Your Personal Anecdote Is Unhelpful

The danger of the elite’s obsession with its own stories and circumstances.

Yoni Appelbaum’s grandfather was a mailman. Appelbaum shared this fact with me in Charlottesville last week, onstage at a “Democracy360” event hosted by the University of Virginia and cosponsored by The Atlantic, where he is an editor. We were there to talk about “building the American dream” and, by Appelbaum’s account, being a mailman was once a way to do that. “He was proud of that job. And it was enough, together with my grandmother’s job, that they could buy a row house in Canarsie and raise a family.”

That was not, however, the point of the story. Rather, Appelbaum wanted to emphasize that his grandfather:

didn’t, though, hope that his son would grow up to be a letter carrier. In fact, when he retired from the postal service, what he did was he went and enrolled at night school so he could earn the university degree he’d never had a chance to have because, from his perspective, the American dream included education and included access to ideas, to culture, to art, to the things that a kid who grew up in the circumstances he grew up in didn’t have when he was a kid, but maybe could earn over the course of his life.

The letter carrier’s son, Paul Appelbaum, went on to Columbia College and Harvard Medical School, with a stint at Harvard Law School along the way, became chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Paul’s sons, Yoni and Binyamin, attended Ivy League universities themselves, became published authors, and write for The Atlantic and the New York Times, respectively.

That’s wonderful. I’m happy for the Appelbaums, truly. But does such an anecdote provide a basis for defining the American dream broadly or, as was the context for this story, asserting the universal importance of traditional higher education? No. It only underscores the enormous problem of survivorship bias in our political discourse.

The famous story illustrating survivorship bias concerns the effort to protect Allied bombers during World War II, which were coming under heavy fire flying missions over Axis territory and returning to base shot through with bullet holes. Common sense suggested reinforcing those areas of the wings and tail that seemed to sustain the most damage, but in fact this was backward. The holes in returning planes showed the areas where damage was less than fatal. The military had no returning planes with holes in the engines and cockpits, because planes struck there did not return at all. Those were the areas to reinforce.

Back at the University of Virginia, our challenge is that the public square is dominated by the vanishingly small segment of the population that proceeds successfully through higher education, rises to the top of various fields of knowledge work, and then gets invited to sit on stage and discuss how things are going in America. Of course, everyone has problems in their lives. But if you are sitting on that stage, your problems are almost certainly not the problems preventing your fellow citizens from flourishing. You made it back to base.

A functioning republic requires an elite that takes seriously its obligation to understand the experiences of people not sitting on stage and to use data rather than personal anecdotes to analyze the nation’s challenges. After all, any society will have an elite. And the good news is that many of the same skills that tend to land one in a modern Western elite are skills useful to analyzing and solving problems and managing processes. (A warrior elite will tend to struggle with major infrastructure projects.) But if you’re the Atlantic editor whose father was the nation’s leading psychiatrist, it’s vital to understand that your family’s take on “the life of the mind,” and your benefits from pursuing it, are not the typical ones.

The same goes for assessing economic and social progress generally. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was on the panel as well and Appelbaum, moderating the discussion, asked him at one point, “if we’re thinking about the arc of the last century, is it downward or upward? How are we doing?” Bouie responded:

That’s really interesting. My inclination is actually to say that it is upward, that by any reasonable measure, okay, I’ll just use myself as an example here. My parents were born in the 60s. My grandparents were born in the 1930s. My great-grandparents were born at the turn of the 20th century. Every successive generation of Bouies and Reeds, the family that I belong to, has done better than the previous generation, even though there are parts of my extended family that you would recognize in certain statistics about black American life. But on the main, we’re all doing better than we did. My parents are doing better than their parents did. I’m doing, in a lot of ways, better than my parents did, and my parents are doing quite well. And we’re just one family. But I think that broad pattern is true.

Of course any public intellectual’s assessment of the multigenerational trajectory that landed him in his current station is going to be a positive one. It’s genuinely alarming that anyone would consider it a useful line of inquiry, or be less than embarrassed to even bring it up. What is going on here?

