In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that a new elite class has emerged that is much more ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans than were the elites of earlier generations:
As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives…
Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.
If Murray is right, this kind of elite ignorance is the flip side of the general public’s political ignorance. Public ignorance is dangerous because it reduces the quality of voting decisions; elite ignorance because it reduces the quality of the decisions made by elites once they get into positions of power.
To illustrate his point, Murray includes in the book a 25 question quiz that is intended to test readers’ knowledge and exposure to mainstream non-upper middle class culture (he assumes that most of the readers are members of the upper middle class elite). I managed a middling 37 on his 0-99 point scale.
As Murray recognizes, one can easily quibble about the details of many of the questions. For example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter. I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions. Other readers will have different complaints. Even so, there is no reasonable version of this test on which I would have come out looking like a Man of the People. More generally, Murray is surely right that there is a culture gap between the new upper middle class and the rest of the public, and that the former is often ignorant about the lives of the latter.
At the same time, I am skeptical that the gap is much greater than it was fifty years ago. Murray claims that the elite of the early 1960s was much more in touch with mainstream culture than today’s upper middle class (which he defines, roughly, as people in various professional occupations who are in the top 5% of the income distribution). He only offers a modest amount of evidence to support that claim, and on some points his evidence cuts the other way. For example, one of the differences between the upper middle class and the mainstream that Murray cites is that the former are much more likely to engage in foreign travel. But that gap was even greater in 1960, when foreign travel was much more an elite preserve than it is today, in the age of relatively cheap jet flights.
More importantly, I am far from certain that the kind of knowledge Murray describes is actually important in improving the quality of public policy. Yes, elites who make policy that affects the lives of truck drivers should have some knowledge of “their priorities.” But it’s not clear to me that knowledge of TV shows, foods, preferred sports, etc., of truck drivers is all that useful to understanding those priorities. Even the experience of living with a low income or working at a job where your body hurts at the end of the day (both stressed by Murray s especially important) may be overrated. You don’t have to do either to realize that poverty imposes substantial constraints on your life, or that physical pain is extremely unpleasant. I actually did qualify for the points you get from having had a job where the body hurts at the end of the day. But I doubt that my attitude towards manual labor would be much different if I hadn’t. Overall, I’m not convinced that a political elite composed of people who scored a 99 on Murray’s test would do much better by the truck drivers than one composed of people who scored 19 or 29. At the very least, Murray offers little if any proof of it in the book.
To be sure, there is an important sense in which elite ignorance reduces the quality of public policy. In a complex society where people have a wide variety of preferences, not even the most knowledgeable elite experts can really have enough information to impose efficient paternalistic regulations that preempt individual choice. But this problem would persist even if all our elites had a deep and extensive knowledge of non-elite culture. The solution is not so much an elite that is better-informed about the culture of the masses, but an elite whose power over those masses is more limited and decentralized.
That said, I’m certainly open to the possibility that diminishing some types of elite ignorance would improve our society. But I’m skeptical that what we need to have a better elite is the kind of knowledge Murray emphasizes.
Nemo says:
I didn’t take the quiz, but some of his takes on what constitutes “populist” entertainment seem odd. You get a point for seeing the film THE KING’S SPEECH? I suspect that film (British actors in 1930s garb) has been seen by a higher percentage of what he considers the elite than of the masses. Likewise with THE BIG BANG THEORY on TV (jokes about quantum mechanics). Probably more likely to be viewed by someone with an advanced degree than a HS education.
January 25, 2012, 9:32 pmFloridian says:
I scored a 44, but this is a a quiz without meaning. I know this goes against the whole “I’m ignorant and proud of it” ethos of the tea party types, but I actually know people who are plumbers and bread deliverymen who go to plays, read widely and are not NASCAR fans.
Plus, I have no interest in watching Oprah or Judge Judy, but even if I did both shows are on in the daytime here, and I’m at work then.
January 25, 2012, 9:34 pmMatt c says:
Elite law professors are always better than ignorant wahoos in Wichita
January 25, 2012, 9:43 pmAnonAgain says:
Child of a big firm lawyer, now one myself, lifelong suburb resident: 41. Though I appreciate the effort to touch on the characteristics of the urban poor and lower-middle class, this seems suspiciously like something put together by a believer in the existence of “Real America” (the United States, minus Democrats, add back in Reagan Democrats).
January 25, 2012, 9:43 pmawp says:
Have you ever lived in a community with a pop under 50,000 and not part of a Metropolitan area?
82% of the US population lives in a metropolitan area. So how is living in a metropolitan area not ordinary?
January 25, 2012, 9:44 pmJay says:
I think that’s part of Murray’s point, though. Most people taking his quiz will like to imagine that they are (or especially, were) a bit less elite than in reality. I grew up in a mid-sized southern town, to parents who probably made around $50-60K most years (I’m 29), and went to a public school. So I could make a decent case for “man of the people” status, especially among those I mostly see on a daily basis now, as a lawyer in DC.
Yet, looking back, I realize that I was not even close to being in the less “elite” half, or even two-thirds, of those I grew up around. My parents had gone to college and were reasonably inquisitive people, if not intellectuals; their friends tended to be ex-military types from the base nearby, other teachers, or the like; I had family in other parts of the country, which gave me exposure to travel and somewhat different ways of living.
So yes, of course, if you’re the type of person who reads Volokh and lives in a non-urban area, you may well know plumbers who go to plays, because people like that tend to find each other when there aren’t that many around. But Murray’s point is that there are, actually, a lot of people who his quiz describes quite well; you just don’t know them, because you’re relatively elite (culturally, if not economically) and rarely interact with them in non-commercial settings.
January 25, 2012, 9:54 pmanon says:
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January 25, 2012, 10:00 pmRobert says:
The way the test is constructed, it’s quite easy not to score very high even if you aren’t what most people would call the political elite.
Take the case of a hypothetical miner in the middle of say, rural Northern Nevada, who likes hunting but not fishing, likes basketball but not NASCAR or football, has never been in the service, never had cause to take a bus somewhere, doesn’t go to the movies because it’s too far away and doesn’t bother with a TV because there aren’t many local channels you can pick up by antennae out in the middle of the desert, and doesn’t visit any of the restaurants on the list because none of the towns in Northern Nevada except Reno have any of those restaurants, and it’s a four hour drive to get to the nearest one. This isn’t that much of a stretch; growing up in Northern Nevada, I knew quite a few people who had many of these traits.
This hypothetical miner would score very high on some questions, but very low on most of the others, and hence get a fairly low score, despite being the very essence of what most would call a blue-collar guy. It makes me think that the author has less experience with the lower classes than he thinks.
January 25, 2012, 10:00 pmgeokstr says:
Typical disgusting characterization of people a leftist disagrees with. Why not throw in the tired but obligatory homophobic and racist slurs while you’re at it?
I for one and lots more of us dumb hick tea party types would be happy to put our knowledge of just about anything other than arcane legal details up against yours (IANAL). Except when it comes to being a lying leftist – we know nothing about that but what we observe in the wild.
And I’ll bet all of us know how to read and punch a paper ballot.
January 25, 2012, 10:05 pmRicardo says:
The test seems to adopt the David Brooks strategy of putting a huge emphasis on consumer taste or preferences rather than actual, say, knowledge of anything. Is drinking Coors Light and taking the family to T.G.I. Friday’s really the best measure of “direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans”?
It also becomes a problem for political discourse when people start thinking in this manner. It creates people who are unquestionably elite themselves but who make a big show of appearing “ordinary” by wearing jeans in public, dropping pop culture references or giving prominent mention to their latest hunting escapades.
January 25, 2012, 10:05 pmJen says:
It is extremely important that policy-makers have at least some understanding of how it feels to have a job that makes you hurt when we are talking about policy questions such as whether to raise the retirement age for social security and medicare. Otherwise, you get people who have never had their hands dirty pontificating about how it’s really no big deal if others have to engage in a couple more years of back-breaking labor in their mid to late sixties before they receive benefits.
January 25, 2012, 10:06 pmBillings says:
This quiz is absurd. I scored a 44 and am a fourth generation bubble dweller with two graduate degrees, attended three high level universities and have lived most of my life in what most people would consider elite suburbs. guess what. we eat at applebees, watch american idol, and watch tv and go to movies. I also was in marching band, play adult sports, have gone fishing from time to time, and have worked at some hard jobs. I would also venture to say that my friends, most of whom also went to name schools, grew up in upper middle class households, and live in well of suburbs have the same habits. the idea that any of us, who by any definition are in the group murray is trying to identify, would score a 2 is way off base. The quiz actually seems to expose murray more than the folks he is trying to identify. Only an out of touch professor would think that an upper middle class family headed by a dentist, doctor or lawyer, would think that the family never went to the movies or ate at a sit down chain restaurant.
January 25, 2012, 10:06 pmChristopher Taylor says:
I think the categories are a bit misleading here. Being well educated and living in a nice area doesn’t so much isolate you as being urban vs rural. The divide between those two categories is much more vast than the divide between rich and poor, in America, at least.
January 25, 2012, 10:09 pmRicardo says:
Only elites rely on “statistics” and “facts” for information.
-5
January 25, 2012, 10:11 pmClark says:
What, has Murray become a namby pamby liberal in his dotage? He’s asking for empathy, and even more shockingly acknowledging that power differences matter? Whatever happened to the conveniently deployed pap about equality of opportunity, and not outcomes that is the usual answer to softy lefty prog commies who bring up exactly this issue?
As for the quiz itself, it is so silly that it makes me wonder if Murray is really, shall we say, African-American.
January 25, 2012, 10:12 pmClark says:
I think the only thing required to not be elite is represent the elephant side of the house. Cf. Newt Gingrich. Career multi-millionaire insider whose fortune has been built on buying and selling influence and access embraced by “real Americans” as a family values non-elite. Maybe it is his serial philandering that makes him “one of them”?
January 25, 2012, 10:16 pmMaddieB says:
I was reminded of this quote from Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson: “Are the opinions of wealthier Americans more likely to be heard and heeded than those of less affluent Americans? … When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.”
“…the danger increases that the people who have so much influence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans…”
Yes. The group of people with that influence is ever shrinking. We can expect that soon, only the 1% and their political hacks will get anything done and it will do very little to help anyone but themselves.
January 25, 2012, 10:37 pmbyomtov says:
I didn’t add up my certainly low score.
One interesting point: I answered yes to the question abut seeing “True Grit,” thinking of the original, John Wayne, version. Do I gain or lose points for that?
January 25, 2012, 10:38 pmGeoffBr says:
It seems like Ilya has correctly identified the biggest problems with this article; even if you accept the validity of the quiz as a given (and there are serious problems with it), there isn’t much support for either of the conclusions he attempts to draw from it.
I hope Murray goes into more detail in his book as to why he thinks that there was less of an empathy gap in the ’60s (an icon of the culture wars if there ever was one), and why he thinks whether or not someone buys Coors Lite has any bearing on the validity of their policy-making.
As excerpted, it sounds more like an attempt to de-legitimize urban Americans (just under 80% of the country, by the way) than a serious policy argument.
January 25, 2012, 10:40 pmSasha Volokh says:
I score 16 or possibly 18, depending on whether I have any evangelical Christian close friends.
January 25, 2012, 10:40 pmam says:
Well, I scored ~23. Like he says, I believe the quiz depends largely on where you grew up. I guess I am elite and out-of-touch. I’ve never attended public school for example.
Or how about the hypothetical New York City museum curator whose father was an astronaut — fly fishes in Chile — volunteered for the Peace Corps — and drinks Coors Light?
January 25, 2012, 11:01 pmXenocles says:
If you aren’t sure, isn’t the answer no? I mean, if you aren’t close enough to know are you all that close?
January 25, 2012, 11:07 pmDave N. says:
I too spent several years in rural Nevada — and I scored a 58. By the way, at least at this juncture, the miner probably has a satellite dish or lives in a community with cable.
I would also note that I mentally added up a score for your hypothetical miner, and figure his score would be about 50, and that made no assumptions about his television or movie habits, his religious beliefs or the restaurants he ate in.
January 25, 2012, 11:09 pmRicardo says:
It reminds me of a segment I once saw on Fox News where Dennis Miller and Bill O’Reilly were talking and Miller was complaining about how Rahm Emanuel “thinks ordinary guys like you [O'Reilly] and me are stupid.”
Hmm, an “ordinary guy” with an advanced degree from Harvard, a long career in broadcast journalism and a multi-million dollar salary? Miller doesn’t have an Ivy League graduate degree unlike O’Reilly so I suppose he is slumming it a bit by elite standards. Still.
January 25, 2012, 11:10 pmthe stranger says:
Of course you are. Because you don’t want it to be true.
January 25, 2012, 11:11 pmAndrew MacKie-Mason says:
The problem with the quiz seems to be that a large part of it is dedicated to direct life experience rather than appreciation or ignorance. An “elite” person who made a legitimate and serious effort to explore more aspects of American culture (say, someone who spent their time volunteering at the local soup kitchen, or who spent summers doing volunteer work with their religious organization) wouldn’t improve their score on the quiz very much. Doing better seems to be directly linked to not having advantages, not to trying to overcome blind spots. That is, it simply assumes that the elite will be out-of-touch and measures how “elite” you are.
January 25, 2012, 11:12 pmXenocles says:
Most of my points came from being a military officer – itself a form of elite. Apparently not being good enough to letter in high school is also a marker of the elite.
I’m unconvinced that detailed knowledge of what the masses like is good for anything other than electability. It doesn’t make a person more likely to be a friend of liberty or (if you incline this way) a more effective designer of public policy.
January 25, 2012, 11:16 pmT.J. Chiang says:
I took the quiz, but I find it much less revealing than you do. Some of the questions are about one’s knowledge and experiences, e.g. what movies do you watch and whether you know anyone who disagrees with you. But the majority of the questions are simply about immutable social-economic characteristics, such as one parents’ job. In other words, it seems to make a mash of two distinct questions: (1) Are you a member of the “upper middle class”?, and (2) Do you live in a bubble? I get that the theme of the book is that the two go hand-in-hand. But the quiz seems to assume the conclusion rather than prove it.
January 25, 2012, 11:17 pmBABH says:
Billings is right, this is a ridiculous test. I have a top 1% background, education, and current lifestyle, but I score a 57 based largely on my political work on behalf of Democratic Senators.
I imagine I would be more out of touch if I had spent my career in Republican think-tanks, as Murray has. Actual political elites – Democratic or Republican – need to interact with a broader cross-section of society than Washington wonks.
January 25, 2012, 11:20 pmThomasD says:
The problem isn’t so much that the elites are more out of touch than in the past. The problem is that the elites impact on the day to day lives of the rest of society has ballooned withing the same time frame.
There is no way any sort of elite could ever share enough experiences to remain in touch with the rest of the populace. the only reasonable solution to the paradox is to minimize the scope of authority this elite exerts over the rest of us.
January 25, 2012, 11:24 pmHarry Eagar says:
I have been reading Cannadine’s life of Mellon. The idea that present elites (by which I suppose he means the rich) are less in touch with the non-elites (by which I suppose he means wage workers) is silly.
January 25, 2012, 11:33 pmSasha Volokh says:
Xenocles: If knowing someone’s religion is what makes someone a close friend, I have very few close friends. Well, regardless, I have very few people I’d truly consider “close friends” — my preferred mode of interaction with people is water-cooler conversation or Facebook comments, and even my closest friends are people I see or speak to about once a year, and even then I don’t talk to them about personal matters. But I have a lot of people I’d consider “good friends”, and I don’t know most of these people’s religion. Of those whose religion I know, there are several who are conservative Catholics, who probably don’t count as “evangelical”.
January 25, 2012, 11:35 pmrpt says:
So what was your score? Mine was 55.
January 25, 2012, 11:42 pmLarryA says:
I scored 59, but a lot of the answers seemed to be flukes. Yes, I’ve been to several Kiwana/Rotary meetings, but it’s because I get invited to speak. I’ve been underemployed for a couple of years, so that’s the income question. I lettered in choir, which I suspect he might count closer to chess club than “sports.”
But what I really have trouble with is the idea that “A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes.”
The mistake is that elites (or anyone else) could have a level of knowledge that would insure they could make valid “decisions affecting the lives of everyone else.”
January 25, 2012, 11:49 pmrpt says:
Top this one, Geo: Four varsity letters in bowling at an all boys Catholic high school in downtown Miami to which I took the bus.
January 25, 2012, 11:52 pmDKH says:
I don’t think the quiz is intended to be taken by a hypothetical blue-collar guy so that the guy can confirm, “Yep, I’m blue-collar.” It’s intended to be taken by professional-class people to evaluate, “To what extent are my experiences inside or outside mainstream American experiences?” or, “How disconnected am I from mainstream America?”
As to the living-in-an-under-50,000-person-town, the question pertains to any point in a person’s life, so while only 18% (according to awp) live in rural areas now, it stands to reason the makeup of that 18% may be different over time, as, e.g., the mining industry goes through cycles.
January 26, 2012, 12:05 amBarb says:
I got 58. There really IS a difference between “elites” and the rest of us. However, I wonder where the people fit who say it is not biologically normal for a man to be faithful to one woman all his life –that all men cheat. I think the elites cheat –and the blacks do –but not most of “middle America.” Certainly not most of evangelical, rural, or small town America with which I am acquainted.
Where the elites are out of touch: with the poor and the religious. They have no clue what they do when they advocate and encourage all sorts of immorality in the name of freedom. When they teach sex ed and see latex as a panacea for all our social ills. When they think porn and entertainment and drugs should have no restrictions. When they champion lotteries and casinos. When they think shacking up is better(and they role model it in every sit com and drama) than marriage with its possibility of divorce. When they don’t believe in religious education or spanking or other restrictions in child-rearing.
Right now the elites have concocted an inefficient, bloated bureaucracy in gov’t welfare. The powers that be have no idea how to help the poor get out of their messes –so they created SSI, give food cards generously, give financial stipends as incentives to go to college for jobs that aren’t out there in schools that are charging way too much because the borrowing gov’t will pay it or loan it –but it won’t be paid back.
