Book report: Twilight of the elites: America after meritocracy by Christopher Hayes
There’s
a prestigious public high school in New York City. To gain admission, it doesn’t
matter who you know, who your family knows, or how rich you are. All you have
to do is score well on their entrance exam and you’re in. Sounds like the
perfect meritocracy, right? The smart kids –regardless of race or ethnicity or
religion or anything else – will get an excellent free education and a boost
into the best colleges, jobs, and lives. So, what’s the result? The student
body is almost all white and Asian, from the best neighborhoods of NYC. Not
what was intended at all.
So,
what went wrong? Well, as with anything, there are ways to game the system.
There are preparation classes kids can take specifically to help them do well
on the entrance exam. Of course, these classes cost a lot of money, and only
the kids whose families can afford it can go. Plus, kids from better
neighborhoods go to better schools, get better educations, and are better able
to score well on the entrance exam.
For
Hayes, this is symptomatic of meritocracies everywhere. Situations that are
supposed to reward intelligence or skill or ability end up rewarding something
else entirely: money, class, and so forth. We all believe in the IDEA of
meritocracies. But actually putting them into practice often doesn’t work the
way we intend. The results are not what we want.
How
about in business? What happens when you reward the sharpest minds, the
cleverest thinkers, the smartest guys in the room? Well, the last phrase may
have given it away. What you get are companies like Enron, where the ability to
cook the books and dupe the investors was rewarded far more than the ability to
make money by deploying energy efficiently. Or Lehman Brothers, whose bundling
of sub-prime loans caused the financial catastrophe we’re all still trying to
dig our way out of.
When
you start rewarding people monetarily for their decisions – and that’s business
in a nutshell, right? – you can’t expect those decisions to benefit anyone
except the person making the money. Another way meritocracy is subverted.
Once
people get into a meritocracy, however they managed that, their future
activities may have nothing to do with smart decisions on their part, and
everything to do with securing their own positions and those of their
colleagues. Hayes’s prime example here is the Catholic church, where church
superiors routinely protected pedophile priests – their colleagues – from the
consequences of their disgusting behavior. Only rarely was one of these child
rapists removed, defrocked, or censured, and almost never arrested or
prosecuted, despite decades of abuse and thousands of victims.
Hayes
does an excellent job of exposing all the ways that our meritocracies fail us.
How about solutions to the problem? Well, not so much. Exposing the problem, as
with the high school, sure. But he goes into an extended discussion about how
one of the main problems is the social distance between the elite and the rest
of us, such as between the ultra-rich and you and me. His suggestion: close
that social distance. Redistribute money. Somehow. Not very helpful.
So,
bottom line, this book exposes some of the weaknesses of meritocracies, which
is useful. We should be looking at these educational, business, and government
systems with a critical eye. But for solutions to the problem, we’ll have to
look elsewhere.
Sort
of recommended
Comments