I read and enjoyed both of Freddie DeBoer’s books. Freddie is a Marxist by self-identification — a rabid anti-capitalist who wants to redistribute all wealth. He’s simultaneously a trenchant critic of the left. This duality makes him interesting to read.
His newer book is How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He marshals ample evidence to show that the social justice movement of the past few years has been an abysmal failure on achieving actual outcomes. He convincingly argue that elites’ obsession with culture war issues and other symbolic victories distracted it from real, on the ground reforms related to crime and poverty. DeBoer centers class, not race, in his analysis. The book in one paragraph: “That basic drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic is no accident. This is the constant dynamic in left politics because of a kind of elite capture. If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”
In The Cult of Smart, his earlier book, Freddie effectively destroys the idea that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed if only put in the right educational environment. In fact, most life and academic outcomes, traditionally measured, are pre-determined prior to a kid enrolling in kindergarten. To be a star student, you want to have good genetics (IQ), be born healthy and at full weight from non-abusive parents who hail from a middle class or upper middle class background, and be free of any developmental or cognitive disabilities. A child is in control of precisely none of those attributes, and the school they attend has no bearing on those factors either. Freddie’s thesis calls into question the wisdom of virtually every educational philanthropic initiative and government ed reform effort — of which there are countless — to say nothing of the pressure parents put on themselves to get their kids into better schools. Freddie then questions the morality of a meritocracy — of a society that orders itself based on intellectual ability — given intellectual ability is not something you’re in control of.
Both books made me think. Here are my Kindle highlights from each.
Highlights from Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
Some cities and states enacted modest criminal-justice reforms, but many of these were later quietly rolled back. In Minneapolis, where Floyd’s murder had taken place, the drift over time was telling: the city council first voted to abolish and replace its police department, then later changed the reforms to simple budget cuts, then later enacted an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.
Worse, there are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class—an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics—as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us.
We have to get past thinking that our righteousness makes victory inevitable and start engaging in the real, tough, boring labor of convincing others. We have a lot of work to do, and there’s no time like the present.
at the height of the George Floyd protest moment, 55 percent of Black respondents wanted police spending in their area to stay the same or to grow; by September 2021, that number had grown to 76 percent.
Consider this statement: “My life is determined by my own actions.” While 52 percent of respondents identified as very conservative agreed with this statement, only 33 percent of very liberal respondents agreed.
But as I have argued in this book, zero-sum racial (or gender, et cetera) thinking is the enemy of progressive politics. White people make up 70 percent of the electorate; men half of it. Straight people, cisgender people, and the able-bodied make up dominant majorities. To convince those people that they must lose for those from marginalized communities to succeed is politically suicidal.
For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.
Highlights from Cult of Smart
For decades, our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you’d like—poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozark Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what’s more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.
You can have two students who are the same age, the same race, the same gender, from the same socioeconomic status, with similar family compositions, who live on the same street, who even have the same teachers. I knew many such sets of kids growing up. And yet for all of their demographic and educational similarity, these kids will see profound inequality in their academic outcomes. Some will be academic stars while some will struggle until they eventually drop out. Why? What is the source of this variation? And why has our society seemingly decided never to ask that question?
But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled? Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification of the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.
The blogger Scott Alexander laid it out well in a piece titled “The Parable of the Talents.” As he points out, in most arenas, ascribing outcomes to biological factors is the more progressive position—when it comes to being overweight, for example, or in the case of mental illness, progressive people tend to believe that it’s biology, not willpower, that plays the largest role.
The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do. And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern. Here it’s would-be hard-headed conservatives arguing that intellectual greatness comes from genetics and the accidents of birth and demanding we “accept” this “unpleasant truth.” And it’s would-be compassionate progressives who are insisting that no, it depends on who works harder, claiming anybody can be brilliant if they really try.
This is, as I’ve said before, akin to having a height requirement for your school and then bragging about how tall your student body is. Schools that use a screening mechanism specifically designed to exclude the students who are less likely to succeed can’t then turn around and assume that the strong outcomes of their students say something positive about the efficacy of their teaching.
In fact, I will go a step further: school quality simply doesn’t matter very much when it comes to quantitative educational outcomes.
Random selection into a better school in Beijing has no effect, random selection into a better school in Chicago has close to no effect, random selection into a better Kenyan school has no effect, nor does it in Missouri, nor in New York City. Once you control for student characteristics, Australian private schools didn’t outperform state schools on the 2009 PISA. Conscription into extra education didn’t much affect life outcomes in late 1970s France. In 1950s England, going to an elite school made no difference to a youth’s job market outcomes. The literature is huge and there are many many more examples.
Once you correct for ability, attending schools like Hunter makes no difference. Several high-quality studies have been performed evaluating the real impact of selective public high schools and have found that attending those high schools simply doesn’t matter in terms of conventional educational and life outcomes.
A high-quality longitudinal study found that, in cohorts of college students from both the 1970s and the 1990s, the returns from attending an elite college were effectively nil, once you controlled for SAT scores. Once you compare like with like, and look at students of similar underlying ability, attending a prestigious school makes no difference.
To succeed academically, a child should be born to college-educated parents. Those parents should be from the middle class or, preferably, the upper class. The child should be brought to full term and be born at a healthy weight. The child should be free from developmental or cognitive disabilities. The child should be raised in a lead-free environment. The child should not be abused or neglected, particularly early in life.
No one would assume that one’s ability to run a race or to lift a heavy weight is synonymous with their greater human value. No one would presume that height is an accurate marker of human worth, or that we should accept a rigid caste system based on how tall we are. And few would doubt that there is a genetic element in each of those attributes. Yet when it comes to intelligence—a complex and multifaceted human attribute that includes both objective abilities of raw reasoning and a great deal of socially constructed and influenced factors—too many would-be egalitarians assume that there is a simple relationship between genetic predisposition and general human value. This is the Cult of Smart in its most distilled form.
