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Thread 3636

Thread ID: 3636 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2002-11-22

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2002-11-22 09:00 | User Profile

Here's an interesting Op-Ed from the [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/opinion/22KRUG.html?todaysheadlines]New York Times[/url] (registration required). He actually mentions NYT's oligarchic Jewish owners, the Sulzbergers.

I think that he's right in that a hereditary ruling class has formed and is beginning to feel secure enough in its power to begin asserting itself openly. I think that he misses, however, that this is largely corrolated with IQ. Smart people in the States tend to rise to the top, and they also tend to have smart children. Charles Murray did a study showing the strong corrolation between IQ and success among siblings from middle class families.

The guy who has it right on this score is Jeffrey Satinover of Harvard. He wrote a piece on what to expect for the Next Millenium for First Things, and one of his predictions was the emergence of a hereditary intellectual elite that will take pains to ensure that their children will have the "smart genes", and to deny them to others.

Of course, Jews like Satinover will make up a large (majority) of that new ruling tribe, but he demurred on that point.

Here's the article.

Walter

America, we all know, is the land of opportunity. Your success in life depends on your ability and drive, not on who your father was.

Just ask the Bush brothers. Talk to Elizabeth Cheney, who holds a specially created State Department job, or her husband, chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. Interview Eugene Scalia, the top lawyer at the Labor Department, and Janet Rehnquist, inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. And don't forget to check in with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and the conservative commentator John Podhoretz.

What's interesting is how little comment, let alone criticism, this roll call has occasioned. It might be just another case of kid-gloves treatment by the media, but I think it's a symptom of a broader phenomenon: inherited status is making a comeback.

It has always been good to have a rich or powerful father. Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. "If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries," he wrote, "it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement." And Kevin Phillips, in his book "Wealth and Democracy," shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it.

But the past is only prologue. According to one study cited by Mr. Krueger, the heritability of status has been increasing in recent decades. And that's just the beginning. Underlying economic, social and political trends will give the children of today's wealthy a huge advantage over those who chose the wrong parents.

For one thing, there's more privilege to pass on. Thirty years ago the C.E.O. of a major company was a bureaucrat — well paid, but not truly wealthy. He couldn't give either his position or a large fortune to his heirs. Today's imperial C.E.O.'s, by contrast, will leave vast estates behind — and they are often able to give their children lucrative jobs, too. More broadly, the spectacular increase in American inequality has made the gap between the rich and the middle class wider, and hence more difficult to cross, than it was in the past.

Meanwhile, one key doorway to upward mobility — a good education system, available to all — has been closing. More and more, ambitious parents feel that a public school education is a dead end. It's telling that Jack Grubman, the former Salomon Smith Barney analyst, apparently sold his soul not for personal wealth but for two places in the right nursery school. Alas, most American souls aren't worth enough to get the kids into the 92nd Street Y.

Also, the heritability of status will be mightily reinforced by the repeal of the estate tax — a prime example of the odd way in which public policy and public opinion have shifted in favor of measures that benefit the wealthy, even as our society becomes increasingly class-ridden.

It wasn't always thus. The influential dynasties of the 20th century, like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers and, yes, the Sulzbergers, faced a public suspicious of inherited position; they overcame that suspicion by demonstrating a strong sense of noblesse oblige, justifying their existence by standing for high principles. Indeed, the Kennedy legend has a whiff of Bonnie Prince Charlie about it; the rightful heirs were also perceived as defenders of the downtrodden against the powerful.

But today's heirs feel no need to demonstrate concern for those less fortunate. On the contrary, they are often avid defenders of the powerful against the downtrodden. Mr. Scalia's principal personal claim to fame is his crusade against regulations that protect workers from ergonomic hazards, while Ms. Rehnquist has attracted controversy because of her efforts to weaken the punishment of health-care companies found to have committed fraud.

