Twilight of the Elites

How did our meritocracy get us into the mess we're in?  Chris Hayes explains it by saying that we're not as much of a meritocracy as we claim to be, and for the most part I agree with him. He starts out with a profile of his selective public high school, which chooses students entirely on a single high-pressure test.  Not completely fair, but one can argue that a test (like the SAT) evens out some of the societal inequities and at the very least cuts out nepotism and outright racial and ethnic discrimination. Unfortunately, there's a closer tie to economic status than to intelligence in standardized test scores, and that's gotten worse with the advent of test prep (required now if you want to get into an Ivy League school, but when I graduated from high school in 1986 only about a third of my private college-prep classmates bothered with the class offered after school, and at least some of them because they'd underperformed, often through nerves, on their first try).

Hayes is on weaker ground when he blames "elites" for systematic failures such as the 2007-08 housing market collapse and corporate corruption such as at Enron. Yes, the "best and the brightest" were in charge, and the conventional wisdom they spread and the standard sources amplified was absolutely, dangerously wrong. I disagree, though, that it was because they were the elite. Those catastrophes weren't created by smart, credentialed people so much as by smart, credentialed crooks. There, and in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, smart people fudged data or outright lied - nothing to do with being elite and everything to do with forcing their view on a system. I have trouble considering these examples of the elite screwing things up when their lies and manipulation, in my opinion, knock them off that tower.

There's another risk to denigrating those we consider elite. If taken too far, we begin to disregard education, experience, and intellectual analysis. We get the President we "want to have a beer with" (or the one who panders to our worst selves) rather than the one who understands that the world is complex and has the education, experience, and wisdom to work through to the best solution. I'd like to discuss Twilight of the Elites with Hayes, particularly in light of what's happened in the six years since it was published, and perhaps also after re-reading Simplexity.