They said you was high class

A few days ago, the New York Times had a story called "Why high-class people get away with incompetence," based on research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  My first thought was that "high-class" seemed like an old-fashioned expression.  I used Google Ngram to check, and found that its use peaked around 1920.  My second and more serious thought was to wonder if the study actually compared upper-class people to the rest of the population:  from the description, it sounded like it treated class as a matter of degree. 

I read the paper, and in fact it did treat class as a matter of degree:  the higher your social standing, the more you overestimated your performance (or less you underestimated it) on some tests that they gave.  They didn't look for any non-linearity at the top end, and probably didn't have enough upper-class people to say much about it even if they had (only 6% of the 270 people in the main sample--students at the University of Virginia--reported a family income of over $300,000 per year).   There was also no measure of competence:  participants asked to do a "fun trivia game" and later a mock job interview.  So I would say that all what the paper showed was that people who are self-confident (measured by thinking you did well on the quiz) tend to do well on job interviews.  And there's a lot of previous evidence showing that higher social standing tends to go with optimism and confidence. 

I'm not criticizing the study--the authors were pretty clear about what they were doing and how they thought it contributed to knowledge.  What I find interesting is how the newspaper story turned it into something quite different, about incompetent upper-class people.  It wasn't because the reporter just relied on a press release--she talked to the authors and a number of other social psychologists, and it sounded like she'd read the paper.  It occurred to me that I have read a number of other stories saying that upper-class people are morally deficient.  One example is the claim that the rich give a smaller fraction of their incomes to charity than the poor, which got a good deal of publicity a few years ago although it's almost certainly false.  Another one is a 2016 column by Peggy Noonan, which I first saw a few weeks ago.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2017 and this was one of the columns they selected.   It was about what she called the "protected class": 

"The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. . . . they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected."

Then she talks about how selfish and hypocritical the "protected" are.  Finally:

"This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens....

Now it seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize."

Of course, Peggy Noonan herself is someone with "power or access to it":  she was a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush and she's had a column with one of the leading newspapers in the country for the last twenty years.  Someone can be critical of a group to which they belong, but it's striking that she didn't draw on her experience to make her case--e. g., talk about the difference between the powerful people she knows today and those she knew in the Reagan White House.  She talks about "protected class" as just vaguely somewhere out there. 

I think these examples show that there's a sort of upper-class anti-elitist mood today--elites, or people who are close to elites, lamenting the moral and other failings of elites.  (It's not necessarily an egalitarian mood--that would mean doing something to reduce the wealth and power of elites).