I’m definitely a member of the 9.9% and I live in Northeast where I see the attitudes described in that interview in spades. I also spend a lot of time in the Bay Area. Most of my friends would be in the top 1% and certainly top 5%. A few likely in the top .1%, but I’m not sure about the threshold or their actual net worths.
When ShawWife was pregnant with ShawSon, we lived in Soho in NYC and she was talking to folks she didn’t know well, who wanted to make sure she had registered our not yet born offspring for pre-school, because otherwise his path to elite schools would be hampered. We moved back to Boston a few years later and were past the deadline to apply to the right preschool there (again, his life was going to be ruined). At age 4, all of our friends were applying to private schools where they seriously interviewed 4 year olds. One of our friends offered to sponsor him at an elite private school but said we’d need another heavy-hitter and in all earnestness suggested that I contact a professional colleague of mine, who was at the time, a Cabinet Secretary. He had been very complimentary about my work and supportive, but he had never met my son and my only relationship with him was purely professional. Based upon that experience, ShawWife and I decided to move to to a suburban/exurban town with good schools.
Even there, many of the top 1% sent their kids to private schools. Our kids were about 50% public and 50% private and at ShawD’s private school, there was such tension about whether the kids were going to get into elite schools that more than half the senior class was on anti-depressants. The parents were either going to kill the kids or themselves if their kids didn’t get in. Totally crazy.
One classmate of my sisters (from Kindergarten in public school and then later at the private HS) spent each summer before HS studying all of the material she was going to take that year in HS, so she knew the material for the year before she started the year, in order that she would do well enough to get into an elite school.
I was an alumni interviewer for a few years at my Ivy alma mater. The proportion of manufactured extracurriculars and extremely polished applicant profiles (especially from the private schools) was pretty high. The parents were clearly investing in prepping their kids for the application process.
Why do all this? Well, the major driver is the increasing inequality of American wealth and income. This is driven by technology and to a lesser extent by globalization. But, in other countries, it is lessened by a redistributive taxation. When ShawSon was studying for an MS in computational and mathematical engineering and an MBA at an elite school a few years ago, he was a completely sold on the view that AI was going to sweep through white collar jobs as well as pink/blue collar jobs and eliminate a lot of work. He could already see his classmates and Silicon Valley compatriots creating apps that eliminated jobs with ease. He felt that in any sane political environment, we would be planning for how to organize a society with many fewer people working. But, he observed that this would not happen in the US and that all of the wealth would be flowing to a) capital; and b) people who created the labor cost reducing software/technology. So, he said to me, “Dad, given the era you were in, it made sense to do what you did” (generate and sell knowledge as a consultant). “But, in my generation, you have to own the machines” (meaning be the owners of tech companies that create reducing technology). The gap between those who either own capital, invest it, or create and market new technologies and the rest of the world is probably not going to get smaller until we reach some kind of tipping point and the political pendulum swings in the other direction. I think parents who want their kids to have happy, productive lives in this brave new bifurcating world are legitimately nervous that their kids will fall on the wrong side of the divide.
