Meritocracy Quotes

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Meritocracy So many talented people with no contacts. So many people with contacts without talent.

Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in willful ignorance.

America loves the myth of a meritocracy more than anything else, because it lets us ignore the reality of the impact of bigotry.

A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

Fransisco, you're some kind of very high nobility, aren't you?" He answered, "Not yet. The reason my family has lasted for such a long time is that none of us has ever been permitted to think he is born a d'Anconia. We are expected to become one.

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout.

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again.

People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it.

The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune.

Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.

This is the cycle of a dynamic society. Equality is never a final state, democracy never a stable equilibrium: they are processes, they are struggles. Our task is now to recognize that that struggle is ours.

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal (...). There is a tendency (...) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

It is no accident that those who are most likely to believe in the myth of meritocracy are young, upper-class, white Americans.

Meritocracy flourishes in sunlight.

Those who believe in equality of outcomes receive top-paying administrative jobs. Those who believe in meritocracy are frowned upon.

That is the great danger of meritocracy: the people who reach the top of the system are precisely the people who have most completely identified with the system and its demands, creating a vicious circle preventing any actual change. It is no accident that conservatives tend to employ the rhetoric of social mobility so readily, as social climbers generally do not ask questions about the ladder.

Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving. Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving.

Paul liked to pick out the secretly cool people, people too cool to flash their coolness. The cool people were not always or even usually the same as the shiny people. Often someone shiny was too conventionally good-looking to be cool but they were still compelling, in terms of sheer wattage. Paul knew he wasn't good-looking enough to be shiny, but he could be cool in certain contexts. Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.

We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.

Good deeds must be rewarded by the system and crimes be punished - this is the essence of meritocracy.

War is never a meritocracy for the casualties.

Although it condemns "discrimination" and advocates "freedom of choice", liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy.

There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”[18

We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless in the principle of forgiveness to the powerful.

the average number of legs in any human population is slightly less than two. So most people actually do have “more legs than average.

We need democracy and meritocracy, not mockracy and hypocrisy.

We should strive to make our society more like Summer Showtime: Mostly a meritocracy, despite some vicious backstabbing. Everyone gets a spot in the chorus. Bring white shorts from home.

Tech’s love affair with the myth of meritocracy is ironic for an industry so in thrall to the potential of Big Data, because this is a rare case where the data actually exists. But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout.

At any rate, humans change over time based on their actions. Truth be told, at the end of the day, equality is just a fantasy. And most of us go through life denying the fact that we live in a meritocracy.

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.

Perhaps it is the case that no organization or hierarchy can withstand the closest of scrutiny. Not even a smugly self-touted meritocracy. The success and persistence of utter fools everywhere is sad testament to that.

Don’t believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone’s future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they’re born into.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade.

What took me to cooking was that there was something honest about it,” says David Chang. There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway. You either can—or can’t—make an omelet. You either can—or can’t—chop an onion, shake a pan, keep up with the other cooks, replicate again and again, perfectly, the dishes that need to be done. No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts. The kitchen is the last meritocracy—a world of absolutes; one knows without any ambiguity at the end of each day how one did.

It is the curse of the competent―not to be called upon.

If someone's deeds lower his position, his pedigree cannot elevate it.

Recognize that having an effective idea meritocracy requires that you understand the merit of each person’s ideas.

The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another.

Socialism is not a meritocracy. By definition it places increasingly confining restraints on those that succeed the most.

the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.

We simply cannot engage with either the ills or promises of society if we continue to turn a blind eye to the egregious and willful ignorance that enables us to still not “get it” in so many ways. It is by no means our making, but given the culture we are emerging from and immersed in, we are responsible. White folks’ particular reluctance to acknowledge impact as a collective while continuing to benefit from the construct of the collective leaves a wound intact without a dressing. The air needed to breathe through forgiveness is smothered. Healing is suspended for all. Truth is necessary for reconciliation. Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model—the myth of meritocracy—that is the foundation of this country’s untruth?

At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal

I think we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don't see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation.

Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin—who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours—like you said you could, and like the job requires—or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen. The restaurant kitchen may indeed be the last, glorious meritocracy—where anybody with the skills and the heart is welcomed. But if you’re old, or out of shape—or were never really certain about your chosen path in the first place—then you will surely and quickly be removed. Like a large organism’s natural antibodies fighting off an invading strain of bacteria, the life will slowly push you out or kill you off. Thus it is. Thus it shall always be. The ideal progression for a nascent culinary career would be to, first, take a jump straight into the deep end of the pool. Long before student loans and culinary school, take the trouble to find out who you are.

But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule.

Vietnamese probed him for anti-white and hence anti-American sentiments. He made it abundantly clear he came from a country that believed in meritocracy. White or black, work your ass off and you will profit.

The wealthy and powerful have rigged the system to perpetuate their privilege; the professional classes have figured out how to pass their advantages on to their children, converting the meritocracy into a hereditary aristocracy; colleges that claim to select students on merit give an edge to the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the well-connected. According to this complaint, meritocracy is a myth, a distant promise yet to be redeemed.14

Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. They also do whites a disservice by obscuring the white allies behind the scenes who worked hard and long to open the field. These allies could serve as much-needed role models for other whites.

Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be blank and be filled in.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.

Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in. We are expected to judge ourselves on what we’re told are the objective measures of our bodies, and we are reminded that others will judge us based on our bodies too.

Structural racism is never a case of innocent and pure, persecuted people of colour versus white people intent on evil and malice. Rather, it is about how Britain's relationship with race infects and distorts equal opportunity. I think that we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don't see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don't want it willfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie, the aforementioned drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it's not being practised.

The key to entering into the Divine Exchange is never our worthiness but always God’s graciousness. Any attempt to measure or increase our worthiness will always fall short, or it will force us into the position of denial and pretend, which produces the constant perception of hypocrisy in religious people. To switch to an “economy of grace” is a switch that is very hard for humans to make. We base almost everything in human culture on achievement, performance, accomplishment, an equal exchange value, or some kind of worthiness gauge. I call it meritocracy. Unless one personally experiences a dramatic and personal breaking of the rules of merit (forgiveness or undeserved goodness), it is almost impossible to disbelieve or operate outside of its rigid logic. This cannot happen theoretically or abstractly. It cannot happen “out there” but must be known personally “in here.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right. Many

We are told that our choices are our own, and our bodies are reflections of the rightness of those choices. If we are thin, we will be presumed to have made good choices. If we are fat, we must have chosen poorly. Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in.

The first commendment of hte post 1970s meritocracy can be sumed up as follows: "Thou shall provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual oritentation, but worry not about equality of outcomes." But what we've seen time and time again is that the two aren't so neatly separated. If you don't concern yourself at all with equality fo outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish.

Liberalism is the ideology at the center of conservative arguments against affirmative action and equal opportunity. By proposing that, all things being equal, everyone has the same opportunity to compete in the U.S. marketplace, success is determined by how hard someone works and not by their economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race. Ethnic and racial identities are to be assimilated, lost, and erased through the celebrated "melting pot" of U.S. culture. Liberalism thus devalues the importance of communitarian experiences and social identities as determinants or barriers to individual success. Instead, it proposes that all individuals are fundamentally equal and that, regardless of their social identity, everyone can control his or her fate through hard work, learned skills, and acquired education- the foundational myth of a U.S. meritocracy.

Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes.

With a blade at your throat, a well-connected uncle or a wealthy mother could not save you. Only you could save yourself.

The traditional way of thinking about the conflict between the rich and the rest—as a battle between capital and labor—no longer captures what is really going on.

American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy. And meritocracy does not dismantle but rather renovates aristocracy, fashioning a new caste order, contrived for a world in which wealth consists not in land or factories but rather in human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.

This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences.

If a criminal becomes a politician, it's the fault of the citizens, not the system, and if a system keeps failing to oust the criminals from politics, that too is the fault of the citizens.

Innovation liberalism is "a liberalism of the rich," to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society's wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy--a system where everyone gets an equal chance and the truly talented get to rise. Once that requirement is satisfied--once diversity has been achieved and the brilliant people of all races and genders have been identified and credentialed--this species of liberal can't really conceive of any further grievance against the system. The demands of ordinary working-class people, Gruman says, are unpersuasive to them: "Janitors, fast-food servers home care or child care providers--most of whom are women and people of color--they don't have college degrees." And if you don't have a college degree in Boston--brother, you've got no one to blame but yourself.

The universities, the colleges, the schools, should not only teach political science—it is such a stupid idea to teach political science! Teach political science but also teach political art, because science is of no use; you have to teach practical politics. And those professors in the universities should prepare politicians, give them certain qualities. Then the people who are ruling now all over the world will be nowhere at all. Then you will find rulers well trained, cultured, knowing the art and the science of politics, and always ready to go to the professors, to the scholars. And slowly it may be possible that they can approach the highest level of meritocracy: the intuitive people. If this is possible, then we will have, for the first time, something that is really human—giving dignity to humanity, integrity to individuals. For the first time you will have some real democracy in the world. What exists now as democracy is not democracy—it is mobocracy.

They should live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure of difference between man and man.

Under this framework, it’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (not in jail, not insane, and not dead—which is more work for some than others), and any work product beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But Millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet Millennials are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told Millennials to accumulate as much human capital as we could, and we did, but the market hasn’t held up its side of the bargain.

Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it.

Overt bigotry, Jim Crow laws and policies, government-mandated discrimination, and the belief in black inferiority have virtually disappeared. Laissez-faire racism, instead, involves persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks for their own conditions, appeals to meritocracy, and resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate America’s racist social conditions and institutions. Government is formally race neutral and committed to antidiscrimination, and most white Americans prefer a more volitional and cultural, as opposed to inherent and biological, interpretation of blacks’ disadvantage status.

