I lived in China for many years -meritocracy central- and have seen some kids broken by the system, others succeed in it, and many exploited by it, come what may. And -a related matter- what do you think of the "Tiger Mom"?
Not good, mostly because it suppresses family size and increases stress for everyone. That very high pressure/investment parenting style makes it difficult to have more than 1-2 kids, which leads to a dearth of flourishing families. Other issues as well around autonomy, social confidence, etc. as well.
I have known many who were raised this way -high achievers, all of them. But few could venture an original thought or emotional response without first passing it by an internalized parental tyrant.
Yes, this is exactly what you should judge somebody on their merit and yes, they should get an award if they put hard work into something get credentials for it and earned a award. What would you rather be judged by the color of your skin or your gender? No, you wanna be judged by the work you put into something your integrity what you stand for what you believe in and what your passion is. Not superficial things.
I had to Google that. It said swag was goodies. Freebies.
Don’t you feel your more then that? Look how well you wrote what you did. That took work. Why wouldn’t u value your hard work. Why should another get the award before you. Because they gave a freebie to the boss or the boss has a gender box to fill? No u would deserve it based on merit
Effort doesn't result in productivity all on its own.
The country that has taken meritocracy farthest is South Korea. 70% of people achieve some level of tertiary education. They go to cram schools all day. Work the longest hours in the OECD. They have high average IQs.
And yet, they have a GDP per capita of $33,000. The US is $81,000. Even France, the land of lazy Eurocommies, is $44,000.
Why didn't meritocracy make South Korea rich?
And of course one cold note that with a TFR of 0.7 and falling, South Korea is literally going extinct. Cause of death? Meritocracy.
Is the certainty that you are right meritorious? Or should one judge oneself by one's character and not judge others. How much integrity is there is this sort of self-serving smugness that comes from judging others as lacking in something that you think you have?
I have three millennial children who graduated from college (UPenn) in '10, '12, and '16. I've gotten to kiwi their college (and grad school) friends over the years. I believe most if not all of them, would say that the most valuable aspect of their education was the friendships they formed and which continue to flourish.
They were legacies as I was an alum and my two grandfathers were alums.
There was stress at college for them because of the way job selection worked. But I don't think it overwhelmed all the other positives.
The problem is not with merit as the metric, but with elite universities as sole status gatekeepers. The helicopter parents are to blame for grinding their children down in pursuit of the most unoriginal goal, going to Harvard and then into management consulting.
Why not aspire towards a broader range of paths? A bright and talented youngster would prepare very differently if they were seeking to join an elite military unit, start a business, or apprentice in a skilled trade. Merit would be no less vital, although it is defined differently in each career path.
This is infinitely preferable to a return to nepotism/aristocracy.
Agreed. The push-parenting is focused on getting children into a tiny number of "elite" schools. It's an Asian mindset, which explains the cite to Palo Alto High School (36% Asian).
Certainly, the elite schools are great in terms of class sizes and hiring networks. Just having a brand name on your resume is a plus. But there's still plenty of schools out there where you can get a good education without having to sacrifice your entire childhood to get in.
I live in New Jersey and have noticed a lot of families sending their kids (mostly male) to Southern schools (University of Alabama seems especially popular). The Greek systems at those schools often serve as their own hiring network.
As the child of someone who benefitted from the meritocratic system that I think worked pretty well for a subset of Americans in a few of the post-War decades/ 1950s/60s/70s (he was a genius, from a very poor family, who was able to get into good schools and become a doctor at some prestigious urban institutions) who then chose to leave the meritocratic elite system (became a rural doctor, running his own successful medical business, probably impossible to do now due to regulations and the state running medicine)— I’m curious to see what alternatives you suggest.
My dad didn’t know how to pass on the legacy to his kids other than ensuring they weren’t burdened with college debt (a huge gift), educated us through lots of conversation and wonder at the world, but never considered passing on his business to us or encouraging us to go to his alma mater or profession. If we’re opting out of this meritocratic rat race for our own kids, how do we position them for future happiness (at a minimum, being able to marry and support a family)? I also really believe in the idea of a kind of rural gentry — wealthy people vested in a particular area, in a particular people — I saw how my dad was what the English might call a squire, in terms of his influence and care and generosity for many people in our community; it was a boon to both them and him — but hard to maintain intergenerationally if your kids need to leave for education/meeting a spouse, as I and my siblings did.
