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The War at Stanford - The Atlantic
A few interesting things about this article:
The author is a sophomore student-journalist, and it's really good writing, by any standard. It turns out his parents are both top journalists. Nature vs nurture (vs high-status parents faking achievements by their kids to make them look good) is ambiguous, yet again!
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing. This reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism." Are the elite student protestors my former classmates' gen-z counterparts? If so, how do my elite "betters" actually go on to do good things? Or, if the elite students are genuinely better than me, why are the people who are the best at looking the best mounting their (electrically conductive material, as required by this deliberately mixed metaphor) flagpole to the third rail? Or, is the sophomore student-journalist's observation true, but irrelevant, making this is just a really well-written, yet redundant, article about campus protests?
The Stanford administration banned calls for genocide, in response to the House hearing, but acknowledged to the reporter that this is illegal, due to a California statute requiring all universities to adhere to the First Amendment, not just public universities. I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
I went to a normal but good public high school like @BahRamYou (please don't ram me), and understood from the get-go that an elite college was out of reach. I thought it was incredibly silly that anyone even countenanced elite college from this background, though some did, and the wokest ones got in. I don't resent it, because I understood that the elite colleges are for the upper class and people the upper class has pity on. I'm middle class, have always been middle class, and I followed the middle class path.
A "good school" to my class is a state school, a "bad school" is a private school, because the only private schools any of my peers were likely to get into would just be tens of thousands more a semester for no extra signaling benefit. Nobody in my class had a stone's chance in hell of getting into any school the upper-middle class would consider "good" unless they were some kind of minority. Getting in-state tuition at a flagship state school was the goal.
My peers are, generally, doing okay. Lots of people working in IT, office jobs, computer programming, nursing, teaching, medical tech, even a couple doctors if I recall correctly. Lots of people having cute babies and building lives together. Some aren't doing well, but that's true for any population of people. Not going to an elite college didn't destroy everyone's ability to live a good and happy life. It destroyed their chance of becoming elite, but they didn't have that expectation anyway. I'm going to teach my children that there's no way on earth they're going to be President or have an elite role, but there's every chance in the world they're going to have a meaningful, fulfilling life if they focus on living according to their values and focusing on the content of their friends' and partners' character instead of their status.
I don't understand the obsession with it, either. Not everyone in society is going to be elite. Some people are going to be normies. The struggle is to identify areas of economic need and study those. Blue collar work is in demand, and we desperately need conscientious people with integrity in these roles that are undervalued for status reasons. White collar jobs still exist.
When people describe all these expectations, all these extracurriculars, all this stress about test scores and good schools and networking and "don't you dare make a mistake"... it sounds so unbelievably suffocating that it's yet another non-miracle to me that so many preppy professional people have concluded our society is deeply oppressive. Because for them, it is.
It is totally fascinating to me that the upper-middle class folks typically hold an ideology that talks a lot about human equality, and says people don't choose their life outcomes, and we need to be respectful of people's different lifestyles, and yada yada yada, but also thinks mediocrity is a terrible life outcome, and you better go to an elite school and have an elite job! The intense pressure I see some people describe is totally alien to me. Sometimes I have to do a double-take, because it sounds like people are describing China and not America.
This is a drum I occasionally beat- the upper class kids aren’t alright. Mental health, transgenderism, it’s not just screens. Upper class kids from culturally liberal backgrounds are under an immense amount of pressure to do things that are extremely difficult in arbitrary ways. Understandably many of them don’t make it. Some become failsons, who have a laissez-faire attitude to community college and smoke lots of weed while living with their parents into adulthood. Some milk themselves and others try to change their gender first.
There’s no forgiveness for error, either. You wonder why cancel culture has no ramp back? That’s why.
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I understand what you're saying, but you sound like you believe your outcomes are essentially fixed at birth, or very early in life. I agree that it's rare for someone to break out of their class origins, and it's also probably unrealistic and unhealthy to have "joining the elites" as a goal in life, such that you'll feel like a failure in life if you don't get there.
That said, it is possible to do this, and someone who really sets their mind to it (and has the raw ability, an important qualification) has at least a chance.
