Pertinent to many conversations here, is a recent interview by Chris Hedges with the author of a new book – “American Exceptionalism, American Innocence”.
The preface to the book starts with a particularly apposite quote by William Baldwin:
“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.”
“The interviewer, Liz Landers, perfectly epitomizes the maturity level of our media.“
The child like maturity of the media became more obvious through the years, the Iraq War, the Russian conspiracy, is clear the Biden was the favorite but is too senile to run, the only option is Warren who won’t rock boat and already sweared loyalty to our Zionist Overlords.
Meritocracy was always a con, a “I deserve what I got. You don’t.” It, of course, has nothing to do with libertarianism, also a con, whose mantra is “What I got is mine. What I got from the rest of you doesn’t count.” Still I found “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition” irritating. It says, “No one should weep for the wealthy,” but then spends the rest of the article doing precisely that. It somehow gets around discussing an issue that is all about class without ever looking at it in class terms (and no, the occasional reference of “middle class” doesn’t count).
It confuses the wealthy with the elites. It says that children of the “elite” have to work too hard to get their privileges, pretty much ignoring the importance of connections and heredity (whose bed they were born in) and implying that the rest of us work a lot less. It mentions legacies only in passing, an egregious oversight when you consider that rich idiots like Dubya got into Yale and the Harvard Business School and Trump got into UPenn and the Wharton School of Business.
As some of us have been saying for years now, things like billionaires and American gun cult are signs of fundamental failures in our society.
The media isn’t fooling anyone about free trade. It is simply doing its job of propagandizing, making it look like there is a reasonable (because it comes from them) alternative to what everybody else sees with their own two eyes. Americans know that free trade is a slogan for more Americans losing their jobs.
Would you seriously believe anything Mark Carney has to say? From his wiki, “Carney began his career at Goldman Sachs before joining the Canadian Department of Finance. He later served as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013, when he moved to his current post [Governor of the Bank of England]. His term is due to expire in January 2020. He is one of the contenders to succeed the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, who is nominated to serve as the next President of the European Central Bank.” The Renminbi as the world’s new reserve currency? You have to run trade deficits to get a lot of your currency out into the world economy for it to act as its reserve currency. China has for years explicitly manipulated the value of the renminbi to serve its own ends. It has one of the diciest banking systems on the planet. What could go wrong?
“The grinding legislative gauntlet that produced Obamacare” was completely self-inflicted.
“Corporate Media Bias Against Sanders Is Structural, Not a Conspiracy”, so when our overlords don’t even bother hiding their conspiracies, they become structural now?
David Koch was thoroughly evil. So much like Trump, Jeffery Epstein, etc. he fit right into the New York social scene.
I sincerely hope that was the peerless JamesBaldwin and not the hapless actor, William Baldwin, writing.
Hugh: Meritocracy was always a con, a “I deserve what I got. You don’t.”
I do not think that is entirely true. There was a time during the Second World War and during the Cold War up thru the 1970s, when a general belief in the need to find and develop competence in administering and leading the institutions of the political economy — government, business corporations etc. — led to genuine efforts to feed the best and the brightest into elite channels of advancement — ruling class schools, deep training in corporate business for technical staff. The “legacy” students were still admitted as a matter of course, but room was made for more than packing peanuts. And, it was not just selection, it was an ethic.
There was a very profound and in retrospect, unsubtle shift toward generalized corruption in the 1980s. Part of that is the credentializing, which legitimizes “I deserve what I got. You don’t” while ignoring the extent to which “what I got” has become not the by-product of production of value, but is instead the consequence of predation or parasitism, as the case may be.
When the privileged liberal wrings his hands over an abstract “inequality” but cannot acknowledge the specific predatory practices driving the creation of Koch-type billionaire oligarchs or crime family businesses like Goldman Sachs, then we have the present political paralysis, where liberal reformers are unwilling to countenance doing anything to alter the “structures” that support class privilege and income.
Meritocracy is a con. I find bruce wilder’s description of it as genuine efforts to feed the best and the brightest into elite channels of advancement pretty damning. Take children who seem able to thrive at a defined curriculum, tell them that they are better than the rest of the population, and hold the glittering prize for advancement in front of them. Who can seriously think that the result will be broad-based welfare and prosperity?
