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Do Americans Care Too Much About “Smart”?
I’ve been reading with great interest the threads from Salvatore, Ryan and Midge on elitism, meritocracy, and higher education. I discovered them too late to get into the discussion, but I’ll throw in an oar by asking a question: do Americans value intelligence too much? I was recently reading this piece on parenting around the world, which claims that Americans care far more about raising “smart” kids than, say, the Dutch, who actually worry that having a smarty-pants child may be a bad thing.
This is not a foolish concern. Intelligence can be an asset in a wide range of circumstances, but it can also be isolating, and can increase the odds of a person ending up jaded, bored, or insufferably arrogant. In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explains his theory about how higher education allowed the new upper class to get ahead through their smarts, winning the good, brainy jobs that were suddenly more abundant in an information economy. They then took their lavish salaries and formed enclaves of snooty people who look down on the rest of us.
Don’t let Murray’s criticisms draw your attention from the important central claim that those upper-middle-class snobs really are (on average) smarter than most of us. It’s obvious how those social and economic trends might increase Americans’ interest in smarts. Do you want your kids to be rich, popular, and professionally successful? Better make sure they’re brainiacs.
I think there’s a lot of truth to Murray’s tale, though there are plenty of very smart people who don’t end up with Harvard degrees and “super ZIP” mansions for one reason or another. I also think these trends may have distorted the way we think about and value intelligence. Smart people can be useful, undoubtedly. It’s in everyone interests for society to find ways to take advantage of what they can do. But that shouldn’t lead us to undervalue other abilities. A person who scores low on an IQ test may still be gifted in another way, but, more importantly, we shouldn’t suppose that rare and unique gifts are necessary for a person to be valuable to society. Average people can do wonderful things too. They do most of the living and loving and bearing and dying in the world, so we shouldn’t talk as though there’s anything wrong with average.
Once you understand the range and complexity of human personalities and characters, you start to wonder whether there’s really even such a thing as “average.” Meanwhile, even smart people may be burdened by the excessive importance we attach to intelligence. What if they don’t want to be part of the new upper class? I’ve known a few very smart people who fled that path on principle and ended up in a somewhat unhappy place, trying to figure out why they felt mildly ashamed of being as smart as they obviously were.
This, in my view, is a consequence of attaching too much significance to one particular sort of ability. Everyone loses. When smart people underachieve, their intelligence actually becomes a burden, because they tend to feel bored and isolated. It would be better if everyone could take advantage of the opportunities best suited to them and take pride in real achievements (rather than inherited advantages that aren’t really meritorious anyway). Is there any way we could get closer to a world like that?
Published in General
I am Michael Lewis’ greatest fan; Moneyball was the first of his most excellent books that I have read. I would observe that Beane’s “inability to deal with personal failures” is an entirely different topic from his success as a youngster.
Derek Jeter was nothing but successful in high school and managed to bypass the NCAA and even the lower minor leagues when he was drafted by the Yankees in 1992. He was mentally as well as physically tough.
The problem is that this is a factual fallacy.
There is no system in the US by which the “rich” lock themselves in, and prevent downward mobility for themselves.
Hence, there’s nothing for “conservatism” to be opposed to.
This is again the Marxian concept of the “rich getting richer” and the “poor getting poorer”.
One study that compared the same individuals across 10 years from 1996 to 2005 found this:
1) 60% of people in the top 1% moved to a lower income bracket
2) 70% of those in the top 5% moved to a lower income bracket
3) 36% of people in the top quintile bracket moved to a lower quintile bracket.
4) 34% of those in the fourth quintile bracket moved to the top quintile bracket
5) 46% of those in the middle quintile moved to a higher quintile bracket (including 16% who moved to the highest quintile)
6) 51% of those in the second lowest moved up (including 7.5% to the top)
7) 55.4% of those in the lowest moved up.
This is in just 10 years.
Then why are we here?
