I believe that a contributing factor to the “victim” self-identification (and accompanying rage) was in how so many upper middle class parents “hovered over” and worshiped their children, protecting them from any anxiety or disappointments (hard parts of reality) that they could and fostering an internalized sense of entitlement (participation trophies!). When the “trophies” for existing quit being awarded, victims of such injustice (wokies love the term “justice”) identified the oppressors as the “fat cats” who had grabbed up all the trophies.
Really excellent piece Rob. I am on staff at a small college and I see today's youth come in aimless and unfocused but they are on a prescribed path, and college is the next level up for them. What is interesting is that for all their knowledge of technology, social media they seem to lack a spirit to make things different. I came of age during the Vietnam war and its aftermath and I watched as those who couldn't adjust to society created their own worlds, people like the two Steves of Apple, of Nolan Bushnell, of Larry Ellison of Oracle, Gates and Allen and others. They came, saw a world they did not fit into well, and created a new one, that seems to be lacking in these younger generations. Instead they have been enculturated to believe that anger is the solution, we have lost something in the intergenerational transfer.
Stalin did not come from an elite background, unlike many of the other Bolsheviks. His father was a violent alcholic shoemaker who was constantly in debt. He was a good student so he recieved a scholarship to a theological college intending to be an orthodox priest but he dropped out before his final exams given he no longer believed in Christianity. He was from a cultural and social backwater in the Russian Empire.
In fact his non-elite background is precisely why he ended up at the top of Russian politics. Like Putin his early experiences of hardship and streetfighting gave him a ruthless edge that the ineffectual intellectuals he was up against just didn't have for the most part. He picked his rivals off with a cool brutality. He made originally made his name in the party for raising funds in a bank robbery in Tblisi. He generally despised the tastes of effete elite art which is why he pushed the Soviet Union away from avant garde art to more traditionalist social realism. Stalin was, like Hitler, a product of an advancement by the elites for their own purposes, with the typical arrogance of the intellectual elite. They believed they could control them but he ended up releasing the untapped demontic energies of someone who had been overlooked as a vulgar thug barely worthy of attention.
While I think the author is onto something here, I think we have another cohort of wannabe elites who have been shut out by our nepo baby / insiders only culture: talented white boys and other intelligent strivers from flyover country who no longer want to genuflect to the current cultural class that n the coasts. Merit was once enough for entree; recently wannabe elites have been subjected to loyalty tests. Did you take a knee? Did you exhibit the correct virtue signal? Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I bet there are a whole lotta young folks who just won’t play. Instead they wanna start a new game with new rules. I think that’s what we will see coming up. The current arrangements are like a geriatric patient who rules from the deathbed holding the inheritance over everyone’s head.
I think you are correct about the dichotomy. But I think those fly-over boys and girls are the ones who defend traditional American values. The truth is that post-Civil War was when the type of elites Mr. Henderson describes were rewarded with power and prestige in a ever more over-reaching federal government. Do not misunderstand me, this is not to say that slavery was proper. Rather it is to say that these modern "elites" Mr. Henderson describes are the descendants, some literal and some figuratively, of those financiers and industrialists who promoted, prolonged, and profited from.American slavery. Their clients - southern plantation owners - took the fall while those industrialists and financiers were rewarded. Early and often. To the extent that many, many, many are now toiling away at their new plantations.
Those who don’t wanna play in the woke elite might agree on the undesirability of political correctness, without agreeing on what they want. Most probably prefer the trad virtues of their boomer grandparents, tho many just play video games & watch TikTok fashion. Some even become rationalists in support of hyper-individualism, without strong support for any current party.
The geriatric patients are ruling not from the deathbed, but from Congress and the White House. Big corporations have the sense to kick out their geriatric patients, unless they are founding owners like Larry Ellison and Warren Buffet.
Thanks for links, and I’m sure you’re right that Rob doesn’t really know the wealthy, as I also don’t. You also write well about them, and it’s clear the top 0.1% is what the media focuses on when talking about the wealthy.