This restricts the concept of “merit” to elite, advanced positions. If you say to the average person that you don’t believe in meritocracy, their response is likely to be “If you need brain surgery, do you want a butterfingered oaf? Don’t you want the best surgeon?” I got a lot of mileage three years ago by saying, “Yeah, I’d want Ben Carson. I just don’t want him to be president.” I believe in merit; I want the best teachers to teach, the best engineers to engineer, the best mechanics to check my HVAC system, even the best ditch diggers to dig ditches. But none of that is merit in today’s political discourse, unless of course you’re discussing monetary incentives, a whole other con game. “Merit” means rule, which in our political system means wealth. And that justifies all the inequality!
It is a profoundly reactionary position to reduce the explanation of the value of performance to the qualities of an individual performer. That conceptualization is used by right-wingers to oppose the minimum wage: “some people are not worth $15 an hour and the policy condemns them to unemployment” goes the argument. And, at the other end of the spectrum, multi-million “compensation” is defended as due to “star” performers.
These reactionary ideas hide the political power inherent in organizing bureaucracies to administer systems. The attachment of conservative economists to the myths of the magic Market is part of this hiding from the reality of Power — in the mythical market, all are equal and independent actors.
Conservatives want hierarchy, of course — the feudal hierarchy of meritless, hereditary rank extracting wealth from the labor and misery of the hoi polloi. They want that hierarchy to be natural and unquestioned.
To me, the question of who should be boss is like the question, “who should sing tenor in the choir?”. The answer to the latter question is, ” he who can sing tenor”. (Semi-quoting Henry Ford.).
In a political economy importantly organized by bureaucracy, there is need for talent and expertise and deeply educated people — lots of them really thruout the hierarchy. But, performance of the system is a property of the system.
The reactionary philosopher Nozick argued from the example of Wilt Chamberlain that just distribution was incompatible with any but the most minimal government. It was a crazy, stupid argument that ignored the ways in which the economic value of Wilt’s talents were a product of organization and organization’s technologies: professional sports, arenas, television.
As humans, our power is in the organization of a deep division of labor in society. We need elites at the top to prudently direct and coordinate mutually beneficial exchange and highly decentralized decision-making. Instead, we have created a system that selects for greedy, amoral psychopaths and narcissists at the top and centralizes power and decision-making to facilitate predatory extraction.
Ethics and the nature of “merit” in meritocracy are inseparable. “Meritocracy” as we know it is an apology for monstrous behavior and pretension.
There are a hundred reasons why power shouldn’t be allowed to concentrate, reasons why concentrated power is destructive to society. “Meritocracy” becomes yet another masking ruse for power pathology, because both the meritocracy (to a point) and the masking ruse (for a while) do work.
I liked that Home Depot was a better one-stop big-box hardware store than Lowes, the defunct HomeBase, or any of my local chain stores. I came to always shop there first. But I also became oblivious to the fact that the chain was slowly backsliding into the becoming the K-Mart of hardware stores. It seems that in the continuous mindless boardroom drive for increased market share and short term profits, they were increasingly selling consumer grade garbage and service. I woke from my marketing/advertisement addled daze after I was realized I was finding far too many superior products for better prices at little local single store shops. I finally had to make the decision to avoid HD lumber, tile, paint and appliance departments entirely. Still, Home Depot parking lots seem relatively full so not everybody has figured this out yet.
It seems “the system” creates a meritocratic climb, peak, then backslide towards mediocracy/idiocracy. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen everywhere from HMOs to places I’ve worked. It seems that without some kind of regulation mechanism that this is a natural human process in many areas.
Bruce Wilder – thanks for picking that error up. Not concentrating!
“Meritocracy” – is really a systemic justification of a pyramidal hierarchy, and provides us all with an illusion of equity. The system is essentially good, even if there are some rotten apples here and then. And if you are good enough, you will get promoted to the right level in the pyramid. Its close ally is social mobility.
But being “good enough” is really about how effectively you serve the hierarchy above you. Eg. As a journalist your career won’t go very far in the hierarchy, if you are constantly breaking stories about government or corporate mendacity – Seymour Hersh and Chris Hedges are good cases in point.
Meritocracy keeps us obedient and working hard to get the next pay cheque / promotion. And for children, it provides a veneer of equality of opportunity, without acknowledging the fact that the children of professional and elite classes have an inherent advantage over those from working classes.
@ven. My last comment is not to be confused with “meritocracy” working within a corporation or very large organization. It was meant to describe the life cycle of large business systems in a caveat emptor world where meritocracy is assumed by the mob.
For individuals working inside the corporate world, meritocracy is often a con. It’s far easier to advance oneself by knowing (allying with) the right people and playing the right games. Those rules also apply if one is obviously brilliantly value-creative, because the PTB can often view you as a threat to their own status. Under those conditions it’s safest to be working directly with an ownership.