Currently reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln, our quintessential "born in a log cabin" American success story. And it does not disappoint: for once, the mythology is mostly true. His father was an uneducated shiftless failure who sneered at "book learning." His mother was a decent but equally uneducated woman who may also have been kind of a floozy. He grew up in crude, impoverished surroundings with violent, uneducated, low trust people who saw no value in working hard or being ambitious or trying to improve their lives because this was assumed to be foolish and pointless. Lincoln failed in most of his business ventures and several attempts at careers.
Now, Abraham Lincoln was obviously exceptional. Even at a young age, people were recognizing that he was smarter than his peers. But while obviously not everyone will be a log cabin to president success story, I would submit that what separated Lincoln was not so much his intelligence, but that at a young age he explicitly rejected your premise: "This is the class I was born into and I should not expect to escape it."
Lincoln was president in the 1800s. It's easy to believe that class divisions back then didn't work like they do now, especially given the proportionately greater rural population.
If anything, it was harder in the 1800s to move up in class.
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Isn't that going too far? The reality is that there is a small but real chance that your children actually are going to attain elite status in society. I don't see the benefit of trying to train them to not have outrageous-level ambition.
I think it makes sense to teach children not to put all their hopes in life on becoming NBA players, famous actors, or elite politicians. But I wouldn't want to train them to think that they have literally no chance of becoming elite.
For some people that is just the reality. They don't have the family background, connections, money, time or resources to white-knuckle their way into the elite. If they get involved in politics, they may become relatively important at a local level. Much less chance they'll be important nationally, and replicating Obama's success at "I went from the log cabin to the White House" is impossible. As it was for Obama, he most certainly was not from the log cabin background, and it's probably important to note that the first African-American president wasn't the typical, even upper-class, African-American.
They can do well, of course, which is what urquan is saying. But unless they're unusually talented, they are not going to be the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, to take examples. They're not going to get into the Ivies, they are not going to be hob-nobbing with the movers and shakers except on a local level, and that's perfectly fine because you don't have to agonise over being one of the 1% or 10% to have a good life.
Wanting to be rich and famous, when there isn't a realistic chance of that, is just going to make you unhappy. How many complaints do we see of the "I was told 'just be yourself' and that would get me a girlfriend, this was all lies" type? We'll see the same over "I was told 'you can be anything' but that was all lies" if you sell your ordinary kid the American Dream of being extraordinary. The American Dream is "you can make it", but it's "even a poor serf or peasant like you from the Old Country can make it, because the circumstances holding you down there don't apply here". It wasn't "Marco Abramohvic can be president fresh off the boat", it was "Marco Abramohvic, fresh off the boat, can work his way up to owning his own small shop selling cheese without being taxed out the door by the local squire, duke, or pogrom".
Now if Marco establishes a cheese empire, maybe his grand-kids who have changed their name to Abrams can get into the Ivies and be part of the elite, because rising up into the gentry class is a thing that happens. But if they're still Abramohvic with the small cheese shop, no. That's the reality that urquan is talking about. And it's not a bad life, either.
What is bad is the messaging that unless you scrabble your way into the elite, you are a loser in life, even if you have a normal, ordinary, decent life. That's harmful. If you don't go to Harvard, you are missing out! In fact, you are being denied! Discriminated against! It is your right to go to Harvard! Well, are you good enough to go to Harvard in the first place? If you are, and you are being hampered by deliberate obstacles set in your path, then go ahead and fight for your rights, and I'll support you. But if the answer is no, I'm smaller university if university at all level, then you are not being denied anything and the life you can get is not a bad life.
RDS is a national level politician and he came from a blue collar background.
DeSantis claims to have a working class background, but as far as I can tell it's largely fictional. His parents were more-or-less working-class, but he went straight from high school to Yale, was briefly a teacher, and then went to Harvard Law School. He then into the US Navy as an officer. DeSantis himself has never had a blue-collar job.
There's a point where "my father once had a job where he worked with his hands" doesn't count for that much.
Being born to a working class family is a working class background no matter how many scholarships you get.
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Huh? I’m not disputing that RDS went to Yale and Harvard. I’m saying he didn’t grow up elite which is what OP suggested.
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I think federal office is more or less closed to non-elites. I can’t remember the last time someone from a normie background achieved such a thing. Maybe Carter, but even in his era, he’s an outlier, you’d probably need to go back the the 19th century to find a significant swath of congress being from relatively normal-people backgrounds.
