Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise

Review of just the first sixth of David Brooks's Bobos In Paradise (Scott says the other five-sixths are '90s avocado-toast complaints). The daring thesis: a ~1955 Harvard admissions shift (SAT-meritocracy replacing WASP-aristocracy holistic admissions, partly to drop the now-declasse Jewish quota) destroyed one American aristocracy and created another -- the 'Bobos' (bourgeois bohemians) who fused meritocratic success with absorbed intelligentsia/bohemian anti-bourgeois values, hence the rustic-20,000-sq-ft-cabin and Native-American-handicraft signaling. Scott engages it as a master key, running the elite-replacement frame through a dozen of his recurring puzzles: the divorce/crime/illegitimacy boom (Brooks vs the lead-crime hypothesis), Tartaria/the WWII civic-architecture shift, partisan polarization (the WASPs as the GOP's lost 'Strategic Classiness Reserve'), Seeing Like A State / high modernism as the WASP legitimizing ideology the meritocrats had to humiliate, the meritocracy debate, his own barberpole culture-war model (which Brooks would call a one-time 1950s event, not a cycle), Ivy anti-Asian admissions, Fussell's Class X, and the locus-of-'values' problem.

Quality 74 · Strong. Strong, upper band. An unusually generative review -- it takes a bold historical thesis and productively connects it to a dozen of Scott's standing interests, which is where most of the value is. Held below Excellent because it openly reviews only 1/6 of the book and is partly a riff-collection rather than a sustained argument.

Claude’s paradigm shift 54 · Moderate. Moderate. Brooks's elite-replacement thesis is Brooks's; the fresh contribution is Scott's synthesis linking it to high modernism, the barberpole model, and the meritocracy debate -- a striking 'one admissions change explains the century' frame.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor. A widely-referenced framing within the ACX-discourse on class/elites; no material reach. 2.