"What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way"
About this Quote
David Brooks is doing a neat rhetorical two-step here: he names a truth that’s easy to feel and hard to prove in everyday conversation, then slips a moral judgment into it with five loaded words: "so much more", "before", and especially "in a perverse way". The line isn’t just about inequality; it’s about a particular kind of unfairness that masquerades as merit.
The intent is diagnostic. Brooks is pointing at a modern status system that congratulates itself for being open while quietly hardening along inherited lines. "Family" isn’t sentimental here; it’s infrastructure: ZIP code schools, networks that turn internships into careers, the ability to take unpaid risks, the soft landing after failure. By saying it matters "more than it did before", he’s challenging the popular story that we’ve steadily progressed away from birthright and toward individual talent. The subtext: we haven’t.
"Perverse" does extra work. It signals an inversion: the era that talks most about opportunity has rebuilt aristocracy with better PR. It’s not Downton Abbey; it’s the résumé arms race, the wedding of elite marriage markets to elite neighborhoods, the way "good parenting" becomes a proxy for class insulation. If you’re born into the right family, the world reads your confidence as competence. If you aren’t, every mistake is evidence you didn’t belong.
Context matters because Brooks is a centrist moralist by trade, interested in social cohesion as much as policy. The line is a gentle indictment aimed at the educated class, including his own readership: the ladder is still there, but we’ve started pulling it up behind us and calling it progress.
The intent is diagnostic. Brooks is pointing at a modern status system that congratulates itself for being open while quietly hardening along inherited lines. "Family" isn’t sentimental here; it’s infrastructure: ZIP code schools, networks that turn internships into careers, the ability to take unpaid risks, the soft landing after failure. By saying it matters "more than it did before", he’s challenging the popular story that we’ve steadily progressed away from birthright and toward individual talent. The subtext: we haven’t.
"Perverse" does extra work. It signals an inversion: the era that talks most about opportunity has rebuilt aristocracy with better PR. It’s not Downton Abbey; it’s the résumé arms race, the wedding of elite marriage markets to elite neighborhoods, the way "good parenting" becomes a proxy for class insulation. If you’re born into the right family, the world reads your confidence as competence. If you aren’t, every mistake is evidence you didn’t belong.
Context matters because Brooks is a centrist moralist by trade, interested in social cohesion as much as policy. The line is a gentle indictment aimed at the educated class, including his own readership: the ladder is still there, but we’ve started pulling it up behind us and calling it progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Family |
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