True, Sam, true. I note that it's a Bourdieuian signal of cultural capital to understand what Bourdieuian refers to.
Also, in the tax code as it stands right now, there's a multiplicity of ways to reduce if not eliminate inheritance taxes. Lifetime exclusions per individual is $13.6 million. At least through 2025. That doesn't include annual gift tax exclusion of $18,000 per recipient. And that's just the simple stuff.
Totally lol! A status signifier if there ever was one!
That's interesting. I may well be wrong in thinking that the system-as-it-is has largely eliminated direct inheritance as a conduit of status. I guess more important than that is the importance of being "self-made" in Americans' conception of self. Everybody has this idea that they're supposed to make it from the ground up - in a way that's very different from traditional aristocracies - even if that's not at all the reality of how the meritocratic system really works.
Your anecdote about the French firefighters is mind boggling to my American brain. Of course the chief of firefighters should be a firefighter.
It's a point of pride at my airport that many of our managers came up the ranks, including one guy who basically started as a janitor out of high school and worked his way up (and was promoted to be one of three senior directors who report to the director of the entire airport.)
Even so, I see the concern about an american aristocracy forming....though hopefully we're a long way from France.
It was mind boggling to me too when my colleague said it! To be fair, he might have been exaggerating - our dynamic was to get into these sorts of arguments with each other. But I guess that's basically right, that Western Europe functions through a professional cadre that goes to the same schools and then duly fills out governmental positions. (Yes Minister is also a depiction of that.) America is a bit wilder in how all this plays out.
I disagree. Don't people "become" aristocrats in the act of being knighted? Don't people lose their aristocratic status, say, as French or Russian aristocrats did after their revolutions or as, for instance, Prince Harry did when he stopped being a royal? Maybe we have different ideas of what aristocracy means?
Being knighted does not make you an aristocrat. Knighthood is simply a national order of merit (in Britain, which is what I assume you're referring to). Sir Keir Starmer or Sir David Attenborough are both knighted but are not aristocrats. Equally, you don't lose aristocratic status. Prince Harry is and will always be an aristocrat (royalty and aristocracy aren't the same thing, anyway). French and Russian aristocrats remained aristocrats (and the French aristocracy still has that status many years after hereditary aristocracy was formally abolished in France). Aristocracy is a form of inherited caste status. If you can gain it or lose then it is not aristocracy. I don't think that going to Yale has anything to do with aristocracy: just being a part of the elite in a completely non-aristocratic system. When I read your article I thought you were mistaking aristocracy for elite status and earning potential.
As you say, probably different ideas of what "aristocracy" means. I am reminded of that scene in the 2005 film The Aristocrats, about the dirty joke, where one of the performers notes that the joke only draws laughs in countries like the USA that do not actually have aristocracies. The point being that countries that have historically had power based on hereditary caste understand aristocracy not as a matter of merit or good breeding but rather as reflecting a sort of drone status.
Thank you for sharing that, and some interesting tangents are suggested. Such as the way the mythos of meritocracy seems to have replaced that of the wild wild west for the most part (here in the USSA). Funny how the politically inclined donor class is so very very heavily weighted by the new oligarchs, and the old ones (check the stats on wealthy families in Italy, and Boston).
There might not be guilt, but there’s a fair bit of anger and frustration with the issue of “elite overproduction”, as you’ll be well aware of, the class you’re referring to isn’t a single stratum. Prestige and visibility are the currency, and being say a corporate lawyer at a mid-level PE firm doesn’t carry the same weight as say being a best selling novelist or a tastemaker at NYT. There’s a fair bit of frustration amongst your class with people who drank the cool aid and believed an elite education guaranteed them a dream position setting taste for “the masses”, and instead find themselves after university in yet another highly competitive arena, fighting against equally competitive peers, for only a handful of prestigious vanity positions.
At a certain level of entitlement, money isn’t even that important, prestige is. Why be a PowerPoint jokey at McKinsey when you can have a regular column on Esquire?
That's right. There's a tremendous amount of in-fighting and self-doubt amongst the "new aristocrats." It's far from homogenous in the paths people take even if there's a fairly tight code of conduct for belonging.
