Why Our Elites Stink

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The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

"Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment."

Or in the tech press, where multi-billion dollar companies are "disruptive".

In this case, I dismiss what he says because he's making exactly zero attempt to control for exogenous variables. There's a lot more going on than just changing from a WASP-only aristocracy to a meritocracy of sorts. Vast cultural shifts have necessitated the change, and cause other things to happen as well. Just to pick a few examples, birth rates have dropped, the US population grows only through immigration, basically. Cell phones happened. That changes a lot. Did the WASP-only aristocracy have computers on their desks? No? Did they have The Internet?

This is a fascinating point, and predicts the crticisms here about how "elites" are defined. All the successful people i know in the tech industry feel like outsiders and rebels. And as such, it's an interesting question whether the tech industry feels more of a motivation for success than we feel a responsility to society. I don't know that we don't, and I don't know whether some "elites" of the past did. But it's an interesting perspective on meritocracy.

In the tech industry we can be dismissive of bankers, but what an interesting thought if they too feel like rebels and outsiders, rather than being the prep school squares we might envision. When I think of the finance folks I know, they really are more similar to tech folks than different.

I can't help but feel that much of the criticisms here are semantic in nature and result from zeroing in on sentences and phrases rather than the central idea of the article.

I certainly dont have the answer, but David Brooks is making an interesting point. Values are important. And this reminds us of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin advocating for real progress rather than quick wins.

It's a potentially interesting distinction, but Brooks doesn't justify it coherently or delve into the implications at all. He compares and contrasts yesterday's elites to today's, but these comparisons hold under either hypothesis. It would have been more interesting if he provided a coherent argument for his claim, or offered any prescriptions to treat the underlying problem (or even to quell the symptoms).

I think David Brooks is over-summarizing Hayes' thesis and also making it sound like he is interested in violent overthrow of "the elites" by comparing him to the French Revolution.

But, those great men actually realized, at least to some extent, how much they stunk. They crafted a limited government because they recognized how easily corrupted people in power are.

This fantasy that everything will be okay if we simply pick the "right" elites has been persistent since FDR's administration. There's no such thing. Brooks argues that we just need to inject some ethics into the process. Good luck. If you can figure out how to do that, we don't need prisons, we don't need 99.9% of the laws we have, and we don't need 99.9% of the government we have. Of course, humans don't work that way. Which is why our government was set up the way it was in the first place.

[1] Our beloved Ben Franklin became postmaster just so he could scoop other peoples' stories for his own newspaper.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_burr

This nicely sums up something that has plagued me for years now. I grew up on the lower middle class side of WASP. My dad is an engineer and my mom waited tables at Zarda BBQ to cover the mortgage. I went the Naval Academy and got the live-in-spartan-quarters treatment and went out into the fleet and felt the responsibility as I looked in a man's eye and said things he didn't want to hear.

When I went to medical school, married with two kids, having completed two tours on ships and a tour on staff back at the Academy, everything got turned on its head. Here were strivers, but, and I remember thinking then "There I was running with a wolf pack. Now I'm swimming with sharks".

Brooks is comparing the best elements of the old elites to the worst elements of the new elite. There's certainly a leadership ethos among the new elites. Try walking around an Ivy Leagure campus without being reminded of some politically correct "cause." Even top ranked business schools eagerly embrace "corporate social responsibility" and other concepts implying a sense of "stewardship." They do use the same old-timey language Brooks would prefer, but the basic ethos is still there.

Ignore Brooks's arguments, the book he refers to actually sounds like the real deal. I've long thought that meritocracy has some inherent problems. That's not to say we should throw it out, but rather that we should be aware of the practical and moral limitations of meritocracy.

Its been my experience that people who believe in service, which is to say they believe they are there to serve the organization/community/nation in order to help it achieve its goals, are the people who make great institutions.

People who believe in wealth acquisition and power make corrupt institutions.

The former live to empower everyone else, the latter live to dis-empower everyone else.

In Why our Elites Stink, Brooks argues that our elites are failing to live up to a “self-conscious leadership code” that a now vanquished vanguard once had. Before we get to whether such a code even makes sense (I think it does, but not in Brooks' sense), consider Brooks’ general critique of Twilight:

It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

To invoke Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live, really? I can see why this complaint might play well with a certain demographic. After all, successful Americans, especially members of the upper-middle class, do spend an inordinate amount of time shuttling their kids to piano lessons, ensuring that their children gain entry into the best high schools and colleges, and generally putting in serious hours at work. They also spend a lot of time ensuring that their own work product exceeds the prevailing standards of their respective fields. They are killing it, I can assure you. These folks are sweating blood everyday to ensure that they don’t lose their place in our economic biosphere, a system that perhaps has less in common with a biological environment – where ecological balance is at least possible – and more with an oil-soaked incline that very much prefers culling over cultivating.