As to what to teach kids, I mean I think it’s cruel to over promise on their futures. We’re in the third generation of people raised to dream big. And I think for the 99% who won’t get those things, their lives were hampered by these outrageously high aspirations that any adult could have told them were wildly unreasonable. The result is a generation saddled with a lifetime of debt for a degree that is quite literally worthless. It’s young adults feeling like failures because their wildly inflated expectations of success in fields where there are maybe ten thousand new graduates hoping for a single job. We graduate more psychology majors every year then there are psychologists in the USA. We graduated millions of aspiring artists with no real job skills despite the fact that even those who manage to sell their art almost certainly won’t make a living off their art. Publishing houses get mountains and mountains of letters from people who want to be writers. Now they can’t pay off their loans, can’t get a real job, and have been taught that the jobs they’re actually qualified for are beneath them. I’m sorry, but for the vast majority, the fine arts and liberal arts majors qualify the students for retail and restaurant jobs. Psychology is in a similar position. Had they been told at 18 that they were likely to get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, they’d very likely have chosen a major of actual career value and not be making TikTok’s of themselves crying in the car because they got a worthless degree loads of debt and can only get jobs at call centers, retail and restaurants.
I think all of the above is a way to say that essentially people need to think more about what the failure state is. Over encouraging your kids to dream big rarely results in huge success and more likely results in heartache and financial difficulties.
Doesn’t Ron Desantis disprove your rule that non-elites can’t achieve high office or even Joe Biden?
Desantis has like 400k networth now. Yes he has has the elite degrees. This just says the filter for entering the elites may be earlier. He no doubt got great SAT scores early then got into elite schools. Paid for it looks like from ROTC money.
The thing with the filter being earlier it could mean one of two things.
Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have money or elite academics early.
The filter may fall in different ways for different people. Even in the days of aristocracy, a super-gifted person might be able to claw their way into elite circles. Or perhaps one of high ambition and the will to do what it takes to get in. But barring near obsession with making it or extremely high skill, I don’t think it’s possible to be in a federal elected position (and by the way, Desantis as governor is in state politics, not federal).
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But that's the point there; you can say "DeSantis and Biden came from ordinary backgrounds" but when you look at them, yeah ordinary backgrounds but DeSantis was smart enough to get into the good university etc.
Biden, looking him up on Wikipedia, has a law degree. He's not an ex-coal miner like Keir Hardie. Indeed, he even was an adjunct professor, and even if we presume this was an easy gig, again it's not "and Joe is blue-collar salt of the earth background" as per the potted bio notion of his life:
And seemingly the family background was affluent, but then became what would be called elsewhere "distressed gentlefolk" until his father later got back on his feet:
He got into local politics, got elected to the Senate, and carved out a career as a good reliable old-style party hack with a solid reputation as the guy who didn't step out of line and knew how to wheel and deal. That was his major selling point both as Obama's VP and as President: "he's not gonna rock the boat".
I've seen the same thing in the Irish, and British, Labour Parties: the guys from the working-class, trade union background were slowly eased out or replaced by the middle-class striver types, who went to university and have affluent middle to upper-middle class family backgrounds and family members.
The last genuine working-class Labour leader for Ireland was Frank Cluskey from 1977-81. The current leaderette (I don't like her and never have) is Ivana Bacik. My personal fave of this trend is Ruairi Quinn, our first openly atheist minister, party leader from 1997-2002, so fierily socialist as a student radical that his nickname was Ho Chi Quinn, and... his brother and cousin are (or were) prominent businessmen, so none of the proletariat tendency there.
If coal miners became politicians today it would mean our entire meritocracy and educational system has failed.
I think it’s reasonable to say the leaders of our complex society should be IQ 130 and probably around a 1500 SAT score. The entire filter for our system would be failing if that kid isn’t getting selected into a top 25 university today.
It’s also been said of unions that the leaders no longer come from the workers but from outside of it. Back in the day poor immigrant kids who were smart might not have been caught up into our systems filters for leadership and would have taken the mill job. Their intelligence would have led them to leadership. But now they are filtered out earlier.
