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If Paul Fussell's book "Class" is in play (and it is a fun read!), the older "The Status Seekers" by Vance Packard must be considered. A lot of Paul Fussell's information came from "The Status Seekers." Paul's book is a more fun (and snarky!) read. Vance's book has more information.

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Interesting conjectures, but seems like an awful lot of curve-fitting. Many of the phenomena could equally well be attributed to Les Trente Glorieuses, and the post-WWII GI Bill, as well as leaded gasoline. It's all over-indexed.

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"But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?"

I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years.

Sharecroppers don't care if the soil is depleted in 20 years. A family that has farmed the same land for 200 years is more likely to care.

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>old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.

This pretty much describes my mom's family: Exeter, Yale, and Princeton (which is where my parents met). My uncle still regularly attends Episcopalian church.

My dad got into Princeton on purely meritocratic grounds: he's from a working-class family of Polish immigrants. So you can say I'm a product of both admissions systems. There's definitely a big cultural divide among my relatives though. (And religious: my Dad's parents were shocked that he didn't marry a Catholic.)

Of course, I wasn't "well rounded" enough to get into Princeton when I applied. I still think I turned out alright though.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

The new aristocracy, in my opinion, will likely be people who got in on bitcoin early.

Almost nobody wants to believe the dollar can fail. Lots of stupid people gambled huge amounts on “crypto.” Lots of intelligent people fell for Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum scam. To most supporters of the current aristocracy, and even many detractors - Bitcoin seems far too simple to be believable.

It's far too volatile on a short term basis for anyone except really confident, anti establishment people who are confident in their long-term prospects to buy into. Bitcoin is perfectly coded for a more meritocratically selected elite than “getting into the ivy leagues”, since all you have to do is buy some, and hold on while ignoring the old elites screaming at you they you’re an idiot. That takes a combination of confidence in yourself + distrust in the current elites + financial wherewithal to at least weather the storm.

I can't think of any group that's as confident about the future as bitcoiners, until you start getting into the territory of religions. Which is probably the right way to see bitcoin maximalism.

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I read "Bobos in Paradise" probably about 15 years ago. It's an interesting book with some good ideas, particularly in the first section, as you've noted.

The discussion about how the modern elite is just as money-grubbing as the old one, but pretends not to be, matches my observations here in Silicon Valley, where everyone talks about how they "innovate" all the time, as if innovation were inherently a good thing regardless of what you're actually doing. Me, I just work here. I don't sit around thinking about whether the software I'm developing now is "innovative" or just a sensible application of established principles to solve a problem. The constant pretensions of Silicon Valley to being meaningful or cultured (an absurdity, since most people around here don't read anything but technical books and bad science fiction) have annoyed me for a long time. I'll be glad to retire somewhere in the next decade and never have to deal with it again.

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The lower classes often try to ape the behavior of the upper classes, with disastrous results. Another good example of this is the Bobo "free love" approach. While elites could have sex and get contraception and abortions easily, the sexual revolution actually hurt the working class and is responsible for the massive uptick in single parenthood starting from the 1960s.

And while elites say one doesn't need to get married, most college-educated people will eventually get married. It's the ones that are trying to copy them that suffer.

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Consider Canada. Or any other country really. They don't have ultra-selective universities that shape the elites.

How does this explain the rise of the checkmarks in other countries...

Edit:

This is what I mean by "ultra-selective". The Ivy League is more selective than the top universities of other developed democratic countries. I can't judge the claims of what a "top university" is in other countries but feel free to check other countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

Ivy League: 136,856 students; US pop: 333 million; fraction: 410 per million

Uni Toronto + UWaterloo: 104,731 students; Can pop: 39 million; fraction: 2685 per million

Oxbridge: 48,965 students; UK pop: 67 million; fraction: 730 per million

Now that I've had time to think: prior to WW2 old money probably really did more or less control society, after the war however forces like mass media wrested control towards "the crowd", where no-one consciously directs things, and this is reflected as a loss of old money control over the universities as well as basically every other important institution. That is the makeup of universities is a reflection of the social change not the determiner.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

This reminds me of another review you did on Fussell's book, "Class". That book seemed humorous. It was laughing at the people it was analyzing. This one seems serious, even a bit similar to Fussell's book in the abstractions it uses.

Which one did you like better?

Also, Whit Stillman made four or five affectionate movies in defense of WASP culture.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

> The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.

Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students. Any story that starts with meritocratic dominance in the 1950-60s has to grapple with the fact that legacies remained a huge presence in the Ivy League. This is nearly fatal to this entire section's thesis.

I think something simpler happened. Harvard became more exclusive. Prior to the mid-20th century almost anyone with the proper educational credentials could get into Harvard. The acceptance rate was around 80-90%. Now, some of this was because you had to prove you had certain aristocratic class markers like knowing Greek. But if you had them you basically got in. This is exactly how the Jews got in: they just studied the class markers. And that wasn't a problem until there were "too many" of them.

The post-war restrictions SHARPLY cut the acceptance rate down to about a third of applicants. And it's declined ever since. It was 15%-ish by the 1980s-90s and is about 5% today. This has set off an intense competition where getting into Harvard is a status symbol.

In 1930 going to Harvard was something you did because you were a WASP. If you were an intelligent Black person you went to Howard. Partly because of racial discrimination to be sure. But partly because going to Harvard was not a prestigious trophy. Simply having a college degree marked you out as elite. So why not go to the college your community built? Where you'd see the elites of your own community?

You saw the same thing with white Catholics. Even ones from very old American families who didn't have to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment. As late as the mid-20th century you had some Virginians going to places like William & Mary because they weren't New Englanders.

Post-war all colleges organized themselves into a hierarchy. Harvard came out on top, as the "best." Elites had found a new competition: to get into the best schools. And Harvard restricted its membership because selectiveness (and the education it conferred) was a status symbol. A meritocratic ideology sprung up about "whiz kids", especially around Johnson and Kennedy's time. And college access greatly expanded. But at the same time as college access was expanded access to these elite spaces contracted. In effect the mid-century turned what had been a pretty open system into a series of sorting tests.

I've never seen any compelling evidence that this actually improves the quality of graduates, by the way. Some universities like Tsinghua also have extremely low acceptance rates. But the University of Tokyo, the most prestigious university in Japan, accepts about 35% of applicants. Oxford accepts about 20%. The doctors, engineers, professionals, academics, etc graduated by those schools are perfectly competent in my experience. And I'm not really aware of anyone who argues otherwise.

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"Bobo" caught on in French, oddly enough.

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A true aristocracy like this sounds like a dream compared to what America is and where it is heading. As you note, techies were the one big chance to overturn the modern establishment but they aren't likely to succeed (anytime soon).

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The source tweets (tweets referenced in the tweet you link here) about the NYT editorial decision to smear Tech have been deleted.

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To the extent that American progressivism/reform = Yankee women, I think you miss something about 20th century WASPs. They surely held the seeds of their own destruction?

Plus there are a lot of sanatorium stays interspersed with the flightier do-good efforts, in the memoirs I've read. Occasionally some real eccentricity. A book called "The Big House" describes such a family. A lighter recent WASP, or almost-WASP, memoir was by Charles (?) McGrath - critic and golf writer - but I can't remember the title ... games and pranks and boats and emotional continence are paramount. It actually was a nice book perhaps to gift if you've a conventional Boomer father whose unexamined politics have brought forth a world so bewildering that only a privileged summer dacha makes it tolerable.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

>[The meritocrats’] efforts to tear down the old customs and habits of the previous elite was not achieved without social cost. Old authorities and restraints were delegitimized. There was a real, and to millions of people catastrophic, breakdown in the social order,

>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they [WASPs] seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?

>Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes.

Couldn't the simple answer to this be that people with high IQs who succeed in testtaking-based meritocracies just have worse social skills, some autism spectrum etc.?

Not to label it as an objectively bad thing, but when we as Society hand billions of dollars in spending power to a guy who is bad at following mainstream social expectations and 'fitting in', good at taking tests, bad at talking to people, and very good at writing computer code instead of a born and bred WASP whos entire life has revolved around fitting into an intricate Trad social setting, we end up with a society that's less good at social skills and related institutions?

This book seems to harp on 'meritocracy' without unpacking the assumption that merit is derived from test scores alone. While people with high test scores probably do have high IQ, I'm skeptical they have the highest merit as defined by a vague sense of personal quality or socialization-ness that enables them to foster strong cultural healthy institutions under traditional values. I think the best person for that would probably be a WASPy rich kid, and once we stopped setting the WASPy rich kids up for success it's expected the institutions they were literally raised to maintain suffered.

For an example, compare Elon Musk (sorry, lazy example) to a hypothetical 10th century upper east side old money elite. I don't know what Mr. Wasp would be doing with his fortune, but I'm sure we'd all consider it to be quite refined, classy, and trad.

I don't think old institutions needed to be torn down as some form of class resentment or revenge, we just accidentally ended up with a class of elites with so much ""merit"" that they were incapable of keeping them going.

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Helpful read by Tanner Greer (Scholar's Stage) on the same subject https://scholars-stage.org/economies-of-scale-killed-the-american-dream/

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Surely an important part of the dynamic - not captured in this analysis - is the nationalization (even globalization) of the aristocracy? It seems to me (and maybe you (Scott) even wrote about it sometime) that in ye goode olde days `power' (both economic and cultural) was more diffuse, and local elites in Oklahoma or whatever were unlikely to be Ivy educated or acculturated. And the local newspaper in Des Moines (say) was more important to Iowans than the NYT. Whereas now power is more concentrated in a handful of national (even global) institutions, all of which are overwhelmingly staffed by Ivy plus graduates, producing a kind of ideological monoculture among the elites which was formerly absent.

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Eric Kaufman's book "whiteshift" has some stuff on WASP formation/culture.

https://willyreads.substack.com/p/whiteshift-book-summary

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Re: Ivy League admissions policy, doesn't Brooks also note that Harvard and Co. felt threatened by the GI bill and the post-war economic boom creating much greater demand for higher education, and thus increased competition from non-Ivy league schools? I read this book probably 15 years ago, so I might be misremembering.