Your own post mentions how Disneyworld has so strongly moved away from being available to all workers, towards being far more for VIP big spenders. That article also noted how much more expensive tickets to live sports events, yet even it didn’t mention how much more expensive tickets to live rock bands have become.
(On the very important issue of increasing inequality, the govt should produce statistics about wealth levels and the key rates to compare at the 99%, 90, 50, 40, & 20% levels.
If the wealth increase of the 99 & 90% is at a faster rate than the 50% median, there should be higher taxes on the rich. Probably moving towards some wealth tax.)
I’m actually more interested in generalizations that are true, rather than merely being backed up by possibly over-credentialed truth benders.
What generalization of Rob is not true? How is he misleading his readers? Neither your brief comment nor OWS post indicate it, except noting downward mobility is not new.
I understand the essay to claim that the downward mobility is the main, or a big, driver of the rage. And that rage has become a more important, tho not necessarily the most important, aspect of of politics.
Do you really think the OWS elite wannabes want to help the poor more, or are more about bringing down those top 99% ahead of them?
I think there was and still is legitimate rage that the 2008 GFC held no consequences for the wealthy of Wall Street. So I don’t think it had to do with demographics.
How about Rob citing "elite overproduction" dynamic coined by Peter Turchin. Elite Overproduction leads to downward mobility which it sounds like you are suffering.
Peter Turchin’s theory is just that, a theory. Your inference about me is incorrect. You could have found that out quite easily. That’s the problem with inferences not backed up by any evidence.
David, just asking out of curiosity. Regarding the four out of ten statistic, can you quantify "many, many" decades? How many exactly? What are the sources? And how many decades would it take to see the impact surface in society? Can you also share what Rob misunderstands about the wealthy? I'm genuinely curious about your perspective, as someone who has gone from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. Rob and I might see things differently from you and it's important to learn from each other respectfully.
His intensive data work shows a consistency in intergenerational mobility across time.
I was ticked off at RH for a recent, nasty comment he made about the physical appearance of another writer. He cited the other writer’s “high BMI.” In other words he called him fat.
My issue is the definition of wealthy. The top quintile is not what Americans think of as wealthy. It’s the 1% and arguably it’s really the 0.1%. There’s a real issue of inequality but it has almost nothing to do with the 80th to 99th%.
Thanks for sharing the sources. I can see how the definition of wealthy using the top 20% is too broad. Personally, I've been across the top 20% spectrum as I advanced in my career. You're absolutely right that being richer than 80% of Americans (around $150k) is much different from the top 99% (around $600k). And there's even a larger lifestyle difference from 99% to 99.9% (haven't made that jump yet :) ). I'll have to set aside time to read and think more before responding further. Thank you, David.
Lmao, no, it’s the top quintile who desperately jab their fingers at the top sliver to distract from their own complicity in siphoning off the income of the rest of the population, also known as the deplorables.
I do not understand why conservative talking heads push Musk as an avatar so much. Musk grew up in a wealthy family. Musk is like Bill Gates except edgier: the product of compounding intergenerational success and wealth. He is not a rags to riches story. Bezos would be a better avatar, but only slightly.
Are conservative talkative heads paid by Musk? Is it simping with better verbiage?
I hope you can take a moment to consider how supremely silly it is to suggest you and I should juxtapose our upbringing in order to ascertain whether Elon Musk is a rags to riches story.
I’m comfy with Musk as a rags to riches story, especially if his family was ever in a lower or low-mid quintile, 40%. Many rich folk spend some time down there, below median, before rising again.
Are you sure Elon never lived in a lower quintile?
It brings up the issue of ages tho. A recent grad without ownership of his parent’s assets, or drop-out (of Harvard) like Bill Gates in the year he founded Microsoft, might well be technically in a bottom quintile, but surviving while preparing a company that will propel him upward again. Technically, tho not really, poor, as were both Steve’s of Apple.