@bruce wilder, I think you’re taking “meritocracy” to mean “organization of the economy by a specialized hierarchy educated for the positions,” rather like the French grandes ecoles career paths, and dismissing the meaning of “rule by the smartest individuals” as a right-wing corruption of “meritocracy”. I don’t agree. I think from the get-go “meritocracy” was embraced by a society where everyone is above average as a means of economic sorting of individuals, and a justification of extraordinarily unequal economic sorting.
Why should a grocery clerk stocking shelves be paid less than the manager sitting in her office? I can’t think of any explanation that doesn’t depend on the notion that the manager is more valuable than the clerk. It’s not simply that the two functions differ. The performers of the two functions have radically different non-job-related positions in life. If meritocracy is simply about recognizing the superior shelf-stocker so that he will actually perform that function, it will not insist on that disparity.
“Meritocracy” holds that there are significant differences in people’s abilities to perform functions. OK, the soprano can’t sing tenor, so the tenor should sing tenor. In meritocracy, the tenor is superior, prudently directing and coordinating the choir, and the soprano defers to him. Does that answer the question, “Who should be boss?” (I wouldn’t use that as my example, but in a discussion, o-oh yeaah, will I ever take the low-hanging fruit.)
In general, there are more people with the abilities to do what we want done than we need. They will need training and experience to get there, but we should value multiple pathways over which they can come. You don’t get a better education at an elite school than you do at a solid state school. You’ll be taught by the teaching assistants of star professors, but they have to make sure than your classmates, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, pass as well. Elite schools are selling first row tickets and passes to the best cocktail parties. It’s what they call education.
As far as solid public administration goes — the New Deal was created and run mostly by the graduates of non-elite schools: Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Robert H. Jackson. And the British welfare state that we all wish we had was created by men who left school as children: Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan. These are the people that elite credentialing eliminates.
“(s)he who can” is largely determined by the social and financial capital available to be invested into a human being. except in our society, it is discussed and thought about as only resulting from the latent abilities and hard work of the individual person.
thus they are not totally “meritless” aristocracy. they are self-perpetuating aristocracy who replicate themselves, as the poor also replicate themselves. to jump from one to the other requires more than hard work. and this kind of investment in the individual starts at, or even before birth. as the observation that poorer toddlers have vocabularies thousands of words fewer than richer children do (based on environment and how much parents talk to them), and that richer children retain much more of their knowledge over the school vacation period than poor children, due to additional enrichment exercises undertaken during that time.
without an investment of some kind and opportunities (often obtained through social networks, thus social capital) to use, learn and even fail, you have no idea what individuals are genuinely capable of doing. vast numbers of the underclass may have at one time been capable of it, but the lack of finances and resources bars them from ever developing. so how do we genuine know who the “best ones” are, when we have ruled out so many potential “best ones” from ever being able to participate in the race (ugh, i hate “life as competition”) to begin with, and continually weed out as the process goes along. a lot of those weeded out lacked resources external to themselves, not internal. we have no real idea how to find the genuine internal abilities with all of these external factors playing such a hugely influential part.
do you know that the ability to finish higher education is very largely determined by finances? very few of the poorer students who start the path from community college ever obtain higher degrees. why? because the need to pay for daily living takes over. they might indeed have the brains to, but other realities impinge and they must bail. and that is from direct, personal experience and interactions with admissions and other providers of higher education. ((they quoted that less than 10% who begin at community college will ever end up with a university degree, as an example))
Elitism is a system of hereditary privilege, allegedly based on expertise. But you can reward expertise but without turning it into privilege by making sure everyone has the basics for a good life and limiting how much beyond that anyone should get.
The tenor example is flawed because almost everyone is good in multiple areas and can be trained to be better in even more. There are almost no professions that are so particular and the abilities so innate that only a “tenor” will do.
In my life, I have met many people in leadership roles who would not know real leadership if it kicked them in the ass. So I don’t think the merit argument works. If all it selects for are people who don’t lead or don’t know how to lead, what good is it?
Z
The trash media campaign against Sanders:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwed7j/bernie-sanders-doesnt-think-he-missed-his-moment-in-2016
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyzqw9/its-not-over-between-bernie-sanders-and-kamala-harris-on-medicare-for-all
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3apwj/bernie-sanders-isnt-going-to-tear-down-elizabeth-warren-thats-not-what-i-do
The interviewer, Liz Landers, perfectly epitomizes the maturity level of our media.
