Re:Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh end use of lega...
by wpietri on Thursday July 20, 2023 @10:23AM
(#36800889)
It is avoidable, and the US has done a reasonably good job of avoiding it. It's notable how little current political and economic leaders are the grandchildren of previous major figures. We could do better, of course. And we should.
Is it avoidable having a hereditary elite? It seems like every society develops one. It even happened in the supposedly classless USSR and they had a name for it the nomenklatura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura. Even in the US there has existed groups with hereditary and elite status but there has been a lot of social change over the past 100 years. The American problem is deciding who that elite should be now. I think a lot of the conflict and turmoil we are having is caused by different groups fighting to establish themselves as the hereditary elite.
Peter Turchin's theory about elite overproduction might have merit applied in our context. We have too many people vying for too few elite seats and the losers seek vengeance. Admissions into elite schools appears to have become a battleground.