In this half-hour lecture, Glenn Loury as an aside makes the point that the existence of a race depends on cultural behavior. After all, if people did not perceive racial differences, over time inter-marriage would eliminate any such differences.
If you think about it, endogamy is a necessary condition for any persistent cultural distinctiveness. If Japanese and non-Japanese were prone to marry one another, that would eventually mean the end of distinctive Japanese culture.
This in turn leads me to think about our contemporary society, in which the Highly-Educated Elites (HEEs) are endogamous. That leads to a distinctive culture, with values, tastes and linguistic patterns that differentiate them from everyone else. If this keeps up, in a few generations HEEs will seem like a different race altogether.
A few hundred years ago, aristocrats seemed like a race apart from ordinary Englishmen. They were taller. They spoke with a different accent. Endogamy was strong among the aristocratic class.
The term “race” is so loaded that people will object to anyone calling the HEEs a race. You may want to reserve the term race for differences that are visible in physiognomy. You may prefer the more typical expression “culture war.”
The advantage to calling the conflict involving HEEs a race war is that it would allow us to see the danger in where the endogamous HEEs are heading.
Race or caste?
“Race”, “ethnicity” and “jati” (the almost completely endogamous subpopulations hundreds of which are classified as one “caste”) differ only in degree. According to David Reich’s book, which I have no reason to doubt, many jatis have not had significant gene flow for thousands of years. Members of different jatis living in the same village can be as distinct as Swedes and Portuguese. Intermarriage between jatis belonging to the same caste is higher than between different castes, but both rates are low.
“Caste War” would be more apt and less loaded. “Rat Race War” would be funnier, and also more apt if one is familiar with the phenomenon of signalling spirals.
For ‘caste’ in the Spanish-America racial-identification sense (cf: casta, castizo), there was actually a multi-generational “Caste War” in Mexico about 150 years ago near what is now Cancun and Cozumel. But that was more like an actual race war, or the “Indian Wars” in the US.
Eight years ago, Charles Murray used it in the more ‘feudal aristocracy’ sense in his analysis in “Coming Apart” in which he focuses only on white Americans and sees uses ‘Belmont’ and ‘Fishtown’ as class-based demonyms to illustrate the phenomenon of “cementing into rigid castes”.
And thirteen years ago Moldbug put out Castes of the United States which also gets at the cultural stratification.
Going even farther back, almost 40 years ago Paul Fussell wrote, “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System”, which needs some updating but still holds up quite well. The UK version was titled, “Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA”, which again points to ‘caste’ as being le mot propre.
It’s arguable that a formal system of actual caste would be better in some ways. It would remove the pressure and incentive to keep throttling up the crazy in certain out-of-control rat races. If there is going to be this kind of fashion cycle among your elites, better it be harmless, commercial, or – get this – genuinely pro-social in terms of “service to the king” or something like that: the kind of thing which could get you ‘knighted’.
About the worst thing that could happen – what I call a “Social Failure Mode” – is that the competition among elites becomes fixated on conspicuously maximizing some ideological principle that, in actual practice, amounts to trying to win gold at the Social Capital Arson Olympics.
HEE fertility is so far below replacement that this scenario seems far-fetched. Instead, HEE keep up their numbers sucking in young people from surrounding communities, denuding them of genetic material associated with achievement. (There was a paper a year or two ago that demonstrated this effect in North England.) HEE community is a big distributed IQ shredder.
I think the deeper question is not what happens to the HEE’s, but what happens to the remaining 90-95% which contains a melting pot of whites, Asians, blacks and Latinos? In France it ended badly for the HEE’s, but some how the British aristocracy avoided the same destruction.
At present, we seem to be heading towards putting the masses into a stupor with legalized drugs while whipping them into an evermore polarized frenzy. The HEE’s need to implement far better policies and placate the masses or this will not end well.
Unfortunately, at this point, the HEE’s cannot even agree upon the problem and IT IS A PROBLEM!
“In France it ended badly for the HEE’s, but some how the British aristocracy avoided the same destruction.”
While the British aristocracy has ceremonial value to the government, it is functionally worthless. It doesn’t do anything in particular, it’s mainly symbolic. The French aristocracy insisted on maintaining sole functional control of the government and refused to be relegated to a symbolic-only role. So they were beheaded.
