Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration
The Impact of the Civil War on Southern Wealth Holders
The Impact of the Civil War on Southern Wealth Holders. Brandon Dupont, Joshua Rosenbloom. NBER Working Paper No. 22184. Issued in April 2016. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22184The U.S. Civil War and emancipation wiped out a substantial fraction of southern wealth. The prevailing view of most economic historians, however, is that the southern planter elite was able to retain its relative status despite these shocks. Previous studies have been hampered, however, by limits on the ability to link individuals between census years, and have been forced to focus on persistence within one or a few counties. Recent advances in electronic access to the Federal Census manuscripts now make it possible to link individuals without these constraints. We exploit the ability to search the full manuscript census to construct a sample that links top wealth holders in 1870 to their 1860 census records. Although there was an entrenched southern planter elite that retained their economic status, we find evidence that the turmoil of 1860s opened greater opportunities for mobility in the South than was the case in the North, resulting in much greater turnover among wealthy southerners than among comparably wealthy northerners. [. . .]
Comparing the two regions, it is apparent that there was considerably more turnover among the ranks of top southern wealth holders than among northern wealth holders. While more than half of the those in the top 5 percent of northern wealth holders had been in the same group in 1860 just one-third of top southern wealth holders in 1870 had enjoyed a similar status in 1860. Roughly the same proportion of the top 5 percent in each region was drawn from the next stratum of wealth holders in 1860 (90th to 95th percentile). On the other hand, our data suggest that the turmoil of the Civil War decade created much greater opportunities for those with moderate wealth in 1860 – between the 55th and 90th percentiles – to move up to the top of the wealth distribution. Nearly 40 percent of the wealthiest southerners in 1870 had been in this group in 1860, compared to less than one quarter of the richest northerners.
The Boston upper class circa 1950: "a Republican-Episcopalian group"
to succeed [Jews] assimilated the cultural tropes of America's highest status caste - the Boston Brahmins, basically.
In reality, of course, the Boston upper class was never politically radical as a group relative to other Americans -- much less in comparison to frequently socialist or communist Jewish immigrants. Not when it was predominantly Unitarian in the middle of the nineteenth century. And not in the mid-20th century, when the Boston upper class had shifted Episcopalian and remained relatively conservative:
Clearly Boston was in a state of change following World War II, undergoing alterations in outlook and values that perhaps would not be clarified for another generation. In spite of the changes, however, there was evidence that the stereotypical Boston lifestyle still existed. In maintaining this way of life in the face of strong challenges, the influence of the past on Boston and its social leaders cannot be overlooked. To appraise more scientifically the mid-century Boston Brahmin, a survey was conducted by the writer in April, 1949, when a questionnaire was mailed to a sample of women from the year's Boston Social Register. Many of the questions included sough to determine the truth of previously discussed generalities, and although it has become increasingly clear that many important points for research were not included in the questionnaire, nevertheless, a definite effort was made to test several of the previously noted characteristics of Boston Brahmins.Also see Jewish Liberalism: the Allinsmith Study:[. . .] The religious preference of our sample was clear; indeed, the previously quoted statement beginning "I come from Boston, I am Unitarian, I wear . . ." might more realistically be changed to "I am Episcopalian or Unitarian, with an emphasis on the former." For even though 77 percent of the women attended one or the other, more than twice as many were Episcopalian. The eloquence of Phillips Brooks and the English tradition seem to have eclipsed the more intellectual approach to religion exemplified by Emerson.
Certain data from this sample, if not startlingly new, clearly validated previously mentioned statements from the literature. Not only was this class Episcopalian, but it was Republican in politics. Eighty-one percent of the respondents were Republican--this in 1949, while located in Democratic Boston, and after living seventeen years under Democratic presidents.
The questionnaire's answers showed, as illustrated in literary sources, that Boston Brahmins emphasized education as a broad cultural goal, but they have been quite conservative in the amount of education given their daughters compared with that provided to sons. Of the sample, only 11 percent of the husbands did not attend college, and of the college-trained group, 71 percent attended Harvard. Of the women, only 13 percent completed college, while the largest group (39 percent), completed secondary private school only. The pattern of private schooling before college--with almost no trend toward either a more-democratic or more-aristocratic type of education--was suggested by the fact that no one in the sample attended only a secondary public school, and just 3 percent indicated they had been taught solely by private tutors.
Regarding the group's marital status, 76 percent were married, 15 percent widowed, 2 percent divorced, and 5 percent were single. Of those married, 51 percent had three or more children and only 7 percent were childless.
[. . .] The single home and its location have remained very important criteria to determine class status; however, upper-class idiosyncracies became manifest in the type of home owned and the conveniences it had. Homeowners comprised 77 percent of the sample, but not all houses were equipped with what are generally thought to be basic essentials, such as electric refrigerators or central heating. Only 2 percent had televisions. An odd item was that a few more families had fireplaces than central heating. The actual differential, while not significant in absolute figures, had some symbolic import--illustrating a way of life hardly typical of the "Great Middle Class."
The lifestyle of Boston's social leaders has alternately stimulated admiration or amusement in the minds of outsiders. The excessive frugality and the tendency not to change butchers, grocers, or candlestick makers generation after generation are well known. To a large extent, such generalities are overdrawn but not incorrect or entirely fanciful. The sample did tend to shop at R. H. Stearns and S. S. Pierce. Forty-three percent named Stearns as their favorite department store [. . .]
The Boston Brahmin woman is reputedly a busy one; thus, how she spends her time should be informative. Only 12 percent of the sample worked outside the home, with teaching, business, editing, and secretarial work being listed. Thirty-five percent stated they were employed before marriage, and the premarital occupation was similar to that followed afterward. [. . .] The more than 70 percent of the "unemployed" busied themselves with all types of activities, the most popular being care of families, cultural pursuites, and church and charitable work. [. . .]
The purpose of this chapter was to draw a composite picture of the Boston upper class and, in particular, its upper-class women. Generalities made speculatively about the Boston upper-class woman were supported by evidence from literary, manuscript, and questionnaire sources. First of all, a strong awareness of an upper class existed in this community which was felt to a large extent by the members themselves as well as by others. Many names of families and individuals were easily identified as being members of this group. One reason for the perpetuation of this class is that conscientious effort has been made by its members to remain ingrown and to foster habits, customs, and values identified with them and their ancestors. The family played the key role in maintaining the proper lineages and instituting the right values. All other significant values appeared secondary to it: individual happiness, the importance of husband's occupation, and many other factors served only to strengthen the importance of family as an institution. Although divorce occurred, it was definitely not sanctioned. So family-oriented was this group that the trend toward smaller families, characteristic of the rest of the country, was reversed here. This was a Republican-Episcopalian group where the men attended Groton and Harvard and the women the Winsor School. The importance of ancestors and their role in the history of community and country continued to vie with the values of money and education as legitimate claims for upper-class position. Even though the women did not work, they wished to be active--in the home and in the family charities, large or small. In many areas, their horizons seemed limited and their concern for larger issues undeveloped. On particular issues, they were conservative, though in the matters of morals, the question of a single--albeit strict--standard was the major preference. Certain institutions patronized by this group either were unique as to type, for instance, "The Morning of Diversion," the sewing circle, or women's clubs with specific forms and roles; or, if generally familiar, were so influenced by the local culture as to seem unusual and at times unique, such as the dancing school or the debut. In all, the picture of the Boston Brahmin, while not drawn by social scientists, was nevertheless delineated and reminiscent of W. H. Warner's portrayal of the upper-upper class in nearby Newburyport ("Yankee City"). [. . .]
