On July 21, 2012 we wrote an article titled Birth of a Caste in America? . In that article we argued that the affluent college-educated class in America is turning into an elite caste. We stated our conclusion with the following:
“The culmination of this ‘high education’ class into a caste was neither described by George Akerlof nor by Robert Shiller. It was articulated eloquently by David Brooks – “Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.”
Remember that casta or caste means lineage. This is why a class becomes a caste when people in that caste end up marrying within that caste as a standard practice. So, is today’s college-educated affluent class becoming America’s “Brahmin” Caste? It sure looks like it.”
This week, a reader pointed us to an article in Newsweek dated August 27, 2012, more than a month after our article. The Newsweek article was written by Niall Ferguson and titled College Becoming the New Caste System. Mr. Ferguson’s article ended thus:
“The problem is that this cognitive elite has become self-perpetuating: they marry one another, live in close proximity to one another, and use every means, fair or foul, to ensure that their kids follow in their academic footsteps (even when Junior is innately less smart than Mom and Dad).
Paradoxically, our universities now offer social mobility mostly to foreigners. For Americans, they risk creating a new caste system.”
We were pleased to see a celebrity thinker-author like Niall Ferguson echoing of our thoughts. The concept of an elite caste in America is an important one for us. So our article quoted extensively from the work of Charles Murray of AEI, Robert Putnam of Harvard and David Brooks of the New York Times. Their words were like “tolling of a bell” for us; the bell of a Caste system in America. We wrote that in our article and then explained our thesis in three sections titled:
- The Etymology of “Caste” & its Development
- Does Economics Create ‘Caste’?
- An American “Brahmin” Caste!
Our approach is to share our reasoning with readers so that they can see how we arrive at our conclusions. The above sections helped us do precisely that in our article Birth of a Caste in America?
We were looking forward to read how Niall Ferguson developed his own case of a new caste system in America. But reading his article showed that Mr. Ferguson merely used the caste system as a casual, unsupported punch line.
We are disappointed in Niall Ferguson. We expected far more from a writer of his celebrity. We expected to learn something, expected to read some insights. Because, the emergence of an elite caste in America is a major event with long term implications for American democracy. That is why we took pains in our own article to develop our case of the birth of a caste concept. Then we followed up with two articles discussing the formation of a E-challenged majority in America and its first salvo against the America’s elite-educational caste:
- Charles Murray, American Electorate & Affirmative Education
- Is Algebra Necessary? – A Historically Consistent Salvo against America’s ‘Educational Elite’?
We wish Mr. Ferguson had explained his own reasoning. Guess, celebrity writers feel they are above that.
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