If two Japanese produce offspring, it will be Japanese. If two HEE produce offspring, reversion to the mean indicates that often it will not be HEE. This is unlike a race.
And there is a very extensive penumbra between the clearly HEEs and the lumpen-masses—a gradient, with no sharp dividing line. With races, the penumbra of intermediates is small; with HEEs/masses, it is huge.
First gen HEEs were usually strongly meritocratic. Their (usually few) children often get extra tutorial help & job help & extra-curricular help as well as special preparatory (prep!) schooling so as to maximize their HEE post graduation entrance.
I think the vast majority of children of two college graduate parents go on to college. Even with somewhat lower SATs, but paying more tuition and with bigger loans.
It seems likely that an increasing number of students are “meritocratically unworthy” of their Top College acceptances. I believe this is more the case today than 30 years ago.
Actually, no. I’m a college counselor for high school students. Markovitz in The Meritocracy Trap is correct. HEE work insane hours and expect their kids to work incredibly hard and get little sleep, too. It’s not just attending the “right” preschool, summer camps, K-8 and boarding school to get the brass ring. My students are doing such high level research in high school that people think it’s doctoral level. They publish in peer reviewed journals, start their own businesses, acquire patents, etc., not for passion, which research tells us comes generally from doing something really well over time, but for the purpose of college admission. As R. Karma noted, “Elites are shuttled into a life-long, endless competition that not only consumes their life quantitatively but qualitatively as well, leaving no room for self-expression, actualization, or discovery — only self-exploitation, value extraction, and endless anxiety.” It’s no way to be a teenager.
It feels like the niche sports situation described in Atlantic recently. I’d love it if you could share a bit more detail, and I’m sure so would other commenters here. Most importantly, how large a segment of educated parents are you talking about?
Thanks Carolyn. I second Candide’s appreciation for your comment and request that you share more detail if you’re able to.
Me too – please more details!
Still I’ll bet SAT scores for Blacks and Latinos getting accepted at Harvard are lower now (in top % terms) than 20 years in 2000. Tho for Asians it is higher.
(If true, would this make it higher or lower? I say lower, tho it’s harder for Asians and Whites).
I guess that the top HEE kids from Whites and Asian, with “Tiger moms”, get to trade in their childhood for early rat race “publish or perish” pressure for the
all important college admission.
So you think a cheatin’ Ted Kennedy type legacy brat or son of a millionaire donor won’t get ahead of the rat racers? Or not too many? 1%? 5%? 25%? 50%? 90%?
When there are only 10% of the spots available for “meritocracy”, there’s intense competition for them. Super intense.
Excessively intense.
But Carolyn, how many entering students at Harvard are “not fully meritocratic”?
My own guess is over 50% at this point.
I understand that Cal Tech is almost purely SAT/ ACT. Full of Asians and Whites, almost no Blacks, Latinos, nor kids of faculty & alum.
How many of the HEEs so characterized (over achievers and disciplined studiers) will fall head over heals for woke ideology once in Uni? And how many of those will remain interested after first year? The question is not rhetorical, as I’m sure the percentage will be significant. But WHAT percentage? THAT is the question.
What mean are they reverting to though?
We don’t see Japanese reverting to the mean IQ of the whole world, but the Japanese mean. The assumption here seems to be that elites are reverting to some general population mean, rather than an elite population mean.
What if the mean that elites revert too is in the long run higher than the general population.
Thanks. You make an excellent point. Social scientists and self-appointed experts on social issues like to rely on ideas about group behavior that make no sense. The poverty of our knowledge on large-group issues is largely a consequence of our poor knowledge of individual behavior and small-group interactions. A good example is Tyler Cowen who pretends to entertain his MR readers with his “speculative” ideas (sorry, Arnold, I know you take him seriously, but he isn’t Gary Becker).
The Hutu genocidal killing of Tutsis was based on tribe, not race. Altho there was also a strong “caste” element, since the majority Hutus were usually the less educated, less successful, and physically shorter & more squat.
As Yugoslavia broke up, the Serbs and Croats had a fierce war. Same race, almost the same language. Different tribes, now different nations – each with fierce national pride.
“Tribe” is already used in this way, and is very useful to identify that it’s the “same race / different tribe”. In addition, similar to identities, one can belong to many different tribes.
