The New Elite?

Dr Arnold Kling, writing in the blog Library of Economics and Liberty takes issue with an article in last Sunday's Washington Post about the "New Elite".  The Instapundit links to this article.

The basis for this critique is this article by Dr Charles Murray (yes, that Charles Murray♠) in this last Sunday's Washington Post.  The title of the article, "The tea party warns of a New Elite.  They're right." is not really related to the article, but goes with The Washington Post theme of the day, which is Tea Parties.♥  Here is a long quote from the article by Dr Murray:

One of the easiest ways to make the point is to start with the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities.  In the idealized view of the meritocrats, those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment, favoring bluebloods and the wealthy, but now they are peopled by youth from all backgrounds who have gained admittance through talent, pluck and hard work.

That idealized view is only half-right.  Over the past several decades, elite schools have indeed sought out academically talented students from all backgrounds.  But the skyrocketing test scores of the freshman classes at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by socioeconomic democratization.

On the surface, it looks as if things have changed. Compared with 50 years ago, the proportion of students coming from old-money families and exclusive prep schools has dropped.  The representation of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans has increased.  Yet the student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares's book "The Power of Privilege:  Yale and America's Elite Colleges," about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares's measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.

The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above.  Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board.  This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent -- such coaching buys only a few dozen points -- but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them -- which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.  Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or rural areas where more than a third of all Americans still live.

But, to Dr Kling's critique:

I am going to disagree with the thrust of Murray's article, which is that the problem of the elite is that they are out of touch with much of America.  I think instead that the problem is that those in the elite who go into politics believe that they know more than they really do.  In my view, we are in a "cycle of failure," in which policies fail, political leaders respond by usurping more power ("we need to strengthen regulation"), failures get worse, more power gets usurped, etc.
Murray continues,

I doubt if there is much to differentiate the staff of the conservative Weekly Standard from that of the liberal New Republic, or the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute from those of the Brookings Institution, or Republican senators from Democratic ones.

I fear that this is true.  The fight is mostly over who gets to hold the reins of power. Restructuring our political system to reduce the concentration of power is a fringe idea. 
I was reminded of its fringiness when I spoke several days ago on the themes of Unchecked and Unbalanced. The audience consisted of members of the conservative elite, and the reception was polite bafflement.

Admittedly, I may have been responsible for some of the bafflement. Before the talk, I kept revising it, without coming up with a truly satisfying outline.  But what the audience wanted to hear (and what they got from most of the other speakers) was a message that once the Republican establishment is back in power, all will be well. There is no way that I could have said that.

Ah, now we see the Tea Party point of view come to the fore.  "A pox on both their houses."

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  He, the co-author of The Bell Curve, that controversial sociological examination of
♥  On the other hand, headline writers are their own little group, locked in a broom closet and not relating to the larger area of journalism or the world itself and just passing puns back and forth amongst themselves.