When their multimillions are based on the companies they built from scratch, they founded, that’s a pretty good rags-to-riches story.
This. Yes, this. I have arrived at these same conclusions just from years of observation and debate with people from all walks of life.
There is great irony though. People that have more want more. Honest studies have proved it. The top 10% that comprise the parents and grandparents of the upset left own 80% of the stock market and 70% of all the wealth. Much of that wealth is real estate values from inflated housing costs that have put home ownership out of reach for the generations that followed them.
It is these well-off baby boomers that pushed globalism that exported all of our industry and manufacturing to other countries for the cheaper labor. They also demanded more cheap labor be pumped in from immigration. They also pushed the meme that all kids needed a college education to get a good career. Lately they came up with the ideology of climate crisis to generate a new market of green and sustainable energy technology that Wall Street would be on. The resulting increase in energy costs destroys more domestic business while the big corporations can rely on China to burn more coal. Just consider how they pull the media to push the propaganda that meat is bad so we will buy Bill Gates synthetic stuff instead... and watch all the small ranches go out of business.
The idiocy of the kids is that they are trying to kill, literally now, the same working class that has been decimated by all these policies and actions of their parents and grandparents, while they are programmed to support more of the same elite people and their policies and actions that perpetuate the economic misery of the kids.
That is the frustrating part of all of this... the tremendous ideological indoctrination and brainwashing that is happening to prevent youth from seeing the truth and actually supporting what would improve their lives.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk might be a crucible in the required mass epiphany to turn this around... except the elite establishment seems to have turned up the volume seeing the risk to keeping the kids in their camp of ignorance.
I had my second family when I was old. By the time they were heading to college my health was potentially uncertain and they both knew that they were going to have to make it on their own and be self supporting right out of school. To make it more fun - they each had 3 years of tuition covered in-state, so they planned on doing Running Start to handle their first 2 year of college credits and on being commuting students. So they were very judicious in their majors and their choices of courses, as they were working against the clock with a limited piggy bank.
My daughter got her MS in civil engineering - structures by the time she was 21. My son got his MS at the age of 21 in MIS - data security. He had ~ $30 K in loans, my daughter had no debt - engineering internships pay pretty well. I was 70 and a cancer survivor by the time my son graduated.
But they were targeting line professional jobs, not elite policy / consultancies. Given a bit of luck, you can make it on your own merit into line professional jobs - if you graduate into a recession things will be hard, even if you have appropriate skills. They both had peers from richer families who were less focused and who have had significant difficulties in the current economy.
For those dealing with professional disappointment (or perhaps wanting to encourage flexibility in their children) I can recommend Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety". It follows two aspiring English professors. One comes from an elite circle and can't readily accept his failure. The other happily moves on to other opportunities and has a happy life as a novelist.
The odd thing is that our friends on the left constantly discuss the wonders of social mobility— people in the bottom 20% rising to the top 20%. Well, as a matter of simple math, if some people are going to rise in relative affluence, an equal number have to fall.
For hundreds of years, literature and history have included spoiled brats. Kids of the relatively rich were grateful for nothing and frequently complaining about how lousy today’s reality is.
As so many Americans are rich, in absolute terms never being hungry, homeless, or needing to dress in dirty ragged clothes, too many of their kids are allowed to grow up selfish & narcissistic & neurotic. Spoiled brats. Such personality traits are more susceptible to nurture/ culture modification than is IQ. These negative traits show up early in behavior, and if the bad behavior doesn’t elicit punishment, the bad behavior gets worse.
Even good Christian homes & Christian families, can raise kids who are spoiled brats, and especially spoiled teenagers. Most spoiled teens grow out of it.
Few spoiled kids are as successful as their successful, usually harder working parents. So they drift downward.
I rise my hat for this outstanding article! It explains a lot of socio-economic aspects found in un-answered questions about a divided nation.