It just feels like going backwards and a thing for poor countries to not identify their most talented individuals early. Do we want 1500 SAT kids working at Wal-Mart for 20 years so they can be good working class people?
many such cases. https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/scores/1500-sat-score-is-this-good
Not sure on your point. I wasn’t saying that can get you into any school. But it does seem to be a reasonable IQ level for top American public offices.
Also every school in the top 17 except Cal Tech has per class enrollment of over 1k. So I’m fairly sure being the 20k best SAT score makes you competitive far earlier than the 17th school.
The 20th school is Notre Dame. In the fictional world of the West Wing the POTUS went to Notre Dame which seems to be a reasonable place approximately to start the academic achievement area for smart enough to handle the intellectual rigor of top office.
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Well, you can't have it both ways. You can't have "tell your kids they can be and do anything" and also "only the top top men get the top top jobs".
I don’t believe any kid can be anything. So no hypocrisy there.
I would say though until you truly know a kids ability telling them they can do anything is a good thing and probably helped me. But that’s because I grew up lower class where most can’t rise up anymore but did end up having top 1% test scores. Until you figure out if someone has talent you should leave the door open.
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Take the transitive closure of the inference steps you are doing here, and you basically arrive at "groups that are definitionally unsuited for governing roles should not self-govern". This may sound attractive to you as long as you can model the qualification as a one-dimensional parameter like IQ, but what if society develops sufficient complexity that a caste emerges which is (genetically, socially) optimised for politics in particular, rather than general intelligence? Would you then also consider it a failure of the system if any group is represented and governed by people who are not members of the caste of Superior Politicians, and thus either a born Superior Politician's potential was wasted, or administration is suboptimal? In that case, you've basically reinvented one standard argument for a medieval aristocracy.
It’s not a gotcha to me.
In that case society would be better governed by the Superior Politicians provided you mean by that they make decisions that mostly benefit all of society on net.
I also have no problem saying S Africa would be better off for everyone if only whites could vote versus everyone. I also believe that is being proven true.
And in the case of S Africa that with the whites not even giving a shit about the blacks. Your super politicians are implying that they actually would have a feel for how to benefit everyone versus being only incentivized to benefit themselves.
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The public should be educated such that members of the public who are capable of understanding self-governing are taught it.
You could ask "what if society is so complex that it's not even possible to teach people?" but I'm skeptical that this can be a thing if the elite is capable of understanding it. And "the populace can't be taught" is a magnet for motivated reasoning (or lying thinly covered by motivated reasoning) and probably won't result in an accurate assessment of whether the populace can be taught.
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I don't agree with this at all. Leaders should be people who actually have had to deal with the real world that most Americans experience on a daily basis. I don't give a damn about their IQ or their SAT scores.
Do you have an example of a well functioning government led by low IQ people?
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That is obviously terrible, but the problems with the leaders no longer coming from the workers is that not only are their interests no longer aligned with the workers' interests, but even if they were benevolent they aren't going to really understand the workers' interests.
IMO I mostly think the elites have done a good job for US workers. They work fewer hours than their parents and their homes have 10x the stuff.
In my opinion the actual erosion isn’t with economics it’s all the social policy that is hurting them the most. The working class was a lot better when they had more religiousity governing their behavior and not the elites culture of today. The tran stuff just confuses them. For every 1 in a couple thousand kids with actual biological transexualism there are hundred if not more working class kids confused who just work better with simpler sexual culture and traditions. Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
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The problem with that is you are brain-draining the labor class of all their natural leaders, and assimilating them into the gentry culture that considers working class culture its enemy. When the union leaders and managers come back from their elite colleges to manage the coal miners and Wal-Mart workers, they will no longer be working class kids who rose through the ranks and who understand and represent the interests of their people; they will instead be culturally-foreign occupiers.
Sure but then obviously you would need an India style class system where some people by birth would be restricted in their career options. This is contra to all of American history.
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I agree with MaicTheTrue. Ron DeSantis is one individual. Think of base rates: there is only one Ron DeSantis. Perhaps a handful of other politicians with similar backgrounds. What is the probability your kid is going to be the next one?