Everytime we take info to the welfare office for the daycare –and everytime we try to get at the bottom of my friend’s loss in benefits, we get the royal run-around. Her case worker doesn’t return her calls –gets the paper work wrong –and knows nothing.
My friend failed 2 out of 3 classes –in part because they wouldn’t accept doctor excuses for illness or your child’s illness during a missed test, and they take off points for absences, too –so she and her daughter each caused her to miss 2 days –and the school wouldn’t let her make up the tests –so she failed and now the gov’t is loaning her 1000 per class to make up the 2 classes. Her phlebotomy certificate (including malpractice ins. and/for clinicals) will cost 13000 –and she likely won’t find a full time job –and whatever she DOES make will make them take away her ssI –or food card –or daycare –and she still won’t have enough to cover all her legit bills.
One incentive for gov’t dependent and poor people to go to school, believe it or not, is the 1100 stipend received every 3 months. Pell Grant covers little of the over 17000 spent for this certificate in a degree program at a private college. My understanding is that the gov’t won’t provide loan or grant for a non-degree program –for just a certificate, but it will if that certificate is part of a degree program–even though she doesn’t plan to try for a degree (medical assistant degree.) Even though the education she is getting for phlebotomy isn’t necessary for a phlebotomist to know!! Even though everybody knows that all colleges are churning out grads for jobs that aren’t there –even the community colleges and small private career schools.
My one son works for his father, is excellent person of good character, is humble, helpful to us, non-addicted with healthy habits –but he has 2 useless degrees and a certificate. Can’t find any openings for these jobs. His latest thing: he is researching an invention….
January 26, 2012, 12:13 amInformant says:
I scored a 38, but my score would have been substantially higher if several of the questions weren’t expressly or implicitly date limited. (My wife and I had a baby early last year, which dramatically cut into eating out, going to movies, etc.)
January 26, 2012, 12:17 amjuris imprudent says:
So I get that Murray finds beer snobs annoying, but relying on the mass produced brands which have had massive market share erosion in the era of deregulation is not all due to elite consumers. One has to wonder how much this test describes his aloofness and his projection of that onto others.
January 26, 2012, 12:22 amDKH says:
If a group of college kids buys some Miller Light so that their beer pong games are more affordable, have they shared a common experience with the masses? I agree that a lot of questions don’t cut very finely, but I think the author knows that, as can be seen with the ranges he provides at the end.
January 26, 2012, 12:31 amTom Rigid says:
This guy wrote The Bell Curve and works for the AEI.
January 26, 2012, 12:36 amRobert in Anchorage says:
Most of the questions don’t make much sense in my state.
– Fishing? Everyone fishes unless they have health issues. The divide is between personal use (blue collar)and fly fishing(white collar).
– Domestic Beer? Most of the rural areas are dry. Drinking beer is urban and upper class.
– NASCAR? Interest in car racing is odd where I live. Our races involve sled dogs, snowmachines, skis and/or firearms.
January 26, 2012, 12:37 amPerseus says:
Hunting is both an aristocratic and a proletarian pastime. It’s mainly effete upper-middle class liberals who are horrified by it.
January 26, 2012, 12:43 amleo marvin says:
Barb, you’re the one who could stand to be better in touch with where all that immorality is going on, not the elites.
January 26, 2012, 12:48 amAndrew MacKie-Mason says:
Yeah just wanted to make sure that one was out there.
January 26, 2012, 12:55 amSteve in Seattle says:
First question: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American neighbor-hood in which the majority of your fifty nearest neighbors prob-ably did not have college degrees?”
Would attending college and living in a dorm room fall under this?
January 26, 2012, 1:04 amBarb says:
..that WHAT was out WHERE? meaning?
If you don’t know what I said is true, you are possibly one of those elites out of touch with reality. Of course not EVERY black man cheats –but there was an article by a black prof here on VC that suggested black educated women find white men to marry–because the black men weren’t marrying. And the women wouldn’t if they waited on the black men. MANY of them –quite likely a majority –are making babies with multiple women at a higher rate than white men. Only an elitist wouldn’t know this is true.
So, is your name Mason? we might be related….
January 26, 2012, 1:06 amBarb says:
..that WHAT one was out WHERE? meaning?
If you don’t know what I said is true, you are possibly one of those elites out of touch with reality. Of course not EVERY black man cheats –but there was an article by a black prof here on VC that suggested black educated women find white men to marry–because the black men weren’t marrying. And the women wouldn’t if they waited on the black men. MANY of them –quite likely a majority –are making babies with multiple women at a higher rate than white men. Only an elitist wouldn’t know this is true.
So, is your name Mason? we might be related….
January 26, 2012, 1:12 amRandy says:
Most commentators are arguing about the validity of the quiz, and I agree that it is troublesome.
But very few are discussing his thesis, which is that the elite are out of touch of the rest. I guess it’s so obviously true no one bothering to argue it.
And I happen to agree. Living in Washington, we see out of touchness all the time — there is an entire class of lawyers/politicians/consultants/lobbyists/government workers who regulate our lives, pass laws and do all sorts of things that they have no idea about. I recall in the 80s when a guy who testifying before congress about how good it would be to cut laws regarding mine safety. He had all sorts of charts and diagrams to show that cutting laws wouldn’t affect safety. One congressman asked him if he had ever been in a mine, and he said no.
I’m all in favor of book learning, but any man must get outside his bubble and see the world for what it is. I regret that I don’t have time to see more and experience more. I was shocked to read that an acquaintance of mine out in the hinterlands had lost his house recently and pretty much lost everything because the economy is so bad. Here in Washington, that sort of thing Just Doesn’t Happen. I know plenty of people who pontificate about the mortgage crisis and wax indignant over stupid people who bought more house than they could afford and so deserve to lose their house. My friend wasn’t that, and his house was modest — he just lost his job and couldn’t afford the payments anymore.
We have tons of think tanks that churn out charts and graphs, and construct elaborate policies that fit certain agendas and ideologies. Then we have news media that panders to tell us what we want to hear and what they think we should hear. We have politicians who don’t particularly care, and the entire class that I mentioned above that care only about their own salary and will shill for anything as long as they are paid well.
I’m surprised that Murray has written such a book, but kudos to him. I do believe that the elite is more insulated. Back 100 years ago, no matter how elite you were, you still were forced to rub shoulders with servants, or walk city streets with all classes of people. Today, you can live in a bubble without ever coming in contact with people unlike yourself. I don’t think that’s healthy for anyone.
January 26, 2012, 1:17 amRicardo says:
True, but when Mitt Romney spoke about his experience moose… er, elk hunting in Montana during the South Carolina debate, I don’t think he did so with the intent of proving his aristocratic credentials, which do not appear to be seriously in dispute. Sarah Palin wanted a TV film crew around when hunting in Alaska but just appeared terribly inexperienced with firearms (having to rely on her father for assistance) rather than either aristocratic or proletarian.
January 26, 2012, 1:20 amAsher says:
So you’re not disputing whether or not Barb’s assertion is correct. You’re just saying she’s a bad person for pointing it out. In fact, black men are much more likely to cheat.
.
January 26, 2012, 1:26 amIt is a reasonable assumption that the type of men willing to marry are more likely than the type of men not willing to stay faithful. This is why the figures are a little misleading and black men are probably more than twice as likely to cheat as white men.
Barb says:
Thanks for the very interesting chart. I wonder if the differences between the states are large or negligible? I wonder if the states with more divorce also have more marriage and the blue states have more shack-ups and splits that won’t be registered.
As for states having teen births, maybe those blue states with fewer teen births have more abortions –or more gays with no births. And maybe some of those teen births were to married girls. There is nothing inevitably immature or immoral about a 19 year old married mother, after all. My h.s. best friend’s mother was 17 when she married –stayed married –and raised a bright, achieving family. Farm folks.
January 26, 2012, 1:27 amAsher says:
Also, more than half the black women with more than one child have had those children by, at least, two different fathers.
January 26, 2012, 1:28 amBarb says:
One more stat: Over 60 per cent of black kids are raised in single parent household. Don’t tell me that all those women wanted it that way –”Just make me pregnant, Javon; I don’t want a father to help raise my baby or support it, sharing expenses in marriage.”
My friend found 3 of her babies’ black fathers were unfaithful. Definitely a deal breaker.
Know any real people, Andrew Mackie-Mason? The point of the book reviewed is that Elitists tend not to.
Thanks for link, Asher.
January 26, 2012, 1:37 amBarb says:
One more stat: Over 60 per cent of black kids are raised in single parent household. Don’t tell me that all those women wanted it that way –”Just make me pregnant, Javon; I don’t want a father to help raise my baby or support it, sharing expenses in marriage.”
My friend found 3 of her babies’ black fathers were unfaithful. Definitely a deal breaker.
Know any real people, Andrew Mackie-Mason? The point of the book reviewed is that Elitists tend not to.
Thanks for link, Asher.
A good comment, Randy. We agree on something!
January 26, 2012, 1:42 amClark says:
Dunning and Kruger strike again.
January 26, 2012, 1:51 ambbbeard says:
I’m first generation upper middle class, though my dad was an engineer with upper-middle class tastes. He drank martinis when he got home, not beer, and he cooked out of Larousse Gastronomique, not Joy of Cooking. He tried to own a Cadillac when he could, but they were usually ten years old.
Anyway, I scored a 50, though I am hardly a man of the people. When I imagine running for political office, I conjure a scene in which I am embarrassed to admit I have never watched a single episode of Seinfeld or American Idol. I have only a general idea of the cost of a gallon of milk. I don’t know what a food stamp looks like. Though I’ve taken my son fishing a number of times, I don’t fish myself, because I’m a Buddhist and we’re not supposed to kill stuff.
So some of these things are touched upon in Murray’s survey, though I’m still puzzled how it fits into an analysis of longitudinal demographics. And truthfully, many of the questions seem to be devised specifically to distinguish Manhattanites from the rest of the country.
What’s missing from Murray’s survey is the most obvious cultural divide in this country: race and its correlates. I wonder how many “elites” have ever spent an hour listening to a black radio station? Or bought clothes at a store that mainly served black clientele? Or sat in a movie theater with a majority black audience? Just asking.
January 26, 2012, 1:56 amRicardo says:
In fairness, though, the title of the underlying book is “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.” The black-white cultural divide (and the within-black cultural and class divide) seems a big enough topic to justify a separate book.
January 26, 2012, 2:33 amPerseus says:
“During the last month have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?”
Of course not, and no one–especially the poor–should have the opportunity to do so.
P.J. O’Rourke: On January 1, 2012, Maine became the first state to ban smoking in all low-income public housing…
Progressive elites may be confused about the existence of right and wrong when it comes to wars against genocidal fanatics, market freedom, and the death penalty for mass murderers. But not when it comes to smoking.
Smoking kills smokers, which is about what they deserve for engaging in such lowbrow, wrong-headed, retarded, vulgarian activity, except they get sick first and that drives up the cost of a single-payer national health care system, plus their second-hand smoke is worse yet because it is a, yuck, inhalation hand-me-down from uncouth people who probably haven’t flossed, and it kills progressive elites who don’t even know anyone who smokes while also releasing greenhouse gases and stinking up the cheery curtains that elites hang in public housing group activity areas to brighten the lives of the underprivileged who are confined to concrete tower blocks with six-by-eight-foot living rooms, seven-foot ceilings, plexiglass windows, and sheet-metal doors with a dozen locks on them…
January 26, 2012, 2:38 amJ.T. Wenting says:
How would one answer question 2 (for starters) if the “main breadwinner” was promoted during one’s childhood from a lower position to one in management?
Happened to me. My father started out as a clerk in the accounting department of a company, was promoted to manager of the department, changed to a job as an accountant with a consultancy firm, and retired CEO of a former customer who’d approached him for the job (despite having no management degree) after he orchestrated their merger with several smaller firms.
I’m not an American but can translate a lot of the questions to similar things in my own culture/society. It just doesn’t add up.
#4 for example. I know precious few people who, as students, did not live below what counts as the poverty line. Having to subsist on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a month after rent, college, and mandatory insurance has been paid will certainly qualify.
#5 as part of the “elite” of students we had several tours of factories where our experimental equipment was created. Managers often visit the worker bees to “boost morale” and “show that we’re involved”. Does that count?
#6 carpal tunnel syndrome, anyone? Back ache from sitting in a carseat for hours in a traffic jam?
#10 counting colleagues?
#15 flyfishing seems rather popular among “the elite”…
#20 I count black suit and tie for managers as a de-facto uniform, it’s required dress according to company dress code after all.
etc. etc. So not only are some questions questionable because of the assumptions about what “lower class” people enjoy (like the ones about eateries, movies, television shows” but many of the others are just as silly.
January 26, 2012, 2:55 amZiz says:
Yeah. Kids in rural areas got to burn things, shoot things, and blow up things.
January 26, 2012, 3:02 amClark says:
Latex has its problems, I admit, but I am not that big a fan of WYSIWYG anyway, and there is something to be said for such a feature rich open source alternative to Word.
January 26, 2012, 3:12 amTatil says:
Are residents living in low-income housing more likely to use taxpayer funded, state run Medicaid? If so, that is a financially sound plan.
January 26, 2012, 3:22 amTatil says:
How man do you think got your LATEX joke? :) It is nice to see another rare soul who finds it a better alternative than Word though.
January 26, 2012, 3:25 amClark says:
Larding in effete and liberals with the upper middle-class is a nice touch, but only somebody particularly effete would use a word so… french.
Next time, I’d recommend “Upper West Side” or “New York” or “coastal”.
January 26, 2012, 5:28 amClark says:
So, are all the people “E”litists know are androids?
January 26, 2012, 5:28 amSurreptitious Evil says:
Hmm, if you substitute “British” for “American”, I get 56. But then I get a lot of that for being ex-military. Which is more of an upper-middle or upper-class occupation in the UK than it seems to be being claimed to be by this quiz.
January 26, 2012, 5:29 amcaptcrisis says:
It is certainly true that:
1) American society is a lot less class-mobile than it was 50 years ago. People who grew up less affluent are less likely to get richer.
2) Wealth has been distributed upward, particularly from the middle class to the rich and especially the very rich, during the past 50 years.
3) Both these trends accelerated during Republican administrations.
The elite’s lack of knowledge of the problems of the poor and working class would inevitably go hand in hand with these developments. In particular, it’s been a long time since anyone with power in Washington has had any knowledge of the problems of the poor. (The last administration that really did was Carter’s.)
The real problem though is not that the elite don’t know — it’s that they don’t CARE.
January 26, 2012, 5:45 amEngineer says:
Increasingly I have been meeting people from Muslim/Orthodox Jewish/ evangelical backgrounds working in advanced R&D. Some have PhDs.
In many respects these people are part of the “elite” and know how to act like part of the elite – yet at the same time they participate in communities and houses of worship with a more economically and socially diverse population.
It seems reasonable to estimate that in previous decades a comparable situation existed in the broader population. Don’t you remember when everyone had to watch the same TV and read the same newspaper?
January 26, 2012, 5:48 amFnord says:
In terms of ignorance, all of three questions (Jimmie Johnson, military insignia, and Branson) out of twenty-five tested actual knowledge. True, there certainly is something to be said for knowing by doing. Even there, though, a few of the questions have odd exemptions which suggest the intent is less to measure connection or empathy to the masses and more to simply measure if someone is upper-middle class.
There are other odd choices. Other people have mentioned the King’s Speech and The Big Bang Theory. I’ll also point out that almost everyone at my private high school participated in varsity sports at some point. Either his test is poorly designed, or there are more common experiences between the classes than he’d like to admit.
January 26, 2012, 6:03 amJeff Walden says:
I score about 20, myself. Some of them are definitely interesting measures. Others, meh.
Does preferring Guinness to domestic lighter beers really make me less middle-class-ish? (I could understand for someone drinking craft brews or local-brewery fare, or obscurer imports. But mass-market appeals to some of everyone, by definition.) I say it means I have better taste, er, I mean, I have different tastes for dark versus light beers compared to many people.
I really don’t understand why fishing is exalted where hunting doesn’t. I’ve hunted recently; I haven’t fished in a long time. (It wasn’t in the family as much as hunting.) What makes fishing more middle-class-ish?
Questions like the breadwinner one assume the family’s employment situation matters for middle-class-ness, when what matters more, perhaps, is how they spend their money, both day-to-day and for the occasional larger expenditures like vacations. Comparing childhood houses, mine was definitely smaller than those of many of my friends, say. But maybe we traveled more often, and more widely, than they did. These seem at least as relevant as the actual income or occupation.
Don’t many schools these days have regular-track and advanced-track options, implicitly segregating people by their grades to an extent?
Why specifically exclude SNF? And why is NASCAR more meritorious than football, or even than Indy car racing (which I’m significantly more aware of, despite not following either regularly)?
What male would ever watch Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Judge Judy? (I am not entirely kidding here.)
Oh, as a postscript, I got Clark’s joke.
January 26, 2012, 6:15 amRicardo says:
It seems like Murray is trying to accomplish too much with one test. There are really four different types of questions measuring very different things:
1. One’s social background growing up — this measures the social mobility among his target audience of educated professionals and Beltway wonks.
2. Participation in shared national culture through sports, civic organizations, watching the same TV programs and movies, etc.
3. Having “blue collar” experiences like experiencing physical pain after a shift, wearing a uniform to work, performing factory labor, etc.
4. Consumer taste and where one’s tastes lie on David Brooks’ Red/Blue state pop sociology spectrum
#4 is the most trivial and doesn’t seem all that enlightening. The rest are all important topics in their own right but it would seem more appropriate to address each one separately.
