Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites

Great review. My copy just arrived today and I’m looking forward to cracking it open.

Also, yes, Diamond Age is a good e.g. of what a radically unequal society that has nonetheless dealt with subsistence-level scarcity might look like. And it doesn’t end well for Bud, either.

If the elite class fails because it doesn’t understand or share the real problems people face (high unemployment, high education costs, access to health care, etc), and they don’t because they all make too much money and are at no risk of exiting the winner’s circle, then just taxing them down to size does seem like the solution. We’d have a different kind of politics if all the creeps on Wall St and tv news had to trade their limos for the bus. Let’s see how elite they are without their money.

I love this piece overall, but this line in particular is a home run.

Calling themselves “job creators”, on this view, is not so much a brag as a threat.

It’s amazing how difficult it is to have this sort of argument when our dominant discourse obscures any discussion of power.

In his book Oligarchy, Jeffrey Winters usefully distinguishes the oligarchy (the hyper-wealthy) from other elites whose power is based on such advantages as charisma, military power, or education. I think our current problem is not so much a plague of elites per se as the overwhelming preponderance of monied elites and the tendency of all standards of value to collapse into the single dimension of wealth, hence the slavish deference successful politicians, academics, journalists, and religious leaders show their monied masters—cable news, in particular, has become a nightly spectacle of millionaires fellating billionaires. Perhaps Hayes will change my mind, but it seems to me that the independent variable that explains the current situation is not the rise of the meritocracy but something rather simpler, the escape of wealth from social control.

Following #8, I have a hard time with “elites” in combination with “meritocracy” given the “fail decade” featured 8 years of George W. Secondly, individual corporations may have collapsed but the 2000s was the third consecutive (and counting) decade wherein corporations as a whole succeeded. The only way you might say they “failed” is if you interpret their goal (success) as something other than profit-making. The 2000s (and 2012) has been a broad social calamity precisely because capital did not fail.

Ref #10: If one assumes that at some point, there was some degree of meritocracy[*], the winners of that competition have now used the power they earned more-or-less fairly to change the rules to that there is no more competition. So even if their children are drooling half-wits (W, Paris Hilton) or just regression to the mean (Bush I, maybe the Kardashians), those children will never be brought down by their mistakes.

And if someone can get into the “elite” by birth, heroic levels of sucking-up or sheer bloody-mindedness, they will have crossed an accountability event horizon beyond which they can no longer suffer any consequences for their failures. But failures do have consequences, which the elites have arranged to fall on the rest of us.

[*] Women, people of color, poor whites all get a Harrison Bergeron style starting handicap, but as of about 50 years ago, they’re mostly allowed to compete.

Our population is now too ignorant for this situation to be remediable, at least not without a different set of disasters. Very few people are capable of distinguishing the elites who are actually oppressing them from pointy-heads with genuine expertise who are just trying to tell them inconvenient truths. Hence the Tea Party.

I don’t have much hope for this country. Since I have a 19 year old daughter who will have to somehow make her way in it, this pains me deeply.

“…how elites got stuff wrong without bothering to mention the non-elites who got things right”

In the chapter on epistemology today, there is some reference to the possibility of a blogger in his mother’s basement in NJ being more more correct than the talking heads you see on TV. I did not look to see if the endnotes clarified if Hayes had some specific blogger in mind. Hayes argues that one cannot expect the average person to spend their time figuring out who to trust among non-elites. If the media during the fail decade leads to general audiences distrusting those presented as experts on mass media, people may end up believing a wide range of nonsense from whatever non-elite sources they stumble upon. (I tell people, “You cannot trust blogs. After all I have a blog.”)

Supposedly merit-based criteria can sort people into a hierarchy based on, for example, wealth or income. But the criteria cannot explain income distribution because the distance between steps cannot be explained by the criteria. We could have, for example, constantly decreasing step sizes and a much more equal distribution. I don’t find Hayes making this point, although a major point of the book is how an initial meritocracy will subvert the criteria (e.g., test prep schools available only to the children of previous winners who can afford them).

I continue to be completely unclear how lower high-end economic inequality (high-end: less space between the 90th and 99.999th percentiles) will have any impact at all on the elitization of decision-making.

For example, how are higher taxes on people earning over $1mm a year supposed to return primary operational (admission, hiring, and curriculum) control of public schools to elected school boards, from than the federal courts and the education bureaucracies?

For another example, how are higher taxes on people earning over $1mm a year supposed to affect land-use/environmental permitting to enable a new power plant/highway/rail line to be built with the amount of review required in 1960?

I’m a bit with comments eight and nine. While the books sounds nice, while I risk No True Scotsman objections, there is no actual meritocracy, or even a genuinely felt meritocracy. A meritocracy judges talent. What we have here is a post-religious society that still wants to be Calvanist, and recycling the old legacy of social darwinism to legitimate the rule of the elites, with jiggered tests and jiggered institutions. The Chinese are an old hand at this sort of non-religious elite justification, using tests that mostly sorted for who had the time and resources and proper cultural identification. The GaoKao just happened, with all of the traditional stories about how “serious” this time is.

The world is not fair, and I think the book (and if it’s not the book, but the reviewer’s fault, then the reviewer) should not be making arguments that fairness causes nonfairness. Instead, it should be describing it as corrupt with dissembling compulsions and illusions of fairness.

#18, let’s not limit our imagination. Why assume higher taxes are the only way to reduce income inequality? And yes, one might argue that an egalitarian society might more easily maintain popular control over education or greater oversight over land use. Concentrated capital certainly makes land-use policy malleable (to concentrated capital).

“Meritocracy says “there must be one who rules, so let it be the best”; egalitarianism responds “why must there?” It’s the power imbalance, rather than inequality itself, that’s the problem.”

“Meritocracy says”? Says who? The M-W definition is below
1: a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement
2: leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria

your definition takes only a very narrow meaning of 2. and magnifies it. Where exactly is the power imbalance exerted by a surgeon? How do you ameliorate his/her power relationships?

“You can never reach the pinnacle of the elite in this new world.”

This is a testable hypothesis. Agree on a definition of “elite” (let say, a combination of status and high income) and check which percentage of the current elite is descended from the previous generation. Taking the “never” literally, the rate should be 100%. I suspect it’s much, much lower.

Regarding the elites getting “stuff” wrong: sure, almost 50% of the time, probably not unlike the non-elites. From which, their wagnerian twilight sequitur non.

So far, I’d file the review under the Not Even Wrong category. For the book the jury is still out.

I’m not really convinced we’ll reach a point where super-productivity has us sitting around doing nothing. There have been some periods where greater productivity coincided with shorter working hours (such as the first half of the twentieth century), but even that was intertwined with shorter work-week campaigns and federal rules regarding “over-time” past 40 hours a week. When given the choice, we Americans usually just turn productivity gains into an opportunity to work the same and spend more, consume more, and waste more.

