Imprecise Truths About The American Caste System From My Own Experience

First, an update on my brother Samuel's defense of his unjustly arrested client.

Last week’s post was about the unjust arrest and indictment for manslaughter of Luis, a client of my brother Samuel, a public defender. I observed the trial and wrote about the inherent inequality and unfairness of our criminal justice system.

Late Thursday afternoon the jury returned from deliberating and declared Luis not guilty on all counts. As well, Luis’s indictment is now sealed so that it won’t come up on background checks.  

It meant the world to me to see the joy on Samuel’s face after the verdict was read, and he could step outside the courthouse into the sunlight with his client.

Samuel, his client Luis, and co-counsel Peter moments after the verdict. (with permission of Luis)

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When I wasn’t watching the trial, I was reading about and trying to get at the heart of an aspect of inequality that involves more than gradations of wealth and income, namely the division of American families into two separate castes––the elite and everyone else.

Questions abound. What marks a family as elite? And are these alleged castes sufficiently stratified and self-perpetuating to be accurately called castes in the first place?

One theory is that America is separated between those who have a four year college degree and those who don’t. But that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because both common sense and statistics show a vast difference between graduating from an Ivy league college and a non-selective school. As well, what about couples where only one spouse has a college degree?

That led me to explore assortative mating as a potential marker of the elite, the idea that highly credentialed women and men are increasingly choosing to marry each other. That has the potential for a caste if these couples use their income and social capital, i.e., who they know, to benefit their children, creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy.

I found a well-constructed study that showed that men and women with college and advanced degrees were marrying each other with greater frequency. The study demonstrated that this marrying of “like for like” had led to a huge jump in economic inequality.

But the study had an issue. The data was dated. It compared data between 1960 and 2005. I needed to know whether the study had been updated. I needed to contact one of the authors as soon as possible to meet my self-imposed Saturday morning deadline.  

Fortunately, the study was led by a professor at UPenn where I’m an alum, where both my grandfathers were alums, and where all three of our children are alums. We’ve been an involved UPenn family. So quick contact was not a problem for me. (Hold that thought)

I spoke to one of the authors as he was waiting in a noisy airport lounge. He wasn’t aware of any similar study that used data more recent than 2005. As well, he shared with me a supplement that he and his colleagues had published that improved upon the original study’s rigor.

The supplement removed some societal changes such as the upsurge in single households from 1960 to 2005. That had the effect of significantly reducing the effect on inequality of assortative mating. And the data was still twenty years old.

I give the authors enormous credit for letting the math and the logic lead them to a less spectacular, but far more accurate adjusted result. ¹

I now had to concede that there was a huge hole in the post I had drafted. Much of the evidence I’d gathered and carefully presented, my numbers and my screenshots of beautiful, poignant charts, were now suspect. This was Thursday night.   

The better alternative was to use my own experience to answer my questions about the nature and existence of an American elite caste. In doing so, I “realize[d] three fundamental truths, [although not] at the exact same time.” ²

The Parental Imperative

Parents are going to use their advantages for the benefit of their children and their grandchildren. It’s built into our DNA. ³

I’ve been writing post after post about the toxic level of American inequality across not only income and wealth but most recently across issues of criminal justice. But I’d never use my children in order to promote a more equal society. I don’t know any privileged parent who would.

Our three children went to private school, went to a selective college, and all have advanced degrees. The two older ones married spouses who also went to selective colleges.  I love my son-in-law and daughter-in-law, and I’m grateful they were the people our daughter and son married. That they are from similar backgrounds and have a similar educational attainment as our children seemed to have been the natural order of things.

I’ll stipulate that giving advantages to my children and grandchildren is at odds with a desire to lessen inequality. But any pang of hypocrisy is no match for my parental imperative.

Social Capital

It’s not just money that creates an elite caste. There’s also an intricate and invisible web of connections that confer various advantages, including admission into the most selective secondary schools and colleges as well as an edge in securing the most coveted job opportunities.

Those coveted jobs are not just about money, they’re also about status and power. A junior reporter at the New York Times, a junior specialist at Sotheby’s, and a third chair violin at the New York Philharmonic have salaries that without family support don’t provide enough money to live comfortably in NYC. But they’re still jobs that are highly sought after and are often secured by the children of the wealthy.

My career on Wall Street was launched through a high school summer job, courtesy of my uncle. I thrived, but I’m sure many people my age would also have thrived.

This very essay is an example of social capital in the form of my close relationship with UPenn. Without it, I don’t think I’d have been able to get to one of the authors of the assortative mating study. At least not within 48 hours while they were all in transit.  

Now that I’m older, it’s usually other people asking me for introductions and nudges in their favor. I almost always agree, and I don’t differentiate between those who could return a favor some day and those who likely can’t. I consider myself a “Giver” and not a “Matcher” to use

Adam Grant

’s terminology in his valuable book Give and Take.