Your references to Yale call to mind a book my Appalachian-born son read when offered a scholarship to Yale: "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite" by William Deresiewicz. Instead of being part of the university's "diversity " quotient, he found a meaningful life outside Yale. I taught a boy who did go to Yale on a diversity scholarship, one offered to Appalachian students. He's a successful distiller in Brooklyn. He's written a book. Success comes with being free to be whatever you want. Deresiewicz exposes the herd (or flock) mentality of education for purpose of status rather than for the purpose of discovering one's authentic purpose and meaning of success.
Deresiewicz was a professor of mine when he was formulating many of the arguments that he made in Excellent Sheep and he's gone on to be a real intellectual hero for me. He's absolutely spot-on. Students at Yale at that time (as well as now, I imagine) believe themselves to be at the top of a meritocratic system. Deresiewicz's critique is much more accurate - that they're basically box-checkers and real worth is to be found elsewhere.
There is no small amount of irony to proclaim the the highest levels of American education rarely produces an intellectual. Not that the assessment is wrong but that it's far too correct. Unfortunately.
Chomsky wrote a paper in 1967 titled The Responsibility of the Intellectual where he explicitly called out this cohort for the crimes being perpetrated on the Vietnamese people. A crime McNamara later begrudgingly admitted to when close to his death, in penance, I'm sure for his complicity in it. Anyway, for those of you out there that can rightfully call yourself an American intellectual, the few that you are apparently, Chomsky's paper was written especially for you and is as prescient today as ever. All you have to do is swap out Vietnam for take your pick.....Palestine, Ukraine and in the near future, Taiwan. It's well worth the small effort to better understand the importance of the role in American society. https://chomsky.info/19670223/
I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you know, it's the cultural language you speak, the shared set of assumptions, the underlying premise of what constitutes good character or meaningful living.
My colleague William Pannapacker, longtime columnist for the Chronicle, grew up blue collar in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Harvard, but struggled mightily on the academic job market before landing a position at a liberal arts college in Michigan. He left that position around the time that I left mine, and he's been effectively adrift ever since. He worked for a time as a telemarketer in Chicago (there was a better name for it), but made less than 50% what he did as a professor and was eventually laid off after maybe a year on the job. He started a consulting business but is now back on the job hunt. I think really belonging to the aristocracy means that you have a bunch of other people looking out for you when you're in a situation like that. The first-gen student can't use their family network, and they never really belonged to the aristocracy, so they're truly on their own. It's a story about college that should be more widely told.
David has written about this, and it's both troubling and pretty insulting to someone from my background: "The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other." Ironically, this was one reason I initially resisted majoring in English. I was not interested in all the novels about gentry trying to marry well. Thomas Hardy's milkmaids fascinated me more. But on another level, it makes sense -- marrying across classes isn't simple. Money, identity, and a whole range of other assumptions that go into daily life can conspire against love. I have learned some of that the hard way.
I'll add one more wrinkle. While it's true that college graduates dominate the managerial class, there are a LOT of impoverished college grads and perhaps an equal amount of thriving tradespeople. I have more than one cousin with just a high school education who earns in the mid six figures. Just as George Packer says that there are at least four different Americas, I think there might be two or three "middle classes." For my cousin in Alaska, that means earning quite a lot fishing for six months, then living on a sailboat in Florida, then piecemeal building a home on land near Kalispell, Montana. The main goal for that slice of the middle class is staying debt free, a foreign concept to many Americans trying to move up economically.
Thank you Josh. Look forward to your piece on this. What I'm writing here is mostly by way of a thought experiment. It is possible that the "new aristocracy" as worked out through education isn't really equivalent to the "old aristocracy" as worked out above all through blood. Where the analogy gets thin is, as you point out, in the sense of security - "new aristocrats" have nowhere near the security that old-fashioned landowners did.
It's a good thought experiment. I hope I didn't imply that you or David had insulted me! Poor choice of words, perhaps. Part of what I'm wondering about in tomorrow's essay is whether college is really transformative in the way it once was or whether it now just turns us into more of what we were at the start...