Thanks, Steve LaBonne for so succinctly pointing out the Teabagger threat.

But I’m stumped, too, about what can be done about this without resorting the traditional faves, arson and bloodshed.

It’s easy for Stafford Beer’s dictum to sound a little glib, but I do think POSIWID has some relevance to this discussion – and along with other commenters that makes me question the premise articulated.

(Purpose of the System Is What It Does.)

i.e. I’m not sure corporations have meaningfully failed on their own terms. They now occupy more of the economy than ever before on some measures.

As for No True Scottish Meritocracy, I have to say again I think there’s some relevance. I’d be more comfortable with the idea that the propaganda of meritocracy has enabled certain elites to arrogate power and justification to themselves… but I’m not sure we had that much actual meritocracy. (Not to dispute that if we had had meritocracy, it could end up the way Hayes implies, that’s a longstanding fear.)

I have not seen, and still have not seen, a review come to grips with the simple fact that We’ve Seen This Before.

We removed the checks and countervailing powers which restricted the elites, and they did as they always have under those circumstances. The elites have always been really, really good at self-justification/hiring toadies, ignoring the realities for the lower 90-odd percent, rigging the rules, etc. Remember, those members who had actual noblesse oblige were notable for that, because it was rare.

To me, it’s like we destroyed our sanitation systems, are getting a resurgence of the old epidemics, and people are saying that it’s because the doctors are not just sons of doctors/third generation Yalies and such.

I aaume what Hayes means by ‘meritocracy’ is that the most skilled rise to the top. But skilled at what? Butt kissing and back-knifing ? My engineering life was spent in silicon valley where engineering skills were rewarded with high pay but not necessarily high advancement. That often went to those who were best at appropriating others ideas or going along with ways to improve profit at the expense of product. How did Microsoft start if not with theft? And does anybody thing Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina were the best people to run companies for the benefit of anybody besides themselves?
Cris Hayes probably thinks he has his job because of some superior talent but when has he really tried to rock the boat by advocating anything radical on his tv show?
It seems very few social bodies have figured out how to handle excess wealth that didn’t lead to repression of the have-nots by the haves. At least not those with a large division of labor and, consequently, a differentiation between labor values. Social groups with more homogeneous labor and with regular surplus, like the New Guinea yam growers and northwest native Americans developed ways to spread the surplus wealth by increasing the influence and prestige of the wealth giver. At one time high income and inheritance taxes encouraged similar attitudes here but that has pretty much all gone by the board.
I think that the only solution is to limit wealth ( lack of it) to some multiple of the mean.

I’ve been arguing since before my CT days that it’s impossible to sustain equality of opportunity (roughly, meritocracy) in combination with highly unequal outcomes

http://johnquiggin.com/2003/12/17/outcomes-and-opportunity/

This is from C.Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite”, published in 1956:

“The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility”.

Lots more good extracts at:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/HigherImmorality_PE.html

For example, how are higher taxes on people earning over $1mm a year supposed to return primary operational (admission, hiring, and curriculum) control of public schools to elected school boards, from than the federal courts and the education bureaucracies?

Well, as an American, my first response would be “they’re not, the local school boards are the ones pushing creationism; centralization is a small price to pay to stop that”. But that may be a malady unique to the US.

Want to see the very explicit source document laying out the very deliberate plan for creating our ever-intensifying dystopia? Go back and read the Powell Memo: i.e., the blueprint for the dumbing down of our public discourse by think-tank deception and clap-trap, the commodification of our education, and the recapture of national cultural and political power by the industrial and financial elites through the wiping out of all the fetters put upon them during the Progressive, New Deal, and Civil Rights eras (Glass-Steagle, anyone?) and the institutions put into place during those eras to (truly) educate and enable their “inferiors.”

What Hayes describes is undoubtedly a reality; otherwise U.S. measures of social mobility wouldn’t have fallen below those of most of western Europe. But when the power elites have deliberately degraded and.commodified our education and public discourse (i.e., the basis of our general intellectual culture) as thoroughly as they have, what difference does it make what class the new members of the power elites come from, since the great bulk of them are going to be as ill-educated and brainwashed as the current members? After all, any critical and well-educated individuals who manage to slip past the vetting watch-dogs will eventually be as marginalized as those few truly progressive Democrats who are lucky enough to have a constituency independent enough of the conventional wisdom and discourse dominated by Fox, WSJ, “Fox on 15th St.,” Cato, Heritage, AEI, etc. to elect those Democrats to Congress, legislatures, etc. (As for the Prsidency, it’s hard to imagine three politicians more elite in raw intelligence than Carter, Clinton, & Obama. But critical thinkers & at least potentially independent of CW? Can you say Clinton’s Citigroup Treasury Sec. — Sr. moment there — Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Eric Holder, Arnie Duncan, etc. ad nauseum? Not exactly FDR’s Brain Trust.

Want some recent examples of this process when it comes to, say, education?

Diane Ravitch just got dumped by BROOKINGS as an UNPAID associate, obviously, — no matter what their PR BS says to the contrary — because she has lately become a fiercer and fiercer critic of the whole testing-privatization corporatist assault on public education, which she had originally supported way back when was Clinton’s Asst. Dep., of Ed. or whatever.

Next, the latest poll shows that 44 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution. I haven’t seen any research that examines the overlap of this form of science denial with denial of the scientific consensus on global warming; but I’d lay good money said overlap is substantial. And anybody who thinks that this is just an unfortunate effect of our evangelical heritage has forgotten the 2008 Republican presidential debate where the bulk of the debaters denied they believed in evolution — most of whom were then probably being just plain LSOS — and John Huntsmann’s remark that his fellow candidates in 2011-12 looked at him as though he were extremely odd when he said that he believed in the scientific consensus on GW. This whole Republican anti-science thing reminds me not just of obvious analogy — the opposition of the Church to Gallileo, Bruno, etc. — but also the Church’s previous resistance to vernacular translations of the Bible and, more generally, reading of scripture by laymen, peasants, serfs, shop-keepers, etc. Ignorance = Power (in someone else’s hands) We can’t have the plebs depending on somebody else for received wisdom or, much worse, thinking for themselves. It’s
more than a little Oreellian, even if it’s a (relatively, for now) soft Orwellian.

(Incidentally, someone here spoke more favorably of local school boards than of educational bureaucracies. Has that person ever worked extensively with local or state school boards? I doubt it. Most of my experience with them suggests that they are one major reason that barely half of Americans believe in “theory of evolution” but swallow so many blatantly unscientific absurdities. Most school board members I’ve had to deal with outside of large cities have been pretty strongly and openly prejudiced against real education, especially in science.)

