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Well before Wall Street’s meltdown, students of the rich and powerful in America had been noticing that
elite attitudes seemed
different from those in past generations—that the rich and powerful appeared more inwardly focused and less concerned with public matters. Barbara Kellerman, a professor at Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership, told me that executives today don’t have it easy—they face more scrutiny, from a more skeptical public, than leaders in the past. But, she said, at least some of that skepticism may be warranted. When we think of the generations that came of age in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, she said, “what we generally have a sense of … is an elite that was at least in the mind’s eye more concerned with the public good and the common good than we generally assume now.” Kellerman has written that even within the companies they lead, many executives have become too distant to be completely effective: the yawning income gap between executives and rank-and-file employees—and the perception that executives are rewarded even when they or their companies perform poorly—has begun to hurt morale and productivity (in part by engendering a more mercenary attitude throughout the organization, discouraging employees from building company-specific skills that their next employer may not value).

Even David Brooks, in his perceptive and generally positive anthropology of the new rich,
Bobos in Paradise
, voices doubts about the sense of social responsibility felt by today’s best and brightest. “By and large they have not devoted their energies to national life,” he writes. “When we look back at the postwar ruling class, we see some mistakes and some hubris. But we also see a group of men and women who made genuine commitments to America that sometimes overrode their self-interest.” Brooks listed a few of them—George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, John McCloy; people who understood that “to those who are blessed much is expected.” Which of us, Brooks wrote, “doesn’t long for an updated version … of that sober patriotism?”

• • •

L
EAVING ASIDE THE
question of whether the modern rich have well and truly earned their money (the answer, of course, will vary dramatically from person to person),
the defining characteristic of today’s elite is its unshakable belief that it deserves every penny (and is perhaps underpaid). The rise of the meritocracy—in which the rich and powerful win their standing through uncommon hard work, intelligence, and chutzpah in a sort of grand economic tournament open to all—is a narrative now deeply ingrained in the U.S. culture. And indeed, society’s winners are drawn from more-diverse backgrounds than they used to be, while hereditary advantages have diminished. Ivy League classes look more colorful today than they did in the 1960s, and are populated more consistently with the nation’s smartest and most disciplined students. And after college, those who prosper the most do so as a result of their own labor, not a trust fund; the lion’s share of income earned by the top 1 percent comes from their career.

In the United States, the rise of the meritocracy has typically been met with celebration, and in most respects it should be. But this recession has underscored the meritocracy’s less savory characteristics.
In his final book,
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy
, published posthumously in 1995, the social critic Christopher Lasch painted a dismal picture of the destination toward which meritocratic progress may lead. Precisely because modern elites believe their status is the exclusive result of their own efforts, Lasch argued, they lack their predecessors’ sense of social obligation. “Although hereditary advantages [still] play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status,” he wrote, “the new [upper] class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.”

The rise of the meritocracy has coincided with—and is inseparable
from—the disintegration of boundaries between both local communities and nations, and the evolution of a more transient lifestyle for the best-educated and most-successful Americans. Overwhelmingly, today’s elites have uprooted themselves from the towns of their birth and congregated in a handful of power centers and creative enclaves both within and outside the United States—New York, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and so on. They circulate frequently among these cities. Globally connected, many of them associate and identify more with meritocratic winners of foreign nationality than they do with ordinary workers at home. Patriotism, Lasch wrote, “does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues.” And the far-flung networks that are their primary social and professional communities bear “little resemblance to communities in any traditional sense of the term.”

Consequently, Lasch argued,
modern elites tend to “exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot—the very definition of meritocratic success.”

I
F YOU WANT
to see the plutonomy up close, you can do worse than to spend some time in Aspen, Colorado. I traveled there in July 2010 for the Aspen Ideas Festival, a weeklong colloquy of the rich and powerful, loosely in the model of the World Economic Forum at Davos or the TED conference in Long Beach, California (anyone can buy a ticket to the Aspen festival—unlike Davos—but it will set you back about $5,000 for the week). Each year, hundreds of well-heeled people arrive in Aspen for the festival, many on their own jet (I counted forty or fifty private jets on the tarmac of the town’s airport, parked neatly in four long rows). Once there, they spend long days discussing pressing social issues, policy problems,
and technological developments, and hobnobbing with the likes of Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, Sebastian Junger, and Kurt Russell.

The crowd at Aspen is not a bad cross section of today’s meritocratic elite—hardworking, cosmopolitan, earnest if a little self-involved—and most of the people there seemed seriously engaged by the big global problems and potentially novel solutions being discussed. During breaks, fit men and attractive women milled about in casual, understated clothing, drinking pomegranate juice and snacking on oversized cookies or fresh fruit. A few were a touch too eager to chat about the World Cup games they had attended in South Africa the week before (in the company of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president), or to proffer what they’d gleaned from their most recent conversation with President Obama. A larger number used the breaks to focus on their BlackBerrys, iPhones, or iPads, transacting ad hoc business. (One fortysomething man sitting next to me at a panel discussion was, by turns, listening to the discussion, checking a feed on his iPad, and, in short bursts, working two different BlackBerrys.)