Niall Ferguson’s review of the book confirms one thing about the out-of-touch elite, though, in his standard-issue criticism of “redistribution.” In reality, the political debate in the U.S. is not over redistributing a large additional chunk of resources but rather on trying to mitigate the economic uncertainty that so many of the poor experience. People like Ferguson have little idea of what it is like to fear losing your job with only modest savings in the bank, to go without health insurance or to worry about making the mortgage or rent payment on time. He will also not understand what the big deal is behind raising the retirement age because writing and speaking is something you can do long past age 60 — not so much if you are a plumber or beat cop.
January 26, 2012, 6:45 amShag from Brookline says:
How about a test to identify whether a commenter on this thread is an elite or an ordinary American?
January 26, 2012, 7:07 amFloridian says:
Well, that’s certainly Newt’s contention (http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/gingrich-normal-affairs-romney.html) . . . and he’s not even black!
January 26, 2012, 7:18 amClark says:
I can’t abide Word. Latex all the way! (Barb, fyi, I like sheepskin too).
January 26, 2012, 7:21 amPerseus says:
Blue states do have the highest abortion rates (Top 10: DE, NY, NJ, MD, CA, FL, NV, CT, RI, HI).
I prefer “pusillanimous pussyfooters.”
January 26, 2012, 7:23 amClark says:
The thing that always makes me crack up is the routine quoting of William F. Buckley’s asinine (and thoroughly hypocritical) statement about the comparative merits of a Harvard education and alphabetical primacy in the telephone book by all these supposed anti-elitists. (It is of course par for the course for those who display so little self-awareness as to support Newt Gingrich for sharing their sincere belief in their proletarian family values). William F. Buckley, he of the horse-siding private school in Paris and London childhood who went to Yale (which, of course, makes one wonder if his jab was merely a manifestation of that traditional high-falutin’ elitist Ivy rivalry that 0.001% of the country cares about), was a part of Skull and Bones, and made a reputation with his knack for $10 words. OTOH, he did support white supremacy, call Gore Vidal a queer and threaten to punch him on national television, so there’s that…
January 26, 2012, 7:32 amAnderson says:
This guy wrote The Bell Curve
Uh, yeah, THIS?
What a surprise that he would write unscientific, patently obvious garbage.
January 26, 2012, 7:42 amcaptcrisis says:
I’m really glad Murray stuck to analyzing white people this time. Really, really glad.
January 26, 2012, 7:53 amBruce Hayden says:
I found the quiz thought provoking. Interestingly, I expect that my score (62) is probably twice that of my next brother, despite both of us growing up with a father who was an attorney and both of us becoming patent attorneys.
I almost thought I had lost points in the letter category (not lettering until college), until I saw that marching band counted. And, I did that so that I could get an A, instead of the C I would have gotten in PE. Some of my points were because of my girlfriends (beer, Judge Judy, etc.), and some because of a feckless youth (right out of college, before graduate school). And, I find that I do prefer living in some small towns, having spent much of the last 5 in a “metro” area of 15,000, as long as I had the winery, ski area, etc. close.
I found it interesting for a number of reasons. The point, I think, on the beer, is that for some, beer is one of the finer things in life, and is treated accordingly. For others, it is one of the food groups. Used to be in a lot of western states, that you could relate distances by the number of beers drunk while driving. You don’t do that with Guiness. And, yes, I love Guiness, but buy a case of Coors Light a week when I am with one woman friend (grew up in Golden, CO, so am a bit prejudiced there).
Part of what was interesting was that the questions really ran the gamut, from working class up through small town upper middle class. I would expect that most small town lawyers don’t do like I do, buying mass market beer by the case. But, they, along with the other professionals in town, are the most likely to belong to Rotary or Kiwanis. My father and grandfather were active for 40+ years each in the later, but it just never seemed to make sense for me as a patent attorney. My kid though joined the college version of Rotary.
But, I also think that the questionnaire was a bit racist – aimed a bit more at White Europeans than other races and cultures. The restaurants tended to be white-ish, as well as the TV shows. Ditto for Branson, Nascar, etc.
One of the things that I might have added if I were drafting the questionaire, was the number of times in the last month you went to Wal-Mart. There seems to be a lot of snobbery against that company, yet, it is the go-to place for much of this country (I found myself the only one frequenting it, of those in my law office in semi-rural NV).
Another is gun ownership. There are an awful lot of guns in this country, yet most of the elite seems almost petrified of such. And, this isn’t just a class thing – as a number of the attorneys I have known in NV and UT were gun nuts, having the disposable income to buy a wide selection of firearms. One firm I was with paid for CCW permitting classes for its attorneys. Throughout much of this country, gun ownership is not remarkable.
What I think that you need to realize here is that the vast majority of people living in the small town I lived in for the last 5 years, in NV, would probably score higher than I did (62), and a large majority of those living in the area I grew up in (Denver suburbia) would probably score at least as high. And, yet, it seems that most of the reported scores here were half or less of my score – while decrying that the suggestion that there was an elite bubble was nonsense. I think that there is, and that Murray has a point here. I also think that I may be more sensitized to it than some, having moved in and out of that bubble throughout my professional career.
January 26, 2012, 8:02 amSecond Amendment Sister says:
Point being, the “elite” have the option of making an effort to overcome “blind spots”. The non-elite live it every day, hence, yes, real life experience counts for more.
It’s like being a grandparent and having the luxury to give the kids back after a visit. It’s cute to feed them sugar and indulge them because you don’t have to make the tough decisions at home.
January 26, 2012, 8:05 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
.
What this points to is the idiocy and inherent unfairness of a common retirement age for all.
.
January 26, 2012, 8:08 amkarrde says:
I will own to the title of Tea Party Type if you wish.
Can you give me a layman’s description of the difference between the cardinality of the set of Integers and the cardinality of the set of Real Numbers? What is the meaning of this comparison?
(…or do you mean “proud to be ignorant of things I think important”…?)
On a whole, I find ignorance-vs-knowledge questions pointless. I can discuss mathematics and physics with most University professors of the Sciences. I can discuss literature that I have read with professors of Literature. I know this because I have had such conversations.
Just last night, after a religious meeting, I was discussing motorcycle riding and car-rebuilds with a young man who enjoys taking things apart and fixing them.
Are any of these signs of knowledge? I don’t care. I have an ability to think, to question, and to learn. And that ability did not switch off after I gained my last degree.
January 26, 2012, 8:11 amAsher says:
I suspect that Murray is more interested in the elite/middleclass divide than the elite/poverty divide. Middleclassishness *is* historic European, especially Anglo, culture, which means it is white. America still has significantly more white middleclass people than it has black people. The implication is that white people aren’t allowed to have a distinct culture, that is only allowed for non-whites.
You’re demonstrating that you have the same loathing contempt for any white person who doesn’t make it into the elite that Lee Siegle demonstrated in the New York Times on MLK day.`
January 26, 2012, 8:29 amMike says:
I was surprised that the test was pretty accurate. I grew up in a rural area with working class parents. I now have 3 degrees and a professional career with a wife who also grew up in a rural area with working class parents and she also has 3 degrees and a professional career. I scored a 65 which was just below the average score of 66 for such a person.
Living in an extremely wealthy suburb of DC now and having spent so much time at well known graduare schools, I completely understand and see this blind spot among the elite. But i think the quiz missed two areas in which the elite have a blind spot of the non elite. I was particularly surprised at the lack of questions about guns. Of the attitudes of the elite, their contempt and disdain for gun owners is pretty apparent during any type of political discussion on that topic.
While the phrase “Guns, God and Gays” is used to negatively describe the working class white segment, it is pretty accurate. Though I would say the issues of gun rights, religion and immigration are so divergent that many white elites simply do not understand and do not care to understand non elite whites.
January 26, 2012, 8:53 amFnord says:
“It’s like being a grandparent and having the luxury to give the kids back after a visit. It’s cute to feed them sugar and indulge them because you don’t have to make the tough decisions at home.”
January 26, 2012, 9:14 amNo one is arguing that the elite don’t have it better than those with fewer resources. That’s why we call them the elite (whether they deserve it or not is a matter of controversy). But that’s not Murray’s thesis.
Barb says:
I was the one, not Leo, who made the remark about latex.
Now, I had to look up WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) –and I still don’t know what Clark was trying to communicate here. It must be an elitist thing….I’m not smart or informed enough to “get it.”
January 26, 2012, 9:20 amJust Dropping By says:
The title of the book is Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, so I’m pretty sure that the quiz was drafted to be taken by white people. (Note, I am not taking a position on whether Murray is a racist. Just pointing out that the book’s title indicates the intended audience for the quiz.)
January 26, 2012, 9:21 amBenjamin G Davis says:
“The only thing he has going for him is that he is rich.” – a French insult
Elite = white, Middle Class = White are along the same lines as American = white. (“All-American looks.”). To use generic terms like this to mean whiteness is an old blindness that has something to do with American culture and who is seen and not seen (the Invisible Man anyone?).
Charles Murray lost any sense of reality with his Bell Curve thought experiments. Now he comes back to realize that the elite are so out of touch with the reality of ordinary Americans that the elite thought experiments and solutions will be out of touch with what the ordinary Americans reality might require. So he is out of touch. Maybe this is just an effort to get himself into the right salons to be the witty intellectual amusement.
I have had the pleasure of spending a great deal of time with the elite in various settings. Most are just ordinary people with a great deal of money. Just a real few – a very narrow few – are amazing. And, of course, that is true among the less rich also.
Put another way, I have been appalled by the behavior of persons in the self-styled elites and non-elites. Usually more appalled by the elites because they are supposed to know better and wield more power to do awful things (torture anyone?).
Also, American elites are shallow compared to the sense of entitlement felt in the “elites” that I met in France – we are all hicks to them.
Best,
January 26, 2012, 9:22 amBen
CPBrown says:
Maybe the elite should be making fewer decisions for ordinary Americans.
This alleged new ignorance (which I contend is not new at all) was not as much of a problem when the federal government did not have as many incursions into people’s daily lives. Decreasing the governmental involvement in most American lives would be simpler than reducing the elite ignorance of normal people’s lives. But I seriously doubt that either will ever happen.
January 26, 2012, 9:25 amgooners says:
This question sucks:
None of those companies are American anymore. Yuengling is now the largest American owned brewing company, and that’s what I’ll drink.
January 26, 2012, 9:27 amrbj says:
Interesting. Of the movies listed, the only one I have seen is Clash of the Titans. But it was the original version, not the (quick look at IMDB) 2010 version.
Managed a 48. Grew up mostly in rural NY, though we regularly took trips into the city to see MOMA and Natural History. (T. Rex vs. Stegasaurus). Dad had a small business, and I worked in his factory, but I also went to a New England prep school (as did he and my sisters.) So I’m comfortable in both worlds, tending more to look at people than economic/cultural/whatever status.
January 26, 2012, 9:27 amClark says:
As I said:
January 26, 2012, 9:31 amFnord says:
@Second Amendment Sister:
And to what extent is that even true? It absolutely is for things like having a job that makes your feet or back hurt.
But Murray apparently also thinks enjoying NASCAR and/or fishing are highly relevant. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those (in fact, after football, car racing is my second choice for spectator sport), but they’re not something forced upon you by circumstance.
January 26, 2012, 9:31 amClark says:
Yes, I realized – must have made a mistake while quoting.
This comment perfectly encapsulates the sour grapes use of “elitist” in discourse on the right. Thanks for making it.
January 26, 2012, 9:33 amClark says:
Is that because the term “chickenhawk” hits too close to home on the right?
January 26, 2012, 9:35 ambbbeard says:
What Buckley said was
He wasn’t talking about a Harvard education, he was talking about the Harvard faculty — two very different things. Like most Ivies, Harvard has a faculty that is about 45 degrees farther left than the student body. I don’t see why this statement is hypocritical. Do you think Buckley would have been welcome on the Harvard faculty?
I thought it was spelled LaTeX.
Actually, I wasn’t speaking of the black-white cultural divide directly, but of the white experience with black people. For example, one of the sources of tension during the Civil Rights era was the perception among white Southerners that they experienced black culture more directly than the Yankees who were imposing their theory of race relations on the country.
I live in Memphis, which today is vastly different from the town it was in the 1960′s, but in ways that would have been difficult to guess in 1968. It is a majority-black city, but one with a significant black middle and upper-middle class. It is not “integrated” in the sense that the opponents of segregation desired. I would be tempted to say that blacks and whites here are (mostly) socially integrated, but not culturally integrated. One wouldn’t think twice about seeing blacks in high-end restaurants, driving expensive cars, on television as community leaders, and not just leaders of the black community, but leaders of the town and county. (The Memphis mayor, A.C. Wharton, was formerly the mayor of Shelby County, and as far as I can tell, is well-liked by all sides of the political divide.) But there are definitely aspects of black culture that remain mysterious and exotic to white residents. Churches, for example, remain pretty segregated, as far as I can tell. Certain stores seem to be oriented specifically to black clientele. Some radio stations remain proudly black.
The relevance here is that among the white elite that has the greatest influence in how the country is governed, I doubt that there is much direct contact with black culture. Is this important? To the extent that national-agenda items have a disparate impact on the black community (e.g. gun control, voter ID, housing policy…), I think it matters a lot more than what kind of beer you drink.
January 26, 2012, 9:36 amAsher says:
Sour grapes for what, exactly? Those elites have systematically attacked the suburban and exurban white middleclass for, probably, the last half century. How is objecting to being attacked “sour grapes”?
January 26, 2012, 9:40 amLoribeth says:
I scored a 77. If I didn’t dislike sports, I would have scored somewhat higher. It seems to me that those who are complaining that this test doesn’t measure what Murray claims it measures are proving his point.
I grew up in Appalachia and continue to live right on the edge of that region. For years I have worked with the most marginal students in the public school system there. I am appalled at the results of government policies that I personally observe every day. For this reason (and others) I have started attending law school. I have not been surprised to find that many of my professors do live in a bubble. While I respect and admire my professors, I have often thought that a few of them have never driven outside the corporation limits of the city where my school is located.
I am intrigued by Murray’s book. I read the Bell Curve years ago and it affected me deeply. In my view, from the sticks, he is onto something.
January 26, 2012, 9:46 ambbbeard says:
LaTeX is a typesetting system that is popular within certain sectors of the academic community. Try googling it — the Wikipedia article is the first thing that comes up.
I’m not sure how relevant the reference is. It’s possible that users of LaTeX consider themselves elite because of their education, but that actual elites have never had any experience with it.
January 26, 2012, 9:49 amrpt says:
Perhaps Murray needs to coauthor his next study with Jeff Foxworthy. He really needs to add some “you might be a redneck if” material. FWIW, Branson is really a retiree destination spot. I’d ask if the reader has ever been to Robert’s Western Wear (or knows in what city it is), know what two sports at which Walter Ray Williams excels, wears white socks for nonathletic events, has and watches RFDTV on their satellite service.
January 26, 2012, 9:50 amBarb says:
Heh heh –it wasn’t about your choice of condoms, Clark. Sex ed, remember? The elites really DO scoff at abstinence education and I understand that Obama adm. has decreed? that funding for sex ed should not be for abstinence programs which are considered by elites to be ineffectual, unnecessary, and even insulting to all the interdigitating, unmarried “parents.”
Actually, there should be NO funding for sex ed. It should be part of every health and gov’t teacher’s duty –the school’s duty –to promote waiting for marriage (reserving sex for marriage) as the best avenue to economic security for your whole life –along with avoiding addictive drugs, gambling and porn. You don’t need additional gov’t funding to teach the basics of life in our schools. (I know how such funding gets used –for a dinner seminar and a day out of the classroom for the faculstration and some brochures and a film and speaker –and maybe a display of expensive programs to buy for the classroom.)
We do have an abstinence based program that comes without charge from the Pregnancy Center (the pro-life one) into our schools for 3 days –called RSVP (Responsible Sexual Values Program.) Elites wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t even allow it in.
What is needed is a clear message from media, entertainers, parents, educators –that teen sex activity leads nowhere good –that chaperoning youth, religious home teaching on the topic, practicing chastity and waiting for marriage and Golden Rule & Grace Living in marriage will help national economy. It will contribute to optimal physical, emotional, and economic health of all.
Only the Elites won’t agree. BTW, I am not against telling kids in that sex ed program that condoms at stores and birth control pills from doctors are available and should be used if you are going to be sexually active against all the best advice to wait. And that only the condom can possibly help to prevent disease. “If you insist on sex, see Mr. So & So (a good family man and father) after class about how to put the condom on properly–your better option is a cold shower — choose to get out of the tempting situation.”
Kids should be taught that basic principle that “delayed gratification pays off.” And they should certainly know about child support enforcement and the fact that you’ll never be as well off financially with multiple households to support –as when you wait for marriage to one woman, responsible for one household. That not waiting obligates your pocketbook for 18 years, at least, per baby.
They should also hear, however, inspirational stories about untimely pregnancies with babies who were not aborted but adopted out –like Steve Jobs and many others.
Sorry for my non-elitist rant!
January 26, 2012, 9:53 amWayne Jarvis says:
Interesting. We can quibble about individual questions and our own experiences and plumber in Arizona versus plumbers from Nebraska and all of that…but it seems to be sort of missing the point.
The central idea is that it is bad when policy makers cannot identify with those that must live under their policies. This is a very good and valid point. The point really struck home when I was talking to my wife (who is getting a PhD in Social Work) about child welfare. As she explained to me the checklist for child mistreatment/neglect. At some point it dawned on me: if my childhood were subjected to this checklist (including things like “do the parents read to their children”; “do the parents smoke around their children”; “do the parents swear around their children”; “do the parents spank their children”) I probably would have been at least flagged as potentially neglected/mistreated.
But that couldn’t have been further from the actual truth about my childhood. I was just a normal kid in a normal family living on the lower-end of lower-middle-class-not-quite-poor. I was not at any actual risk. But to those developing the checklist, my parents were breaking all of these middle-class parenting taboos and that corresponded to how much my parents cared about me.
As a snarky aside: I always love it when people who have never actually had to work in a factory bemoan the lack of manufacturing jobs. The false nostalgia for shitty jobs, indeed.
