Elites are not like us

A young member of the British elite - by OpenArt

When I was a teen, commuting to grammar school from my working class housing estate, I thought people like my teachers and the parents of my school-friends were a separate species from my working class community.

• Middle-class people were polite, pleasant, organised and thoughtful. They could follow a train of thought with interest and contribute with sophistication.
• By contrast the working-class people of my acquaintance seemed loud and boisterous, crass in their humour, impulsive and easily distracted. No conversations about ideas.

Gemini tells me that there are correlations between socioeconomic status (SES) and the Big Five personality traits.

“Here's a summary of the findings:

• Conscientiousness and Agreeableness: Individuals from higher SES backgrounds tend to score higher on conscientiousness (organized, disciplined) and agreeableness (cooperative, helpful).
• Extraversion and Openness: Studies suggest a positive association between SES and extraversion (outgoing, sociable) and openness to experience (intellectual, curious).
• Neuroticism: Lower SES is linked with higher scores on neuroticism (anxious, tense).”

This class-sorting by personality type is accompanied by an IQ gradient (of almost 2 SD). With assortative mating - recall that personality traits and IQ have heritability greater than 50% - this inexorably leads in the direction of a persistent caste system. Indeed, as Gregory Clark has shown ('The Son Also Rises'), social mobility in modern societies is already far less than most people imagine.

Another reason why populism, the revolt of the dispossessed, can never win, merely providing shock troops for cynical, shameless, but aspirational elite members jockeying for their own place at the summit.