Why do Americans resent upward mobility?
slate.com
slate.com
by expanding their admissions to include women and minorities while keeping standards high.
No. Again, no. There are very distinctly two sets of standards, one lower than the other, and it shouldn't require much elaboration as to why that causes legitimate resentment. or why it deviates from any real notion of a meritocracy.
The result of that expansion is now with us: Barack Obama
Umm, no. It's fairly clear to every non-brainwashed observer that BHO's skin color was a huge part of the elite's attraction to him. That behavior on the part of the (noun) elite, is distinctly not compatible with the maintenance of an (adjective) elite class.
Despite pushing aside the old WASP establishment—not a single WASP remains on the Supreme Court—these modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility, by many Americans
Sigh. Replace "WASP" with anything and I mean any other term, "Black", "Jewish", "Italian" anything in the world and ask yourself, "Why would the blacks/Jews/Italians not admire the other groups pushing them out of power?" Why would that be reasonable?
The stupidity is almost overpowering.
It frustrates me that Americans still tend to view Harvard (or maybe Yale) as America's most elite university. It is an extraordinary organization, of course, but it is (strangely?) MIA in engineering and many branches of applied science. Consider the US News and World Report's list of "most elite undergraduate colleges":
Harvard Princeton Columbia Stanford University of Pennsylvania California Institute of Technology MIT Dartmouth Duke University of Chicago
Now look at the top ten research institutions in Engineering overall..
MIT Stanford Berkeley Georgia Tech University of Illinois (Urbana) Carnegie Mellon CIT University of Michigan University of Texas (Austin) Cornell
So there's only one ivy here, and it isn't an especially high ranking ivy in the ivy pecking order.
I don't think people resent wealth at all in America. People have huge admiration for Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page. They have less love for Zuckerberg, but that's because they see him as a punk kid, not because they hate his product. There's plenty of respect mixed in there too.
To me, if you want to say Americans hate people who went to elite institutions, I'd ask: which elite institutions? The elite engineering schools, or the ivy leagues? Ok, maybe some "anti-intellectuals" may brag that they didn't go to Yale (which is stupid, I'll admit). But how many brag that they didn't go to University of Michigan, Illinois, or Texas?
I think it comes down to the notion that wealthy people are wealthy because they created wealth. Once an elite is viewed as a parisitic aristocracy, the admiration drops off a cliff. As it should...
... that said, I do think it's unfair to paint the Ivy League completely with this brush. But it is telling that these venerable, elite institutions have been surpassed by such a different (and often publicly supported) group of universities.
Please define what "elite" is in this case. I understand it's not the elite (ruling) class. Is that the new dog-whistle term for white-collar, urban, college-educated whites? Or the old dog-whistle term for well-off Jews? Neither? Both?
"Barack Obama...Columbia and Harvard Law School...Michelle Obama...Princeton and Harvard Law School...Clarence Thomas...Yale Law School, and Supreme Court justice.[...]
In America, the end of the meritocracy will probably come about slowly: If working hard, climbing the education ladder, and graduating from a good university wins you only opprobrium, then you might not bother."
Glad to know that merit == went to Harvard/Yale. I wonder where the author of this article went to college?
The main effect probably won't be a real shift in the types of people with actual power, but rather an increasing marginalization of our public institutions, like in other countries with ineffective governments.
I'm not sure if that's the context of the word as described in the article, but I get the suspicion that it's not an educational consequence, but an attitudinal one. It might be a backlash against perceived favourable treatment of one sector of the economy/group of people rather than an attack on education alone. If Sarah Palin is getting traction on terms like 'elitist', then it must be because this feeling resonates with the voters. And I don't see that one's education level is the sort of thing to really provide a rich wave of support. Which, to me, means that it must be something else.
Lawyers are the most heavily represented profession in all three branches of government. Personally I'd like to see more people that have to deal with real world constraints like the hard sciences, engineering, and market constraints taking government leadership positions, and less positions going to people who've spent their whole life doing purely theoretical work. But I don't think that's an anti-intellectual position to take.
I don't know any "anti-intellectuals" who resent engineers, doctors, architects, or capable businesspeople. There is a little resentment for scientists, but it's typically reserved for those in highly theoretical/abstract parts of science, especially those who make public policy recommendations based on theoretical work. And there is a lot of resentment for lawyers and politicians.
Much of this article would be improved if it could cite any other sources.
See:
In the rest of the English-speaking world, 'Tall poppy syndrome':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
In Japan, "the stake that sticks up gets hammered down" (though this may be more about nonconformity than success):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_proverbs#Sayings
In Scandinavia, 'Jante Law':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law
(American individualism, materialism, frontier-mythology, immigrant-mythology, and rootlessness are all potential explanations for a warmer appreciation of the idea of the 'self-made success'.)
The article mystifies me from a global perspective. Americans to me seem obsessed with upward mobility. The "American Dream" is a dream of upward mobility, for goodness sake.
Why do we resent taxes on the rich, even when we're poor? Because we expect one day that we might be that rich person. One's skin color or religion is largely irrelevant in the US compared with the amount of money that you have. This is not the truth in many places.
In the UK there is a non-trivial relationship between the two.
On the west coast (in Seattle specifically -- but I believe the same holds true in LA or the bay area) nearly all money is new money, which forces social mobility to be tightly coupled with economic mobility.
Another significant factor is that, culturally, Americans (in my experience) more closely associate wealth with success than any other nation and success correlates directly to social value (and mobility).
While it might be possible to move up the economic rungs without moving up socially, it's not generally possible to move up the social ladder without correspondingly increasing your wealth.
(Disclaimer: I'm not by any means a member of the social elite -- to the extent that such a thing exists in Seattle -- nor am I by any means "rich")