January 26, 2012, 9:54 amrpt says:
Do you mean that neither Romney nor Gingrich have combat experience? Romney has at least coined the term “mansion missionary”; the only guy with french cuffs on his starched white shirts.
blockquote cite=”comment-1371325″>
Clark:
January 26, 2012, 9:55 amIs that because the term “chickenhawk” hits too close to home on the right?
Clark says:
You’re worse than elitist. You’re a China panderer drinking a beer with a foreign name! You…. huntsman!
January 26, 2012, 9:57 amPJens says:
Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat. – Socrates
Socrates knew way back then that it was possible for rulers to gain power over things and people they knew little about. The gap between elites and ordinary people is nothing new. It may be a larger gap now, or not.
There is also an understanding gap between other groups of people. Men and women for example. Men have long ruled over women with little clue or care about them.
This country needs leaders who work for the well being of all citizens, not just the wishes of special interests who put them in power. In order to do that, it is important that the ruling eleites at least try and understand the lives and experiences of the ordinary people.
January 26, 2012, 9:59 amnidefatt says:
There was a book years ago on the culture of poverty with a similar test- do you know how to pack up all your belongings in 3 hours and get out of your home? Do you know how to hotwire a car?
I highly doubt any of this is an issue. After all, the whole point of our democracy is everyone has the same chance to impose their culture and values on the rest. What wrecks that is a highly monopolized media, not the ignorance of one group and another. This country was built by immigrants who spoke different languages and totally different cultures- yet here we are.
This book is dumb.
January 26, 2012, 10:00 amBart DePalma says:
The problem with our Credentialed Elite goes beyond mere ignorance about the majority of the citizenry to an arrogant assumption of their own superiority and their domination of the areas of unelected power – the bureaucracy, courts, the legal profession, finance and the media. This combination of ignorance, arrogance and power very arguably leads to gross mis-governance like the government creation of the subprime home mortgage market so ably reported on by Gretchen Morgenson and Peter Wallison.
I argue in my book Never Allow A Crisis To Go To Waste, that the Tea Party movement is largely a rebellion against the mis-governance of the Credentialed Elite in the Obama administration.
January 26, 2012, 10:05 amDon says:
I got an 80 on this quiz. It struck me as reflecting the lives of people around me. I could have gotten a higher score if I drank or knew more smokers.
I live and grew up in a small Idaho town, pop
January 26, 2012, 10:09 amAsher says:
That’s correct. The two phenomena you label are distinctly products of Europe and peoples who originate in Europe. You’re just demonstrating what I’ve been saying for years, which is that people of European descent are not allowed any identity at all. Chinese get to be Chinese, blacks get to be blacks, but white people have to be “tolerant” and “multicultural”, meaning devoid of any identity, at all, with the exception of the elites.
Are you even familiar with the arguments offered in the Bell Curve? The basic conclusion is that the patterns we see in things as seemingly disparate as the ASVAB, SAT and Firefighters’ exams cannot be solely explained by “nurture” causes. Do you dispute that conclusion? The pattern for all sorts of measures, like these, display a remarkably similar pattern where the black mean is one standard deviation below the white mean. If you have a test normed to 100 where whites score an average of 100, with a standard deviation of 15, then the black mean will be about 85, give or take a fifth of a standard deviation.
The average SAT score of black students from families in the top quintile of household incomes is lower than the average score of white students from the bottom quintile. Please, explain that stat.
January 26, 2012, 10:10 amDon says:
I don’t know why it won’t post my full comment.
January 26, 2012, 10:15 amAsher says:
The ability to delay gratification almost certainly has a significant genetic component. Also, depending on the social and economic context, delayed gratification has very little benefit. There’s very little benefit to studying in high school if you lack the intellect to cut it in college.
January 26, 2012, 10:18 amMDT says:
Randy,
I’m surprised that Murray has written such a book, but kudos to him. I do believe that the elite is more insulated. Back 100 years ago, no matter how elite you were, you still were forced to rub shoulders with servants, or walk city streets with all classes of people. Today, you can live in a bubble without ever coming in contact with people unlike yourself. I don’t think that’s healthy for anyone.
My God, I’m agreeing with Randy.
January 26, 2012, 10:22 amsailorman says:
This is sort of the inherent problem here.
Elites are
1) less likely to have knowledge of the experiences of the masses; and simuultaneously
2) more likely to DEVALUE their lack of knowledge.
So not only don’t we know what we’re talking about, but we share the hubris that “what we don’t know isn’t important.”
When elites have different policy outcomes than non-elites, we have a tendency to view that as a failure of others to adopt our (superior) way of thought. We could more accurately consider that perhaps we’re simply oblivious.
January 26, 2012, 10:23 amRicardo says:
Hmm, let’s look at Mr. Wallison’s biography from Wikipedia:
He has served as General Counsel for Treasury, White House Counsel to President Reagan, partner of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and now works for the think tank AEI.
Wallison’s arguments about the subprime mortgage market are quite false but I’m genuinely surprised to see someone celebrating him while criticizing the unelected “credentialed elite” and their “ignorance” and their “arrogant assumption of their own superiority.” I mean, really?
January 26, 2012, 10:28 amDKH says:
Don, I suspect you wrote something like “…small Idaho town, pop ‘less than’ 25,000…,” and used a ‘less than’ symbol rather than the actual words. The symbol is probably confounding the web page renderer or whatever software is processing comments. Try substituting the text.
January 26, 2012, 10:33 amBob from Ohio says:
He said the telephone book versus the Harvard faculty.
It wasn’t the Harvard education but the educated fools on the faculty he was attacking.
The statement has more weight now than ever as the faculty has drifted more and more leftward.
January 26, 2012, 10:35 amBABH says:
Exactly. American democracy is wide open. Anyone with a college degree (and some, though very few, without) is a member of the political class. Anyone who shows up to meetings and is able to get things done is a member of the political elite. A handful of determined, dedicated activists are able to effect major policy changes within a surprisingly short period of time, even at the Federal level. Such activists can be, and are, drawn from any walk of life, and they must make their case to an even wider audience in order to raise money, consolidate voting blocks, and get their agenda on the table.
This is a well-known truth outside of Washington DC. Washington itself, however, is filled with hacks like Murray who believe that influence is measured by cocktail party invitations and appearances on cable news shows. They aspire to be part of a coastal social elite – the chattering class – which is a very different thing from the political elite, where chattering ends and actual decisions are made.
January 26, 2012, 10:37 amgooners says:
Obviously. That’s why Gingrich and Romney are battling it out for the Republican nomination, because neither of them are at all elite.
January 26, 2012, 10:38 amClark says:
May facts never get in the way of your good fight against elitism.
January 26, 2012, 10:42 amWayne Jarvis says:
Maybe. Or maybe the lesson here is that policymakers that just fundamentally cannot understand “average people” (if such a group actually exists) should try to do less. Rather than trying to nudge people to live their lives “like us,” we should just leave them alone.
January 26, 2012, 10:50 amAsher says:
The problem with Murray’s thesis is that it isn’t radical enough. The chattering classes aren’t so much ignorant of the middleclass but openly hostile toward it.
Apparently, we have a leftist version of Anonimus on board.
January 26, 2012, 10:53 amDotar Sojat says:
“Elite law professors are always better than ignorant wahoos in Wichita.”
I grew up near the stockyards in Wichita, with the flare-off pipe at the refinery lighting my bedroom at night. The quiz is pretty much me down the line except I don’t fish and I now tend to English stouts and porters, although I went through college with a Coors IV in me. All my friends’ dads were blue collar, mostly workers at Coleman or one of the aicraft plants or similar jobs. I never knew anyone who lived in a two story house until junior high. I went on to obtain a MA and a JD, and now live in another midwestern city in a decidedly upscale neighborhood, surrounded by other upscale neighborhoods. The children in these areas will grow up without the slightest idea of how 98% of the population lives (or has to live). They wil go to college with and marry the same kind of people. Saw it with my oldest. When they become decision makers, they will operate and live in exactly the bubble Murray describes. So much of the objection to Murray always smacks of a need for him to be wrong.
January 26, 2012, 10:54 amRicardo says:
I am. It seems pretty well-established that there is some genetic component to measured IQ. However, it is a logical fallacy to extrapolate from that fact to the assertion that mean IQ differences between groups are genetic in origin. Nisbett et al. (2012) contains an updated literature review on the topic and James Flynn has also written much on this in the years since Hernnstein & Murray was published.
January 26, 2012, 10:55 amAsher says:
There is a good and proper place for a healthy elitism. That is not the elitism we have today, which is self-centered, sneering, contemptuous and wants to endlessly meddle in the affairs of others. The best analysis of today’s so-called elite is Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.
January 26, 2012, 10:57 amuh_clem says:
It’s Murray, so one shouldn’t have very high expectations in terms of intellectual rigor or honesty. But he does point out a very real problem that many of the people making the big decisions have no clue what it’s like to be on the bottom rungs of society or how their decisions affect the lives of those who are.
The problem with his approach and his silly little quiz is that he’s trying to redefine “elite” to encompass anyone outside of the small and shrinking demographic of white rural denizens who haven’t been to college. Now, I’d like to think I live in a country where 90% of the population has secured a position among the “elite”, but facts and figures about wealth distribution and it’s associated trendlines leads me to conclude that his idea of what it means to be “elite” is just tendentious bullshit.
January 26, 2012, 11:06 amBart DePalma says:
Peter Wallison is indeed part of the Credentialed Elite. While most of this elite tend to be politically left, there are indeed conservatives in their ranks. None of this changes the facts Wallison catalogued in his dissent.
January 26, 2012, 11:15 amW. J. J. Hoge says:
I fall into Murray’s category of second generation upper middle class who tries to get out. I scored 56.
I don’t see the test as a scientific survey. It’s a means of pointing out to those of us who are (or think we are) members of the elite how disconnected our lives have become from folks on the left side of the bell curve. Most of us don’t have the gut-level understanding of the real world problems those people face. We don’t share their experiences.
Let me offer a crude example about the experience of violence.
A very great percentage of the males of my father’s generation had a personal experience of violence as soldiers,
January 26, 2012, 11:15 amBart DePalma says:
Both Romney and Gingrich are part of the Credentialed Elite, which makes a great many Tea Party folks unhappy and moves many of them to Paul and Santorum.
January 26, 2012, 11:17 amuh_clem says:
Oh, and as for my score on the quiz, I can’t be bothered to add it up, although I’d be surprised if I scored above the low 20s.
This despite the fact that I grew up poor working class in the shadow of the chemical plants downriver of Philly. At least we had indoor plumbing, unlike most of my first cousins. As soon as I turned 16 I went to work as a janitor in one of those waste treatment plants, which is about the bottom-rung of the job market. (No time for HS sports – I was working full time) I continued to work at a series of shit-jobs to pay for my own college. Unlike Murray, I actually *know* what it’s like to come home from work physically exhausted and smelling like excrement, or to unload trucks at four in the morning in sub-zero temperatures.
So, when he tries to lecture me about how I don’t understand “non-elite” America because I don’t watch Oprah or drink Coors, I think a big fat raspberry in his direction is entirely appropriate.
January 26, 2012, 11:20 amDan Hamilton says:
Another thing the detractors NEVER talk about is that WHITES WERE NOT AT THE TOP! Asians were.
If he was what the detractors said he was, Whites would be at the top.
Please explain how he is a White Raciest when he says that Asians score above Whites????
January 26, 2012, 11:22 amuh_clem says:
The comment software appears to be eating posts again…
January 26, 2012, 11:24 amSteveL says:
I’ll happily take my 39 with no regrets. Upper middle class now, and parents were as well. But their parents weren’t, and we lived for most of my formative years in a non-elite, mostly blue-collar suburb. So I had plenty of friends who didn’t go to college (and now drive tow trucks for example).
Along with the other flaws people have pointed out, the restaurants make no sense. All the upper middle class people I know with kids eat at Applebees, Chilis and TGIF. If anything, this test reflects whether you are fully aware of the culture of blue-collar, white, southern and midwestern people. Do poor African Americans in NY, Detroit and Chicago buy pickup trucks, go to Branson or watch NASCAR? Hell no. So I suspect that left-leaning people in true urban settings probably are ignorant of this culture, but then they may know more about urban black culture than the upper middle class white folks in the suburbs.
January 26, 2012, 11:25 amgooners says:
Sure, I guess 10% can be “many”.
January 26, 2012, 11:32 amSmooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
Elitist; but scored a 48. Not sure what that means.
January 26, 2012, 11:33 amLN says:
It’s convenient how Asians are on the top, and yet virtually all of our business and political leaders are white, and no one seems too troubled by this grave injustice and perversion of nature. It’s almost as if Asians are a non-threatening minority that mainly serve as a useful foil to contrast against all the other groups.
January 26, 2012, 11:39 amLN says:
January 26, 2012, 11:40 amKen Arromdee says:
I think people saying “the Big Bang theory appeals to the educated” are missing the point. It’s still a popular show; you are basically saying “Non-elites like it, but only elites truly appreciate it.” The question was asked because non-elites like it, and the fact that you may appreciate it more than the unwashed masses is irrelevant.
If there’s a Wal-Mart question, you wouldn’t say “well, that’s a bad question because the reason I go to Wal-Mart is that I have a sophisticated economic theory which tells me that Wal-Mart is to my advantage, and those other guys just go to Wal-Mart for the low prices”.
January 26, 2012, 11:41 amClark says:
Actually, that’s a thumping majority in Real Math.
January 26, 2012, 11:44 amClark says:
Interesting. So it’s not true that, as some posited here, Anonimus was a leftist false flag operation (planted by Alinsky, I assume) to hoist blubbering rightists by their own petard?
January 26, 2012, 11:47 amNBL says:
Which dialogue is this from? I ask because it is surprising when viewed in contrast to many of Plato’s unashamedly elitist arguments, particularly in the Republic. I’d love to be able to read the context. Thanks!
January 26, 2012, 11:52 amLN says:
So Murray offers up a quiz to test your relationship to “real America,” but he makes zero effort to validate the quiz to see if it measures what he thinks it measures. Fascinating.
January 26, 2012, 11:52 amSmooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
The title of the post would make more sense if it used the word “Elite’s”, instead of “Elite”
January 26, 2012, 11:59 amnon says:
This is a different, and provocative list to use in the same way as the quiz. The lack of finance and health questions really hurts Murray’s quiz IMHO.
January 26, 2012, 12:02 pmAsher says:
Meh, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that there is a general factor of intelligence. What I am sold on is that evolution in homo sapiens has been speeding up not slowing down. Ecological divergence plus time equals genetic divergence, which inevitably leads to heritable behavioral divergence. It’s simply not plausible that over the past hundred thousand or more years of ecological divergence that the species hasn’t undergone a significant divergence of
behavioraltraits.“IQ” measures for a substantial portion of
behavioraltraits that confer thrival (adjective form of thrive) in the setting of European civilization. It is not a measure of inferiority or superiority. Groups from different ecological backgrounds will have divergent traits and this is, simply, not arguable.Whites evolved to thrive in social conditions in which whites have produced and thrived. Same for Asians. Same for Africans.
The Bell Curve is just another piece in the mosaic that demonstrates divergent traits.
January 26, 2012, 12:05 pmAsher says:
In China, where the Han have spent the last few thousand years producing a social environment, most people in power are Chinese.
Meh.
In Japan, where the Japanese have spent the last few thousand years producing a social environment, most people in power are Japanese.
Meh.
In America, which is a European social environment, where Europeans have spent the past few thousand years producing a social environment, most people in power are white.
OMFG!!!! Nazis. NAZIS. NAZIS!!!!!!! Someone call the multicultural police.
January 26, 2012, 12:12 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I can’t finish the quiz.
“5. Have you ever walked on a factory floor?”
Several times a day, every day. I feel like I’m being queried by Martians.
…
bbbeard is correct in what he says about Memphis. It’s possible to live a very integrated life in Memphis, but also a very segregated one if you are black and poor, or white and wealthy. I wrote here about my frustration at a sermon offered by an elitist white person who seemed to think his experiences extrapolated to all of us. To balance this, I’ll mention a woman I knew there, a white woman who taught kindergarten in a black public school. She took maternity leave one year, and after her baby was born, brought her in for the students to see. They were startled when they looked at her daughter, and asked how she’d had a white baby. At that point she realized that the students thought that she was black, light brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin, and all. Because it had never occurred to them that they might ever cross paths with a white person.
January 26, 2012, 12:13 pmrpt says:
Well, what was your score? This seems more and more like an Onion discussions as it goes on.
January 26, 2012, 12:13 pmSykes Five says:
I don’t know, but generally speaking, agricultural knowledge was an affectation of Greco-Roman elites. One did not actually farm, of course, and did not actually manage the plantations, but was nonetheless expected to possess a ready stock of agricultural lore, own treatises on agriculture, etc.
January 26, 2012, 12:14 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
And that was a point of The Bell Curve as well–that our society has moved from one where people of normal and even somewhat subnormal intelligence could support themselves and raise families without requiring governmental assistance and permission. Much of the growth of government, while ostensibly to help the poor, has in practice made many Americans dependent on governmental assistance because entry to so many occupations is now limited. You want to start a beauty shop doing hair? There are regulations on that. You want to use your car for a taxi service? You need a medallion from the city–and those are expensive. But because the elites have little or no contact with ordinary people, they do not realize the damage that they are doing to ordinary folks.
January 26, 2012, 12:17 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
And yet he correctly predicted the results of those changes on the day that they took effect, September 30, 1999. (He underestimated the scale of the disaster.)
January 26, 2012, 12:20 pmThorley Winston says:
I got a 67. I haven’t hung out with any smokers in the last month, I don’t buy beer, don’t know military rank insignias, haven’t fished since high school, and don’t follow NASCAR or reality television. On the other hand, I grew up lower middle class in a small town, played sports, regularly watch action/sci fi/fantasy movies on DVD, worked manual labor in high school and have a wide variety of friends with different religious and political beliefs.