Re: architecture, I remember reading somebody discussing this Tartaria phenomenon, and the class component was part of it, for sure. To sum up what I remember: the mid 20th century was a period of tremendous techno-optimism. Mid century modern and brutalist architecture tapped into that optimism, because it seemed futuristic and scientific, with all the right angles and whatnot, which gave it a cool factor, plus the fact that these buildings could be built quickly because a lot of it was just poured concrete and steel was evidence of technological progress and the increasing productivity that was going to lead us to a glorious future of wealth and prosperity. At the same time, old Victorian style or classical buildings, though perhaps pretty, were associated with the bad old days of chamber pots, choking on the smoke from the massive fireplaces needed on every floor to keep them habitably warm, and other practical concerns, but also the bad old days of aristocratic class prejudices, where the scullery maid wasn't allowed out of the basement and one didn't speak to a footmen or valet except to bark orders or rebuke him for some perceived shortcoming.

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A lot of this check out, I think, though as explanations go it seems a little complicated (and at points ad hoc). I think an alternative explanation for how we've ended up where we're currently at is that people started inheriting money.

This, I think, is the dark matter of the US economy- we know it's everywhere, but nobody can point to it. And I'm not talking about eight figure windfalls coming down from dead shipping scions; I'm talking about the kind of money you'd expect to see run through a family if, since WW II, each generation kept putting away low-mid six figures. You get to the end of the 20th century, and with compounding interest you've suddenly got a lot of people tripping into low seven figure bonanzas when their parents die.

So- imagine you're a reasonably self-aware, college educated Democrat, both you and your spouse have solid-but-not-great jobs, and you're making $180k-$210k a year gross. That's not bad, but that does NOT cover:

1) The mortgage on a $450k house.

2) Payments/insurance on two Infinity crossovers.

3) Club sports fees for the two kids.

4) Annual vacations that require air travel.

5) College expenses when the kids get out of high school...

And so on. Yet there are millions of Americans who are living that life on these kinds of incomes. So where's the money coming from? And, to the point of this book review, how would coming into that money affect your worldview? Again, assuming the beneficiary is reasonably self-aware, we might expect them to carry some vague sense of guilt and shame at having their lifestyles-- in middle age, no less-- subsidized by monies that they did not year. Which, in turn, could lead to......

1) a lot of mumbling about 'privilege' (while doing nothing tangible to mitigate its cultural/economic influence),.

2) the pursuit of class signifiers which aren't 'too' grotesque, but which still relay the appropriate message.

3) a desire to use education and 'intellect', as opposed to wealth, as a primary status signifier (since we have both, but only the former was earned)

4) an insistence of minimizing the importance of personal agency in life outcomes (since you 'can't be blamed' for living a life that you haven't really earned)

And so on. We talk a lot about the basically uninterrupted spell of economic progress that we've seen since the post-war years, but not (it seems to me) much about how that generational accrual of wealth has affected social standings. My feeling is that its probably driven more of our social outcomes than the people who think the most about these kinds of issues would like to admit.

And so on.

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Re techies becoming nu elites:

It will happen as soon as techies learn the codes, protocols, and requirements of elite behavior.

Or, us nerds need to follow the law of eliteness (not elitism): Rule not with overwhelming force, but with attractive power.

The incessant need to be seen as smarter than, and the obnoxious competitions that we succumb to to demonstrate our ability actually counteract whatever authority we wish to establish.

Now, you may think yachting or polo obnoxious. But you’d be wrong. The silly hobbies of the old elite remained hidden from the masses. A nu-elite, posting on twitter, however, broadcasts their weaknesses (and strengths). And this, while entertaining, sows division. Fame and infamy, two sides of the same coin. Entertainers have haters.

As tech continues to expand into “softer” fields, like with AI-generated art and literature, soon it will be cool to understand exactly how the machines that influence our culture operate.

In the meantime, engaging playfully with the humanities will continue to pay dividends to us geeks who have the energy to invest in such non-practical pursuits.

On this note, I do hope that Scott and his readers will take another look at contemporary architecture (art too, but arch, at the nexus of art and tech, would be a good starting point). You may wish to review the book “Learning from Las Vegas” by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. It does a good job of explaining how to appreciate the banality of middle America.

And the works of Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid may shine light on why brutalism (see: Corbusier), as ugly as it may be, has value if only to inspire its successor styles.

In general, the split between STEM and Liberal Arts may be chalked up to a difference between convergent and divergent thinking. While engineering problems have a right answer, and arbitrary chains of right answers compose into gigantic towers, the process of evolution in the arts seeks to discover new questions, and this necessitates constant critique (deconstruction) of the status quo, making things worse before we accumulate the will and insight to make them better.

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One minor correction: James B. Conant was no longer president of Harvard in 1955. He'd left in 1953 to become the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Nathan Pusey became president in 1953. His Wikipedia article says:

"During his presidency of Harvard, Pusey overhauled the admissions process, which had been biased heavily in favor of the alumni of New England-based boarding schools, and began admitting public school graduates based on scores obtained on standardized tests such as the SAT. This was highly controversial with the school's alumni population but set the stage for diversifying the student body and faculty."

I read Nicholas Lemann's book on standardized testing about 25 years ago, in which Conant plays a large role, so I too took away the impression that Conant (who played giant roles in mid-century America - e.g., Conant was on the committee that picked Hiroshima for the first A-bomb) did it, but the timelines don't match up. On the other hand, Conant might well have gotten to the same point at the same time as Pusey did. Conant ardently believed in meritocracy as crucial to the Cold War.

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Alternative explanations (among many) to explain The Sixties, which didn't start until around the assassination of JFK on 11/22/63 and the Beatles going on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964.

- Somebody suggested to me that the world moving so far to the left culturally over the course of 60s was due to the Vatican 2 council of 1962-1965 liberalizing the Roman Catholic Church, the chief institutional bulwark of reaction for centuries. The Catholic Church was riding high at the time, especially in America, so Pope John XXIII's decision out of the blue to call a council to modernize the church might serve best as the unmoved mover behind The Sixties.

- The invention of The Pill used to be cited all the time as the cause of The Sixties. I don't hear it much anymore, but that's because fewer people can remember back that far.

There are quite a few other plausible theories.

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It probably sounds weird, but all of your "mysteries and concepts" seem completely un-mysterious to me. To wit:

Tartaria: Big plain boxes are easier and cheaper to build than old-fashioned buildings, so the for-profit businesses that build most modern buildings for practical purposes--and want to save money for their shareholders--prefer them. (Similarly, once basic manufactured clothing became vastly cheaper and easier to wear than hand-tailored outfits, practical people flocked to the former.)

Partisan polarization: it's no worse than it was in the past--it's just become more uniform because modern media have unified the political playing field. 100 years ago, local Democrats and Republicans hated each other, but their representatives could do business in Washington (or the state house) on matters of common interest because the local enmities were far away. Today, everyone back home knows exactly what their representatives are up to at all times, so the latter must keep up the appearance of bitter partisan hostility even in Congress.

High modernism: the old upper class was industrial, so its members at least paid lip service to industry (while pining, as all wealthy moderns do, for the simpler pleasures and grander glories of the pre-modern aristocracy: country estates, servants, contempt for the filthy masses of starving peasants). The meritocrats, on the other hand, earned their wealth as managers and professionals, so they're freer to disdain industry completely, and openly profess their hatred for the industrialism that raised non-elites to comfortable lifestyles complete with a basic dignity far closer to their own.

Meritocracy: Ruling classes aren't by nature more or less competent in a general sense--rather, they're more or less heedful of the needs and concerns of those they rule. Over time, their concern and understanding for those beneath them inevitably decays, and they get replaced by a new ruling class less remote from, and hence more aware of, the rest of the population.

Culture wars: The cultural "flip" that created the Bobos was perhaps larger than most, but it was hardly unique--we've witnessed several since then. The tension among adjacent layers of society seeking to signal their superiority to those below them and similarity to those above them ensures that class signals will be in a constant state of flux, with every signal ceasing to become effective the moment a lower class figures out how to emulate it.

College admissions: All elites begin as meritocracies by some criterion--whether industrial/mercantile success or academic ranking. But in seeking to pass their elite status on to their children, they inevitably shift towards rejecting meritocracy in favor of hereditary or cultural traits that they can pass down to their rapidly-regressing-to-the-mean descendants. That's what we're seeing today, as the children of the meritocrats of the 1960s eviscerate the standards of merit that once elevated their parents, in favor of new definitions of merit defined by crude, politicized cultural signals that are easy for the mediocre scions of the elite to learn and absorb.

I'll stop there (mostly because I don't know anything about Fussell), but if anybody's still reading, congratulations to you...

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I recently ran across an explanation for “the stunning rise in divorce, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy rates” that is so powerful that I am shocked that I wasn’t aware of it before. In short, it was changes in a few laws (specifically welfare and divorce law), just the sort of subtle thing that is described in the review book: https://fireflydove.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-libertarian-view-of-gay-marriage/

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Architecture: I did a popular long Twitter thread on the change in architecture for city halls before and after 1945, comparing apples to apples: e.g., San Diego's various city halls.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1226758411653545984

Styles were already changing in the 1930s. E.g., San Diego's 19th Century city hall was ornate, but its 1938 city hall was relatively streamlined, but still elegant and nicely detailed. It's 1964 city hall looks like worker housing in Sao Paulo, judging from the lone picture of it I could find online (unlike the many pictures of the two previous city halls.

One thing to note: coal-powered cities were so sooty that old buildings had gone dark and ugly and it seemed easier to just tear them down and put up something made of glass and steel. But in 1961, De Gaulle's culture minister Andre Malraux started having Paris's grand old buildings washed, with spectacular results.

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What you describe here:

"So I was wondering if the right and left poles might just flip, over and over, in a long-term secular cycle."

Is spot on, and it's exactly what the philosophies/frameworks of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory elucidate. There's been a constant swing back and forth between the right/left divides, each at times playing the "establishment" and the other the "rebel", pushing and pulling, while the entire thing trends/spirals in a more complex and evolutionarily appropriate direction for the complexities of the time.