Finally, David Sibley has a nice take on the “Chronicle” blog on the recent abrupt firing of the relatively new President of UVA by the UVA Board because she was pushing for the retention of such passé, uncommodifiable majors as classics (the RPM of Jefferson’s corpse just accelerated significantly) and German. (Say what? Maybe because they don’t want American kids learning the tongue of the new rival once-and-future masters of the universe?)

I happened about 10 years ago to have a conversation with the provost of UVA at the time. He said that UVA — not a state university, but a “state-supported” one — got even less of its operating budget from the state of Virginia than my gradschool alma mater — Penn State (yeah, I know, what’re ya gunna do) — got at the time from PA, which was then around EIGHT or NINE percent. In contrast, when I had started grad school at PSU in 1973, the state appropriation had been between 40 and 45 percent of the operating budget. And it wasn’t like there was no governmental financial aid. I spent 6 years in grad school (counting a year’s internship, during which I drew a federal stipend), my wife worked much less than half-time overall (we had two small kids), but I started my (second) career with what today would be considered trivial debt — everything else was covered by federal & state asstships &, mostly, fellowships, which was true for almost all my classmates. My wife, incidentally, had gotten a pretty decent education in the mid-’60’s at a state teachers’ college for tuition of — wait for it — $50 per semester or less than each of us made per week as lifeguards in the summers during college. Of course, although Norway and Sweden can still afford to do stuff like that AND have a system of universal health care, somehow the USA can’t (read “can essilynafford to but won’t anymore”).

What can we do about this? Think Soros would leave all his money to Current TV? (TIC — I think.)

Those discussing The Diamond Age and the whole post-scarcity tangent would probably find Peter Frase’s essay for Jacobin, “Four Futures” interesting if anyone hasn’t seen it. He discusses different ways the future could go after labor becomes largely unnecessary, depending on whether society is or isn’t resource constrained and whether it is an egalitarian or hierarchical society. The idea of a society that has no real need for labor, isn’t constrained by resources, and still insists on arranging itself to maintain inequality is the bizarre one, which he discussed in a less developed form in his essay “Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity, and which seems to cover much of the same ground that Stephenson was developing into a specific case of in The Diamond Age.

And then he discusses Red Plenty, Kantorovich, and Cockshott in the part about an egalitarian future that’s constrained by resources. Although, it predates the CT Red Plenty discussion(s), so many people here are probably ahead of where he was in that department.

Most people forget – or just don’t know – that Michael Young’s book The Rise of Meritocracy (1958) which gave us the word ‘meritocracy’ was a satire not a political manifesto.

Listening to politicians extoling the virtues of meritocracy I can’t help thinking it would not sound any more chilling if they were banging on about Engsoc: ‘Our government is rolling out a a radical new programme to pull our country out of recession. Imagine a boot kicking a face forever…’

Regarding Michael Young, I think a lot of the comments here would be improved by using “meritocracy” in the sense he used it. Chris Hayes (or Chris Hayes, Chris Chris Hayes! as Spencer Ackerman used to call him) is quite clearly informed by it.

And I do like the framing of 2000-2010 as an era of failure. I mean, think of it. Everywhere you looked some prominent politician was debasing themselves in public, as Hunter Thompson said of the 1972 Democratic Convention.

Isn’t it a problem for Hayes argument that the elites who were at the peak of their control 2000-2010 in government and business were a bunch of boomers and pre-boomers? That is, these are people who went to college and university and worked their way up the ranks of society in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades *before* “meritocracy” really instituted itself throughout society and the educational structure from the 1980s onward. The very top leaders of the 1990s to 2000s were not products of the meritocratic system; it’s their kids who will be, who are only in their teens to 30s right now, not having held any major power so far in society.

Could someone say more about what Hayes thinks is the solution? The post seems to say that the “cure” is taxing the rich. Well, if the problem is that the rich have too much money and power, then that’s fine. But it seems a non sequitur to suggest that reducing the power of rich people would do anything about the problems mentioned in the post’s second paragraph (sex abuse, steroids, etc.).

To those saying it’s not really meritocracy: I think the point is that you start with meritocracy, but then the winners pull the ladder up behind them. You see this in civil service China too. Ostensibly any one could pass the test and get a position, but the education was expensive. US used to have good public schools and cheap public colleges, now not so much.

I’m impressed the post and 50 comments happened without any mention of ‘democracy’. General egalitarianism got mentioned, but how do we get a political system that resists elite sabotage and values equality in the first place? I’ve read that the Greeks disdained elections as too undemocratic, too prone to exalting wealth and charisma; they mostly used town meetings or random selection. We’re too big for the former and mere ballot initiatives are problematic, but could use randomly selected houses in conjunction with an elected legislature, if not in replacement of it. And we could clamor for employees and tenants having a say in business or landlord decisions that affect them, even if it’s just an expectation of non-binding consultation.

Not that democracy is perfect, but what is? The question is whether high democracy is stable, and a more desirable stable point than growing plutocracy.

Looking forward to reading the book etc, but one thought right now: European countries have a lot less income inequality, and a lot more welfare etc. But EU elites in ‘social market’ Germany and Brussels seem to be getting it wrong big time just the same, their much less compensated bankers have made profoundly foolish investment decisions, their churches covered up abuse etc etc. So I start a bit skeptical that US-style meritocracy in particular is really at the root of the problem …

It is troubling to me that the “educated” elite today have lost understanding of how humans and their societies really work by not being acquainted with the great social and political philosophers of Ancient Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. The search for prescriptions for just and economically fair societies exist in abundance among their writings — the founders of this country wrote volumes (not in the Constitution, a best blueprint of their compromises to their perceptions of reality) but rather in their arguments (see the Federalist Papers) influenced by these ancients. And yet, we continue to try to reinvent the wheel in light only of new technology. Human nature has remained the same throughout history and I believe, sadly, that whatever technology allows us to do towards equalizing access to abundance, we will find a way to let our innate competitive — and greedy — spirits disturb any harmony technology may create.

It is troubling to me that the “educated” elite today have lost understanding of how humans and their societies really work by not being acquainted with the great social and political philosophers of Ancient Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.

And universities like UVA are busy getting rid of all that stuff just to make sure none of the future best and brightest accidentally come in contact with it, which might lead them to ask inconvenient questions.

“I would call it Elster meets Gladwell if I thought that would be taken as praise”

Ugh. Maybe for those of you who have a working understanding / acceptance of Elster, there is something in the OP that resonates, but I find myself lost in the Gladwell-ness of it all. That is, there’s a lot of neato-cool examples of stuff I can relate to, but they don’t add up to anything like a solid support of the main argument, which doesn’t hold together by itself.