Part of the problem is that our culture rewards the personalization of policy issues. Speakers are supposed to use their own stories to connect with an audience and show that they care. Audiences will often pay more attention, they are more likely to be persuaded, they leave with a more favorable perception of the speaker. Another part of the problem is self-interest. Elites instinctively want to advance policies that serve people like themselves, which requires using narratives about people like themselves as the basis for the policy. And so long as they immerse themselves and their audiences in such narratives as typical, everyone can proceed on the absurd assumption that their own preferences just happen to coincide perfectly with the common good.

And then, of course, there’s just ignorance. Spend enough time in these bubbles, and you really will start to believe your story is typical. “There was a moment in post-war America where, through the Montgomery G.I. Bill and other mechanisms, we sort of said to a broad swath of the population, actually, you can go as far as your talent will take you,” Appelbaum continued. (I believe, per his mention of “post-war,” that he was referring to the original G.I. Bill of the 1940s, not the much later Montgomery program.) Notwithstanding popular myth, the G.I. Bill did not send a broad swath of the population to college. Over the decade after World War II’s end, about 2.3 million of 16 million eligible service members used G.I. benefits to attend college. (Fun fact: A much larger number used the benefits for vocational, technical, and on-the-job training programs—what we might today call non-college pathways.)

Even the 2.3 million figure wildly overstates the G.I. Bill’s effect, because many of those veterans are the population that would have attended college anyway had there been no war. In “Going to War and Going to College: Did World War II and the G.I. Bill Increase Educational Attainment for Returning Veterans?”, economists John Bound and Sarah Turner report that the share of Americans completing college in the post-war years never reached 20%, and the G.I. Bill’s effect was to increase completion by somewhere between 4 and 10 percentage points. On average, veterans aged 17 to 22 at the war’s end went on to complete one year of college.

Fast-forward 80 years, and most Americans still read at an elementary school level. For all the nation’s investments in boosting academic performance and subsidizing higher education, only 40% attain a bachelor’s degree and nearly half of those go on to be unemployed or underemployed, defined by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as working in a job that most people say does not require a degree. It’s a safe bet that if you hear someone waxing poetic on a Democracy360 stage about everyone being “entitled to the life of the mind,” in Appelbaum’s words, or about “a country where we say the life of the mind is for everyone,” in Bouie’s, that person reads above a sixth-grade level. He attained a bachelor’s degree. He is from the fortunate fifth of the population that does go successfully from high school to college to career, and he wishes everyone else would just join him.

What does everyone else think? We should probably ask them, which is what American Compass does, though surprisingly few other institutions seem similarly interested. Which is a more important purpose for public education: helping students develop the skills and values needed to build decent lives in the communities where they live, or helping students maximize their academic potential and pursue admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations? By 71% to 29%, parents choose helping people to build decent lives. By 80% to 20%, young people say the same thing.

If policymakers would have created one of the following options for your child upon their graduation from high school, which do you most wish would have been available: a 3-year apprenticeship program after high school that would lead to a valuable credential and a well-paying job, or a full-tuition scholarship to any college or university that your child was admitted to? By 57% to 43%, parents choose the 3-year apprenticeship.

Yet no topic produces a sharper divergence than “tracking.” Appelbaum worries deeply about the prospect:

I wonder about this because the old critique of technical education was that it was a kind of a de facto segregation that took kids from some backgrounds and said, you’re entitled to the life of the mind and took kids from other backgrounds and said, the most you can hope for is a steady paying job at the factory. And it did that to them pretty young and put them on those divergent pathways. … And so when I hear people talk about, as you are here, about the need to not leave that part of the population behind, I wonder how do you do that without going back to a society that bifurcates kids at a young age and says, most of you can go and work in backbreaking, hard jobs that nevertheless will give you a steady paycheck and those of you privileged enough to have been born to greater opportunity get to have access to these other goods.