For the last question, I think you should have gotten bonus points for guessing “Charles.” ;)
January 26, 2012, 12:20 pmSykes Five says:
I agree but I think Murray might not, because he screened out Chipotle (whose burrito I just finished) on the basis that it appeals to the elite, despite evidence of its success in the general marketplace. If he watched Big Bang Theory, maybe he would conclude it doesn’t belong and its success is some kind of fluke, too.
Also, do I get points for thinking that Branson referred to the chauffeur on Downton Abbey?
January 26, 2012, 12:20 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Lots of Republicans aren’t Tea Partiers.
January 26, 2012, 12:21 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
Look at the percentage of Asians in the U.S., and the low fraction of Asian business and political leaders is not all that surprising.
January 26, 2012, 12:23 pmSykes Five says:
Yes, the test should just say, “Have you taken your family on an outing that lasted longer than six hours during the last year?” because you would certainly have ended up in one of these places at meal time. I do not choose to eat at those places but I end up there on roadtrips or long mall visits.
January 26, 2012, 12:24 pmDoug says:
I think Murray’s main point comes in his explanation for Question No. 9. I don’t think a lot us realize how secluded we are in our contacts with people of lesser intelligence.
I scored a 62 on the quiz, but it would have been much higher if I hadn’t scored 0 points for the pop culture stuff. I grew up in a metro area and went to one of the high schools Murray describes where everyone has above-average IQ. My wife, however, is from a rural area in Georgia, and that’s where we settled after I graduated law school. I’m a solo attorney and have a lot of dealings with people in the sub-100 IQ range.
Murray makes a mistake, I believe, by trying to show that the elite have experiences of a different kind. That’s undoubtedly true, but I think it would’ve been fruitful to focus on how the elite and the underclass experience the same things differently.
For example, both the elite and underclass use social media. But if you read the Twitter feeds of the elite, it’s almost exclusively used to convey a sense of intellectual superiority among friends with witty wordplay or obscure references. But with the underclass, it’s almost exclusively about posturing or obscene rants against perceived slights. (Well, most of it is an incoherent mess of misspelled words and poor grammar. But if you interpret the message, you’ll get the sense of a heavy dose of inferiority complex and anger.)
In fact, I’d be willing to wager that very few Volokh commenters on Twitter have read a tweet from a sub-100 IQ user. I recommend it; it really is a trip down the rabbit hole.
January 26, 2012, 12:25 pmSykes Five says:
Maybe the country doctor gets a pass, but the former big firm lawyer is definitely a credentialed elite.
January 26, 2012, 12:27 pmrpt says:
Do you a copy of “The Great Books” set in your house?
January 26, 2012, 12:28 pmKevin R says:
I thought the restaurant thing was silly too. I grew up in the type of small town he seems to be going for, and none of those top-9 restaurants were there, or anywhere else in the county. Those are more “suburb” than “small town”. I kind of get the impression he’s just lumping together “all places in the US that aren’t Manhattan”. (Claifying edit: Obviously some of those restaurants hadn’t expanded as much as they have now when I was growing up, but my parents still live in that town, so I know what it’s like now, too. Still none of those restaurants.)
(Comments here started out ok, but were soon derailed by the usual suspects. I realize our hosts hate banning people, but a few well-placed bans would go far…)
January 26, 2012, 12:35 pmSeaDrive says:
I didn’t look at the quiz, but I note few comments (except the LaTex joke) concerning computers, smart phones, Facebook, or Twitter. Perhaps this is Murray’s weakness.
I join with Randy and others to say that the underlying notion is right even if the quiz is fatally flawed. The poster child is Romney, who has not got a clue about living on less than $100K, much less less than $50K.
Legislators at either state or federal level don’t seem to have a clue about how complicated life is, and how even the simplest assumptions about how people live have many, varied, and valid variations. So they write stupid laws. Especially, about computers, it seems.
January 26, 2012, 12:35 pmSarcastro says:
Wait, so the test is trying to prove that middle class people live very different lives from working class people?
This is totally news!
I think we need to divide our country into a Rich America, a Middle America, and a Poor America. Only then will we truly have representative government.
But this quiz is too silly to spend an entire comment thread on. Lets debate racial essentialism instead, that’s not silly at all!
January 26, 2012, 12:36 pmyankee says:
The really ironic thing about this quiz is that it doesn’t appear to be based on any actual facts about middle-class Americans. It’s a combination of stereotypes, assumptions, and normative beliefs about what makes a “real” American (as with the implicit elevation of people who live in rural areas even thought the vast majority of Americans live in metropolitan areas).
I do think privileged Americans’ ignorance of how middle-class Americans live is a problem though. If you’re the sort of person who thinks you’re not rich because it’s hard to pay the nanny, you’re not going to understand the problems of people who find it hard to locate affordable childcare and don’t have the luxury of considering a full-time servant a “necessity.”
January 26, 2012, 12:36 pmgooners says:
I know. That’s why I look at polls that break out self-identified Tea Party supporters and look at the percentages for each candidate.
January 26, 2012, 12:38 pmrpt says:
Yes, you’ve got some real non-elite alternatives there:
“Santorum earned a B.A. with honors in political science from Pennsylvania State University in 1980, an M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981, and a J.D. with honors from the Dickinson School of Law in 1986.[19] He was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, and practiced law for four years at the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, now known as K&L Gates.”
“[Ron Paul] attended Gettysburg College, where he was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and earned a B.S. degree in biology in 1957. After earning a Doctor of Medicine degree from Duke University’s School of Medicine in 1961, Paul relocated with his wife to Michigan, where he completed his medical internship at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. He then served as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and then in the United States Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968.”
January 26, 2012, 12:41 pmThorley Winston says:
I don’t think anyone has suggested that it’s “really no big deal” to raise the retirement age and think that’s evidenced by the fact that pretty much everyone who has proposed it has suggested phasing it in over time and grandfathering in people who were at or near the current retirement age. I think that it’s something that should be done (as well as means-testing) but I’m cognizant of the fact that there are a lot of older people – like my own father – who worked such physically demanding jobs most of their lives that they would not able to keep working as long as I and the rest of my generation are going to have to pay the bill for the entitlement programs that the last two generations voted for themselves.
January 26, 2012, 12:43 pmAsher says:
My score was 58. Raised evangelical Christian and homeschooled. Currently, an apatheist (seems someone came up with that term before me). Living in the heart of Seattle, and raised in the city limits. Undergrad degrees in econ and finance from a top fifteen business school. Three years working toward a doctorate in philosophy, which I will never finish.
Again, the issue is not elite ignorance but elite contempt and hatred of the middle.
January 26, 2012, 12:43 pmBJM says:
I scored a 59, current HLS 1L. True, some of the questions struck me as lacking, especially number 25. I’m from Ohio and I’ve never heard of Branson. A better question might ask if someone owns or has ever fired a gun. It might not perfectly line up with elite/non-elite aims of the quiz, but I feel it would at least be an improvement over that question.
Two thoughts:
1) (Coming from a town of under 6,000) The test is too slanted towards interpreting a rural area as specifically non-elite. A lot of the questions about college education, income, fishing, etc. are all highly correlated with smaller areas. True, inner-cities have more poverty, but the masses are not flocking to rural Ohio for the job prospects. There are plenty of urbanites who are not part of the “elite” as well and may not score highly.
2) I think the point Murray might be trying to make, though he’s not doing it in the best manner, is something like this, assuming for a moment everything he says is true. He argues: i) the elite today are more removed from average society and ii) this removal causes them to make worse policy decisions. Imagine a different scenario, an “elite” who scores highly. What is the most salient fact in the idea that someone is a man of the people and then goes on to make public policy or otherwise has “elite” status? I think it’s the fact that they transitioned there. You may disagree, but I think you can see his argument as a potential reason for diminished upwards social mobility.
Rephrased, his argument would look like this: i) contemporary elites are removed from the problems and influences of “ordinary Americans”; ii) this is because they did not rise from the bottom or middle of the hierarchy upwards; iii) by lacking any first-hand knowledge of the mechanics of such a transition, they iv) fail to implement successful policies that aid others in making the same leap. This, v) leads to mistrust and misunderstanding of each side by the other.
January 26, 2012, 12:45 pmAsher says:
This, coming from someone convinced that America is awash in Christian dominionists, with no presentable evidence, and with much evidence to the contrary.
Priceless
And intellectually dishonest
January 26, 2012, 12:46 pmAsher says:
I do not. Although I do have the bulk of Kant, Marx, Shakespeare and Nietzsche.
January 26, 2012, 12:52 pmNo Points for Thinking of Richard Branson — The League of Ordinary Gentlemen says:
[...] Ilya Somin, who clocked in at 37, shares his own all-too-elite thoughts over here. In part: [T]here is no reasonable version of this test on which I would have come out looking like a Man of the People. More generally, Murray is surely right that there is a culture gap between the new upper middle class and the rest of the public, and that the former is often ignorant about the lives of the latter. [...]
January 26, 2012, 12:58 pmAsher says:
I want to say “Yes!!!” because someone, finally, gets it, and “Um” because what took you so eff’ing long.
The elite actively seek to distance themselves from the middle, but the easiest route to this objective is to try and obscure the distinction between the middleclass and the underclass. That is really the main objection to the elite.
The most salient objective interest of the middlesclass is to distance itself from the underclass.
January 26, 2012, 1:00 pmSeamus says:
Is it really so hard to grasp that WFB, though part of the elite himself, didn’t want to be ruled by the elite?
January 26, 2012, 1:01 pmRandy says:
Buckley didn’t refer to just any old phone book, but a *Boston* phone book.
January 26, 2012, 1:07 pmRandy says:
Buckley didn’t refer to
just any old phone book, but a *Boston* phone book.
January 26, 2012, 1:16 pmRandy says:
Buckley didn’t refer to
just any old phone book, but a *Boston* phone book.
January 26, 2012, 1:18 pmtheobromophile says:
My family (both sides, in fact, and all three sides, if you count my stepparents) has a long tradition of educating their children and then kicking them out of the nest at age 22 (or sometimes, age 18) and telling them to go make their fortunes on their own. After a few years loading freight cars, working two jobs, waitressing, etc., the aforementioned family members usually work their way up the food chain.
I have no idea what Charles Murray would make of that. I also do not know what he would make of people whose families are upper-middle class, but who go into non-profits, art, etc., and then don’t make the money that their parents did.
January 26, 2012, 1:19 pmStephen Lathrop says:
I completely agree that there is a growing separation between a near-hereditary American elite and other Americans. I disagree that the most important problem is that those elite persons do not understand (although many don’t seem to) the lives and difficulties of the others.
The most important problem is that those elite persons don’t have the practical knowledge of how the world works that the others have. Members of elites compound that problem when, as they often do, they hold the real and vital knowledge of their social inferiors in disregard. That, too, happens all the time.
That means that when members of the elite find themselves running things, they are too often clueless. Having been educated to parse abstractions, the notion that mobilizing materials creates friction, that people working together experience dissension, that the world is not infinitely malleable according to theory, plays too small a part in the mentality of the modern elite, and especially of its younger members.
Things were not always thus. As recently as the mid twentieth century, America was equipped with numerous leaders whose upbringing and early adulthood harked back to farming, or something similarly practical. The supply of those kinds of policy makers has grown vanishingly small, and the nation is not better for it. You are not usually going to get the same quality of judgment from someone who grew up in a rich suburb, attended exclusive prep schools, matriculated at an Ivy League college, and went on to Harvard Business School. What would a person like that know about things that don’t work?
January 26, 2012, 1:34 pmThorley Winston says:
I like Chipotle as well but I think it makes sense not to include it in this list for two reasons. One, the list seems to consist of traditional “sit down” places where someone is seated and they come take your order (hence places like Subway and Boston Market aren’t included). Two, a lot of places don’t have Chipotle yet (I have friends in Duluth who ask us to bring them “Chippers” whenever we go to visit).
January 26, 2012, 1:36 pmPhiladelphia says:
Almost all of the commenters here have missed the real point of Ilya’s post: “The solution is not so much an elite that is better-informed about the culture of the masses, but an elite whose power over those masses is more limited and decentralized.”
God protect us from well-meaning people who think they know how we should all live to protect us from all of life’s hardships.
January 26, 2012, 1:40 pmLN says:
This is so dumb I don’t even know how to respond. Let me try slowly.
I did not write my comment in a void, I wrote it in response to the argument that Charles Murray — who argues that societal outcomes are determined by IQ — couldn’t be racist because Asians have higher IQs than whites in America.
I said that although Asians have higher IQs, they are not over-represented in America’s leadership class, and Charles Murray and his supporters have no problem with this. In other words, because the fact that Asians have higher IQs is non-threatening to whites, it is a cheap way for “race realists” to argue that they aren’t racist. “Look, I believe in a racial hierarchy, but my group isn’t even on top! I’m just being objective.” Except, of course, that in reality whites are indeed on top.
Now you’re telling me that you don’t believe IQs don’t determine societal outcomes. Well, guess what? Neither do I. What on earth does that have to do with the argument I was making above? If you don’t think IQ is that important why don’t you argue with someone who disagrees?
And where am I being the multicultural police or calling people Nazis? Do you know how to read?
January 26, 2012, 1:44 pmRandy says:
Wow — sorry for that posting screwup!
January 26, 2012, 1:54 pmRandy says:
Good point. But to the extent that the elite will always be with us, and that government will always be regulating people and the economy, we should have some people there who are non-elite, or at least have an elite that understands the issues of the non.
January 26, 2012, 1:57 pmneurodoc says:
neurodoc also wonders why Coors Lite. Coors has no taste appeal for him, and he imagines that Coors Lite must be still less palatable. It isn’t an especially cheap beer, is it, like Pabst Blue Ribbon and Rolling Rock? Didn’t it have a special “elitist” cachet because it wasn’t distributed in the East and it was made with pure Colorado mountain water? The Coors family had a reputation as union-busters and big supporters of Conservative causes, so might that not also somehow influence the “meaning” of Coors as a choice, even after the company was merged with Molson?
January 26, 2012, 2:08 pmBarb says:
It’s parenting. Do you think it’s IQ and affirmative action that the top incomes among blacks still have low achieving kids? It could also be that different races have excellence in different skill sets? And there are certainly some outstandingly smart black people –and Oprah is one of them.
January 26, 2012, 2:08 pmSarcastro says:
Because dividing up into stratified societies will work super well. Like a caste system.
Though I’ve always preferred not to let all that dumb labor go to waste. Why isolate the lower class, when you can call them ‘proles’ and they can work for the Inner Party?
January 26, 2012, 2:10 pmGiant Frog says:
47. No TV, and sports mostly outside of school (boxing and what passed for “ironman” back then).
Here’s an example of the holier-than-thou attitude which insures the meddling, er, involvement, will continue:
Of course not, and no one–especially the poor–should have the opportunity to do so.
Murray doesn’t say that outcomes are determined by IQ, merely that IQ is a large part of it; how much a part depends on what types of outcomes your’re talking about. And I can’t find anyone who made the argument you’re arguing against.
That depends on what you define as the “leadership class”. Asians in the US make considerably more money than europeans (almost 50% higher rate of income > $100K/year, which isn’t surprising given the IQ difference), but they’re fairly rare in politics. (And in movies.) But politics in a democracy, like acting and entertaining, is more of a popularity/personality contest than a high-g activity.
January 26, 2012, 2:22 pmWake Up Little Susie says:
Two words: Orin Kerr.
22 more words: you should have heard what happened when ordinary Americans called him last year on CNN. Talk about ppl talking past each other!
January 26, 2012, 2:23 pmAsher says:
In individuals? Not particularly. In tranches? Absolutely. If you take a random sample of a thousand individuals all with IQs of 105 and compare them to a random sample of individuals all with IQs of 95 you’re going to find huge disparities in almost every conceivable measure.
The reason is that the relevant object of measure is not the individual but the group. Groups are far more informative objects of measure than individuals, no matter how you group them. It could be continent of origin. It could be measured IQ. The groupis always the most relevant unit of analysis.
January 26, 2012, 2:27 pmAsher says:
January 26, 2012, 2:32 pmBart DePalma says:
Take a look at the internals of the polling.
Gingrich is the favorite of the Tea Party because he articulates conservative principles the best. But between a quarter and a third of the Tea party are not buying and support Paul and Santorum.
January 26, 2012, 2:36 pmCJColucci says:
The real question isn’t whether you eat at Applebee’s, but how you like the salad bar.
January 26, 2012, 2:37 pmAsher says:
The antonym of unity is diversity. If you’re going to have unity it’s going to be over something, something of substance. The easiest trout to social unity is through ethnic and cultural background. Another route is through social class.
January 26, 2012, 2:37 pmgooners says:
Taken care of.
January 26, 2012, 2:39 pmAsher says:
I was homeschooled by an artistic mother with a bitter, emotionally abusive father who was just along for the ride. My next two brothers were rebellious and occupied my mom’s time trying to keep them out of hell. Seriously. Smoking cigarettes were, at least, halfway to putting you in eternal damnation.
At sixteen, my mom bought me a calculus textbook and I learned enough to test myself into Calc III in freshman year. You tell me how that happened.
BTW, my entire upbringing consisted of telling me how to stay out of hell. Somehow, magically, I ended up beginning freshman year in Calc III.
Right.
January 26, 2012, 2:44 pmrpt says:
Not “awash” at all, but certainly out there and active, including several for whom I’ve done legal work. for example, Jerry Boykin (not a client) is speaking at West Point soon. Besides, as an atheist, how could you tell, and how is this relevant to the current discussion?
January 26, 2012, 2:52 pmPhiladelphia says:
I disagree strongly. Push back against well-intentioned social architects–however ignorant or all-knowing they may be–is the best defense of liberty. No amount of understanding of the non-elite will improve the resulting unintended consequences. That is especially true when the chief tool the government uses is redistribution of resources among various groups.