All that to say, I am glad to see you have a book forthcoming!
There used to be a system to find elite talent from all over the country. The book "The Idea Factory" went over how government programs scoured the nation and found top talent in rural farming communities who transformed industries.
Ironically, current "meritocracy" would deem these people unsuitable now, because they didn't go the right daycare.
Yes, they tried to recruit my dad as a freshman in high school to into one of these programs, to begin college early. My grandma wisely said no — I think the university he would have ended up at was already full of progressive lunacy in the mid-1960s, and could well have turned him into a carbon copy of that. Having a few more years to mature in a farming community probably greatly helped his ability to strike out on his own later in life, as well as to respect and honor people who weren’t as educated or intelligent. He always looked for the genius (intellectual or otherwise) in every patient, no matter their IQ. I’m not sure he would have had that perspective if he had been funneled into the elite system at 14.
Whatever ostensible merit Ivy students were selected on, it appears to have selected a class of dingbats who loudly proclaim their belief in obvious absurdities.
People who believe - or publicly claims to believe - Western culture is one long story of "settler colonialist" villainy. Who believe "trans women (men in dresses) are women". Who believe it was a good and wise decision to offshore our country's entire industrial base. Who believe in replacement immigration and magic dirt theory. Who believe feminism has benefitted anyone at all save a handful of bored upper class harridans.
These people are too damned stupid to shine my shoes. That we still regard these schools as elite is a function of their old pretty campus architecture; and of cultural inertia.
I published an article on my own substack over the weekend that touches on some of these same themes - the downsides of "meritocracy," the excess prestige of a few elite institutions ruining old-fashioned local culture, how P.E. should be a much bigger part of the education of normal children and not just elite athletes, why athletic scholarships are usually a good thing, how the Koreanization of the American education system should be avoided at all costs, and so forth - while using recent developments in college football as a frame story to introduce it all.
But probably my biggest single complaint against childhood "meritocracy" is the way that it's made so many parents and teachers think it's necessary to drug children for ADHD - something I'm passionately against since multiple of my childhood friends were mentally ruined that way. I've written about the ADHD controversy at length as well:
In a perfect world where perfect people were geared toward the perfect outcome of each child, and education were dynamic enough to compensate for every single learning type, emphatically yes!
In reality focusing on anything else but merit - because we do not have the tools, resources, intelligence, goodwill quotient, or know how to do otherwise - it leads to ruin.
Idealism and utopia are noble concepts which we should all strive to achieve, but here's the thing, in our current system of imperfect individuals in an imperfect world of systemic corruption, meritocracy is the ONLY way to get there.
The "tautology" dismissed at the outset of this article IS the definition of meritocracy. It's the definition that almost everyone uses. It might seem frustrating that we have to use it, but that frustration exists because the political Left exists, and the Left often denies the tautological.
Similarly, we have SCOTUS "originalism", which is defined as saying "the words mean what they say they mean". Another tautology, and yet necessary. Just as with "meritocracy", the Left rages against "originalism", which thwarts their efforts to make up policy out of thin air.
This article (or series of articles) posits a straw man definition of "meritocracy" and then beats it up. Nobody is actually behind the position being attacked here. Genuine "merit" includes trustworthiness, loyalty, and the like, which often derive from kinship. Preferring family is not at odds with meritocracy any more than "don't source parts from unreliable countries" is at odds with maximizing profit over the long haul.
I don't think you're really 'elite' if you're having to do this. It's more the urban, globally mobile worker bee class that likes to think it's elite but really is just the shoe shiners for financial asset owners at the top.
The children of asset owners all the way up and down the spectrum from urban financial, to the multitude of small business owners to farmers and those who are self employed, usually don't live this way. Some of them don't even go to secondary school. They are expected to help and go into the family business, and if they to school it's for networking and fun.
And asset owners are still the closest thing to the traditional aristocracy in terms of living style. Having to grind for someone else for a salary or wage, no matter how large it is, is the domain of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Grinding completely for yourself/family, on your own land, and usually employing local people, is far closer to the traditionally way of living.