Plus there’s a lot of history of Tribal Warfare. Which we should be trying to avoid, in part by understanding that there are many differences between tribes.
Those whose identity is “Democrat” or “Republican” or “Libertarian” or “Green” can also be understood as belonging to political tribes.
While the HEEs are the leading cultural “tribe”, as well as being majority Democrat, they have long been mocking members of the Rep tribes, both HEE Reps and normals, and are now often explicitly exiling them from the HEE colleges.
These aspects of the on-going class cultural war can be labeled “tribe” or “caste”, but “race” has far too much specific slave-based baggage to be useful. Even naming the races is an issue. There are already disputes about Hispanics being classed as “White” or not, with respect to race. Funny that “Yellow” is almost totally replaced by “Asian”, and “Mongol” has long been unused.
“Negro” is right out.
Race and tribe differ only in degree. Both are endogamous communities that have been isolated for some time. I am convinced this can be quantified rather exactly. Call the quantitative measure of difference “group-average relatedness”. Perhaps GAR(Serbs, Croats) ≈ GAR(Hutu, Tutsi) ≈ 0.01 GAR(black, white). Hutu genocidal killing of Tutsis having been based on a difference 1/100 of the difference between some other groups (groups that had long ceased to be salient in their situation) only tells us that quantitative amount of difference between groups by itself doesn’t predict how hostile they will behave towards each other.
“Race and tribe differ only in degree. ”
Maybe.
But similarly “caste”. Tho differences between tribe categories and caste categories are less than race categories.
Even “sex” – with bio-sex being exactly the difference between XX people (female) and XY people (male), all of whom are human. Which differ in DNA only slightly with chimpanzees…
Very much YES to the conclusion:
“quantitative amount of difference between groups by itself doesn’t predict how hostile they will behave”
Arnold claims:
” If this keeps up, in a few generations HEEs will seem like a different race altogether.”
Others claim it should be called caste instead of race.
I claim it should be called tribe.
Race-war is bad.
Tribal war is bad.
…
One might say the French Revolution and commie revolutions were class war – bad.
Not sure about any good examples in history of “caste-wars”. Which makes me think of the soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World,
Happy totalitarianism,
where Alphas, Betas, Deltas, and Gammas, all had their places, and were happy in them.
It’s not clear that India using castes to avoid a French style class revolution is really so bad.
So which group should I dislike less? The HEEs or the LENEs (low education non-elites)?
I’m a MENE (moderately educated non-elite).
For the HEEs, I dislike the hubris and the fake science. Anytime p<.05 for their ideologically motivated studies, they want to shove it down our throats good and hard.
For the LENEs, I dislike the high reproduction rate in out-of-wedlock, single parent families. I also dislike the crime rates, addiction rates, welfare rates and general lack of marketable skills despite the fact that the U.S. has one of the highest K-12 per capita spending rates in the world.
“So which group should I dislike less? The HEEs or the LENEs (low education non-elites)?”
They both vote democrat so do you have to choose?
Fair point. But, my family needs to live somewhere and for that we are going with HEE neighborhood (or something that approximates it) every single time. I don’t want the drama or dysfunction of the lower castes.
You should probably help the LENEs more. What gov’t hasn’t much tried is bigger incentives to be married, to have a job, to get a HS education, to avoid crime.
Brainstorm example: Rank all gov’t school districts in each state (nation?) according to marriage status of the parents of the kids, the students. In the bottom 20% (33%? 25% 40%?), the parents who are married get, on their anniversary, $1000 plus $100 for each year of marriage (thus $2k after 10 years). For the next 40% up to 60%, this amount is decreased at a 2.5% rate for each 1% higher that district is.
Note the problem — such an incentive program for doing the right thing fails to help “the most needy”, those who do the wrong things.
It’s fine to be angry at HEEs who fail to start businesses and hire poor people. The right way to help any individual poor person is pretty clear –
offer THAT person “a better job”. If you’re not doing that, you’re not helping much. Too many big-gov’t virtue signalers think there are other, more convenient ways (to them) of helping the poor with other, mostly wasteful, gov’t programs.
“ You should probably help the LENEs more.”
It’s a lost cause. Just send them their welfare checks and be done with it already. No need to tweak around the margins.
