The symmetry, the wealth, and the mirage of American elegance
Dr. V had to give a talk at Princeton, and I tagged along. We expected an elite university (our milieu for the last decade). What we didn’t expect was how stunningly beautiful the town would be.
Everything felt curated: the neoclassical facades, the quiet wealth (it has a Hermes store for Heaven’s sake), the perfectly measured charm of a place that knows exactly what it is.
It made me think of how different America’s internal geography is from the UK or France. In Europe, the capital is the cultural and intellectual heart—London, Paris. In the US, it’s more like Germany or Italy: multiple regional power centers—city-states in all but name.
And Princeton is one of them. Unlike either of the Cambridges:
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Cambridge, Massachusetts is a behemoth, flowing into the urban sprawl of Boston, powered by MIT and Harvard.
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Cambridge, UK is insular, its 31 colleges often more concerned with their individual legacy than the town around them.
But Princeton, somehow, has achieved a kind of graceful middle ground. It’s not sprawling, but it breathes. It doesn’t dominate, but it defines.
Gated Ideas in a Gated Town
That evening, we were invited to an extraordinary dinner party hosted by a Princeton professor. The kind of gathering where you’re surrounded by brilliance, good wine, and the conviction that ideas still matter.
But I couldn’t help noticing something else: college professors in places like Princeton are granted the luxury of their ideals, in large part because the entire ecosystem is so structurally exclusionary.
Princeton, for all intents and purposes, is a gated community.
As of 2024, the median home price in Princeton, NJ is over $1.1 million—nearly five times the U.S. national average. Rental prices are similarly astronomical. It is demographically filtered, spatially curated, and intellectually fortified.
Within that bubble, you’ll hear eloquent defenses of democratic socialism, but it’s hard to ignore that tenure-track positions are harder to land than an Ivy League admit—and perhaps just as arbitrary.
And as much as no one wants to say it aloud:
Anti-Asian bias in academic hiring is very real.
Numerous studies have shown that Asian Americans are underrepresented in elite faculty positions relative to their qualifications—particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where subjectivity in hiring runs highest.
It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a selection problem, compounded by cultural bias and institutional inertia.
In the US, you can preach equality—so long as your postcode guarantees you never have to live it.
America in Microcosm
Just a few minutes away from this curated idyll are Trenton and New Brunswick—working-class, immigrant-heavy, racially diverse. Princeton, by contrast, is gorgeous, white, and model minority.
The contrast isn’t just economic—it’s institutional.
The capital of New Jersey is Trenton, but since 1945, the official residence of the governor has been in Princeton.
First at Morven, and since 1982, at Drumthwacket—a colonial mansion tucked into the town’s leafy heart. Technically, not all governors have lived there. But still—the symbolism writes itself:
The governor rules from lily-white Princeton while the capital sits a few exits down the highway.
Only in America could the aesthetic of governance matter more than proximity to the governed. The wealth gap isn’t subtle—it’s spatial, architectural, and historical.
The U.S. is now the most unequal developed country in the world:
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In 1980, the top 1% held about 10% of national income.
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Today, they hold over 20%, while real wages for the bottom half have stagnated.
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By Gini coefficient, the U.S. ranks as the most unequal among G7 nations, and in the top 15 globally.
Yet you wouldn’t know it, sipping wine in a Princeton garden.
America in Microcosm (continued)
Princeton, for all its symmetry and charm, is a mirror—reflecting the best of American soft power and the worst of its structural imbalance.
It is a world unto itself. Beautiful. Immaculate. And bordered by realities it doesn’t have to touch.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Questions for the Curious:
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Is elite academic liberalism still credible when it’s practiced from within such enclaves?
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Can tenure-track academia survive as a serious pipeline for ideas if its selection processes remain this opaque?
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And for those excluded—by race, class, or ideology—where do real intellectual alternatives now come from?
Elite liberalism is present whether we like it or not unfortunately. Just because of how the European conquest of Native American lands turned out specifically in the context of North and South America. Of course it’s not credible imo, but very much exists. I personally have been put off by tenure track academia for sometime now. Multiple issues exist, including the one you mention. The real intellectual alternatives in the West are all but dead now since the system is structured the way it is. American academia has become quite transactional over the last few decades. Very unfortunate given how all major scientific discoveries in the early part of the last century came from there.
these are good points; I guess Industry and China are doing the heavy lifting in innovation?
ChatGPT for instance did build on Transformers. What I know on the topic comes from Dr. V
Industry in the US now along with academic departments have morphed into a weirdly incestuous relationship of mutual benefit. Good research should not be determined by any monetary yardstick at its onset. It should be driven by an actual need to fill an existing gap and the desire to contribute without requiring immediate monetary rewards. Unfortunately the downward trajectory of GE, Boeing, Owens and Corning, Dupont ( a few examples of iconic American ingenuity in hard core value based research and manufacturing) where the MBA began dictating how the subsequent engineering efforts ought to go instead of the engineers, just to keep reaching their financial goals shows the absolute downfall of any meaningful innovation in the US industry. When a FB is valued more than an actual core manufacturer like Boeing or GE, one must introspect about the path that this has lead to. Don’t know much about China to comment, though they definitely pulled the carpet from under the US’s feet with Deepseek!