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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

Weird. David Brooks in person: rather interesting. David Brooks on paper: easily dismissable.

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?

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I think you missed the point. The problem is in having a system which labels itself meritocratic, because it lacks the concept of an elite. When you have such a system, those who rise to power do so with the personal story that they earned it. Brooks is arguing that while we used to have social values that allowed some classes to project themselves as "elites," at least in those days the elites had a sense of responsibility for the culture, and for the institutions they guarded. We had the downside of people legitimately feeling they were better than others, and the upside of a more tightly run ship.

I do agree that he's full of shit. He's being nostalgic for a time he did not even live through, and he makes ridiculous sweeping statements like, "Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character."

I agree that he's nostalgic and full of shit but you're putting words in his mouth when you say the problem is "those who rise to power do so with the personal story that they earned it." Brooks is arguing that they DID earn it, he says the mechanisms that put people at the top tend to be honest and that people at the top work more than others. What he's saying when he's being nostalgic is that the old people at the top had a sense of responsibility to society. You could call it a patronizing attitude.

But as we seem to agree that's bs for a number of reasons. Most notably that Brooks even says the old "elite" were sexist and racist (at least anti-Semetic). But if you're a racist, sexist leader, you probably don't really have the benefit of those people you're racist and sexist to in mind. Or if in some weird contradiction you do, your bigoted attitude likely makes you a poor steward even with the best of intentions.

Yes, he asks if we would say government is working better now than 60 years ago, and given (just for starters) the huge difference in opportunities available for women and minorities, I'm not seeing why I shouldn't say that.

The whole thing rests on a premise that, in some vague and mostly-unspecified way, "things used to be better," or at least "people used to think things were better." But this doesn't seem backed up by anything. And on the contrary, one of the more interesting things I learned in one of my history electives in college was that people have been cynical about their leaders for a long, long time, including at the very start of the US.

Personally, my hunch is that we simply have quicker/more effective means of disseminating information about corruption now.

There are a many, many more axes for government performance than just equality of opportunity for people under it, though. Simply comparing the reaction of the government to the recent financial crisis to the past reactions makes it easy to see that something has been lost. In previous financial crises, significant regulations were brought to bear to patch the bugs. This time, despite some extremely significant structural problems that are easy to identify (complete regulatory capture of the ratings agencies and the SEC, for example), relatively little has been done.

I agree that more should be done with regard to the financial crisis and corruption, but I'm also very skeptical of comparisons made in the middle of it, trying to answer the question of "how did the government perform during it" before the final outcome is known. I realize that that's an unsatisfactory answer in many ways, but government often moves slowly and I'm not sure that's a bad thing—i.e., I don't want the outcome of this whole mess to be the TSA of the financial industry.

I'd argue that government is more pervasively corrupt today because it pretends to be clean. We aggressively try to stamp out "transactional" corruption, but pretend that systemic corruption doesn't exist.

In 1960, a salesman would give a government buyer a bottle of whisky for Christmas. That's a serious crime these days. But today, we eliminated to a large extent the "upfront" influence and instead launder it through "lobbying" firms. A $30 bottle is a crime, $30,000,000 of advertising through a PAC is ok.

What you describe is the unintended consequence of thinking that we can legislate ethics by continuing to pile on detailed proscriptions or requirements within our laws.

As the number and detail of laws has increased, the fragility of the system has decreased. It's like software, the more special-case tightly-coupled components you have; the less robust the system.

Our laws could use a good refactoring.

> Personally, my hunch is that we simply have quicker/more effective means of disseminating information about corruption now.

Corruption matters more now.

When govt is only 3% of GDP and has little regulatory power, corruption can't affect much.

Yeah, I think we agree: Brooks claims the mechanism that gets them there is meritocratic, but because they do not have the concept of being an elite (the patronizing attitude), which they do not have because they "earned it", they are worse leaders. "The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites."

Although I don't buy the whole article, I think this is an interesting viewpoint.

One could argue that the brand of libertarian politics often espoused in american hacker circles is pretty much the politics of this "meritocratic elite who can't admit they're an elite".

I worked hard to earn it, I deserve it, I resent the idea that society should impose on me any responsibility towards those who didn't/weren't lucky enough to. (A cognitive bias where one discounts the role of luck in one's own success is perhaps quite important to this viewpoint.)

I definitely agree that it's an interesting view point, but Brooks makes no effort to really show that things have ever been different. He defines the good old days as the opposite of today, rather than actually describing them.

The question of whether or not someone earned their place in society is one that people have and will always wonder: it gets at the nature nurture question and thus is totally wrapped up in our identities.

Interesting. And if we called it a patronizing attitude, we are using the word in its most literal sense.

> "Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character."

I don't know if it was any different 50 years ago, but that's exactly how they hire now.

Not only that, but we're talking about what the press knows. The press is a lot bigger now, because we're all a member of the press. There's more news now because there's more capability to disseminate information quickly. In the "heady days" of the 50s and 60s that David talks about, our speed of information uptake was much lower than it is today. So to tie our current problems to a meritocratic system that isn't run (well, as deeply) by a caste of elites is just completely ignorant of the fact that the average person knows more than the average person did in the 1960s.

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