American society is increasingly stratified, Sean Reardon says, because elite parents are investing so much in the cognitive enrichment of their kids, but the real cause, Megan McArdle notes, could simply be that all the people who are really good at school are marrying other people who are really good at school and having children who are really, really good at school:
Recently, I came across a copy of These Happy Golden Years (the final book of the Little House on the Prairie series) in a used bookshop. I couldn’t resist buying it; I spent so many happy hours with those books as a kid.
You read it differently as an adult, of course, and one of those things that struck me is that Almanzo Wilder doesn’t seem to be nearly as smart as his wife. Laura obviously liked school, and was good at it, from an early age. Almanzo hated it, and wanted to finish as quickly as possible. There’s no evidence that he reads or otherwise occupies himself with intellectual pursuits in his spare time. Laura doesn’t seem to find that strange, or to resent it; both contemporary reports and the way she writes about her husband makes it clear that she still loved him, all those decades later.
But today we’d find it hard to believe that those two could marry and be happy; what on earth would they talk about? Laura Ingalls would quite likely have gone to an elite school, and probably graduate school, then moved to a coastal city, and eventually married another bookworm. Almanzo Wilder would be married to someone like him, a hard worker who nonetheless found school tedious and left as quickly as possible. And when their two sets of children showed up at school, their test scores would be very different.
Instead they had one child, Rose Wilder Lane, who became a very talented short-story writer (her collection, Old Home Town, is a very fine and somewhat brutal study of the Missouri town where she grew up.) They could just as easily have had a child like Almanzo, whose talents lay in other directions. But the more that the educational elite clusters together, the less likely that is. And the higher the educational barrier to high-paying professions, the more tightly high income will seem to be linked to the educational proficiency of your kids.
I read the “Little House” books many times as a child; just this year I finished reading them to my daughter. These days I often find myself looking at what I read through a “red-pill” lens.
For example, in manosphere terms, both Pa and Almanzo (and Almanzo’s dad, too) are Alphas: capable, confident, leaders of men. Pa could build a freakin’ house from scratch using basically and ax and a pocketknife, plus he was on the schoolboard, AND he could stare down a lynchmob. Almanzo and a sidekick risk their lives (and their horses’ lives) to save the town from literally starving to death.
Speaking of horses: I think that was one of the key attractors for Laura. She LOOOOVED Almanzo’s horses, and quite possibly his ability to control several nearly-wild horses. It’s like a motorcycle: chick crack.
We can also analyze the stories from a Moldbug/Seeds of Albion class/ethnicity angle. The Ingallses and the Wilders are both Puritan/Brahmin/New England families….and it shows. Almanzo might not have been the scholarly type, but his family was—heck, his sister was a schoolteacher, just like Laura and Ma. Of course, there were no other professions for women, I know. These families also had low time preference, and the Wilders as described in Farmer Boy seem to be quite prosperous. Both families are quite patriotic, which is a curious difference between Brahmins Then and Now. I think Steve Sailer has talked about how the Brahmins used to think of this as THEIR country, and took seriously the business of running it. Now the Brahmins “leapfrog” America to show how concerned they are about the rest of the world. They are Congregationalists (that’s only mentioned in passing in the books, I think), and they seemed to actually believe in God, so they hadn’t fully evolved to the modern Brahmin faith of Universalism (although NB that Unitarianism is an offshoot of the Calvinist Congregational church).
TL;DR – reading books is fun when you think about them via the Red Pill.
I actually haven’t read the Little House books — must get around to it — but I’ve read just about everything by daughter Rose (who was considerably more than a “talented short-story writer”), most recently Travels With Zenobia, in which she and a friend describe a 1926 adventure driving from Paris to Albania in a Model T Ford. The book contains a funny description of Almanzo’s first attempt at driving a car: when he felt he needed to slow down fast, his instinct was to brace himself against the gas and brake pedals and pull hard on the steering wheel.