The universities are simply no longer the elite and ruling class breeding grounds they once were. They are just selection mechanisms for the best worker bees for Global corporate imperialism.
Giving kids back their childhoods is something I keenly feel as a parent. The cost of trimming down their lives and our family culture to fit nicely on a college application essay is simply too great.
It's a good essay. I don't necessarily agree with it- Sir Henry Maine, a Victorian jurist, was essentially correct when he argued that the Enlightenment was a movement from status to contract- but your essay does raise important questions.
Chief of which is how far has our civilisation declined as a result of the rise of the college educated 'yes' man (or woman, who are generally even worse- due to lack of trait disagreeableness)? In the old days 50% of the managers in any organisation were promoted from the shop floor. Having people to tell bosses why a particular new and shiny thing was a terrible idea was an all-important feature of a functional civilisation.
What's more, universities develop the analytical mind at the expense of the operational mind. Often getting the job done quickly is far more important than getting the job done in the best way possible- the perfect is often the enemy of the good. We still need the analytics- their AARs can form the basis of continuous improvements, but the operational mindset is even more important to preserve in any organisation which makes products of keeps our societies functioning.
The other problem is the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. Universities used to be able to teach kids how to argue their case effectively (although this particular skill seems to be in decline with the advent of smartphones as an oratorical crutch). I've known educated people who could argue their case effectively, but were about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, and people who were shop floor promotions who weren't particularly good at giving excuses and reasons at the appropriate juncture.
You’ve reminded me of the documentary All Things Must Pass, which was about the rise and fall of Tower Records. Other than the rise of the digital media, the company failed because its executives no longer came from the shop floor.
In its heyday, it was common for its C-suite to be made up of people who started at the bottom. Then like everywhere else, the executives slowly but surely became almost entirely made up of MBA graduates.
Tower Records! There is a blast from the past, You’ve reminded me of my university days. By the early nineties Tower Records had several stores in London. I used to visit them with a couple of mates. Most of the other record shops I used to visit were Indie shops.
The stores were bought in the early 2000s by Virgin, who weren’t bad, but weren’t as good as Tower Records. There was some overlap when Virgin continued to trade as Tower, but was Virgin on the inside.
I read somewhere that the music industry continues to generate just as much profit, but most of the profit heads towards established big name artists. Sad really. At one point Indie music and House/Club/Happy Hardcore/Garage made it look like the industry was losing its grip on music.
Your argument is empty. You’re saying that meritocracy is wrong because it’s bad because some people fail? Because it’s a grind for the kids? Because upper crust legacy students are better with fashion? Silly and spurious arguments. Meritocracy finds the best people and school is one form of it, but fight any Navy Seal and tell me that meritocracy doesn’t work.
"Now we are in the absurd situation in which a new upper class - every bit as entrenched as the old one and constituted of many of the same families - has to frantically engage in make-work from birth to maintain what they have, destroying what would have been wonderful childhoods in the process."
This is so important. The energy that gets wasted into what amounts to a quest to construct a pedigree of merit, for lack of a better phrase, on behalf of one's progeny - it's like some absolutely appalling arm's race. The issue needs to be hit on again and again and again. Not only does this arm's race smother childhood, but it also regularizes the most appealing acts of nepotism and favor trading once the kids have admittance to those schools that grant the coveted degrees, but haven't quite fully launched. Scroll on LinkedIn sometime for public examples of what I mean.
It's like the parents cannot let hand over the final outcome of the "game" to the children, but have to keep trying to guide them.
Johann, I hope you'll come back to this topic sometime and excavate it further. One day, we'll hopefully ook back on it with the same combination of disbelief and bemusement as when we read about the "cargo cult" rituals of certain isolated South Sea Island communities after World War II ended.
It basically goes: "competent people tend to be promoted to their level of incompetence"
Because they tend to be promoted by their competency in their previous position that doesn't necessarily translate to the promoted position.
What if today's meritocracy (with its definition of quantitative merit, surrounded by culture of credentialism) also came up with the inverse version of peter principle.