January 26, 2012, 2:53 pmWhite Trash says:
The whole point of the quiz is not that is “scientific” but that many of the elite do not understand what most face daily. Compound that with these same elites are perfectly happy to tell others what they experience is not true and that they are nothing but ignorant scum. When these elites make policy it does solve the problems of the “ignorant scum” but usually makes these problems worse.
January 26, 2012, 3:07 pmLN says:
You could start by reading the comment I was replying to. It’s conveniently quoted in my original comment.
Geez people.
January 26, 2012, 3:16 pmCalderon says:
I ended up with a 50, after splitting the difference on some of the answers. My scoring was very high on the first half of the questions, and then had a lot of 0′s on the second half of the test. Probably a reflection of being born into basically a working class family but personally becoming upper class in terms of income, though not style or manners.
As for the rest of the OP, I agree strongly with both of Prof. Somin’s points. First, measuring the distance between the elites and working class over time is going to be very difficult. I’d be interested in what data Murray uses. There’s not going to be any data actually measuring interactions, and trying to measure that distance by what media, etc. elites consume has the problems other commenters have pointed out. There might be data on how geographically clustered the wealthy are, but again a questionable measure and wealth alone doesn’t capture being “elite.” And I don’t have much to add to Prof. Somin’s second, fundamentally Hayekian, point.
January 26, 2012, 3:26 pmMAM says:
Can you have a robust polity where elites become more and more entrenched? Of course, the question assumes, in part, that the entrenchment of the elites is based on political power and social barriers to entry, not merit.
Aren’t we really arguing about income/wealth mobility? If elites are clueless, isn’t one reason for this is lack of competition? Necessity is the father of invention. If American mobility is at the point of the Guilded Age, that suggests that the elite will get more ignorant since they have little to gain by creating competitors. I tend to believe that the elites want to give just enough to the masses to prevent a severe disruption but their isolation means that they don’t really have a clue where the breaking point is.
January 26, 2012, 3:30 pmLN says:
No, it’s because he’s a Washington outsider with strong family values, haven’t you been paying attention?
January 26, 2012, 3:31 pmrpt says:
Don’t forget Shoney’s. It puts the rest of them to shame.
January 26, 2012, 3:41 pmrpt says:
And Tiffany’s! In the hotbed of Manhattan conservatism.
January 26, 2012, 3:43 pmdht says:
While there are many current elites who were born into upper middle class families, I would point out that since 1960 (the beginning of the study) we have had only 3 presidents who were from upper class families – JFK and the 2 Bushes. All of the rest came from middle class, or lower, families, and were able to succeed very well. They may have ended up elite and out of touch, but they did not start that way.
January 26, 2012, 3:48 pmAsher says:
Leftism is a religion. The elite class in what is known as the US is stocked with Leftist Dominionists. Frankly, I’d rather live under christian dominionists than leftist dominionists.
Christian dominionism is the theological stance that God created Christianity to politically conquer the world. Only after this happens can the second coming occur.
This is a well-known body of thought. It is also considered heresy becaseu, as I explained before, humanity is desperately wicked and incapable of creating a “holy” body-politic. Any suggestion that humans can create God’s will on earth is tantamount to claiming that humans can be God, which is heresy, as I explained before. If you think that Youth with a Mission is dominionist then you are operating under a completely personal definition of the term – I think I recall you implying that wanting to outlaw abortion was tantamount to dominionism. You understanding of dominionism was, per your own words, entirely about your personal feelings.
What are you? Female?
My point is that you are full of sh*t.
January 26, 2012, 4:11 pmjlowery says:
I was with you up until this point. Staying in a bubble and surrounding yourself with people like you isn’t some new thing. Whether you talk about gated communities of the 1900s or plantation aristocratic styled culture of the 1800s, it’s always been there. A rich person running into the servants cleaning their house isn’t the same thing as actual interaction. If it was, then today’s upper-middle class person who talks to the person who bagged their groceries at Whole Foods or got their coffee at Starbucks would somehow be a man of the people.
What has gotten worse is that the Internet has made it easier to find and stay in a bubble for all of your cultural, religious, and political beliefs. But, despite this, I don’t think there’s this new phenomenon of upper middle class individuals that live different lives than those below them. Having money has always afforded itself different privileges and experiences than those without money.
Generally, what Murray appears to be complaining about isn’t a “bubble” per se, it’s a loss of binding national culture. Between the Internet and cable we have an entertainment glut that means everyone isn’t forced into the same programming by lack of choice. The same is true of food and drink, with a large variety of options now available at all times of the year. But all that’s not the fault of any bubble, it’s just fracturing that comes with increased choice available for marginal increased cost.
January 26, 2012, 4:17 pmzuch says:
Sounds a bit like Foxworthy’s “You Might Be A Redneck If….”
I have news for Mr. Murray: There’s plenty of poor to lower middle class people who are not NASCAR/Denny’s fans.
And once upon a time, at least some Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs were lily-white and all-male.
Oh, yeah, silly me… Murray’s book title: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010″ OK, now it makes sense…..
Cheers,
January 26, 2012, 4:23 pmAww, someone is too good to work a second job? at Haemet says:
[...] Prof. Ilya Somin points to a 25-question quiz from Charles Murray that is part of Murray’s work on class differences. Murray argues that modern elites are generally people who were born into an elite class, went to elite schools, and worked in elite professions, rather than those who come from working class or immigrant families and then succeeded on their own. Murray then echoes Thomas Sowell in saying that this lifelong elitism divides the ruling class from those whom they would rule, such that those who have never worked in a coal mine, for example, nor known anyone who has, then make regulations to govern coal mine workers and purport to know what is best for them. This, Murray argues, is a change from the past. [...]
January 26, 2012, 4:38 pmGlen says:
I scored (a conservative) 70.
I also live in Berkeley, CA. I invest in technology start-ups. My wife is an attorney, and is the director of a public health policy non-profit.
But I can’t remember the last time that I was at a dinner, party or other get-together where I wouldn’t have had “strong and wide ranging political disagreements” if I’d opened my mouth. Nor can I remember the last time I ran into someone in our current neighborhood who had ever been fishing. Or admitted to watching anything on TV other than PBS… and on and on.
January 26, 2012, 4:42 pmzuch says:
Wow. A used copy of Bart’s book on how Obammie’s a commie [what an original thesis!] is going for 260% above list price. Must be a collector’s item!!!! Surely you all will want one of these babies on your coffee table right now….
Cheers,
January 26, 2012, 4:48 pmrpt says:
Here’s your “non-elites” speaking:
“Jailed ex-Congressman Duke Cunningham wants Newt Gingrich to know he’s got the Republican presidential candidate’s back.
Cunningham apparently has been watching the Republican presidential primary debates while spending 100 months in a Tucson, Ariz. federal prison. Cunningham, a Republican who represented northern San Diego, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion in 2005 in one of the biggest federal bribery scandals in recent memory.
Cunningham tells Gingrich in an electronic message he says he sent to the candidate last month that his fellow prisoners, and their families, support Gingrich:
‘Newt, a voice out of the past. Down but not out and still fighting. First I do not want anything from you but have been watching the debates. I have 80% of inmates that would vote for you. They might not be able to but their extended families will.’”
January 26, 2012, 4:49 pmTed says:
Where does that survey show rates of teenage abortions? All I could find on there was abortion rates for women 15-44. If you’re intending to support Barb’s rebuttal to Leo’s chart regarding teenage birthrates, shouldn’t you provide data regarding teenage abortion rates by state?
January 26, 2012, 5:19 pmrpt says:
I am not a leftist and not a female but why is this such a big issue for you? It’s not about my “personal feelings” but rather that I do a lot of work in the Christian business and ministry world and have attended a lot of meetings, both internal (i.e boards) and public (i.e church).
January 26, 2012, 5:24 pmChrisTS says:
Asher writes:
Really? I know you are a Nietzsche fan, but this is absurd.
January 26, 2012, 5:27 pmChrisTS says:
I wish Ilya had not mentioned the silly ‘test.’
I scored a 43, with little effort.
My blue collar creds? Daughter of a Harvard undergrad and law school grad and a Radcliffe grad; descendant of doctors and lawyers and a SCT justice; private school educated; Ph.D. married to a Ph.D.; college professor; Mayflower ancestors on both sides. A real woman of the people.
January 26, 2012, 5:33 pmAsher says:
You mean lumpenproles, not proles. Their very existence is s service to the Inner Party.
January 26, 2012, 5:42 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
How many times in the history of the world has that played out. And it will continue to, because one thing that humans love to do is stratify themselves. We do it in large groups and small, every chance we get. We do it when we know better.
January 26, 2012, 5:45 pmCold Warrior says:
Didn’t the Stuff White People Like blog make the same point? And still manage to be entertaining? Murray’s self-important analysis even makes David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise thing seem insightful in comparison. I’ll even go so far as to say that the previous insipid tome on this non-issue, Bowling Alone, appears to be more enlightening.
January 26, 2012, 5:47 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Yes. I read a biography of Bill Clinton at some point. He had a fairly wretched childhood. It’s really astonishing when you look at where he came from, to contemplate what he accomplished.
Reagan also had very humble beginnings.
January 26, 2012, 5:49 pmAsher says:
So, you’re saying that there are equal numbers of people on the right and left who work for the New York Times, government bureaucracies and teach soft subjects in universities? Really? Really?
January 26, 2012, 5:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Somehow I am reminded of that kid Axel who used to comment here.
January 26, 2012, 5:59 pmThe Sociology of Elite Americans | Whig Newtons says:
[...] Conspiracy has a nice post here as well: http://volokh.com/2012/01/25/charles-murray-on-elite-ignorance-of-ordinary-americans/ Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]
January 26, 2012, 6:02 pmTed says:
Why is the Pabster not listed as a domestic mass-market beer. Evidently, Murray is no hipster.
Snakes are also the most relevant unit of analysis, no? I mean, I would love to know what the analysis your speaking of actually is, so I could evaluate whether “the group” and specifically the mean average of that group’s IQ is the most relevant “unit” of analysis.
It’s obviously because you are white…err, or Asian. What’s your mean IQ?
I can see how you excelled in Econ and finance, but struggled in philosophy: too many black women in philosophy…
January 26, 2012, 6:03 pmJ. Patrick says:
i think neurodoc would agree with me that the divide between illeists and non-illeists is of more pressing concern. when our overlords start speaking in the 3rd-person….be afraid.
January 26, 2012, 6:08 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I am reminded of what happened when one of Henry Ford’s grandkids (maybe Henry Ford II) started asking for a car. He was approaching 18 (I think that was license age at the time), and his father told him that he would give him a car. He was taken into a large room at the Ford factory, and shown his new car: completely disassembled. He had a room full of tools, and there were skilled mechanics to answer his questions and show him how to do things (although not to build the car for him). It took him several months to put the engine together, the body, the transmission (probably a manual), and get a working car. And along the way, he learned how cars work.
I am sure that there are elites whose parents make similar demands on their kids today like this. But I don’t have much confidence that the numbers are large.
January 26, 2012, 6:19 pmleo marvin says:
On the contrary. Leo Marvin wishes there were more Republicans like Bob Dole.
January 26, 2012, 6:29 pmWake Up Little Susie says:
Have you ever lived in a community with a pop under 50,000 and not part of a Metropolitan area?
82% of the US population lives in a metropolitan area. So how is living in a metropolitan area not ordinary?
the question is whether you have ever lived in a non-metroplitan area. I have lived in Cincinati, Toronto and San Francisco, among other places. Still, I would get to answer yes because I spent 18 months living in a community of a couple hundred located 10 miles away from a town of a couple thousand. There were no elites there, although we did have our share of scorpions and wild dogs. 120 degrees a day, day in, day out for months on end in the summer. It was all meth shacks and the impoverished elderly, with a few military families (I would mostly see those at the bars or when I would go to donate to the food bank).
It is not unusual to live in a “metropolitan area,” but it may be unusual to have spent any significant time NOT doing that. It does change you as a person, and the experience of living out there profoundly changed me.
January 26, 2012, 6:36 pmLN says:
Right, because executives at insurance companies and energy companies, and Republican politicians, aren’t really elites, because they’re not liberal. To be an elite you have to be a reporter at the New York Times or a sociology professor.
January 26, 2012, 6:50 pmMark Field says:
Heh. I scored a 34, but in my family my parents were the first persons ever to attend college (and my mother didn’t graduate until I was 13 and she got her teaching credential). One grandfather ran a hardware store (in Peoria, IL — can’t get more Real Murkin than that), while the other worked for Caterpillar (started on the floor, worked his way up to foreman). When I was born my father was in the service because he could only pay for college via ROTC.
Turns out I did have Mayflower ancestors though.
In short, Murray’s test is as full of shit as his IQ book.
January 26, 2012, 6:54 pmrpt says:
Yes, really. And at the banks and corporations, too!. Imagine that.
January 26, 2012, 7:09 pmMatthew Carberry says:
I’d say the distinction is more than “class” or urban/rural, it is also regional.
For instance, the economic and political “elite” in even the urban Pacific Northwest, who have lived here for any length of time anyway, seem very different in tone and style than those in urban New England and the mid-Atlantic states.
In any event, the corruption of the Eastern Megalopolis is clearly demonstrated in that the coffee put out by Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks is considered anything other than swill and until recently it still took work to find a beer of any distinction.
January 26, 2012, 7:13 pmzuch says:
Just keep in mind when reading “many” here that you don’t have to worry about who to believe, Bart or your lying eyes: Bart has explained to us all in his magnum opus that:
Just like the
right-wing Republicans seeking a new, less tarnished nameTea Partiers are some unstoppable mass movement wildly popular in this country….It’s that “fuzzy math” that Dubya loved so much.
Cheers,
January 26, 2012, 7:27 pmrpt says:
What is this, another anti Jan Brewer comment?
January 26, 2012, 7:34 pmCareless says:
That’s possibly the strangest/most flagrantly wrong/insane assertion I’ve ever read here. You’re not an idiot, you have internet access, so you know that the NYT and government bureaucracies is not evenly split between people on the right and the left, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to accomplish with that.
Aside from that, there are people here using two different definitions of “elite”, by income and social status. Murray is pretty clearly talking more about the second group than the first, and that group skews left while the first skews more to the right. You adding in “banks and corporations” does not make your first sentence any less ridiculous.
And, for the record, the extremely rich went heavily to the left after Bush’s first term (not really sure what they’ve done in Obama’s).
January 26, 2012, 7:37 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I don’t know if the story is true, but there’s a legend that in one of Ted Kennedy’s re-election campaigns, his opponent pointed out that Teddy had never “worked” at manual labor one day in his life. At his next campaign appearance at some factory gates, a blue-collar worker going off shift asked him if this charge were true. After a pause, Kennedy said it was.
“Well,” the man said, “you ain’t missed a damn thing.”
January 26, 2012, 7:38 pmTed says:
OCC, has anyone devised a workaround or fix to the comment display issue?
January 26, 2012, 7:41 pmClark says:
FOR. THE. WIN! (although it might be too inside baseball for many commenters).
January 26, 2012, 7:44 pmzuch says:
… like passing (or attempting to pass) a hundred or so anti-abortion bills this last year. Republicans have focused liek a laser on creating jobs … in the anti-abortion legislation writing industry, and no where else.
Cheers,
January 26, 2012, 7:51 pmRandy says:
Then perhaps we should take away their right to marry?
January 26, 2012, 7:52 pmRandy says:
I think the point that Murray was trying to make was already made much more eloquently and forcefully by Barbara Ehrenrich in her book “Nickled and Dimed.” Unlike Murray, she actually tried to live like the non-elites he describes and got to know them and befriend them. And yes, we would all do well to know what it’s like trying to make ends meet on a minimum wage job.
January 26, 2012, 8:05 pmRandy says:
It also means they will institute the death penalty for sins ranging from blasphemy to homosexuality.
Christiain domonionism is just another one of those totalitarian fantasies the people delude themselves into thinking will be the cure for the world’s ills. Haven’t we had enough of that with communism and fascism?
January 26, 2012, 8:13 pmRandy says:
CAreless: “Aside from that, there are people here using two different definitions of “elite”, by income and social status. Murray is pretty clearly talking more about the second group than the first, and that group skews left while the first skews more to the right. You adding in “banks and corporations” does not make your first sentence any less ridiculous.”
Oh, Please.
I realize that in the right’s paranoid fantasy world, the word “elite” is a code word for “liberal.” In their mind, the words are interchangeable and equally disparaging.
But that isn’t what Murray is getting at ( at least from what I have read). His use of the word elite is much more encompassing, and refers to any person who is out of touch with people who are of the lower classes, or lower middle classes. That definition includes not just reporters from the NY Times, but also anyone who has a comfortable income and doesn’t struggle to make ends meet, and has to worry about whether medical bills can be paid.
So under that definition, Murray’s definition, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are most definately part of the elite. So are most CEOs and anyone who calls himself an investor. It applies to most people on this comment thread, even those who are steadfast conservatives.
Yes, there are plenty of elites who are an entire range of political beliefs, and yes, there are people who are deeply religious on the right wing who would be just as much elite as you or me. You think Pat Robertson understands the concerns of the pilot who chauffers him in his personal jet? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
January 26, 2012, 8:21 pmRandy says:
Careless: “You’re not an idiot, you have internet access, so you know that the NYT and government bureaucracies is not evenly split between people on the right and the left,”
Count me as one who doens’t *know* that. Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion? Shouldn’t be too hard, since you have internet access.
Having worked in the government for 12 years at the federal level, I personally know that it is not a hotbed of radicalism. In fact, I’d say it’s probably as diverse as the general population.
But hey, if you have proof that the government is filled with leftists, please bring it forward. The entire internet is at your disposal.
January 26, 2012, 8:34 pmAsher says:
As I keep telling people, for leftists, if you’re white it is evil for you to have any culture or identity, unless you can make it to elite status. Chinese can be Chinese. Japanese can be Japanese. Africans can be African. But Europeans are only allowed multiculturalism, “tolerance”, “diversity”, etc.