We decided to export our middle/lower middle class jobs to China, Mexico, etc. We said that this was a good thing because free trade is awesome and we can always compensate the losers with monetary payments and job retraining (the economists always think that money can make people whole as if that’s the only thing that matters).
We also decided that it was a good idea to import more and more unskilled labor from Mexico, etc. because the economists said that porous borders were awesome. The immigrants benefit and the lower skilled natives don’t see any negative impacts whatsoever. We even have the magical p<.05 studies to show this.
Meanwhile, we decided to liberalize our cultural norms which, among many other things, removed all of the stigma from having out-of-wedlock children that cannot be supported except through massive welfare payments.
There aren’t going to be any magical policy buttons to undo this. We are going to have to live with it and just hope that the lower classes reproduce a lot less (which they aren’t). Have a nice day :)!
H. G. Wells was going down that road of class differences becoming evolutionary species differences in “The Time Machine.” The sci-fi story was a warning.
Aristocrats have looked different. For over a thousand years, powerful and rich young men have looked for beautiful wives, and were more willing to “marry down”. They had sons who did the same thing, and so it went for centuries. Does beauty have a genetic component? If so, the aristocratic “race” would become more beautiful over time.
Genetic selection is different from the health advantages of being able to afford better food and housing.
What’s wrong with the term “class warfare,” other than that you’re appropriating a term from Marxism?
Hope to listen to Loury sometime, but random thoughts in the meantime:
* Does anyone read Goethe’s The Elective Affinities anymore?
* There are so many great classic novels (The Leopard, Buddenbrooks, Middlemarch…) with themes about the inevitable decay of family fortunes that, especially in these accelerated times, keeping a fortune together for more than a few generations seems an infrequent occurrence at best. Virtue signaling displays of “philanthropy” are hastening the demise of such endowments more frequently as well.
* Assortative mating by income/wealth, rather than by education credential status seems to predominate. Women get more degrees than men so higher income/ wealth males without education credentials are more likely to marry credentialed, higher class women. A Swedish study found:
“…in hypogamous unions, women tend to have a higher social class background and occupational prestige, but lower income than their partners. The income gap between partners is not simply a consequence of the gender wage gap, but driven by selection into different union types. Men and women who form hypogamous unions are negatively selected in terms of their income.”
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/36/3/351/5688045
* According to Pew, Oklahoma and Hawaii have the highest rates of interracial marriage. And “One-in-six newlyweds (17%) were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity in 2015, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. This represents a more than fivefold increase from 3% in 1967.” The new census will show much higher rates.
* Nearly 15% of people in the USA were born outside the country, a figure as high as it has ever been.
* The mayor of the city where I live part of the year in South America was re-elected yesterday with over 60% of the vote despite candidates from 6 other parties winning voting blocs. city has 2 major professional soccer teams and the population’s support is highly polarized, to the point of celebratory fireworks being set off whenever one or the other team loses. The mayor previously was the highly successful president of one of the teams. An engineer, he originally won support with a “No More Politicians” motto and a highly pragmatic, non-ideological style of governance admired for its competence. If the USA political system was restructured to allow individuals like him to attain public office, much of the polarization feeding the racial divisions in the USA might be less intense.
* The urban-rural divide in the USA still seems most significant evolutionarily. It still calls to mind the evolutionary split from a common ancestor between the merely social cockroaches and the eusocial termites. Urban reproduction is increasingly a function of technology and it won’t be long before we see incubator farms.
“much of the polarization feeding the racial divisions in the USA might be less intense.”
Really???
I would argue that Trump was pretty pragmatic, and the HEEs hated him more for that.
The USA is not now, and has mostly not been for decades, very racist.
There are politically incorrect reasons the races and their job achievements have not been converging – but it’s NOT PC to mention them.
Urban reproduction is no problem for welfare receiving poor, and undesirable for highly educated women who would rather be highly paid prestigious wage-slaves to rich owners rather than bored in taking care of their kids in bigger families.
Yes, but it was a miracle that Trump was ever elected and a foreordained tragedy that he would be driven from office. What I forgot to mention about the re-elected mayor was that he broke a multi-decade Worker’s Party stranglehold on the office. My impression is that one tends to get greater competence and substantive diversity the more pluralist and consensus oriented the political system.