This review reminded me of the Russian movie "The State Counsellor". It is an excellent thriller about the Russian anarchists acting with fury at the beginning of the 20th century nd prior to the "Great Revolution." Close to the end, the detective Pozharsky finds them, and the brain behind their actions with the code-name "Needle." He realizes that she is, in fact, the Countess Dobrinskaya. After she explains the disillusionment with that high status, she explodes the bomb killing both of them. The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Boris Akunin exploring the rage against the establishment.
On the other hand, we should not forget that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not poor either...
I believe that a contributing factor to the “victim” self-identification (and accompanying rage) was in how so many upper middle class parents “hovered over” and worshiped their children, protecting them from any anxiety or disappointments (hard parts of reality) that they could and fostering an internalized sense of entitlement (participation trophies!). When the “trophies” for existing quit being awarded, victims of such injustice (wokies love the term “justice”) identified the oppressors as the “fat cats” who had grabbed up all the trophies.
UMC parents also live vicariously through their offspring snd feed into their grandiosity of z”changing the world/becoming anything they want.”
Really excellent piece Rob. I am on staff at a small college and I see today's youth come in aimless and unfocused but they are on a prescribed path, and college is the next level up for them. What is interesting is that for all their knowledge of technology, social media they seem to lack a spirit to make things different. I came of age during the Vietnam war and its aftermath and I watched as those who couldn't adjust to society created their own worlds, people like the two Steves of Apple, of Nolan Bushnell, of Larry Ellison of Oracle, Gates and Allen and others. They came, saw a world they did not fit into well, and created a new one, that seems to be lacking in these younger generations. Instead they have been enculturated to believe that anger is the solution, we have lost something in the intergenerational transfer.
Stalin did not come from an elite background, unlike many of the other Bolsheviks. His father was a violent alcholic shoemaker who was constantly in debt. He was a good student so he recieved a scholarship to a theological college intending to be an orthodox priest but he dropped out before his final exams given he no longer believed in Christianity. He was from a cultural and social backwater in the Russian Empire.
In fact his non-elite background is precisely why he ended up at the top of Russian politics. Like Putin his early experiences of hardship and streetfighting gave him a ruthless edge that the ineffectual intellectuals he was up against just didn't have for the most part. He picked his rivals off with a cool brutality. He made originally made his name in the party for raising funds in a bank robbery in Tblisi. He generally despised the tastes of effete elite art which is why he pushed the Soviet Union away from avant garde art to more traditionalist social realism. Stalin was, like Hitler, a product of an advancement by the elites for their own purposes, with the typical arrogance of the intellectual elite. They believed they could control them but he ended up releasing the untapped demontic energies of someone who had been overlooked as a vulgar thug barely worthy of attention.
While I think the author is onto something here, I think we have another cohort of wannabe elites who have been shut out by our nepo baby / insiders only culture: talented white boys and other intelligent strivers from flyover country who no longer want to genuflect to the current cultural class that n the coasts. Merit was once enough for entree; recently wannabe elites have been subjected to loyalty tests. Did you take a knee? Did you exhibit the correct virtue signal? Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I bet there are a whole lotta young folks who just won’t play. Instead they wanna start a new game with new rules. I think that’s what we will see coming up. The current arrangements are like a geriatric patient who rules from the deathbed holding the inheritance over everyone’s head.
I think you are correct about the dichotomy. But I think those fly-over boys and girls are the ones who defend traditional American values. The truth is that post-Civil War was when the type of elites Mr. Henderson describes were rewarded with power and prestige in a ever more over-reaching federal government. Do not misunderstand me, this is not to say that slavery was proper. Rather it is to say that these modern "elites" Mr. Henderson describes are the descendants, some literal and some figuratively, of those financiers and industrialists who promoted, prolonged, and profited from.American slavery. Their clients - southern plantation owners - took the fall while those industrialists and financiers were rewarded. Early and often. To the extent that many, many, many are now toiling away at their new plantations.
