In this episode, Diane details the discussion of the history, pluses, and minuses with meritocracy through the prism of three recent books on the topic. Michael and Diane then discuss how this ...
“A narrative is emerging. It is that the new meritocratic aristocracy has come to look like every other aristocracy.” — David Brooks, “The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite,” The New York Times, ...
Today, parents scramble to shuttle their kids to and from extra-curriculars, provide them with SAT prep, and leverage their money and connections — all to get their children admitted into elite ...
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? “Merit is a sham,” Daniel Markovits writes in the first sentence of his ...
The realization that life isn't as fair as democracy obliges us to pretend it is ought to cool populist passions rather than intensifying them. There are not many contemporary phenomena that have ...
Michael Young’s novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, was written in the voice of a historian in 2033 describing a meritocratic Britain where talent was identified, nurtured, and ...
In the US the cream used to rise to the top, but that's no longer true. What happened? "The Aristocracy of Talent" tried to answer that question.
Even people on the fringes of the meritocracy, even those members of the meritocracy who do not share its core political beliefs still engage in all the social posturing and scraping and all engage in ...
Imagine for a moment that you were an incompetent public official, and you didn't want anyone to know you were incompetent. What would you do? Well, your first task would be to destroy the meritocracy ...