Regarding your other point, the urban-rural divide must be taken into account as well. I loosely recall reading that something like 60% plus of urban females from 25 to 29 are childless versus something like 45% of rural females even though the rural are less likely to be on public assistance despite being poorer on average. Lower rural income levels are associated with much higher levels of employment as well as of entrepreneurial activity. I think Census statistics showed that even rural non-farmers are much more likely to start businesses and be self-employed but also that rural start-ups have higher 5 year survival rates than their urban counterparts. The future is rural.
Yes, it was a miracle that Trump was elected in 2016. As much as Bush in 2000. In both cases because the Dems had been in power for 8 years and had done everything possible to rig the election.
Also, the elections of both Clinton and Obama were miracles. After all, they were unknowns, weak candidates picked by the Party because they had to break with the past. Clinton won thanks to Ross Perot. Obama won thanks to McCain, the front-runner idiot that became paralyzed on September 17, 2008, because of a surprising financial crisis (btw, I earned my living as an adviser on fiscal and financial crises).
Note: I’m surprised that you have mentioned a local election in Brazil as a reference for what may happen in other parts of the world. I understand that in Brazil, at the national level political coalitions have been weak for a long time and therefore in local elections some “independent” candidates may have a greater chance of winning than, for example, in Argentina or Chile.
Obama and Clinton, like Trump, initially ran as populists. But both had held elected office and had little establishment resistance before and neither had any experience in tax-paying industry and thus shared establishment contempt for the chumps. Trump’s campaign had no establishment support. Like the mayor, he parlayed public recognition into political support.
Yes, using one city mayor as a reference point is idiosyncratic: I am particularly interested in his career because my wife knew him when she worked in a liquor store that he frequented and was kind and humble. She calls him “gente simples, gente boa” something like “good people, the salt of the earth.” It is hard to imagine someone like this winning an important office in the USA. Trump lacks the humility but his defenestration cannot be attributed solely to that.
But more importantly one has to wonder what the systemic features are that permit an accomplished outsider to attain political office and get re-elected after performing objectively well? Reading the Federalist Papers, it seems like a system that would enable this is exactly what the Philadelphia convention was after. Yet, successful outsiders are vanishingly rare in USA politics. Nevertheless the mayor is the best argument for the status quo in the USA political system: the possibility of a unicorn.
It is almost impossible to imagine it happening in a parliamentary system. So the question is what systemic factor was it that enabled a unicorn in the mayor’s case? And I think multi-partyism is the answer. Would the benefits of reform in that direction outweigh the benefits of a move in the opposite direction towards a parliamentary system? Probably not. Consensus-oriented pluralist and representative multi-party parliamentary systems in which populist movements can inspire as well as discipline establishments still seems like the systemic ideal.
Alternative view. Final paragraphs from The Revenge of the Yankees by Michael Lind
“By evolving from an ethnoregional culture into a crusading secular creed disseminated by the universities, the public school system, the corporate media, and corporate HR departments, post-Protestant wokeness is capable of assimilating anyone, of any race or ethnicity, native-born or immigrant, who is willing to conform to its weird rituals and snobbish etiquette. The Long Island lockjaw accent has been replaced by the constantly updated “woke” dialect of the emerging American elite as a status marker. You may have an Asian or Spanish surname, but if you know what “nonbinary” means and say “Latinx” (a term rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American origin) then you are potentially eligible for membership in the new national ruling class.
The recent conversion to wokeness of the legacy media and big business can be attributed to the increasing reliance of both sectors on a few prestige universities to recruit their top staff. In living memory, if you wanted a job in a prestigious law firm or company in Dallas or Atlanta, you would do well to attend the local state or elite private university, to make connections with the offspring of the local gentry; being an Ivy League graduate, far from being a plus, might well be held against you. The nationalization and globalization of American business, however, has produced a new, increasingly homogeneous managerial elite filtered through a small number of Ivy League schools and high-status public universities, which serve as finishing schools for the woke overclass.
