-new-500-000-plus-voters
It says that according to IRS data, in 1990, Republican districts were richer than Democrat districts. Today it's reversed: "Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more".
Not really sure how to square these dueling stats, but obviously the threshold is different ($500k household income) and the data collection method is different.
I think the thing about /districts/ is probably true but misleading - I've seen it from several sources. But stats on individuals pretty consistently point the other way, except possibly in the far right tail, so I guess it's an urban/rural thing where cities have lots of poor people and a few super-rich ones and vote Democratic, and the country is lower variance and votes Republican.
For another data point, this 2014 Pew Research survey finds an even split in the highest income group (47% lean Republican, 44% lean Democrat).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/party-affiliation/by/income-distribution/
Edit: I'm wondering if the difference is household vs individual income. If Republican voters tend to have more traditional, single-income households, you'd expect to see a smaller proportion of rich Republicans on studies that look at household income and a larger proportion for studies that use individual income. E.g. if you and your spouse vote Democrat and both earn $80k, you'd be included in the $100k+ household income group, but not the $100k individual income group.
The way incomes are distributed makes this effect much stronger. There are a lot more individuals earning $50k-$100k than there are people earning over $100k. Therefore a lot of two-income households will clear a $100k household income threshold and a lot of single-income households won't.
The Democrats are the party of the upper middle classes and the lower classes. But there are more of the latter than the former so they average out to poorer. The Republicans are the party of the middle classes so they're somewhat above average. You add in age polarization and that's how you get to a wealthier Republican base despite winning the poorer parts of the country. And the very wealthy might lean one way or another overall but mostly it's a case by case basis. Lots of Republican and Democrat billionaires.
This is actually a pretty normal pattern. It dates back at least to the 17th century where the middle classes and lower aristocrats fought against an alliance of the crown and its bureaucrats plus the lower classes. And the nobles split into factions. So while the statement might be technically false it's gesturing in a true-ish direction. It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
>It's more that money doesn't map directly onto class as well as we sometimes like to pretend.
That's certainly true of the way the word is used here in the UK - the classic example of someone super-rich who parses as lower-class to UK eyes is Donald Trump - but a decade ago my impression was that when Americans use the word money is a larger part of it. I think that may have changed a bit in the past ten or twenty years, though?
I think that Americans are much more conscious of the difference between the guy who makes $400,000 a year because he owns five carlots in an exurb somewhere and the woman who makes $400,000 a year because she is a corporate lawyer.
I don't think they really get that the rich guy who behaves like he's lower-class is lower-class (like, as you say, Trump).
Americans mostly don't have a proper concept of social vs economic class. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist in their society, it means they're not aware of it and it causes all sorts of problems.
They have contempt for a man who has a lot of money but exhibits lower-class tastes but they're not quite sure why. They guess it must be some kind of moral failing on his part.
There is an old British style American aristocracy, mostly on the east coast. But they began their slide into irrelevance with the American Revolution when much of their structural support was removed. Nowadays they're barely relevant even in their local regions.
Americans are less aware of class for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves middle class. And class has less impact on day to day preferences than in places like Europe. For example, there's no American equivalent to fox hunting or horse racing. Most upper class and lower class Americans have relatively similar habits in terms of entertainment, dress, etc. Richer Americans have nicer suits or bigger tvs. But it's a different of degree rather than kind.
But lastly, the American class system is vastly more fluid and complicated than the British one. Unlike most class systems that you have to be born into the American class system is based on education, profession, wealth, and mannerisms. And what matters depends on where you are. For example, wealth is relatively more important in New York City and fame relatively more important in LA. Engineers are relatively low status in much of the country but that's not true on the West Coast. Midwest, and the South. (This isn't recent either: Hoover was an engineer and came from California.) And so on.
The system does exist. Donald Trump is the same over here: a rich lower class guy (or at least that's his pose). But he's that way not because of his birth but because of his mannerisms and profession. (He had wealth and education which is why he coded as nouveau riche instead of a lower class slob.)
Likewise the system is relatively open. An American can simply join the upper classes if they adopt the right mannerisms, have enough money, etc. The Clintons are probably the closest the American left has to royalty at this point. But one of them was the son of a single mother and the other the daughter of a small business owner. Likewise you have a lot of elites who protest they came from a poor background. And it's often true. But Americans have accurately divined the poor kid who goes to the right schools, has the right mannerisms, and makes a lot of money IS part of the upper class without reservation in the US.
PS: This is all modulo the success of specific classes at reproducing themselves by passing along education, social customs, wealth, etc.
He probably should have said "rich normalizing for age, sex, and race." My impression is that for a given race, sex, and age, the richer you are the more you think Democrats speak to you, and the poorer you are the more tuned in to the Republican message you are.
Around here youngish brown female City Council members and NGO lawyers with good salaries think our top priorities should be rooting out prejudice and subsidizing higher education, but the brown middle-age male gardeners and drywall biz owners who live and die by deals and contracts want the government to stop fucking with their livelihood via pandemic ukases or licensing and environmental requirements, and they're not especially excited about allowing Mexican gangs to import street enforcers by just having them walk across an open border.
But when you mix together income, age, sex. and race, it's a big muddle, because younger people (who are almost always left) are usually poorer, black people are almost always poorer, brown people are sometimes poorer, brown and black people get special treatment by Democratic policies, and when it comes to men and women...well, who can explain *that* weird decision by The Creator?
Do you have any evidence to support that?
Because it definitely isn't true for education - controlling for education strengthens the correlation between being rich and Republican - and I'm deeply sceptical about most of the other controls weakening it.
I think this isn't a hard phenomenon to explain - the obvious answer is the correct one.
Democrats favour policies which advance the economic interests of the poor, and are thus a majority among poorer-than-average people, and do less badly with people rich enough that they no longer care than they do with people richer than average but not ludicrously rich, while Republicans favour policies that advance the economic interests of the rich, and are thus a majority among richer-than-average people, especially but not exclusively those who aren't super rich.