Twice as many non-Brahmins as Brahmins lacked a special interest in the history of their families, but when it was expressed, that interest was according to the prevailing community pattern of genealogy: English background and Revolutionary War experiences, for example.
[Source: The Other Brahmins, Boston's Black Upper Class (c). By Adelaide M. Cromwell.]
The 1944 presidential vote also revealed this marked difference between Jewish and Gentile political behavior. The upper-class and upper-middle-class Christian denominations voted heavily against Roosevelt and in favor of Republican standard-bearer Thomas Dewey. Only 31.4% of the Congregationalists, 39.9% of the Presbyterians and 44.6% of the Episcopalians backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The more working-class denominations, however, voted heavily for him, particularly the Catholics who were 72.8% in his favor. In terms of their combined educational, occupational and status rank in the Allinsmith survey-that of second place-the Jews might well have been expected to vote Republican. Actually, they were 92.1% for Roosevelt. This overwhelming support was greater than that of any of the Christian denominations. [. . .]However, in the 1952 elections, despite the fact that the Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had led the Western coalition to victory over the Nazis, 75% of the Jewish voters supported Adlai E. Stevenson, a man who had played no role of any importance in World War II. There was no difference in the attitude of the candidates toward Jewry or the state of Israel. The issue was clearly one of moderation vs. liberalism. In a situation where American voters as a whole gave decisive support to Eisenhower, three-fourths of the Jews backed his Democratic opponent. Moreover, interviews in depth of Boston voters showed that only 30% of the Gentiles with high socioeconomic status, as against 60% of those with low socioeconomic status, backed Stevenson. Among Boston Jews, 72% of those with high status voted for Stevenson.
Relationships between wealth or social class and prosocial behavior
A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior
Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and implications are discussed.
Giving behavior of millionaires
SignificanceWealthy individuals play an important role in charitable giving. We present evidence that millionaires give more than any other group studied in the literature. This holds particularly in a clear giving situation. In our study, millionaires either participated in a dictator game or an ultimatum game and they either interacted with another millionaire or with a low-income individual. In the dictator game, the millionaire decides how to split an amount between herself and a recipient who has no power. In the ultimatum game, the receiver needs to approve the proposer’s proposal; otherwise, both players are paid zero. Millionaires give more to a low-income participant in the dictator game than in the more strategic ultimatum game.
Abstract
This paper studies conditions influencing the generosity of wealthy people. We conduct incentivized experiments with individuals who have at least €1 million in their bank account. The results show that millionaires are more generous toward low-income individuals in a giving situation when the other participant has no power, than in a strategic setting, where the other participant can punish unfair behavior. Moreover, the level of giving by millionaires is higher than in any other previous study. Our findings have important implications for charities and financial institutions that deal with wealthy individuals.
Barbara Ehrenreich: a more representative example of the non-"ethnic" element of our present elites than Garry Trudeau
Ehrenreich, one of Peter Dreier's "Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century", is the daughter of upwardly mobile, working class parents (her father was a copper miner who ended up a corporate executive).
Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town".[6] In an interview on C-SPAN, she characterized her parents as "strong union people" with two family rules: "never cross a picket line and never vote Republican".[2] In a talk she gave in 1999, Ehrenreich called herself a "fourth-generation atheist".[7]While, owing to heritable factors, we expect present elites will on average have forebears who are at least slightly above average in social status, the vast majority of their ancestors a generation or two ago were relatively unremarkable middle or working class people. The far-from-perfect heritability of social status and the fact that middle and working class people greatly outnumbered elites means there would have been significant upward social mobility in any case; but the massive expansion in the ranks of the college educated and white collar workers over the past century, along with mass immigration, means the overwhelming majority of present US elites have no special connection to the 19th-century or earlier American upper class."As a little girl", she told The New York Times in 1993, "I would go to school and have to decide if my parents were the evil people they were talking about, part of the Red Menace we read about in the Weekly Reader, just because my mother was a liberal Democrat who would always talk about racial injustice."[8] Her father was a copper miner who went to the Montana State School of Mines (now part of the University of Montana), and then to Carnegie Mellon University. He eventually became a senior executive at the Gillette Corporation. Her parents later divorced.
Even if we limit ourselves to the non-"ethnic" elements among present leftist elites, I have no doubt Ehrenreich is much more typical than Trudeau.
People have different interests and different dispositions. The "values" Ehrenreich belatedly claims as her cultural inheritance are subject to significant genetic influence. Though a range of political opinion has existed within every class throughout recent American and European history, traditional elites tended to favor the right, out of self-interest and likely also because some of the biologically-influenced traits associated with political conservatism favored entry into and retention in the elite. We now have whole segments of the elite where entry among non-"ethnics" is restricted to those who actively forsake their group and traditionalism. This does not favor "elite WASPs", but people who are genetically predisposed in that direction and relatively rootless to begin with.An acquaintance was telling me about the joys of rediscovering her ethnic and religious heritage. "I know exactly what my ancestors were doing 2,000 years ago," she said, eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, "and I can do the same things now." Then she leaned forward and inquired politely, "And what is your ethnic background, if I may ask?"
"None," I said, that being the first word in line to get out of my mouth. Well, not "none," I backtracked. Scottish, English, Irish--that was something, I supposed. Too much Irish to qualify as a WASP; too much of the hated English to warrant a "kiss Me, I'm Irish" button; plus there are a number of dead ends in the family tree due to adoptions, missing records, failing memories and the like. I was blushing by this time. Did "none" mean I was rejecting my heritage out of Anglo-Celtic self-hate? Or was I revealing a hidden ethnic chauvinism in which the Britannically derived served as a kind of neutral standard compared with the ethnic "others"?
Throughout the 60's and 70's, I watched one group after another--African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans--stand up and proudly reclaim their roots while I just sank back ever deeper into my seat. All this excitement over ethnicity stemmed, I uneasily sensed, from a past in which their ancestors had been trampled upon by my ancestors, or at least by people who looked very much like them. In addition, it had begun to seem almost un-American not to have some sort of hyphen at hand, linking one to more venerable times and locales.
But the truth is, I was raised with none. We'd eaten ethnic foods in my childhood home, but these were all borrowed, like the pasties, or Cornish meat pies, my father had picked up from his fellow miners in Butte, Montana. If my mother had one rule, it was militant ecumenism in all matters of food and experience. "Try new things," she would say, meaning anything from sweetbreads to clams, with an emphasis on the "new."
As a child, I briefly nourished a craving for tradition and roots. I immersed myself in the works of Sir Walter Scott. I pretended to believe that the bagpipe was a musical instrument. I was fascinated to learn from a grandmother that we were descended from certain Highland clans and longed for a pleated skirt in one of their distinctive tartans.