Who doesn’t worry about this? Everyone else. “Most people would agree that schools should treat students fairly and give them all the best possible chance at success,” we explained to parents in the American Compass survey. “But people often disagree about how to do that. Some believe that schools should use tracking to offer students different pathways based on their aptitudes and interests. Others reject the idea of tracking and say that schools should set a goal of bringing all students along to the same end point, which is typically preparation for college. Which is closer to your view?”

We got the single most lopsided result we’ve seen in five years of polling. Fully 86% of respondents preferred “high schools should offer families different tracks to choose from, which would place their children in different courses. For instance, one track might focus on college preparation, while another would focus on technical skills and workplace experience.” Only 14% chose “high schools should try to keep all students on the same track and in the same courses, with a goal of preparing all students for college.” Among middle-class families, 95% chose tracking. Half of the respondents saw the term “diverse pathways” instead of “tracking.” This made no difference.

Most Americans, but not Team Life-of-the-Mind, recognize that the choice is not really between tracking or no tracking. Unless the plan is to hire every student an individual tutor, tracks will always exist. The problem today is that we have just one track, the college track. It may not feel that way for those well suited to that track. But it sure as heck does to the majority who fall off. Indeed, if we want to “avoid” tracking by having just one track, lest we bifurcate kids at a young age, the only fair solution would be to place everyone on a non-college track. Focus on helping everyone develop skills and values to build decent lives in the communities where they live. And if that doesn’t work so well for some of the more academically inclined students, well surely they can figure that out after high school is over.

The passionate commitment to a universal model never seems to extend that far: to a universal model other than one designed to serve the people on stage. Instead, when pushed, a most telling line comes back: well I don’t see you sending your kid to vocational school—or, as Appelbaum put it, “I meet many people who are worried about the lack of training pathways into technical careers, very few of whom have apprenticed their sons to be operating engineers or electricians.” To which several things must be said.

First, that hopefully depends. The rejection of college-for-all and embrace of different pathways for people of different aptitudes and interests is intended to replace the impulse toward a universal right answer with the pluralistic recognition that different people are best served differently. Whether someone’s son should become an electrician is not some cosmological constant for which we must have one answer. You’d have to get to know the son. Indeed, lots of people in all walks of life have sons who might prefer becoming an electrician to sitting through a comparative literature seminar. Good parents from any walk of life would hopefully support a child in that endeavor, and we should strive for a culture, an education system, and an economy in which they can do so with pride and confidence.

Second, this is precisely the personalization of broad issues that needs to stop. What a perverse habit of the elite mind, to think that the circumstances of the elite should provide the point of reference for good public policy. The implication is that the honest elite thinks through what would best serve him, and then magnanimously and fairly imposes that choice on everyone. Apparently, the needs and best interests of the children of Democracy360 speakers should guide the shape of education policy for the nation. Notice how conveniently this flatters the most selfish and unreflective policy choices while ruling out of bounds the downplaying of one’s personal preferences that is in fact the obligation of leadership.

Finally, the way we talk about these things matters. The alternative to pursuing a “life of the mind” is not a “backbreaking” job. A wide variety of good jobs exist for skilled workers who did not pursue college degrees. Our goal should be to make such jobs standard throughout the economy. Indeed we should insist upon it, because somehow converting everyone to lives of the mind is no option at all.

The jobs of electrician and operating engineer are good ones and important ones. You should be proud to have a son that is either, and the literally millions of parents who do have children in those jobs should be proud of them, and they deserve to live in a society where people on stage at Democracy360 conferences would be proud to have their own sons do those jobs, and certainly don’t go around implying the opposite. And no, but you’re not an operating engineer, is not a rebuttal to this point. To the contrary, it is entirely necessary that people who write and speak for a living do in fact have and show respect for the many other pathways and roles followed and occupied by most people. That is an absolute, nonnegotiable prerequisite for a functioning republic—and should be for speakers at a conference entitled “Democracy360” too.