8 ms·

America’s new aristocracy

77 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

johnfitzeecs 12y ago
sounds like a load of eugenics
- clavalle 12y ago
  We prefer 'self-selecting breeding pools that happen to align toward advantage'.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - zo1 12y ago
    I'm glad I'm not the only one that picked up the creepy undertone of what the article is proposing/representing.
- putzdown 12y ago
  Or possibly anti-eugenics, right? "Smart people are getting together to breed more smart people, and that's unfair, so let's bolster the smart people who became that way...uh, magically... (and maybe put down the smart dynasties while we're at it)." At least that's how it reads to me.
david927 12y ago
Most other countries went from aristocracy to democracy. I'm sad that America is maybe the only one to go the other way -- to have been founded on the principles of The Enlightenment and to slip into plutocracy. 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - greggyb 12y ago
    > ... founded by an elite group of aristocrats.... And on the basis of taxes which disproportionately affected them. I understand that there is more nuance here, but to a first order approximation parent comment and my extension are accurate.
- mcguire 12y ago
  America was founded as a democracy only for land-owning white men. We have gone back and forth through various levels of plutocracy and populism, but overall have been getting more democratic. For one thing, we're nowhere near the plutocracy of the pre-income-tax, late nineteenth century. While recent trends have not, in my opinion, been going in a good direction, I wouldn't be worried about this particular issue at all. Check out Made in America (https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/about/ https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/about/).
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  I'm sad that America is maybe the only one to go the other way -- to have been founded on the principles of The Enlightenment and to slip into plutocracy. 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.
  - api 12y ago
    In Europe it's gone: 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.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Surely this is conflating the professionals with the power dynasties. While marrying for intelligence may be common among professionals, marrying for status is still more common among the very rich, where any jobs are hobbies and the idea of actually relying on an income from stuff you do, is a sign of not being the right sort. Bright people marrying each other and having genius children does not remotely explain the Bush dynasty.
- Jugurtha 12y ago
  I think the author fired this to capture the attention of the reader early on, so that later he could expose the problem. 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.
happyscrappy 12y ago
Meanwhile Europe still has an aristocracy but we will ignore that and fret about the unlikely chance that America will develop one.
- talideon 12y ago
  Last time I looked, Europe had more republics than monarchies...
  - benmathes 12y ago
    aristocracy != monarchy.
    - talideon 12y ago
      Sure, but they do happen to coincide in general.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    and in france almost all of the high level bureaucrats and politicians come from the same school (ecole sciences po)
    - EliRivers 12y ago
      Which appears to have a remarkably wide intake, striving not to be simply a place that rich French aristocrats send their children. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/europe/05iht-educLede05.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/europe/05iht-educLed... Bravo.
      - dnautics 12y ago
        The diversity initiative makes up 10% of the class? That's laughably low, compared to say UC Berkeley, or even the ivies in the US.
- venomsnake 12y ago
cafard 12y ago
If the Ronald Reagan had happened to choose Donald Rumsfeld or any of the other plausible candidates as his running mate in 1980, would we be taking about George W. or Jeb Bush at all? And if the Republican Party had thought the 2012 election winnable, would we be talking about Mitt Romney?
aaron-lebo 12y ago
The article is conflating some things. Yes, Jeb Bush will be running. Yes, Clinton will be running. Both are dynastical-ish issues. 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.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  Yeah, the Clintons are really more of a (dysfunctional) power couple than a dynasty.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
They might also want to consider an education system that prioritises good teaching and not teachers faking impossible exam scores. Exam scores are not what makes a teacher.
- gaius 12y ago
  The article mentions the problems with teachers in the second half. 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.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Yes, this was a reaction to that. My objection is to the idea of "good teaching", as that often seems to be defined as "high standardised test scores".
brd 12y ago
Coming from a household where only 1 parent had a college degree, growing up in a less affluent town within a highly affluent county, and being best friends with a member of a much more well-to-do town/family has given me some interesting opportunities to see these effects at work. 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.
- Retra 12y ago
  >we should be happy that there's some form of survival of the fittest still impacting the breeding of homo-sapiens. 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.
  - brd 12y ago
    It's not a terrible line of thought, simply an unpopular/controversial one. We've effectively eliminated selective pressures that would otherwise create a trend towards increased fitness. The most successful members of our society are increasingly the ones that are having the least children, this is irrefutable. 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.
dnautics 12y ago
Is intellectual capital really that important? You can have a college degree studying an esoteric subject and be working a minimum wage job at a starbucks. Hell, you can do a postdoc in biochemistry, quit, start working for lyft, and get a pay raise. Until recently, semi-skilled oil rig workers in north dakota could comfortably make 80-100k.
