Social Mobility
Upward mobility can be achieved in two ways: opening elite universities, as happened with the GI Bill, or challenging the claim of being elite, and thereby, in revaluing them rationally, creating a more realistic map of excellence and making a degree from a university like Stanford or Harvard not materially different from a degree from Texas State
... See moreGeorge Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
I’ve come to believe that upward social mobility shouldn’t be our priority as a society. Rather, upward mobility should be the side effect of far more important things: family, stability, and emotional security for children. Even if upward mobility were the primary goal, a safe and secure family would help achieve it more than anything else. Conven
... See moreRob Henderson • Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
In fact, the researchers found that these soft skills, when measured in the fourth grade, are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting a student’s future income.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.
Walter Kirn • Lost in the Meritocracy
The new ideology of meritocracy competed with two alternative notions of social organization: the egalitarian principle, with its call for complete equality in the distribution of goods between humans; and the hereditary principle, with its belief that titles and posts (and partridge shoots) should be automatically transferred to the children of th
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