… here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
It’s not even clear that society is better led. Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?
Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?
Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then?
The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.
Why has this happened?
I don’t click on NY Times articles, so this may be a good column, but I haven’t “read the whole thing.” However, to reinforce one of the quoted points, I think that the whole credit default swap disaster was based on a computer model constructed by MIT whiz kids. It was supposed to prevent risk from bringing down financial institutions, and it didn’t work.
Katherine, that’s pretty much what I hear from the long-time pros in the field with whom I work. There is an oft-repeated refrain decrying “MBA kids with no experience or sense of history” coming up with things that look good in theory but in practice were a recipe for disaster.
Any article mentioning Baltzell is worth reading. Baltzell would have predicted that a meritocracy not leavened by protestant values would run amok, even though I think even he was surprised at how far the old Wasp ascendancy would fall. He just couldn’t figure out how we could do the leavening. Membership in the Somerset was just never going to be the carrot.