In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

At the end of yesterday's post, I said I was still mulling over the question of how the latest crop of famous white-collar crooks had suddenly sprung from the authentic American upper class, or at minimum the prestigious gentry represented by Ivy League faculty, when their earlier equivalents like Ivan Boesky. Jeffrey Epstein, and Bernard Madoff had been middle-class Jews or other ethnics who'd gone to public school and often hadn't finished college. I'm nowhere near done with that task, but I think I've found three directions from which to approach the problem, outlined in the title here: bobos in paradise, impostor syndrome, and affinity fraud. The first refers to David Brooks's ploddingly obtuse 2000 book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There . Its thesis in brief is that the Ivy League and other top-level universities were traditionally bastions of wealth and privilege, but after World War II, for reasons Brooks never quite ex...