nmeofthestate 12y ago
If we accept the premise of the article - that the population is sifting itself out by intelligence, then the better a country is at being a meritocracy, the more likely we are to see this stratification of the populace. It's funny then that the article comes right out and says the solution is to improve the prospects of smart disadvantaged kids. This will just accelerate the process, although it will at least slightly enlarge the meritocratic elite.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  The article doesn't even use the word "intelligence". 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".
  - pash 12y ago
    No, the article doesn't use the word intelligence; it uses the words brains, brainpower, intellectual capital, talented, and clever instead. That's The Economist for you. 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.
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      Except the article is talking about how clever-but-poor kids don't succeed in the same way. A clever kid from a poor family with only shitty education available is going to be far more likely to remain poor. > 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.
acconrad 12y ago
> It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains. 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.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  Unless you are talking about theistic evolution, it has no point. Making beings suited to thrive in their environment is the method that led to our existence, but it's not the point of our existence unless we decide it is. It's perfectly fine to believe that the point of your existence is procreation and filling the world with better versions of yourself, but other people might have other agendas, like creating an egalitarian society or preventing overpopulation or replacing people with robots. None of them can be objectively verified as the purpose of humanity.
pervycreeper 12y ago
>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. 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).
- mathattack 12y ago
  This is very true. One can argue that much of the difference can't be overcome - there is no way that a public education can outperform someone whose life involves Mandarin immersion and test prep tutors. 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.
stagger87 12y ago
The idea of "assortative mating" is covered in depth in http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Markets-Inequality-Remaking-American/dp/0199916586 http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Markets-Inequality-Remaking-A... I have no affiliation with the book, I just read it recently and thought someone might be interested in the topic.
kailuowang 12y ago
On average, kids from affluent families have a 20 point IQ advantage over kids from poor families. That's more than one standard deviation which is 15 points. 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.
- Delmania 12y ago
  “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - John Steinbeck
  - kailuowang 12y ago
    My opinion is that the poor see themselves the way the rich want them to.
  - zo1 12y ago
    And if they keep spending what little money they do have pretending to be millionaires, instead of spending it on their children's education... Then I'm afraid voting with their majority power to get what they want without necessarily earning it is the only way to go if you believe the state is the only way to fix the problem. 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.
- cpursley 12y ago
  The top 10% of the wealthiest Americans already pay 68% of the total income tax. What's needed is better management and allocation of the existing money, not throwing more money at the problem to be mismanaged. Other countries manage to education their children well at all sorts of tax levels.
putzdown 12y ago
I find this article rather bizarre. The opening paragraph sounds a note that the rest of the article fails to pick up. It seems to me newsworthy that so many of the presumed candidates for 2016 are attached to past presidents, and "aristocracy" in that sense is definitely worrying and worth public discussion. But that's not the subject of the article. 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.
zo1 12y ago
As much as I think the article's author means well. I am quite disturbed by what some of their suggestions represent. 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.
erroneousfunk 12y ago
"It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties." 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.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
The fact of University education having soared 17 times the median income, obviously means there is a bubble that needs to pop. 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...
- fokov 12y ago
  17 * $53,891 = $916,147 There is no way the average or even median university education costs nearly 1 million dollars. I have no doubt it costs way too much, but this argument isn't valid.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    17 times the rate of increase, not 17 times the current value. So new_school_cost/old_school_cost = 17*new_median_income/old_median_income.
    - lmm 12y ago
      My brother is getting rich faster than Bill Gates - I mean, he went from 0 in the bank last year to $200 this year, whereas Gates actually gave some money away! Sometimes the absolute value is much more meaningful than the derivative.
zackmorris 12y ago
UPDATE - I removed the Thomas Jefferson quote as it's evidently a fake: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/democracy-will-cease-to-exist-quotation 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.
- jimrandomh 12y ago
  That quote looked suspicious, so I typed it into Google. It's fake.
  - zackmorris 12y ago
    Thanks, I stand corrected, that's why I like this site. I saw it on a bumper sticker so now am bummed out that it wasn't true: http://www.teapartygearonline.com/merchandise/bumper_stickers01.htm http://www.teapartygearonline.com/merchandise/bumper_sticker...
cratermoon 12y ago
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligarchi.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligar...

