The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And order'd their estate.

The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal omits that stanza, the second of Mrs. Alexander’s original six (not counting the refrain). It also omits her fifth:

The tall trees in the greenwood,
The meadows where we play,
The rushes by the water,
We gather every day …

Understandable, in both cases. The fifth stanza might possibly be re-cast for a modern child (the hymn comes from Mrs. Alexander’s 1848 Hymns for Little Children), perhaps along lines like:

The Xbox and the iPod,
Computer games we play,
The supervised activ'ties,
We're driven to every day …

There’s nothing much you can do with that second stanza, though. Best just flush it down the memory hole. It very likely is the case that some people have higher net worth than others, though it’s a bit indelicate to talk about it. Still, even if this is so, no believer can possibly think that these inequalities come about as a result of divine ordinance. Still less can anyone, believer or unbeliever, think that Mother Nature had anything to do with it. Good grief, no! Believers and unbelievers alike are agreed that if there are indeed inequalities in our society, they result from uneven distribution of opportunity, caused by:

• Left Believer: Sinful human nature blinding us to the social justice ethic implicit in the Law, the Gospel, or the Koran, depending on your precise confession.
• Right Believer: Social pathologies — illegitimacy, easy divorce, feminism, a corrupt popular culture — arising from ignorance of, or wanton defiance of, the divine plan.
• Left Unbeliever: Oppression by the various types of human malignity that inevitably arise in capitalist society: sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc.
• Right Unbeliever: Insufficiently rigorous education policy, insufficiently family-friendly tax and health-insurance policies, excessive regulation stifling enterprise, etc.

These notions fill the air. They are the common currency of politics, and the basis for innumerable speeches, sermons, opeds, commencement addresses, and academic papers. There are bits and pieces of truth in them. Some believers do not fully respect the Brotherhood of Man; illegitimacy has dumped a lot of kids in bad neighborhoods, to their disadvantage; human malignity does keep some people down (though not only under capitalism); public policy often is not friendly to free people who want to make the best of themselves.

Yet all those bits and pieces of truth together explain very little about social inequality. What mainly explains it is innate ability. U.S. society today is very nearly a pure meritocracy, perhaps the purest there has ever been. If you display any ability at all in your early years, you will be marked for induction into the overclass, especially if you belong to some designated victim group. (We preen ourselves endlessly — and pardonably — on how much more "inclusive" our present elites are than our past ones. This is one of the ways we avoid thinking about the necessity for any elite to be exclusive in some fashion.) There are still trust-fund kids, but they are not very consequential in this meritocracy.

Seek out the rich man in his castle: It is far more likely the case in the U.S.A. than anywhere else, and far more likely the case in the U.S.A. of today than at any past time, that he is from modest origins, and won his wealth fairly in the fields of business, finance, or the high professions. Seek out the poor man at his gate: It is likewise probable, if you track back through his life, that it will be one of lackluster ability and effort, compounded perhaps perhaps with some serious personality defect. I have two kids in school, eighth grade and tenth. I know several of their classmates. There are some fuzzy cases, but for the most part it is easy to see who is destined for the castle, who for the gate.

Of the deciding factors, by far the largest is intelligence. There are of course smart people who squander their lives, and dumb people who get lucky. If you pluck a hundred rich men from their castles and put them in a room together, though, you will notice a high level of general intelligence. Contrariwise, a hundred poor men taken from their gates will, if put all in one place, convey a general impression of slow dullness. That’s the meritocracy. That’s where we’ve come to. As Herrnstein and Murray put it:

Mathematical necessity tells us that a large majority of the smart people in Cheops' Egypt, dynastic China, Elizabethan England, and Teddy Roosevelt's America were engaged in ordinary pursuits, mingling, working, and living with everyone else. Many were housewives. Most of the rest were farmers, smiths, millers, bakers, carpenters, and shopkeepers. Social and economic stratification was extreme, but cognitive stratification was minor.

So it has been from the beginning of history into [the 20th] century. Then, comparatively rapidly, a new class structure emerged in which it became much more consistently and universally advantageous to be smart.

The problem with this smartocracy is, we have this itchy feeling that it’s un-American.