Definitely something you should look into more if you haven't already. Ken Wilber, Clare Graves, Don Beck, Jeff Salzman, and especially currently Steve McIntosh's "Institute for Cultural Evolution".

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A late friend of mine taught history at Yale when Yale junked it's Jewish quota for the class entering in the fall of 1965 (a decade behind Harvard). He said even being the grandson of Senator wouldn't have gotten George W. Bush in in 1965 rather than 1964. The intellectual atmosphere of the campus changed immediately in 1965, became much more electric, he recalled

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Bobo, standing for "bourgeois-bohème", is pretty common in French (which may or may not have coined it, it's unclear on Wikipedia). It's used in France especially, I believe, to describe a certain kind of Parisian. We occasionally use it for the equivalent in Montreal too for the artsy, urbane social class that lives primarily in a specific neighborhood. It's gently derisive, and overall a pretty good (if vague) descriptor of the people it refers to. You English speakers should use it more!

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I don't really buy the premise of the book, but I did wander in to this social circle once by accident in my youth. A friend of mine had by weird historical contingency ended up on one of their soccer youth teams, and got invited along to the parties every year by fiat. I was her plus one.

My overwhelming impression was of basically nice (but money-obsessed) noodleheads. During the secret santa (it was Christmas), gift values were all over the map because they didn't have a sense of the difference between $20 and $200, and something like a third of the gifts were a bottle of lemoncello for some reason? Only one or two were employed in a traditional sense, and those were sinecures- part-time work that paid $400,000 a year, to 'tide them over' I think was the phrase; they were embarrassed about it. Another one cornered me pretty early on and started asking a bunch of unusual questions about my personal life, not just where I went to college or what my major was, but odd little details. I was rescued by my date who walked up and said (to both of us), "she's trying to figure out whether you're old money or new money." I just said, "Oh! I am not money." And then we had a little laugh about it and went back to a normal and mutually respectful conversation.

They were perfectly nice, really, but it was eye-opening how much it was clearly a social network first, where money just happened to flow very freely and was a primary topic of conversation; it was absolutely a 'class' barrier that I'd crossed, in the old-fashioned sense. I wasn't there nearly long enough to get a bead on the deeper mythologies of the set, but they definitely had a parallel understanding of money that made 'earning' it worse, not better. They were also pretty tryhard about being 'eccentric' and quirky, I guess because it was taboo to talk about accomplishments so they needed something else to talk about over dinner, and the ones winning the game were the ones who made the money seem like it just sort of rained down on them from the clouds.

In retrospect, the most interesting thing about it is that all of their wealth depended on internal and inward-facing connections to this group, or I guess being part of inherited/family wealth from it, and nothing depended on any reputation or actions outside of it; they lived on investment income and such, but hired other people to make the investments. So it seems like a sort of socioeconomic 'dark matter' where I have no idea how many people live like this or how much wealth overall they possess. It was just a few dozen at the party, anyway. I'm not sure it even *matters*; I think in economic terms, their function was mostly to be the name at the top of large currency reservoirs being exploited by the financial industry. Whether they're shrinking as a group or holding on in to the 21st century, I have no idea, and I can't imagine there being any broader social consequences either way.

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Have you seen the lead-crime meta-analysis which claimed to have found evidence of publication bias having exaggerated the effect of lead on crime by an order of magnitude?

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf

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Bobos came out in the era of the "Stuff White People Like" website. It was certainly a moment, and Brooks captured it—not the reality, on the ground, but a way to look at things that made sense for people in it.

Perhaps it resonated because most of Brooks' facts were simply invented.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2004/04/01/david-brooks-booboos-in-paradise/ — worth a read not just for the careful "oh wait, your telling anecdote is literally not true, the opposite is true", but for Brooks' attempt to intimidate the journalist. 2004 was the end of a long era where you could just make stuff up.

Which brings up a larger queston: what's the point of these books? They're not scholarship ("big synthetic theory inducted from data"); they're not journalism ("just the facts"). They seem to be GPT-3 prompts avant la lettre, where the commentariat is GPT-3. Put in a Brooks line, and out comes a million comments.

Someone should write that phenomenon up.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

This was a really interesting review that was a joy to read, but I feel like the lede was _still_ buried right at the end in the penultimate paragraph where Scott tries to sketch out the tech utopia failing in 2015. I can't imagine myself being remotely better qualified to make that call than Scott, but it seems to me that battle hasn't been won or lost yet. FTX and the collapse of whatever Web 3.0 was just set us all back a few years, too. But then Elon took twitter...I don't know, man. While both political parties are led by two Octogenarians it feels like we're still in a holding pattern. Lots of alpha in 2024.

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> What would get printed in the New York Times - previously the WASP aristocracy’s mouthpiece, but now increasingly infiltrated by the more educated newcomers?

Hasn't the NYT been owned by Jews since the late 19th century when Adolph Ochs bought it? Admittedly, he was a German Jew rather than some later-arriving eastern European.

As for the demerits of "meritocracy" it's worth keeping in mind that the traits which lead to individual self-advancement, which Greg Cochran calls "moxie", sometimes are undesirable for everyone else:

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/20/natural-aristocracy/

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Ultimately I think all of these big social changes are overdetermined. If you find yourself asking "Which of these fifteen different totally plausible factors caused this massive social change?" then the answer is usually "All of them, plus a few dozen more". Anything that isn't massively overdetermined by dozens of different factors doesn't cause a massive social change.

I think that "replacement of one elite by a different elite" definitely isn't a bad lens to view the massive social changes of the mid 20th century through. I certainly don't think that the whims of the Harvard University Admissions Department are enough to explain it (these whims were themselves caused by some of the dozens of other social factors at play) but they're some part of it.

Economic factors seem like they should be pretty huge here. The idea of the US being ruled by a bunch of "Boston Brahmins" seems ridiculous now, simply because Boston isn't that important or wealthy any more. The Boston Brahmins couldn't possibly have held on to power in the face of changes that moved the economic centre of gravity of the country far to the south and west.

It's interesting to see all the changes in fashion, all the "this is now high-status, this is low-status", all the little morals of the little morality plays that make up most of our culture's fiction and news reporting, all as existing downstream of the signalling needs of a new elite. And of course elite rotation wasn't a one-time process, there's now a whole bunch of elite castes competing for our attention, and all culture is just elite-on-elite warfare now.

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Not really addressed elsewhere in the comments- the rise of socialism as an ideology among the influential elite of the US.

While a number of intellectual superstars were folded into the space race on the side of America, there was also a broad adoption of Communist ideals among newer strivers, as a part of the conflict with old money aristos. This had a negative (imo) impact on just about everything from social structures, publuc expenditures, economic management, and nationalism.

The failure of the USSR has not had as much of a muffling effect as I had hoped on the pursuit of those ideals.

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The connections that Brooks makes between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy's power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture that first emerged in the 60s doesn't seem to stand up to even moderate historical scrutiny, in all honesty. Some issues that immediately come to mind off the top of my head:

-The idea that the cultural values that Brooks calls "bohemianism" became dominant in America for essentially parochial reasons limited to the US (a change in university admissions policies, the displacement of a previous aristocracy) doesn't track well with the fact that these social changes happened around the same time in basically every part of the western world (and to a lesser degree in Asia as well).

-The general phenomenon of the power of the WASP aristocracy being displaced by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing--there are books that are contemporaneous with those changes like Whyte's *Organization Man* and Burnham's *Managerial Revolution* that were already observing the trend. The decades before the 50s saw WWII, the New Deal, and the general enrichment and empowerment of the various ethnic immigrant groups--all of these were vastly more convincing causal factors of the decline of the WASP aristocracy than one individual university president deciding to admit a moderately larger amount of non-WASPs. The dominant social orthodoxy that the bohemians were challenging was *this* orthodoxy, which had already displaced the WASP aristocracy by the time that they emerged--he postwar social order features as something of a glaring missing link for all of Brooks' analysis.

-The idea of a clean break between WASP culture and bohemianism, with the former being a separate, distinct group of people that overthrew the latter doesn't make a lot of sense. The WASPs were heavily associated with set of a few denominations--episcopalianism, congregationalism, and unitarianism--and today all of these are generally considered some of the most liberal, bohemian-ish religious groups in the country. It's probably more accurate to say that many young members of the WASP aristocracy simply adopted some bohemian values (at least superficially)

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What if it's just aesthetic taste changing without any particular shift in underlying values? The main difference, it seems, between the "aristocratic elites" and the "meritocratic elites" is that they blanket themselves in different displays of wealth and charity.

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I think it's a mistake to think of the modern elite "class" as being like an actual class division. You do have to jump through certain hoops and take on various cultural attitudes, but fundamentally it is a group that allows entry to outsiders.

Further, today's elites don't typically think of themselves as elites. I recall listening to a political speech decrying globalist elites with a man who had been accustomed to charging $450 an hour as a lawyer, who had previously been a member of parliament, and who was at the time the chief of staff to a Senator. And he wondered aloud "Who even are are these elites they keep talking about?" oblivious to the obvious reality that he was one.

I won't go so far as to say that today's wealthy and powerful have *earned* their position in society, but for the most part they haven't been born into it. People like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks, etc didn't grow up with famous names. They know what it's like to not be important, looking up at the important people from the outside. And while I don't think that necessarily makes them humble or empathetic, it does create a different worldview to someone who is born into power and privilege.

In comparison, "Old money" consciously resented "New money" because they might have been just as rich, but they weren't *like us* - there was an actual group identity among the elites. And even that wealthy "aristocracy" was a less exclusive version of the old fashioned actual aristocracy where you know that when your father dies you will become an Earl, etc.

In a real class system you are what you're born as, and the notion of "social mobility" is weird and confusing. The people at the bottom might dislike people at the top for one reason or another, but they never envy the position of the elites because there is no concept that they could take it for themselves. You might as well wish to steal someone else's parents for yourself - it just doesn't compute.