Thank you for this reflective and nuanced piece on the form that aristocracy has taken today in American society. I also went to an Ivy, thinking that things were now meritocratic and that there would be a broad range of people I'd meet. Instead, I found that, in spite of other types of diversity, most people had similar upbringings and were of a similar socioeconomic background. For most of the people I encountered, everything was about getting a certain kind of well-paying job—having "the same elite careers." I recently read Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, and it makes several similar points!
"It really was a smart strategy to have two adults earning professional salaries, with one or two high-quality children, and then to outsource the child rearing to nannies and pre-schools." — Until rather recently, I used to believe most people thought of marriage as based on love. Then I realized that the attitude described in your essay was not uncommon, and that for some, marriage is simply "business," something to be considered coldly, objectively, professionally. A little heartbreaking, but one lives and learns!
Thank you Ramya! Yeah, I went thorough a bit of disillusionment exactly in the way you described. I somehow wasn't expecting so many of these interesting, thoughtful, free-spirited kids to get a job at McKinsey or Goldman at the first opportunity - and then to never look back.
Hm. I really like this piece (which is vulnerable and thoughtful and etc etc) and yet find it sort of... blinkered, perhaps. I notice that many of the commenters on this piece are like you: Yalies who found your peers to be boring box-checking meritocrats. But my experience going to Middling Public U tells me that this isn't unique to Yale or the Ivies at all! My peers might have been from Laos or Yemen or Latvia or yeshiva or the barrio, but on average they were absolutely striving for the same narrow spectrum of "acceptable" jobs. Sure, social class limited their horizons somewhat - aspiring CPAs rather than quant bros, Deloitte instead of McKinsey, whatever. (I note that the ur-"good job," "doctor," is conspicuously absent from the list of "respectable" professions for modern-day aristocrats.)
Is marrying within your college cohort *really* an elite thing, for instance, or were your peers just among the many, many women going through four years of college to earn their MRS degree?
Interesting. I guess, for the purposes of this post, I was interested in just trying to get at the mindset of a particular social strata as opposed to comparing it to anybody else. I do think the "MRS" doesn't really exist anymore. For women in "elite" colleges, the idea is more about "having it all" - career and a healthy social and sexual life and then eventually kids. The whole kids question seems to be deferred until you are at least 30 - at which point you are supposed to have established yourself. The marrying-within-the-cohort thing was something that I only noticed much later on and that seemed like a bit of a dirty secret. What was surprising about it was that there really were very few serious, committed relationships among people I knew when I was in college - it was sort of hook-up culture and then the idea was that you would keep moving forward and then meet your partner later on, somewhere out in the wide world. Instead, a lot of people seemed to have circled back and found their partners among people they already knew - which, for me, speaks to the idea of an enclosed, self-perpetuating caste, even if that certainly wasn't the self-perception at the time.
I can't go along. For me, aristocracy is much related to skin in the game. What is described here is a smart-aleck aristocracy, oriented to it's degenerate states.
Curious to what you mean by "skin in the game." You mean family trees?
I guess this post is a thought experiment and the word "aristocracy" might not fit in all of its particulars - in the absence of landed wealth, titles, etc, it's really much more difficult for a particular class to define itself and then self-perpetuate - but certainly passing on a certain kind of status is critical to people who are of the class I'm describing.
I pretty much looked at aristocracy here like nobility, disregarding the "cracy" (ruling) part. Historically, an aristocrat was some man able to take care of his own business plus to lead men into combat successfully. Plus knowing when to fight and when to negotiate plus getting along with neighbours. I'm not sure whether this applies to all original nobles. Ancient China and eastern Rome may have had more brainy elites, for example.
The hereditary nobility is a degeneration issue. When there are less dangerous ways to be elite than going to war every other year, people prefer that of course.
But the core of aristocracy for me is willing to risk more than most.
Good essay Sam. Liked your thoughts.
Thank you Madan!
True, Sam, true. I note that it's a Bourdieuian signal of cultural capital to understand what Bourdieuian refers to.
Also, in the tax code as it stands right now, there's a multiplicity of ways to reduce if not eliminate inheritance taxes. Lifetime exclusions per individual is $13.6 million. At least through 2025. That doesn't include annual gift tax exclusion of $18,000 per recipient. And that's just the simple stuff.