Something bugs me about the line of reasoning that meritocracy is a problem because the “winners” pull the ladder up behind them. It leaves open the notion that if we could somehow perfect meritocracy, then all would be right with the world. Yes, meritocracy is a problem, but not only when it fails to function in its pure form: I take issue with the idea that one person *deserves* a better quality of life than another just because they perform better at whatever metrics society happens to value. If that were the case, we could simply breed ever more meritorious people by selecting for intelligence and physical attributes. Not born with high intellectual aptitude? Sorry, but you’re getting the life of poverty you merit. Meritocracy is certainly not a road to happiness for a vast majority of the populace.

The idea of meritocracy is so tempting because each of us wants to believe that when we work hard, we will achieve some external success. We also want to believe that the rewards we have are ours because we in some way deserve them. This is quite seldom the case. Even those of us who were born into poverty and clawed our way out cannot attribute our success solely to our own merits. Every person has some non-merit-based help along the way, even if that help is as simple as a random fortuitous event.

So, instead of saying that meritocracy fails because it becomes corrupted, let’s say that meritocracy fails because it can never exist in the first place, and because striving toward meritocracy yields unhappiness.

“I think we annoyed everyone else with our repeated insistence that reducing economic inequality was somehow always the appropriate solution to each of the many social ills the group identified”

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It’s not just the rise of the meritocracy that caused the Fail Decade. It was also the celebration of certitude that compounded the problem during the George W Bush era. If your elites aren’t perfect (after all none are), but you’re darn certain they are, that just makes the problem (and the incentives for misbehavior) a whole lot worse.

Meritocracy is particularly vulnerable to this, because after all their rise seems so scientific. How can they be wrong?

A system of social and cultural values, which recognizes the capability is far less scarce than opportunity, and loyalty, idealism and integrity is far more valuable, socially, than the extremes of individual achievement, is healthier than what we have going on.

Could you clarify this, Bruce? Also, what do you take to be the lesson in Michener’s story? My take is: it takes time to build culture.

In my mind meritocracy is implied by and consistent with democracy. “Merit”–highly subjective term evidently–to me includes consideration of character.

@65: conversely though, if the problems are all nails, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer.

mattski @67: “Merit” … includes consideration of character.

Yes, that seems like the right lesson to take from Bruce’s story.

“Meritocracy” is a very useful idea for those at the top. It implies that you are at the top because you are better than all the rest (cue Tina Turner). Revolution is therefore not only nasty and violent but also misguided, because the result could only be substituting people with less talent for those currently in charge. When the disasters into which our current meritocrats have led us are pointed out, they cheerfully reply that things would – indeed, must – have been worse if other people had been in their place because, you know, they’re meritocrats so there is nobody better…

There is a wonderful circularity about it.

chris 06.19.12 at 12:36 am

Well, as an American, my first response would be “they’re not, the local school boards are the ones pushing creationism; centralization is a small price to pay to stop that”. But that may be a malady unique to the US.

Sorry but could you just run that by me one more time – you think that democracy is likely to turn out such an awful result that taking away the right of people to vote and control their own destiny is justified? And all over Creationism, a belief that has zero negative consequences for anyone but the Believer (unlike pretty much everything any Western intellectual has believed since 1919 – look at Heidegger or Sartre) and which every single student in America can believe or not with zero negative consequences to their lives or careers and debates about which every single student can access with about two second’s work any time they feel?

Fascinating.

If so, is there any subject on which you think the American electorate can be trusted?

QS:

JS, “evil or incompetent” is answered best by “neither”. … Sometimes these risks don’t work out. Individual “incompetence” is much less important than recognizing the necessary outcome that markets produce winners and losers.

No real disagreement here. Admittedly, the “evil or incompetent” phrasing makes it seem like I’m talking about individual intentions/competency, which wasn’t at all my point. I could put the point this way: is institution X functioning such that it’s more or less reliably achieving its institutional aims? I think if you look at the major governing institutions of our society, I think the answer is a resounding No. (My point was that the truth of this is compatible with the thought that the institutional aims in question are in fact detrimental to the social good.)

geo:

JS@43: Are they incompetent? Virtually all the increase in national income over the last several decades has gone to the 1 percent. That seems like success to me.

As for Iraq, it’s one thing to say: “The US failed to bring a thriving democracy and civil liberties to Iraq” and quite another thing to say “The US failed to achieve unrestricted basing rights, oil exploitation rights, and foreign-investor rights in Iraq.”

I get this, but it seems like a false dilemma to me. Of course the administration (and the military) didn’t, umm, give a flying fuck about democracy and civil liberties. But plausibly, the aim was (a) an easy win, (b) a client state, and (c) control of resources. They maybe, maybe got (c). Highly unlikely that they got (b), and they most certainly didn’t get (a). This seems like a failure to me.

gordon 06.20.12 at 12:25 am

“Meritocracy” is a very useful idea for those at the top. It implies that you are at the top because you are better than all the rest (cue Tina Turner). Revolution is therefore not only nasty and violent but also misguided, because the result could only be substituting people with less talent for those currently in charge.

I might agree with that. It has one draw back too – people who rise to the top in a meritocracy think they belong there. People who have inherited their money know they do not. Old money tends to think they need to pay some of that back by serving the public good. Which is why George H. W. Bush volunteered to fly and spent his life in public service. Why the Ford Foundation and all the other grandchildren of the Robber Barons fund Left Wing causes. New money thinks it has every right to behave as they like. Which is why Donald Trump is such an ass – and I bet is not nice to anyone lower down the social scale. And also why Soviet bureaucrats were so nasty to everyone as well.

When the disasters into which our current meritocrats have led us are pointed out, they cheerfully reply that things would – indeed, must – have been worse if other people had been in their place because, you know, they’re meritocrats so there is nobody better…

Whatever else you can say about America in the 20th century, things would have been worse if other people got their way. Educated Americans – mainly in opposition to the American system because it keeps them out of power – have since the 1960s supported every other alternative they can think of. Chomsky attends Hizbullah pep rallies even though as a Jew they want him dead. Those alternatives have invariably turned out not merely worse but vastly worse. Before meddling you ought to make sure the system you want is an improvement. Not merely on paper but in reality.

wait, wait, the 2000s are fail decade compared to what? seeing as how every single decade before that starting from (generously…) 1790, huge percentages of the elite were always at work figuring out how to fight continent-wide and world and to colonize people and resources (so as to have more resources to fight wars!), and creating machines whose purpose, directly or indirectly, was to enable their nations to fight wars, the 2000s were the bad decade? sure, most of that elite agression was turned into money, but what did you expect? like does the author prefer the elite as a slave owner, or cold warrior, or builder of socialism in the ukraine in 1932, or defense contractor in 1962, or a functionary in the raj, or as a prussian infantry colonel, over an i-banker? for reals?

The Bushies did not even bother to keep an adequate military force in place to keep down the violence. Thus we can assume they did not predict any. Thus the only plausible explanation is that they genuinely thought they would be welcome.

