I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that’s best left to a full post, I’m not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze’s 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.
Will elite worldviews increasingly diverge from the worldviews of those left behind economically?
Maybe, although just as there are forces for divergence, there are forces for convergence. The media can, and do, transmit elite-aligned worldviews just as they transmit elite-opposed worldviews, while elites fund political activity, and even the occasional political movement.
Would increasing inequality really prevent people from noticing economic gains for the poorest?
That notion sounds like hyperbole to me. The media and people’s social networks are large, and can discuss many economic issues at once. Even people who spend a good chunk of time discussing inequality discuss gains (or losses) of those with low income or wealth.
For instance, Branko Milanović, whose standing in economics comes from his studies of inequality, is probably best known for his elephant chart, which presents income gains across the global income distribution, down to the 5th percentile. (Which percentile, incidentally, did not see an increase in real income between 1988 and 2008, according to the chart.)
Also, while the Anglosphere’s discussed inequality a great deal in the 2010s, that seems to me a vogue produced by the one-two-three punch of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, and the economist feeding frenzy around Thomas Piketty’s book. Before then, I reckon most of the non-economists who drew special attention to economic inequality were left-leaning activists and pundits in particular. That could become the norm once again, and if so, concerns about poverty would likely become more salient to normal people than concerns about inequality.
Will the left continue adopting lots of ideas from postmodernism?
This is going to depend on how we define postmodernism, which is a vexed enough question that I won’t dive deeply into it (at least TheAncientGeek and bogus have taken it up). If we just define (however dodgily) postmodernism to be a synonym for anti-rationalism, I’m not sure the left (in the Anglosphere, since that’s the place we’re presumably really talking about) is discernibly more postmodernist/anti-rationalist than it was during the campus/culture wars of the 1980s/1990s. People tend to point to specific incidents when they talk about this question, rather than try to systematically estimate change over time.
Granted, even if the left isn’t adopting any new postmodern/anti-rationalist ideas, the ideas already bouncing around in that political wing might percolate further out and trigger a reaction against rationalism. Compounding the risk of such a reaction is the fact that the right wing can also operate as a conduit for those ideas — look at yer Alex Jones and Jason Reza Jorjani types.
Is politics becoming more a war of worldviews than arguments for & against various beliefs?
Maybe, but evidence is needed to answer the question. (And the dichotomy isn’t a hard and fast one; wars of worldviews are, at least in part, made up of skirmishes where arguments are lobbed at specific beliefs.)
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze’s 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.
Will elite worldviews increasingly diverge from the worldviews of those left behind economically?
Maybe, although just as there are forces for divergence, there are forces for convergence. The media can, and do, transmit elite-aligned worldviews just as they transmit elite-opposed worldviews, while elites fund political activity, and even the occasional political movement.
Would increasing inequality really prevent people from noticing economic gains for the poorest?
That notion sounds like hyperbole to me. The media and people’s social networks are large, and can discuss many economic issues at once. Even people who spend a good chunk of time discussing inequality discuss gains (or losses) of those with low income or wealth.
For instance, Branko Milanović, whose standing in economics comes from his studies of inequality, is probably best known for his elephant chart, which presents income gains across the global income distribution, down to the 5th percentile. (Which percentile, incidentally, did not see an increase in real income between 1988 and 2008, according to the chart.)
Also, while the Anglosphere’s discussed inequality a great deal in the 2010s, that seems to me a vogue produced by the one-two-three punch of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, and the economist feeding frenzy around Thomas Piketty’s book. Before then, I reckon most of the non-economists who drew special attention to economic inequality were left-leaning activists and pundits in particular. That could become the norm once again, and if so, concerns about poverty would likely become more salient to normal people than concerns about inequality.
Will the left continue adopting lots of ideas from postmodernism?
This is going to depend on how we define postmodernism, which is a vexed enough question that I won’t dive deeply into it (at least TheAncientGeek and bogus have taken it up). If we just define (however dodgily) postmodernism to be a synonym for anti-rationalism, I’m not sure the left (in the Anglosphere, since that’s the place we’re presumably really talking about) is discernibly more postmodernist/anti-rationalist than it was during the campus/culture wars of the 1980s/1990s. People tend to point to specific incidents when they talk about this question, rather than try to systematically estimate change over time.
Granted, even if the left isn’t adopting any new postmodern/anti-rationalist ideas, the ideas already bouncing around in that political wing might percolate further out and trigger a reaction against rationalism. Compounding the risk of such a reaction is the fact that the right wing can also operate as a conduit for those ideas — look at yer Alex Jones and Jason Reza Jorjani types.
Is politics becoming more a war of worldviews than arguments for & against various beliefs?
Maybe, but evidence is needed to answer the question. (And the dichotomy isn’t a hard and fast one; wars of worldviews are, at least in part, made up of skirmishes where arguments are lobbed at specific beliefs.)