Lord of the Rings is an accessible example of this. The movies depicted the Frodo/Sam relationship as being personal devotion between two peers, and Sam's "Mr Frodo" is just something he says. But the book is written very much from an old class perspective, which obviously Tolkien was marinated in as an Englishman of his era. Frodo is older, much richer, and occupies a vastly higher social position than Sam. Sam calls Frodo "Mr Frodo" because he is in a lower class and he must always address his superiors respectfully. Frodo never tells Sam "Please, don't bother with the "Mr" thing," because although his personal regard for Sam is high the idea of waving away the class distinction between them is not even thinkable.

And of course it's that tension between the understanding of Frodo and Sam occupying very different social positions on one hand and yet becoming very close because of their shared adversity that makes their relationship dynamic interesting. But modern audiences have become so unfamiliar with class as a concept that it becomes widely perceived as homoerotic.

The class system failed because people outside of the elite gained power and wealth that couldn't be resisted and were able to supplant the elite class, despite not having a class identity of their own. I don't think that can happen so easily today - someone who is an "outsider" but gains wealth, status, and power just gets assimilated into the elite.

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Regarding Native American blankets, it is not surprising that as mass production increases hand made objects become more desirable (especially handmade by "talented" artisans using rare raw ingredients) precisely because pieces of art are a status symbol, this is a general reaction to abundance where we care more about the story behind an object than the object itself. I would urge caution when listening to critiques of changes in art that are overly simplified. Collecting "non western" items as part of an art collection is an extremely WASPy behavior with distinguished roots stretching back to at least the 15th century.

Also the reason a lodge in Tahoe (although I think Aspen is the better choice) is more desirable now is because 1. Electric/Gas heating 2. The rise in Alpine Skiing as a sport 3. The Airplane/Helicopter.

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I suspect Brooks was heavily influenced by Fussell, and that bobos are an extension of class X. Unless I missed it, I was surprised Brooks didn’t cite Fussell -- even the humor is of similar style (though Fussell is much funnier).

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Quote: “why [are] Ivies.. so unwilling to admit more Asians despite their supposed anti-racist principles. They consciously think of themselves as the gatekeeper of a US elite class, and having a 50% Asian ruling class in a 5% Asian country would be really jarring.”

Comment: But this is going to happen. Harvard and the rest of the Ivies can win some battles, but they cannot win the war against Asians. The same will happen as happened with Jewish admissions. The interesting question is rather: What happens next?

A fruitful starting point for predictions is to begin with Brook’s idea that the ruling class is the repository of values, and values change when there is a change in ruling classes. Combine this idea with the insight that in our societies, universities are the gatekeepers & selection mechanism for elites.

Armed with these twin insights, here are three predictions of what is in store for the future:

(1) The rise of Asians as the dominant elite group will mean a partial return to old WASP cultural ideals. Since the “Asian values” of discipline, hard work, and ruthlessness aligns better with the old-WASP elite culture than with the hippie-infected Bobo elite culture.

(2) In the longer term, We will see increased intermarriages at the elite level between Asians and Caucasians, creating a gradually larger mixed-ethnic ruling group. In particular a mixed Asian-North European type. Why? Because this is the only non-Asian group that Asians really respect as a culture. White-skinned North-Europeans (including Ashkenazi Jews) are almost regarded as “honorary Asians”. I am thinking in particular on Japanese, Chinese and Korean Asian ethnicities here, but it is likely even more general.

(3) A parallel development (under the radar for Brooks?) is the rise of women as an elite group in their own right, not as appendages to men's elite status. When it comes to university admissions, the percentage of women has risen even faster than the percentage of Asians during the last 50-70 years. This implies a gradual feminization of the elite culture. The present “woke” culture is an effect of this change. It is essentially the more caring attitude of women toward the not-so-successful in life, translated into elite language & elite culture.

All of this is inevitable, so let us just sit back and enjoy the unfolding of the show.

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Short version: Tone was set by Jews instead of Calvinists. I think everything else is just a corollary.

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> (with the blue-blooded Bush dynasty playing Canute trying to hold back the waves)

Canute did not actually try to "hold back the waves". He wanted to demonstrate to his courtiers precisely the opposite: that he was, in fact, powerless to do so.

I suppose you know that, so is that your argument, that the Bushs consciously demonstrated that they are powerless to stop the decline of their own class?

> Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering.

What does "trad" mean? Traditional?

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Please note that the word bobo did catch in France.

See this 2006 song by a well known singer:

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Bobos_(chanson)

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A small note: Apparently Bobo did not stick in the US. But in Europe, french speaking part (France, part of Belgium and Switzerland) it did stick and will be used and understood by many. It stands for Bourgeois Bohème which is a litteral translation. You can even hear a song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZzR7-apnKA

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I'm surprised that, in a country where most have high-school Spanish lessons, nobody seems to notice a key reason why the very useful coinage "bobos" didn't stick. "Bobo" in Spanish means "dumb," which is something that I immediately realized would be a problem when David Brooks first wrote about the concept in The Atlantic a couple of decades back. I guess he should have asked me first. This is not irrelevant: among the upper and aspiring upper-middle class, knowledge of some basic Spanish is not so very uncommon, and bobo is a very simple, starter-level word. Then again, something similar happened when they launched the "Pajero" car in the US (meaning "Masturbator" in Spanish) to the great merriment of your Guatemalan maid.

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"they stuck to a few standard rich people hobbies (yachting, horseback riding) and distrusted creativity or (God forbid) quirkiness."

This is interesting. Quirkiness has always been a hallmark of European nobility, a trait much overdone to, among other things, set oneself apart from boring, staid, predictable bourgeois. Who of course can't do quirkiness and are always mystified by the aristocrat's penchant for it.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

Bobos are not necessarily on the left, politically.

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> Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 - these are stratospheric scores.

A sidenote, but it's important to note that this book was written in the late 1990s and published in 2000. Back then, SAT scores near 700 were indeed stratospheric. There have been numerous rounds of "recentering" since then, and as such getting a perfect SAT score is no longer all that rare. By contrast, when Bill Gates took it, getting a perfect SAT score was incredibly uncommon. I think Bill got something like 1590 if memory serves. (Bill Ballmer had a perfect 1600).

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One aspect that Scott barely mentions is the Jewish angle. A significant part of the new elite were comprised of Jews, often from middle-class and lower-middle class backgrounds. They formed a coalition with often poor whites like Bill Clinton who were previously excluded. I think late 20th century liberalism was largely shaped by this union.

What's ironic is that today's Ivy League establishment is substantially Jewish (look at their presidents) yet have increasingly returned to the old WASP elite's habits of "holistic admissions".

This seems pretty depressing, given it implies that keeping meritocracy constant is a rare feat and new elites tend to calcify, become more mediocre over time and then play defensive to keep their gains. Will there be a new Conant and Pusey in our era? I am skeptical. Whatever said about the old WASP elite, they had a certain idealism that the new elite lacks.

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Good essay but it misses the actual key change: what happened in the second half of the 20th century was that the WASP/Harvard/moneyed elite class went from being *a* class to being a *ruling* class.

For most of American history college grads didn’t run the show and politics, journalism, entertainment, business etc were run by hard working normies who showed up one day in the mail room and grinded their way up. The professionalization of college admissions opened up college to this group and became a credentialization factory that took the best farmer kids etc and put them in Harvard, which became the ticket to elite levels of journalism, business, government, etc.

It also had them become more bohemian with all the Bobo class markers and associated cultural decline, which by the way us not been seen among this group of Bluechecks, as documented in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.

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The applications of Brooks's theory to "Tartaria" and "high modernism" seem contradictory to me.

Claim 1 is that the old elites loved classical buildings and the new elites reacted against this by going for concrete-and-glass cuboids.

Claim 2 is that High Modernism -- the thing whose architectural expression is concrete-and-glass cuboids -- was the legitimizing ideology of the old elite, and the new elite reacted against this by saying "down with concrete-and-glass cuboids".

I'm not sure how plausible I find either of those individually, but they can't _both_ be right.

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Scott says that Brooks's theory is one of the best alternatives he's heard to the leaded-gasoline hypothesis for what happened to crime rates from ~1960 to ~1990. But I don't understand what the theory actually is. On Scott's account, Brooks doesn't give any sort of detailed causal story, he just "kind of drops that paragraph in there and runs". Maybe I'm missing some context that Brooks and Scott both find obvious and that isn't obvious to me; how does "old-money family elites replaced by meritocratic elites" naturally lead to "more violent crime"? What, according to this theory, _actually happened_?

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Today I learned that: I champion traditional bourgeois values; have yesteryear's Harvard-level test scores; and would never make it into the elite anyway, not due to <s>racial animus</s> holistic admissions, but because there just aren't enough Asians in the country yet. Heavy is the minority head that wears the crown. Oh well, the school-chapter of life is done with, but I don't think having attended Rensselaer is too shabby either. It at least __sounds__ way more WASPy!

This alt-history hypothesis is plausible-sounding enough, and I have no idea if it's accurate...but the current end state certainly is. Found my bile rising reading about the New Meritocrats' Code of Conduct. One person's irony and detachment is another person's fakery and nihilism...not having the basic self-respect and humility to authentically own being rich and elite, makes that position even less admirable than it already is underneath the veneer of humanitarian values. I prefer blue-bloods for the same reasons I prefer outwardly bigoted ____ists: with them, I know very clearly exactly where I stand, whether it's good or bad. The patronizing condescencion of the Meritocrats, by contrast, strikes me as utterly contemptible and narcissistic. A farce put on to highlight and celebrate the largesse of the giver, not the recipient...whether it's in the guise of White Person With Coloured Friends, Cishet Allyship, Male Feminism, land acknowledgements, or whatever other new FOTM. Sorting people into little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

It's probably not in the other 5/6, but I'm real curious how the Brooks Theory would explain the Overproduction-of-Elites Theory, which also seems somewhat plausible. Maybe the Old Guard aristocracy had better internal guardrails against expanding the Strategic Classiness Reserve *too* fast, thus averting class inflation? Elite is a relative position, after all, not an absolute one...if everyone is elite, then no one is, and the whole mansion of cards falls down. There are only so many novel ridiculous ways to mint exclusivity (I'd like to hope).