Um, no. If, let’s say, North Dakota broke away and formed a theocracy that executed blasphemers and homosexuals it would not necessarily qualify as dominionist. Totalitarian, sure, and not someplace I’d want to live.
Dominionism is the very specific theological vision that God placed his chosen believers to politically take dominion of every corner of the earth. Anything short of that is not dominionism.
Now, I grew up with some passing associations with some pretty fringey Christian elements. The thing about the Christian fringe is that as they get more fringey they get LESS political – for them, exercising any political power is taking on the mantle of Caesar, verging on antiChrist. Dominionism is considered a heresy because it attempts to do what is the sole authority of God, that of ruling all the nations of the earth …
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood …
You just don’t know what you’re talking about.
January 26, 2012, 8:40 pmjoe says:
Bosses sort of knows about their employees and how they operate, but the employees have to know exactly how their bosses operate or they will not be able to effectively control and manipulate the environment they work in and probably lose their job. I think the same principles apply to the ignorant elite. The problem is not so much the elite are out of touch with the people they want to lead. The real problem is that the average voter has been deceived into believing the ignorant elite are empathetic and sympathetic to their fears, hopes dreams and expectations when in reality they have no clue. That is why Gingrich will take the nomination away from Romney. The voter can see through Romney’s deception and will never trust him, but they are certain they know what Gingrich is up to and feel they can control him.
January 26, 2012, 8:43 pmneurodoc says:
First, illeism is clearly not suited to everyone, everywhere, at all times. And the circumlocution necessary to affect that pose is more burdensome on the speaker than you may appreciate.
Be assured, that when acting in his overlord role, neurodoc does not go with the illeism shtick/em>. (Do you think Sarcastro does the unbracketed/bracketed silliness other than here in the course of VC thread?)
Finally, even if neurodoc did not dislike the taste of Coors, he would still choose Bass Ale both because it so well complements a good steak and being English it goes along with the illeist pose. (Maybe they will start advertising Bass as the beer for illeists.)
Bob Dole is an illeist?
January 26, 2012, 8:50 pmMario says:
The key part of the test is the reading in the evaluation.
The number part is just something to keep elite minds engaged long enough to bother reading the meaningful bits.
January 26, 2012, 8:59 pmWake Up Little Susie says:
Link that is: (i) current, (ii) ontopic; and (iii) something that Professor Kerr would never deign 2 understand:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-things-we-use-to-judge-people-we-dont-know/
January 26, 2012, 9:09 pmleo marvin says:
Link.
January 26, 2012, 9:15 pmBlue says:
Yes, fly fishing should have been worth less, bait fishing worth more.
January 26, 2012, 9:28 pmRicardo says:
In fact, as I pointed out above, his test is picking up at least 4 distinct definitions of what “elite” could mean: what your SES was growing up, whether you’ve worked at a blue collar job, your participation in a shared national culture and what your consumer tastes are. I don’t see any justification for conflating all four of these as measures of social elitism.
January 26, 2012, 9:35 pmRicardo says:
I’m not sure what article you are referring to but here is Wallison in 2006:
Unfortunately, the link to the AEI website this came from now says I lack permission to access the requested item. But here is the link in case you want to try.
January 26, 2012, 9:49 pmneurodoc says:
While this book was still a work in progress, the Washington Post had a piece on it and the author. Afterwards, neurodoc had a brief exchange with Murray about his thesis, in particular the consequences of the move to an all-volunteer military. IIRC (lapse into the non-illeist there), Murray has elected for himself a “non-elitist” way of life, chosing to live in a more blue-collar community (Frederick, MD), send his kids to “non-elitist” public schools, etc.
January 26, 2012, 9:50 pmCurt F. says:
This is the most uplifting thing I’ve read all day. Thank you!
January 26, 2012, 9:57 pmEd says:
The Elites understand the middle and lower classes perfectly well.
In the case of the leadership of the democrat party, they know precisely how to permanently crush their lessers.
The Obamas and Pelosis seek a perpetual impoverished dependent class of broken himans seeking scraps from the table of Big Government.
January 26, 2012, 9:58 pmStephen Lathrop says:
On this thread some people with the highest Murray quiz scores seem to think there is something to the analysis. Many scoring below 50 or so generally debunk. I’m guessing the divide is breaking around a difference in current life context—between a working class heritage now fading (the lower scores), and a life still being lived among the working class (the higher scores). I wonder what to think when some with lower scores seem defensive about that.
Despite an elite college education made possible by the egalitarian wave that swept the Ivy League in the 60s, most of my employment experience has not been elite—and I scored a 74. I suspect Murray’s test does illuminate some interesting distinctions. But I don’t think he has any clue what what to make of them. The issue isn’t the inability of the elite to imagine and empathize with the others. The issue is an elite so deprived of practical outlook and experience that it impairs their ability to do their elite jobs without screwing them up and hurting the bystanders. Maybe it’s at that point that the lack of empathy and imagination becomes critical.
January 26, 2012, 9:59 pmleo marvin says:
I can’t believe Newt just invoked Alinsky.
January 26, 2012, 9:59 pmRandy says:
I recall that Princess Diana tried very hard to raise her children so that they would at least come in some contact with ordinary subjects. She had them visit hospitals, do volunteer work for the poor and even took them to McDonald’s. Most parents I know of thought this was terrific for her to do that. I noticed, however, that none of my friends actually did anything like that with their own kids.
January 26, 2012, 10:01 pmneurodoc says:
It may be that Bob Dole is another illeist, but the link you provided doesn’t prove him to be one. A spoofing headline, no quotes with him doing the third person thing. (A commenter mentioned a skit in which Dole enlisted in the Navy, but of course Dole was badly wounded in Italy as an Army officer in WWII.)
neurodoc doesn’t have any particular movie in mind, but when he thinks of an illeist, he sees Alec Guiness playing the role of a British military type from a bygone era.
January 26, 2012, 10:01 pmneurodoc says:
Boy, that doesn’t comport with neurodoc‘s notion of Alaska. He imagined that Alaska, not NH, was the real “live free or die” state. There is prohibition in rural areas, not a booze and/or beer culture?! There are Carrie Nations in those parts and they won’t allow the sale of alcohol?
January 26, 2012, 10:11 pmneurodoc says:
Paul, a physician who graduated from Duke and has served many terms in the House, and Santorum, who graduated from law school (Fairlie Dickinson?), served for years in the House and Senate, after which he has made big money influence peddling, they are not part of the “Credentialed Elite”? How do they fail to qualify as solidly such, is it a matter of family origins (Santorum’s coalminer grandfather who immigrated from Italy), the views they express, the way they comport themselves, or what that makes them “uncredentialed” or “non-elite”?
January 26, 2012, 10:19 pmdeepelemblues says:
Sounds like “ignorant and proud of it” is a case of projection.
January 26, 2012, 10:31 pmWarren Bonesteel says:
Most of you, including the author, are confusing the map for the territory…thus, making Murray’s point for him.
…but you can’t see that…and have…and will continue to … argue that you do.
Your worldview is completely different than that of the real 99%. …but ocan’t see that, either.
Your solution for those who disagree with your own worldview is often the same as that of the residents of the country of the blind. (H.G. Wells.)
iow, you are often no less eltist – and blind -in your thinking than your ideological opponents.
January 26, 2012, 10:47 pmleo marvin says:
Who knew neurodoc was so skeptical that proof was necessary? One hopes neurodoc is just pulling Leo Marvin’s leg, since Bob Dole’s illeism is a well-known meme. On the off chance neurodoc is really unaware of it, here are some more examples. (Link, link, link)
January 26, 2012, 10:58 pmSouthern Man says:
I seem to have one of the higher scores (54) posted here. I’m a university professor with multiple graduate degrees raised by college-educated middle-class professionals but we lived in a small, very WASPy town (I’m FB friends with the first black kid to attend our high school) and were (and are) evangelical Christians. My paternal grandfather was a butcher; my maternal grandfather, a union laborer. I helped pay for college by working in a furniture warehouse and during a car-less period took a couple of 200-mile trips on Greyhound. I watch no TV so no points there, but saw almost all of the movies. And while during the week it’s strictly jacket and tie on weekends I’m in the pickup tooling around rural Oklahoma where I have ten unimproved acres adjoining a terrific little fishing lake. I’d call it the best of both worlds!
January 26, 2012, 11:04 pmneurodoc says:
Thanks for the more conclusive proof that Bob Dole is another illeist. Not much of a public figure these days, and more remembered as a spokesperson for erectile dysfunction (ED) (and cancer of the prostate) these days than as a Senate Majority Leader and presidential candidate. (Imagine the possibilities if he had done the illeist thing when talking about ED, that could have been a real hoot.
neurodocremembers Dole saying of his advanced in years friend Claude Pepper, that if Claude Pepper ate a banana, then he Bob Dole ate a banana. And Claude Pepper said that at his age he no longer bought green bananas and waited for them to ripen. (Yeah, OT, but fun.)
January 26, 2012, 11:19 pmPacRim Jim says:
I got 55.
January 26, 2012, 11:31 pmAs far as this American is concerned, this country is for the average Joe and Jane who are unwilling to live as infrastructure for a supercilious elite.
Two things the ruling class manque should remember, next time they advise us to eat cake: The middle class has the votes — and, just in case, we have the guillotines.
Tcobb says:
I think this is all deflected. There was always a cultural void between the people in America. Other than the language, the cultures of diverse places like New York and Texas for example weren’t much alike. It really didn’t make any difference because the power to even attempt to micro-manage the lifestyles of the “other” didn’t exist until recent times. Now it does. And the self-righteous scum are rising, demanding that everyone adopts their values and lifestyle.
Micro-management is the root of all evil, and the only good social engineer is a dead social engineer. Let us hope for the day when all social engineers shall be good.
January 26, 2012, 11:57 pmClark says:
Between Bob Dole’s Viagra and Karl Malone’s Rogaine, it seems illeists are just being that way to compensate for their personal, shall we say, shortcomings?
January 27, 2012, 12:07 amPerseus says:
The teenage abortion rates may be found here (Table 3.1, p. 13) and the only difference is in their ranking (it’s the same 10 states). Top 10 states: NY, NJ, NV, DE, CT, CA, HI, MD, FL, RI.
January 27, 2012, 12:15 amDarkerthanyouthink says:
I scored a 61. I don’t visit Volokh much.
January 27, 2012, 12:19 amJonathan Silber says:
I live a life in the middle class, ignorant of life at the top, and at the bottom.
In this ignorance of others, in stations of life not mine, I’m like the so-called elites.
But I’m different from them in that I don’t presume to know what’s best for others, or seek to impose my preferences on them.
That presumption of theirs is unwarranted and contemptible—and vulgar: for what is more common than to presume to dictate to others.
The elites in our day, despite their degrees from fancy schools, are most of them destructive fanatics, detached from reality, and, since their efforts tend to undermine the bonds of civic order, anti-social to the core.
January 27, 2012, 12:26 amzuch says:
An interesting variant of the old “no true Scotsman”.
Cheers,
January 27, 2012, 12:47 amClark says:
Between the shared florid tinfoil hat wearing styles and the fact that I’ve never seen geokstr comment on this site when Newt is on stage, it does make one wonder…
January 27, 2012, 1:11 amPaul says:
In 1960 a lot of the elites like JFK or HW Bush would of spent 4 or more years in the military, living, killing and dying with all classes. It as common. That is not a common experience today with the upperclass.
January 27, 2012, 1:23 amClark says:
OTOH, only aristocrats can shoot other people in the face and then get an apology from the person who was shot for the terrible inconvenience.
January 27, 2012, 1:52 amAsher says:
I do think you are the single most self-satisfied intellectually dishonest little prick I’ve ever encounter on the internet.
There is a very clear and universally-understood definition of domininism within Christian theology. There are dominionist and non-dominionists, the latter comprising all the various schools that are simply not dominionists. Both the dominionists and the non-dominionists agree on what is generally meant by the term dominionism. You can’t have your own private little definition of the term.
The term “scotsman”, or “christian”, for that matter, are much less clearly defined.
One thing that is often missed about the “no true scotsman” fallacy is that it is quite often a response to an unfair charge. Consider the following statement: “God, christians sure are stupid. I mean Mormons wear magic underwear”. And the response: “Mormons aren’t christians”. Now, the response isn’t necessarily that unreasonAble and the really unreasonable party is the one who made the first statement.
The “no true scotsman” fallacy usually involves large ambiguities in the meaning of a term or phrase. “Scotsman” can be quite ambiguous. There is no such ambiguity in “dominionism”.
zuch, you are fundamentally a putridly intellectually dishonest little prick.
January 27, 2012, 2:24 amRobert in Anchorage says:
NH beats us overall because of economic freedom – we don’t have any. We do pretty good on privacy and personal liberty but alcohol is a local issue. Many bush community have serious problems and try various levels of prohibition. People get tired of pulling drowned family members out of the Kuskokwim…
Where booze is legal (or bootleged) R&R whiskey would be the tipple of choice. R&R is cheaper than beer to ship (less water weight), comes in unbreakable plastic bottles, and won’t freeze.
I would give 2 points for having consumed hard liquor from a plastic bottle in the previous month, 3 bonus points for home brew or bootlegging, and subtract 2 points for beer or wine coolers.
January 27, 2012, 2:39 amAsher says:
@ zuch
What’s so infuriating is that almost every comment I see from you involves you playing snipe-y, substance-free language games. If everyone conversed in your manner intellectual discussion would be impossible, as every statement would be just substance-less snarky language manipulation.
You get to do what you do, here, because most of us, including the leftist do not. You’re an intellectual leech, mooching off the rest of us.
January 27, 2012, 3:33 amJersey says:
I am working on the foreclosure review as an independent contractor reading the mostly handwritten submissions of the injured parties in the mortgage debacle. If the elite had a clue as to what these people have been through, if the elite had a clue what it is to have a limited education and therefore limited employment options (and I mean having to choose which bill to pay every payday), if the elite had a clue what it is to literally lose everything (not just one’s home), the elite would not be skeptical about needing more comprehension of the majority of this country. If you think HAMP and HAFA or any of those programs helped those people, you haven’t got a clue. The “elites” in Congress do not represent the people.
January 27, 2012, 6:07 amSmoking Frog says:
I scored 47. People with midrange scores would be people with “mixed” lives and backgrounds, so perhaps one should ask what percentage of the population have that. It might be smaller than one imagines. If it is small, this would make the test better than if it is large.
January 27, 2012, 6:22 amBlue says:
I scored 46, a lot generated during the three years between leaving school and working a blue collar job to survive and returning back to school in my early 20s.
I find that break in plan to be one of the most useful times in my life retrospectively…but I’d not recommend it as a general live path.
January 27, 2012, 8:04 amJon Rowe says:
Wouldn’t the “no true Scotsman” fallacy actually be erroneously ascribing a characteristic to Scotsman that they don’t necessarily possess? And then saying if you don’t possess the characteristic, you really aren’t a “true Scotsman”?
So with Mormons & Christianity, it depends on how you define “Christianity.” If the Trinity is a central, non-negotiable tenet of Christianity then Mormons aren’t Christians and “no true Christian denies the Trinity” is an accurate statement. On the other hand if we lower the bar to Jesus being something uniquely special as a “savior” (regardless of whether He is 2nd Person in the Trinity, the Incarnate God) then Mormons get to be Christians.
Benjamin Rush committed the “no true Scotsman fallacy” when, propagandistically, he asserted a “Christian” couldn’t help but be a “republican.” Well, in fact, that vast majority of “Christians” throughout recorded history were not “republicans” and the two concepts actually have nothing to do with one another.
January 27, 2012, 8:04 amBlue says:
I wish we had plus ones on this board. This is exactly right. in my case, for example, I worked as a front-line, blue collar worker (street inspector) for three years. Until you’ve seen what its like to be on the receiving end of leadership directives you really shouldn’t be put in a position to make them.
January 27, 2012, 8:07 amonlyabill says:
How in the world do you equate a “smaller government, less intrusive government is better” to “I’m ignorant and proud of it”? With a statement like that you are just showing your “ignorance”.
January 27, 2012, 8:08 amJon Rowe says:
This is a particular kind of fundamentalism known as theonomy or post-millennial. One thing I’ve come to understand is that the Bible/Christian theology is extremely complicated and relies on many different elements (i.e., verses and chapters of scripture, interpretations thereof) to function as a particularly coherent system. It’s like a chemical reaction where the littlest change can yield drastically different results. Change just one little interpretation of a verse or chapter of scripture and then boom.
January 27, 2012, 8:16 amSGT Ted says:
I would prefer that the “elites”, who have proven themselves to be little more than credentialed incompetents, to respect their fellow citizens enought to refrain from trying to “improve” anybodies lives. Because the evidence is that they haven’t a clue as to how to do so. How about the “elites” just STFU and leave the rest of us alone for a while.
January 27, 2012, 8:35 amBarb says:
Asher, at least you had a father and if Mom home-schooled you, I suspect he had the job so she could stay home to do that?
Your folks and religion were right! Smoking IS half-way to Hell –at least it will get you there (or wherever)sooner than not smoking.
I see fatherless ness –and non-working fathers as epidemic in black community –and it does affect the achievement. When a study says that top-earning blacks’ kids still test low on SAT’s, it should also indicate whether or not the top-earning parent (probably the mother) is in a faithful/functional marriage with Father in the home as the primary wage earner. Kids without adequate parenting time are pretty much left to themselves and their peers –and I’ve seen first hand in black neighborhoods and schools that “folly is bound up in the heart of the child.” But there is no “rod of correction” (discipline) to “drive it far from him. ” I ride the bus to church on Wed. nights and they all try to out shout each other to be heard by me or themselves. I taught in black schools and helped my daughter do so as a pianist. At least the first 15 minutes is spent settling people down, passes to the bath room, listening to excuses, passes to the office for the miscreants -and then,maybe then, you can teach. The respect for authority is low; the arrogant-posturing of the Self among Peers is high. The home should civilize and some do not. And peer pressure, as always, is unfortunate for those parents who are really trying hard.