Well that certainly is a big picture view
It is a goid skill to have. FWIW can see trees too.
What are the new plantations?
Those who don’t wanna play in the woke elite might agree on the undesirability of political correctness, without agreeing on what they want. Most probably prefer the trad virtues of their boomer grandparents, tho many just play video games & watch TikTok fashion. Some even become rationalists in support of hyper-individualism, without strong support for any current party.
The geriatric patients are ruling not from the deathbed, but from Congress and the White House. Big corporations have the sense to kick out their geriatric patients, unless they are founding owners like Larry Ellison and Warren Buffet.
You seem to attach great importance to the below as if it's a revelation and proof for downward mobility you think is new and noteworthy.
"According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there."
That four out of ten statistic has been remarkably stable for many, many decades. It's not new.
You consistently make generalizations without backup or rigor.
You write about the wealthy without really knowing anything about us.
You have a big audience that you are misleading. I suppose it's big because you write and say what they want to hear. That is not new.
"You write about the wealthy without really knowing anything about us." What an unkind comment !
Thanks for links, and I’m sure you’re right that Rob doesn’t really know the wealthy, as I also don’t. You also write well about them, and it’s clear the top 0.1% is what the media focuses on when talking about the wealthy.
Your own post mentions how Disneyworld has so strongly moved away from being available to all workers, towards being far more for VIP big spenders. That article also noted how much more expensive tickets to live sports events, yet even it didn’t mention how much more expensive tickets to live rock bands have become.
(On the very important issue of increasing inequality, the govt should produce statistics about wealth levels and the key rates to compare at the 99%, 90, 50, 40, & 20% levels.
If the wealth increase of the 99 & 90% is at a faster rate than the 50% median, there should be higher taxes on the rich. Probably moving towards some wealth tax.)
I’m actually more interested in generalizations that are true, rather than merely being backed up by possibly over-credentialed truth benders.
What generalization of Rob is not true? How is he misleading his readers? Neither your brief comment nor OWS post indicate it, except noting downward mobility is not new.
The generalization that downward mobility is the most important aspect of our politics. There’s nothing in the essay that connects to that assertion.
I understand the essay to claim that the downward mobility is the main, or a big, driver of the rage. And that rage has become a more important, tho not necessarily the most important, aspect of of politics.
Do you really think the OWS elite wannabes want to help the poor more, or are more about bringing down those top 99% ahead of them?
I think there was and still is legitimate rage that the 2008 GFC held no consequences for the wealthy of Wall Street. So I don’t think it had to do with demographics.
How about Rob citing "elite overproduction" dynamic coined by Peter Turchin. Elite Overproduction leads to downward mobility which it sounds like you are suffering.
Peter Turchin’s theory is just that, a theory. Your inference about me is incorrect. You could have found that out quite easily. That’s the problem with inferences not backed up by any evidence.
David, just asking out of curiosity. Regarding the four out of ten statistic, can you quantify "many, many" decades? How many exactly? What are the sources? And how many decades would it take to see the impact surface in society? Can you also share what Rob misunderstands about the wealthy? I'm genuinely curious about your perspective, as someone who has gone from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. Rob and I might see things differently from you and it's important to learn from each other respectfully.
One expert on economic mobility is Raj Chetty. https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/SOTU_2015_economic-mobility.pdf
His intensive data work shows a consistency in intergenerational mobility across time.
I was ticked off at RH for a recent, nasty comment he made about the physical appearance of another writer. He cited the other writer’s “high BMI.” In other words he called him fat.
My issue is the definition of wealthy. The top quintile is not what Americans think of as wealthy. It’s the 1% and arguably it’s really the 0.1%. There’s a real issue of inequality but it has almost nothing to do with the 80th to 99th%.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/our-second-gilded-age-goes-supernova
Thanks for sharing the sources. I can see how the definition of wealthy using the top 20% is too broad. Personally, I've been across the top 20% spectrum as I advanced in my career. You're absolutely right that being richer than 80% of Americans (around $150k) is much different from the top 99% (around $600k). And there's even a larger lifestyle difference from 99% to 99.9% (haven't made that jump yet :) ). I'll have to set aside time to read and think more before responding further. Thank you, David.