Also, I know the Venn circles don't exactly overlap, but I think "PMC" is better at capturing the milieu-idea being framed rather than "bluecheck". (The Elon irony I guess is that "I Will Not Allocate Scarce Resources Using Prices" is a super-Meritocrat mindset. There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there's Amalgamated Bank.)

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I’ll put in a good word for the best book about class and this issue. Old Money by Nelson Aldrich was written in 1988 and is an examination of the very phenomena of why the old ruling class died out.

It is a nuanced and deep examination of the history and the whole idea of an “elite” and why they lost their moral authority. Aldrich notes the many downsides, most obviously embodied in Tom Buchanan, the boorish and bigoted husband in Gatsby. But he also notes they had an actual ethos, whether they followed it or not, to value and preserve the best of civilization, to educate people on its enduring value, and to be above the scrum for money everyone else was involved in.

Interesting to note that Aldrich graduated from Harvard in 1955, and went on to be a bit of a Paris bohemian and one of the founding editors of the Paris Review. His musings about his own life and deeply WASPish family put the book right next to The Education of Henry Adams.

The other interesting book on the 50s is Auchincloss’s Rector of Justin, about a headmaster who believes very much in the civilizing ethos, but laments that all his students become bankers and lawyers.

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I am always on the lookout for bobo wedge issues, i.e., controversies that set "bo" against "bo." For example, near where I live there is a small regional airport that has ambitions to greatly expand scheduled passenger service. The bourgeois bo loves this because it makes travel so much more convenient. The bohemian bo hates it because noise. You can likely think of more.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

quote>>But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected.<<

How open is the admissions today in comparison to Conant/Pusey's time? Meritocracy is no true meritocracy, otherwise they'd be sorting by SAT and take the top of the applicants. I'm not from USA and no expert on admissions but as far as I know one needs to be doing some community work that would be viewed in a positive light by BoBos etc. and it's the primary filter. Out of the masses, they don't look for the brightest. They look for the next generation of keepers to keep BoBo values, and select the brightest among them so that they're good at keeping those values, and they heavily indoctrinate them in that. So it's not meritocracy as in the literal meaning of the word, which should be the antonym of aristocracy but it's like the mamelukes for the lack of a better term in my realm of words?

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This explains the work displayed at Art Basel. Art was formerly transgressive and avant-garde. The greatest works illuminated conceptual, intellectual leaps ... merit.

The art world is currently drowning in coy, woke, conformist neo-naive art. The new "salon." Art trends are driven largely by collectors and the art advisors behind them, not just artists with radical new ideas.

This conformist, neo-naive irony started with Basquiat in the 1970's. His appropriation of street art by a street artist was a logical extrapolation of Warhol's appropriation of commercial art by a commercial artist, without a shred of the insight displayed in Warhol's diaries and daring works.

The 1970's timing is right for the new aristocracy to have enough wealth to become collectors.

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founding

> or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?

Depends on how you define meritocracy. Arguably, 80 years ago it meant that you were able to build a company and make a lot of money. Now it means you do good at standardized testing - or to put it in a less neutral way, that you have high iq, high counsciousness and are good at working inside the system. It could be an inherent difference between them - and it probably is, it's frightening how the current elites are run ing from individual responsibility and prefer to blend into a system.

Or it could be just an artefact of the culture that got created from pure randomness when the tide changed. Partly a reaction to the establishment of the time, part common characteristics of the new guys, part just what books they happened to read.

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>”The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting. But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?”

There’s reasonable sounding arguments that hereditary monarchs are a good form of government because the rulers have a built-in incentive to ensure the long-run success of the country when they know their grandkids will be running it. In contrast, other forms of government have less incentive for long-run success and more for short-term wins. E.g., If there’s a policy option that requires short-term pain for long-term gain, contrast the incentives of the president/PM (my part loses power next election that coincides with the pain and other party gets all the credit when the gain comes) vs. the king (me and my descendants rule no matter what I do, so I’ll make the highest expected value choices to maximize our dynasty’s long-run wealth and power, which is enhanced by ruling a richer country).

One hypothesis is that the WASP has similar long-term outlooks when making decisions. “Yes, if I prioritize the long-term over the short-term, Preston Fitzgerald Mayer III’s boy might beat me in the next election. But A few years later when my son is in office, the economy will be stronger.”

The meritocracy version of politics isn’t optimizing for “who can provide the best long-term outcomes” it’s optimizing for “who can win elections in the short-run.” Voters have a short memory so I suspect the current system has way less emphasis on the long-term than is optimal.

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Re: the question of *why* the old aristocrats might have been good, I can think of couple reasons. Historically, the successful long-lived republics have all basically been oligarchies controlled by ancient, wealthy families that more or less controlled all the levers of power. You're rich and powerful in the Republic because of what your family represents, and similarly you need to live up to the family name. Also, you're a legitimately rich guy who owns a lot of stuff, not just a particularly well-compensated employee, so you generally want rules that help you build stuff and not rules that stop you from building stuff. Meanwhile, you might also be tempted to set up a rent extraction operation via regulatory capture but the other families would rather you not do that because they are all also your business competitors in addition to being your political rivals.

Cutthroat meritocratic bureaucracy is more of a mainstay of imperial administrations. The levers of power are held by the emperor's well-compensated, well-educated employees. Those employees have a lot of power in that they make a lot of important decisions, but they are really just custodians of someone else's authority, they have no stake in anything except looking good *within* the system. This works really well if your goal is basically to just execute the emperor's will, since all the employee-administrators will compete with each other to execute it best. But they don't have competing self-interests that make them interested in a pro-business, pro-investment climate. And without a single emperor to hand down the goal of the state, the administrators basically just pick up their cues from whatever they think will increase their social standing within the bureaucracy itself.

The nascent tech takeover was basically just an attempt to combine these two ideas by having wealthy, business-interested meritocrats, but it turns out that they do a better job combining the flaws of both systems than they do combining their positives.

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Most people believe in meritocracy if it means that one's surgeon has to be qualified for his or her job. But there's a huge gap between that and believing that we need elitist institutions like Harvard to select a group of teenagers to train into a ruling class (and that this process is justified by the same idea as demanding a qualified surgeon). Not all countries have elite universities. Or believing that the CEO of a company has earned the salary that is so much above the salaries of the other employees.

In fields like physics some schools are going to be better than others because they will attract the best researchers or have better funding. But I don't really understand why in fields like law there is any benefit (to society in general) in having a very hierarchical system where some law students start out much better just because they were selected by a top institution and get to network with the other elite students, forming a privileged club from the beginning. People who are talented in law will demonstrate that in practice, they don't need to be pre-selected into an elite group.

Reading British newspapers, there seems to be a certain sense of shame among some circles about the dominance of Oxbridge (compared to other British universities) because it's seen as a remnant of aristocracy. In the US, ironically, there seems to be more acceptance of the idea that the people who get into Ivy League schools really are the best people, because, you know, meritocracy.

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I think the timeline's wrong, in a "Does reality cause straight lines on graphs" sense, for this to be the key explanation for why progressives are in charge now.

The Tartaria effect starts earlier - if you google "[Year] in architecture," you get a wikipedia page that makes this easy to track. Comparing 1938 with 1948, in '38 buildings look like they're expected to be decorative, but trying to get away with doing as little ornament as possible; in '48 they've become proper "post-war" monstrosities.

The intelligentsia are both recognisable and powerful in the '30s - hence HG Wells being a household name, and Stalin-sympathisers writing in the New York Times. There are also WASP-y socialist/progressive groups - the Intercollegiate Socialist Society for example. They don't control academia, which is interesting in a modern sense, but they're there.

FDR surrounded himself with academics and communist-sympathisers in the 30s, and ran an administration that's clearly in the same clade as, say, Biden's.

I think this looks more like an expanding social movement in favour of state-led egalitarianism that gradually takes over different parts of the US/world, starting in the late 19th century. It takes Harvard in the 50s and Yale in the 60s.

Taking the Ivy League was probably a strategic mistake for the progressives, as it got them mired in credentialism. This also happened at the same time they were making the much larger strategic mistake of extending egalitarianism to include who's perspectives they should take seriously (a bit like if the Bolsheviks had picked a bunch of random factory workers to staff their central committee).

So far as the WASPs are concerned, they never had much of a grip on the post-civil-war democrats. They were only politically important because they had some control over the Republican Party (shared, weirdly, with bearded men from Ohio). The Ohioans fizzle out by about 1900, making the GOP solidly WASP. The WASPs then completely fucked up running it, making it a worthless husk of a party, until finally being booted out by people who actually wanted to stop the progressives. Any account of why the modern Republican Party is so ghastly has to take into account that from the perspective of stopping the Democrats, the old Republican Party was (per Tucker) as useless as a marzipan dildo, and its Rockefeller faction was intentionally purged for this reason. The Bush/Romney wing represent their continuation, but pretend to be conservative to hide how useless they are. The modern GOP is also useless, but that's mostly because their actual objection to the democrats is that "Jesus wants tax cuts for Israel," which is a stupid program.

TL;DR: Progressivism as a project was expanding anyway, and taking the Ivies was a step along the road, and the WASPs lost power after the GOP purged them for being crap at running it.

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Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

If the art piece at the head of this is from AI, then it has improved greatly, very nice adaptation of Rousseau's style!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Rousseau#/media/File:Henri_Rousseau_-_Le_R%C3%AAve_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

EDIT: Never mind, I am an idiot; it's the cover art from the book, so done by a human.

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So far, not much discussion of the 1960s and its popularization of bohemian culture.

Ask a teenager in Mount Pleasant, Iowa in 1954 if he'd ever hear of Bird and you'd probably get a baffled response "you mean, birds, like, turkeys and chickens?"

Ask that teen's younger brother ten years later if he'd ever heard of The Beatles and he wouldn't have to discuss entomology.

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>But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?

My guess is this has to do with elite-cohesion being more important than elite-merit. Like you mentioned, the new admission criteria kind of just selected a haphazard group of geniuses that weren't culturally aligned. The WASPs on the other hand networked together in their elite boarding schools, built comradery on the lacrosse courts, and overall have a shared in-group identity that goes beyond "we're the elites".