But, because those facts are embarrassing to Republicans, there's a cottage industry that's sprung up around trying to deny or obfuscate them and claim the politically-valuable underdog card.
Sure, I just told you it was my experience. So that's 50+ years of observing a few hundred people and getting to know their attitudes. Whether it would hold up if we interviewed hundreds of thousands of people in a carefully controlled nationwide study I don't know, but obviously my priors would be that it does, because otherwise I have to believe my experience is weirdly idiosyncratic. Similarly, to seriously consider an alternative hypothesis, I would need some persuasive evidence.
It's been a long time in my experience since Democrat top policy preferences have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the poor -- at least, of the working poor. Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, affirmative action, unrestricted immigration, environmental regulation that makes pushes up the prices of utilities, transportation, or household appliances, are all things that negatively impact the economic interests of the working poor -- and the latter know that very well. That's why those policies are not popular among people who are trying to scratch out a living and get a little bit ahead, and why Democrats find it always necessary to couple their policy proposals with increasingly grandiose proposals for subsidies and class warfare FUD. I mean, go ahead and find some Central Valley immigrant family trying to save up to buy a little farmland of their own who are thrilled about the CARB mandate to only buy EVs after 2035 if you can. They can be (and if it comes to pass undoubtably will be) bought off by a subsidy sufficiently generous, but if the underlying policy were popular they wouldn't have to be.
It's also been a long time since the Republican policies have focussed on advancing the economic interests of the rich. The rich these days generally want a heavy regulatory state that raises the costs of entry of potential competitors, so they can stay atop the heap. The rich enjoy unequal access to the writers of law, so these days they prefer a big powerful government that can write law that freezes in place their domination. They're fine with high taxes -- which they can readily afford -- so long as what the government funds with those taxes benefits them, e.g. comes back as subsidies for the industries in which they work, or salaries for jobs they or their Stanford JD or Harvard MBA kids might take.
The claim that minimum wage laws hurt the working poor is extraordinary, and poorly a supported. It has been debated here many times.
> Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position.
I recently listened to a good chunk of the Revolutions podcast, which I'm guessing many people here are familiar with. One of the points the author makes is that revolutions do require the complicity of part of the ruling class. Basically, a united ruling class will generally be able to smack down any threat to its hegemony. If the regime in power becomes too sclerotic to respond to changing circumstances, a united ruling class will stage a coup, which is not the same as a revolution. True revolutions happen when there is a fissure in the ruling class, and one faction unites with a mass movement to restructure the system. There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
I don't want to over-analogize the French Revolution to the Harvard admissions office. But I think the general point stands that the interests of the "ruling class" can be cross-pressured.
It might not be "over-analogizing" so much as seeing the Harvard stuff as at a much later point in an unfolding chain that (sort of) begins with the French Revolution/Industrial Revolution/capitalism. What I took away from the Revolutions podcast is that it was the first real attack launched by the nascent professional managerial class (look how many of the leaders were lawyers! Liberal democrat parliaments & legislatures = still dominated by lawyers). Brooks unwittingly (or lazily, imho) gives the impression that the WASPs were an "aristocracy" overthrown by the PMC, but they were haute bourgeoise, not aristocrats.
>There were plenty of nobles cheering the downfall of the aristrocracy during the French Revolution.
It's worth noting here as an illustration that Napoleon Bonaparte's family had been officially classified as noble (nobility was a fuzzy concept in 18th century Corsica, but the Buonaparte family made the list when France took over and had to figure out who belonged to which estate), and had received his military education thanks to a scholarship for children of impecunious noble families.
>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
There was also a step change in inheritance tax, meaning that British landowners would see their assets shrinking each generation...unless they found something more profitable than agriculture to invest in. So it was a two way process... successful industrialists would be given titles, but successful aristocrats would invest in industry. By no means all were successful: a number of great families could not adapt, and withered away.
>Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their positio
They don't entirely sit in their hands, but they don't entirely adapt either.
I'm sure it is real. I was questioning Scott's (initial) claim for common-ness.
Googling keeps coming up with this: "The average for the most wealthy [*] 1% [in the USA] reaches upwards of $719,000, while the average for the next 9% experiences a steep decline at $174,200."
I'm going to assert a useful definition is that the most wealthy 1% in the US are not upper middle class, but are rich :-)
So we have an average of a bit under $200K for the next block that seem reasonable to consider as containing the upper middle class. And the bottom of this is probably "just" middle class?
So ... we don't particularly care about the average here as the curve is very skewed ...
So ... maybe we care about the top 4 percentage points of the 1% - 10% range and then want to know the median? Or the number inheriting more than $250K? Or $500K?
*Typical* cannot realistically be over $1M for that group, there just isn't enough money to go around.
[*] I cannot tell if the 1% here are the 1% most wealthy (dead) parents or the most 1% most wealthy people getting an inheritance. There is probably moderately high correlation in any event, but ???
"In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good)."
Interestingly, seniority (like primogeniture) also has a solution to this! If you're son #3, you do not expect to inherit, and probably have a downward mobility job lined up from family tradition ("we send our third sons to the navy"), and absent murdering your elder brothers, there's not a way to succeed by sacrificing more.
[Some monasteries assign status by seniority, a little because older people are wiser, and mostly because people can't affect how quickly they age, and so a potential source of conflict is out of their hands.]
I can't wait for a latter-day Carmina Burana to be written by the tonsured second sons of SV elites. Unless we send them with a monthly remittance to colonise Mars.
Music will be amazing, libretto will be trash.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
The one time I remember hearing about this was when a family member got divorced, and it happened to be right before their spouse's parent died and left them millions of dollars. (So if the divorce had happened a bit later, they would have gotten half of the inheritance, which was the point people talked about; I imagine it would have gone unmentioned otherwise.)
It's been a topic of conversation between myself and my parents (not just their will, but also inheritances from my grandparents)--blunted in importance, from my perspective, by the high probability that they and I die at the same time.
Why do you expect that they and you will die at the same time? Given where we are commenting, I presume because you believe in some kind of imminent AI apocalypse?