Totally lol! A status signifier if there ever was one!
That's interesting. I may well be wrong in thinking that the system-as-it-is has largely eliminated direct inheritance as a conduit of status. I guess more important than that is the importance of being "self-made" in Americans' conception of self. Everybody has this idea that they're supposed to make it from the ground up - in a way that's very different from traditional aristocracies - even if that's not at all the reality of how the meritocratic system really works.
It's still a powerful conduit of money but self-made money is a much more powerful conduit of status. Could be at the subject of a post.
A system that sets you up for success while also making you feel like you’ve totally earned it. Beautiful!
Your anecdote about the French firefighters is mind boggling to my American brain. Of course the chief of firefighters should be a firefighter.
It's a point of pride at my airport that many of our managers came up the ranks, including one guy who basically started as a janitor out of high school and worked his way up (and was promoted to be one of three senior directors who report to the director of the entire airport.)
Even so, I see the concern about an american aristocracy forming....though hopefully we're a long way from France.
It was mind boggling to me too when my colleague said it! To be fair, he might have been exaggerating - our dynamic was to get into these sorts of arguments with each other. But I guess that's basically right, that Western Europe functions through a professional cadre that goes to the same schools and then duly fills out governmental positions. (Yes Minister is also a depiction of that.) America is a bit wilder in how all this plays out.
You can't "become" an aristocrat. You can't "surrender" aristocratic status. That's not what an aristocracy is.
I disagree. Don't people "become" aristocrats in the act of being knighted? Don't people lose their aristocratic status, say, as French or Russian aristocrats did after their revolutions or as, for instance, Prince Harry did when he stopped being a royal? Maybe we have different ideas of what aristocracy means?
Being knighted does not make you an aristocrat. Knighthood is simply a national order of merit (in Britain, which is what I assume you're referring to). Sir Keir Starmer or Sir David Attenborough are both knighted but are not aristocrats. Equally, you don't lose aristocratic status. Prince Harry is and will always be an aristocrat (royalty and aristocracy aren't the same thing, anyway). French and Russian aristocrats remained aristocrats (and the French aristocracy still has that status many years after hereditary aristocracy was formally abolished in France). Aristocracy is a form of inherited caste status. If you can gain it or lose then it is not aristocracy. I don't think that going to Yale has anything to do with aristocracy: just being a part of the elite in a completely non-aristocratic system. When I read your article I thought you were mistaking aristocracy for elite status and earning potential.
As you say, probably different ideas of what "aristocracy" means. I am reminded of that scene in the 2005 film The Aristocrats, about the dirty joke, where one of the performers notes that the joke only draws laughs in countries like the USA that do not actually have aristocracies. The point being that countries that have historically had power based on hereditary caste understand aristocracy not as a matter of merit or good breeding but rather as reflecting a sort of drone status.
Thank you for sharing that, and some interesting tangents are suggested. Such as the way the mythos of meritocracy seems to have replaced that of the wild wild west for the most part (here in the USSA). Funny how the politically inclined donor class is so very very heavily weighted by the new oligarchs, and the old ones (check the stats on wealthy families in Italy, and Boston).
"USSA" as an acronym makes me laugh. Thank you Scott!
There might not be guilt, but there’s a fair bit of anger and frustration with the issue of “elite overproduction”, as you’ll be well aware of, the class you’re referring to isn’t a single stratum. Prestige and visibility are the currency, and being say a corporate lawyer at a mid-level PE firm doesn’t carry the same weight as say being a best selling novelist or a tastemaker at NYT. There’s a fair bit of frustration amongst your class with people who drank the cool aid and believed an elite education guaranteed them a dream position setting taste for “the masses”, and instead find themselves after university in yet another highly competitive arena, fighting against equally competitive peers, for only a handful of prestigious vanity positions.
At a certain level of entitlement, money isn’t even that important, prestige is. Why be a PowerPoint jokey at McKinsey when you can have a regular column on Esquire?
That's right. There's a tremendous amount of in-fighting and self-doubt amongst the "new aristocrats." It's far from homogenous in the paths people take even if there's a fairly tight code of conduct for belonging.