Z
ven
Joan et al,
Pertinent to many conversations here, is a recent interview by Chris Hedges with the author of a new book – “American Exceptionalism, American Innocence”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iO_c3KAKZI
The preface to the book starts with a particularly apposite quote by William Baldwin:
“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.”
Chiron
“The interviewer, Liz Landers, perfectly epitomizes the maturity level of our media.“
The child like maturity of the media became more obvious through the years, the Iraq War, the Russian conspiracy, is clear the Biden was the favorite but is too senile to run, the only option is Warren who won’t rock boat and already sweared loyalty to our Zionist Overlords.
Hugh
Meritocracy was always a con, a “I deserve what I got. You don’t.” It, of course, has nothing to do with libertarianism, also a con, whose mantra is “What I got is mine. What I got from the rest of you doesn’t count.” Still I found “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition” irritating. It says, “No one should weep for the wealthy,” but then spends the rest of the article doing precisely that. It somehow gets around discussing an issue that is all about class without ever looking at it in class terms (and no, the occasional reference of “middle class” doesn’t count).
It confuses the wealthy with the elites. It says that children of the “elite” have to work too hard to get their privileges, pretty much ignoring the importance of connections and heredity (whose bed they were born in) and implying that the rest of us work a lot less. It mentions legacies only in passing, an egregious oversight when you consider that rich idiots like Dubya got into Yale and the Harvard Business School and Trump got into UPenn and the Wharton School of Business.
As some of us have been saying for years now, things like billionaires and American gun cult are signs of fundamental failures in our society.
The media isn’t fooling anyone about free trade. It is simply doing its job of propagandizing, making it look like there is a reasonable (because it comes from them) alternative to what everybody else sees with their own two eyes. Americans know that free trade is a slogan for more Americans losing their jobs.
Would you seriously believe anything Mark Carney has to say? From his wiki, “Carney began his career at Goldman Sachs before joining the Canadian Department of Finance. He later served as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 until 2013, when he moved to his current post [Governor of the Bank of England]. His term is due to expire in January 2020. He is one of the contenders to succeed the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, who is nominated to serve as the next President of the European Central Bank.” The Renminbi as the world’s new reserve currency? You have to run trade deficits to get a lot of your currency out into the world economy for it to act as its reserve currency. China has for years explicitly manipulated the value of the renminbi to serve its own ends. It has one of the diciest banking systems on the planet. What could go wrong?
“The grinding legislative gauntlet that produced Obamacare” was completely self-inflicted.
“Corporate Media Bias Against Sanders Is Structural, Not a Conspiracy”, so when our overlords don’t even bother hiding their conspiracies, they become structural now?
David Koch was thoroughly evil. So much like Trump, Jeffery Epstein, etc. he fit right into the New York social scene.
bruce wilder
“The civilized have created the wretched . . .”
I sincerely hope that was the peerless JamesBaldwin and not the hapless actor, William Baldwin, writing.
Hugh: Meritocracy was always a con, a “I deserve what I got. You don’t.”
I do not think that is entirely true. There was a time during the Second World War and during the Cold War up thru the 1970s, when a general belief in the need to find and develop competence in administering and leading the institutions of the political economy — government, business corporations etc. — led to genuine efforts to feed the best and the brightest into elite channels of advancement — ruling class schools, deep training in corporate business for technical staff. The “legacy” students were still admitted as a matter of course, but room was made for more than packing peanuts. And, it was not just selection, it was an ethic.
There was a very profound and in retrospect, unsubtle shift toward generalized corruption in the 1980s. Part of that is the credentializing, which legitimizes “I deserve what I got. You don’t” while ignoring the extent to which “what I got” has become not the by-product of production of value, but is instead the consequence of predation or parasitism, as the case may be.
When the privileged liberal wrings his hands over an abstract “inequality” but cannot acknowledge the specific predatory practices driving the creation of Koch-type billionaire oligarchs or crime family businesses like Goldman Sachs, then we have the present political paralysis, where liberal reformers are unwilling to countenance doing anything to alter the “structures” that support class privilege and income.
nihil obstet
Meritocracy is a con. I find bruce wilder’s description of it as genuine efforts to feed the best and the brightest into elite channels of advancement pretty damning. Take children who seem able to thrive at a defined curriculum, tell them that they are better than the rest of the population, and hold the glittering prize for advancement in front of them. Who can seriously think that the result will be broad-based welfare and prosperity?