Yes, I think AI will probably happen in my parent's lifetimes (and then either all of us will die or none of us will die for quite some time).
In almost every state in the US, inheritances left to one spouse are typically *not* subject to being split in divorces. So the timing probably didn’t matter.
A quite extraordinary number of idiotic comments on this.
>Will Bitcoiners be the new aristocracy? (79 replies)
There were more than 79 replies; the interface says 156.
>Will Elon’s Twitter prove the uselessness of the professional managerial class? (24 replies)
There were 40 replies downstream of the linked comment, not 24.
Sorry for being tedious.
The number in the OP is just a static number; it doesn't dynamically update when the thread gets more comments.
Yeah, but I think the vast majority of them were there before this was posted.
Probably a static number when Scott wrote that part of this post. If I were putting together a "Highlights from the Comments" post for something, I expect I'd compile it gradually as I read interesting or otherwise notable comments, not write it all at once right before posting it.
> I am less sure about this one. “Elite overproduction” means there are more aspiring elites than elite positions. But what is an “aspiring elite”?
We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out. The archetypical coffee barista with a degree in media studies.
I think if your ever looking for "elite overproduction" look for that mismatch between what people were raised to expect and what they got and you'll find it.
> 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.
This strikes me as utterly wrong. If you have a small group who a) all know each other, b) all can benefit from rent seeking, and c) are protected from threats outside their clique. They won't stop each other rent seeking because of rivalries. They'll collude to rent seek on an unimaginable scale.
> We've had a generation of kids being promised that if you go to university you're guaranteed a good job only for that to not quite work out.
This; and also the fraction of people who go to universities is growing, and there is grade inflation. So the kids not only got to universities, but they are often straight A students... and still can't find a good job.
(At some moment they may realize that a plumber makes more than 2x the money they do. Then they might start screaming that it is not fair that the system does not reward intelligent people who spent lot of time and money getting their education.)
Theoretically, the government/accrediting organisations should impose minimum standards, although they have various incentives not to (putting people into more education keeps them off the unemployment lists, for example).
Wasn't the top of the Roman Republic basically "rent seeking on an unimaginable scale" ?
I mean, to the extent that slave-owning is an economic rent (and literal rent is an economic rent), then yes. I wouldn't oversell the making money from politics angle though - you could squeeze people a bit, in the lower and sub-magistracy offices your patron would finance you, but higher up you'd spend so much money on games and bribes you'd probably make a loss. Grain captains could do a lot better for themselves, but weren't elite positions.
In a healthy, open oligarchy society will be set up in such a way as to benefit the oligarchs but personal enrichment through the state is comparatively rare - your fellow oligarchs have all the money, so it's more like agreeing to sit on a homeowners' association to manage the country for your peers. The modern world is different, because everything has to be squashed into the shape as a fake democratic republic even when that's totally unnatural for the society in question.
Obviously there are questions of bias, but literary sources from the Late Republican period suggest that governors could be extremely corrupt, and that this was widely recognised as a problem. Supposedly Gaius Verres said that a governor needed three years in office: one to pay back his creditors, one to bribe the jurors in the inevitable corruption trial, and one to get rich.
It also probably didn't help that the Roman government tended to subcontract out the gathering of taxes to private companies, which were incentivised to squeeze the provincials for all they were worth. (Basically, the companies would pay for the right to collect taxes from a certain province, and then have to make up the sum by collecting them. Any extra was taken as profit.) There's a reason why the Gospels use "sinners and tax collectors" almost as a hendiadys.
Erusian's comment misses some basic facts about British applications (that I know because experienced them). I had to go through all the replies to it, because I couldn't quite believe that nobody had said anything.
In the UK, you can only apply to five universities. That's it, that's what you can do in a year. There are very limited exceptions if all of those five reject you, but every kid who in America would be applying to fifteen or more schools (AKA almost everyone from an elite background seriously looking at Ivies without a legacy or a truly absurd application) can only apply to five. So if you want a safety school, three uncertain unis, and Oxbridge, you can go for that. But it's *risky* in a way that it isn't in the US.
On top of that, UK applications are much more test-score dependent, and test scores are known in advance. In the US, I can tell someone I think they're a weak applicant relative to the standard that I expect Harvard has, but there's a lot of variation for what Harvard's standard happens to be depending on who reads the application, what the rest of the incoming class looks like, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. In the UK, you can count. They will tell you explicitly on the website what numbers they want, and if you don't have the numbers you don't bother, because you only have five schools.
To compare the acceptance rate of two schools under these wildly different systems is pointless. I'd also reference Tanner Greer's point that, as US political and business power have nationalized, becoming prominent among the national elite at an Ivy is now much more important than building a strong network and connections in your community at the local or state Good Enough University. To this day, if you want to do politics in Alabama the advice is to go to the University of Alabama and join the right fraternity. But in most of the country that has shattered, increasing demand by the elites to go to the nationally best-connected and best-regarded schools.
The other difference with the US is that nobody knows going in if the applicant is going to walk out with a degree in astrophys or medieval lit. This means that the physics departments over there don't get to handle their own admissions but rather have to deal with who the university as a whole picks.
That depends on the university. At my undergraduate Alma Mater (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, part of the California State University system), each "College' of the University had its own separate admissions criteria. You had to declare a first and second choice major when applying, and you'd be assigned one of these if admitted. Once you're in, it was usually pretty easy to change majors within a College, but there was a really high bar to switching to a different College.
"Colleges" in this context being administrative subdivisions of the University, each consisting of several thematically-related departments. The Colleges at Cal Poly being Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering, Math and Science, Liberal Arts, and Business.
People *did* comment on that, but maybe in not the same branch ?
The UK also has clearing, where students who haven't found a college can be matched with unfilled places at any college.
Clearing is a heck of a long-shot though, so no-one's going to put in a hopeless Oxbridge application on the basis that they might get in through clearing.
In the present tense this is absolutely true, but pre-pandemic it was a bit less rare (although still not common).
That's not what its intended for...its intended for going somewhere rather than nowhere.
