Nils Gilman has a series of tweets in which he claims that the "rise of meritocracy" has been bad for the Western World in this way:
Gilman goes on to say that the rage we're seeing from the oligarchal elite today is the result of them feeling "unsettled" by the prospect that others might join their ranks out of pure merit, rather than by marrying in or whatever other mechanisms one had to gradually joined the elites, one at a time, to be assimilated, rather than an entire phalanx of people reaching for the golden ring of the 1% all at the same time by dint of having skills the world needs and the elite can't provide.
I think it's possible to look back on the period between the "Robber Baron" "Golden Age" and today and realize just how much bullshit that is. Both Gilman and David Brooks (Gilman was responding to Brooks) are looking at a very short period of time in human history, one in which a combination of factors gave rise to remarkable growth in the economy of the world.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb documents in The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority, all takes is a tiny intolerant minority, refusing to act as the majority wishes for a long enough period of time in a way that avoids incapaciting obstruction of their goals, for the minority to change the culture to suit their needs. For the elite, what they cannot tolerate is the idea that they could fall out of the elite. For the elite, what they need is more. They have a voracious, unstoppable, unsatisfiable need to have everything.
Gilman goes on to say:
Emphasis mine, because that's the phrase that gives the game away. Where did this vastly increased inequality come from? From the tiny minority gaming the system for the past fifty years. In 1972, after Lewis Powell (who would eventually go on to be a Supreme Court Justice) wrote The Powell Memo, that "elite [with] a strong incentive to care for the system" decided, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, to instead game the system and ensure a never-ending flow of money into their accounts. The erosion of federal controls on banking and corporate corruption followed in the wake of a sustained, intolerant campaign by the wealthiest and most powerful to consume more and more and more of everything, leaving the rest of us with nothing.
The rising tide between 1972 and 2019 may have "lifted boats" but it lifted them inequally and disproporationally, and the tide rose faster, swamping some of those boats, and the rest of us see the tidal waves coming, if not in the form of surveillance capitalism but in the real threat of real tidal waves.
Gilman's thesis is also completely undone by two historical models: Rome and Sparta. Sparta, for all the ridiculous worship that the far-right makes of the homoerotic imagery of The 300, isn't with us today because it collapsed from internal pressures: the elite did optimize for strong, beautiful men, and they changed the laws to ensure that inheritance and property rights continued only in an upward direction. They hoarded all the money and all the farmland, and Sparta ultimately collapsed because the economy came to a grinding halt. A murderous contempt for the poor and the alien combined with a decaying oligarchal elite doomed Sparta.
That should sound familiar.
The Spartans were terrible warriors anyway.. It was Athens, not Sparta, that ultimately saved Greece. This is why we run "marathons" and not "thermopylaes."
Rome is even more relevant. While Sparta reflects the desires of an ethnically-oriented state to be even more ethnocentric, ultimately to its own demise, Rome was definitely an empire, where people of all classes and races mixed together to create an even bigger and more powerful state. It had no ethnocentrism to speak of and would make deals with anyone. What it had, instead, was class warfare, codified into law. But that doesn't stop Rome from collapsing. Edward Watt's book Mortal Republic spells it out:
Watts goes on to show that, in its last century, the legislative process of Rome, which was designed to create compromise and consensus, was instead propagandized to obstruct progress and to punish anyone who threatened the status quo of the ruling elite.
As Sean Illing writes in that article, "Well, that sounds familiar."
So Gilman is basically wrong; any system designed to create consensus is vulnerable to an intolerant elite that believes that if it keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, eventually they'll get that lucky break, that last moment when all the powers of the state are vulnerable, and they'll finally, totally, and completely control the machinery.
That moment is now: Donald Trump is in the White House and Mitch McConnell is preventing any action at all that would rein him in, becaume Mitch McConnell knows that as long as he's where he sits, he can put in a generation of judges who will create a utopia for the rich and a hellscape for the "undeserving," the people like you and me. And that's the way he wants it.
Yes, America will be little more than bastions of wealth surrounded by ruins.
But they'll be his ruins.
An elite that is secure in its prerogatives has a strong incentive to focus on the care and feeding of the system. The old WASP elite felt confident and secure in their privileges. They understood that the system worked well for them, which made many of them prepared to put personal effort into maintaining that system. This wasn’t noblesse oblige or the result a wonderful “culture.” It was self-interested, but self-interested in a context where there wasn’t much distance between personal interests and societal interests as they understood them. “Good for General Motors,” QED.
