(2021-03-18) Yglesias Meritocracy Is Bad

Matthew Yglesias: Meritocracy is bad. The current system of social hierarchy in the United States is of course not a perfect meritocracy (nothing is ever perfect), but it’s genuinely pretty successful on its own meritocratic terms. The problem is that those terms are bad.

I think the idea that America’s existing elites are somehow “pretty dumb” is itself one of the dumbest lies that people tell themselves

Every time I’ve done an event with Yale students over the past 18 years of my career, the questions have all been really good.

we are in fact missing out on some smart kids (mostly ones living in low-income rural communities), but the fact is we are doing pretty good at sorting.

And if you talk to people with a curious and open mind, you’ll pretty quickly find out that New York Times reporters are really smart. So are McKinsey consultants. So are the people working at successful hedge funds. So are Ivy League professors.

This just turns out to be an outcome that still has some problems.

Smart people do bad things

going to a private equity-owned nursing home increased mortality for patients by 10 percent against the overall average.

The healthcare sector poses these kinds of questions in droves

*You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honor and offer legitimate medical advice.

But this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle.* Boy is this a strawman.

All the chess people in “The Queen’s Gambit” behave with a great deal of honor.

That’s the difference between Donald Trump and John McCain.

The problem with Trump is that he’s a bad person.

what people are pointing to with Trump is a complete collapse of public virtue.

The George HW Bush family are aristocrats whose political ambition is tempered by a sense of noblesse oblige and concern for the dignity of the family name.

Trump and his kids are total scumbags.

I’d rather have a dumb Democrat win a Senate race over a smart Republican any day. Smarts just don’t matter that much.

Joe Biden... was in the bottom of his class at this not-super-prestigious law school. And while it’s obviously too soon to pronounce his presidency a huge success, it certainly seems to be off to a promising start.

You don’t want people who are extremely stupid running everything. But in both government and the economy, it’s just not the case that putting the “best and brightest” in charge of everything is a good idea.

the benefits of an egalitarian economic order are clear, real

What you need to do is actually change the framework — have a society that’s less based on sorting and ranking, and more based on equality.

I’d like to see less emphasis on taking the tech bros down a notch and more on just making the welfare state better, more generous, and more user-friendly.

The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded

while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.

Nobody deserves to be as exalted as the most exalted people in America are right now.