It instead would go: "competent people tend to be barred from their level of competence"
Which is very fitting with Asians and their bamboo ceiling, how they tend to be bad in leadership position, and why most paper published tend to be full of empty paper pushing.
While those who are charismatic, creative, and innovative tend to be barred from actually going into top position despite the fact they are the one in the ability to do so, just because the 'examination of merit' see them as somewhat lacking (not good enough GPA, has no PhD etc.).
I'm very interested in this case, but it also strikes me that this is taking issue with the system as it stands today - and the ways it is _not_ meritocratic.
Because US university admissions care so much about grades and extracurriculars, it is a gruelling process to prepare for applications and great resources have to be spent. Therefore, parental resources have to be sunk into this - not very efficient, nor fun. But going more meritocratic would help this problem - for example, focusing more on the SAT would mean that securing perfect grades (and therefore being a study horse with no social life) would matter less, as would the pursuit of time and money intensive extracurriculars.
I studied PPE at Oxford and support people in their applications today - an advantage to the system is that a large part of the admissions system is how one scores in the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA). The section 1 of the TSA is essentially a reasoning test - there is some technique to it that a bit of tutoring or self study can resolve (I think the tutoring saves time on working it out for yourself more than it provides an edge in kind), but once the technique is mastered it really ends up relying on your reasoning. This means that there is a limit to how much one can buy and study one's way into an interview - preparation for a serious Oxbridge application will start anywhere from 3 months to 2 years in advance, but not preschool.
I lived in China for many years -meritocracy central- and have seen some kids broken by the system, others succeed in it, and many exploited by it, come what may. And -a related matter- what do you think of the "Tiger Mom"?
Not good, mostly because it suppresses family size and increases stress for everyone. That very high pressure/investment parenting style makes it difficult to have more than 1-2 kids, which leads to a dearth of flourishing families. Other issues as well around autonomy, social confidence, etc. as well.
I have known many who were raised this way -high achievers, all of them. But few could venture an original thought or emotional response without first passing it by an internalized parental tyrant.
Yes, this is exactly what you should judge somebody on their merit and yes, they should get an award if they put hard work into something get credentials for it and earned a award. What would you rather be judged by the color of your skin or your gender? No, you wanna be judged by the work you put into something your integrity what you stand for what you believe in and what your passion is. Not superficial things.
I want to be judged by my swagger
I don’t think you read the piece, or if you did, you missed the point entirely.
I had to Google that. It said swag was goodies. Freebies.
Don’t you feel your more then that? Look how well you wrote what you did. That took work. Why wouldn’t u value your hard work. Why should another get the award before you. Because they gave a freebie to the boss or the boss has a gender box to fill? No u would deserve it based on merit
Swag is ghetto slang for goodies, shiny baubles, free stuff.
A swagger is a style of walk.
Defs.:
To walk or conduct oneself with an insolent or arrogant air.
To brag; boast.
To walk with a swaying motion; hence, to walk and act in a pompous, consequential manner.
Credentialism is pretty superficial.
Effort doesn't result in productivity all on its own.
The country that has taken meritocracy farthest is South Korea. 70% of people achieve some level of tertiary education. They go to cram schools all day. Work the longest hours in the OECD. They have high average IQs.
And yet, they have a GDP per capita of $33,000. The US is $81,000. Even France, the land of lazy Eurocommies, is $44,000.
Why didn't meritocracy make South Korea rich?
And of course one cold note that with a TFR of 0.7 and falling, South Korea is literally going extinct. Cause of death? Meritocracy.
Is the certainty that you are right meritorious? Or should one judge oneself by one's character and not judge others. How much integrity is there is this sort of self-serving smugness that comes from judging others as lacking in something that you think you have?
I have three millennial children who graduated from college (UPenn) in '10, '12, and '16. I've gotten to kiwi their college (and grad school) friends over the years. I believe most if not all of them, would say that the most valuable aspect of their education was the friendships they formed and which continue to flourish.
They were legacies as I was an alum and my two grandfathers were alums.
There was stress at college for them because of the way job selection worked. But I don't think it overwhelmed all the other positives.
15 years later, things ae undoubtedly different.
