America’s Elite: An Hereditary Meritocracy
9th February 2015
The signal flaw of this thumbsucker is stated in the subhead:
The children of the rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves. That’s a problem.
Why? It’s never explained, just assumed.
For sure, America has always had rich and powerful families, from the floor of the Senate to the boardrooms of the steel industry. But it has also held more fervently than any other country the belief that all comers can penetrate that elite as long as they have talent, perseverance and gumption.
Unfotunately, there is increasing evidence that ‘talent, perseverence, and gumption’ are in large part hereditary and fostered by a good family life. This gives ‘progressives’ hives, because their whole worldview is founded on the nonsensical notion that every person is just the same as every other person, so any difference in outcome must be due to some evil circumstance, probably caused by some Rich White Person.
Today’s elite is a long way from the rotten lot of West Egg. Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties. It is not a place where one easily gets by on birth or connections alone. At the same time it is widely seen as increasingly hard to get into.
That’s because talent is hereditary and not available to everybody without exception, schooling and hard work depend on individual effort that goes against the grain of the natural indolence of human nature, and diligence in parental duties is a product of a culture that most ‘underprivileged’ refuse to adopt.
More than 50 years ago Michael Young warned that the incipient meritocracy to which he had given a name could be as narrow and pernicious, in its way, as aristocracies of old.
Which is, of course, only a problem if you are predisposed to assume that all inequality is somehow bad.
Once progressives saw academic testing as a way of breaking down old structures of privilege; there is now a growing sense that it simply serves to advantage those who have been schooled to excel in such situations.
In other words, the system works, and they don’t like it, because it points out that their core assumptions are bullshit; they react as they always have, by blaming the facts for showing up their premises rather than re-evaluate their premises in light of the facts.