77 points by e15ctr0n 12y ago

johnfitzeecs 12y ago

sounds like a load of eugenics

clavalle 12y ago
We prefer 'self-selecting breeding pools that happen to align toward advantage'.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- zo1 12y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one that picked up the creepy undertone of what the article is proposing/representing.
putzdown 12y ago
Or possibly anti-eugenics, right? "Smart people are getting together to breed more smart people, and that's unfair, so let's bolster the smart people who became that way...uh, magically... (and maybe put down the smart dynasties while we're at it)." At least that's how it reads to me.

david927 12y ago

Most other countries went from aristocracy to democracy. I'm sad that America is maybe the only one to go the other way -- to have been founded on the principles of The Enlightenment and to slip into plutocracy. 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.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- greggyb 12y ago
  > ... founded by an elite group of aristocrats.... And on the basis of taxes which disproportionately affected them. I understand that there is more nuance here, but to a first order approximation parent comment and my extension are accurate.
mcguire 12y ago
America was founded as a democracy only for land-owning white men. We have gone back and forth through various levels of plutocracy and populism, but overall have been getting more democratic. For one thing, we're nowhere near the plutocracy of the pre-income-tax, late nineteenth century. While recent trends have not, in my opinion, been going in a good direction, I wouldn't be worried about this particular issue at all. Check out Made in America (https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/about/ https://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/about/).
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
I'm sad that America is maybe the only one to go the other way -- to have been founded on the principles of The Enlightenment and to slip into plutocracy. 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.
- api 12y ago
  In Europe it's gone: 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.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Surely this is conflating the professionals with the power dynasties. While marrying for intelligence may be common among professionals, marrying for status is still more common among the very rich, where any jobs are hobbies and the idea of actually relying on an income from stuff you do, is a sign of not being the right sort. Bright people marrying each other and having genius children does not remotely explain the Bush dynasty.

Jugurtha 12y ago
I think the author fired this to capture the attention of the reader early on, so that later he could expose the problem. 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.

happyscrappy 12y ago

Meanwhile Europe still has an aristocracy but we will ignore that and fret about the unlikely chance that America will develop one.

talideon 12y ago
Last time I looked, Europe had more republics than monarchies...
- benmathes 12y ago
  aristocracy != monarchy.
  - talideon 12y ago
    Sure, but they do happen to coincide in general.
- dnautics 12y ago
  and in france almost all of the high level bureaucrats and politicians come from the same school (ecole sciences po)
  - EliRivers 12y ago
    Which appears to have a remarkably wide intake, striving not to be simply a place that rich French aristocrats send their children. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/europe/05iht-educLede05.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/europe/05iht-educLed... Bravo.
    - dnautics 12y ago
      The diversity initiative makes up 10% of the class? That's laughably low, compared to say UC Berkeley, or even the ivies in the US.
venomsnake 12y ago

cafard 12y ago

If the Ronald Reagan had happened to choose Donald Rumsfeld or any of the other plausible candidates as his running mate in 1980, would we be taking about George W. or Jeb Bush at all? And if the Republican Party had thought the 2012 election winnable, would we be talking about Mitt Romney?

aaron-lebo 12y ago

The article is conflating some things. Yes, Jeb Bush will be running. Yes, Clinton will be running. Both are dynastical-ish issues. 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.

saalweachter 12y ago
Yeah, the Clintons are really more of a (dysfunctional) power couple than a dynasty.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

They might also want to consider an education system that prioritises good teaching and not teachers faking impossible exam scores. Exam scores are not what makes a teacher.

gaius 12y ago
The article mentions the problems with teachers in the second half. 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Yes, this was a reaction to that. My objection is to the idea of "good teaching", as that often seems to be defined as "high standardised test scores".

brd 12y ago

Coming from a household where only 1 parent had a college degree, growing up in a less affluent town within a highly affluent county, and being best friends with a member of a much more well-to-do town/family has given me some interesting opportunities to see these effects at work. 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.