I was replying to:
"In the UK, you can only apply to five universities. That's it, that's what you can do in a year. "
Sorry, my comment was unclear. I meant that I don't think many people think about relying on clearing (to get in anywhere) when picking their five, so it probably doesn't lead to many more people applying to universities that are obviously out of reach.
"Only" being able to apply to five universities isn't stopping people from going to university , so the US approach is arguably over kill.
Back when I was applying, Oxford didn't even do clearing (not sure about Cambridge, though I imagine they'd be the same). Instead, they'd make slightly more offers than they had places, to make up for students who did unexpectedly badly in their exams.
It's also not clear what the "acceptance rate" for a UK university would be, as the offers are all conditional (simplifying a bit, UK students to one set of exams at 16, and another at 18). You apply to five based on your 16-year-old grades, who then make you a conditional offer that they'll take you if you get so-and-so 18-year old grades. The offer has to be conditional, but if they really want you they'll set it at 2 Es (out of 3-4 exams at 18) - a friend of mine had this for Cambridge (but, of course, got 4 As anyway). That's pretty rare though, and the standard offer was 3 As back then.
So the acceptance rate is either the number of people who got an offer vs applicants, or the number of people who achieved their offer vs applicants. There won't be a huge difference at Oxford and Cambridge, but there'll be a chunk every year.
I think it's calculated using the number of people who get offers -- they're all accepted, after all, even if their acceptance is conditional.
People keep on trying to bring this point up. Yes, there are differences, but the vast majority of the acceptance difference is due to simple numbers. There are more spots for less people.
The average number of applications an American puts out is a little under 7. So while this would skew the numbers it would only be a little. There's also countervailing skews like the much larger number of US universities. US applications are also highly test score dependent to the point where people at my school were directed into bands based on what they scored on the SAT. It's not strictly required you stay within your band... but it isn't in the UK either. And no, it's not pointless to compare the same statistic under two systems.
There are legitimate differences, such as the fact UK degrees are less uniform, but those don't go against my overall point that it's less arbitrary and less selective to get in.
"the average number of applications an American puts out" and "the average number of applications someone who gets into Harvard makes" are two numbers that bear some sort of relationship to each other, but I don't see why I should expect them to be particularly similar. Most Americans go to schools that accept most applicants: students going to schools with acceptance rates under 10% are a very unusual bunch. Honestly, I'm very surprised that the average you give is so *high*: what's the source?
I'm confused. You seem to have just switched back and forth between comparing Harvard to Oxford and then the entire British system to the entire American system. For example, the five limit doesn't just apply to Oxford but universally, so the general American statistic is the relevant comparator. If you want just Oxford I expect you'll find it's more than 5 on the British side because those limits only apply to native British. And don't apply to native British apply overseas, as they more often do at that level.
What is the specific point you're trying to make? Are you really going to claim that Oxford is not significantly less selective than Harvard? Because that seems fully unsupportable to me. Simply the graduates per capita number proves it.
As for the number being high: There's about 50 American schools more selective than Oxford in the US and significantly more that accept a minority of applicants. If you combine those two numbers together there's more selective universities in the US than universities, period, in the entire UK. So while not the majority of American universities it is a large and significant number are. This is one of my points: if they were comparatively sized systems then the larger number of applications per person might matter for the selectivity of the top position. But the US system also has more colleges which pushes statistics in the opposites direction.
For Brits who are accepted at Oxford, the limit is five applications. For Americans who are accepted at Harvard, the average number of applications is unknown to me, but fifteen is a plausible number. And I don't have hard numbers to back this claim, but I can say with 75% confidence, from my time studying there, that 70% of British students at Oxford did not apply to foreign universities. Their options are extremely expensive (American schools), non-English-speaking, or not competitive with Oxbridge (Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada). Perhaps more of them *should*, but at least in 2013-2015 they didn't.
25,000 undergraduates at Oxbridge, 8,000 admitted per year or so (vast majority do three-year degrees), three quarters of Oxford's are domestic students https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/full-version-facts-and-figures, on a population of 60 million, so 1/10,000. Harvard admits 1,250 a year on a population of 333 million. If you think that the right comparison is Harvard, that's a conclusive answer, and no amount of adjustment is realistically going to get a factor of 25 difference. On the other hand, I would add at least Yale, MIT, and UChicago.
> For Americans who are accepted at Harvard, the average number of applications is unknown to me, but fifteen is a plausible number.
Coincidentally, I happen to know someone who applied to Harvard in 2014. They put out nine applications and were discouraged from putting out more. Two safety schools, two stretch schools, and two middle of the road schools was considered enough for a total of six. Now, this doesn't mean it's a good average. But nor does your "I think it's plausible" standard. In fact I only know one person, out of the dozens I do know, who put in 15+ applications and a lot of people made fun of them for it. Anecdata but still.
> 70% of British students at Oxford did not apply to foreign universities.
This is the wrong statistic to begin with. The number of people who got in who applied elsewhere is not trivially the same as the number of people who applied who applied elsewhere. The former excludes almost three quarters of the sample.
> If you think that the right comparison is Harvard, that's a conclusive answer, and no amount of adjustment is realistically going to get a factor of 25 difference. On the other hand, I would add at least Yale, MIT, and UChicago.
Even adding them you still don't get the 25x adjustment factor you'd need. And I don't think you get similar effects in terms of uniform prestige or entire elite classes coming out of (say) UChicago.
More to the point, admitting the impossibility of your position does seem pretty close to admitting I'm right and that the American system is much more selective. If you combine that with my assertion British education still makes you pretty good at most things then you end up at my conclusion: the selectivity is not inherently necessary. And then to my speculation it's done to create a narrow elite and not because it's educationally necessary.
I'm actually quite sympathetic to the University of Paris for refusing to publish its acceptance rate on the grounds that people will think the school is bad because it's relatively high to American or Chinese schools. And I have not said anything bad about Oxbridge as far as I'm aware. Being less selective is not a bad thing, after all.