The official ideology of America's elite remains one of meritocracy, just as our political leadership pretends to be populist. But that won't last. Soon enough, our society will rediscover the importance of good breeding, and the vulgarity of talented upstarts.

For years, opinion leaders have told us that it's all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

jay

2002-11-22 14:59 | User Profile

Well, Murray & Hernstein wrote that it was precisely this "boys club" that prompted Ivy leagues to introduce the SAT tests. They thought that by opening up the universities (like Harvard) to the brightest, it would prevent the generational priviledge of attending the best schools.

And sure enough, the IQ's of Harvard grads have shot up tremendously in the past 70 years. Also, with air travel and family mobility, anyone in CA or WA can have no problem attending a school 2000 miles away.

However, this had an unintended consequence: self-selection. Soon, the bright began to mate exclusively with other bright people. In 1900, the 140 IQ teacher in Nebraska married a 90 IQ farmer. Today, she goes to Med school and marries another 140 IQ student. Soon, the bright become super bright and the dull remain so.

HUGE consequences to our society - especially factoring in the delayed childbearing now of the bright. Big big issues. Of course, the Bell Curve reviews never discussed this stuff. As Ted Koppel said, the Bell Curve is like Hillary's health care plan: everyone has an opinion, but nobody's read it.

-J

amundsen

2002-11-23 16:18 | User Profile

As government wields more power, more people are interested in working for it. So it is not suprising thatwealthy families are so willing to be 'public servants.' What is interesting to me is that in our times we have so many women getting positions of power in the government. 40 years ago the jobs went to the sons, and the husbands of the wives, but now they go to the daughters. Actual blood ties are always stronger, and therefore more dangerous to everyone else. The wives of Roman Emperors and senators of Rome were consigned to ruling behind the scenes, and when they wanted a regime change they had to poison their husband. The American women can directly wield power.

Roy Batty

2002-11-25 02:04 | User Profile

The bigger story is the lack of kinship the white "elite" have with whites outside their circle, in comparison to the loyalty jews have for their entire tribe. The white elite is class conscious, upper class is their criterion. For jews, being a jew is the key.

Case in point, "exclusive" colleges. As shown on a couple of other threads, these schools, like Harvard, admit jews and asians at levels 3 to 5 times higher than what they would if test scores and grades were the only criteria. The jews are admitted because they are ... jews, and the jews running the schools look out for them. The asians, disregarding the ones that have legitimate scores, etc., are there to keep whitey out. In other words, Hiram Chung with a 1350 SAT gets in over Ed Whiteman with a 1510. What does this have to do with it? The kids of the white elites get in - but that's it! The elite "legacy" beneficaries take up a lot of the white slots. The hell with the unwashed masses except for jocks and women. The jews are busy trying to work more and more of the tribe into positions of power, while the white elite keep their little inbred group as it is, small. This is why there will be hell to pay in the end.

BTW, if one looks closely at the info in The Bell Curve - most whites with IQ's over 140 DON'T go to college. When they do, they aren't going to the Ivy League, and UCLA and Berkley are doing their best to discourage these evil folks from attending as well. The elite - and the yahoodis, should be concerned about where these people are, and what they are up to ... but arrogance leads to many forms of complacency.

Walter Yannis

2002-11-25 12:27 | User Profile

I mentioned Jeffrey Satinover's blurb in the [url=http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0001/articles/satinover.html]January 2000 issue of First Things[/url]. I thought it was pretty good, so here it is.

Walter

Jeffrey Satinover Millennia are really big events—like when the odometer on your car rolls over from 9999.9. Well, the kid brought his car in for its 2,000 year check-up, so I did it. But I warned him, the news is really bad, so fixing it is really going to cost a lot.

Here’s one problem. The redeemers have already arrived. The Thousand Year Reich may seem to have lasted a scant few years, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that after three days in the bunker, almost every one of its core ideas was resurrected to radiate future-ward over ever spreading territory. Mercy killing, abortion, infanticide, the whole conceptual structure of unlebenswertige life, once seen as repulsive, has within but one generation been transformed into the very portrait of beauty. Eugenics, insistent racialism, and nationally demarcated socialism are now the common heritage of all enlightened Westerners. Governor George W. Bush got it (inadvertently) right: it’s ridiculous to whine that we’re "slouching toward Gomorrah"—we’re in a dead sprint, chest at the tape, proud of our imminent triumph.

That’s one problem. Another is this: Fairness. The hereditary aristocracies have vanished, but a new cognitive elite has just begun its ascent to dominance, and everyone is invited to join—if they are smart enough to know how. At our best universities, the largest proportion allow their brains to be shaped by useless drivel: deconstructionism, alternate sexualities, loony methods for achieving "social justice." The American mind isn’t just being closed, it’s being evacuated. But there is another, much smaller, group on campus. It pursues quantitative studies. Year by year, the content grows ever more sophisticated and complex. Many years of training in sophisticated mathematics will allow a student to but scratch the surface of, say, early quantum mechanics. To really get its present state requires many years more. This group is naturally both elite and meritocratic. Math and physics students are now being recruited by Wall Street because even finance is becoming ever more quantitative. The right shoes and the right social network may still help at the beginning, but increasingly, it’s the right number on your Stanford-Binet, and the application of that number to the right stuff, that does the trick. It’s not for nothing that the riches of Silicon Valley were created by nerds. Of all the major universities, MIT produces the largest proportion of entrepreneurs and has the reputation elsewhere in the world of being "the best." When the rising elite have consolidated their ability to manipulate emerging biomolecular and quantum computational technologies, they will form a club whose barriers to entry will be the most scrupulously fair in history—and the most ruthlessly impenetrable to the unqualified. Having little need to preserve dominance by force or trickery, they may form, if they have a mind to, the most benign and self-centered ruling class imaginable. The arrogance of today’s "caring" elites is a mere foretaste of the unasked-for helpfulness to come. Perhaps we will even alter human nature itself, and turn ourselves into something utterly alien, a race for whom the old standards—wisdom, humility, nobility, kindness—will be discarded like a serpent’s skin. We’ll just become winners, until we meet an alien race better at it than we, but since at that point we will be genetically convinced that might alone makes right, it won’t matter.

Yet another vehicular system that seems to be failing is religion. I suppose that God Himself is doing just fine, but His earthly defenders are on the ropes—and it’s our own fault. Religion deservedly comes in for more criticism in its failures than does science, because genuine religion claims for itself the ability to know what’s true, whereas genuine science claims for itself only the ability to quantify the probability of a thing being wrong. (Bad science and bad religion simply swap roles, the former proclaiming Truth, the latter worshiping Doubt.) Religion’s bête noire is the fact that a genuine truth arrogantly asserted—that is, without so much as a moment’s consideration that it might be false—is a most pernicious kind of falsehood, far worse in its effects on the humane than a flat mistake.

It’s a matter of modesty. It never uses the term, but science itself is a method to insure modesty of claims (however arrogant its practitioners). Religion, on the other hand, speaks constantly of the virtues, and then, on the whole, displays them with no greater consistency than does any other human institution.

This defect interacts dangerously with a second one. The rising cognitive elite doesn’t care for religion. For them, fine-sounding phrases about "brotherly love" are a joke. In their world, it’s simple: if you’ve got the brains and can back them up with action, you’re a full-fledged member. It is among this elite that the highest proportion of truly multiracial progeny can already be found, and more than anything else, that expanding reality will be a far more convincing argument that they’re right and the religionists wrong. But the biggest problem is this: the world is changing far more dramatically than I think the boy can appreciate. It’s a world where quantum teleportation, quantum computation, and quantum cryptography, for example, are not only being taken seriously, some have already been implemented at practical scales and are the object of intensive commercial research and development. It’s not just a matter of some really cool technologies for us to gape at, but of a world where only those capable of mastering the wizardry behind the technologies will rise, and where our creations may well outstrip their creators.

How about, say, self-evolving brains composed of teleporting quantum computational elements processing information simultaneously in multiple universes? Science fiction? Nope. Between July 16 and 19, 1999 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA and the Department of Defense held their first annual conference on evolvable hardware. A sample of the presentations:

• Evolving Circuits by Means of Natural

Selection

• Embryologic Electronics

• The Design and Use of Massively Parallel

Fine-Grained Self-Reconfigurable

Infinitely Scalable Architecture

• Self-Repairing Evolvable Hardware

• Genetically Engineered Nanoelectronics

• Co-Evolutionary Robotics

• Evolving Wire Antennas

Willy-nilly, we have embarked upon an adventure that leads to shores far more distant and alien than any we have ever set out for before. Attempts are being made, naturally, to link all this weirdness to philosophies and theologies of yore, to take the utterly mysterious and make it at least sound familiar. But I suspect that we are on the verge of something that we’re not going to be able to grasp quite so simply. It’s possible that we’ve all been wrong in important ways all along. Even human immortality is not so remote a scientific possibility as was once thought.

Picture a world, then, in which, long before the dawning of the fourth millennium, mankind has created conscious, brilliant semiconductor simulacra made of endlessly self-repairing parts; it has itself eaten of the second tree in the Garden, that of Life, and thus acquired the immortality it has long sought—or at least a select group has, whose members have likewise devised methods for the enhancement of their already concentrated pool of intelligence-associated genes. Where in such a world would there be a place for divine justice? Nowhere. (Unless, of course, there really is a Heaven, in which case the justice would be perfect.)

So, what were the damages for all this? You won’t be surprised at the reaction I got: "Change myself? But it’s the car that’s got the problem!" All I can say is, between now and the next checkup he better bring the thing in to an authorized service center—and on a regular basis. And you know, I don’t get his dad. What lunatic gives a teenager with a long record of moving violations a souped-up Lamborghini, an instruction booklet, and a set of keys? It’s no wonder that sometime around 2450 a group of traditionalists are going to take off for the new world found orbiting around Cygnus 351.

Jeffrey Satinover is the author of Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, Cracking the Bible Code, and The Quantum Brain (Wiley, forthcoming). He has long been a psychiatrist in private practice in Connecticut and is currently a student in physics at Yale.

jay

2002-11-25 17:10 | User Profile

Originally posted by Roy Batty@Nov 24 2002, 20:04 BTW, if one looks closely at the info in The Bell Curve - most whites with IQ's over 140 DON'T go to college.

                I don't believe that.  Please cite.

30% of Americans graduate from College. around 45-50% of whites. I have to think the brightest (>120 IQs) are graduating at a rate closer to 65-75%.

-J

Roy Batty

2002-11-25 18:43 | User Profile

Jay, I'll dig up the info in a day or two when I have some time to surf ... I should have saved the articles. Basically, the stats were broken down by IQ info and test scores, from TBC etc., and it showed the vast majority of whites in colleges were clustered in the 115 - 120 range in IQ, and the majority of those higher in IQ were not in college. What had the authors break down the info was the chapter in The Bell Curve in which it was discussed what happens to most bright Americans that don't attend college. I can attest to the fact that many of the best computer people I have worked with were dropouts, never went to college, or if they did, their studies had nothing to do with IT. Hell, my schooling had little to do with computer science, but that is where I ended up for years. Most of the candidates from exclusive schools seemed locked into thinking that revolved around things they acquired through rote learning etc. For very bright whites, there aren't enough slots at most of the "elite" institutions anyway, due to admittance practices. Which brings us back to the elites and their closed door policies.

Anyway, that's off the beam. I'll grab the breakdown in a day or so. (Or later today if I can quickly finish up this crap I'm working on - which means I shouldn't be at this site right now - tsk tsk)