America’s new aristocracy
economist.com
economist.com
The premise of the article is that good education is available to some and not others, and that their children are more likely to also get good education, thus perpetuating the gap.
This leaves plenty of intelligent and meritorious people with poor educations and thus poor prospects, which tends to carry over to their kids. The very opposite of "meritocracy".
The article more than once calls for improving the prospects of poor, clever children.† If you missed the emphasis on intelligence, I suggest you give the article another read.
† — In Britain, where the article was published, clever is very nearly synonymous with intelligent (and more often used), by the way. Americans tend to use clever to mean something more like witty, inteventive, or even cunning.
> The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared.
> The solution is not to discourage rich people from investing in their children, but to do a lot more to help clever kids who failed to pick posh parents.
> Improving early child care in the poorest American neighbourhoods yields returns of ten to one or more; few other government investments pay off so handsomely.
Privilege breeds privilege, not by genetics but by nepotism.
Some white kid called one of the few black kids at my middle-school a nigger and they got in a fight. Somehow, only the black kid got sent to the principal's office. So the white kid walks by and taunts the black kid AGAIN at which point the black kid makes a bad decision blinded by emotion and grabs some scissors and chases the white kid down the hall. Black kid expelled and white kid... well I don't think anything happened to that POS.
I've tutored them so I know, these rich kids with helicopter moms are hands down working harder than everybody else. They're taking AP courses they're not even interested in because that's their work ethic, they play sports and it's assumed they should get at least a partial scholarship. By senior year in high school they're ahead of their peers in life skills, emotional maturity, work ethic and academics.
The parents raising these kids to be "bred for success" aren't leaving it up to the chance that they can cash in on nepotism, they teach these kids to work hard.
I actually read the goddamn article so let me restate it for you here to make it clear for you: The new advantage in our economy is essentially education, although the article uses the 5 dollar word "intellectual capital". Because the amount of "intellectual capital" a person has is closely tied to the amount of actual capital their parents have, we are seeing increasing inequality on this front. Rich parents are able to provide stimulation and training for their child from birth by way of having more free time because they can afford it, or by having various tutors for their child. When their child reaches school, rich people get better schooling for their children due to America's insane school funding paradigm. Finally, when those children reach college, rich people are actually able to afford to send their children to good institutions, and receive preferential admission for their "legacy students".
None of the above points to society filtering itself on some sort of intrinsic "merit" that a person is born with, leading to some grand meritocracy. Rather it points to a new type of capital being important in our system, and wealthy people being able to cultivate it for their children. Improving prospects for disadvantaged kids might just make them "smart", not that they are born smart and just held back by poverty.
TL;DR: Two kids of equal potential will have their economic circumstances dictate just how "smart" they become, and in an economy predicated on being "smart" this will lead to inequality. America should work to allow both children to become as "smart" as they possibly can be.
First and foremost, I don't understand the paragraph decrying successful people pairing off and breeding, we should be happy that there's some form of survival of the fittest still impacting the breeding of homo-sapiens.
Having said that, I don't think the success of well-to-do kids is about smarts; intelligence can truly be found across the board. The well-to-do kids understand early on the stakes of the game and they have the opportunity to learn the industries and occupations that afford a better lifestyle. They mostly gain these insights because they see their parent's careers and the careers of their parent's friends and have a chance to understand where the more lucrative opportunities are.
When I spoke with peers from my own town, most had no clue what they wanted to do and many were seeking out occupations with low ceilings (social work, teaching, etc). When I spoke to peers from my friend's town, most knew they wanted to get into sales or engineering or law or medicine. I think this is ultimately the biggest difference between upper and lower class upbringings and I'm still waiting for a concise study along these exact parameters.
This is a terrible line of thought. Evolutionary fitness is not measured by us, and we have no obligation to support it. This is a massive fallacy. It is classic rationalization.
Those that survive are fit by evolutionary terms. It doesn't matter who survives or why you think they should. It is perfectly acceptable for unsuccessful people to reproduce, since that is the very adaptation that ensures their survival and guarantees their fitness.
Flies survive by reproducing en mass. Thus they are fit. It doesn't matter if they are only flies; they fill their niche and evolve just the same.
You cannot control evolution by choosing whether or not to reproduce. Evolution doesn't have a 'plan' for you to interfere with: it is simply what happens. It is the outcome.
