Tyranny of Merit
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Christopher Hayes, Crown Publishers, 292 pages
"“Elite” wasn’t always a dirty word. Before the 19th century, the term described someone chosen for office. Because this typically occurred in the church, the word possessed distinctly ecclesiastical connotations. The pre-Victorians transformed a word imputing religious status to individual persons into a collective noun with class implications. By the 1830s, “elite” referred to the highest ranks of the nobility.
Those meanings are no longer primary. As invoked by followers of the Tea Party movement, for example, “elite” means essentially a snob. Not, however, a snob of the old, aristocratic breed. In this context, “elite” means men and women who think degrees from famous universities mean they know better than their fellow citizens.
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What’s to be done? One answer is to rescue meritocracy by providing the poor and middle class with the resources to compete. A popular strategy focuses on education reform. If schools were better, the argument goes, poor kids could compete on an equal footing for entry into the elite. The attempt to rescue meritocracy by fixing education has become a bipartisan consensus, reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.”
Hayes rejects this option. The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.
Hayes’s prescription, then, is simple: we should raise taxes on the rich and increase redistributive payments to the poor and middle class.
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The central insight of this tradition is that there is no society without a governing class. Whether they’re selected by birth, intelligence, or some other factor, some people inevitably exercise power over others. Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen."
Those meanings are no longer primary. As invoked by followers of the Tea Party movement, for example, “elite” means essentially a snob. Not, however, a snob of the old, aristocratic breed. In this context, “elite” means men and women who think degrees from famous universities mean they know better than their fellow citizens.
...................................
What’s to be done? One answer is to rescue meritocracy by providing the poor and middle class with the resources to compete. A popular strategy focuses on education reform. If schools were better, the argument goes, poor kids could compete on an equal footing for entry into the elite. The attempt to rescue meritocracy by fixing education has become a bipartisan consensus, reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.”
Hayes rejects this option. The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.
Hayes’s prescription, then, is simple: we should raise taxes on the rich and increase redistributive payments to the poor and middle class.
........................................
The central insight of this tradition is that there is no society without a governing class. Whether they’re selected by birth, intelligence, or some other factor, some people inevitably exercise power over others. Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen."
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