It's awesome you achieved three generations of alums. Hopefully it becomes four!
The problem is not with merit as the metric, but with elite universities as sole status gatekeepers. The helicopter parents are to blame for grinding their children down in pursuit of the most unoriginal goal, going to Harvard and then into management consulting.
Why not aspire towards a broader range of paths? A bright and talented youngster would prepare very differently if they were seeking to join an elite military unit, start a business, or apprentice in a skilled trade. Merit would be no less vital, although it is defined differently in each career path.
This is infinitely preferable to a return to nepotism/aristocracy.
Agreed. The push-parenting is focused on getting children into a tiny number of "elite" schools. It's an Asian mindset, which explains the cite to Palo Alto High School (36% Asian).
Certainly, the elite schools are great in terms of class sizes and hiring networks. Just having a brand name on your resume is a plus. But there's still plenty of schools out there where you can get a good education without having to sacrifice your entire childhood to get in.
I live in New Jersey and have noticed a lot of families sending their kids (mostly male) to Southern schools (University of Alabama seems especially popular). The Greek systems at those schools often serve as their own hiring network.
As the child of someone who benefitted from the meritocratic system that I think worked pretty well for a subset of Americans in a few of the post-War decades/ 1950s/60s/70s (he was a genius, from a very poor family, who was able to get into good schools and become a doctor at some prestigious urban institutions) who then chose to leave the meritocratic elite system (became a rural doctor, running his own successful medical business, probably impossible to do now due to regulations and the state running medicine)— I’m curious to see what alternatives you suggest.
My dad didn’t know how to pass on the legacy to his kids other than ensuring they weren’t burdened with college debt (a huge gift), educated us through lots of conversation and wonder at the world, but never considered passing on his business to us or encouraging us to go to his alma mater or profession. If we’re opting out of this meritocratic rat race for our own kids, how do we position them for future happiness (at a minimum, being able to marry and support a family)? I also really believe in the idea of a kind of rural gentry — wealthy people vested in a particular area, in a particular people — I saw how my dad was what the English might call a squire, in terms of his influence and care and generosity for many people in our community; it was a boon to both them and him — but hard to maintain intergenerationally if your kids need to leave for education/meeting a spouse, as I and my siblings did.
All that to say, I am glad to see you have a book forthcoming!
There used to be a system to find elite talent from all over the country. The book "The Idea Factory" went over how government programs scoured the nation and found top talent in rural farming communities who transformed industries.
Ironically, current "meritocracy" would deem these people unsuitable now, because they didn't go the right daycare.
Yes, they tried to recruit my dad as a freshman in high school to into one of these programs, to begin college early. My grandma wisely said no — I think the university he would have ended up at was already full of progressive lunacy in the mid-1960s, and could well have turned him into a carbon copy of that. Having a few more years to mature in a farming community probably greatly helped his ability to strike out on his own later in life, as well as to respect and honor people who weren’t as educated or intelligent. He always looked for the genius (intellectual or otherwise) in every patient, no matter their IQ. I’m not sure he would have had that perspective if he had been funneled into the elite system at 14.
Whatever ostensible merit Ivy students were selected on, it appears to have selected a class of dingbats who loudly proclaim their belief in obvious absurdities.
People who believe - or publicly claims to believe - Western culture is one long story of "settler colonialist" villainy. Who believe "trans women (men in dresses) are women". Who believe it was a good and wise decision to offshore our country's entire industrial base. Who believe in replacement immigration and magic dirt theory. Who believe feminism has benefitted anyone at all save a handful of bored upper class harridans.
These people are too damned stupid to shine my shoes. That we still regard these schools as elite is a function of their old pretty campus architecture; and of cultural inertia.
This series is excellent. Keep it up!
I published an article on my own substack over the weekend that touches on some of these same themes - the downsides of "meritocracy," the excess prestige of a few elite institutions ruining old-fashioned local culture, how P.E. should be a much bigger part of the education of normal children and not just elite athletes, why athletic scholarships are usually a good thing, how the Koreanization of the American education system should be avoided at all costs, and so forth - while using recent developments in college football as a frame story to introduce it all.