This restricts the concept of “merit” to elite, advanced positions. If you say to the average person that you don’t believe in meritocracy, their response is likely to be “If you need brain surgery, do you want a butterfingered oaf? Don’t you want the best surgeon?” I got a lot of mileage three years ago by saying, “Yeah, I’d want Ben Carson. I just don’t want him to be president.” I believe in merit; I want the best teachers to teach, the best engineers to engineer, the best mechanics to check my HVAC system, even the best ditch diggers to dig ditches. But none of that is merit in today’s political discourse, unless of course you’re discussing monetary incentives, a whole other con game. “Merit” means rule, which in our political system means wealth. And that justifies all the inequality!
bruce wilder
It is a profoundly reactionary position to reduce the explanation of the value of performance to the qualities of an individual performer. That conceptualization is used by right-wingers to oppose the minimum wage: “some people are not worth $15 an hour and the policy condemns them to unemployment” goes the argument. And, at the other end of the spectrum, multi-million “compensation” is defended as due to “star” performers.
These reactionary ideas hide the political power inherent in organizing bureaucracies to administer systems. The attachment of conservative economists to the myths of the magic Market is part of this hiding from the reality of Power — in the mythical market, all are equal and independent actors.
Conservatives want hierarchy, of course — the feudal hierarchy of meritless, hereditary rank extracting wealth from the labor and misery of the hoi polloi. They want that hierarchy to be natural and unquestioned.
To me, the question of who should be boss is like the question, “who should sing tenor in the choir?”. The answer to the latter question is, ” he who can sing tenor”. (Semi-quoting Henry Ford.).
In a political economy importantly organized by bureaucracy, there is need for talent and expertise and deeply educated people — lots of them really thruout the hierarchy. But, performance of the system is a property of the system.
The reactionary philosopher Nozick argued from the example of Wilt Chamberlain that just distribution was incompatible with any but the most minimal government. It was a crazy, stupid argument that ignored the ways in which the economic value of Wilt’s talents were a product of organization and organization’s technologies: professional sports, arenas, television.
As humans, our power is in the organization of a deep division of labor in society. We need elites at the top to prudently direct and coordinate mutually beneficial exchange and highly decentralized decision-making. Instead, we have created a system that selects for greedy, amoral psychopaths and narcissists at the top and centralizes power and decision-making to facilitate predatory extraction.
Ethics and the nature of “merit” in meritocracy are inseparable. “Meritocracy” as we know it is an apology for monstrous behavior and pretension.
Willy
There are a hundred reasons why power shouldn’t be allowed to concentrate, reasons why concentrated power is destructive to society. “Meritocracy” becomes yet another masking ruse for power pathology, because both the meritocracy (to a point) and the masking ruse (for a while) do work.
I liked that Home Depot was a better one-stop big-box hardware store than Lowes, the defunct HomeBase, or any of my local chain stores. I came to always shop there first. But I also became oblivious to the fact that the chain was slowly backsliding into the becoming the K-Mart of hardware stores. It seems that in the continuous mindless boardroom drive for increased market share and short term profits, they were increasingly selling consumer grade garbage and service. I woke from my marketing/advertisement addled daze after I was realized I was finding far too many superior products for better prices at little local single store shops. I finally had to make the decision to avoid HD lumber, tile, paint and appliance departments entirely. Still, Home Depot parking lots seem relatively full so not everybody has figured this out yet.
It seems “the system” creates a meritocratic climb, peak, then backslide towards mediocracy/idiocracy. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen everywhere from HMOs to places I’ve worked. It seems that without some kind of regulation mechanism that this is a natural human process in many areas.
ven
Bruce Wilder – thanks for picking that error up. Not concentrating!
“Meritocracy” – is really a systemic justification of a pyramidal hierarchy, and provides us all with an illusion of equity. The system is essentially good, even if there are some rotten apples here and then. And if you are good enough, you will get promoted to the right level in the pyramid. Its close ally is social mobility.
But being “good enough” is really about how effectively you serve the hierarchy above you. Eg. As a journalist your career won’t go very far in the hierarchy, if you are constantly breaking stories about government or corporate mendacity – Seymour Hersh and Chris Hedges are good cases in point.
Meritocracy keeps us obedient and working hard to get the next pay cheque / promotion. And for children, it provides a veneer of equality of opportunity, without acknowledging the fact that the children of professional and elite classes have an inherent advantage over those from working classes.