Although the woke managerial culture in the United States has lost most of the vestiges of its Yankee mainline Protestant origins, the emerging American national oligarchy has the same enemies as the old New England-Midwestern WASP oligarchy: white Southerners, Catholic white ethnics and observant Jews. This became clear in the summer of 2020. The woke left not only demanded the removal of statues of Confederate traitors—a perfectly reasonable demand—but also targeted Columbus, the icon of Italian Americans, and Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors. Democratic liberals warned, in the tones of 19th-century Yankee Protestant nativists, that papists were taking over the Supreme Court. At the same time, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Italian American by ancestry but woke by culture, exhibited a striking double standard when it came to public gatherings by left-wing protesters on the one hand and, on the other, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews.
The increasingly powerful and intolerant woke national overclass justifies its cultural iconoclasm in the name of oppressed minorities. But this is just an excuse for a top-down program of cultural imperialism by mostly white, affluent, college-educated managers and professionals and rentiers. Woke attitudes are much less common among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans than among the white college-educated elite.
What we are witnessing is a power grab carried out chiefly by some white Americans against other white Americans. The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatize, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/revenge-of-the-yankees
As usual, in the name of the oppressed minorities. Yes, too many idiots still ready to buy it.
Long before this, the heightening of class identity will lead to conflicts within existing groups. Blacks and Latinos are already at war politically in CA where blacks think “their” affirmative action gimmes are being grabbed by Latinos.
Latinos are starting to feud about Cuban Republicans and more democratic and lower status Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Not even considering the long-standing differences between those who pass for white and those clearly Amerindian or Black.
Pakistanis are “black” in the UK, but part of the Asian broad grouping in the US.
I’m sure lumping multiple ethnicities that do not get along with each other in their home countries into the broad Asian category is not going to lead to peaceful cooperation.
Only Israelis seem to be clearly able to escape the anti-Asian discrimination while being lumped in with Asians or Europeans as convenient.
Race-war? Caste-war? Tribe-war? Ethnic-war? (reply comment above prefers Tribe, and still does while mentioning ethnic, too.)
War is hell. We should all be trying to avoid all of these wars.
Dems out of power hate the leading the Rep.
I call that Democrat Derangement Syndrome. Not Trump, nor Bush, nor Palin, nor Kavanaugh, nor Reagan.
It’s the same deranged hate from many, most?, in Dem tribe hating the leader/ some leader of the Rep tribe.
The Dem woke “Clan” in the Dem Tribe, that faction, is taking over. It’s especially becoming clear in its takeover of universities – tho a few colleges have some pushback.
“The Dem woke ‘Clan’ in the Dem Tribe, that faction, is taking over.”
I agree. However, some commenters on this blog have suggested that Biden was going to construct a firewall against the woke left and govern as a moderate.
So, how is that working out so far?
“Biden Fills Economic Posts With Experts on Systemic Racism”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-15/biden-fills-economic-posts-with-experts-on-systemic-racism
If you spend some time (as I have) with Al-Anon parents, you sure do encounter a lot of rich, highly educated families with big problems to deal with. The phrase “downward mobility” is several degrees too polite.
Of course there is no social science behind my remarks. But the notion of an uninterrupted social status inheritance seems over-simplified to me.
If it makes sense to distinguish young HEEs from young HEE’s gone wrong, I should say that it is the latter group that populate grievance studies and their offshoots, in addition to anti-social activities that they espouse.
Should be “Highly Educated Elite Bourgeoisie”.
Difference between HEE whites and non elite whites is apparent based on physiognomy. I work at an elite law firm—if you look through the bio pictures on the internal website you would easily do better than random guessing lawyers from administrative staff, holding age and race constant. Obviously lower rates of obesity among the lawyers are part of it, but also things like greater neoteny, narrower faces and smoother skin make it easy to guess too.
What happened to the highest SES males choosing the most visually attractive girls with only a little regard to the girl’s SES.
They started using contraceptives and then moved onto something else when they discovered that the low SES attractive girls weren’t intellectually stimulating enough over the long-term. In any event, at this point, there is very low mixing during the peak dating years between those in the high vs. low SES.
The late Daniel Seligman used to say, “To find the prettiest young women, go to a selective college campus.” His theory was that smart, successful men had married prettier than average women. This had eventually resulted in a lot of smart, pretty women. At the other end, this had resulted in Jerry Springer women, dumb and ugly.
Reading in reverse, I see that B.B. already said much the same thing, November 16, 2020 at 12:27 pm.
High SES males have plenty of visually attractive high SES females to choose from.