But in Ivanhoe, it was the dark-eyed "Jewess" Rebecca I identified with, not the flaxen-haired bimbo Rowena. As for clans: Why not call them "tribes," those bands of half-clad peasants and warriors whose idea of cuisine was stuffed sheep gut washed down with whisky? And then there was the sting of Disraeli's remark--which I came across in my early teens--to the effect that his ancestors had been leading orderly, literate lives when my ancestors were still rampaging through the Highlands daubing themselves with blue paint.
Motherhood put the screws on me, ethnicity-wise. I had hoped that by marrying a man of Eastern European-Jewish ancestry I would acquire for my descendants the ethnic genes that my own forebears so sadly lacked. At one point, I even subjected the children to a Seder of my own design, including a little talk about the flight from Egypt and its relevance to modern social issues. But the kids insisted on buttering their matzohs and snickering through my talk. "Give me a break, Mom," the older one said. "You don't even believe in God." [. . .]
But, then, on the fumes of Manischewitz, a great insight took form in my mind. It was true, as the kids said, that I didn't "believe in God." But this could be taken as something very different from an accusation--a reminder of a genuine heritage. My parents had not believed in God either, nor had my grandparents or any other progenitors going back to the great-great level. They had become disillusioned with Christianity generations ago--just as, on the in-law side, my children's other ancestors had shaken off their Orthodox Judaism. This insight did not exactly furnish me with an "identity," but it was at least something to work with: we are the kind of people, I realized--whatever our distant ancestors' religions--who do not believe, who do not carry on traditions, who do not do things just because someone has done them before.
[. . .] In my parents' general view, new things were better than old, and the very fact that some ritual had been performed in the past was a good reason for abandoning it now. Because what was the past, as our forebears knew it? Nothing but poverty, superstition and grief. "Think for yourself," Dad used to say. "Always ask why."
In fact, this may have been the ideal cultural heritage for my particular ethnic strain--bounced as it was from the Highlands of Scotland across the sea, out to the Rockies, down into the mines and finally spewed out into high-tech, suburban America. What better philosophy, for a race of migrants, than "Think for yourself"? What better maxim, for people whose whole world was rudely inverted every 30 years or so, than "Try new things"?
The more tradition-minded, the newly enthusiastic celebrants of Purim and Kwanzaa and Solstice, may see little point to survival if the survivors carry no cultural freight--religion, for example, or ethnic tradition. To which I would say that skepticism, curiosity and wide-eyed ecumenical tolerance are also worthy elements of the human tradition and are at least as old as such notions as "Serbian" or "Croatian," "Scottish" or "Jewish." I make no claims for my personal line of progenitors except that they remained loyal to the values that may have induced all of our ancestors, long, long, long ago, to climb down from the trees and make their way into the open plains.
I have to talk about my family a little bit. There is a reason in my case why the constant linkage of God, family, and flag is upsetting to me, and it has to do with the history of my particular family. I am a fourth-generation atheist. My freethinking ancestors were not members of the "liberal elite" who are always getting bashed for being anti-religious, who are so hated by the current conservative elite. My atheist ancestors were miners, railroad workers, farmers, farm workers. Once they had been religious people, many of them Catholics.Related:The story is told that my great-grandmother, a Montana farmwoman named Mamie O'Laughlin, sent for a priest when her father was dying. The priest did not want to be bothered. (This is western Montana, the late 19th century, the trip would have been dangerous.) And he sent back a message to Mamie that he would come but only if she would pay him a fee of $25, which was a huge sum in those days and way beyond the means of my great-grandmother. So her father died without the consolation, whatever it may have been, of the sacrament. [. . .]
At one time there were dozens of freethought newspapers published throughout the United States. The freethought movement was very much connected to movements for social change of different kinds. In the Northeast, the freethought movement was linked to the working men's movement of the early 1800s, which was a progenitor of the trade union movement. In the West it flourished among miners and other low-paid working people who were drawn to the Wobblies and other unions at the early part of this century. [. . .]
But this is not how it worked in my family. My dad was a really hardline atheist. I am not as hardline as he is. He used to read us Ingersoll on Sunday mornings--that was family quality time. He really believed some of the things, I later found out, that it says in the bible; like that we shall be judged by the way we treat "the least amongst us." He believed that, because he had been one of those "least amongst us" in his life. [. . .]
Here's a strange story from my great-grandfather John Howes whose earliest rebellion against religion--I am slightly embarassed to say--was to pee in the holy water before Easter service when he was a young Catholic boy in Canada.
The Myth of Old Money Liberalism
Haidt on moral foundations 1/2
Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages
It must be pointed out here that this high rate of family-mortality bore no relation to the economic status of these lignages. Death strikes equally rich and poor, baron and squire, the eminent and the insignificant. Causes general to the times were at work: high mortality in spite of a high birth-rate; the hazards of war; those of political upheavals, with their train of attainders and confiscations - which, at least up to the fourteenth century, were less important in France than in England. Other causes are particular to such social groups as attain some sort of eminence. Thus, the necessity, in order to avoid splitting estates through partition between children, of sending younger sons into the Church, would sooner or later bring the line to an untimely end. [. . .]
New families were thus constantly replacing the dying ones. Some of the newcomers came from junior branches of the local nobility itself, who, through marriage with heiresses, replaced in their lordships the old lines now extinct.'9 Others belonged to the gentry of neighbouring provinces and settled in Forez in the same way.20 None of these was really bringing new blood into an otherwise dwindling social class. More important for our purpose are the new men, those who suddenly appeared as knights or squires with no known ancestry in the nobility and who, given the chance, founded new noble lignages. To know where they came from, we must work mostly by inference and generalise from a few well-documented cases. We can be sure, however, that these newcomers were not recruited from a well-defined social group, but came from widely different strata [. . .]
In a country and at a time when society was almost entirely rural, the largest group of new noblemen came, so it seems, from peasant- stock. In Forez, there was no sharp dividing line between peasants and poor squires, except their different birth. By the thirteenth century, serfdom was as unknown there as in Normandy; all peasants were freemen, even those who owed tallage and a few labour service restricted to one or two days a year.
[Edouard Perroy. Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages]
Garry Trudeau: weak, sensitive boy traumatized by prep school, not a product of "old money liberalism"
Steve Sailer writes:
For example, consider Garry Trudeau. He was a scion of old money liberal Protestant good blood good bone folks (his mother went to Miss Porter’s School, for example)1. Let's not exaggerate the wealth or social standing of Trudeau's family. While I don't doubt they easily fell within the top 5% in both respects, thousands of people of Trudeau's generation were born into richer families with more impressive ancestors, and most of these people did not become obnoxious leftists.
Trudeau's father and paternal ancestors going back several generations were doctors. His mother's father was a sales manager and Republican politician. Certainly respectable and likely prosperous people, but I'd say they belonged to the multigenerational upper middle class rather than the upper class.
