The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy (2018)

Quotables<p>past:<p><i>As I got older, the holiday pomp of patriotic luncheons and bridge-playing rituals came to seem faintly ridiculous and even offensive, like an endless birthday party for people whose chief accomplishment in life was just showing up.</i><p><i>I came into many advantages by birth, but money was not among them.</i><p>present:<p><i>The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.</i><p><i>Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.</i>

Quotes about meritocracy vs reality<p><i>you will often hear ... in the United States everyone has an opportunity to make the leap: Mobility justifies inequality. As a matter of principle, this isn’t true. In the United States, it also turns out not to be true as a factual matter. Contrary to popular myth, economic mobility in the land of opportunity is not high, and it’s going down.</i><p><i>Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents’ rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise.</i><p>With these quotes are stats; they evidence how there is little mobility between socioeconomic classes. With limited exception, people tend to stay where they were born.

My intuition is that the emergence of classes is an inherent property of unperturbed social structures, amplified by the scale, regardless of the underlying political system.<p>Perturbations are what shake the structure and prevent privilege to be passed and social structure from being reinforced at each generation.<p>Peace, order, and stability are only good up to a point. Some chaos is needed to prevent societies to become too unequal.<p>Successful technological innovations tend to bring perturbation to the system, as do wars, ecological catastrophes, and pandemics.

This seems to put blame on people who have avoided the meltdown in manufacturing and other blue collar jobs, rise in housing and medical costs, etc as if it were a zero sum game, and blaming it on &quot;meritocracy&quot;.

Another author notices the Pareto curve as it applies to wealth and gawks<p>What makes this HN content at all? It&#x27;s not curious, it&#x27;s self flagellation from the Coastal class<p>You want to understand the other half? Talk to Trump voters.

This long and rambling article starts with an anecdote about the author&#x27;s own merit and class ascendance, only to move on to point out that class mobility is worse now than ever.<p>It is written with no nod towards personal responsibility and instead argues that every outcome was predestined at birth (despite the author&#x27;s humble brag to the contrary).<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the thesis is, because as a person with a day job, I don&#x27;t have time to read more than a half dozen paragraphs. It seems the author is motivated, at least to a degree, by guilt.<p>I will say that I&#x27;m conflicted about passing privilege onto children. Should I be allowed to work hard to make money to give my kids a head start (tutors, for example)? It seems preposterous to say no, that I must treat my children as badly as the worst parent in the name of equality. OTOH maybe it&#x27;s ok to institute a larger estate tax so that the next generation does have to contribute to society with all that knowledge we&#x27;ve collectively bestowed on them. It seems rather wasteful as a society to spend tons of resources educating funemployed&#x2F;under-employed trust funders.

This tactic of people not quite there saying they have it but don&#x27;t deserve it (offering personal anecdotes in the Atlantic no less) seems a bit much. The trouble with the new meritocratic elite the author describes is that it isn&#x27;t broadly recognized as an elite by the people outside it, which is arguably the source of cultural tensions now. It lacks a certain legitimacy, as though some people arrived and collected the symbols of an establishment and pretended to become them, like driving your own limousine and telling people you are rich. They have seized institutions certainly, but dying ones. Personally I don&#x27;t have much patience for writers who forfeit the stewardship of the culture they inherited, especially to signal they have somehow transcended it. It&#x27;s a kind of moral bargaining that avoids accepting they have failed to build and sustain the freedoms and opportunities of their culture, and these are the self justifying stories they tell themselves. Being more concerned with how to distribute wealth than how to build, grow, and sustain it is a cheap substitute activity. They are nice words that provide comfort to some readers I&#x27;m sure, but I can&#x27;t afford such cheap ideas.