David Brooks On The Failure Of The Elites

David Brooks, a somewhat dimwitted apologist for the status quo, has suddenly decided the status quo doesn't work. I signed up for a free trial subscription to the Atlantic so I could reach his latest piece, How the Ivy League Broke America , behind a paywall. If you don't want to do this, he summarizes it in this YouTube interview: Let's recall that in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise , he was all for the elites. The bobos were bourgeois bohemians, whom he defines as postwar Jews beginning with the baby boom generation, who benefited from the advent of the SATs, attributed to Harvard's President James B Conant, which caused elite schools to drop their Jewish quotas and admit high-achieving Jews in greater numbers. Brooks, who got into Chicago, cited his own example as part of this positive outcome. He found the students at Princeton, which he visited as part of the book project, admirable in that they scheduled their days in 15-minute increments to maximize t...