2. It would have been more helpful for this narrative if Garry Trudeau's parents were actually liberal. Trudeau's mother belonged to a Continuing Anglican church. Trudeau's parents were Republicans. They did not encourage their son's faggotry. A fan lazily (or wishfully) attempts to frame Trudeau's leftism in terms of the make-believe construct of "old money liberalism":
Members of Trudeau's more recent family tree were not rabidly Republican, but their politics, perhaps because of their privileged social status, leaned to the right. As an educated, civically engaged family, they saw themselves as belonging, nevertheless, to a tradition of liberal egalitarianism. In his satire he has made the dissonance of these competing ideologies a major theme, continually returning to the ironies and hypocrisies of individuals and a society built on such conflicted ideas. In addition, having been raised at the intersection of the ethics of aristocratic gentility and liberal idealism, Trudeau seems to have adopted a sense of noblesse oblige that has fueled both his selfless devotion to promoting social justice through satire, as well as his supreme confidence in his worldview, his business ethics, and his position as social chronicler.But no support whatsoever is offered for claims that the family professed "a tradition of liberal egalitarianism" (nor have I been able to find evidence for this elsewhere), and his parents do not seem to have been active in politics.One may also speculate that Trudeau's populist indignation at corrupt authority, nepotism, and old-boy networks is rooted in a need to exorcise a sense of lingering guilt at having such fortunate opportunities. It has even been speculated that the depth of his intense loathing for the Bush family comes from his need to differentiate his own privileged, WASPy persona--one that is tempered by self-criticism and a championing of social underdogs--from that of other Ivy Leaguers who, from his perspective, have seemingly used their background and connections to increase their own wealth and power. For example, those strips which mock the elder Bush for his participation in the closed Skull and Bones society at Yale (the university attended by Trudeau as well) reflect a vehemence and particularity that belies his deep-seated, especially personal dislike for this other type of New England family. (At the same time, one could argue that the Bush family's adoption of swaggering, folksy, Texan personas was an effort to distance themselves from the type of liberal New England elitism they saw in families like Trudeau's; Bush indicated as much in 1988, when he charged that Trudeau only spoke "for a bunch of Brie-tasting, Chardonnay-sipping elitists" [Alter 67].)
(As for the assumed connection to New England, only one of Trudeau's great-grandparents was born in Vermont; the other seven and proceeding generations were born in the mid-Atlantic. In total, no more than 1/4 of Trudeau's ancestry traces back to New England; 1/8 of Trudeau's ancestry is French, his great, great-grandfather having been an evidently incompetent Confederate officer and doctor from New Orleans; the remainder of his ancestry came by way of the mid-Atlantic and includes Dutch and German.)
The facts actually presented by this author paint a picture not of a self-assured aristocrat driven by a sense of noblesse oblige and carrying on a tradition of "liberal idealism" picked up from his family, but of a sensitive bitch who couldn't hang with other members of his class, who because of this developed a resentment of winners, and who imbibed his liberalism from popular culture.
By Trudeau's own description, he was an awkward teenager. Physically weak, athletically slow, pigeon-toed, and small for his age, he did not fit into the popular crowd. About his time at St. Paul's prep school in New Hampshire, he says, "I was not the class clown. In fact, I was pretty shy. . . . [It was a] tortured time for me [because] I was the second or third smallest in my class" (Alter 64). As a result of being ostracized from the elite cliques at school, Trudeau's inner, imaginative life was given ample time and space to develop. He found solace in art--an interest that did not help his social life; a classmate recalls that the prep school was "an unbelievably bad climate to be an artist," and as a result, "Garry took a lot of grief" ("Doonesbury: Drawing and Quartering" 60).Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys--and the Men They BecomeThe traumas of his teen years--including seeing his parents divorce--gave him ulcers and probably contributed to his career-long sympathy for people in minority or underdog positions in society. He has little nostalgia for this awkward period in his life; for example, he stated in an interview in 1986 that "Adolescence is, I think, an unpleasant time of life no matter where you spend it and with whom you spend it. I didn't like being a teenager. I didn't like teenagers when I was one. And I still don't like them. It's a very selfish time of life" (Grove D15).
As Trudeau entered into his young adult years--the point at which he was expected to follow his father's lead in becoming a physician--his interest in art and theater put him at odds with his extended family. One can see how Trudeau's creative and sensitive personality did not mesh his father's worldview, a philosophy that can best be summarized in the maxim he repeated often to his son: "Life is not something to be enjoyed, so just get on with it" (Weingarten W14). In some way the disconnect between Trudeau's aspirations and his family's expectations was typical of many family conflicts in the late 1960s when staid lifestyles of the older generation clashed with the newly bohemian, countercultural ethics of their children. Trudeau was not a rebellious kid in any radical sense, but his affinity for the arts seemed to place him within the general parameters of this dissenting youth culture. Trudeau jokes that during his teen years his grandmother "would plead with my parents to send me to Outward Bound, because she had read in Life that the counselors were very good at reaching troubled teens" (Trudeau, Flashbacks 90). [. . .]
In light of Trudeau's adult dedication to following politics with a wonk-like intensity, it is interesting to note that, although he had vague countercultural leanings as a youth, he did not have a deep understanding of politics or any strong convictions about particular parties or candidates during his formative years. Here he describes this teenage detachment:
I wasn't particularly politically attuned growing up. There wasn't much debate at our dinner table. My parents were Republicans, so the GOP was my team, and Ike was our genial manager. In '60, I was too young to really respond to JFK's charisma as intuitively as I was repelled by Nixon's sleaziness, and in 1964, I was so disengaged that I actually designed placards for both parties at my high school. Later I came to admire Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but more as pop figures than as visionaries who changed the world. Vietnam was the wake-up call. That's when I really started paying attention, and by then heroes were in scarce supply. Besides, who needed role models? We had the certainty of youth. (Bates 62)[. . .] This gradual success of the strip also won for Trudeau some grudging praise from his family. His father offered him barbed congratulations, saying, "You're lucky you were born when you were. In my day you'd have been a loser" (Trudeau, Flashbacks 16). Similarly, his mother quipped after hearing he had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, "I'm perfectly thrilled and delighted. I've kept my fingers crossed for fear he might end up in jail" (Trudeau, "Investigative Cartooning" C1).
[Kerry Soper. Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire.]
Wherever boys play games, as on the playing fields of nature, where predation and aggression have shaped animal behavior for tens of millions of years, sheer size makes a difference. You won't find that fact in many textbooks, but it may be the single most important lesson of unsupervised schoolboy existence.The way those feelings of beleaguerment, insecurity, and behavioral adaptation live on in an adult psychology has been insightfully captured by the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury. In a lovely 1996 essay called "My Inner Shrimp," Trudeau admits that "for the rest of my days, I shall be a recovering short person" with "the soul of a shrimp." Trudeau, unlike some of us, benefited from a delayed but explosive growth spurt that propelled his final height to over six feet. But it's the feelings he experienced at age fourteen, when he was the third-smallest kid in his high school class, that still perfuse his adult soul. Trudeau sometimes pondered going to a high school reunion to show off all those postpubertal inches. But the Little Man Inside nixed the idea.
"Adolescent hierarchies," he writes, "have a way of enduring; I'm sure I am still recalled as the Midget I myself have never really left behind."
