Certainly, those at Davos are the world Elite, globe-trotting to Switzerland to talk about the ills of the world and what they can do about it (or transform it) without truly understanding the root cause of the problem. And if you want to know what I believe an Elite to be, well, here you go. So, are you an Elite? Is your life experience set you up to be one (regardless of your actual socioeconomic standing)? I bumped into this post:
What the heck am I talking about? I’m talking about my score on the 20-question “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz. (Try it: it only takes about 60 seconds.)
Still puzzled? The quiz is connected with the appearance of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which will be published next Tuesday. The book lays out Murray’s thesis that much of America’s upper middle class and upper class—a “cognitive elite”—exist in a bubble from the rest of the middle and working class. A long excerpt appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal:
For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. . . Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. . .
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.
Take the quiz; my results after the jump.
Melting pot, no longer. We don’t share the same values, setting the stage for current political warfare between those of the Progressive movement (using Government to ensure equal outcomes for all, even if it requires a totalitarian State to enforce it; re: Occupy Wall Street) and the Liberty and Freedom movement (that advocates that individuals determine their own outcomes with a very limited Government to act as referee instead of overlord; re: TEA Party). I’m not even sure that “a salad” even describes the US nowadays.
On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 13 and 16. In other words, you don’t even have a bubble. The questions (and no, your score is not one-to-one):
- Have you ever worked on a factory floor? Y
- Have you ever held a job that caused a part of your body to hurt at the end of the day? Y
- Have you seen last year’s mega-hit movie, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”? Y
- Can you name this NASCAR champion? Y (it is TMEW’s favorite driver)
- In the past five years, have you been fishing or hunting? N (fishing is boring, no hunting (I have no compelling need to be in the woods at 4am and 20 degrees – a warm bed is more like it), but I do go shooting)
- Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? Y (yes, and that describes me as well)
- During the past year, have you stocked your own fridge with domestic mass-market beer? N (actually, does not apply as I do not imbibe any alcohol)
- Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong and wide-ranging political disagreement? Y
- Have you eaten at an Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s, or Outback Steakhouse in the past year? Y
- Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck? Y (actually, both of us have)
- Have you ever attended a Kiwanis or Rotary Club meeting, or a gathering at a union local? N
- Have you ever participated in a parade that did not involve global warming, gay rights, or a war protest? Y
- Since leaving school, have you worn a uniform as part of your job? N
- Have you ever ridden on a Greyhound or Trailways bus? N
- Did you ever watch an “Oprah” show all the way through? N
- Did you or your spouse ever serve in the armed forces? N (but boths sons have)
- Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or high-prestige occupation (defined as dentist, physician, architect, attorney, engineer, scientist, or college professor)? Y
- Have you ever lived for at least a year as an adult in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your nearest 50 neighbors probably did not have college degrees? Y
- Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard? Y
- During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes? Y
