News & Observer | newsobserver.com | 2008 NCAA Men's Bracket

Why is it OK to be unusually rich but not unusually smart? John Derbyshire explores this question in the National Review.

His essay starts with an isnghtful observation: By and large, America’s public culture accepts unequal outcomes but feels uneasy about the notion of unequal potential. It defend the idea that some people can have gobs of money and others not so much on the premise that the wealthy worked hard for it or possessed certain qualities that made them especially deserving of that money.

And yet, even though intelligence is often an important component of that success, our public culture often pulls back from the idea that some people (so long as they’re not named Albert Einstein) are innately smarter than others. In the land where all people are created equal, we like to believe that it is opportunity (and industry) rather than innate ability that determines success; that it is culture rather than genetics that often separates the haves from the have-nots.
Of course, these two notions are in conflict.

It accepts the idea that some people have more than others because they possess certain advantages — the hopeful thought behind this is that that advantage is not innate and therefore inevitable but a function of social forces that might be changed. This still creates tension that the rich somehow deserve their unequal holdings.

Unless you’re John Derbyshire who argues:

Yet all those bits and pieces of truth together explain very little about social inequality. What mainly explains it is innate ability. U.S. society today is very nearly a pure meritocracy, perhaps the purest there has ever been. If you display any ability at all in your early years, you will be marked for induction into the overclass, especially if you belong to some designated victim group. (We preen ourselves endlessly — and pardonably — on how much more "inclusive" our present elites are than our past ones. This is one of the ways we avoid thinking about the necessity for any elite to be exclusive in some fashion.) There are still trust-fund kids, but they are not very consequential in this meritocracy.

Seek out the rich man in his castle: It is far more likely the case in the U.S.A. than anywhere else, and far more likely the case in the U.S.A. of today than at any past time, that he is from modest origins, and won his wealth fairly in the fields of business, finance, or the high professions. Seek out the poor man at his gate: It is likewise probable, if you track back through his life, that it will be one of lackluster ability and effort, compounded perhaps perhaps with some serious personality defect. I have two kids in school, eighth grade and tenth. I know several of their classmates. There are some fuzzy cases, but for the most part it is easy to see who is destined for the castle, who for the gate.

What do you think?