I would never imply that its unacceptable for unsuccessful people to reproduce, I'm simply stating that the trend within the opposite group is a bit unsettling.
Edit: There is an analogous claim you could make to highlight the absurdity of this:
Say we are talking about a plane crash and you said "We should be glad the plane crashed: it means that gravity is still affecting humans, as it should!"
Flying planes doesn't invalidate gravity. Gravity is a law of nature, and it works whether we fly or not. You are still bound by gravity even if you leave the ground. Survival of the fittest is a law of nature. You are still bound by it, even if you find it easy to survive. Nature doesn't care if you are successful by human social standards; that is simply not a consideration the laws of nature take into account.
It doesn't mean that at all.
As you say, poor people are often much better breeders than rich people. They're more likely to have kids younger, and those kids in turn are more likely to breed earlier than the middle classes and the aristocracy.
This actually makes them fitter in a Darwinian sense - because 'fit' just means 'more likely to breed successfully in a given environment.'
It doesn't mean any more than that, and there's certainly no moral implication about 'quality' there.
Defining who is and isn't successful is a huge social problem - possibly the biggest problem of all.
Naive definitions of success won't cut it in either direction, because in the long term you have to consider species survival, and today's definitions of 'successful' may not be best for avoiding long-term extinction.
Yes you can; you're changing the environment, changing which genetics have higher fitness.
You are technically correct, but to express what the grandparent meant: we should be happy that our culture is such that traits that are positive for humanity (increased intelligence) do increase evolutionarily fitness.
Affluent families spend significantly more money in education than poor families. The elite families send their kids to $40k/year prep school since they are 2-3 years old.
The more knowledge/information required to be successful in the society, the more important this difference in education spending and IQ is. The inequality is inherent.
Instead of focusing on reducing the inequality, we need to convince the rich people that paying more tax to educate the majority of the population is a good thing for themselves in the long run. Why not just convince the poor people to vote that way? You may ask. Well, from my understanding, rich people knows the best on how to influence poor people.
Ironically, it's all the individuals that mean well that are constantly planting and reinforcing negative self-fulfilling prophecies into the minds of the poor. We need to stop telling them that they can't do it without help, and that instead they must simply do what they would if they didn't think they're helpless leeches. Because they naturally are not that, at all.
[1] http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf [2] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
> What's needed is better management and allocation of the existing money, not throwing more money at the problem to be mismanaged.
His point: the top 10% earn 45% of the income and pay 68% of federal income taxes. That's a lot of money that could be used to improve the lives of the 90%, but it's being mismanaged by the government. He's saying, instead of increasing the amount of money that is going to be mismanaged by the government at the expense of the 10%, why not do more with what we already have?
>Other countries manage to education their children well at all sorts of tax levels.
I think you'll find that - coincidentally - those countries have much higher tax rates, and the disparity between high and low incomes is smaller than it is in the US.
Education is always a good thing, and not just for the obvious reasons.
But poor education is as much a symptom of damaged political belief systems as it is a cause.
Fixing education will only fix the political pathologies up to a point.
http://rossieronline.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/us-schools-v...
Also:
> 68% of the income tax is not nearly enough, considering that the rich own the vast majority of the wealth, and benefit disproportionately from it.
Income is not the same as wealth. The top 10% earn 45% of the income and pay 68% of federal income taxes. How much higher would be "fair" to you?
That's how much more the average person in the top decile makes compared to the rest.
(68/10)/(32/90) == 19
That's how much higher the tax the top decile's taxes are. That means that they are paying 2.6 times as much taxes per dollar.
Is it too high? Too low? I guess it really depends on what the baseline is. You can't really tell from these numbers. If the bottom 90% pays 10% of their income in taxes and the top 10% 26% I think it would sound acceptable, if not a bit low. These numbers don't really tell much of a story.
I guess my point is that as long as the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer, the tax delta is not high enough.
Education spending has steadily risen over the last fifty years. Years of schooling has steadily increased.
