AuthorSpencer Chen

• The connections between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy’s power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture of the 60s are questionable and don’t stand up to historical scrutiny.
• The displacement of the WASP aristocracy by a managerial upper-middle class predates the changes to university admissions that Brooks is discussing.
• The idea of a clean break between WASP culture and bohemianism is inaccurate, as many young members of the WASP aristocracy adopted bohemian values.
• The space race and nuclear weapons were more significant factors in the changing of the elite guard than university admissions.
• The current ruling class is not resisting the movement to discriminate less against Asians, and the concept of ‘starving artists’ does not overlap with ‘Class X’.
• Legacy admissions are roughly a third of Harvard students, which is fatal to the thesis of the book.
• The meritocratic phase of the Ivy League schools lasted only a few years, from 1960 to around 1967, when full-tuition academic scholarships were eliminated.
• This was a major blow to their selectivity, and by 1980, only the rich or the broke could afford Ivy League tuitions.
• This has resulted in a situation where the ruling wealthy elites can shut out middle-class white and Asian males from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line.
• The alternative hypothesis, that the Ivies suddenly became so good at picking smart people, is infeasible.
• A hereditary aristocracy might have been good because it created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites, and provided a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy.
• The nascent tech takeover of the elite was an attempt to combine the flaws of both systems, but it has done a better job combining the flaws than the positives.
• An anecdote from a WASP party reveals that money was the primary topic of conversation, and that the wealthy were embarrassed about their sinecures.
• Yale’s Jewish quota was eliminated in 1965, and the intellectual atmosphere of the campus changed immediately.
• David Brooks’ 2000 book Bobos in Paradise popularized the term “Bobos” to describe the upper-middle class of the late 1990s, but the facts of the book have been called into question.
• An alternative explanation for the current state of the US economy is that people have been inheriting money, leading to a sense of guilt and shame among beneficiaries.
• The phenomenon of Bobos has been connected to Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory, which suggest that the right and left poles of the political spectrum flip back and forth in a long-term secular cycle.

Click HERE for original. Published December 9, 2022