This is why, ELITES, you should support vouchers for school alternatives for the parents and kids who want to escape chaos of failing public schools. And most home schools are better in results than public! I do believe home schoolers like my grandkids should be tested in a monitored setting along with public –to see if they are being educated –though public school might not do any better with those whose home schools are neglectful. At least you don’t have the destructive peers –and bullies. My grandsons tested 99 and 95 percentile on the Iowas, a proctored test given to the home schoolers by the Home School Co-op in our city. Home schoolers tend to study piano and other music, too.
January 27, 2012, 8:42 amRicardo says:
World War I and World War II were the only time in American history that the draft would have touched the “elite.” During the Civil War, the wealthy could pay a substitute to take their place in the draft and during the Vietnam War, plenty of current elites like Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton managed to get draft deferments.
January 27, 2012, 9:14 amJon Rowe says:
One of the things the recent “Seasteading” thing got me to think about was how liberty, property and contract all “fit” together — and the “social contract” in forming a nation.
As a libertarian I support the contract/property rights of NYC co-opts to enact and enforce ridiculous rules under which I’d never want to live(and yes, I know I can’t afford to buy one and they wouldn’t have me anyway).
Think about how corporations, formed by contract, can grow into the size of nations.
I think this is what a lot of the theocratic colonies had in mind. They did write harsh rules into their colonial orders; but they were actually a lot like big contracts. From what I remember, even if the infraction — like worshipping a false god — merited the death penalty, they often gave the violator a chance to scram and banished them from the territory instead of executing them. At least that’s what happened to Roger Williams.
So what if we had libertarian utopia where voluntary groups got to set their own rules via contract and property rights? And what if those rules tended to be tyrannical? And what if the group via contract, grew and grew so that it became as large as a nation or a state?
That was how theocracy existed in the United States and I think the theonomists want to go back to this era. And that also explains why they have formed an alliance with libertarian-anarchists. If North Dakota became a theonomist state, I wonder if instead of stoning me to death, they would give me a chance to simply leave and banish me.
January 27, 2012, 9:18 amRich says:
Actually, here in NJ their are lot’s of very educated Tea Party types along with what should be really called blue collar professionals. Those people who have advanced training in their field of trade, who own the company and direct/train their employees. If you look at what anyone who does HVAC, Electrical, plumbing, masonry work and the like has to know I would easily put them against most people with a college degree maybe even a Master’s.
January 27, 2012, 9:40 amOh just from my own personal knowledge I know 9 people with PhD’s mostly in sciences and medicine who are Tea Partyer’s and a lot with Master’s degrees.
theBuckWheat says:
“not even the most knowledgeable elite experts can really have enough information to impose efficient paternalistic regulations that preempt individual choice.”
F.A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize was titled the Pretense of Knowledge, and his central point was that no committee of experts could possibly have enough information to make economic decisions that were better than those made by individuals working with their own local situation.
see: The Pretense of Knowledge http://mises.org/daily/3229
His work was based on a paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society,
January 27, 2012, 9:46 amsee: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=92
rpt says:
Indeed. He likes the name because it invokes mysterious danger in two words: “Saul” (foreign and pagan, that is, pre-salvation) and “Alinsky” (European socialist). Gingrich is very good at this stuff. No need to learn who the person really is much less read his work.
January 27, 2012, 9:56 amrpt says:
I grew up with Claude Pepper as my Congressmen. Thanks for the good memories.
January 27, 2012, 10:01 amHucklebuck says:
67, bitchez.
January 27, 2012, 10:02 amSmooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
Smooth is in actuality an elitist illeist; unfortunately for him, Smooth also has an Elmer Fudd lisp.
January 27, 2012, 10:30 amJon Rowe says:
Test: The comments are not loading properly.
January 27, 2012, 10:53 ammotionview says:
World War Two was the great class mixing bowl; once the privileged sons decided Vietnam was for the rubes, the split was unavoidable.
January 27, 2012, 10:54 amLN says:
Nothing ironic about invoking a fancy-pants Nobel Prize winning economist to settle a debate about elitism.
January 27, 2012, 11:17 amIrenist says:
I grew up on welfare and have had a lot of physically demanding blue collar jobs (as an adult, and not just for a summer). But I’m from the Northeast, so I didn’t score that high on this quiz, because much of it measures “red state-ness” and its Southern-tinged folkways. Military service, NASCAR, and evangelical Christianity aren’t that big back home: a bunch of chain-smoking blue collar truck drivers in southern New England are more likely to be, e.g., Catholic than evangelical. (Ditto the more heavily Latino parts of the Southwest, I imagine.) By Charles Murray’s GOP-hack lights, an evangelical Southern Congressman who likes NASCAR and Budweiser is less “elite” than a Northeastern auto mechanic who stops at the “packy” [package store] for some “Sammy” [Sam Adams] on the way home to watch the Sox or Pats. The David Brooksy, G.W. Bushy insinuation that Northeasterners aren’t “real Americans” because our folkways are different is really irritating.
January 27, 2012, 11:20 amTed says:
Thank you. Now I shall await Leo’s rebuttal showing teenage pregnancy rates…
January 27, 2012, 11:21 amProfane says:
HAH! I am a third-generation college student, and 2nd-generation Ph.D., and I scored 60.
January 27, 2012, 11:26 amAsher says:
Sure. If someone produces a definition of some term with which you disagree then it is incumbent on you to provide another definition and a description of why it is more concise. The “no true scotsman” fallacy involves not providing a concise definition for what actually is meant by “scotsman”, meaning you can just move the goalposts whenever it suits your purposes.
I gave a concise definition of what “dominionism” entails. There are actual people who subscribe to a theology that says it is the duty of believing Christians to politically dominate the entire globe to usher in the second coming.
If zuch has a better definition then he should provide it.
He does not.
Therefore, zuch is intellectually dishonest.
January 27, 2012, 11:54 amAsher says:
Exactly. Even most Christians who want to see blasphemy and homosexuality outlawed where they live have no interest in seeing that extended beyond their immediate vicinity. There is an immense difference between someone who wants to outlaw blasphemy locally and someone who wants to outlaw it globally.
That zuch refuses to distinguish between the two means he is intellectually dishonest.
January 27, 2012, 11:58 amRandy says:
Sorry, Asher, but as you well know, there are many tunes that the dominionists play. Just because one branch says that they will take over the whole world or nothing at all doesn’t mean that there aren’t other branches just itching to take over whatever they can.
Indeed, there is a lively debate within dominionism as to who is right and who is wrong.
Now, I don’t particularly care – - I think they are all foolish and dangerous. But the fact remains that there are many prominent spokesmen for the movement, such as Rick Joyner and Johnny Enlow, who seek to impose their theocracy upon all Americans.
You can argue that they are not true Christians or dominionists, but they will argue that YOU are not a true Christian or dominionist. What you can’t argue is that they exist and this is their theology.
January 27, 2012, 12:35 pmRandy says:
I would beg to differ. Just because you only want to impose your theocracy in one small space doesn’t make you any less dangerous. Stalin, Mao and Castro are no less dangerous merely because they worked their magic only within the confines of their own countries.
Here is THEIR choice: You don’t like the constitution? You don’t like the fact that all religions and all people are treated equally? You don’t like the fact that we have freedom of speech and association? Then leave. I’m sure other countries are just waiting for these guys to save them from blasphemy and homosexuality and everything else that dominionists dislike, but we are not.
January 27, 2012, 12:40 pmKelly says:
I scored a 76. Redneck city, baby! If you’re belly aching about this quiz, picking apart every question, you are probably an elitist (I kid, I kid).
I was in the military, met and married my husband while in the military and he spent 20 years on active duty before retiring. I think I’m well read, well traveled and know plenty of people across all social boundaries. Since my husbands retirement we’ve found ourselves in a whole nother tax bracket, living in an upscale community in a large city. Frankly, I miss our poor days in the military. Kicking back, bbquing with the neighbors while our children ran around naked, in a pack vandalizing things. Around here when people introduce themselves its as Mrs so and so, no first name. That is weird to me. I guess elitist like to keep their first names secret until they find out more about you.
January 27, 2012, 12:45 pmAMartel says:
They’re not “elite.” In any way.
January 27, 2012, 12:55 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
You’re thinking of Sarah Palin. Let’s keep our betes noires straight.
January 27, 2012, 1:43 pmTed says:
Is this the kind of novel syllogism you intend to include in your dissertation? Because I have trouble following it. I can see where you might conclude that Zuch’s application of the fallacy is invalid, due to absent premises, but I also don’t see any premises that support your conclusion of dishonesty.
January 27, 2012, 2:07 pmMarcus Carey’s On the Marc: Elite ignorance residing in a suburb near you? | Our Town Square says:
[...] Carey’s On the Marc: Elite ignorance residing in a suburb near you? Thanks to Professor Volokh for bringing this to our [...]
January 27, 2012, 2:13 pmzuch says:
Asher, originally, in the comment that I was responding to:
Cf.
Wikipedia:
But I’m “intellectually dishonest” [something that apparently needs to be asserted more than once to make sure everyone is aware of it] to say that not everyone agrees with Asher. C’est la vie. Personally what I find fascinating here is a demonstration of apparent familial concordance of personality traits….
Cheers,
January 27, 2012, 2:18 pmArea Man says:
If the quiz is “troublesome” — or more correctly, downright ludicrous and reflective of nothing more than Murray’s own prejudices and ignorance — then his entire thesis falls flat. If Murray cannot reliably and coherently identify what an “elite” is, if he uses metrics that define the vast majority of Americans as elites, or are based on tired cultural stereotypes, then who exactly has he identified that is out-of-touch (aside from himself)? The whole thing appears to be an exercise in heaping scorn on the vast numbers of educated middle-class urbanites, while drawing attention away from the actual elites, the people who wield the wealth and power in this country. Maybe the latter group are indeed out-of-touch, and maybe that’s a problem, but Murray has directed his contempt at the wrong people. Quite deliberately, I’m sure.
January 27, 2012, 2:36 pmArea Man says:
According to Murray’s own numbers, 48% of people had at one time lived in a non-metropolitan community under 50,000 as of 2000.
Just so we’re clear, 52% of Americans are out-of-touch elites who are ignorant about how the majority of Americans live.
January 27, 2012, 3:07 pmDavid says:
This topic itself seems to go to the heart of Hayek’s “Knowledge Problem”. They don’t (will never) know enough to plan the economy. They don’t (will never) know enough to plan our lives.
If they would, please, just leave us alone.
January 27, 2012, 4:28 pmMST says:
You seem to have misread your stats: US Census defines “Urban Areas” as any “clusters” over 2,500 population:”2: Urban areas include all urbanized areas (over 50,000 population) and Urban Clusters (2,500 to 49,999 population) as defined by the Bureau of the Census in the 2000 Decennial Census.” You have to add them all up to get your 82% (79% in the 2000 Census). A town of 2,500 qualifies as Urban, but shares little in common with folks living on 67th Street and 5th Av.
Indeed, 58% live in the defined “Urbanized areas” of over 50,000. But we’re also not trying to talk about what’s “ordinary, average, normal” but rather about cultural isolation and a decided provincialism of the elites.
Murray is not saying if you know NASCAR or go to Denny’s four times a year you have the common touch, but rather that it will be hard (not impossible, just hard) to understand the 42% if you score low here. These aren’t the culture, they’re just markers. If you actively disdain them (and I know lots of folks who do) you stand a good chance of looking at red state folks like they have two heads.
I got an 87, by the way, don’t watch television, nor NASCAR so picked the coach not the driver, vegetarian, so we don’t fish, have two degrees and am living in Boston, upper 5% income.
January 27, 2012, 5:17 pmChrisTS says:
@Asher:
You mean my colleagues in Bio and Econ are less elite than I am? Cool – especially as they make more money.
January 27, 2012, 6:40 pmChrisTS says:
Mark Field:
Pretty much my point, but I, of course, expressed it so much more classily. :-)
January 27, 2012, 6:48 pmStephen Lathrop says:
The picture in the Civil War is more complicated than that. The Southern elite mobilized heavily. Sure, the Northern practice of paying draft substitutes was a disgrace. But recall that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. saw a lot of combat, and was wounded several times, including being shot through the neck at Antietam. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the hero of Gettysburg, was a college professor from Bowdoin, who taught both rhetoric and religion before the war. Members of the elite from both sides served. Yale, for instance, had more than 500 alumni on both sides, and if my memory serves, more than 150 died. Probably few if any of those were drafted, but the point you were addressing was the mixing of classes in the military. There was a lot of that during the Civil War.
January 28, 2012, 6:39 pmJon H says:
Pretty much the entire state of Connecticut is a “metropolitan area”. The exceptions would be the northwest and northeast, which are “micropolitan areas”.
Northwest Connecticut is where people like Richard Kissinger live.
January 28, 2012, 10:39 pmJon H says:
Here’s a map of US metropolitan and micropolitan areas: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Metropolitan_and_Micropolitan_Statistical_Areas_of_the_United_States_and_Puerto_Rico.gif
Going by that map, there really aren’t many non-metropolitan-area towns.
January 28, 2012, 10:43 pmKB says:
I got a 70 and I drive a pick up truck, but by Oklahoma standards, I’m viewed as sophisticated with my fancy college learning and whatnot. I grew up a military brat, so I did see some of the world, when I wasn’t running around on post getting into trouble with large packs of other military brats dodging the MP’s.
January 29, 2012, 6:18 pmminn. matt says:
Scored an 80. Grew up on a farm, graduated magna from a top 20 law school. Clerkship then big law. Apparently im very out of touch.
January 29, 2012, 10:54 pmBarb says:
i guess such a person for global law would have to be either a dominionist or a secular 1-world gov’t advocate — i am neither –except for the belief in a reign of christ someday –if/when a risen jesus returns we will all believe then –and satan and temptation will be vanquished. i would welcome all nations agreeing about sins and their harm in the meantime
however, i do share a belief that christians have a duty to be politically involved –to be salt and light in their nations
as ive said before, the law teaches –and legislators should believe in good values and not be confused about these values: life, trad.marriage, fidelity, honesty, justice, liberty, charity, sobriety, peace, security, education, equal opportunity, democracy
January 30, 2012, 12:52 amJ. Patrick says:
Pulp made a great song about this btw. From “common people”:
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you’ll never get it right,
cos when you’re laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.
You’ll never live like common people,
you’ll never do what common people do,
you’ll never fail like common people,
you’ll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there’s nothing else to do.
….
it’s a great song with wide audience appeal. check it out.
January 30, 2012, 1:37 amTake this test now | My Blog says:
[...] had seen this during Volokh progressing this week, though didn’t have time to blog about it. Then Joanne Jacobs posted [...]
January 30, 2012, 4:00 amragebot says:
Getting in a little late on this one, been out of town for a while.
Re: Question 17 about lettering in high school. Does my letter for being on the debate team count as a yes, or does it just negate my letter for running on the track team?
Or should I just blow off the whole test as a joke?
January 30, 2012, 9:25 amV says:
77 here. Finance partner @ BigLaw, but 2nd generation off of the farm. Grew up in blue-collar town and went to public schools, but my parents love to read. Having 2 small children (maybe that is also the divide — hard to have Architectural Digest house, both in budget and furnishings, with small people about the house) affects both restaurant and parade attendance. I worry that my children will grow up in a bubble though.
January 30, 2012, 11:14 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
J. Patrick, you can tell that “Common People” is a great song, because William Shatner covered it. It’s on his Has Been album, which has been on my maybe list for a while.
January 30, 2012, 3:31 pmPeter says:
Nothing to add other than a 56 and the categorization describes me well “A first- generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and moviegoing habits.”
What I found most amusing is I knew Branson in both contexts (the businessman and been to the city in Missouri)
January 30, 2012, 8:43 pmAre You in the Bubble? « Politics & Prosperity says:
[...] reduces the quality of the decisions made by elites once they get into positions of power. (“Charles Murray on Elite Ignorance of Ordinary Americans,” The Volokh Conspiracy, January 25, [...]
February 1, 2012, 12:41 amBarb says:
Ron Haskins wrote a review of this book by Murray for Natl Review. Feb. 6, 2012.
Murray says there are 4 “founding virtues: –marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiousness.” And these are dividing America as the lower socio-economic class declines in commitment to these virtues. He says the lower class has doubled since 1960, “changing national life.”
This is obvious to me –and it started with removing prayer from classrooms –starting a hostile gulf between religion & education–and the hippies who parented the white Americans Murray analyzes between age 30 and 49 today. By 2010, more than 1/3 of marriages of this age group in the lower class (lower by occupation and education) end in divorce compared to 5 % for the upper class.
By 2010 more than 1/4 of white babies are born out of wedlock –but for college grads, the percentage is 5%. For h.s. drop-outs, unwed births are 60 per cent.
Combine unwed births and divorce rates, and 6 or 7 times as many lower-class children as upper, live with single parent. And more go to jail. (don’t know if he’s still talking only about whites here, or not.)
Finally, he refers to upper class (elites) as wimps in the fact that they walk the walk –but don’t talk it. i.e. they don’t stand up for the founding virtues in their own traditions that make for success in life — despite all the evidence in support.
I say that’s because the elite leaders need votes and are afraid of offending or seeming judgmental. And also because they don’t BELIEVE in traditional morality even if they live it. They are more committed to moral neutrality and values relativity –just as the education elites taught them in all those values clarification classes: “No one but you can decide what is right for you –blah blah blah.”
February 1, 2012, 5:47 pmBarb says:
Jon Rowe –you are such a cute, young guy –on your profile. And gay I guess –from your comments here? Depriving a woman of her chance to be a wife and mother –and yourself as well.
Did you say you recommended no sex before age 18? What if you didn’t have any sex until marriage to a woman….
February 5, 2012, 12:26 amBarb says:
oops –page slipped –this above to Jon R. was supposed to be elsewhere.
February 5, 2012, 3:04 pm