This is implied in your example, but it may interest readers to know that you can only apply to one of Oxford *or* Cambridge, not both.
I did not know that, and wondered how those numbers were adding up
> For centuries [in England], 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
Largely true, but not entirely. Even by the 1200s, merchants in several British cities were becoming increasingly wealthy and more assertive as a result.
When summoning his first Parliament, in 1265, Simon de Montfort (the de facto regent of England at the time) acknowledged this by including burgesses, i.e. merchant representatives, as a small group of humble guys sitting at the back, so to speak. These were included in subsequent parliaments, and over time evolved into the House of Commons, which today runs the whole show!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_de_Montfort%27s_Parliament
Also, once a law called the Statute of Quia Emptores was passed in 1290, rich merchants could purchase and obtain good title to land. So for many that was a major goal in itself, to obtain a source of "settled" income rather than what was called "precarious" income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quia_Emptores
And don't forget that the City of London has long been a semi-independent mercantile power.
>But what is an “aspiring elite”? In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good). In a meritocracy, it’s less clear. Smart people? Graduates of top colleges?
In a meritocracy, I thinks it's still the "children of the last set of elites" (+ambitious social climbers, as always). People generally feel like they deserve the same lifestyle and status as their parents.
Ambitious social climbers are brutally kept in check in the old system, but encouraged in the new system.
There seems to be a confusion between “elite” and “meritocracy”.
In particular almost every comment seems to assume that the only thing worth doing in life is to become a mover and shaker. If you’re not a Fortune 100 CEO or a Senator you’re worthless. Ie the only goal is to enter the true elite.
I see things differently. A you can have an incredible life in America based on merit, as an engineer, lawyer, doctor, accountant or suchlike. And the gate to these jobs is essentially your skill and hard work, not your college. Whether you have a degree from MIT or Howard or Ohio State, you can get an engineering job commensurate with your skill.
So what I see in the US is two pathologies. The first is a sick measure of what counts as success in life; the second (consequence of the first) is an endless dissatisfaction with life (and endless whining over desserts, blame as to identity politics, etc) because people can’t accept that life as an engineer in Toledo making $80K a year is actually pretty good when society tells them the only life that counts is being VP of Hardware at Google and making $2M a year.
It’s a mildly interesting academic question as to who gets to occupy the .001% of slots that count as elite in the US. But it should not be an important question for most people; and if it is, well that obsession more than anything “the system” did or did not do to you is probably the cause of most of your life dissatisfaction.
> I would love to see a scholarly, well-thought out comparison between the Imperial Chinese meritocratic system and our own
Try "The Great Degeneration - How Institutions Decay and Economies Die", by Niall Ferguson (2013).
Re aristocrats running the country, that obviously works better if they are on their best behaviour and are not above the law.
In England this was ensured until the 19th century by the very harsh felony laws: Anyone convicted of a felony, praemunire, or treason faced not just death (for most offences) but forfeiture of all goods and chattels. Their dependents were literally turfed out onto the street!
Although harsh, this had a couple of beneficial effects. Firstly, it paid for the justice system, which meant taxes could be lower. Also, it meant there was less risk of favoritism, if anything the opposite because the prospect of an errant aristocrat's estate reverting to the Crown was an incentive for the Government to vigorously pursue and prosecute complaints made against aristocrats and rich people generally!
For example, one Earl with a large estate was out hunting and, either accidently or for a jolly jape, chased a deer some way into his neighbour's estate. A fairly trivial offence one might think, but his neighbour prosecuted him for poaching, and as a result upon conviction the poor guy was executed and his estate forfeited.
I'm sceptical of Ferguson on this - the Crown didn't prosecute felonies/misdemeanours (save for offences against the Crown) at all in England until the 1830s, and barely did until well into the second half of the 19th century. The justice system more than paid for itself with court fees (particularly covering judges for the Assizes - the only real expense given JPs presided at the Quarter Sessions and still aren't paid for this day; Borough Recorders were paid for by the borough in question).
I should have made clear that after the Ferguson reference at the start of my post, I went off on a tangent with my own somewhat related points, and these were not from Ferguson's book.
The income from forfeitures may not have been directly used to help pay for the justice system, but they were all funds thrown into the Government's pot. So in that sense they contributed indirectly.
Also, even where the Crown did not prosecute, what I meant was that no more obstacles were put in the way of proceedings stemming from private complaints, nor pardons and suchlike more often granted, than one might otherwise expect for aristos and the rich compared with the justice dished out to the hoi polloi! In other words, everyone was generally treated equally before the law.
> the wealth of the unassimilated non-U rich started to outweigh the wealth of the true Upper Class.
What really started killing the old class system, financially, in the UK was the "People's Budget" of 1909, set out by Chancellor of the Exchequer ("Finance Secretary") David Lloyd George. This introduced a 20% land tax on each change of land ownership, including inheritance (although death duties had already been introduced, in 1894).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Budget
This was hotly resisted and vetoed by the House of Lords (the "upper chamber"), but as a result their powers were all but eliminated by the Parliament Act 1911. Among other things, this act removed their power to reject money bills and in effect turned them into the mere talking shop or "revising chamber" they are today.
This whole discussion reminds me of an interesting essay from "Palladium":
https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/
Obviously written by a very intelligent and perceptive young person, but as I reread it I think she doesn't make her main point as explicit as she could have. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say what I think she means here.
It seems to me Dashan's main objection to the woke Ivy kids is that they're deluding themselves. They're ashamed to acknowledge that they're members of America's current power elite, so they dive into political movements that call for a radical redistribution of power--even though, paradoxically, their activism is an exercise of the disproportionate power they already hold, and one that makes genuinely marginalized people feel even more alienated from the dominant discourse.
Dashan seems to feel that we'd be better off if progressive elites were more honest with themselves: if they started from the premise "I have privilege, there's no shame in that, and I intend to use it responsibly", rather than reaching for some semblance of oppressed status based on their skin color, sexuality, or what have you. (I think this is why she mentions the odd case of the Singaporeans.)