In my experience, the impact of spending money on education is greatly exaggerated. I was a smart kid, probably 2.5+ STD above the norm in IQ, who went to public school for a while, then to private school. In public school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. At expensive private school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. Kids who were at the bottom of the bell curve at this private school still struggled, there was nothing money could buy to make them struggle less. The primary benefit of an expensive private school is that I was surrounded with other smart people, who I could have nerdy conversations with, rather than being a weirdo nerd. The second benefit is that you get to start building a network earlier. This benefit was very limited though, as we all scattered after graduation into different locations and careers. Most of that $40k is being spent on luxuries, not on stuff needed to educate, because education is inherently quite cheap. Mostly you just need to read stuff and practice, with just a bit of guidance from a mentor to check your work and keep you on the right path.
Anyone who wants to spend more money on education needs to state exactly what the money should be spent on, why they believe spending that money will have a positive ROI, and also needs an explanation of why the money we are already spending has not equalized things.
Imagine you had the freedom to design an education for your child and a group of his or her peers. Any money that you save could be spent on helping them get started with a mortgage or investing in their startup or spent on interesting travel or vacations. How much would you need to spend to max-out their learning? How would you spend it?
The first thing I would come up with is to spend it on the teachers, who are paid like shit now. I am not asserting that the current teachers deserve a much better pay. I am asserting that teacher as a profession deserve a much higher pay so that it gets the people it deserves.
From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right track. If someone simply lacks the cognitive power, there is nothing a teacher can do to make them smart. The student can improve somewhat with practice and drilling, but they still plateau at a lower point than the smart student. So we need to spend enough money that their is a guide to help students get through roadblocks, but I see no evidence that we are spending too little to provide appropriate guidance. I think one hour of personal guidance for every 10 to 20 hours of self-practice is a perfectly normal ratio. That is what we do when training new engineers, or learning a musical instrument, and there really isn't much of a way to gain more benefit by increasing the quantity of guidance.
I think that teaching could be improved somewhat, at the high-end. But it could be done by reallocating existing spending, not spending more. I do think that mentorship helps a lot, but mentorship needs to come from an experienced practitioner. So what we need is a system where a programmer can work a job for a few years, then take a mentoring job for a year, then work for a few years, etc. This would require eliminating the need for education degrees, and optimizing teacher's time for personal mentorship rather than grading tests, building lesson plans, and performing classroom management. It really would be an entirely different job than what is now considered a teacher. A "teacher" now is really just a glorified day-care worker, paying them more won't help much.
This is quite right. It is astounding to think about the amount of intellectual capital that is being squandered by the current structures in place.
It is in our collective best interest to develop this resource as much as possible.
Perhaps a market based solution would be to institute an entrepreneurship-focused boarding school (and after that, maybe a genetic engineering focused nursery, call it X-Y-Combinator, say).
That said, there are schools (say the Success Academies) who find a way to perform well, even with poor kids, many of which are english language learners and special ed. Unfortunately many cities (and the progressives running them) are doing their best to chase away these reforms rather than embrace them.
But the discussion about education is off. Jeb is the embodiment of family dynasties, but let us not forget that there ware Adams, Harrisons, and Roosevelts. And Clinton is a strange example considering she married Bill, who came from a poor family and basically pulled himself up by charisma, which discounts the second-generation education notion presented.
This bubble is sustained with student loans from the Government. The law of unintended consequences, you want to help the students, you give them money, prices go up.
In Spain something similar happened to houses. I don't want loans if they make houses 4 times more expensive, like European money did. I prefer to pay it myself, 4 times faster.
I had a very good education in different countries in Europe, and it was "free" in the economic sense, but it required me to have very good grades.
In some ways I would have preferred to pay a reasonable price for my education, but giving me the right to choose what I want to study and what not (just pass the exam without having to ace it for maintaining scholarship).
The economist, being Keynesian and all wants the Government to control everything top-down, but central planning is not the best system.
BTW: I find the hypothesis of the article ridiculous. It is not intelligence or education what makes Ivy league students wealthier in the US, but connections to power and privileges.
In fact, few people on the very top are that intelligent or educated. I have met some of them. They have other values, like being working, having charisma, being social...
Sometimes the absolute value is much more meaningful than the derivative.
Not to sound unfair, but isn't this how mate selection works? Why would two successful, bright people not want to mate and create successful, bright children? Isn't this what we want for our children, to be bright, capable, with functional, stable households and marriages brought about by parents who they themselves value education and a stable marriage/family?
I'm all for equality and the anti-aristocracy sentiment (I was a first generation college student, and my parents come from humble backgrounds), but it seems like the whole bend on the genetic predisposition of privileged children based on what they are born with seems like exactly what the whole point of evolution of the human species is about - creating a better version of ourselves.