And this basically proves my point. See also Hayes on the consequences of the elites becoming a self-contained, self-perpetuating group (here).

PS – … in which case, it’s the purposes we should be criticizing, not the failure.

Of course they planned to install a puppet government, what else? That’s the point of this game; Saddam’s government wasn’t puppet enough.

When they hit a snag, they proceeded by splitting it along sectarian lines (standard ‘divide and conquer’ strategy), and they backed Sistani’s side. So, assassinating him would’ve been counterproductive.

And I think banking on Shia was their big mistake: since the Shia are a majority, they don’t need American patronage. You should always side with a minority. So, they won the battle (against the Sunni Triangle), but they lost the war. Now, that’s incompetence.

I see we’re receiving a transmission from Planet Sexual Harassment = Freedom. We should compare basic physical constants — it could provide an important test of the anthropic principle in cosmology.

The creationist areas of the country are superficially friendlier in casual interactions. That’s a long way from nicer, and the creationist areas are much less nicer places to live.

“Sweden is actually a good pharmaceutical innovator and strong exporter…Evidence please”

The Astra part of Astra Zeneca is Swedish. A few years back, they had the world’s best selling drug (Losec).
They are a country of fewer than 10 million people, yet come 10th on the list of US patents.

“Sweden is an export-oriented mixed economy featuring a modern distribution system, excellent internal and external communications, and a skilled labor force…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden

In the age of Wikipedia, asking for evidence is evidence of laziness.
Particularly when you’re wrong.

=== So Much For Subtlety 06.20.12 at 4:07 am
[…]
.
America’s rate of social mobility is so low because it does not have selective education. Those Scandinavians give children an exam and then stream them. Something that Americans regard as undemocratic. So they all get the same inadequate education in massive industrial-scale schools. Which do nothing to make up for the advantage that rich children get from a well-stocked home. Meritocracy is an interesting word as it depends on what you are looking for.
===

Since you apparently missed the entire suburbanization/exurbanization of US society, and are unaware that the vast majority of US public schoolchildren attend locally-controlled suburban schools (essentially all of which have separate classes for remedial/regular/honors/AP students, selected by competitive performance), why should we take anything else you say seriously?

Cranky

The Bushies did not even bother to keep an adequate military force in place to keep down the violence. Thus we can assume they did not predict any. Thus the only plausible explanation is that they genuinely thought they would be welcome. Which means they did not intend to create a puppet state or seize any natural resources.

Well. I think it’s safe to say YOU can assume it. Did you allow for the possibility that, in their unparalleled incompetence, they thought that oil contracts and a friendly client state would fall into their lap?

They meant every single word of what they said. And, as I said, it is childish to say otherwise.

You seem to have some considerable expertise in “childishness”. And Subtlety!

Data Tutashkhia 06.20.12 at 9:18 am

Of course they planned to install a puppet government, what else? That’s the point of this game; Saddam’s government wasn’t puppet enough.

A neatly circular argument – the war is about my fantasy because the war is about my fantasy. What else? Exactly what they said. Democracy. Liberation.

When they hit a snag, they proceeded by splitting it along sectarian lines (standard ‘divide and conquer’ strategy), and they backed Sistani’s side. So, assassinating him would’ve been counterproductive.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. In the First Gulf War the Shia rose against the Sunni government. How do you explain pre-existing, indeed long-standing, Iraqi sectarian divides if it was all the work of the Americans a decade (in fact several centuries) later? How do you explain the sectarianism of Saddam’s government which was Sunni dominated? How do you explain the sectarianism of the rest of the Middle East – notably that other Ba’athist country, Syria? All the work of the Americans?

No doubt you will have some trite sound bite to explain that too.

You can side with the Shia without siding with Sistani. As they did with Chalabi.

And I think banking on Shia was their big mistake: since the Shia are a majority, they don’t need American patronage. You should always side with a minority. So, they won the battle (against the Sunni Triangle), but they lost the war. Now, that’s incompetence.

If that was what they were trying to do, perhaps. But given there is no evidence of it it is irrelevant. It exists in your imagination. In reality what they tried to do was create a democracy. Which they expected to work. Thus they sided with the majority of the voters. Who happened to hate them, just not all that violently by Iraqi standards.

Cranky Observer 06.20.12 at 11:30 am

Since you apparently missed the entire suburbanization/exurbanization of US society, and are unaware that the vast majority of US public schoolchildren attend locally-controlled suburban schools (essentially all of which have separate classes for remedial/regular/honors/AP students, selected by competitive performance), why should we take anything else you say seriously?

You can take what I say as you like it. I did not miss it. It is irrelevant. In so far as it is not irrelevant, it proves my point – instead of selecting by academic merit as most of Europe does, Americans select by class and wealth through property purchase. The fact that there is limited streaming is also irrelevant. It is not enough. British schools have the same lame system and decades of experience has shown it does not make up for the loss of the selective Grammars. I did not mention what they had for lunch either. Will you be bringing that dereliction to my attention too? The color of their sneakers? The existence of Glee clubs?

mattski 06.20.12 at 1:04 pm

Well. I think it’s safe to say YOU can assume it. Did you allow for the possibility that, in their unparalleled incompetence, they thought that oil contracts and a friendly client state would fall into their lap?

Ummm, no. I am sure they thought they would get a friendly client state and I am sure that they thought that American companies would win contracts on a level playing field. Or even one that was pro-American just a tad. But that is my point – they thought they would get this through liberation. The fact that they went in light proves it. Nor have you even begun to suggest a reason why anyone should think otherwise. 100 percent of the evidence points to this conclusion. What do you have?

Lee A. Arnold 06.20.12 at 1:08 pm

So you get all your stuff from Fox News and chain emails? But you forgot to reassert your implication that Leftists have violently broken up meetings of anti-blank-slaters!

It is not an implication, it is a statement of fact. Which no one in their right mind denies. If you feel like denying it, please do so. Can I take your reliance on a rather lame ad hominem as proof you have nothing substantive to say?

Um, # 79: “America’s rate of social mobility is so low because it does not have selective education. Those Scandinavians give children an exam and then stream them. Something that Americans regard as undemocratic.”

Please check your facts. Scandinavians regard streaming as highly undemocratic, as indeed it is.

According to wikipedia, in Sweden: “Between ages 6/7 and 15/16, children attend compulsory comprehensive school (grundskola), divided in three stages.” Comprehensive = “not streamed” or “open to all”.

Like higher ed in the USA, secondary school, beginning at 15 or 16, is not mandatory in Sweden (no more in Finland.) As I understand it, all Swedes, (apparently) get the same mandatory, democratic, unstreamed education, as in Finland. Entrance to secondary and Tertiary (as in the US) ed., is by exam. Except that in contrast to the USA, in democratic Scandinavia, tertiary university tuition and board are completely state subsidized.