Gilman goes on to say that the rage we're seeing from the oligarchal elite today is the result of them feeling "unsettled" by the prospect that others might join their ranks out of pure merit, rather than by marrying in or whatever other mechanisms one had to gradually joined the elites, one at a time, to be assimilated, rather than an entire phalanx of people reaching for the golden ring of the 1% all at the same time by dint of having skills the world needs and the elite can't provide.
I think it's possible to look back on the period between the "Robber Baron" "Golden Age" and today and realize just how much bullshit that is. Both Gilman and David Brooks (Gilman was responding to Brooks) are looking at a very short period of time in human history, one in which a combination of factors gave rise to remarkable growth in the economy of the world.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb documents in The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority, all takes is a tiny intolerant minority, refusing to act as the majority wishes for a long enough period of time in a way that avoids incapaciting obstruction of their goals, for the minority to change the culture to suit their needs. For the elite, what they cannot tolerate is the idea that they could fall out of the elite. For the elite, what they need is more. They have a voracious, unstoppable, unsatisfiable need to have everything.
Gilman goes on to say:
This elite insecurity, combined with vastly increased inequality that makes falling out of the elite a desperately bad outcome, makes it locally rational for elites to focus relentlessly on gaming the meritocratic system in order to secure their own position and that of their families.
Emphasis mine, because that's the phrase that gives the game away. Where did this vastly increased inequality come from? From the tiny minority gaming the system for the past fifty years. In 1972, after Lewis Powell (who would eventually go on to be a Supreme Court Justice) wrote The Powell Memo, that "elite [with] a strong incentive to care for the system" decided, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, to instead game the system and ensure a never-ending flow of money into their accounts. The erosion of federal controls on banking and corporate corruption followed in the wake of a sustained, intolerant campaign by the wealthiest and most powerful to consume more and more and more of everything, leaving the rest of us with nothing.
The rising tide between 1972 and 2019 may have "lifted boats" but it lifted them inequally and disproporationally, and the tide rose faster, swamping some of those boats, and the rest of us see the tidal waves coming, if not in the form of surveillance capitalism but in the real threat of real tidal waves.
Gilman's thesis is also completely undone by two historical models: Rome and Sparta. Sparta, for all the ridiculous worship that the far-right makes of the homoerotic imagery of The 300, isn't with us today because it collapsed from internal pressures: the elite did optimize for strong, beautiful men, and they changed the laws to ensure that inheritance and property rights continued only in an upward direction. They hoarded all the money and all the farmland, and Sparta ultimately collapsed because the economy came to a grinding halt. A murderous contempt for the poor and the alien combined with a decaying oligarchal elite doomed Sparta.
That should sound familiar.
The Spartans were terrible warriors anyway.. It was Athens, not Sparta, that ultimately saved Greece. This is why we run "marathons" and not "thermopylaes."
Rome is even more relevant. While Sparta reflects the desires of an ethnically-oriented state to be even more ethnocentric, ultimately to its own demise, Rome was definitely an empire, where people of all classes and races mixed together to create an even bigger and more powerful state. It had no ethnocentrism to speak of and would make deals with anyone. What it had, instead, was class warfare, codified into law. But that doesn't stop Rome from collapsing. Edward Watt's book Mortal Republic spells it out:
The story of Rome’s fall is both complicated and relatively straightforward: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.
Watts goes on to show that, in its last century, the legislative process of Rome, which was designed to create compromise and consensus, was instead propagandized to obstruct progress and to punish anyone who threatened the status quo of the ruling elite.
As Sean Illing writes in that article, "Well, that sounds familiar."
So Gilman is basically wrong; any system designed to create consensus is vulnerable to an intolerant elite that believes that if it keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, eventually they'll get that lucky break, that last moment when all the powers of the state are vulnerable, and they'll finally, totally, and completely control the machinery.
That moment is now: Donald Trump is in the White House and Mitch McConnell is preventing any action at all that would rein him in, becaume Mitch McConnell knows that as long as he's where he sits, he can put in a generation of judges who will create a utopia for the rich and a hellscape for the "undeserving," the people like you and me. And that's the way he wants it.
Yes, America will be little more than bastions of wealth surrounded by ruins.
But they'll be his ruins.
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