That seems right to me. One of the things I find admirable about elite progressives in the past is that they seemed comfortable wearing their privilege. I'm thinking of people like John Maynard Keynes: a male British Oxbridge graduate living in a time when that tiny class of people ruled much of the world, and when it must have been hard to imagine any other arrangement, except possibly having to share some power with male American Ivy League graduates.
As far as I can tell, Keynes never publicly agonized about how undeserving he was of all his advantages. That's a more contemporary style which hadn't yet caught on in Britain or America. He did what he could to make the world a better place without a lot of theatricality, and Dashan seems to be implying that's the best approach.
Isn't the problem more that you can't be a self-aware ruling elite without a theory of your own legitimacy, and the current elite just don't have one? They justified becoming an elite (whenever and however they managed it) on the basis of overthrowing the old elite for equality's sake, and haven't found a route to change tack (hence they have to justify continuing power in the name of "more equality," much as the Bolsheviks claimed they had to stay in power to root out counterrevolutionaries, kulaks etc). Meritocracy was their embryonic attempt to create one ("we're better than you because of how high our SAT scores are"), but now they've realised that'd force them to surrender to the Asiatic hordes.
You can have a theory saying you're legitimate because of your connection to those oppressed, no? Ie despite being part of the ruling elite you too are a queer woman of color, like many oppressed such.
I guess you could...? You'd need your whole elite to be queer women of colour (or at least one of the three, and I'm not totally sure women would be either diverse enough, or capable of forming a separate class). Things would get pretty interesting though.
But how do you avoid "I deserve to be an elite because I share many features with oppressed classes" from degenerating into "I deserve to be an elite because I am a member of an oppressed class" into "I deserve to be an elite because I myself am oppressed", i.e., what we've got already?
That works if you're as competent as Keynes. You can be an Elon Musk and build interesting electric cars, you can be a Jeff Bezos and invent e-commerce for the masses. Et cetera. But what if your only real talent is bullshit and only real resource class connections, so e.g. all you can do is talk a bunch of credulous class peers out of enough money to start a crypto exchange, which you cannot run competently at all, so it explodes and burns to the waterline in short order? One way to insulate yourself from criticism by those experiencing class envy is to pre-excuse your failures by adopting the principle that all you do is driven by exigent broad noble social purpose. It's harder condemn you for screwing a million people out of their life savings if it was For A Good Cause, however dumb and arrogant your decisions were.
I am reminded of my ex-wife's social work classmates, who thought they should wear jeans etc 'to be in solidarity with their clients.'
As a lawyer, I wear a suit because, among other things, you are renting a privileged privately-educated white man for the day, and I should damn well dress like it.
What this says about the kind of people who go into social work vs otherwise is left as an exercise for the reader.
Scott, I think the focus on *inheritance* (as literally the money one gets after their parents die) is a red herring. Much more important is the money children keep getting from parents while they are still alive.
As I see it, this basically comes in three forms: (1) direct gifts of money and things; (2) parents paying all kinds of expenses for their children; and (3) children getting well-paid bullshit jobs in their parents' companies. The second and third option are more difficult to notice, both to kids themselves and to people who know them.
As an example of the first option, I have a friend who seemed to be in the same social class as I. After finishing university I got my first job and started saving money to buy my own apartment, but then I noticed something confusing -- the prices of housing were growing so fast that the difference between one year and another was greater than my entire yearly salary. Which meant that regardless how long I would try saving money and how much I would save, I could never buy my own apartment. This didn't make sense to me. (Later the growth of prices slowed down a lot, and my salary increased 4x, so it became doable.) Then my friend got his own apartment. So I asked him, what was the secret, what is the part that I am missing, because it just did not make sense to me, mathematically. He said "well, my parents took money out of their bank account, and bought the apartment for me". That was quite a shock. I haven't seen any obvious signs of wealth from him or his family, and yet, a single transaction achieved the same that took me several years of saving every cent while doing side jobs.
As an example of the second option, I have a different friend whose father made tons of money but decided to not give any to his children, because they were supposed to make their own money; all the money he made he intended to spend on his luxurious retirement. However, this strict rule only applied to cash transfers and gifts. It did no apply to providing free food and accommodation. As a result, my friend never kept any job for more than three months (always followed by six to twelve months of unemployment). Because he had free accommodation and free food, so he only took a job temporarily when he ran out of pocket money. Then a decade or two later he finally started some online business that was profitable, so now he keeps doing that.
As an example of the third option, I knew a guy who was employed at his father's company, where I also worked. That guy probably did literally nothing; whenever there was a task assigned to the two of us, I did it completely alone. (I did not mind, because those tasks had no deadlines, so I just spent more days on that task.) I would not be surprised if he made more money that other people working at that company. And if he ever became good at something, he had an impressive CV to back that up.
Now in my experience these three things happened to three different people, but if I imagine them all happening to the *same* person... someone getting all their expenses paid, plus a free house, and a job that pays them lot of money for nothing... such person could be eligible for early retirement when they are 30, and a millionaire (just from investing half of their salary) when they are 35. The inheritance they get when they are 50 is just a cherry on the top of the sweet cake.
And if such person actually does something useful, that is *extra* money, plus they probably have a diploma from an expensive university (if they choose the employment path, probably management), and all the time they need, plus their parents can invest in their business, and if the business fails they can immediately start a new one with new investment (if they choose the business path).
Not at all surprised about your friend… actually something of a highly educated upper middle class marker to be low-key and avoid conspicuous consumption in most forms but then be astoundingly flush when it comes to real estate.
Another classic is the “backpacking across Europe” gap year for your teenager. Juuuust enough Bohemian-ness not to be gauche.
>big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.
Why would they do this? Do ivy grads actually have some characteristic that is needed now, which was not needed in the past, or are investors making an inefficient mistake?
Safety. You know the Ivy grad is intelligent, conscientious and socially competent enough to become an Ivy grad. The self-proclaimed autodidact might just be a delusional narcissist with a good sales patter, or an out-and-out conman (so might the Ivy grad, but I hear VCs all into Bayes' theorem now so they're still a safer option).