Alex 06.20.12 at 2:02 pm

I don’t know what “warmists” are – moderate hotties? – but here’s a prominent climate-change denier engaging in public incitement: I didn’t need to go back more than a month.

You know, I have been around the internet for some time and you would think I would know better by now. But really the blatant dishonesty of your comment really shocks me. Judith Curry does not call for violence. She does not commit a single act of violence. Thus your comparison is flatly out wrong. What is more she does not “engage in public incitement”. Not even close. Some moron makes a comment on a blog. She mocks him. Big freakin’ deal.

curryja | May 24, 2012 at 9:23 pm |
Well Tucci78 is regarded as high entertainment by many of the regulars here. Not so much accepting his sentiments, as being entertained by his presentation of them.

That is not an endorsement. That is a clear distancing herself from someone she has not banned yet but who is clearly regarded as a nut case. There is simply no way that an honest reading of what she said can produce what you claim for it.

Harold 06.20.12 at 2:49 pm

Please check your facts. Scandinavians regard streaming as highly undemocratic, as indeed it is.

That must be why so many of them do it then. In fact that will be why all of them used to do it and many of them still do. For instance, which country does this refer to:

After their nine-year basic education in a comprehensive school, students at the age of 16 may choose to continue their secondary education in either an academic track (lukio) or a vocational track (ammattikoulu), both of which usually take three years.

Or this:

Prior to 1994 there were three branches of upper secondary schooling: “General” (language, history etc.), “mercantile” (accounting etc.) and “vocational” (electronics, carpentry etc.) studies. The high school reform of 1994 (Reform 94) merged these branches into a single system.

According to wikipedia, in Sweden: “Between ages 6/7 and 15/16, children attend compulsory comprehensive school (grundskola), divided in three stages.” Comprehensive = “not streamed” or “open to all”.

Sure. Dating back all the way to 1994 I dimly remember. Before which they had gymnasium. Well they still do, but they call all schools by that name now. Here’s a simple prediction – those Scandinavian countries that abolished streaming in the 1990s will soon experience a drop in social mobility. What are the chances you think?

As I understand it, all Swedes, (apparently) get the same mandatory, democratic, unstreamed education, as in Finland. Entrance to secondary and Tertiary (as in the US) ed., is by exam. Except that in contrast to the USA, in democratic Scandinavia, tertiary university tuition and board are completely state subsidized.

Finland still streams. At least for the last three years. Entrance to University in the US is not really determined by exams. That is why students have to lie so much in their entrance essays – and why rich parents can use their influence to get their little ones internships and provide volunteer opportunities building stuff in the Third World that, like, taught them so much about their humanity. It is not relevant, but I don’t think most of Scandinavia uses exams to enter secondary school either – although the system is still competitive and based on previous marks. And I am surprised to hear that people use exams for high school entry in the US as well. At least for public schools. You mean if I want to go down Podunk State High just down the road I have to prove anything other than I am a warm body of the appropriate age who happens to live in the area?

Data Tutashkhia 06.20.12 at 3:13 pm

Subtlety, it’s my fantasy like gravitation is my fantasy. States don’t invade states to ‘liberate’ them, they invade to pursue their own interests. And installing a puppet government is the most obvious way (these days, anyway) to do it. As for “Exactly what they said”, that’s just silly, because every invading state says this. If you take it at the face value, then you must take every invading state’s proclamation the same way, but I’m sure you’ll find it problematic.

You are stating as a fact what you need to prove. For instance Tanzania invaded Uganda to overthrow Idi Amin. They did. In the Liberation War. Then they left. Explain to me Tanzania’s interest.

Not every invading state says this. And we have so few invading states for good reason. Of course you have to take every invading state’s proclamations at face value. Until they prove otherwise. America did not. This discussion should have ended long before this point.

js @43:

“In other words, when it comes to the “Evil or incompetent?” the question, the answer clearly suggested by the last decade is “Both!” I haven’t read the book (plan to soon), but if Hayes is giving an analysis of the incompetent side of the equation, that’s surely all to the good.”

It also fits with the hypothesis of ‘Second Gilded Age’. Remember, back then they trashed the system as well.

Too Much for Subtlety #99: “It is not an implication, it is a statement of fact.”

Then please by all means, give a LINK to the “fact” that left-wingers have violently attacked people for being anti-blank slaters, or that left-wingers even care. I asked for this in #85.

‘Too much’, you blame the defects of American education on its supposed lack of streaming. You wrote (#79): “America’s rate of social mobility is so low because it does not have selective education. Those Scandinavians give children an exam and then stream them.”

Then you write (lamely) that “Finland still streams” in the last three years. The last three years (high school or vocational school, the equivalents of our community colleges) are not compulsory in Finland. People take the entrance exams voluntarily. (I believe they make re-take them if they fail, but am not sure). Education from the ages of seven to sixteen, which is compulsory, is not “selective” in Scandinavia, at least in Finland and Sweden (according to wikipedia). The idea of making people compete for a spot in compulsory education is cruel and perverse. Though this is the very thing that people are trying to introduce in our cities.

Your shifting arguments show you are not serious.

“…every major societal institution failed. Big businesses… auditors …Supreme Court … intelligence apparatus … media …military….professional sports …church… government … banks .”

Given the author and Hayes both camped at Harvard for a time the disastrously smug and insufferable Academy is not allowed allowed a pass on that list because it was getting a bit long. Pointing at everyone else but would be, um, elitist.

Hey! I just had an original and interesting insight.

How bouts we restrict the franchise, the right to vote in any election, to those without a college degree? Or low-wealth, or low-income?

Certainly the elites will not stop trying to obtain skills and credentials, but their power and political influence will be limited to the ways they can influence and persuade the non-elites. And their education, wealth, skills, and arrogance should mean they would have no fear of the idiocracy. They would think they could manage it. They might be wrong. And competition would be intense, and to the benefit of the underclasses

Won’t happen, but I can dream.

(Psssst: Romney? $1000. I’m cheap. Aw hell $100. A case of beer?)

The biggest problem with Chris’ thesis is the implied corrective actions.

If Chris is correct, then we could right things by kicking racial/ethnic minorities out of access to power, wealth and influence. We could ban women from the professions.

I guess I’ve no idea why you think this. Like I’ve said, I haven’t read the book yet. But I have read excerpts and I’ve read lots of articles by Hayes, mostly in The Nation. So I’ve some sense of where he’s coming from, and this is clearly, clearly, not what he’s advocating. The whole point is that the idea of meritocracy is seductive precisely because it’s not about birth, hereditary rank, etc. But it still fails. I mean, you wouldn’t want to conclude from Marx’s critique of capitalism that he favored a return to feudalism, right?