Lmao, no, it’s the top quintile who desperately jab their fingers at the top sliver to distract from their own complicity in siphoning off the income of the rest of the population, also known as the deplorables.
I do not understand why conservative talking heads push Musk as an avatar so much. Musk grew up in a wealthy family. Musk is like Bill Gates except edgier: the product of compounding intergenerational success and wealth. He is not a rags to riches story. Bezos would be a better avatar, but only slightly.
Are conservative talkative heads paid by Musk? Is it simping with better verbiage?
Isaacson’s biography of Musk doesn’t portray Elon’s father as a successful businessman; more of a conman.
And I admire Musk because he’s accomplished more for space travel than anyone else in decades. Blue Origin still hasn’t reached orbit yet.
You've missed the point of my observation.
Musk did not start in a precarious financial situation. He started in a wealthy family.
Musk is not a rags to riches story. Rob including Musk in that category could be doing a couple of things:
1) reveals Rob as misunderstanding the trope, which makes me take him a little less seriously.
2) reveals Rob as having Simp tendencies for Musk, which makes me take him less seriously
3) reveals Rob as careless in his analysis, which makes me take him less seriously.
Musk can be your favorite rich guy. That doesn't mean he is what most people claim as their favorite *trope* of a rich guy.
At least according to Isaccson’s biography, Musk’s family was fairly precarious and not at all wealthy.
So a lot closer to rags to riches than you seem to want to believe.
Errol Musk is on record discussing being wealthy. I don't think you know what precarity means.
I’ll put my upbringing against yours any day, Mr Jealous.
I hope you can take a moment to consider how supremely silly it is to suggest you and I should juxtapose our upbringing in order to ascertain whether Elon Musk is a rags to riches story.
I’m comfy with Musk as a rags to riches story, especially if his family was ever in a lower or low-mid quintile, 40%. Many rich folk spend some time down there, below median, before rising again.
Are you sure Elon never lived in a lower quintile?
It brings up the issue of ages tho. A recent grad without ownership of his parent’s assets, or drop-out (of Harvard) like Bill Gates in the year he founded Microsoft, might well be technically in a bottom quintile, but surviving while preparing a company that will propel him upward again. Technically, tho not really, poor, as were both Steve’s of Apple.
When their multimillions are based on the companies they built from scratch, they founded, that’s a pretty good rags-to-riches story.
I agree. I thought Isaacson's book was a good read. Mama's modeling career sounded a little sketchy to me too.
Musk super successful in making real items, space ships & Teslas, rather than merely more computer tech.
Plus Musk buying Twitter and unbanning Trump & so many other previously banned Republicans & those who were against woke.
Does Rob really push Musk? Did Charlie Kirk? Does Trump, now?
DOGE was and continues to be better at saving millions of govt/taxpayer dollars than any other anti-waste scheme we’ve seen.
This. Yes, this. I have arrived at these same conclusions just from years of observation and debate with people from all walks of life.
There is great irony though. People that have more want more. Honest studies have proved it. The top 10% that comprise the parents and grandparents of the upset left own 80% of the stock market and 70% of all the wealth. Much of that wealth is real estate values from inflated housing costs that have put home ownership out of reach for the generations that followed them.
It is these well-off baby boomers that pushed globalism that exported all of our industry and manufacturing to other countries for the cheaper labor. They also demanded more cheap labor be pumped in from immigration. They also pushed the meme that all kids needed a college education to get a good career. Lately they came up with the ideology of climate crisis to generate a new market of green and sustainable energy technology that Wall Street would be on. The resulting increase in energy costs destroys more domestic business while the big corporations can rely on China to burn more coal. Just consider how they pull the media to push the propaganda that meat is bad so we will buy Bill Gates synthetic stuff instead... and watch all the small ranches go out of business.