Willy
@ven. My last comment is not to be confused with “meritocracy” working within a corporation or very large organization. It was meant to describe the life cycle of large business systems in a caveat emptor world where meritocracy is assumed by the mob.
For individuals working inside the corporate world, meritocracy is often a con. It’s far easier to advance oneself by knowing (allying with) the right people and playing the right games. Those rules also apply if one is obviously brilliantly value-creative, because the PTB can often view you as a threat to their own status. Under those conditions it’s safest to be working directly with an ownership.
nihil obstet
@bruce wilder, I think you’re taking “meritocracy” to mean “organization of the economy by a specialized hierarchy educated for the positions,” rather like the French grandes ecoles career paths, and dismissing the meaning of “rule by the smartest individuals” as a right-wing corruption of “meritocracy”. I don’t agree. I think from the get-go “meritocracy” was embraced by a society where everyone is above average as a means of economic sorting of individuals, and a justification of extraordinarily unequal economic sorting.
Why should a grocery clerk stocking shelves be paid less than the manager sitting in her office? I can’t think of any explanation that doesn’t depend on the notion that the manager is more valuable than the clerk. It’s not simply that the two functions differ. The performers of the two functions have radically different non-job-related positions in life. If meritocracy is simply about recognizing the superior shelf-stocker so that he will actually perform that function, it will not insist on that disparity.
“Meritocracy” holds that there are significant differences in people’s abilities to perform functions. OK, the soprano can’t sing tenor, so the tenor should sing tenor. In meritocracy, the tenor is superior, prudently directing and coordinating the choir, and the soprano defers to him. Does that answer the question, “Who should be boss?” (I wouldn’t use that as my example, but in a discussion, o-oh yeaah, will I ever take the low-hanging fruit.)
In general, there are more people with the abilities to do what we want done than we need. They will need training and experience to get there, but we should value multiple pathways over which they can come. You don’t get a better education at an elite school than you do at a solid state school. You’ll be taught by the teaching assistants of star professors, but they have to make sure than your classmates, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, pass as well. Elite schools are selling first row tickets and passes to the best cocktail parties. It’s what they call education.
As far as solid public administration goes — the New Deal was created and run mostly by the graduates of non-elite schools: Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Robert H. Jackson. And the British welfare state that we all wish we had was created by men who left school as children: Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan. These are the people that elite credentialing eliminates.
anon y'mouse
“(s)he who can” is largely determined by the social and financial capital available to be invested into a human being. except in our society, it is discussed and thought about as only resulting from the latent abilities and hard work of the individual person.
thus they are not totally “meritless” aristocracy. they are self-perpetuating aristocracy who replicate themselves, as the poor also replicate themselves. to jump from one to the other requires more than hard work. and this kind of investment in the individual starts at, or even before birth. as the observation that poorer toddlers have vocabularies thousands of words fewer than richer children do (based on environment and how much parents talk to them), and that richer children retain much more of their knowledge over the school vacation period than poor children, due to additional enrichment exercises undertaken during that time.
without an investment of some kind and opportunities (often obtained through social networks, thus social capital) to use, learn and even fail, you have no idea what individuals are genuinely capable of doing. vast numbers of the underclass may have at one time been capable of it, but the lack of finances and resources bars them from ever developing. so how do we genuine know who the “best ones” are, when we have ruled out so many potential “best ones” from ever being able to participate in the race (ugh, i hate “life as competition”) to begin with, and continually weed out as the process goes along. a lot of those weeded out lacked resources external to themselves, not internal. we have no real idea how to find the genuine internal abilities with all of these external factors playing such a hugely influential part.
do you know that the ability to finish higher education is very largely determined by finances? very few of the poorer students who start the path from community college ever obtain higher degrees. why? because the need to pay for daily living takes over. they might indeed have the brains to, but other realities impinge and they must bail. and that is from direct, personal experience and interactions with admissions and other providers of higher education. ((they quoted that less than 10% who begin at community college will ever end up with a university degree, as an example))
Hugh
Elitism is a system of hereditary privilege, allegedly based on expertise. But you can reward expertise but without turning it into privilege by making sure everyone has the basics for a good life and limiting how much beyond that anyone should get.
The tenor example is flawed because almost everyone is good in multiple areas and can be trained to be better in even more. There are almost no professions that are so particular and the abilities so innate that only a “tenor” will do.
In my life, I have met many people in leadership roles who would not know real leadership if it kicked them in the ass. So I don’t think the merit argument works. If all it selects for are people who don’t lead or don’t know how to lead, what good is it?