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-twelve-team-college-football
But probably my biggest single complaint against childhood "meritocracy" is the way that it's made so many parents and teachers think it's necessary to drug children for ADHD - something I'm passionately against since multiple of my childhood friends were mentally ruined that way. I've written about the ADHD controversy at length as well:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/the-can-we-and-the-should-we-of-science
In a perfect world where perfect people were geared toward the perfect outcome of each child, and education were dynamic enough to compensate for every single learning type, emphatically yes!
In reality focusing on anything else but merit - because we do not have the tools, resources, intelligence, goodwill quotient, or know how to do otherwise - it leads to ruin.
Idealism and utopia are noble concepts which we should all strive to achieve, but here's the thing, in our current system of imperfect individuals in an imperfect world of systemic corruption, meritocracy is the ONLY way to get there.
100. Being told you are constantly at a disadvantage will set you up for failure.
Well said
Yes, thank you. And here's the other horrid side of that coin:
CRT Removes the Reason to Try, This is Not Theoretical: Black Lawyer Excoriates Critical Race Theory: https://old.bitchute.com/video/DaS25FLR8ktR [2mins]
Common Core ELA Social Justice Activism Indoctrination:: https://youtu.be/FSHoxWaVeto [11mins]
The "tautology" dismissed at the outset of this article IS the definition of meritocracy. It's the definition that almost everyone uses. It might seem frustrating that we have to use it, but that frustration exists because the political Left exists, and the Left often denies the tautological.
Similarly, we have SCOTUS "originalism", which is defined as saying "the words mean what they say they mean". Another tautology, and yet necessary. Just as with "meritocracy", the Left rages against "originalism", which thwarts their efforts to make up policy out of thin air.
This article (or series of articles) posits a straw man definition of "meritocracy" and then beats it up. Nobody is actually behind the position being attacked here. Genuine "merit" includes trustworthiness, loyalty, and the like, which often derive from kinship. Preferring family is not at odds with meritocracy any more than "don't source parts from unreliable countries" is at odds with maximizing profit over the long haul.
I don't think you're really 'elite' if you're having to do this. It's more the urban, globally mobile worker bee class that likes to think it's elite but really is just the shoe shiners for financial asset owners at the top.
The children of asset owners all the way up and down the spectrum from urban financial, to the multitude of small business owners to farmers and those who are self employed, usually don't live this way. Some of them don't even go to secondary school. They are expected to help and go into the family business, and if they to school it's for networking and fun.
And asset owners are still the closest thing to the traditional aristocracy in terms of living style. Having to grind for someone else for a salary or wage, no matter how large it is, is the domain of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Grinding completely for yourself/family, on your own land, and usually employing local people, is far closer to the traditionally way of living.
The universities are simply no longer the elite and ruling class breeding grounds they once were. They are just selection mechanisms for the best worker bees for Global corporate imperialism.
Giving kids back their childhoods is something I keenly feel as a parent. The cost of trimming down their lives and our family culture to fit nicely on a college application essay is simply too great.
If the kids have a passion and sense of themselves, that will seve them well.
It's a good essay. I don't necessarily agree with it- Sir Henry Maine, a Victorian jurist, was essentially correct when he argued that the Enlightenment was a movement from status to contract- but your essay does raise important questions.
Chief of which is how far has our civilisation declined as a result of the rise of the college educated 'yes' man (or woman, who are generally even worse- due to lack of trait disagreeableness)? In the old days 50% of the managers in any organisation were promoted from the shop floor. Having people to tell bosses why a particular new and shiny thing was a terrible idea was an all-important feature of a functional civilisation.
What's more, universities develop the analytical mind at the expense of the operational mind. Often getting the job done quickly is far more important than getting the job done in the best way possible- the perfect is often the enemy of the good. We still need the analytics- their AARs can form the basis of continuous improvements, but the operational mindset is even more important to preserve in any organisation which makes products of keeps our societies functioning.
The other problem is the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. Universities used to be able to teach kids how to argue their case effectively (although this particular skill seems to be in decline with the advent of smartphones as an oratorical crutch). I've known educated people who could argue their case effectively, but were about as useful as a chocolate fireguard, and people who were shop floor promotions who weren't particularly good at giving excuses and reasons at the appropriate juncture.
