Monday, September 3, 2012

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites ** 1/2

This book, whose subtitle is America After Meritocracy, purports to show that our current crisis of public confidence results from the failure of meritocracy. Meritocratic thinking is fundamental to the American creed, but the disasters of the past decade -- the financial crisis, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and so on -- demonstrate the bankruptcy of the approach.

That's what the author says the book is about, but he doesn't question the fundamental correctness of a meritocracy. He points out how difficult it is to assess merit in real life situations and illustrates the problems that come from the single-minded pursuit of limited goals, but his suggested solutions are the traditional liberal ones: progressive taxation, class solidarity, and government regulation.

Hayes' prose gets a bit overheated when he describes the crises, so that it's easy to lose track of his point. Ultimately, he attributes our lack of trust in social institutions to two factors: the unprecedented inequality in modern America and the inherently different interests of the elite and the rest of us. The role of meritocracy in  his analysis is that its individualistic bias sanctions the inequality and that people welcomed into the elite naturally take on the interests of the elite class. It seems to me that these issues arise regardless of the method used to choose the governing class, so that it's not a strike against meritocracy.


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