The indictment, crudely, is that we are creating a caste society unfairly dominated by upscale snobs. Richer than other Americans, they are increasingly insulated from popular beliefs and tastes (so it’s said). Worse, they perpetuate their position by sending their children to elite private universities that are gateways to the best jobs. In a book a few years ago, Labor Secretary Robert Reich called the new upper tier “symbolic analysts.” Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein termed it “the cognitive elite” in “The Bell Curve.” And Michael Lind calls it “the over-class” in his book “The Next American Nation.”
As with most stereotypes, this one contains some truth. Managers and professionals-the core of this new class-have exploded. Since 1940 the labor force has slightly more than doubled to 119 million in 1993. Meanwhile, managers quadrupled (from 3.8 million to 15.4 million) and engineers quintupled (from 300,000 to 1.7 million); doctors and lawyers expanded sharply (lawyers went from 182,000 to 777,000 and doctors from 168,000 to 605,000). With more managers and professionals, they can be treated as a cohesive class that can be analyzed, criticized or satirized.
It’s a setup. We don’t live in a classless society (and never will), but we do live in an enormously fluid one. That is the central point that all these analyses miss or minimize. The meritocracy is no monolith. It has its own cultural, economic and political fissures (doctors vs. lawyers on malpractice, for example). And the success of the people at the top does not cause the poverty of the people at the bottom. If elite universities didn’t produce successful graduates, you’d wonder: why not? They do. But if a prestige degree was the only path to advancement, you’d worry: is America a closed society? It isn’t.
One report in the mid-1980s on 2,729 top executives at 208 major corporations found that 17 percent of them didn’t go to college or dropped out; an additional 28 percent had bachelor’s degrees from nonprestige schools. At NEWSWEEK, Editor Maynard Parker graduated from Stanford; but his boss, Editor-in-Chief and President Richard Smith, went to Albion College. Jack Welch and John Smith, the heads of General Electric and General Motors, both graduated from the University of Massachusetts.
I am not denying the obvious. In life, it helps to come from a high-income, well-educated family and to go to a well-known college. But the image of a pampered elite that can easily program its own future is vastly overdrawn. I graduated from Harvard; my father had no college degree. The odds that any of my three children will go to Harvard – assuming they want to – are low; the chances of all of them going are zero. Indeed, elite colleges have become less accommodating of alumni. As late as 1961, almost a quarter of Yale freshmen were sons of Yale College graduates. In 1994, only 9 percent were.
In America, the paths to fame and fortune (and even contentment) are many and ever changing. Two of the nation’s most powerful men today, Bill Gates and Rush Limbaugh, are college dropouts. People have different talents, ambitions, drives and luck. Brothers and sisters pursue different life goals with varying success. Nor have those with higher incomes been entirely sheltered from economic upheaval. Managers and professionals have suffered from “downsizing.” By one government study, job security (though still considerable) eroded as much in the 1980s for college as for high-school graduates.
It is precisely the realization, among better-educated and higher-income Americans, that they cannot fully guarantee their own futures – let alone their children’s-that has raised society’s audible anxiety. Down the economic ladder, people have always faced possible layoffs and interrupted incomes. Hardly anyone loudly complained. Upscale society imagined itself immune to these possible upsets, and the recognition that this is an illusion has triggered outcries. But change and insecurity define both a competitive economy and a meritocracy.
Our new class theorists downplay this endless turbulence and, in the process, forget history. In a recent book, the late Robert Christopher described the “de-WASPing of America’s power elite” – that is, the decline of the stranglehold of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants on our major business and cultural institutions. Wrote Christopher:
“When I left to enter the Army in late 1942, my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut was a place where marriage between Irish and Italian Americans [still raised] eyebrows on both sides, where social intercourse between WASPs and Italian or Jewish Americans was still minimal and generally awkward, and where no one of Polish or Greek heritage could sensibly hope ever to win the presidency of a local bank or brokerage house.”
The social barriers of Christopher’s youth have been battered by intermarriage, more education and new social norms. In 1940, less than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree; now nearly 25 percent of young Americans do. At Yale (whose records are very good), about 70 percent of freshmen came from private schools in 1940. In 1994, nearly 60 percent came from public schools. Almost half were women, first admitted in 1969. About 10 percent were black, 7 percent were Hispanic and 16 percent were Asian-American. Two fifths received financial aid.
Our meritocracy has flaws and hypocrisies. Doctors, lawyers and managers often act in self-interested ways, just as unions do. There are advantages of privilege and connections; “affirmative action” is another wrinkle. But whatever its defects, the meritocracy is a huge advance over the preceding barriers of race, sex, religion and ethnicity. Life is unfair, John Kennedy once said. It always will be-but it is not rigged, at least not in America.