10x teams are better than 10x engineers. https://avichal.com/2011/12/16/focus-on-building-10x-teams-not-on-hiring-10x-developers/

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<i>Brooks namedrops Seeing Like A State as the quintessential meritocrat book and high modernism as the quintessential meritocrat bogeyman. High Modernism was something like the legitimizing ideology of the WASP aristocracy: we are great because we have raised shining skyscrapers, blasted railways through mountains, and built giant eternally-churning factories. As part of their cultural revolt, the meritocrats had to ritually humiliate all of this, which made them adopt as their legitimizing ideology a James Scott / Jane Jacobs - esque perspective of “skyscrapers disrupt the social fabric and blasting tunnels sounds environmentally unfriendly, how about some nice locally-sourced organic food?”</i>

Not sure this explanation really holds up, TBH. For one thing, it's not obvious, at least not to me, that meritocrats really have rejected "high modernism" -- it's just that, instead of railways and giant factories, our current elites point to GDP figures and technology as evidence of their suitability for rule. For another, it's glaringly obvious, at least to me, that our current elites *don't* care about disrupting the social fabric, which is why they're fine with offshoring manufacturing jobs and promoting large-scale immigration.

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The discussion is fascinating, but I have not so far seen a single mention of the decline of the middle class.

As the middle class in America (and elsewhere in the West) is picked clean and left to rot, while the 1% (or whatever you want to call them) flourish as never before, interelite competition needs must intensify, because there is the Very Rich and then there is Everyone Else, and Everyone Else is barely getting by.

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The modern college admission scheme did not lead to strict meritocracy.

Yes, most smart, conscentious driven people go get their degree, but then they go out to do whatever things they are driven towards - academic research, engineering, entrepreneurhood, medicine, finance, corporate law.

However, by an large, these people are driven by practical or personal goals, not by social-engineering goals, so they don't bother "being the elite" in the sense of making organizations to try and set policy. They are far more driven to make a better mousetrap, or airplane, or refrigerator door, or contract, or quantitive pricing algorithm, or futures trading to ensure that enough tomatoes will be grown this season, or sewer pipe, than in making an organization that will win Abortion War #99231.

The main goal of meritocracy is to ensure that the details of society are designed by these points of people, rather than by random people. That America manages to do so, is a large contributor to why America has so much wealth.

I've quipped that tech companies pay managers a lot because otherwise it would be impossible to find anyone good that is willing to be a manager and deal with politics rather than do Actual World Improvements.

Now, there's a different subset of people that would actually rather do politics and win Abortion War #99231 than Actual World Improvements. The problem is, because these people care about politics, they generally win in politics. But the problem with winning in politics, is that winning in politics doesn't mean that you are right, just that you are left.

There might even be a reverse correlation, people to first order want to be doing the right thing, but in the cases where politically-expedient thing is different from the right thing, then there will be a very strong drive to do it.

Therefore, it makes a lot sense that having the world managed by the best politicians won't produce better result than having the world managed by a set of elites chosen in some uncorrelated-with-political-merit way.

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"And they were jocks - certainly good at lacrosse and crew, but their kids would be much less likely than modern elites’ to become a scientist, professor, doctor, or lawyer."

Well, of course not; doctors and lawyers are the professions, and professionals are who you have working for you. You might as well expect Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham II to be thrilled at the notion of Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III becoming a groundskeeper.

Part of the irony around the Ivies is that they started off as the equivalent of seminaries, or at least with strong denominational identities;

Harvard - "A 1643 publication defined the university's purpose: "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust". The college trained many Puritan ministers in its early years[28] and offered a classic curriculum that was based on the English university model‍—‌many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge‍—‌but also conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. While Harvard never affiliated with any particular denomination, many of its earliest graduates went on to become Puritan clergymen."

Brown - seems to have started off as non-denominational, as the Baptists wanted a college of their own: "The Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches were also interested in establishing a college in Rhode Island—home of the mother church of their denomination. At the time, the Baptists were unrepresented among the colonial colleges; the Congregationalists had Harvard and Yale, the Presbyterians had the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), and the Episcopalians had the College of William and Mary and King's College (later Columbia) while their local University of Pennsylvania was specifically founded without direct association with any particular denomination. Isaac Backus, a historian of the New England Baptists and an inaugural trustee of Brown, wrote of the October 1762 resolution taken at Philadelphia:

The Philadelphia Association obtained such an acquaintance with our affairs, as to bring them to an apprehension that it was practicable and expedient to erect a college in the Colony of Rhode-Island, under the chief direction of the Baptists; ... Mr. James Manning, who took his first degree in New-Jersey college in September, 1762, was esteemed a suitable leader in this important work."

Columbia - "Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college. The period leading up to the school's founding was marked by controversy, with various groups competing to determine its location and religious affiliation. Advocates of New York City met with success on the first point, while the Church of England prevailed on the latter. However, all constituencies agreed to commit themselves to principles of religious liberty in establishing the policies of the College."

Cornell - later foundation (in the 19th century) and on purely secular educational grounds: "Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883, it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian school, but had to compete with church-sponsored institutions for gaining New York's land-grant status."

Dartmouth - "Although founded to educate Native Americans in Christian theology and the English way of life, the university primarily trained Congregationalist ministers during its early history before it gradually secularized, emerging at the turn of the 20th century from relative obscurity into national prominence."

Princeton - "Princeton University was founded at Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1746 as the College of New Jersey. New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1746 in order to train ministers dedicated to their views. The college was the educational and religious capital of Scottish-Irish America."

Pennsylvania - "In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time in which it was preached. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. …Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard, William & Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey—Franklin's new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service."

Yale - "Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", a would-be charter passed during a meeting in New Haven by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701. The Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. …Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, and the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as increasingly liberal, ecclesiastically lax, and overly broad in Church polity. The feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not."

White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, indeed!

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I read Brooks' book, actually a couple of his, a decade or so ago.

My uncle, a working-class public high school kid from a small city in Kansas, attended Harvard as a scholarship student starting in the late 1940s. He had a terrible time there which was entirely cultural, truly a fish out of water. Then he spent his entire adult life at various middling white-collar jobs in New England trying vainly to "live up to" all that he'd encountered at Harvard. He was never a very happy person and it seemed clear that a lot of that was that Harvard, when he went there, was a lot like what Brooks describes.

Then I, a middle-class public high school kid from the northern Midwest, got admitted to Yale in 1981 (and wait-listed by Harvard but I really wanted to go to Yale because my high school girlfriend/fiance was heading to NYU). I did attend Yale and had a generally good undergrad experience (with the girl not so much, cie la vie).

It is clear to me that I would not be seriously considered for admission today by either of those schools; my credentials were decent and quirky-enough-to-stand-out for the 1980s, would be quite pedestrian today. (My wife works in college admissions and I have through her gained a fairly deep understanding of how that whole thing has shifted in recent decades.)

I was much less a fish out of water than my uncle had been, partly because of the overall shift that Brooks describes. However I do think that the social change was not as abrupt as he describes -- when I was at New Haven the legacy admissions were still a visible plurality, and still in some ways dominated the social scene on campus. And that plurality was overwhelmingly male, which connects to my other point to make here....

Which is that Brooks seems to largely miss or ignore the other great shift in Ivy League admissions during the period he is writing about: the inclusion of women. Those schools went from all-male to co-ed pretty abruptly. By the time I got to New Haven the college was 55-45 male-female. By the 1990s it was basically even, and for a quarter-century now all of those institutions have actually struggled to keep their male percentages above 40%.(*)

As a 1980s undergrad writer and then editor of the college newspaper I interviewed various older male faculty members (for various articles) who were holdovers from the "old Yale"; every single one of them regarded the influence(s) of women students as by miles the greatest cultural change within the institution. They had a range of opinions about whether or to what degree that change was net-positive; but every single one of them thought it was the most dramatic change. They were clear and in some cases eloquent that they meant change beyond the obvious, they were talking about culture, and "the institution's core ethos" and stuff like that, not just things like mating habits.

More broadly, that seems to me like a huge shift in the composition of the U.S.'s (Western Europe's) establishment or elite classes during the period that Brooks writes about. And a historically-unique one by the way. So it seems like a factor which must be considered more than he seems interested in.

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"George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II - the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan."

This was a powerful line. The military is one of the most formative institutions we have, so shifting from an élite where military service in youth was common, to one where such service is rare, would likely result in all sorts of shifts in mindset.

Granted, in the WW2 generation, military service was very common at all levels of society, élite or otherwise. It's good that we haven't *needed* that level of mobilization recently. But it does change the mindset of a class quite a bit when military service is normal versus abnormal.

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I'm waiting for the day when we get a Rationalist's review of The Joys of Sex .

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I don't have a wide enough pool of potential Category X people to draw upon.

Having money is certainly a help in most things. One can take more risks. But I don't think having the money would disqualify one from being Category X for Paul.

I knew (very casually ...) some Silicon Valley types who tend to work at small companies pursuing some radical idea: Lucid Dreaming technology aids, or anonymous computation. A bunch were signed up for cryonic suspension.

Would Paul have classified them as Category X? I dunno. I think of them as mostly being upper-middle class in outlook, but middle class folks who take ideas much more seriously than most people and are willing to take ideas to a logical conclusion even if that conclusion isn't mainstream. But still middle class.

Does homeschooling count towards being Category X? Homeschooling still seems pretty independent-minded to me, but maybe this isn't quite what Paul had in mind?

Category X really doesn't fit Paul's model well and if one was rigorous about definitions it might even vanish -- most/all Category X people could be neatly binned in one of the existing classes. Or maybe not.

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https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/

Piece about wealthy university students of elite class who pretend to be poor, abdicate the responsibility inherent in their lucky situation, and the author would like them to not do this (something like that). Quick scan of comments and I didn't see this op-ed posted, so I thought I'd add it.