Think it in terms of sports. Some individuals become the elite sport stars worth millions of dollars and have a pretty nice life until they retire. it doesn't change the fact that 99.x% of kids who want to become top players in a major league never become one. For a parent of perfectly ordinary good kid with ordinary good talents, it would be very irresponsible to encourage their kids to start on the path of all necessary requirements to become a top athlete (invest heavily in training and start their sports career in their teens). It makes sense if you have a pretty good probability that either your kid is in the top 1/10,000 talent bracket or if you are from gang-ridden favela without any other prospects and there is absolutely nothing to lose. Neither case applies to most people in the first world, where there is a secure career path option.
I believe it is quite the same thing if you want to become an elite political operative. You need right personality, some intellectual capacity, right social talents, in-born ambition, and looks (or charisma, which is often again, the looks). If the kid is not naturally popular in his/her group of kids and demonstrating the instincts of top political operative by age 11, I don't think it would be useful feed them the ambition to be a top politician.
Ambition is good thing, but it is better to direct it to useful pursuits.
AOC? That’s two. I don’t think Massie was from some elite family and well it as well known as the other two is still pretty well known.
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You don’t need to be a politician at 22 to be a politician at 60. They can go on the safer career paths (honestly prefer politicians with outside politics experience).
Truth is in a meritocracy especially with intelligence being highly hereditary you would expect the longer that meritocracy exists that elites would largely come from some form of elites (in Americas case it’s going to be dominated by the PMC or top 20%). The only way you get elites from the lower class with intelligence being hereditary is when you have another blocking force like in immigrant communities that are working class initially before those immigrant communities sort themselves on intelligence. And the occasional smart kids whose family was poor because of alcoholism (my dad died of liver cancer so I sort of fit this).
Sure. And my point kinda was, any random kid is going to better served by realistically geared aspirations and fully generic "how to be successful in life, at the margin" kind of lessons (less about becoming the president or going to Harvard, more about conscientiousness, habit forming, reading the room to observe true unwritten rules). If the kid has the special something to become the president, he/she will stumble upon that path by their own talents (or perhaps you already possess much more meaningful resources to help them than aspirations only, such as a trust fund or networks).
Unrelated, but there may be something wrong with that model, depending on how do you quantify "largely" and all the rest of the details. An example of a possible mechanic to consider: Consider differential birthrates in social strata. Suppose a fully deterministic hereditary model of genetic eliteness and the meritocratic elite has relatively less children than non-elite classes. Then, due to dwindling applicant pool, either the size of elite gets smaller each generation, or the brightest sons and daughters of plebeian background must be given opportunities to enter. Alternatively, if the meritocratic elite has relatively more kids but size of elite stays the same, in a couple of generations, there will be large class of nearly elite upper middle class class just below the threshold, with nearly the same genetic background as the members of elite. Due to random variation, some kids of this non-elite upper middle class again would have the merits to become elite again.
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I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
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I don't mind being "normal" if normal means middle-class. But I'm worried that the middle-class is dying out. You're either a leader, or a follower. A manager/capitalist, or a worker/proletariat. We had, for a while, a middle class of technicians, educated from normal schools, who were able to use our brains to make a good living. But that option seems to be hollowing out.
I'm not sure who you mean, because I think "technicians", read broadly, are still in pretty good shape. There's a whole flurry of medical professions often requiring a 2-year degree that would fit the bill (many are "technologist" rather than "technician"). The blue collar jobs called "technician" are still around too, though obviously some are better than others. It's the vast class of lower-skill blue-collar factory jobs which have gone away, and those were always solidly in the "worker" realm.
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I agree. I think I'll be fine until retirement but I worry what it's going to be like when my kid grows up. The best path forward is to either get a government job and stay there for life or go into a field where the government limits competition via licensure, like medicine, the skilled trades or law. For everything else there are so many immigrants that you're going to be left fighting for scraps with the entire population of Asia and Africa like the Canadians are doing now.
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This upper middle class group hasn't been hollowed out, it's been growing. What is hollowing out is the middle class factory line worker who makes good money despite being effectively a low skilled laborer. The skilled knowledge workers have been growing in numbers and income.
Until they in turn will be hollowed out by AI taking over their jobs, as is the fond hopes of the owners of the companies employing them. We may look back in future decades at these "skilled knowledge workers" as the equivalent of the "unskilled labourer" on the assembly line.
I don't think AI is going to be either the bugbear or the cornucopia of post-scarcity that it's being portrayed as, but I do think some people are going to get unpleasant surprises about how "skilled" their ability is deemed for work.
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