What Brooks does not realize is that the elites Hayes has in mind are not the folks killing themselves to excel as line-contributors at management consulting firms, law firms, and technology companies. Hayes is talking about people who, through a mix of talent, political maneuvering and luck are able to ascend to the top of the mountain and defend it against those (i.e., the line-contributors) who desperately need access to capital and the other resources (political connections, e.g.) to climb further up the mountain. Yes, I am saying that Brooks’ has conflated (deliberately?) upper-middle class strivers with the real elite. And for that reason alone, his direct assault against Twilight fails.

But what of Brooks’ positive argument, the idea that elites today are sorely lacking a code of honor? Consider Brooks’ own words:

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

There is some “truthiness” here. It is true that if you read about the Libor scandal, you will get the sense that a bunch of immature brats are now playing skipper atop large vessels that they do not quite comprehend.

Yet it is also apparent that Brooks does not understand the preconditions to creating and maintaining a self-conscious code of stewardship and honor. That code is only possible where a number of preconditions have obtained. First, wealth and earning disparities between capital and labor have to be reasonable, a point that Hayes repeatedly makes in Twilight.

Second, such a code is possible only where the word “merit” does not mean something like “best able to enrich Zeus and his favored demigods.” Brooks in fact touches on this, but only obliquely. He observes that “Wall Street firms . . . now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character.” Presumably Brooks would agree that experience makes someone truly more meritorious in the world of banking, since experience would inculcate a broad sense of social responsibility.

I don’t know if this is true of executives in the banking world; it’s quite possible that senior bankers are just as prone to take huge risks as their younger counterparts, given the willingness of Congress to wash away billion-dollar gaffes through bail outs. Nonetheless, I would generally agree with Brooks that experience and character are characteristics relevant to a recruiting or hiring decision. But I digress. The point here is that merit must actually be something genuine and (wherever and whenever possible) immune from manipulation. Where such an immunity is impossible, merit must be something that ordinary people can fight to have reinstated, followed or respected within the key institutions that structure and reproduce society over time.

Defining genuineness is not easy. It doesn’t mean gauged by standardized tests, which are suspect as tools of exigency and manipulation (see the history of military recruiting, which I think of as the sordid incubator of modern standardized tests). Ensuring that merit is a “genuine” concept is simply a way of saying that this word should not become co-opted by an existing regime to justify its own immoral conduct. Put another, perhaps stronger, way: Merit must be defined independently of what happens to be beneficial for the existing elite. Is that hard to do? Absolutely. Should we strive to attain this lofty goal? Without a doubt.

The third precondition is related to the second: There must be mechanisms and institutions in place to prevent Zeus, as well as his favored demigods, from (1) controlling the very definition of “merit” – though controlling access to key institutions and capital and (2) living a distant life, a life immune to the fears, concerns, and hopes of those who do not live at the top. In Hayes’ parlance, we need to dismantle the “autocatalytic” infrastructure that allows elites to rig the game in their favor. We need less, not more, social distance.

In a nutshell, then, Brooks’ positive diagnosis fails because he hasn’t done any rigorous thinking about the core problem. Hayes is right: It’s not just that the people in power don’t happen to have a code of honor, it’s that our most important economic and political institutions are architected to reward only those people who are willing to forever flush that code of honor from their psyches. That dear friends, is, unfortunately, today’s price of admission to Mount Olympus.

But, really, this talk of "elites" tends to put me on edge, because a lot of times it's really about who you define as the elite. I came of age politically at the time when anybody to the left of Rush Limbaugh was an effete "latte liberal", and the word "elite" basically referred to anyone who had a college degree and saw through the insane rhetoric of the time. Who you call "elite" becomes part of your agenda, essentially.

Brooks goes on about diversity and the decline of WASP dominance as an obvious sign of the shift to meritocracy. This out of hand dismisses the possibility the WASPs just actually were/are elite. Why is this a fair assumption?

http://blog.jim.com/culture/not-the-cognitive-elite-3.html