You’ve reminded me of the documentary All Things Must Pass, which was about the rise and fall of Tower Records. Other than the rise of the digital media, the company failed because its executives no longer came from the shop floor.
In its heyday, it was common for its C-suite to be made up of people who started at the bottom. Then like everywhere else, the executives slowly but surely became almost entirely made up of MBA graduates.
Tower Records! There is a blast from the past, You’ve reminded me of my university days. By the early nineties Tower Records had several stores in London. I used to visit them with a couple of mates. Most of the other record shops I used to visit were Indie shops.
The stores were bought in the early 2000s by Virgin, who weren’t bad, but weren’t as good as Tower Records. There was some overlap when Virgin continued to trade as Tower, but was Virgin on the inside.
I read somewhere that the music industry continues to generate just as much profit, but most of the profit heads towards established big name artists. Sad really. At one point Indie music and House/Club/Happy Hardcore/Garage made it look like the industry was losing its grip on music.
Your argument is empty. You’re saying that meritocracy is wrong because it’s bad because some people fail? Because it’s a grind for the kids? Because upper crust legacy students are better with fashion? Silly and spurious arguments. Meritocracy finds the best people and school is one form of it, but fight any Navy Seal and tell me that meritocracy doesn’t work.
You summarized what I'm saying perfectly, thank you
"Now we are in the absurd situation in which a new upper class - every bit as entrenched as the old one and constituted of many of the same families - has to frantically engage in make-work from birth to maintain what they have, destroying what would have been wonderful childhoods in the process."
This is so important. The energy that gets wasted into what amounts to a quest to construct a pedigree of merit, for lack of a better phrase, on behalf of one's progeny - it's like some absolutely appalling arm's race. The issue needs to be hit on again and again and again. Not only does this arm's race smother childhood, but it also regularizes the most appealing acts of nepotism and favor trading once the kids have admittance to those schools that grant the coveted degrees, but haven't quite fully launched. Scroll on LinkedIn sometime for public examples of what I mean.
It's like the parents cannot let hand over the final outcome of the "game" to the children, but have to keep trying to guide them.
Johann, I hope you'll come back to this topic sometime and excavate it further. One day, we'll hopefully ook back on it with the same combination of disbelief and bemusement as when we read about the "cargo cult" rituals of certain isolated South Sea Island communities after World War II ended.
Are you familiar with 'the peter principle'?
It basically goes: "competent people tend to be promoted to their level of incompetence"
Because they tend to be promoted by their competency in their previous position that doesn't necessarily translate to the promoted position.
What if today's meritocracy (with its definition of quantitative merit, surrounded by culture of credentialism) also came up with the inverse version of peter principle.
It instead would go: "competent people tend to be barred from their level of competence"
Which is very fitting with Asians and their bamboo ceiling, how they tend to be bad in leadership position, and why most paper published tend to be full of empty paper pushing.
While those who are charismatic, creative, and innovative tend to be barred from actually going into top position despite the fact they are the one in the ability to do so, just because the 'examination of merit' see them as somewhat lacking (not good enough GPA, has no PhD etc.).
I'm very interested in this case, but it also strikes me that this is taking issue with the system as it stands today - and the ways it is _not_ meritocratic.
Because US university admissions care so much about grades and extracurriculars, it is a gruelling process to prepare for applications and great resources have to be spent. Therefore, parental resources have to be sunk into this - not very efficient, nor fun. But going more meritocratic would help this problem - for example, focusing more on the SAT would mean that securing perfect grades (and therefore being a study horse with no social life) would matter less, as would the pursuit of time and money intensive extracurriculars.
I studied PPE at Oxford and support people in their applications today - an advantage to the system is that a large part of the admissions system is how one scores in the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA). The section 1 of the TSA is essentially a reasoning test - there is some technique to it that a bit of tutoring or self study can resolve (I think the tutoring saves time on working it out for yourself more than it provides an edge in kind), but once the technique is mastered it really ends up relying on your reasoning. This means that there is a limit to how much one can buy and study one's way into an interview - preparation for a serious Oxbridge application will start anywhere from 3 months to 2 years in advance, but not preschool.