Retra 12y ago
>we should be happy that there's some form of survival of the fittest still impacting the breeding of homo-sapiens. 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.
- brd 12y ago
  It's not a terrible line of thought, simply an unpopular/controversial one. We've effectively eliminated selective pressures that would otherwise create a trend towards increased fitness. The most successful members of our society are increasingly the ones that are having the least children, this is irrefutable. 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.

dnautics 12y ago

Is intellectual capital really that important? You can have a college degree studying an esoteric subject and be working a minimum wage job at a starbucks. Hell, you can do a postdoc in biochemistry, quit, start working for lyft, and get a pay raise. Until recently, semi-skilled oil rig workers in north dakota could comfortably make 80-100k.

nmeofthestate 12y ago

If we accept the premise of the article - that the population is sifting itself out by intelligence, then the better a country is at being a meritocracy, the more likely we are to see this stratification of the populace. It's funny then that the article comes right out and says the solution is to improve the prospects of smart disadvantaged kids. This will just accelerate the process, although it will at least slightly enlarge the meritocratic elite.

ceejayoz 12y ago
The article doesn't even use the word "intelligence". 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".
- pash 12y ago
  No, the article doesn't use the word intelligence; it uses the words brains, brainpower, intellectual capital, talented, and clever instead. That's The Economist for you. 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.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Except the article is talking about how clever-but-poor kids don't succeed in the same way. A clever kid from a poor family with only shitty education available is going to be far more likely to remain poor. > 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.

acconrad 12y ago

> It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains. 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.

ewzimm 12y ago
Unless you are talking about theistic evolution, it has no point. Making beings suited to thrive in their environment is the method that led to our existence, but it's not the point of our existence unless we decide it is. It's perfectly fine to believe that the point of your existence is procreation and filling the world with better versions of yourself, but other people might have other agendas, like creating an egalitarian society or preventing overpopulation or replacing people with robots. None of them can be objectively verified as the purpose of humanity.

pervycreeper 12y ago

>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. 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).

mathattack 12y ago
This is very true. One can argue that much of the difference can't be overcome - there is no way that a public education can outperform someone whose life involves Mandarin immersion and test prep tutors. 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.

stagger87 12y ago

The idea of "assortative mating" is covered in depth in http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Markets-Inequality-Remaking-American/dp/0199916586 http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Markets-Inequality-Remaking-A... I have no affiliation with the book, I just read it recently and thought someone might be interested in the topic.

kailuowang 12y ago

On average, kids from affluent families have a 20 point IQ advantage over kids from poor families. That's more than one standard deviation which is 15 points. 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.

Delmania 12y ago
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - John Steinbeck
- kailuowang 12y ago
  My opinion is that the poor see themselves the way the rich want them to.
- zo1 12y ago
  And if they keep spending what little money they do have pretending to be millionaires, instead of spending it on their children's education... Then I'm afraid voting with their majority power to get what they want without necessarily earning it is the only way to go if you believe the state is the only way to fix the problem. 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.
cpursley 12y ago
The top 10% of the wealthiest Americans already pay 68% of the total income tax. What's needed is better management and allocation of the existing money, not throwing more money at the problem to be mismanaged. Other countries manage to education their children well at all sorts of tax levels.

putzdown 12y ago

I find this article rather bizarre. The opening paragraph sounds a note that the rest of the article fails to pick up. It seems to me newsworthy that so many of the presumed candidates for 2016 are attached to past presidents, and "aristocracy" in that sense is definitely worrying and worth public discussion. But that's not the subject of the article. 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.

zo1 12y ago

As much as I think the article's author means well. I am quite disturbed by what some of their suggestions represent. 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.

erroneousfunk 12y ago

"It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties." 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.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

The fact of University education having soared 17 times the median income, obviously means there is a bubble that needs to pop. 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...

fokov 12y ago
17 * $53,891 = $916,147 There is no way the average or even median university education costs nearly 1 million dollars. I have no doubt it costs way too much, but this argument isn't valid.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  17 times the rate of increase, not 17 times the current value. So new_school_cost/old_school_cost = 17*new_median_income/old_median_income.
  - lmm 12y ago
    My brother is getting rich faster than Bill Gates - I mean, he went from 0 in the bank last year to $200 this year, whereas Gates actually gave some money away! Sometimes the absolute value is much more meaningful than the derivative.

zackmorris 12y ago

UPDATE - I removed the Thomas Jefferson quote as it's evidently a fake: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/democracy-will-cease-to-exist-quotation 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.

jimrandomh 12y ago
That quote looked suspicious, so I typed it into Google. It's fake.
- zackmorris 12y ago
  Thanks, I stand corrected, that's why I like this site. I saw it on a bumper sticker so now am bummed out that it wasn't true: http://www.teapartygearonline.com/merchandise/bumper_stickers01.htm http://www.teapartygearonline.com/merchandise/bumper_sticker...

cratermoon 12y ago

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligarchi.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/13/meritocracies-become-oligar...