"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).
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
>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.]
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
>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?
> 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.
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.
"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).
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
>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.]
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
>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?
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.