PART 1 IS about the emergence of a new American upper class that is qualitatively different from any that the country has ever known.
Harvard economist Robert Reich was the first to put a name to an evolving new class of workers in his 1991 book, The Work of Nations, calling them “symbolic analysts.”1 Reich surveyed the changing job market and divided jobs into three categories: routine production services, in-person services, and symbol-analytic services. In Reich’s formulation, the new class of symbolic analysts consisted of managers, engineers, attorneys, scientists, professors, executives, journalists, consultants, and other “mind workers” whose work consists of processing information. He observed that the new economy was ideally suited to their talents and rewarded them accordingly.
In 1994, in The Bell Curve, the late Richard J. Herrnstein and I discussed the driving forces behind this phenomenon, the increasing segregation of the American university system by cognitive ability and the increasing value of brainpower in the marketplace.2 We labeled the new class “the cognitive elite.”
In 2000, David Brooks brought an anthropologist’s eye and a wickedly funny pen to his description of the new upper class in Bobos in Paradise. Bobos is short for “bourgeois bohemians.” Traditionally, Brooks wrote, it had been easy to distinguish the bourgeoisie from the bohemians. “The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class values. They worked for corporations and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention.” But by the 1990s, everything had gotten mixed up. “It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker,”3 Brooks wrote. Bobos belonged to what Brooks labeled “the educated class.”
In 2002, Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, identified “the creative class,” telling his readers, “If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member.”4 He celebrated the changes in the workplace, lifestyle, and social capital that accompanied the ascendancy of the creative class.
Reich, Brooks, Florida, and Herrnstein and I were all describing the changing nature of the people in the managerial and professional occupations of the upper-middle class. When I use the term new upper class, I am not referring to all of them, but to a small subset: the people who run the nation’s economic, political, and cultural institutions. In practice, this means a fuzzy set in which individuals may or may not be in the upper class, depending on how broadly you want to set the operational definition.
At the top are those who have risen to jobs that directly affect the nation’s culture, economy, and politics. Some of them wield political power, others wield economic power, and still others wield the power of the media. I will call this subset the narrow elite. The narrow elite includes the lawyers and judges who shape constitutional jurisprudence, the people who decide how the news will be covered on national news programs, and the journalists and columnists whose bylines are found in the leading print media and on the Internet. It includes the top executives in the nation’s largest corporations, financial institutions, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. It includes the producers, directors, and writers who create the nation’s films and television dramas, the most influential scholars in the nation’s elite universities and research institutes, and senior government administrators and politicians.
The narrow elite numbers fewer than a hundred thousand people, and perhaps only ten thousand or so. If this seems too small, think about the numbers for specific components of the narrow elite.
With regard to opinion media, for example, go to political websites that maintain a list of links to all the columnists on their respective sides of the political spectrum, make sure you’ve got a full representation of columnists from Left to Right, and add them up. Make a list of the influential talk show hosts from Left to Right. It is impossible to make the number of genuinely influential opinion writers and talkers larger than a few hundred. The top few dozen have much more influence than those below them.
With regard to constitutional jurisprudence, count up the judges on the circuit courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, and estimate the number of attorneys who argue cases before them. The influential actors cannot be made to number more than the low thousands, with the number of key figures no more than a few hundred. When it comes to formulating and passing legislation, the number of key actors at the federal level does not even consist of everyone in the House and Senate. A few dozen of them are far more influential than everyone else. In the corporate and financial worlds, the CEOs and financial heavy hitters whose actions affect the national economy are limited to the very largest and most strategically placed institutions. And so it goes throughout the narrow elite. The number of influential players is surprisingly small even for a country as sprawling and decentralized as the United States.
Construed more broadly, the new upper class includes those who are both successful and influential within a city or region: the owners and top executives of the most important local businesses and corporations; the people who run the local television stations and newspapers; the most successful lawyers and physicians; the most prominent faculty if the city has an important university; and the most powerful city officials.
The number of people who belong under the broad definition of the new upper class is a judgment call. At one extreme, we might choose to limit the definition to the top 1 percent of people working in managerial and professional occupations. There is an argument to be made for such a stringent restriction. In the military, flag officers—generals or admirals—constitute only about 0.4 percent of all military officers. In the executive branch of the federal government, positions reserved for the Senior Executive Service plus presidential appointments amount to about 1.3 percent of the civilian equivalent of military officers (GS-7 or higher). It could be argued that these include the vast majority of people who could be deemed “highly successful” in the military and the executive branch of government.