We do have some preliminary evidence that Conservatives and Liberals vary, on average, in their testosterone-estrogen ratios, with Conservatives males higher on the testosterone side, and Conservative females higher on the estrogen side. This means that the Liberal females and males are closer to each other in their testosterone-estrogen ratios, and the Conservatives further apart.Formidability and the logic of human anger
Individuals with enhanced abilities to inflict costs (e.g., stronger individuals) or to confer benefits (e.g., attractive individuals) have a better bargaining position in conflicts; hence, it was predicted that such individuals will be more prone to anger, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and consider themselves entitled to better treatment. These predictions were confirmed. Consistent with an evolutionary analysis, the effect of strength on anger was greater for men and the effect of attractiveness on anger was greater for women. Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts—both in interpersonal and international conflicts.Facial Structure May Predict Endorsement of Racial Prejudice
Alex Shoumatoff on St. Paul's SchoolStudies have shown that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is associated with testosterone-related behaviors, which some researchers have linked with aggression. But psychological scientist Eric Hehman of Dartmouth College and colleagues at the University of Delaware speculated that these behaviors may have more to do with social dominance than outright aggression.
[. . .] “Racial prejudice is such a sensitive issue and there are societal pressures to appear nonprejudiced. More dominant individuals might care less about appearing prejudiced, or exercise less self-regulation with regard to reporting those prejudices, should they exist,” says Hehman, who conducted the research as a graduate student at the University of Delaware.
The researchers asked male participants about their willingness to express racially prejudiced beliefs and about the pressure they feel to adhere to societal norms. The results revealed that men who have higher fWHR (determined from photos of their faces) are more likely to express racist remarks and are less concerned about how others perceive those remarks.
For the past 150 years St. Paul’s School, the “exclusive” (as it is invariably called) boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, has been the Eton of America’s upper crust. Or perhaps it is its Hogwarts, as Harry Potter’s fictional academy is called, providing the country with many of its most accomplished wizards—not just at making money, although that is what its graduates have tended to do, but in practically every endeavor. Its main constituency has traditionally been the conservative old Wasp families of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—the plutocracy that has been running the country for generations. But this is changing. Since the first black student was admitted—in my class, which graduated in 1964—the school’s admissions policy has been progressively more meritocratic. The “natural aristocracy,” based on virtue and talent, to use Thomas Jefferson’s distinction, has been displacing the “artificial aristocracy,” based on wealth and birth. Every year there are fewer “legacies,” fewer fourth- or fifth-generation Paulies, among the 533 students, who now come from 37 states and 21 countries.Despite its reputation for being a breeder of staunch, old-line Republicans, St. Paul’s has also turned out a distinguished roster of liberals, including the cartoonist Garry Trudeau and Senator John Kerry. Kerry was in the class of ’62, two years ahead of me, and even then he seemed to be plotting his run for the presidency. [. . .]
The fourth element of the St. Paul’s calamity had been incubating for years: the allegations that, from the late 1940s through the early 90s, dozens of the school’s masters (as the teachers were known until women joined the faculty, in 1972), including several revered ones, had sexually molested students. [. . .] But boarding schools attract sexually conflicted adults. [. . .]
The faculty was also at odds with the rector and the board. Partly it was because the teachers were liberals, and the trustees were for the most part stodgy conservatives “who have not crossed the postmodern line into the world with the rest of us,” as one faculty member put it. And partly it was a class issue: the trustees acted as if the teachers were underlings, when in fact it is the teachers who dedicate their lives and careers to fulfilling the school’s mission.
The American Ruling Class (2005)
On "WASPs":
Lewis Lapham: Mike was still having trouble with the different meanings of the word class. Despite having gone to Yale, he suffered the pangs of social inadequacy. He associated the word class with New England ancestors, very old money, and the characters in a tale told by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But, he was willing to correct his examination paper.
Mike: Have the old families, I mean the WASPs, really disappeared, or are they just keeping their heads down?
Mike: How do you think that wealth, power is structured anymore?
Samuel Peabody: Well in my case, our case, wealth was rather dissipated by the time it got to my father, who was a clergyman. Groton was, as you know, founded by my grandfather. Much of the leadership of the country, especially in the 30s, were Groton graduates. I don't see that happening today. Isn't it interesting? Where does the leadership come from today? For my money, we're wandering. Where are we going? I don't know. Thinking about it I thought that after the Marshall Plan this country was at its peak. This was the finest moment. After that we've been going bump, bump, bump.
Lewis Lapham: If the country's wealth no longer rests in the exclusive hands of the Protestant social establishment, where then does one look for America's Class A stock? It occurred to me that Mike would profit from a meeting with a well-connected hedge fund manager.
On "merit":
Jack: But I'm still troubled by you calling it a ruling class. I mean, this is America, it's a democracy. People get where they're going based on merit.
Lewis Lapham: All ruling classes are based on merit, Jack. The principle was as true of Nazi Germany as it was of Louis XIV's France. The question is, how do you define merit? Of what does merit consist?
Mike: Right, because in the old monarchies, merit was born in the blood. The question is, where is it born in America?
On our "manufactured" elite:
Mike: I think I'm beginning to understand. The ruling class is still mostly male and mostly white; but outside of those few restrictions, just about anybody can make the grade.
Lewis Lapham: Americans are an inventive people, Mike. We manufacture our ruling elites, what we like to call the meritocracy, in the same way that we build SUVs or 747s. The members come and go, in power for a season or a generation, then replaced by new technology, fresh money.
Or, to plagiarize myself: If we're speaking of Davos types -- high-level politicians and bureaucrats, and upper management of large companies -- these people are predominantly drawn from middle/working class backgrounds. For the most part, they circulate into and out of this elite during their lifetimes. These types are frequently contemptible for sure, but blame the (as it happens, highly-democratized) system that trained and selected them for that, not "upper-class whites", which present international elites for the most part aren't.
Besides intelligence (which probably pretty much every elite in history has been selected on to one degree or another), present elites are selected for rootlessness, conformity, low fertility, etc.
So it's clear where I'm coming from: there will always be hierarchy and there will always be social mobility. But some forms of social organization will be better and some will be worse. The particular "meritocratic" system of selecting elites that grew up after WWII has been a disaster for America's ethnic core. Blame of "WASPs" or the "upper class" typically is misplaced.
Goodhart's Law: ' When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. Universities optimise for grades instead of knowledge. Politicians seek popularity, not the public good. Tomatoes are bred into heavy, flavorless sacks of water. Soviet Nail factories, when instructed to produce a certain number of nails per month, produced tiny, useless nails. Science is no different.Description of the documentary:
Watching Half Sigma and his commenters
"I read the paper, understood most of it, but was basically lost trying to understand the graphs. (It's true that my math and science foundation is fairly weak.)"
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates"Well when I was 17, I didn’t realize that my parents were poor and stupid."
-- Half Sigma
Background: Half Sigma was born to lower-middle-class Staten Island Jewish parents and blames the American class system for his failure at life. At some point he read Paul Fussell's 1983 book Class, decided this made him an expert on the subject, and started mixing up dated observations from Fussell with his own observations of the people he perceives to be his social superiors in present-day Manhattan.
