In popular lore, Brooklyn used to be a place you escaped to shed the skin of hereditary disadvantage. Today, it’s becoming a place you go to silver the spoon of hereditary advantage.

Old Brooklyn’s relationship to America was that of an outbound pump. It has been home to a staggering number of extraordinary children, often of relatively ordinary parents, who later achieved greatness: Woody Allen, Lauren Bacall, Jay-Z, Neil Diamond, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Larry King, Spike Lee, Joan Rivers, Carl Sagan, Howard Schultz, Jerry Seinfeld, Barbra Streisand.

New Brooklyn has reversed the flow, suctioning in migrants from the ranks of America’s hyper-talented, who arrive and swiftly begin immunizing their children against even the slightest hint of mediocrity.

New Brooklyn has hardly displaced the Old. The New, concentrated in the neighborhoods closer to Manhattan, still represents a fraction of the vast borough’s 2.6 million people. The two Brooklyns awkwardly coexist, nowhere more starkly than in politics: Brooklyn votes emphatically for the left’s relative egalitarianism — giving President Obama 81 percent of its vote — even as its gentrifiers drive out the poor, secede from the public education system and, in many ways, embody how the country increasingly shows the patterns of an inheritance society.