The Elite Bubble

The infamous Dr Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) has a new book out, Coming Apart:  The State of White America, 1960-2010.  Not a promising title, is it?

The blurb at Amazon starts:

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

Over at Instapundit there was a link to a self-evaluation that helps one to understand if one is inside an elite bubble or more in contact with the hoi pilloi.  As Dr Murray puts it:

A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn't know much about how everyone else Lives is vulnerable to making mistakes.  How vulnerable are you?

Here is the "quiz".  My score was 43.

I don't think this is a problem restricted to the Democratic Party.  Just listen to Republicans complaining about "the Republcan Establishment".

I remember Rep Shirley Chisolm campaigning in 1972, for President, and saying that she was not so much worried about the ecology of the whales as she was about the ecology of little boys and girls in Appalachia and New York City.  This was a response to a college student in Denver asking about her position on ecology.  She was my kind of Democrat.  She and Senator Scoop Jackson.  Oh well, that was a long time ago.

Regards  —  Cliff