The rise of the overclass [View all]

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9027846/The-rise-of-the-overclass.html

Even more than Britain, the United States has experienced the emergence of an arrogant and deracinated “overclass” of super-rich. Economists say that the super-rich in the United States are now seven times better off than they were 30 years ago. Troublingly, this massive growth of wealth and power has come directly at the expense of ordinary people. Statistics show that the income of the average working male in the United States has flatlined since the 1970s.

This sharp division of wealth has been accompanied by an even more troubling phenomenon: the ideals of the founding fathers have been shattered as class divisions in the US have widened beyond anything seen in Victorian Britain. Social mobility is in the process of grinding to a halt, as the American sociologist Charles Murray has exposed in a brilliant new book, Coming Apart.

Murray exposes how the new United States upper class, which he labels a “cognitive elite”, has developed an hereditary stranglehold over the top professions and management positions. The brightest people tend to marry each other, then ensure that their offspring get to the best schools and universities, with the result that, to quote Murray: “The parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.” These gilded families then inter-marry and socialise together, living in the same areas, creating a phenomenon which Murray labels “super zips” – the 800-plus richest and most desirable postal codes in the United States, where the cleverest and richest congregate. What Versailles was to 18th-century France, these smart postcodes are to 21st-century America – a sure sign of a sclerotic social system and long-term decline.

Murray argues that the emergence of this “hereditary” elite has smashed the bonds of United States society. An essential part of the American myth was the idea that any child, however poor and disadvantaged, could rise to the very top. But those avenues of advancement are now being closed off.