DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

The irony here is fairly obvious.

So it was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history.

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

Perhaps because it’s rather obviously an exercise in navel-gazing? By what sophistry are academics convened at Columbia University considered to be somehow outside of ‘the elite’, however defined?

“The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

Uh, hate to be the one to break the bad news, Professor, but if your not allowed to hang out at country clubs, it’s far more a function of being named Sudhir Venkatesh than of being a professor of sociology.

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

Ah, now it becomes clear. When they say ‘elite’, they actually mean ‘rich’. That avoids the elephant in the room: The fact that any definition of ‘elite’ in America that doesn’t include the upper tiers of academia, government, and mass media (such as The New York Times) would be laughed out of the room in any gathering other than one of Crustian academics.

This is how the professoriat can pretend to objectivity and outsider status–the ‘elite’ are rich and we’re not rich so obviously they’re not in the ‘elite’. Never mine that every professor at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford makes far in excess of the Obamassiah’s $250,000 p.a. definition of ‘rich’.

“If you look at the poor as a problem, you’ll be angry at elites or you’ll expect them to come up with a solution,” said Mr. Venkatesh, who took the most pragmatic line. “You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

And there’s the Voice of the Crust. I guess Bill Gates was just walking down the street one day and was randomly picked to win the World’s Richest Guy contest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2010 at 18:33 and is filed under Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.