To keep this along the lines of Rachel’s post – it is often the case that smart people get lost in the analysis of the data that is representative of the world around us and forget that they are mere shadows. In that sense I do think smart is a problem.
It seems to me that talk of the “class system” arises because people like to measure stuff, and stuff includes things like income and wealth.
Anywho, as long as we’re talking about “class,” let’s not pretend that it was all cooked up by Marx. Our Constitution doesn’t prohibit titles of nobility because it’s a Marxist document.
What’s the connection between”nobility” and “class”?
No, but it is a Marxian logic which dictates that those that are “rich” ought to be “attacked” because they are so. Which seems to me is what is going on here for the last half a dozen discussions.
And ignoring facts and instead relying on a fictitious account of the economic realities in the US, is not a “problem”? Claiming that there is some “entrenched nobility” in the US that is keeping down “the average person”, even when there is 0 evidence to suggest so, is not a “problem”?
No one has answered my question yet: what exactly is hoped to be accomplished by beating the drums of anti-intellectualism, anti-rich, class warfare and populism?
PS: The study I linked to has a sample of 120 million taxpayers, and tracks them between 1996 and 2005. 120 million taxpayers is essentially….every working person in the US. That’s not a “shadow”. That is reality.
PPS: This “class warfare” anti-rich logic reminds me of the Leftists who say “we’re all for small businesses! It’s big business we don’t like!” A big business is a small business that was successful. A small business is a business that wants to be big. When you’re small and unsuccessful, we “like you”. When you’re successful, we don’t like you anymore. Bill Gates was the great entrepreneur and innovator. When he sucked. When he grew into a big business, he become the personification of all that’s bad with Wall Street.
And so we go on and say that when you’re working your way to riches, you’re a “good guy”. An average guy. A guy with morals and virtues. The foundation of the American dream. When you make it to the riches, you suddenly become “the elite liberal aristocracy” with no virtues, morals and only materialistic “smarts” to keep you warm.
Indeed, and let’s not forget that Meghan McCain is a Columbia graduate. I strongly doubt that she got accepted on merit.
Yes. People don’t appear to understand that the majority of wealth in this country isn’t inherited; it is earned.
Attacking successful people for being successful is mostly pointless (mostly, rather than completely, because it is a useful tool for some) and frankly, poisonous. It is the worst type of escape hatch for people who are struggling because it validates the bad models and undermines the good ones.
I don’t think that is the nature of this discussion, and I don’t think it has turned in that direction either.
The connection between nobility and class is classification. For example: patricians, plebeians, proles.
Leftists may say that, but they don’t act on it. Overregulation is especially harmful to smaller, less established businesses, who lack the resources to successfully navigate it and the connections to have future regulations written in their favor.
AIG,
The income mobility study doesn’t address classes head on, and certainly doesn’t disprove their existence.
Review the study and you’ll find that most movement is due to life cycle changes. Young people make very little, and approach their peek earnings as they reach middle age, then have it drop off as they get older.
Movement from the very bottom to the very top is small, as is movement from very top to the very bottom.
What happens is that those who start out in the middle quintile will move to the first or second quintile as they gain work experience. Those in the bottom quintile will move up to the fourth or third by enlarge. As both groups age, their earnings will decline putting them in a similar position to where they started. The classes still exist relative to one another, they are just both moving targets.
There are clearly exceptions, but when you control properly for age when analyzing the data, where you start largely allows you to predict where you’ll be in middle age, and where you’ll be old age.
It’s a measure of a particular aspect of reality.
I think I love you. :)
I think Mitt Romney is a good example of someone who is brilliantly smart but can’t get his head out of the data cloud. He just can’t connect the data to the reality it measures. All the world is a math problem to Mitt.
Guess I’m back to being chopped liver. ;-)
Dangit. I wanted to participate in this discussion, but I got busy and didn’t get the chance.