I feel mostly resigned to the idea that some smaller number of people/families will always have more money (power) than the larger remainder of the population, with minimal space for new "blood" to move into that highest echelon. In this case, I would prefer that upper crust people both 1.) do obnoxiously stereotypical rich people things because if they don't, who can? and 2.) feel some amount of weight from their crowns in the form of an obligation to do big, great things in society (even if this is mostly so that they can brag about it on the polo field (pitch? grounds?)).

The thing I ponder after reading Scott's piece and the linked article above: Is there an actionable way to influence the culture of wealthy families to nudge them back towards that aforementioned noblesse oblige? Could we just ask those 0.1%'ers to please stop with the white water rafting and get back to cultivating the next generation of powerful philosopher kings? Is EA this nudge? Or, based on the texts Scott referenced, should I understand that this process will just sort of happen as a result of natural fluctuations in signaling, taste-making, etc. and I should just relax and enjoy the yacht races?

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Considering the extent to which the 19th century Ivy League were primarily still provincial finishing schools for future clergymen and schoolmasters, I wonder to what extent they in turn were following the lead of the new class of boys' schools, like Groton (1884) and St. Paul's (1856). Which were in turn aping Rugby. Never underestimate the power of Anglophilia in shaping a nation's governing elite. Maybe the collapse of British Empire is what finally did in the WASPs! Timing lines up. Though Vietnam's "best and brightest" may be a better account. In either case, complete loss of self-confidence.

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Bobo really took off in France, where the word is very common.

"Metropolitan" is an excellent movie about the dynamics you describe.

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I’m sorry I haven’t read the 314 comments before mine, but I think the most interesting thing about “Ivy League creates the upper class” is what’s been happening to college admissions since the mid-nineties.

Specifically, the Scholastic Aptitude Test of yesteryear became the Scholastic Achievement Test. Today, SAT stands for nothing. The math was gutted. Check out the old numerical reasoning and compare it to the modern math section. Currently, remembering the sin/cos/tan of 30, 60, and 90° angles will do wonders for one’s score. Is that really reflective of a facility with math?

On verbal, the analogies were eliminated because they were too hard to study for. Analogies have one of the highest g-loadings of IQ subtests. There were other changes to the verbal, like all the read-and-match-by-scanning-the-passage questions are less indicative of intelligence than figuring out “what’s the analogy.”

Scoring is ridiculously easy these days. Remember when 0-3 people scored 1600 on the SAT? Now, thousands of people score 1600, at least, they got an 800 on each section of the test in the 10 times they took the test.

Scoring is much less dedicated to preventing false positives. There are now four answer choices on each question, down from five. Instead of penalizing wrong answers more than blank ones, both are scored equally. Penalizing wrong answers reduces false positives, people with high scores but low ability.

I wrote a long comment on iSteve about this, complete with more details and links.

This must have a huge impact on who gets into college. Colleges were big on bragging about “this is our most diverse class ever with our highest SAT average, but they never reported the mean percentile scores, which were certainly lower than in earlier years.

As bad as this is for letting competitive ambitious people into the upper class instead of y’know, smart people, it’s rough for high schoolers. The SAT used to be a stressful day. The norm for upper-middle class+ kids and social climbing Asian immigrants spend years practicing for the test. I have heard to Korean kids have summer schools where all they do is practice gaming the test. A test that has intentionally become much easier to game.

I’m curious about what employers think of people coming out of the Ivy League. Do they think recent graduates today are as smart as the ones thirty years ago? What do they think about the Asians, especially? Does anyone know?

Anyway, people who took the SAT in 1995 are 43 or so today. These people are coming into influential positions in institutions. Institutions that are not covering themselves in glory. Is that because the people running things are ambitious, competitive, and ruthless, but a lot less intelligent than the people they replaced?

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Personally, I see changes in Western leadership more a function of decadence than meritocracy or aristocracy (either feudal or Ivy League).

I do think it is important to differentiate between a small group of inbred wealthy that are mostly playboys/playgirls/society types - that spits out a few who want to be leaders of their nations/societies vs. a professional managerial class in which every single one believes that they are simply hair splitting difference from being leaders of society/nation.

There are likely also substantive differences between a group of people who are already wealthy and stable in their position vs. a different group of people who are constantly jockeying for position and who are, by and large, still in search of permanent wealth and/or position.

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The "bluecheck" thing never made all that much sense even pre-Musk, since for example, Trump himself had the blue check. It seems to be a right-wing code word for "journalist" (since historically, journalism was the most common way to get the check), in which case you might as well just *say* journalist unless the purpose is in-group signaling rather than communication.

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My new model: There are five (count 'em) sets of elites in American society:

1. Wall Street

2. Hollywood

3. Silicon Valley

4. Washington DC

5. The media (which is the only one that doesn't have a neat geographical synecdoche)

Other wealthy and/or respected sectors like oil, medicine, academia, and the military, don't really have power on their own, only what can be borrowed from government or media. This is why you won't catch the children of powerful people going off to work in them; only in one of the big five.

The emergence of Silicon Valley as a power centre on its own is very recent; Silicon Valley was rich long before it was powerful; they only became powerful once the social media age began and they started to control the flow of information. This, not coincidentally, the point at which the industry got co-opted by the left side of politics, kicking out or silencing the libertarian-leaning old guard.

Anyway, there's five elites, and each has different characteristics. Each has slightly different characteristics in terms of the sort of people who rule it. Some can still be broken into by outsiders, others are extremely closed off. Some are centrist, others are far left (none is conservative). Some worship Harvard, others worship Stanford, and some worship random liberal arts colleges that I've never even heard of. They're all chummy with each other, and they're all at low-level war with each other. And of course there's internal conflicts in each of these institutions too.

Anyway, I think that thinking about the modern elite class makes more sense once it's considered as a weird multipolar blob riven by internal conflicts.

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I've wondered whether the change in Ivy League admissions was really an uncaused cause. It seems that Harvard has always had a deep attitude that it graduates the future leaders of society (particularly in the "high social status" sense of "leader"), going back to when it graduated Puritan ministers. And the 1950s and early 1960s would be when it would start becoming apparent that there were ways to become a leader in Boston and its hinterlands that didn't depend on being from a moneyed WASP background. That would have been the point where businesses would start to be driven by understanding and harnessing new technologies as much as the traditional hard work and ruthlessness. ("Route 128" was Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.) So Harvard's change may have been as much a reaction to the changing times as a driver of it.

Which may also explain some of the affirmative action wars. As Scott says, even if an East-Asian-American has sterling academic credentials and comes from high-status roots in the old country (as many do), currently there they're at an ethnic disadvantage for reaching positions of high status due to their shallow roots in the US. So loading up the class with high-performing East-Asian-Americans doesn't optimize "the social status of our graduates at age 50".

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"Your particular Native American blanket might have been made by the most famous Native artisan, using only heirloom wool sustainably harvested from free-range sheep raised on traditional farms run by indigenous people of color. If your guests have any class, they will see the blanket, recognize it, and know all of that."

- it can't actually be true that guests ever recognize these attributes in blankets?

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Was the old WASP aristocracy really all that...ostentatious? My father is an old-line WASP (my grandmother frittered her inheritance away on racehorses, so the money--but not all the antiques--are gone) and takes great pains **not** to look like he's spent a lot of money--the family car has never been bought new, for example. At the same time, his tastes are unmistakably upper-class ones...

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I can't help but wonder if Musk's doing-away-with the blue check as a status symbol will lead to the usurpation of the Meritocrat aristocracy, just as Conant/Pusey's alterations to Harvard's admissions policy supposedly led to the usurpation of the WASPs'.

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Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead seems like it aligns perfectly with the idea that Meritocrats derided ornate architecture as a relic of the decadent past. The most interesting thing about the book is the way it uses architecture as a proxy for Rand's ideological divide in society. In one section Roark gets absolutely pissed when a customer comes and asks him to add decorative columns to the front of his design:

"Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope--not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it."

"Well," said Mr. Janss, "I’ve never thought of it that way." He added, without great conviction: "But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty."

"What who calls what beauty?"

"Well-l-l..."

"Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?"

"I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another," Mr. Janss confessed, "but I guess that’s what the public wants."

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"Bobos" absolutely caught on in French, and is still used to this day.

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Dec 2, 2022·edited Dec 2, 2022

I think this review is still giving too much credence to what's basically a monocausal explanation of 'kids these days are the problem' for everything. That is, even if we grant that there was a shift towards meritocracy in college admissions (some of the other comments talk about it being more complicated than that, but I'm not that familiar with the topic):

* The transition towards simplified art - that is, more or less, modernist art - started in ~1900, not 1955.

* Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe. Furthermore, the concept of a meritocracy determined by standardized testing is *much* closer to High Modernism than premodern elites, and some serious explanation would be needed for this meritocratic elite to be the ones that turned against meritocracy.

* Whether or not 'starving artists' have vanished as a class, Fussell wasn't among their number, and the concept doesn't seem to much overlap with 'Class X'. (I do think ACX has a tendency towards over-cynicism in assuming that everything is signaling and that people have no honest interests. The vast majority of 'new elite' members do not enjoy whitewater rafting, and so they don't participate in whitewater rafting.)

* Conservatives have complained about the new generation lacking 'values' for the entirety of human history. The fact that they're also complaining now really doesn't require explanation.

The connection with political polarization, though, does seem like it may be related - if the same elites ran both parties, it makes sense that their policies weren't that different. Of course, polarization very much is a cycle. Then again, the dominance of the Old Establishment wasn't eternal either, and the late 19th century seems like very much a period that also followed a different elite (the agrarian slaveholding elite, maybe corresponding to the 'Cavaliers') losing much of their elite status. So maybe there's something there - cycles of elite competition and all that. (Though searching for cycles in history is generally a matter of finding patterns in random noise, and I'm not entirely convinced Turchin's work is different.)

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Apropos the connection to “Whither Tartaria?”, I was recently reading something about fascism that brought up Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism.” Eco devotes several of his 14 signs of fascism to a rejection of modernism and modern art. Prefer the old stuff? That’s your inner Nazi talking. I’m not sure this is as powerful an idea as it once was, but I suspect it was critically important.

