according to Sean Reardon, there is also a gap between the middle class and the elite. American society is increasingly stratified, he says, because elite parents are investing so much in the cognitive enrichment of their kids.
But is that really the right explanation? The rich pulling away from the middle class is also exactly what we would see if test-taking ability has a substantial inherited component, and the American economy is increasingly selecting for people who are very, very good at taking tests.
Toss in changes in marriage patterns, too.
Yes and one thing to keep in mind is that true that elite parents are investing so much in the cognitive enrichment, it is also true that elite children should be less motivated because that can often afford to coast on inheritance.
Also I notice that more and more professional athletes had parents who where professional athletes.
BTW if his hypothesis is correct it could be that the poor and middle class parents are smarter than the over aggressive and self-denying rich. Maybe it is smart to opt out of the rat race and say enough is enough and let the children enjoy their youth. A middle class parent might exclaim to one of these hyper-educating, rich parents that “Hey everything that the kids do need not be educational”.
Y’know Thorsten Veblen treated with this phenomenon and concluded something to the effect:
Wealth, beauty and intelligence tend to concentrate.
I think it’s interesting to look at the shift in the life scripts of the intellectual and leadership elites.
When I read anything produced, say, prior to 1980, I am often surprised to discover, upon a little cursory biographical exploration on Wikipedia, how many of the deepest and most skillful authors I read spent much, if not most, of their lives – and very often their childhoods – living under what we’d certainly consider meager conditions today and working distinctly blue-collar jobs. Many of the brilliant and successful old times I’ve met have personal histories that fit this description as well. “The Great Depression and WWII” is not the modal explanation in their cases.
The kinds of jobs that we’re told repeatedly that even ordinary / unskilled Americans “won’t do” today were apparently frequently performed by our first-rate intellectuals without much complaint only a generation or two ago.
But think about that today. Describe the pathway of the new narrow elite class. It seems much more homogenous, sheltered, and, frankly, “approved”. More to the point, it seems we’ve moved to a zero-defect, never-screw-up-even-once model. It’s not just “the kids who perform really well on tests” – the elite schools have their pick of the litter of more perfect-scorers, perfect-GPA’ers than they can admit (a point about which they are happy to brag to you, especially when pretending to ‘defend’ and ‘explain’ their ‘holistic’ admissions ‘philosophy’).
We get a lot of talk about ‘Diversity!’ but, really, It’s not hard to guess what a zip-code analysis of the the student body at the Top-6 looks like, which, for all the ethnic variance, still strikes me as socioeconomically homogeneous. And there was that recent interesting report about the lack of talented but poor whites, which probably enhances the concentration and homogeneity.
This has Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” written all over it. But really, “the kind of life script of the person who get into Harvard and becomes a member of the narrow elite, how he raises his or her children, and their chances of perpetuating the lifestyle and cycle” is, is seems to me, almost boringly and, not too long ago, completely conventionally bourgeois, but rapidly becoming entirely distinct from the rest of the population as we “cement into rigid castes”.
Ottimo, articolo davvero interessante, era proprio quello che cercavo! Grazie per lo spunto!