What about the 'overclass?' - Column

National Review, Sept 11, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The author Michael Lind was interviewed on the (indispensable) MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and was questioned about some of the theses of his book The Next American Nation [reviewed this issue, p. 60]. One of these is that the United States is headed toward a `Brazilianization' of society, by which Mr. Lind meant that the affluent class is self-perpetuating and is sealing itself off from the rest of the country. How? By sending its sons and daughters to the most privileged colleges, taking refuge in private country clubs and mansions, intermarrying, and so on. The greatest entitlement in the hands of this overclass, said Mr. Lind, is the institution of the `legacy' in the primary colleges and universities.

Interviewer David Gergen came up with a half-dozen super-prominent men in American political life who had not attended the fancy colleges. Furthermore, 45 per cent of top chief executives either dropped out of college or graduated from a second- or third-category college. How did Mr. Lind account for that? Oh. Well, he wasn't saying that meritocracy was dead in America, in fact it is more pronounced than it was in the nineteenth century. It just isn't meritocratic enough.

It is a very old complaint, that which is leveled at the wealthy and their progeny. It certainly attracted the attention of Andrew Carnegie, who favored a 100 per cent inheritance tax. The current federal estate tax is very high -- 60 per cent; 80 to 85 per cent on money left to grandchildren, beyond the generation-skipping allowance. The federal estate tax doesn't yield all that much revenue (the 1995 estimate is $15.6 billion, or 1.2 per cent of total federal receipts) and definitive studies haven't been done -- because they can't be done -- to measure the economic impact of the high taxes. We do not know how many industrious and inventive Americans switch into overdrive instead of continuing to chug-chug up the hill to accumulate more to leave their children and grandchildren. The avoidance of taxes is a primal urge, like sex and patriotism and religion, and lighthearted redistributionists are well counseled to be aware of this, though when the jacobinical fever rages, people don't care whether they are stifling production with their taxes. All that they care about is that the Haves shall have less.

On the matter of the `legacy' to entry into fancy colleges, Mr. Lind is on insecure ground again. It is true that at the margin, the practice goes on. But it is very far from being comprehensive. Twenty-five years ago the admissions director of Yale University got into serious trouble with the alumni after several years' application of what very nearly amounted to an anti-legacy policy, during which he reduced to 13 per cent (from about 18) the sons of Eli admitted.

The question was raised, For what reason are alumni expected to give funds to their alma mater? Yes, perhaps, as a measure of gratitude for education and experiences received. And yes, because they wish their alma mater to continue to retain fine scholars. But first-rate scholars are going to be teaching somewhere -- they don't have to teach at any one university. At about that time (the Sixties), Professor C. Vann Woodward, the distinguished Southern historian, was lured away from Johns Hopkins by Yale at considerable expense. This move did not further `education': the kids are as bright at Johns Hopkins as at Yale; and anyway, professors at that level are hired primarily to write books and teach graduate students.

To contribute to Yale to make it possible for Vann Woodward to move there traces to a perfectly understandable pride, tribal in character, in maintaining in first-rate condition the university to which the alumnus hopes his son or daughter will one day be admitted. Mr. Lind's thesis isn't really persuasive unless somebody comes up with Animal House students congestively present at Yale or Harvard or Stanford. That won't happen because such folk don't, pace Lind, get admitted. No alumnus is going to yell, whatever his contributions to his alma mater, if his son is turned down after coming in with a combined SAT score in three digits.

An old bark, an old tree, bringing to mind that the problem in Brazil is that they don't behave as we do.