Notably, the idea of "plucking" children that display intelligence from a young age and somehow aiding them in their education. Now I may be wrong, but this seems like we're metaphorically "harvesting" intelligence for the benefit of society.
The assumption being that society at the moment can't naturally do that, and we have to use state funding/power/force to make it happen. As with all such assumptions, it comes with a eery connotation that we have "very smart" scientists (you know, the ones we don't naturally reward in society") that have studied this, and they concluded that the best course forward for society is for them to "pick" a favorable feature in the populace and help it blossom.
Looking forward to see what sort of discussion this mini-rant/tangential-brain-musing sparks.
http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/democracy-will-ceas...
I’m also a big fan of Occam's razor when it comes to politics because people tell themselves all kinds of imaginative things to justify their beliefs while a five year old child would see right through them. The simplest answer may be unpopular even if it’s the right one, and I think that’s why people so often ignore it.
The truth is that US taxes are about as low as they have ever been for any developed country, there are more loopholes than ever before, and money has corrupted politics to the point where the wealthy determine elections now instead of the voting populace.
The reason this matters is that the poor don’t have capital. They don’t even have good credit. How can they be expected to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get an education when people even on this site (one of the densest concentrations of intelligence in the world) constantly demand privatization? Take away the entirety of a people’s wealth and what do they have left? Their inalienable rights, their community, their heritage, in essence their government. I think any attack on what we’ve traditionally thought of as government services (like public education) is only going to lead us faster to aristocracy.
I have an inkling of what could be done to reduce wealth inequality but the pragmatic view of these things has become unpopular. I just ask that anyone who is passionate about something like school vouchers or inheritance taxes take a step back and look at the big picture. Instant runoff voting, publicly funded elections, and treating all net income equally under a progressive tax system are just a handful of newish ideas that would do wonders for leveling the playing field. My feeling is that people don’t want it leveled, so the disparity between rich and poor today basically comes down to prejudice.
http://www.teapartygearonline.com/merchandise/bumper_sticker...
I point my finger of blame at the same thing that gave us the American Dream: a vast amount of land and the automobile. It meant everyone could own a home and land of their own, but it also meant that by not living in closer proximity to each other we forgot that we're family members and we turned into competitors. It only became important that you get your share (large, please!) and not making sure that we're all, as a nation, able to live well.
Now we are engaged in a great power war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so misguided and so derailed, can long endure.
Check out Made in America (https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/about/).
Hardly. This is a very traditional political cycle that was first documented by the Greek historians and philosophers. Polybius and Plato aptly named it "Kyklos" (Cycle) and goes from Anarchy -> Democracy -> Aristocracy -> Monarchy.
This period of cycle is different however as there is no more "West" to go and start your anarchic society so it should be interesting to see what happens this time round the cycle.
Anarchy -> Democracy (Greece, early Rome) -> Aristocracy (late Rome) -> Monarchy (imperial Rome, middle ages) -> Revolution (brief partial anarchy?) -> Democracy -> Aristocracy (Eurozone) -> ???
I wonder if it's one of those "wheels of reincarnation," kind of analogous to the mainframe/PC cycle of centralization vs. decentralization. Decentralization creates problems that can only be solved by centralization (tragedy of the commons, paradox of thrift, etc.), but then centralization creates its own new problems that drive decentralization (corruption, arbitrary power), rinse and repeat.
Aristocracy->Timocracy->Oligarchy->Democracy->Tyranny
> The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, — when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.
-- James Madison, the architect of our Constitution
Ahh, you Americans can be quite funny - being exceptionalist even when you're slagging yourselves off.
The fact is, it's not just America where inequality is growing and elites are entrenching themselves. I also don't think your analysis of why America ended up uniquely having inequality/elites is convincing one, even if it were true.
The sixth president of the United States was the son of the second president. I don't think the founding of our country was quite as utopian as the author believes.
The subject of the article is the privilege ("aristocracy" even) of intelligence. The thesis is that intelligent parents beget intelligent children, and since intelligence tends to beget success and wealth, intelligence represents a sort of inheritable good, a "fortune," in effect, handed down through family lines. Since all such inherited benefits undermine equality (the claim goes), they are a societal evil and should be combatted. The article suggests that the best way to combat them is to promote the less-intelligent or the intelligent-without-parentage. This is soft-gloving the issue; if inherited intelligence really is a societal evil, surely holding down those who are intelligent would also be a valid strategy.
