Prof. Ilya Somin points to a 25-question quiz from Charles Murray that is part of Murray’s work on class differences. Murray argues that modern elites are generally people who were born into an elite class, went to elite schools, and worked in elite professions, rather than those who come from working class or immigrant families and then succeeded on their own. Murray then echoes Thomas Sowell in saying that this lifelong elitism divides the ruling class from those whom they would rule, such that those who have never worked in a coal mine, for example, nor known anyone who has, then make regulations to govern coal mine workers and purport to know what is best for them. This, Murray argues, is a change from the past.
Aside from the somewhat ahistorical aspect of Mr. Murray’s ideas (feudal society? caste systems? the history of America until WWII?), he also neglects to discuss the problem of downward social mobility. Higher education is more costly than it used to be, which means that today’s doctors are often hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, not tens of thousands. Also, most ways to make good money now depend on quantitative skills (accounting, medicine, investment banking, private equity), and there are no shortage of elites who shun such academic disciplines. My generation also grew up hearing that we should “Do what [we] love and don’t worry about money,” which means that the children of today’s elites have $200,000 degrees in art history and no way to make the money their parents made.
(Law school, the traditional route for people who hate math and couldn’t pass organic chemistry, is more a route to debt slavery than the good life, WSJ hogwash aside.)
While it is problematic to have elites who purport to govern us but have no idea what people go through, I’m more concerned about the anger from the children of elites who think themselves entitled to a place amongst the elites, but no idea of how to get there beyond obtaining a degree from an elite school. Much of the reason that Occupy Wall Street was filled with the children of rich parents is that they weren’t protesting the existence of a ruling class – otherwise, they would be hating their parents instead of accepting college tuition from them – they were protesting the fact that they are not a part of it.
There are always problems when those who know little about an area try to govern it, no matter how intelligent those people may be – witness the manner in which patent attorneys and professors cite the Federal Circuit as having better patent decisions than the Supreme Court, because the former specialises in that field – but there are additional problems when people find their own pretty paws too good for work. Most people – rich or not – start out on the bottom rungs and work their way up, but the elite children born to late-in-life elite parents do not remember the lean years and have no concept of the fact that they need marketable skills and that they need to be willing to do unglamourous work in order to build their credibility, resumes, and work ethic.
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