Bill Gates was one of the featured attractions of the conference. With the recession still biting deeply in the United States, Walter Isaacson, the president of the Aspen Institute, kicked off an onstage interview with him by asking what he was optimistic about. Gates replied easily, “I’m optimistic about most things.” He went on to list some of them: global health and education were improving markedly; literacy was way up in Africa, and childhood deaths were down; technological and scientific progress were continuing worldwide. Gates didn’t mention America or its prospects; his frame of reference encompassed the whole globe. And why shouldn’t it? This expansive view of how we should think about economic and social fortune is both logically unimpeachable and morally laudable.

It is also deeply liberating for American business elites today.
In a recent essay, the journalist Chrystia Freeland recounted a conversation she’d had with the CEO of a U.S.-based investment fund, one
of the world’s largest. The firm’s investment committee often discusses the likely winners and losers from continuing globalization, the CEO told her. Recently, he said, one of his colleagues had been arguing that the travails of American workers shouldn’t be a source of angst. “His point,” the CEO continued, “was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.”

Not that long ago, the interests of American capitalists and American workers—while never the same—were in some important respects aligned. Firms were dependent on domestic labor, domestic financing, and the domestic consumer market; the strength and competitiveness of America’s economy and workforce were essential to the fortunes of large American companies—and those of their executives. What was good for General Motors was good for America, and vice versa.

But in Aspen, one could see how much these ties have weakened—and how little the entrepreneurs and executives at the conference seemed to depend on the health of other classes of Americans. In a public interview at the conference, Michael Splinter, the founder of Applied Materials, a large, California-based supplier of chip-making equipment that has pushed heavily into green technology, and that recently decided to move its largest R&D operations to China, said, “This year, almost ninety percent of our sales will be outside the United States. The pull to be close to our customers, and most of them are in Asia, … is enormous.” At a panel discussion on the future of the middle class, Tom Wilson, the CEO of Allstate, said, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world.… I have 1,500 people in Belfast, 1,000 people in India, people in the Philippines.” The employment difficulties of citizens with limited education “is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business,” Wilson said. Business “will adapt.”

David Hale, the founder of David Hale Global Economics, a consulting firm that counsels large corporations and investment
firms, celebrated that adaptation: Since the fourth quarter of 2009, he said at a panel discussion, U.S. firms had “enjoyed very large gains in productivity, very large gains in profits.… No other country in the world could do what America did to its workforce twelve and eighteen months ago. In this recession, the American economy had an output decline of 3.8 percent—we reduced private sector employment by 7.5 percent.” Because of its uniquely aggressive actions, “American business today is 10 to 15 percent more competitive than it was a year ago compared to Europe and Japan.”

The particular sense of community at the Aspen Ideas Festival is difficult to put your finger on. Freeland has described the international conference circuit as the natural habitat of the new, global meritocratic elite—a replacement for the balls and fox-hunting parties that filled the social calendar of hereditary elites generations ago, with an updated focus on networking; continual learning; and sober discussion of the economic, political, and technological changes that might lead to business opportunity. At Aspen, while the participants were overwhelmingly American, the ambitions and affinities were global.

And yet these sentiments of global citizenship and global ambition were matched by a near-total insularity from non-elites, and a personal detachment from the struggles of other Americans. Several people I spoke with said that from their enclaves and offices in Boulder or the Bay Area, the recession appeared mild or invisible—though of course they knew it wasn’t, really. That same sentiment could be observed in the popularity (or lack thereof) of different events at the conference: the talks on emerging technologies were generally well attended, and a panel discussion about the federal deficit and the future of taxes was standing room only; the panel on reigniting job growth, on the other hand, was less than half full when it started, though more people eventually trickled in. There was no shortage of gloomy speechifying at Aspen, but many attendees seemed to sort of float through that, intellectually aware and suitably concerned in an abstract way, yet personally untouched.

Onstage, Bill Gates sat talking about global progress, and then, as the interview continued, about a host of other issues, from green energy to fixing U.S. schools. At this point in his career, Gates is as benign an icon of the meritocratic elite as one could imagine, the physical embodiment of the meritocracy’s promise. Whatever one may think of the latest version of Windows, he made his vast fortune by creating something that has improved the work and lives of countless people. And now, in his fifties, he is in the midst of giving most of that fortune away.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was endowed with some $36 billion as of September 2010, and Gates was in the midst of a nationwide effort to convince America’s richest people to join him in a pledge to give away half their wealth within their lifetime or upon their death. (More than fifty billionaires have agreed.)

“There’s a lot to be optimistic about if you look at it the
right way,
” Gates emphasized. His charitable endeavors reflect that optimism; they’re designed around the idea that by trying new approaches to solving old problems, we can not only alleviate suffering but achieve permanent progress in areas ranging from health to education. About 84 percent of the Gates Foundation’s distributions in 2009 were international, reflecting the belief that the return on giving is generally highest outside the United States, in places where, for example, so many children are being stunted by malnutrition or killed by preventable disease. But roughly 16 percent—$489 million in total—was focused inside the United States, the lion’s share of it on fixing American schools and providing college scholarships.

Gates talked about that issue in his interview. As to both equality of opportunity and international competitiveness, he said, nothing was more important than education: a country that doesn’t offer good educational opportunities to all its people is simply wasting much of its IQ. Maximizing national IQ was high on Gates’s list for curing what ails America; he mentioned it again when the discussion turned to immigration, calling IQ “the most important import into the United States” and noting the benefits of a larger inflow of
accomplished and highly educated immigrants to the country’s tech companies. And, of course, Gates was right. Gathering up the best and brightest undoubtedly serves the national interest, and bringing more of them into closer proximity with one another is likely to speed technological progress.