Here’s an example. A guidance counselor I know introduced me to a high school junior from an impoverished neighborhood. This young woman had exceptional promise but didn’t want to pursue college because she wanted to stay and help her mother take care of her much younger brother.

The guidance counselor thought that if the young woman could experience college life through a muti-week summer program, she might change her mind about college. And thereby maintain her dream of becoming a doctor.

Summer programs between junior and senior year of high school at elite colleges are competitive and expensive, but I was able to use my connections and provide some financial support to get the young woman into one of those programs. Her summer experience changed her views about her future. She’s now enrolled at an elite university that provided her with a full scholarship.

A hard truth

I don’t like to dwell on it, but advantaging your own children or others comes at the expense of other children. It gave me great pleasure to help launch the future medical career of that young woman. But the space she took displaced someone else.

There’s a limited number of spaces at elite schools, of high paying and high status jobs, of desirable homes in desirable neighborhoods, and of marriage partners who were educated at selective institutions. So the jobs your educated children will take, the homes they will buy, and, perhaps most crucially, who they will likely marry will crowd out opportunities for others. It’s math.

America is more than wealthy enough to address economic inequality and improve the lives of Americans who live outside the elite caste. (Note: I’ve yet to define “elite caste” or even prove its existence beyond a reasonable doubt––that’s my brother’s trial talking).

Our current per capita GDP has tripled in real terms (adjusted for inflation) since LBJ’s war on poverty in the mid 1960’s.

But the wealthier a country becomes, the greater the expectation for better lives by those at every place in the economic strata and the greater the competition for what’s valuable and limited. Harvard’s not expanding its enrollment, the Philharmonic is not making its orchestra larger, and owning a home in New York and many other new development constrained cities has become out of reach for most young people.  

So even as the economy does well in the aggregate, the number of people who believe in the American Dream, defined as the next generation doing better, has fallen significantly. GDP increases don’t matter if your children can’t afford to buy a house or you can’t send them to a selective college or if you live under a general sense of economic precariousness and foresee the same for your children. ⁴

A solution to economic inequality aimed at people, mostly men, who don’t go to college is to emphasize the “trades,” e.g., electricians and plumbers, as jobs that provide a good living without the necessity for a BA. But that will not solve class divisions. Women with college degrees, especially from a selective college, especially with an advanced degree, are unlikely to want to marry a man in the “trades,” no matter how lucrative his income.

This all sounds rather harsh, but I believe it to be true. Given the parental imperative, the interplay between wealth and social capital, and the limited, if not fixed, availability of elite educations, jobs, and homes, I can’t see how the division between an elite class and all others won’t continue and accelerate.

But that’s not a conclusion. Because there are so many trends I haven’t addressed––such as declining birth rates, increased political polarization, artificial intelligence–– that could soon significantly alter everything I’ve written above in ways I can’t imagine. ⁵

That’s a “cop-out,” but I’d rather be truthfully imprecise rather than falsely precise.

Finally, as to who’s part of the elite and who’s not, I think I know an elite when I meet them. The characteristic they have in common is that their capital, both financial and social, gives them a sense of immunity, real or not, from life’s economic and status vicissitudes and thus great agency over their lives.

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For the Comments: Do we have a caste system in America or are my theories exaggerated?

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I can watch Good Will Hunting once a year. After Matt Damon as Will intellectually demolishes the hateful Harvard grad student (we hate him and his hair in equal measure), he says this to Will:

“Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive through on our way to a skiing trip.”

1. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2016

Technology and the Changing Family: A Unified Model of Marriage, Divorce, Educational Attainment, and Married Female Labor-Force Participation

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos

2. A play on my favorite song from Hamilton, Satisfied.

3. Of course, providing your children with too many advantages too quickly can destroy your children’s self-esteem and lead to disaster.

If you’re thinking about the “Varsity Blues” scandal, so am I. That’s perhaps the best cautionary tale of parents trying to use unreasonable, unethical, and illegal means to give their children an edge and having it blow up in the family’s face.

4. See, for example, this Gallup poll.

5. Examples follow of selected trends that are recent, important, and have yet to reveal their long term impact.

• American birth rates are at an all time low.

• There’s a rolling crisis in higher education with community college enrollment having plunged and four year college enrollment about to follow suit given the coming cliff of a generation of lower birth rates. As well, with the ballooning of student debt, there’s greater skepticism about the value of college and advanced degrees.

• Women have edged out men in attaining college degrees; and current enrollment is almost 60/40 in favor of woman so the female education advantage will continue to grow.

• Artificial intelligence. Other than name checking it, I have nothing to add except a lot of smart people believe it will be a game changer to employment and societal structure.

• Political polarization is a threat to democracy and another increasing factor in who people choose to marry.

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