Yeah, but _why_ is this true now, when it wasn't true then?
I'm not sure anyone's ever really been keen to invest in random people off the street, unless they've got an invention that you can literally see working (like a car, or vulcanised rubber). You might invest in someone with a proven track record as an employee in a field setting up their own business, but working at Bell Labs for 25 years isn't a thing any more.
Because in the past you could take bigger chances on hiring and funding, since you could just fire or otherwise cut off someone who didn't work out. It is much harder to do that these days, often a priori through assorted regulation, including notice and severance requirements, and also because of the threat of post-facto legal extortion. I mean, you can often still toss young white male workers out the door without risking any subsequent lawsuit, if you're also sure they're heterosexual, but also obviously if you prefer to hire (or fund) that type, or are more willing to take a risk on that type, you are just asking for trouble.
It used to be that any old college degree was a sufficient signal of intelligence, diligence, and conformity for most purposes. As more and more people started going to college, more discerning hirers started looking for filters along the same lines that gave stronger signals.
In addition, there was probably a snowball effect as graduates of highly prestigious universities got into positions of power. They naturally tended to see value in their own educational backgrounds and preferred hiring and promoting others of similar backgrounds. I know Google (founded by Stanford grad students) had a very strong preference for graduates of prestigious universities for a long time, at least until the late 2000s when they analyzed data and found little to no correlation among employee performance data with college prestige and made an effort to deemphasize it in hiring decisions.
> For upper middle class people, inheriting their parents’ money could be the biggest financial event of their lives, maybe bringing them from paycheck-to-paycheck to having six-to-seven figures in the bank, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
I doubt that paycheck-to-paycheck → seven-figure-bank-account happens as often as you suggest (even after the edit) – but not because I disagree about the magnitude of inherited wealth.
Instead, I disagree about the *timing*. I believe that most people who reasonably expect to be able to leave seven-figure bequests don't wait until death to start transferring money to their heirs. This is partly for technical reasons (e.g., US tax law excludes annual gifts of up to $15k-60k+ (depending on structure/details) without triggering estate/gift taxes). And it's partly for non-tax, practical reasons (e.g., if someone knows they'll be leaving a lot of money to an adult child one day, they might decide to advance the gift so that that adult child can have the money now – perhaps *explicitly* to avoid the perceived stress of living paycheck to paycheck).
So the explanation for people not discussing inheritance as "one of the single biggest financial events of their lives" might just be that it wasn't a *single* event at all – just a lot of events over time.
Nitpick: the thresholds you describe are gift tax REPORTING requirements. You don’t actually have to pay taxes on gifts until $12 million.
I think there are two classes of non-elite adults who get substantial inheritances. First, people whose working class parents stayed in California's Bay Area--there may be other places where ordinary houses escalated in value, but this is the most famous one. But I wonder if more and more of these people are selling up early and getting the hell out of Dodge (often with their kids).
Second--and this is more common than people think--a really, really rich parent who achieved his wealth in his lifetime and had kids with ordinary UMC lives. This is the group Scott is imagining, I think. And as someone pointed out, a lot of the transfers happen long before the will is activated. I know people who get thousands of dollars a year from investments their parents put in place for them. That's actually what Joe Kennedy did for all his kids.
"I would love to see a scholarly, well-thought out comparison between the Imperial Chinese meritocratic system and our own (or else a discussion of why this is a false analogy and wouldn’t illuminate anything)."
Scott is asking for a monograph collapsing 2000 years of a highly varied and often dynamic governing system into some uniform reduction that can be compared to a diverse variety of American or Western "meritocratic systems." I think that book is unlikely to undertaken by a responsible scholar. I think we can draw many lessons from the traditional Chinese experience, but they will by and large be drawn from particular sets of circumstances.
Kade U. suggests, "Those employees [of an imperial meritocracy] 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."
I don't see how Kade's description fundamentally differs from meritocratic roles in contemporary government or most corporate systems, some privately-owned companies excepted, perhaps. No meritocratically appointed functionary, in government or enterprise, operates from her personal authority, and most have major stakes in looking good "outside" the system, in their family and community lives (as was decidedly true in traditional China).
He continues: "This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will . . ."
If the reference point is China, by far the longest sustained example of an imperial meritocracy, a very significant proportion of emperors were as much the instruments of their high minsters as the reverse. There was nothing exceptional about the eldest sons of emperors other than their position and access to an education--if they were intelligent enough for it to make much of a difference--which was delivered by members of the meritocratic bureaucracy. There were certainly strong emperors, for better or worse, whose often arbitrary inclinations had to be served in form or substance, but a great many were no better than, or much worse than, a moderately competent CEO dependent on, or content to follow without protest, the guidance of subordinates. And it was a strong norm that emperors should be subject to and welcome remonstrance. Much of the dynamic of governance concerned factional contestation within the bureaucracy (which was not necessarily a negative for the state, but certainly could be).
Interestingly (I think), the original Chinese theory of the meritocratic state, developed in the century prior to the full application of the meritocratic framework in 221 BCE, featured a model of the emperor as a cipher: a man without goals or ideas, whose possession of absolute power was completely based on affirming the operation of a cybernetic system wherein functional performance criteria were matched against closely monitored results, with rewards and punishments, promotions and demotions administered mechanically, without deviation from standards. Ideally, the emperor himself would do nothing other than physically occupy the throne at court and perform prescribed ritual functions. Didn't work out that way, but it seems an impressive concept two millennia before Weber's "ideal bureaucracy."
Quick note that Bourgeois Bohemians (Bobos) has been in use in the English language at least since 1918, -- in Wyndham Lewis' tremendous novel "Tarr" . His commentary therein seems to get at most of the characteristics of this upper class as it was found on the continent. This leads me to believe that this "development" of elites has less to do with a singular college admissions decision, and more to do with general currents
Phil Getz wrote: "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."