I think it’s a mistake to regard post-scarcity as a subject for science fiction. The rich countries today are already post-scarcity as far as technology is concerned, and have been for some time.

It seems clear to me that we could organize production with today’s technology so that no one had to do demeaning, dangerous, or excessively tedious work — or too much work of any kind — and still produce enough stuff to provide all the wellbeing that stuff is able to provide. At which point, eliminating the remaining need for labor would be not just unnecessary but a step backwards, since useful work is, after all, a major source of fulfillment.

As for the book, I haven’t read it (would like to, but there are so many books…), but I tend to share Peter Dorman’s criticisms (@97) of the thesis as presented here.

Like JWM, I haven’t read the book, though I plan to, so I’ll repeat a few thoughts which may be familiar. As I mentioned very recently, it’s a logical necessity that, when inequality is growing rapidly from a relatively egalitarian starting point, it can’t be derived primarily from inheritance.

So, if we define “meritocracy” as a system in which people achieve their position primarily through their own endeavors, rather than through being born into a particular position, and say that the greater are the rewards for success and punishments for failure, the more meritocratic is the system, then the US at present is highly meritocratic.

On the other hand, it’s easy to see that the meritocracy is already breaking down at many levels, from the Presidency (recent dynastic presidents or aspirants include Bush, Gore, H Clinton, Romney) to the elite universities, where an every narrower section of the population gets access to the qualifications needed to compete for the top jobs.

122.2 is the problem, not a solution in that attempting to abstract an individual from their personal history, society and social conditions, etc that abstraction as an operative normative principal universally applied in some Rawlsian system of blind justice can only also ignore in fairness the privilege and factor endowments of Romneys and Bushes.

“primarily through their own endeavors, rather than through being born into a particular position”

Doesn’t happen never happens cannot happen. We are born and develop socially embedded, and the successes and failures are socially determined, whether it is the poor reaching the top over adversity or the privileged reproducing their privilege. If it looks like the social system rewards endeavor through agency, we are simply not looking closely enough, or choosing to ignore which kinds of activity or character are socially rewarded in a noticeable way, usually monetarily or with fame or power in liberal capitalism.

The milkwoman with a thousand friends and a loving family, capable in her job over decades in the same town doesn’t get the money and the books and documentaries and awards, but that is not to say she is not rewarded for her endeavors and is definitely a success.

Sure you will all nod and say salt of the earth and the really valuable human, and yet still try to maximize and equalize Ivy league degrees and six-figure salaries.

Wilder approached it at 69 above. Liberal capitalism and economics hasn’t a clue what real merit is.

“I like the construction worker who lives across the street, and the guys pouring concrete on my street. Hard workers, always smiling.”

David Brooks has kidnapped Bob McManus and is holding him hostage until his demands are met!

js: “I guess I’ve no idea why you think this. Like I’ve said, I haven’t read the book yet. But I have read excerpts and I’ve read lots of articles by Hayes, mostly in The Nation. So I’ve some sense of where he’s coming from, and this is clearly, clearly, not what he’s advocating. The whole point is that the idea of meritocracy is seductive precisely because it’s not about birth, hereditary rank, etc. But it still fails. I mean, you wouldn’t want to conclude from Marx’s critique of capitalism that he favored a return to feudalism, right?”

We (USA) live in a system which the elites were freed to pillage and burn, and despite what John Quiggin said, we are both low on the social mobility scale and dropping.

Now, why in the name of all that’s sacred would Chris think that meritocracy is the problem?

IMHO, this is like those people who survey the current scene, and decide that the most important priority is to destroy Social Security, and to hand the money over to the looters who run the plutocracy. Something is seriously wrong with the way that they think.

Peter Dorman concluded this way,

When I think about what is new and different in this stew, more meritocratic elite selection doesn’t come to mind.

Saying essentially, I wouldn’t blame meritocracy per se, which seems right to me. As I said earlier meritocracy is an ideal. In the real world there are lots and lots contaminates creeping in, undermining that ideal. That is not the fault of the ideal. I think that is an important point.

So, two people who’s comments I find consistently valuable: Barry, I think js is right that there is little reason to think Hayes is pointing in the direction you suggest. And js, I don’t think your “and it still fails” holds up.

And bob mcmanus proves conclusively that the left end of the political spectrum tapers off in low comedy.

No one’s discussed the ship’s captain metaphor recently. The race toward inequality would make a good analogy with the ship’s captain if everyone in the ship said things like, “Don’t challenge the captain (or his nephew) for that cushy, well-paid job–he’s in charge and it’s important to respect his authority!” I don’t know to what extent that’s actually happening, or whether it just sounds plausible. But it doesn’t actually fit well with the argument about meritocracy especially if competition is supposed to be important for the latter.

meritocracy is an ideal. In the real world there are lots and lots contaminates creeping in, undermining that ideal.

Actually, I think Hayes’ critique of this idea (as relayed by Swartz) is very important. Meritocracy is *not* ideal. It is not ok that most people lead lives of insecurity and drudgery while a few people enjoy privilege and plenty, regardless of how those few are selected. The ideal is democracy (or perhaps no -cracy at all.)

The critique I understood Peter Dorman to be making is that it is not clear that the elite justifying its status on the grounds it deserves it, is anything new.

it’s a logical necessity that, when inequality is growing rapidly from a relatively egalitarian starting point, it can’t be derived primarily from inheritance.

I don’t think it’s true that this is a logical necessity.

How much an individual’s position in some rank ordering depends on their parent’s position, and how much that rank ordering influences life chances, are in principle wholly independent.

Consider the former USSR. For the sake of argument, let’s say that pre-1989 it was highly egalitarian, much more than today. (I think this is true.) Let’s also say that rich younger Russians today are overwhelmingly the children of people who occupied the top of the old Soviet hierarchy. (I don’t know how true this is, but let’s say.) Then that would be a case of a large increase in inequality, with inequality based mainly on inheritance.

I think, actually, it’s you, Bianca, who are confused about the argument. The argument is that is that top 0.01% and their elite servants *really do* score better on the objective standards that are supposed to allocate their positions. Nobody is getting a job just by being someone’s nephew. But this does not prevent either an increasing inheritance of status, or the people on top from fucking everything up.

JW,
If the question is why did things 2000-2010 fail, I assume there were people involved who were at most in the top 25%. If your assumption is that everything is controlled by the elite to an extent that the rest of the top 25% doesn’t matter (presumably they can be the boss’s nephew or whoever), then sure, discussing the elite makes sense. Maybe it’s also interesting why we’ve shifted the definition of elite from, say, 2% to 0.01%. I don’t see how meritocracy makes a difference. But sure, if your assumption is that the job at hand is to cut the topmost among the elite down to size, and (because most people assume we’re in a meritocracy) the best way to do that is to say meritocracy is bad, fine.