I think intelligence is undoubtedly a good thing (per se, though it can be used for evil of course). But it’s just one among many advantages a person can have, and it’s sad that our social prejudices are such that unintelligent people feel like they have nothing worthwhile to contribute, when they are as capable of virtue and love (far more important) as anyone. Also of social contribution, of course. As others have said, you don’t need to be unusually intelligent to be capable of learning. I’ve definitely known people who desperately wanted to be in an intellectual elite, but who just weren’t smart enough for it. That’s a sad thing.
But there’s a cost for smart people too. As many people on this thread have astutely pointed out, intelligence comes with special temptations to certain vices, such as laziness and underachievement. Smart people can also be short in coping skills, since they experience failure less often. One good way to combat those problems is to encourage them to seek out challenges and to associate (not exclusively, but sometimes) with other intelligent people who will check their tendency to think they are always the smartest one out there. If “smart people enclaves” come with all kinds of very particular class associations, people who seek them out will often be tarred as elitists or class traitors or what have you. I think that’s the kind of (in my view justifiable) concern that provoked Sal’s post on elitism in Higher Ed.
But very smart people tend to get bored, jaded and often insufferable if they’re not permitted to apply that intelligence productively. Even if social custom dictates that they should become farmers or housewives or take over the family business. I’m not saying that they should be permitted to do whatever they want or to avoid all ordinary obligations. But their need for development and for productive outlets is real and not just a product of class envy or elitism. If we weren’t so obsessed with intelligence generally, we might be more relaxed and less touchy about that.
I’ve often thought it interesting that the ideas that a North American and a British person are trying to convey when using words like “smart” vs. “clever” are very different.
To us, “smart” means raw intelligence, righteous and ethical, while “clever” means something devious and underhanded.
To the Brits, “clever” seems to be closer to our idea of “smart”, while they think of “smart” as more of a class distinction, somewhat akin to “posh”, rather than a description of intelligence.
I wonder if other languages, such as Dutch for example, have similar differences in how such words are interpreted.
Maybe the Dutch worry about having children who are too “smart” because they define the word differently than we do. Perhaps the equivalent Dutch word that would describe the idea for what we think of as “smart” is something completely different.
After all, Dutch is very similar to German, and we know how many words there are in German for ideas we don’t have words for in English (schadenfreude being the most well-known example).
(Apologies if this line of thinking has already been discussed. I didn’t take the time to go through the comments thread.)
You should. I said some really smart stuff.
Posh too, I bet.
I agree with your premise, but I reach a different conclusion.
I think that our president has achieved political office by virtue of luck and corruption, but hasn’t really achieved anything concrete.
He seems to have moved up the rungs of academe (as a student) by virtue of affirmative action. If it had been because of grades and test scores, they wouldn’t be so secret. He became president of the Harvard Law Review without having ever written so much as a case note. That strikes me as unprecedented, if not corrupt.
He was a “professor” of constitutional law at the Univ. of Chicago, again without publishing anything. Every single statement he has made as president that concerned the constitution and Supreme Court precedent has been factually incorrect, fraught with errors a first-year law student wouldn’t make. No one outside of the conservative press calls him on it. (continued)
He thinks he can understand economics without studying it (remember Cash for Clunkers and the stimulus bill?). Same for foreign policy, environmental policy, and the military. He strikes me as so cocksure of his brilliance that he couldn’t possibly get anything wrong, and as a result, he gets everything wrong. His hubris and unparalleled self-regard are a result of being over-praised and over-promoted, and we all know why that has happened to such an ordinary man. The whole world is suffering the consequences.
I agree, and would add an observation from academe, a place with a high proportion of smart people. Far too many academics ‘live inside their heads’, by which I mean that they live in a world of abstractions and in quest of intellectual originality. This leads to a certain detachment from reality in many cases. This explains, I think, why high intelligence so often seems at odds with wisdom.
As almost every conservative’s favourite Lefty (Orwell) observed:
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”