Neoliberalism insists that if we work hard enough, we can earn as much money as anyone else. Of course, the concept of meritocracy is integral to neoliberalism and erases the reality of capital itself, that capitalism is not just material capital but also, importantly, social and cultural capital. Without these forms of capital, (p. 77) one cannot, in fact, “succeed” in a capitalist culture. One obvious example is the art world, where one can only have their work shown in a gallery if they have connections to that gallery (galleries do not, for the most part, accept unsolicited submissions). All the cash in the world can’t create the generations of social connections of a middle-class family, whose circle might include art collectors, gallerists, critics, and artists. It is also the values and unspoken rules of the ruling class that distinguish who is allowed in and who is not.

The ills of the world, and their cures, are listed below: 1) A world of privilege is a world of elitism and injustice. Meritocracy is the cure. 2) Capitalism, the creed of “Greed is good”, is the disease of materialism and objectification for the sole purpose of profiting the ownership class. A new spiritual, artistic, creative and intellectual paradigm is the cure. 3) Abrahamism is a mental illness. Illuminism is the psychological cure. 4) The religious divide between East and West has held back global progress. Illuminism, a religion of enlightenment and reincarnation in common with Eastern thinking, yet steeped in the most profound Western thinking, is the bridge. The

The middle class and upper middle class are highly attached to the institution of school explicitly as a sorting mechanism, as a way of justifying privileges of which middle-class members are already central beneficiaries. These critics suggest that the entire notion of schools as meritocracies actually reifies and reinforces class privilege--making those whom school rewards (those who already have a lot of benefits) feel they deserve the privileges they have.

It's capitalism that's crazy. It's neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that's crazy. It's the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it's your fault if you're broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It's the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we're crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That's fucking crazy...

The tyranny of merit arises from more than the rhetoric of rising. It consists in a cluster of attitudes and circumstances that, taken together, have made meritocracy toxic. First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts democracy and disempowers ordinary

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

As inequality has grown, as its negative consequences have become harder and harder to ignore, our response has been to put more and more weight on the educational system, to look to school reform as the means of closing the 'achievement gap' and of guaranteeing the increasingly illusory promise of equal opportunity. We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task.

In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “misrecognition.” Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual’s hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children.

1 in every 28 children in the United States—more than 3.6 percent—now has a parent in jail or prison. Just 25 years ago, the figure was only 1 in 125. For black children, incarceration is an especially common family circumstance. More than 1 in 9 black children have a parent in prison or jail, a rate that has more than quadrupled in the past 25 years.”57 Not

We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

Because that’s not what the B-man is, either. You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy. . . .

By the time Napoleon had spent five years at Brienne and one at the École Militaire he was thoroughly imbued with the military ethos, which was to stay with him for the rest of his life and was to colour his beliefs and outlook deeply. His acceptance of the revolutionary principles of equality before the law, rational government, meritocracy, efficiency and aggressive nationalism fit in well with this ethos but he had little interest in equality of outcome, human rights, freedom of the press or parliamentarianism, all of which, to his mind, did not. Napoleon’s upbringing imbued him with a reverence for social hierarchy, law and order, and a strong belief in reward for merit and courage, but also a dislike of politicians, lawyers, journalists and Britain.

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

More fundamentally, meritocracy is impossible to achieve, because, as Young says, a meritocracy is always based on an imperfect definition of merit and often narrowly defined to favor training, connections, and education primarily available to the wealthy. Take Stanford. Because Stanford is filled with students with top high-school GPAs and SAT scores, administrators can pat themselves on the back and say, “We only admit the best students. We’re a meritocracy.” The students are encouraged to think similarly. But is it just a coincidence that the median annual family income of a Stanford student is $167,500 while the national median is roughly one-third that? Did those high-achieving students naturally get high SAT scores, or did they benefit from their parents’ paying for tutors and sending them to private schools? Privilege accumulates as you advance in life. If the college you attend is the basis of your future employment networks, then it is impossible to say that your employment success is solely based on merit.

The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted. This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.

Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for outcasts, rebels, and the socially obscure. He secured higher military rank even though he had been successful in combat. He adroitly worked CBS News, the Washington Post, and the United States Senate, yet still rose to prominence.

It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life. These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism. With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing. So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.

There is a certain strain of modern Western sociopolitical thinker that aggressively admires “meritocracy.” Every society should be a meritocracy, argue these adherents, and we should not pass laws that favor one group of people over another, for any reason. There should be no affirmative action laws for university admissions, no initiatives to gender-balance workforces. The cream shall simply rise to the top! These people (usually heterosexual, rich, white men, with a bookshelf full of Ayn Rand novels) conveniently forget that for a meritocracy to work—for a society to properly value and celebrate hard work and individual success —the people within the society need to start from the same point of origin. Otherwise, the cream isn’t rising to the top— the people who were closest to the top already are rising to the top, and the whole concept of meritocracy crumbles to dust. What they are actually calling for, these people, is a pseudo-meritocracy that does not distinguish between the accomplishments of a man with a Mayflower last name who inherited a billion dollars from his dad and those of a Black woman who was born into poverty in a redlined neighborhood in a state that enforces draconian, racist laws. (Some people, as the old saying goes, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.) It’s not a meritocracy if some runners start the race ten feet from the finish line and some are denied entry to the race because of systemic biases within the Racing Commission.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)