Early in high school, Joe Brunonian decided that he wanted to attend a big-name college. More precisely, he started to think that he deserved to. Despite the fact that he's just a middle class kid, his parents and teachers were very encouraging, and this gave him a sense of entitlement within the meritocracy. One thing led to another; he didn't want to under-represent himself, and that fear inspired him to eke out dozens of borderline A's during high school. If he had exhibited even a slightly different attitude towards those performance metrics, he might be at State U. today rather than at Brown.
The personal neuroses of your average Ivy League student, however, represent more than a psychoanalytic curiosity. They actually constitute economic data. The practices, habits and beliefs formed during an education-heavy upbringing are real non-liquid assets, and they can be represented with the idea of "cultural capital."
The meritocracy rewards individuals partly for some ethereal quality known as "intelligence" but mostly because they quantifiably demonstrate that they have marketable skills. The cultural practices that cultivate (and sometimes constitute) those skills are what David Brooks calls "cultural capital." Cultural capital is not distributed fairly or meritocratically. Joe Brunonian can take no credit for the fact that his parents prioritized education and encouraged him to succeed. That is why Brooks sees cultural capital as the key variable in identifying contemporary American class difference.
"Cultural capital" doesn't correspond perfectly with wealth, but it isn't distributed evenly over the population, either. In both the education system and the job market, certain demographics (such as educated immigrants, Asian-Americans and the wealthy) benefit from a wealth of it.
The reality is that for someone with marketable skills, work ethic and a certain type of cultural fluency, very few doors in today's society are closed. I don't think that was true 50 years ago. Birth has diminished in importance, and cultural capital has partially supplanted it. In his Sept. 7 New York Times op-ed, Brooks puts it bluntly: "The market isn't broken; the meritocracy is working almost too well. It's rewarding people based on individual talents. Higher education pays off because it provides technical knowledge and because it screens out people who are not organized, self-motivated and socially adept."
Brooks' nuanced model of contemporary American privilege is the most precise, reasonable and up-to-date you're going to find anywhere. In the column quoted above, he uses it to explain how rising wage inequalities actually have little to do with the old notions of class disparity, and may instead be the result of a more efficient meritocracy that places a higher premium on leadership and adaptability. He goes on to suggest that persistent demographic inequalities stem primarily from the unequal distribution of cultural capital, and that this can be fixed through what he calls "second-generation human capital" policies. In Brooks' lingo, that means the same thing as cultural capital: "The first-generation policies gave people access to schools, colleges and training facilities. The second-generation policies will help them develop the habits, knowledge and mental traits they need to succeed once they are there." This is a refreshing idea because it provides a good foil to the imprecise Marxian notion that classical capital disparities are the main obstacle to socioeconomic advancement.
Brooks is brilliant and we should be listening to him, but he's a bad philosopher; he doesn't evaluate with much depth. His observations are incisive, in a very Cartesian way, but readers must decide what to make of them. In this case, I think his ideas represent an interesting problem for mainstream liberals. Simply put: what does the left think of the new meritocracy?
If Brooks is right, inequality in cultural capital distribution is the last remaining barrier to near-universal social mobility. Suppose that, one or two generations from now, the demographic disparities in its distribution are successfully diminished through "second-generation human capital policies." In that hypothetical future, people would be rewarded by the market in much closer proportion to their "innate" abilities. Individuals' monetary rewards would be more closely linked to the market's valuation of their optimized skills.
Is that a multiculturalist's dream come true, or is it the final triumph of capitalism and cultural homogenization? The idea of 'cultural capital' extends the market into the sacrosanct arena of culture. In Brooks' hypothetical future, corporations and universities would be more diverse in skin tone, but perhaps less diverse culturally. (And, the society at large would be materially wealthier, because human capital would be employed by the market more efficiently as intelligent children from "culturally poor" families would no longer be excluded from the high-end labor market.)
Brooks creates good models of what's happening, but his analyses are philosophically impoverished. It's up to us to reconcile his models with our personal ideologies.
Matt Prewitt '08 did not base Joe Brunonian on himself.