Fussell could not have been any clearer on who he put in his "Top out-of-sight" category: "The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely."
This class, as described by Fussell, barely exists today. The proportion of the richest Americans (or their children) with any particular connection to the mid-20th century or earlier American upper class is small and continually shrinking.
I just looked up the original Half Sigma "top out-of-sight" post, and his confusion is even deeper than I remembered:
(Please note that this was a post from June of 2012 -- not 1952.)The top out-of-sight upper class
A few days ago I threw out the idea that the country is run by WASPs, which I think is rather misleading and over-simplistic. It’s probably more accurate that there are several different power groups in the United States. The two most obvious power groups are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
There's no ambiguity about who Fussell classes as "top out-of-sight". It's not any Manhattan yuppie/hipster/"bobo" who went to private schools and who Half Sigma could see himself crossing paths with. It is, in caricature, the stock mid-20th century estate-dwelling upper class of popular imagination (which, again, increasingly no longer exists).Searching for other power groups, one of the obvious power groups is the highest social class in the country. And to know what the highest class is, we turn to the late Paul Fussell’s book Class, and we find out that the highest class is what Fussell calls the “top out-of-sight upper class.” Fussell, unfortunately, doesn’t say much about this class, probably because he doesn’t know that much about them. The primary difference he talks about is that the regular upper class live in showy mansions and make their wealth known to the lower classes. The top out-of-sight upper class hides from public exposure.
In the movie Born Rich, directed by Jamie Johnson (which I previously blogged about), one of the important things he mentioned about his class of people is that they like their privacy and they were very opposed to him making a documentary about them. So Paul Fussell got the out-of-sight part right, although out-of-sight means that they are non-obvious rather than that you literally can never see them. The top out-of-sight is more often hiding in plain sight rather than on a private island off the coast of Maine. They might summer at such a place, although there are probably more of them summering on Nantucket.
I have personally met people from the top out-of-sight upper class, and maybe you have to. They are not rock stars, and because they are often hiding in plain sight, they are actually a lot easier to meet than upper class people who are more likely to have gatekeepers to restrict access to them. Imagine the unlikelihood of having a conversation with Donald Trump. But there are many top out-of-sight upper class people living in Manhattan who you can talk to easily enough, although they won’t be interested in being your friend for the same reason you (a middle to upper middle class person) wouldn’t want to be friends with a prole.
So now I will fill in some of the gaps of this class. Of course, I don’t have much personal knowledge, so I am mostly making educated guesses.
And, yes, the "out-of-sight" part was meant literally -- referring to the houses, not the people. Half Sigma fails even at basic reading comprehension. Fussell:
No one whose money, no matter how copious, comes from his own work--film stars are an example--can be a member of the top-out-of-sight class, even if the size of his income and the extravagance of his expenditure permit him to simulate identity with it. Inheritance--"old money" in the vulgar phrase--is the indispensable principle defining the top three classes, and it's best if the money's been in the family for three or four generations. There are subtle local ways to ascertain how long the money's been there. Touring middle America, the British traveler Jonathan Raban came upon the girl Sally, who informed him that "New Money says Missouri; Old Money says Missoura.""When I think of a really rich man," says a Boston blue-collar, "I think of one of those estates where you can't see the house from the road." Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called "the class in hiding." Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression, Vance Packard speculates, that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be "discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth." From the 1930s dates the flight of money from such exhibitionistic venues as the mansions of upper Fifth Avenue to hideaways in Virginia, upper New York State, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. [. . .]
The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It's likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate.
Ethnic origins of Forbes world billionaires (2013)
| No. | % | |
| Northwestern European | 415 | 29.10 |
| Asian or Pacific Islander | 313 | 21.95 |
| Jewish | 249 | 17.46 |
| Middle Eastern or Central Asian | 120 | 8.42 |
| Eastern European | 95 | 6.66 |
| Southern European | 84 | 5.89 |
| (New World) Hispanic or Brazilian | 75 | 5.26 |
| South Asian | 69 | 4.84 |
| Black | 6 | 0.42 |
| total | 1426 | 100 |
Particularly for Eastern Europe, individual classifications may be less accurate than my classifications of US billionaires, but the overall breakdown should be reasonably close to reality. I may have incorrectly included a few people in the Jewish list, but if anything probably incorrectly left off a larger number -- my Jewish category should be more accurate/comprehensive than Forbes Israel's "Richest Jews" list in any case. Note that I've arbitrarily chosen to include Tatars in the Middle Eastern category, along with Armenians, Azerbaijanis, etc. Mongoloid-appearing Kazakhs were included in the Asian category. I generally put Latin Americans with Northern European or Italian names (who were not obviously mestizo) in the appropriate European category.
You're free to post any corrections.
Related posts:
- 2012 Forbes 400 by ethnic origins
- The world's richest Jews (an incomplete list)
- Ethnic origins of US attendees of 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos
Full list below.
2012 Forbes 400 by ethnic origins
| 1987 (%) | 2009 (%) | 2010 (%) | 2012 (%) | |
| Northwestern European | 72 | 51.75 | 50.5 | 51.25 |
| Jewish | 23 | 35.5 | 35.5 | 34.75 |
| Italian | 2.25 | 3.5 | 4.25 | 4.25 |
| East Asian | 0.25 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.25 |
| Middle Eastern | 1.5 | 2.25 | 2.5 | 1.75 |
| Greek | 0.5 | 1.5 | 1.75 | 1.5 |
| Eastern European | 0.25 | 1.5 | 1.75 | 1.75 |
| South Asian | 0.0 | 1.25 | 1.0 | 1.5 |
| Hispanic | 0.25 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.75 |
| Black | 0.0 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 0.25 |
Related posts:
Full list below. As always, I welcome any corrections.The world's richest Jews (an incomplete list)
Steve Sailer alerted me to Forbes Israel's list of Jewish billionaires (http://www.forbes.co.il/rating/list.aspx?en6v0tVq=FK), pointing out the number of American Jews appears to be much lower than might be expected based on assessments of the ethnic makeup of the Forbes 400 in 2009 and 2010. As translated by Google:
The world's richest JewsHaving now looked at the 2012 Forbes 400, I see an ethnic breakdown similar to 2009/2010. The Forbes Israel "richest Jews" list was published about a week ago and appears to be put together based on the Forbes World's Billionaires list, which was updated in March 2013. The most recent Forbes 400 was finalized in September 2012, so, while minor differences are possible, for the US the lists should mostly overlap. The Forbes 400 threshold is about $1.1 billion (rather than $1 billion), so we'd tend to expect more US names on the Forbes Israel list than Jews in the Forbes 400 -- if the compilers were thorough. They don't appear to have been.Jewish billionaires comprise 11% of global billionaires list, and common wealth reaches -812 billion. Who is the top, and in some places deteriorated Mark Zuckerberg?