The idiocy of the kids is that they are trying to kill, literally now, the same working class that has been decimated by all these policies and actions of their parents and grandparents, while they are programmed to support more of the same elite people and their policies and actions that perpetuate the economic misery of the kids.
That is the frustrating part of all of this... the tremendous ideological indoctrination and brainwashing that is happening to prevent youth from seeing the truth and actually supporting what would improve their lives.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk might be a crucible in the required mass epiphany to turn this around... except the elite establishment seems to have turned up the volume seeing the risk to keeping the kids in their camp of ignorance.
Rage is the flipside of shame, shame is either diminished masculinity or femininity, and is always present in legitimate trauma.
Whatever the demographic then, they feel “castrated,” “envy,” and in their “lived experience,” traumatized one would suppose.
I had my second family when I was old. By the time they were heading to college my health was potentially uncertain and they both knew that they were going to have to make it on their own and be self supporting right out of school. To make it more fun - they each had 3 years of tuition covered in-state, so they planned on doing Running Start to handle their first 2 year of college credits and on being commuting students. So they were very judicious in their majors and their choices of courses, as they were working against the clock with a limited piggy bank.
My daughter got her MS in civil engineering - structures by the time she was 21. My son got his MS at the age of 21 in MIS - data security. He had ~ $30 K in loans, my daughter had no debt - engineering internships pay pretty well. I was 70 and a cancer survivor by the time my son graduated.
But they were targeting line professional jobs, not elite policy / consultancies. Given a bit of luck, you can make it on your own merit into line professional jobs - if you graduate into a recession things will be hard, even if you have appropriate skills. They both had peers from richer families who were less focused and who have had significant difficulties in the current economy.
Smart kids and you raised them well
This article describes every New York kid who goes to the University of Michigan because they couldn't get into the Ivy League schools.
For those dealing with professional disappointment (or perhaps wanting to encourage flexibility in their children) I can recommend Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety". It follows two aspiring English professors. One comes from an elite circle and can't readily accept his failure. The other happily moves on to other opportunities and has a happy life as a novelist.
https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Safety-Modern-Library-Classics/dp/037575931X
Tremendously well-written
The odd thing is that our friends on the left constantly discuss the wonders of social mobility— people in the bottom 20% rising to the top 20%. Well, as a matter of simple math, if some people are going to rise in relative affluence, an equal number have to fall.
Resentment is the biggest offender. Better that they should take up drinking.
For hundreds of years, literature and history have included spoiled brats. Kids of the relatively rich were grateful for nothing and frequently complaining about how lousy today’s reality is.
As so many Americans are rich, in absolute terms never being hungry, homeless, or needing to dress in dirty ragged clothes, too many of their kids are allowed to grow up selfish & narcissistic & neurotic. Spoiled brats. Such personality traits are more susceptible to nurture/ culture modification than is IQ. These negative traits show up early in behavior, and if the bad behavior doesn’t elicit punishment, the bad behavior gets worse.
Even good Christian homes & Christian families, can raise kids who are spoiled brats, and especially spoiled teenagers. Most spoiled teens grow out of it.
Few spoiled kids are as successful as their successful, usually harder working parents. So they drift downward.
I rise my hat for this outstanding article! It explains a lot of socio-economic aspects found in un-answered questions about a divided nation.
This review reminded me of the Russian movie "The State Counsellor". It is an excellent thriller about the Russian anarchists acting with fury at the beginning of the 20th century nd prior to the "Great Revolution." Close to the end, the detective Pozharsky finds them, and the brain behind their actions with the code-name "Needle." He realizes that she is, in fact, the Countess Dobrinskaya. After she explains the disillusionment with that high status, she explodes the bomb killing both of them. The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Boris Akunin exploring the rage against the establishment.
On the other hand, we should not forget that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not poor either...