But 1 percent is perhaps too stringent. If we restrict the new upper class to the top 1 percent in the private sector, we’re going to have nothing but chief executives of major companies, the most senior partners in the very largest and most influential law firms, and so on. There’s also money to consider. If I were to limit the broad elite to the top 1 percent of those working in management and the professions, the mean family income of the new upper class as of 2009 would have been $517,700.
A plausible middle ground is the most successful 5 percent of the people working in the professions and managerial positions. In the military, the top 5.5 percent of officers in 2006 consisted of those with the rank of colonel or above.5 The Senior Executive Service, presidential appointees, plus the GS-15s constituted the top 6.6 percent of employees with a GS-7 grade or higher. In the world of business, 5.1 percent of all people classified as working in managerial positions were chief executives. Not all chief executives qualify for the new upper class and, in large corporations, senior executives just below the CEO do qualify, but saying that the most successful 5 percent of businesspeople belong in the new upper class would seem to be reasonable.
These considerations lead me to conclude that using the top 5 percent lets in just about everyone who is unequivocally part of the new upper class, plus a large number of those who are successful but borderline. I hereby operationally define the new upper class as the most successful 5 percent of adults ages 25 and older who are working in managerial positions, in the professions (medicine, the law, engineering and architecture, the sciences, and university faculty), and in content-production jobs in the media.6 As of 2010, about 23 percent of all employed persons ages 25 or older were in these occupations, which means about 1,427,000 persons constituted the top 5 percent.7 Since 69 percent of adults in these occupations who were ages 25 and older were married in 2010, about 2.4 million adults were in new-upper-class families as heads of household or spouse.8
Every society more complex than bands of hunter-gatherers has had an upper class and, within that upper class, an elite who ran the key institutions. The United States has been no exception. But things are different now than they were half a century ago. America’s new upper class is new because its members have something in common beyond the simple fact of their success.
Insofar as Americans in the past used the phrase “upper class” at all, it usually connoted the old-money rich of the Northeast United States. The closest parallel to what I am calling the new upper class used to be known as The Establishment. But The Establishment, too, was identified with the Northeast, and its role was associated with a few great corporate entities (predominantly the oil, steel, and railroad giants), the staid financial world (it was still staid when people talked about The Establishment), and political influence discreetly exerted in paneled rooms behind closed doors. Insofar as members of The Establishment served in government, they were to be found primarily in senior posts in the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Establishment had little to do with the film industry, television, journalism, high technology, rough-and-tumble entrepreneurialism, or rough-and-tumble politics.
As of 1960, the people who had risen to the top had little in common except their success. The world in which David Rockefeller, the biggest name in The Establishment, grew up could not have been more different from the world of the Jewish immigrants and sons of immigrants who built Hollywood and pioneered radio and television broadcasting. The men who were the leaders at CBS News in 1960 included the son of a farmer from Polecat Creek, North Carolina (Edward R. Murrow), the son of a Kansas City dentist (Walter Cronkite) who dropped out of college to become a newspaper reporter, and a Rhodes Scholar (Charles Collingwood).
Dwight Eisenhower’s initial cabinet was called “nine millionaires and a plumber.” But only two of them had been born into affluent families. The others included two sons of farmers, the son of a bank cashier, the son of a teacher, the daughter of the only lawyer in a tiny Texas town, and the son of parents so poor that he had to drop out of high school to help support them.
The Kennedy administration’s early nickname was “Harvard on the Potomac,” but his cabinet was no more elite than Eisenhower’s had been. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was rich and Harvard-educated, and Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon was a full-fledged member of The Establishment, but the others consisted of three sons of small farmers (a tenant farmer, in one case), and the sons of a sales manager of a shoe company, the owner of a struggling menswear store, an immigrant factory worker, and an immigrant who made his living peddling produce.9 A narrow elite existed in 1960 as in 2010, but it was not a group that had broadly shared backgrounds, tastes, preferences, or culture. They were powerful people, not a class.
Americans still rise to power from humble origins. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader as I write, was born to a miner and a laundress in Searchlight, Nevada, and grew up in poverty. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, was one of twelve children born to the owner of a working-class bar, and took seven years to finish college while he worked to pay for it. Hilda Solis, President Obama’s secretary of labor, was born to immigrant parents who met in citizenship class and worked on factory floors all their lives. It still happens. But along with the continuing individual American success stories is a growing majority of the people who run the institutions of America who do share tastes, preferences, and culture. They increasingly constitute a class.
They are also increasingly isolated. The new isolation involves spatial, economic, educational, cultural, and, to some degree, political isolation. This growing isolation has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.
Such are the propositions to be argued in part 1.