If you want to argue, however, something like that the auditors didn’t catch Enron because elites don’t want audits to happen and thus accountants are trained not to do audits properly, you really do have to discuss accountants in more detail than “elite servants.”

while “meritocracy” hasn’t caused the problems, it hasn’t solved them either?

More than that, it has obscured the real issues, by putting the focus on who occupies the top spots, rather than on the existence of a few top spots in the first place.

BTW, what objective standard justifies, e.g., Jamie Dimon’s influence and wealth?

I bet he did great on his SATs.

You’re just replicating the exclusive focus on the top 0.01%

Well, yeah. I have the book now, though have to read it, but if Hayes is saying that the problem with our “meritocracy” is the tendency to overpower a tiny elite, I would be surprised and disappointed. It would like be saying the problem with capitalism is that there are too many billionaires.

Ooops.

It sometimes seem like commenters here are more interested in finding new metaphors for “really rich people suck” than in anything else

Capitalism as a structuring system or ruling idea or ideology does not include just the top 1%, it determines the beliefs and behavior of everybody

Meritocracy as a social system is only an interesting social problem (if it is about only the top 1% we have a different ideological problem) if you understand that it also justifies the gap between someone making $30k a year and someone making $50k a year. And that justification for difference in the bottom quintile is used to justify the differences at the very top.

Now to understand how a non-meritocracy might work, one can look for instance at the (even if only partly theoretical and ideal, and currently disappearing) lifetime employment system in Japan, where raises were universal and equal according to positions in the hierarchy and company performance (IOW janitor and CEO each got 2%), and promotions and bonuses were based strictly on seniority.

And bob mcmanus proves conclusively that the left end of the political spectrum tapers off in low comedy.

Okay. As whatever kind of Marxist, I try not to focus on meanie capitalists like Jamie Dimon, but on Capital, Labour, and what is happening at the bottom of the income scale. Enlightenment among the chattering self-congratulatory classes will not bring the revolution, not some kind of partial understanding by the worker that a tweaked and reformed meritocracy will give them their just desserts. Just work harder and study more, proles, and move up the income ladder as long as we tax the billionaires will always perpetuate the plutocracy.

It’s when the workers understand That it is not their fault, nor is it the fault of the Capitalists, not is there any real meritocracy at all at any income level, not can there be, that we will change from “To each according to their ability” to “To each according to their need”

Bob McM: I agree that the book (as I understand it) would have made more sense. Still totally unrealistic IMHO, and not particularly more relevant to the last decade than to any other decade, but just at least it would have been easier to make sense of.

I haven’t read the book either but from hearing Hayes talk about it on his show and from the excellent interview with him over at the Jacobin, it seems that whether he’s saying “we don’t actually have a meritocracy” or “we have a meritocracy” is bad depends on how you’re defining things. Especially in the financial and corporate world, “merit” is defined as cleverness, and, the elites are very good at making their children clever. Really truly clever: it’s not an illusion. But not necessarily wise, empathetic, etc. Older elites had different values be they chivalric or what have you and trained their children in those, and, lo and behold, you had “gentlemen” who earned their rank by virtue of their gentleman-ness. The ideology of meritocracy makes us think that an elite of Zuckerbergs is less harmful than an elite of Winklevii, but there’s no reason this is necessarily so.

Point being, the elite always define the terms of the game. On those terms, they can always claim a basis for winning. The point is to throw away the terms – or, better, to say that maybe, just maybe, this thing isn’t actually a game.

Meritocracy is not ideal. It is not ok that most people lead lives of insecurity and drudgery while a few people enjoy privilege and plenty, regardless of how those few are selected. The ideal is democracy (or perhaps no -cracy at all.)

Confusion about terms here, and I apologize for being in the category of “haven’t read the book.” Minus your first sentence I agree with your statement. I was using the term in the sense of, We want the people who excel at a given task to have gainful employment performing such tasks.

In my mind the question of compensation is somewhat different. “Let the market decide” how much you are paid, to me, is not a characteristic of meritocracy so much as a characteristic of laissez faire.

But it’s always necessary to be realistic in our expectations. Things don’t always work out like we planned (Randy Newman!) Take the story Bruce attributed to Michener above. Sometimes–often–a person with superior skills AND character is passed over for promotion. To my mind this sort of problem is more cultural than say, institutional. Every so often a person of excellent character gets appointed to a high position and is able to do a lot of good by appointing or promoting other good people. That is what we should be striving for.

150.3:so often a person of excellent character

I herewith declare you an Honorary Eminent Victorian

151: Mine own liberal utopia. You’ve had your chance

About time the achievers and disinterested enlightened judges of “excellent character” served for a while instead of ruling.

Hey you know what egalitarianism really means? It isn’t a matter of different or better calibrated scales or systems of differentiation between people.

It means you don’t judge, measure, or rank people on any scale of social worth.

It’s remarks (at 148) about “gentleman-ness” and Mattski’s remarks (at 150) about people with superior skills and character remind me of C. Wright Mills’ statement which I quoted (with link to source) at 38. His point, I think revolves around what might be called the multidimensionality of “merit”. There are really a very large number of dimensions on which merit might be measured, ability to get rich in our current society being but one. Here is another quote from the same source which makes the point clearly:

“Whenever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected. A million dollars, it is said, covers a multitude of sins. It is not only that men want money; it is that their very standards are pecuniary. In a society in which the money-maker has had no serious rival for repute and honor, the word ‘practical’ comes to mean useful for private gain, and ‘common sense,’ the sense to get ahead financially. The pursuit of the moneyed life is the commanding value, in relation to which the influence of other values has declined, so men easily become morally ruthless in the pursuit of easy money and fast estate-building”.

If, then, “gentleman-ness” and “character” have no monetary value, they will be dropped from the definition of “merit”. Mills is talking about the consequences of this. His viewpoint seems to me to have a lot in common with the way a greenie might talk about externalities. Of course, externalities weren’t much of an issue in Mills’ day.

It means you don’t judge, measure, or rank people on any scale of social worth.

Living your creed is overrated, eh bob?

Harold, that is a vivid reminder how ill our culture is. I have the idea, which could be wrong, that the reason Obama doesn’t criticize more our national religion of worshipping money is he’s afraid of kicking up a shitstorm…

No discussion of meritocracy would be complete without a mention of this profile of the Brant Brothers. Hey everybody, rich people are “ubermenschen” — it says so right there in the Times.

JW, did you post that before or after the Times put up its Style section profile of Chris Hayes (right under the one Martin Amis, in the print edition)? Because one was about to say something snarky about that section of the paper, but now one can’t (and there’s the article in Section 1 about how 40% of 20-25 yos in Manhattan live with their parents, all 40% of them of course being in the top 0.01%).