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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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
Divorce is actually dropping because people aren't marrying. Again, the exploding in divorce in the 70's and 80's was basically 25 years of pent-up demand and shifts in how people marry.
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