This is a wonky argument at best. A few of the holes:
In what way is this situation new? If the inheritance of intelligence gives a unfair advantage to the heirs, when in all of human history was this ever not a source of inequality?
Surely inequality (in this abstract sense) is not such a universal, unmitigated evil that it must be fought everywhere it appears. People are in fact different; some people have advantages; some of these advantages are inherited. Where's the evil, the danger, in that? "Equality" in the sense that democracies embrace and fight for has never been taken as encompassing personal traits. If I'm beautiful and my parents are beautiful, should I hide my face in shame in a democratic nation? If I'm a great pole vaulter and so was my mother, should I hide my skill or contribute extra funds to support the training of weaker pole vaulters? The article misunderstands the notion of equality and, consequently, misidentifies the "danger" or "unfairness" arising from differences in people's abilities.
This is no innocent error. If we truly believed, as a society, that smart/beautiful/talented/gifted people posed a danger to society, represented a form of inequality, and formed an "aristocracy," we would be motivated to perpetrate the grossest sort of manipulations (at best) and atrocities (at worst) to equalize them with us ordinary folk. The result would be horrific, evil, and destructive to the utmost, not only for those unfortunates who were subjected to "equalization" but also for society itself.
Attack the privileged, if you must, when their possessions or powers pose a threat to the wellbeing of members of society in general. Do not attack those who simply have great abilities, even if their parents did too, or you'll achieve nothing but spite against your own face.
Bravo.
Many schools are in the grip of one of the most anti-meritocratic forces in America: the teachers’ unions, which resist any hint that good teaching should be rewarded or bad teachers fired.
At first, it seemed as if the author almost conveys the thought that educated people should feel guilty from breeding with other educated people.
But thinking about it, all he seems to want is to break the implication: Bright kid ==> came from educated family.
To tear down causality, so that even kids who were born in ghettos could do something with their lives.
However, pondering on my own family:
My mother didn't continue college. My father studied in a technical high-school, but didn't go to college due to the fact our country was invaded by France and he had to provide for his mother and brothers and sisters, working with his father. He didn't go to college so that they get to.
Even though they didn't go to college, and although they were under great financial stress, there was one thing you couldn't mess with at home: Reading. They were ferocious readers. I was raised in a home with the classics (Balzac, Dumas, Hugo), books about plants, History, philosophy, geography, manuals for everything (from sewing machines, to guns and radio transmission). They raised 9 kids and we all went through a ton of stuff. We call the bathroom "The National Library" for a reason.
I wasn't allowed to go out until I've written many pages (to improve hand-writing, way before I was of age to be schooled. When I was 10, first year we started French at school (by that time, I had been exposed to the language for 10 years already), my teacher accused me of not being the one who wrote the text she asked us to and I had to write in front of her to believe. It was a "grown-up" writing). I've been accused so many times of cheating because I did something "I wasn't supposed to be able to do or knew something I wasn't supposed to know".
They schooled my brothers and sisters, who then schooled me.
My first three languages, I learned at home, my fourth when I started playing with kids outside. And then English, etc. My childhood was reading, reading, and reading. I had to summarize things like stories, and explain them. I've been asked questions on them. Engineering magazines, newspapers, you name it.
I assumed all the kids had to do this.
We became Software/Civil/Electronics Engineers, Architects, Maths and Chem/Physics grads and Designers.
So the question is: Knowing that they didn't go to college, and the fact my father was a political prisoner for years, and my mother had her parents tortured and murdered by French military when she was 9 or so...
How did they manage not to fall into the trap of perpetuating the cycle, and blaming their life conditions. After all, failing our education would've been extremely easy to justify with what they went through.
The answer is, in one word: Sacrifice. They sacrificed a lot of things and were not selfish, and never complained or neglected our education by finding an excuse in self-pity on why it was okay to fail us. Then my brothers and sisters were not selfish by transmitting and putting a lot of effort in my education, more than they received. And we're putting that effort with my nieces and nephews.
Would we stop putting that much effort in my nieces and nephews if public education was of quality? Definitely not. It's not the same motivation a brother or sister, an uncle, or a parent, has toward a child than a teacher has.