Per Opensecrets.org, counting both direct campaign expenses and the outside PACs/superPACS/etc, the Republicans outspent the Democrats in the 2000, 2004, and 2012 presidential elections; the reverse was true in the 2008, 2016, and 2020 ones. Looking back farther, the Dems outspent the GOP in 1996 and 1992, while the GOP outspent the Dems in 1980, 1984, and 1988.
In national midterm elections the Republicans outspent the Dems in 2022, 2014, 2010, 2006, 2002, and 1998. (The Georgia Senate runoff will not meaningfully change the 2022 national totals.)
The Democrats outspent the GOP in 2018.
Phil Getz wrote: "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." The "most of them" part is to some degree a side effect: for the Court's first 100+ years most of its justices did not have law-school degrees. Only starting after WW I did the Court come to be mostly peopled by law-school graduates, and entirely so only starting after WW II.
Phil Getz wrote: "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." Each of these statements is hilariously false. I ran them past my spouse who has had a lengthy career working at high levels in college admissions and...well she's able to breathe now but is still giggling quietly.
That Getz offers no sourcing for anything he asserts seems to be not coincidental.
if I post, what name does my post show up as?
Not unrelated, British journalist Peter Hitchens argues for the return of the hereditary peers to the House of Lords: https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/12/a-hopeless-plea-bring-back-the-hereditary-peers-.html
Background for reference, https://www.britannica.com/topic/House-of-Lords
The people who are in Lord's instead of the traditional aristocracy are life or working peers (They have non heritage titles). On the one hand, they could be said to depend on the the other place, because they are installed by the prime minister of the day...but they also have a job for life, so they can rebel.with impunity.
I've not read the 700 comments on the last article but I want to point out two things from a French perspective :
1) the term "bobo" is used a lot in France, generally to describes left-leaning elite Parisians.
2) In France, the concept of meritocracy dates back from the French Revolution were the new government decided that military officers needs not be from the aristocracy. Admissions to elite school such as Polytechnique, Centrale, Science Po or HEC (the French equivalent to Ivy League universities) have been based on (the French equivalent of) standardized tests since the 19th century.
>Is spot on, and it's exactly what the philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate.
I firmly believe that googling those phrases is how you end up inside a Junji Ito storyline, and I refuse to do it.
The theories are just your size!
> You would expect that people would eventually become well calibrated, and think “I’m in the top 5% but not top 1% for intelligence/college selectivity, so I can expect a job of X level of eliteness, but not Y level” and in expectation be right.
The issue is that Harvard admissions aren't actually a meritocracy, they're a pseudo-meritocracy. Affirmative action is one obvious reason for this but it's actually still true even if we narrow our focus only to a single race. Admissions are just a crapshoot. Students with 1600s on the SAT will get rejected while students with 1400s will sometimes get accepted. Some students will get accepted by Harvard but rejected by Princeton and Yale, others the exact opposite. The number of students who are academically qualified for Harvard far outnumbers those who actually get in which in turn causes resentment.
I'm just a knucklehead with an eye on my country's politics, but it's worth mentioning that Phil Getz's comment buries an enormous lede. The note, "with the Democrats losing the South" does so much heavy lifting it should be on WWE. Both major parties underwent immense shifts, and the lack of any mention of, just to name a few things, The Southern Strategy and the identity politics-based shift amongst Republicans, colors the comment differently than I have to assume it was intended.
Does anyone know of good updated works on class in America? Anything after 2015?
"I do think ACX has a tendency towards over-cynicism in assuming that everything is signaling and that people have no honest interests."
I wonder how mutually exclusive those two things are. Can't a person both enjoy something, yet enjoy it in a way which conforms to group belonging or status seeking? A person wants to wear jewelry and wearing jewelry is an "honest interest." Their group affiliation, however, determines whether they wear a Cross or Thor's Hammer or a Star of David or a skull from Hot Topic or a modern style of secular jewelry from Kay Jewelers. If you ask them, they may sincerely express an "honest interest" in their jewelry and protest that they are "signaling" anything. Their choice in jewelry is just a matter of personal self expression. But "personal self expression" basically *is* signaling for all practical purposes. Unless your personal self expression is private or hidden, it serves as a signal.
This seems like a common source of conflict between people when contextualizing situations.
Also, how do we distinguish "signaling" from "an honest interest that you want others to know that you have?" What prevents us from saying that any interest, if broadcast, is a kind of signaling? Do people signal to themselves as a form of internal consistency?
Also, if we talk about describing something as signaling are we just talking about translating activities into a particular paradigm? Do English speakers have a "bad habit" of translating "si, se puede" into "yes, we can" rather than engaging the phrase in the original Spanish that the speaker would use?
To what extent can we *objectively prove* that a desire to let others know about something you're doing is 'not signaling.' Or is demarcation between signaling and non-signaling just not subject to any objective criteria?
It would be very useful if people stopped mistaking "legacy admissions" for the only or even primary means through which money gets you entry into elite colleges.
> But what is an “aspiring elite”? In a hereditary aristocracy, it’s “children of the last set of elites”; depending on reproduction rate, that can either be many people (bad) or few people (good). In a meritocracy, it’s less clear.
But it's not a full meritocracy. Two parents that got into Harvard on merit expect their children to get into Harvard. (Or if they are obviously stupider than them, into another very high-ranked university, so they can remain in the upper middle class.) With the TFR of 1.5, you get:
- gen 0: 1000 Anglo-Dutch upper class admissions
- gen 1: 750 gen 0 legacy admissions, 250 merit admissions
- gen 2: 750 gen 1 legacy admissions, 250 merit admissions
- and so on
But that's for both parents being Harvard alumni. In reality, some of these merit alumni will marry non-Harvard alumni. And they will still want their children to get into Harvard. Or an Ivy. Or one of the good non-Ivies. But certainly not into something less prestigious than the alma mater of the other parent. And it's not like their children don't deserve a merit-based spot at one of the Ivies: they are not some upper-class twits that like dressage or vintage cars or sailing: they went to a good school and studied hard, they cultivated that "well-rounded" personality. Merit leads to prosperity, and prosperity enables merit.