[This is the appended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 30 August 2013.]
In these commentaries we have examined major trends like systemic unemployment, income inequality, and the notion of a Great Divide that may rend America across one of its ideological faults. In this installment I’ll briefly summarize a schism that may be new to some of you, and is definitely not apparent to most Americans – the emergence of a new cognitive upper class.
The existence of such a class of Americans has been heralded and discussed by some of the country’s leading authors, journalists, and sociologists of all political stripe. Among them are liberal economist and former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, New York Times journalist and author David Brooks, and leading sociologist and observer of the cultural scene Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame. Murray’s latest best seller to people who follow such trends is Coming Apart – The State of White America, 1960-2010 published last year and updated this year with just released data.
The major thesis of all these authors is that a new class of the cognitive elite has arisen during the last 50 years. Not only has this class arisen, but it has also pretty much separated from the rest of the country along several important dimensions. Among these are wealth, income, interests, life styles, locales, and, of course, smarts. These are the people who manage our businesses and institutions, make up the academic ranks, are prominent in government and shaping public policy, and form the creative cadres of science, technology, and the arts.
This class of so-called “over-educated elitist snobs” came into being in the years after WW2 when the universities became the great cognitive filtering system as they began accepting students on the basis of merit, instead of limiting higher education to the well-to-do or well connected. The data shows that the big transition took place over the 1950s and was well entrenched in the 1960s. The fruits of the separation began to be seen in the 1970s. Then by the 1980s the information age was in full swing with the rapid spread of low cost personal computers. All of this favored the class of people who were good at manipulating symbols, whether these made up words, numbers, or equations. Robert Reich named these people “symbolic analysts”.
And with this new class there arose a new kind of segregation. Since like people like to be with others like themselves, a process called homogamy kicked in to further the separation of classes. Social scientists use homogamy to describe the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics. In the nation’s universities educated students began marrying other educated students which led to a homogamous selection of the best and the brightest offspring, the new cognitive elite. Since their parents were able to get the best jobs, create the most profitable enterprises, and affect public policies in their favor, their kids went on to repeat the cycle, as the new upper class congregated in communities of residents with like minds and means.
As Charles Murray points out, a moment’s reflection tells us also that today homogamy works on both ends of the cognitive abilities scale. College grads are more likely to marry college grads, and high school dropouts are more likely to marry other high school dropouts. So with the information revolution in full swing, newly created wealth poured into the coffers of the new upper class as the ‘cognitive stratification’ that began in the 1950s became established in the nation’s socio-economic landscape. Data shows that since the 1970s almost all benefits of economic growth have gone to the top half of wage earners.
And since people like to congregate with people they can talk to and who understand them, this class segregation not only continues, but is picking up steam. The wealth inequality resulting from the last decades of cognitive homogamy will most likely increase as this upper class continues to create more wealth along with public policies that allow them to keep most of it. This concentration of wealth is abetted by the well-known adage of ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’ – in other words, not so smart people don’t hang on to wealth very well.
We will revisit this important class division in future commentaries, and examine in greater depth what Charles Murray and other students of the American transition have discovered.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with an addendum and relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
[Addendum] In Coming Apart Charles Murray emphasizes that America has always been a classed society – the rich have always lived differently from the poor, and both have ‘stuck to their own kind’. Of course, both classes have been dynamic in the sense that their memberships have been fluid in a land of freedom and entrepreneurship.
But his focus is the “American project” (much discussed here as the Great Experiment) – as envisioned by the Founders was “to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American was to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured.” Murray's demonstrated thesis is that “that culture is unraveling.”
In his dissertation Murray does “not make a case for America’s decline as a world power. The economic dynamics that have produced the class society (he deplores) have, paradoxically, fostered the blossoming of America’s human capital. Those dynamics will increase, not diminish, our competitiveness on the world stage in the years ahead. Nor (does he) forecast a decline in America’s military and diplomatic supremacy.”
The arguments to be made are that the transformed America will not be anything like the one we had fifty years ago when only 18 out of 100,000 were arrested for drug offenses (today that number is 1,284), and Jim Crow still ruled the South. During this half century the poor did not get poorer, considering their total income, only that they also did not get any richer, and in the interval the first step onto the ladder of self-sufficiency was made more difficult. And that systemic character of our society will not change as the cognitive elite continue to command the development and benefit of the new avenues of wealth they create.
And why may we expect that kind of future as the alternative to a Mad Max dystopia? Simply because (as we have argued) the hoi polloi are not and will not be able to command the cognitive and other types of capital to enable them to make such contributions in this age of accelerating technology and global intercourse. This story unfolds in its data-rich details.