IQ, SES, and criminality
The current study, based on the nationally representative NLSY data, follows incarceration over a 24-year period. This represents the longest prospective examination of the NLSY crime data to date, since previous analyses have been shorter and is not prospective (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). With the aim of providing greater confidence in the results, unlike prior analyses the current study uses three major criminological outcomes (onset, incidence and frequency of incarceration), and not one (incidence of incarceration). Based on theoretically reformulated associations between the study variables, the results show that low IQ, low parental SES and their interaction modestly predict the incidence of, frequency of and time to incarceration.Related posts:Theoretically, a low IQ may make coping and decision-making difficult and increase the likelihood of crime. Taken in isolation the association between low IQ and increased risk of crime in the current results may be taken as evidence that is consistent with the Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Concurrently, however, the present results also indicate that a low parental SES increases the risk of crime, potentially through an inadequate familial environment (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). These family characteristics may include little emphasis on social attainment. Thus, the current findings indicate that the family environment may provide a route to influence the association between IQ and crime. This possibility is not considered in the Bell Curve view on crime that emphasizes neighborhood SES (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), and is consistent with opponents to the Bell Curve (Fischer et al., 1996).
Collectively, however, the effects of IQ and parental SES on crime are modestly amplified, as captured by the interaction reflecting unfavorable conditions (i.e., particularly if both IQ and parental SES are low). A possible explanation of this interaction is that a disadvantaged home environment does not encourage social attainment and a low IQ makes coping and decision-making difficult. Taken together this increases the likelihood of crime. Thus these findings support an interactional perspective of crime. Their interpretation is consistent with the usually competing theoretical notions that contrast low SES (Fischer et al., 1996) or low IQ (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) as factors that increase the likelihood of crime. [. . .]
This study does not separate genetic–environmental influences, unlike past research (e.g., Koenen, Caspi, Moffitt, Rijsdijk, & Taylor, 2006). SES may not purely be an environmental factor that is unrelated to IQ. Parents may give children both genes for IQ and SES (i.e., passive gene–environment associations), and a parent’s SES is partly based on their IQ as a result of life-long active gene–environment interactions. Accordingly, IQ and SES may be moderately correlated due to common genetic influences. Also, as the participants in this study mature, they become increasingly free to create their own environments, partly due to both IQ and SES. The current study, however, affords no assessment of genetics, or upward or downward social mobility, thereby highlighting key directions for future research.
A model of social class from BBC survey data
A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment (pdf):
We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC’s 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite’, whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of ‘new affluent’ workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a ‘precariat’ characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.
Unrelated articles on Harvard meritocrats
Harvard University has turned out more graduates who have reached ultra-high-net-worth status than any other university in the world, according to Wealth-X, the educational and research business development organization of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals.The Fall of Academics at HarvardWealth-X defines this demographic as those with $30 million or more in assets. All but three of the universities with the highest number of UHNW individuals are in the United States.
Harvard has the highest number of billionaires with 52 and the largest number of UHNW individuals with 2,964. That group has $622 billion in net worth. The University of Pennsylvania, which has 1,502 UHNW graduates with a total of $242 billion in assets, is a distant second in aggregate UHNW assets. [. . .]
“American universities dominate the rankings largely because these prestigious institutions have been able to attract global talent,” says Wealth-X President David S. Friedman. “Most of the ultra-high-net-worth alumni have self-made fortunes, underscoring how these institutions have served as launching pads for many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and companies.”
This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading mentality on campus that neglects the classroom. [. . .]The Harvard People I Know Who Are Breaking The Law (Again)“Nowadays there’s much less willingness on the part of the students to take courses or to have majors for which they don’t see the utilitarian application,” he says. Students take less time to explore intellectually, worried more about carving out a tangible path for their futures.
Gardner cites the extensive recruitment for investment banking, management, and consulting firms as potentially adding fuel to the fire. This emphasis on what he calls a “one-way race to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Hollywood” comes with an “inordinate” worry about maintaining near-perfect grades—the only foreseeable path to weighty titles and even heavier paychecks.
When an education holds less value than the prestige that follows, dishonesty can be more easily justified as a means to an end. Harvard becomes simply a pit-stop on the way.
Along with these new definitions of success comes its reckless pursuit, by which, Gardner believes, students have become “hollow” in an ethical sense that plays out in an educational setting: They are not only more inclined to cheat, but are also more likely to see it as acceptable. He cites the example of Marilee Jones, former Dean of Admissions at MIT, who resigned in 2007 after admitting that she had lied on her own resume regarding her education. In a group of 15 students from another school to which Gardner spoke, none thought she should have been fired. Jones, they said, had been doing a good job—and everyone lies on their resume, after all.
The first name of one of my freshman-year roomates was Nathan. Nathan's last name was Blecharczyk. Nathan is now the Chief Technology Officer of Airbnb, Inc., a company that raised $112 million from Andreesen-Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm, and was recently valued at over $1 billion. Just after the company announced this enormous round of funding in mid-2011, news broke that Airbnb had been sending fraudulent, misleading e-mail spam via Craigslist, in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, to thousands of individuals, and possibly many more. The company effectively denied responsibility, blaming a contractor. Nonetheless, the press releases from Andreesen-Horowitz citing Airbnb's amazing traffic already sounded suspect. Gawker's Ryan Tate asked, "Did Airbnb Scam Its Way To $1 Billion?", as did other major news publications.The answer is most likely yes. What most people don't know is that during our freshman and sophomore years of college, Nathan was one of the top 100 spammers in the world. This key fact, which I'm guessing was not disclosed to Airbnb's investors, does not appear on Google or any major search engine because of ROKSO's good behavior de-listing policy, but if you know where to look, it's crystal clear. While we were roommates, Nathan ran a sort of enterprise called Data Miners out of Grays M-54 in Harvard Yard using a variety of aliases for himself. Data Miners would hop from service provider to service provider each week, sending millions of messages at a time. Nathan was clearly brilliant—he had designed both custom hardware and software to send these messages in bulk as efficiently as possible—and he paid his way through college thanks to these endeavors, but what he possessed in engineering skill he obviously lacked in morals. [. . .]
Airbnb isn't the only darling of Silicon Valley violating state money transmission law, however. If you've ever played Farmville, you know how tempting it is to buy items that will keep your farm going strong. Facebook has recently decreed that all games must use its Facebook Credits system, which allows customers to—you guessed it—pre-fund accounts that are denominated in credits, rather than dollars, so that those funds can be distributed to companies other than Facebook. Those accounts can be used now at third-party web sites (including international sites) and have long been used to compensate third-party game developers, who presumably convert the credits back into dollars on their end. This, too, is money transmission. Like Airbnb, Facebook doesn't have a license, and that's a shame, because Mark Zuckerberg, his directors, and investors could all find themselves in federal prison for violating forty-seven money transmission statutes, including California's.
However unlikely—and to be clear, it's "unlikely" because no State would bother prosecuting wealthy campaign donors and job providers, so for both companies the licenses are effectively optional, leaving your money at risk—this fate would be fitting given Mark's actions around the same time that Nathan was considering what to do about the FTC. As I've noted in the past, the scene that you didn't see in The Social Network was the one where he broke into Crimson reporters' e-mail accounts using failed Facebook sign in attempts, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and common sense.