I already knew there were entire movements in post-WWII European art that worried any representational art (art that depicts something recognizable in the physical world) had been tainted by fascism. It’s a hard thing to wrap my head around the idea that someone somewhere refused to paint, say, a nude or a bowl of fruit because it reminded them of Nazis, but I didn’t live through the war.

I recently realized the dominance of spare, unadorned, rectilinear “Brutalist” (an oft-misused term) buildings in the latter half of the 20th century could easily be due to a combination of perceived cost savings and the possibility that *everyone who mattered* might call you a fascist if you objected. The former might be enough on its own, but paired with the potential charge of crypto fascism, well, I bet that kept a lot of people in their seats at the town hall.

And it works both ways. Remember the minor freak-out when Trump declared that Neoclassical would be the standard style for new government buildings? Trump likes old-school things, and is old enough himself to have been building things in NYC when both its bobo and legit bohemian populations were at their peak. If anyone was on the receiving end of this theory it was him. We all knew who the Neoclassical requirement was supposed to stick it to in 2017, even if more recent generations can’t quite articulate their associations for traditional vs. modern architecture. So this pattern or something like it will probably persist.

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>The WASP aristocracy in fact seems bad to me; a lot of them really were arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting.

Maybe, But didn't they also sponsor not-boorish artists to create masterpieces, akin to how European (first noble, then bourgeois) elites sponsored much of what fills the Louvre and a hundred other museums today?

A separation of tasks between the wealth-producer and the beauty-creator seems to produce better results than having your bobo install his own painting atelier in his 600m² lakeside chalet and make his own shitty -but oh so full of individuality- paintings.

Also, Yachting (and a lot of boorish old-money activity, like breeding horses or hunting castaways that trespass on your island) sounds hella fun, and I won't blame them for indulging on it.

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I feel like if even half of this was true, The change in Harvard’s and other university’s admission policy would have been a much bigger deal. Aristocracies don’t generally sit on their hands when something threatens their position. At the very least there would be legislative attempts to reverse the change. It’s possible the aristocracy didn’t realize how important the change was, but they should have realized it when the meritocrats became a thing, and when their kids stopped getting into top universities. There just wasn’t enough of a fight for something which supposedly toppled a virtual nobility. And it is highly unusual for an entire class of people to make an epistemic mistake about something which it is very important for them to get right, when the consequences of a mistake will be immediate and when the subject isn’t some obscure scientific field which requires expertise to understand. If David was smart enough to figure all of this out, why weren’t the aristocrats? It was far more important for them to get it right, and it doesn’t seem that David’s knowledge of the future was particularly useful for this inference, so the aristocrats had nearly all the relevant information David did.

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I *wish* rich people nowadays just threw parties and bought expensive stuff. That's harmless. Mildly wasteful at worst.

Instead, we made them feel that that was bad and now they seek absolution for their perceived sins by trying to save the world, but actually increasing all kind of major risks (hello, nuclear war with Russia)

I wish SBF had done the drugs and the orgies without also feeling the need to be a productive member of society.

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Given that the architecture changed before the enrollment process, and given that something prompted the enrollment process itself to change, I think it's worth noticing that, while who the elites are and what they value may be upstream of many things, something else is necessarily upstream of who the elites are and what they value.

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"But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be."

This quote really struck me as not right. What it took to demolish that old WASP aristocracy was the rise of the world's first long-lasting republic, an industrial revolution, a race war in which the republic happened to be on the right side, and a small set of relatively independent institutions that were (a) key to the elite and (b) relatively easily changed from the inside... that's a startling set of circumstances.

Quite the contrary, if Brooks is right, this demonstrates just how hard it is to dislodge an aristocracy, especially given that the old WASP aristocracy never really went away. It just got pushed slightly to the side, and could easily come roaring back.

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""Bobos”, stood for bourgeois bohemians. It was cute but never caught on" -> actually it did catch on in French! Quite a common expression

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Dec 3, 2022·edited Dec 14, 2022

The meritocratic phase of the Ivies lasted only a few years, from 1960 to sometime around 1967 when full-tuition academic scholarships were eliminated at all Ivy League schools, using the justification that they were ruining football. This was a major blow to their selectivity; before then, there had been /many/ full-tuition scholarships at most of the ivy leagues.

In the 1970s, full-tuition merit scholarships offered by third parties began to appear, but not for white males (except for scholarships offered only for particular majors, usually for careers in what was considered charitable work). Financial aid operated on the principle that they would start giving you financial aid only after your parents sold all their assets and spent all their money, and screw your brothers and sisters if that made it impossible for them to go to college. By 1980, no one could afford ivy-league tuitions except the rich or the broke, and only people who weren't white males could get full-tuition merit scholarships.

Starting around 1970, people who hadn't gone to any Ivy League or equivalent school (eg MIT) suddenly were blocked from reaching positions of power, wealth, or prestige--in politics, law, finance, business, education, and science. I did a survey around 2010 of people who had Nobels in physics, and found that of those who attended college before 1970, most had either not attended an ivy, or attended an ivy or equivalent (in physics) on a full-tuition merit scholarship. After 1970, that number dropped to... a very small number, impossible to establish because I couldn't know whether non-white-male students had received a full-tuition scholarship, but possibly zero. By the 1980s (IIRC), the number of Supreme Court justices who hadn't attended an Ivy had dropped from "most of them" to zero or one. After 1990, the same could be said of elected US Presidents, and the number of new American industrialist billionaires who hadn't attended an ivy or equivalent had dropped from "most of them" to a few, owing to big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.

Also in the 1970s, the political parties were disrupted, with the Democrats losing the South, and starting to lose the working class. They flipped positions between then and now. The Democrats are now the party of the rich. Witness the fact that they're outspending the Republicans right now in the critical Georgia Senate race by 2 to 1. Check political-spending statistics, and it appears that roughly a third of the disposable wealth in America was transferred to Republicans to Democrats between 1980 and the present.

This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-branding the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party toward identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.

The alternative hypothesis, that the ivies & co. suddenly became so good at picking smart people in the 1960s that they scooped up literally everyone capable of success since then, is infeasible, because

1. they can only admit about 1/1000th to 2/1000th of America's college population each year, and standardized tests show the median Ivy attendee is only in the 98th percentile

2. middle-class white & Asian males can't /all/ suddenly be incapable of success

3. most or all of them don't require standardized tests anymore on an application, so they have no good means of identifying talented students

4. in earlier years, enough highly-successful people hadn't performed well in, or hadn't attended, high school (eg Edison, Einstein, Henry Ford) that there should be at least some such people today, but I'm not aware of any

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I think this overestimates the role of elites in shaping culture, both under the old money aristocracy and the new money quasi-meritocracy. In a liberal, democratic, capitalist society, elites are strongly incentivized to appeal to the preferences of the masses, at least on a surface level: Political elites need to appeal to voters, while corporate elites (including the media) need to appeal to consumers.

Instead, the Blue Tribe seems largely centered around the white-collar "professional-managerial" (and academic) upper middle class, bolstered by the support of blue-collar minorities, young but educated activists, and various corporations that deal with the public or the government directly and thus have to worry about maintaining good PR. The Red Tribe seems largely centered around a different subset of the upper middle class, mostly blue-collar "petit-bourgeoisie" independent contractors and small business owners, bolstered by support from rural Whites, disgruntled youths from Blue Tribe backgrounds who've defected, and companies in fields like manufacturing that don't need to be overly concerned with image and can comfortably default to supporting the more fiscally conservative party. The individual cultural preferences of the multi-millionaires and billionaires aren't an especially important driving factor here.

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Epigraph of this book should be:

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing was ever made.

-Immanuel Kant

Each of these different types of people experience themselves as archetypal. Their attitudes seem to them to be common sense, not always noble but reasonable, understandable. Their speech has no accent. Their jokes pierce to the absurd underpinnings of just the things that most call for it. Other people’s points of view look malformed & misguided, and their speech sounds stretched here, tilted there.

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Dec 4, 2022·edited Dec 4, 2022

We don't call it yachting anymore, it's "small boat sailing" with connotations of ruggedness, thrift (I oil the teak myself!), environmentalism (wind power), and connection to and immersion in nature. "Small" is defined as anything under 400ft (e.g. shorter than Jeff Bezos yacht). However, having a smaller boat does grant higher status, as it signals commitment to the principles above.

Also, Scott- your not realizing this makes you a suspected poseur, possibly even tragically uncool old money.

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founding

This was a really fun read, but I find Brooks' argument a little silly. I picked on it a bit here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/causal-explanations-considered-harmful

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I haven't read the book, but it seems a too simple story. Many other things were changing in US society: baby boom, rapid expansion of wealth after WWII with US the dominant industrial power, expansion of television in many households, Viet Nam, migration of many Southern blacks to Northern cities, protest culture aided by TV (MLK, Viet Nam)...

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"money-obsessed WASP capitalist who would buy the baroque gold altar"

No WASP capitalist would ever be so crude as to buy a baroque gold altar. Not sure if you missed the point about the WASPs or if David Brooks did. The whole idea was to be subtle but obvious about your money, like old boat shoes.

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"All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy."

Who's kidding whom? All of your lacrosse / country club / WASP stories are happening now, but with a different set of characters--they are not old money, not WASP. I should know I live right in the middle of it.

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A quick note that the adjective "bobo", for bohemian-bourgeoise, is (still) in use in francophone Québec. I initially misheard it as boho for bohemian until I disputed that description of a particular Montreal neighbourhood and had it explained to me.

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It seems strange to call the current group the meritocrats when they're highly critical of meritocracy, although I suppose that would have made more sense back in 2000.

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That Native American blanket example helped me understand something I saw in Australia: the aboriginal art that sells for the most is not the art that shows the most virtuosity. It's the stuff that looked "authentic" in a condescending way.

Of course, if this shift happened in Australia as well, as I suspect it did, it cannot be explained by changes in Harvard's admission policy alone.

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But possibly Sam Bankman-Fried (& Caroline) are leading indicators of the end of the "meritocratic families" and their hold on power.

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If you're worried about signalling that you've read Moldbug you can use Sailer's "megaphone" instead.

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