Your references to Yale call to mind a book my Appalachian-born son read when offered a scholarship to Yale: "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite" by William Deresiewicz. Instead of being part of the university's "diversity " quotient, he found a meaningful life outside Yale. I taught a boy who did go to Yale on a diversity scholarship, one offered to Appalachian students. He's a successful distiller in Brooklyn. He's written a book. Success comes with being free to be whatever you want. Deresiewicz exposes the herd (or flock) mentality of education for purpose of status rather than for the purpose of discovering one's authentic purpose and meaning of success.
Deresiewicz was a professor of mine when he was formulating many of the arguments that he made in Excellent Sheep and he's gone on to be a real intellectual hero for me. He's absolutely spot-on. Students at Yale at that time (as well as now, I imagine) believe themselves to be at the top of a meritocratic system. Deresiewicz's critique is much more accurate - that they're basically box-checkers and real worth is to be found elsewhere.
There is no small amount of irony to proclaim the the highest levels of American education rarely produces an intellectual. Not that the assessment is wrong but that it's far too correct. Unfortunately.
Chomsky wrote a paper in 1967 titled The Responsibility of the Intellectual where he explicitly called out this cohort for the crimes being perpetrated on the Vietnamese people. A crime McNamara later begrudgingly admitted to when close to his death, in penance, I'm sure for his complicity in it. Anyway, for those of you out there that can rightfully call yourself an American intellectual, the few that you are apparently, Chomsky's paper was written especially for you and is as prescient today as ever. All you have to do is swap out Vietnam for take your pick.....Palestine, Ukraine and in the near future, Taiwan. It's well worth the small effort to better understand the importance of the role in American society. https://chomsky.info/19670223/
Thank you Paul. Will read.
I'll be writing about this soon, but I think belonging to the aristocracy goes beyond graduating from Yale. There's a whole background network that prepares students for the admission race, and while the degree might open more opportunities, the full range of options requires knowing how to leverage the degree. That's more than who you know, it's the cultural language you speak, the shared set of assumptions, the underlying premise of what constitutes good character or meaningful living.
My colleague William Pannapacker, longtime columnist for the Chronicle, grew up blue collar in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Harvard, but struggled mightily on the academic job market before landing a position at a liberal arts college in Michigan. He left that position around the time that I left mine, and he's been effectively adrift ever since. He worked for a time as a telemarketer in Chicago (there was a better name for it), but made less than 50% what he did as a professor and was eventually laid off after maybe a year on the job. He started a consulting business but is now back on the job hunt. I think really belonging to the aristocracy means that you have a bunch of other people looking out for you when you're in a situation like that. The first-gen student can't use their family network, and they never really belonged to the aristocracy, so they're truly on their own. It's a story about college that should be more widely told.
David has written about this, and it's both troubling and pretty insulting to someone from my background: "The sense of a new aristocracy really hit for me when I realized how many of my cohort were marrying each other." Ironically, this was one reason I initially resisted majoring in English. I was not interested in all the novels about gentry trying to marry well. Thomas Hardy's milkmaids fascinated me more. But on another level, it makes sense -- marrying across classes isn't simple. Money, identity, and a whole range of other assumptions that go into daily life can conspire against love. I have learned some of that the hard way.
I'll add one more wrinkle. While it's true that college graduates dominate the managerial class, there are a LOT of impoverished college grads and perhaps an equal amount of thriving tradespeople. I have more than one cousin with just a high school education who earns in the mid six figures. Just as George Packer says that there are at least four different Americas, I think there might be two or three "middle classes." For my cousin in Alaska, that means earning quite a lot fishing for six months, then living on a sailboat in Florida, then piecemeal building a home on land near Kalispell, Montana. The main goal for that slice of the middle class is staying debt free, a foreign concept to many Americans trying to move up economically.
Thank you Josh. Look forward to your piece on this. What I'm writing here is mostly by way of a thought experiment. It is possible that the "new aristocracy" as worked out through education isn't really equivalent to the "old aristocracy" as worked out above all through blood. Where the analogy gets thin is, as you point out, in the sense of security - "new aristocrats" have nowhere near the security that old-fashioned landowners did.