Trivers-Willard effect in U.S. billionaires revisited
Based on evolutionary theory, Trivers & Willard (TW) predicted the existence of mechanisms that lead parents with high levels of resources to bias offspring sex composition to favor sons and parents with low levels of resources to favor daughters. This hypothesis has been tested in samples of wealthy individuals but with mixed results. Here, I argue that both sample selection due to a high number of missing cases and a lacking specification of the timing of wealth accumulation contribute to this equivocal pattern. This study improves on both issues: First, analyses are based on a data set of U.S. billionaires with near-complete information on the sex of offspring. Second, subgroups of billionaires are distinguished according to the timing when they acquired their wealth. Informed by recent insights on the timing of a potential TW effect in animal studies, I state two hypotheses. First, billionaires have a higher share of male offspring than the general population. Second, this effect is larger for heirs and heiresses who are wealthy at the time of conception of all of their children than for self-made billionaires who acquired their wealth during their adult lives, that is, after some or all of their children have already been conceived. Results do not support the first hypothesis for all subgroups of billionaires. But for males, results are weakly consistent with the second hypothesis: Heirs but not self-made billionaires have a higher share of male offspring than the U.S. population. Heiresses, on the other hand, have a much lower share of male offspring than the U.S. average. This hints to a possible interplay of at least two mechanisms affecting sex composition. Implications for future research that would allow disentangling the distinct mechanisms are discussed. [. . .]A striking result of the current study, one implied by neither of the two initially stated variants of the TW hypothesis, is that heiresses have a considerably lower percentage of male offspring than heirs, self-made billionaires, and the general population. That is, for women, the observed effect is actually diametrical to the prediction made on the basis of the TW hypothesis. The difference in the proportion of male offspring between heiresses and heirs is, in fact, the highest difference observed in this study. Despite the large size of the effect and due to the low group size of 26 heiresses, however, it is only statistically significant when not controlling for multiple comparisons. Once this correction is applied, the difference remains only slightly above statistical significance in the logistic regression model. Future research should test whether this finding can be replicated with larger samples of elite women. [. . .]
These objections notwithstanding: What could drive this distinct finding for men and for women? A clue to an answer may be provided by the literature on the effect of various stressors on reducing the percentage of male offspring [13], [41]–[44], including occupational stress [38]. If stress and status both affect sex composition, at least two mechanisms may interact and confound each other in producing sex ratios in population subgroups. Could it be that heiresses, partners and spouses of self-made men, and those of male heirs have, on average, different work and career patterns and are thus exposed to various degrees of occupational stress? Specifically, heiresses may be more likely than the spouses of male billionaires to hold stressful leadership positions in companies they inherited from their parents.
Ethnic origins of US attendees of 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos
Starting from this list of Davos attendees, I've attempted to quickly classify the 711 "USA" individuals by racial or ethnic ancestry.
This is a very rough draft, but the initial breakdown I come up with is [29 Jan: made a few changes (see comments); updated percentages shown in brackets]:
[46.41%] 46.69% Northwestern European
[27.29%] 27.43% Jewish
6.05% Southern European
5.49% South Asian
[4.08%] 3.80% Middle Eastern
3.38% Latin America / Brazil
3.23% East Asian
2.25% Eastern European
1.55% Black
[0.28%] 0.14% North American Indian
Corrections are welcome. I've again defaulted to putting people in the NW European category. There may be a few false positives in the Jewish category, but there are probably more false negatives.
Full list below.
Was there ever a Ruling Class? 1000 years of Social Mobility
Notes from a presentation by Clark last year containing "work in progress from a planned book on social mobility over the long run" (pdf):
What is the fundamental nature of human society? Is it stratified into enduring layers of privilege and want, with some mobility between the layers, but permanent social classes? Or is there, over generations, complete mobility between all ranks in the social hierarchy, and complete long run equal opportunity? [. . .]
This book systematically exploits a new method of tracing social mobility over many generations, surnames, to measure the persistence of classes over as much as 800 years, 24 generations. It looks at societies where surnames are inherited, unchanged, by children from fathers. In such cases they thus serve as a tracer of the distant social origins of the modern population (and interestingly also as a tracer of the Y chromosome).
In this role surnames are a surprisingly powerful instrument for measuring long run social mobility. The results they reveal are clear, powerful, and a shock to our casual intuitions.
(1) In England, where we can trace social mobility back to 1066 using surnames, there were never any long persistent ruling and lower classes for the indigenous population: not in medieval England, and not now. About 5-6 generations were, and are, enough to erase most echoes of initial advantage or want. For the English class is, and always was, an illusion. Histories such as those of the Stanley family turn out to be rare exceptions, not the rule.
(2) Paradoxically, while England reveals complete long run mobility, the rates of social mobility per generation, better measured by looking over multiple generations, turn out to be lower than is conventionally estimated. But the mathematics of mobility is such that even such slow regression to the mean, over time, will completely erase initial advantage and want.
(3) The rate of social mobility in England was as high in the middle ages as it is now. The arrival of the whole apparatus of free public education in the late nineteenth century, and the elimination of nepotism in government and private firms, has not improved the rate of social mobility.
(4) The extraordinarily complete long run mobility of England is likely typical of other western European societies. But other countries, in contrast, do exhibit persistent social classes over hundreds of years. In the US, for example, the Black population has persisted at the bottom of the social order, and the Jewish population at the top. In Chile surname evidence shows the indigenous population has remained at the bottom since the Spanish conquest of 1541. [. . .]
(7) Though parents at the top of the economic ladder in any generation in preindustrial England did not derive any lasting advantage for their progeny, there was one odd effect. Surname frequencies show was that there was a permanent increase in the share of the DNA in England from rich parents before 1850. After 1850 a frequency effect operated, but in reverse. Surname frequencies show the DNA share of families in England who were rich in 1850 declined relative to that of poor families of the same generation by 2010. [. . .]
What is the meaning and explanation of these results? This is a much more contentious and difficult area. The book argues for the following conclusions:
A. Why can’t the ruling class in a place like England defend itself against downwards mobility? If the main determinants of economic and social success were wealth, education and connections then there would be no explanation of the consistent tendency of the rich to regress to the society mean. Only if genetics is the main element in determining economic success, if nature trumps nurture, is there a built-in mechanism that ensures the observed regression. That mechanism is the intermarriage of the rich with those from the lower classes. Even though there is strong assortative mating, since this is based on the phenotype created in part by chance and luck, those of higher than average innate talent tend to systematically mate with those of lesser ability and regress to the mean.
B. Racial, ethnic and religious differences allow long persisting social stratification through the barriers they create to this intermarriage. Thus for a society to achieve complete social mobility it must achieve cultural homogeneity. Multiculturalism is the enemy of long run equality.
On the Normans:
Ezra Pound: racial preservationist
I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.Incidentally, Ezra Pound is another person with more New England ancestry than George Gilder. (Four of Pound's great-grandparents were born in Massachusetts; one was born in New Hampshire; one was born in New York, with ancestry entirely tracing back to Connecticut; one was a Quaker from New Jersey; and one was from Ireland.) Update: More from Pound below.
I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.
The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington’s time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp.
[#51 (July 2, 1942) U.S.(B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM]