This Washington Post article describes a class of elite Americans who are physically, educationally, and culturally isolated from ordinary people to the point that they basically have no first hand information about how non-elites live and think. It is interesting for its numbers, detail and references to similar findings in other writings including the author's own. Hat tip to Christine. Among the factoids in the article:
Although only 55% of high-schoolers taking the SAT have at least one college educated parent, 87% of those scoring over 700 do.
Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.
Part of the isolation is political. In that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their beliefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The political preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea party.
The description of the New Elite seems pretty accurate to me, but is this really different? I remember Presidential Candidate George Wallace telling voters he was going to go to Washington and throw all of those pointy-headed liberals and their brief cases into the Potomac River. When have we not had elites running our institutions?
Is there a call for action here? Or is it enough to improve our understanding?