It's a good thought experiment. I hope I didn't imply that you or David had insulted me! Poor choice of words, perhaps. Part of what I'm wondering about in tomorrow's essay is whether college is really transformative in the way it once was or whether it now just turns us into more of what we were at the start...
Thank you for this reflective and nuanced piece on the form that aristocracy has taken today in American society. I also went to an Ivy, thinking that things were now meritocratic and that there would be a broad range of people I'd meet. Instead, I found that, in spite of other types of diversity, most people had similar upbringings and were of a similar socioeconomic background. For most of the people I encountered, everything was about getting a certain kind of well-paying job—having "the same elite careers." I recently read Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, and it makes several similar points!
"It really was a smart strategy to have two adults earning professional salaries, with one or two high-quality children, and then to outsource the child rearing to nannies and pre-schools." — Until rather recently, I used to believe most people thought of marriage as based on love. Then I realized that the attitude described in your essay was not uncommon, and that for some, marriage is simply "business," something to be considered coldly, objectively, professionally. A little heartbreaking, but one lives and learns!
Thank you Ramya! Yeah, I went thorough a bit of disillusionment exactly in the way you described. I somehow wasn't expecting so many of these interesting, thoughtful, free-spirited kids to get a job at McKinsey or Goldman at the first opportunity - and then to never look back.
me neither! it was sad to see not only how the humanities shrunk but also how other students dismissed them as either “easy” or “useless”
Hm. I really like this piece (which is vulnerable and thoughtful and etc etc) and yet find it sort of... blinkered, perhaps. I notice that many of the commenters on this piece are like you: Yalies who found your peers to be boring box-checking meritocrats. But my experience going to Middling Public U tells me that this isn't unique to Yale or the Ivies at all! My peers might have been from Laos or Yemen or Latvia or yeshiva or the barrio, but on average they were absolutely striving for the same narrow spectrum of "acceptable" jobs. Sure, social class limited their horizons somewhat - aspiring CPAs rather than quant bros, Deloitte instead of McKinsey, whatever. (I note that the ur-"good job," "doctor," is conspicuously absent from the list of "respectable" professions for modern-day aristocrats.)
Is marrying within your college cohort *really* an elite thing, for instance, or were your peers just among the many, many women going through four years of college to earn their MRS degree?
Thanks Quiara.
Interesting. I guess, for the purposes of this post, I was interested in just trying to get at the mindset of a particular social strata as opposed to comparing it to anybody else. I do think the "MRS" doesn't really exist anymore. For women in "elite" colleges, the idea is more about "having it all" - career and a healthy social and sexual life and then eventually kids. The whole kids question seems to be deferred until you are at least 30 - at which point you are supposed to have established yourself. The marrying-within-the-cohort thing was something that I only noticed much later on and that seemed like a bit of a dirty secret. What was surprising about it was that there really were very few serious, committed relationships among people I knew when I was in college - it was sort of hook-up culture and then the idea was that you would keep moving forward and then meet your partner later on, somewhere out in the wide world. Instead, a lot of people seemed to have circled back and found their partners among people they already knew - which, for me, speaks to the idea of an enclosed, self-perpetuating caste, even if that certainly wasn't the self-perception at the time.
I can't go along. For me, aristocracy is much related to skin in the game. What is described here is a smart-aleck aristocracy, oriented to it's degenerate states.
Hi Schweinpriester,
Curious to what you mean by "skin in the game." You mean family trees?
I guess this post is a thought experiment and the word "aristocracy" might not fit in all of its particulars - in the absence of landed wealth, titles, etc, it's really much more difficult for a particular class to define itself and then self-perpetuate - but certainly passing on a certain kind of status is critical to people who are of the class I'm describing.
Hi Sam,
I pretty much looked at aristocracy here like nobility, disregarding the "cracy" (ruling) part. Historically, an aristocrat was some man able to take care of his own business plus to lead men into combat successfully. Plus knowing when to fight and when to negotiate plus getting along with neighbours. I'm not sure whether this applies to all original nobles. Ancient China and eastern Rome may have had more brainy elites, for example.
The hereditary nobility is a degeneration issue. When there are less dangerous ways to be elite than going to war every other year, people prefer that of course.
But the core of aristocracy for me is willing to risk more than most.