Bourgeois values restoration as a public policy

In All cultures are not equal, I comment on the tempest in a teacup between some Penn professors who make the startlingly banal claim that there are patterns of values and behaviors which are more or less conducive to good life outcomes and a variety of hysterical postmodernist critical theorist who regard this patently self-evident claim as akin to Hitler or white supremacy. I wish I were making it up but these are the crazy years as we reach the end times of postmodern critical theory where the stresses of its own contradictions and failures begin to tear it apart.

But in thinking about the folderol it did prompt a thought. It seems to me that there is an interaction and graduation between, to use James Heckman's terminology, cognitive and noncognitive skills.

Cognitive skills are those associated with thinking - IQ of course but some of the finer subsidiary components such as maths, verbal, spatial, memory, etc. Noncognitive skills are those associated with motivation, integrity, futurity, work ethic, disposition towards saving, conscientiousness, etc.

In the past fifty years we have become exceptionally good at identifying and channeling people with high cognitive skills through SAT, ACT and college admissions. We find them and then channel them into flagship state universities or into private elite universities. We have also, as an unintended side effect, facilitated a couple of generations of assortative mating, creating a new, partially heritable elite. We then channel them into a handful of hothouse, dynamic cities. No wonder so many become somewhat divorced from the lives and concerns of the other 85% of the population. The cognitive elite are on a fairly remorseless and inexorable conveyor belt of talent.

As Heckman points out, however, it is not only cognitive skills which create value. The noncognitive skills mostly associated with bourgeois values (motivation, integrity, futurity, work ethic, disposition towards saving, conscientiousness, etc.) also are sources of productivity and value.

If you think about it, there is a natural matrix to be derived from these skills. A first attempt to begin to explore those trade-off gradations is below.

Click to enlarge.

Happy are those blessed with both high IQ and high non-cognitive skills. Their lives, absent exogenous tragedies, are golden. The world is their oyster. Really bright and really diligent, persevering, sociable, reliable, future-oriented, etc. In virtually any economy anywhere, anytime, they land on their feet.

Then there is everyone else with all sorts of variation and balance between cognitive and noncognitive skills. I have attempted to capture some of those recognizable stereotypes that you find in any large organization or society.

In addition to Cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills, there is a third important dimension not captured in this matrix and that is "Acquired Skills." Acquired skills would be things from knot-tying and first aid, through spread sheet familiarity and cooking to team management and surgery. Things which have an academic base but in which proficiency is only acquired through practice. Cognitive, noncognitive and acquired are all important constituent elements to good life outcomes. Not any one of them is a silver bullet towards improved life outcomes. Rather, the argument is that all three are critical and that our current portfolio of policies does not address all three nor with any marked effectiveness.

From the mid sixties onwards, with the GI Bill and low tuition and high economic growth and SAT/ACT and later, student borrowing, we removed a lot of barriers towards optimizing human capital across the nation. It became unusually possible to match the best and brightest into the highest reaches of academia. Undoubtedly this capacity is part of what has continued to fuel the American economy.

What the Wax and Alexander article is pointing out is that in the same time frame, from about the mid-1960s onwards, just as we got good at finding and channeling cognitive talent, we also became disdainful of and indeed dismissive of non-cognitive skills. Let it all hang out, pursue your passion, be all you can be, don't be a square, color outside the lines, etc. We loosened societal norms. Obviously there was some aspect of this loosening of norms that was/were highly beneficial such as ensuring that all women had an equal opportunity to make a full range of life choices and not just traditional ones. Unlocking the institutional and legal barriers to any sort of minorities whether by race, ethnicity, orientation, etc.

Not their words but I think Wax and Alexander are obliquely saying that we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We forgot or ignored Chesterton's story of the fence. In our enthusiasm to clear the road of all obstacles, we ignored that some of those "obstacles" were actually safety rails. We lost our capacity to acknowledge the value attendant to traditional bourgeois values and behaviors.

As documented by Charles Murray, we ended up with a tragic situation where the cognitive elite were bright enough to maintain the bourgeois values, reinforcing their remarkably privileged condition of being bright and well behaved. But out of misplaced tolerance, they championed bourgeois values only among themselves and left everyone else to make their own decisions. Indeed, an argument could be made that the elite unintentionally went further and espoused policies that actively undermined the old bourgeois values among others which so benefited themselves.

Those not blessed with the good fortune of high cognitive skills, indeed challenged by low cognitive skills, suddenly found themselves without the safety net of high non-cognitive skills. This ended up being an avoidable tragedy. While there is not much we can do to affect IQ and cognitive skills, there is actually a fair amount that we can do to build and reward non-cognitive skills.

I am by no means advocating for the disassembly of the cognitive conveyor belt. Finding and cultivating the best minds is a pretty worthwhile practice for everyone.

What I am suggesting is that perhaps we need to find the will and means to re-cultivate the bourgeois value system which has been so demonstrably successful in all classes in all countries and to do it for everyone. There is a limit to how much that cultivation might be able to achieve but I suspect that it would at least increase the capabilities of many people of more modest cognitive abilities and provide them a means towards achieving better life outcomes.

Almost as important, I wonder if a focus on non-cognitive skills might also serve to thin the bubble and restore some awareness of and sympathy towards fellow Americans among the high cognitive/high noncognitive class. I speculate that some of the disdainful claims from within the high cognitive/high noncognitive bubble (bitter clingers, antipathy towards others, bible clutchers, basket of deplorables, etc.) is sourced to the elite conflating high IQ with high noncognitive capabilities. Because they belong to that group in the privileged elite, I suspect that they assume anyone not like them must also not have high noncognitive potential. They essentially dehumanize everyone not like them.

If we refocus on a common effort to raise noncognitive skills, to restore bourgeois values, I wonder if that might not open the eyes of the privileged to the real human value of everyone else? Perhaps that is a pipe dream but restoring a shared valuation of the importance of bourgeois values would, I think, be a step in the right direction for everyone.