Thought experiment inspired by Chapter 2 of Chris Hayes' awesome book (which you should read, by the way):

Imagine that the bookies in Las Vegas allowed gamblers to place bets every year on which 5th graders in New York City would test into Hunter College High School, one of the highest ranking public schools in the country. Getting into Hunter is particularly kick-ass because a large percentage of its graduates end up attending elite colleges and universities. To get into the school, students m More...

Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy is a critical look at one of the most basic and taken for granted aspects of American society: the meritocracy. Second-nature to most of us, meritocracy is the idea that the best and the brightest among us should rise to the top. That pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps is possible, that the elite have earned their place, and that everyone has that opportunity. Ironically, this distinctly American ideal was first defined by an Engl More...

I've never seen Hayes on MSNBC, but I did see him speak on this subject in Chicago last summer, and immediately picked up his book. Hayes argues that America's meritocracy is flawed because it results in a new brand of elites who then proceed to create/maintain a system that guarantees the benefits of being in the elite to their own kith and kin. For example, parents concerned about getting their kids into elite schools in New York City spend thousands of dollars on test prep and other edges, le More...

I plan my week around watching Up with Chris Hayes on Saturdays and Sundays, taping the morning show on MSNBC and watching segments of it all day long. In smart, lively discussions with knowledgeable people of differing persuasions, Chris provides depth and meaning to headlines of the week. His ability to analyze and articulate difficult concepts in simple, comprehensible language--and to have fun doing it--is a great gift to those of us who want to understand American politics and world events More...

I love Chris. I love that he is intelligent and that he has a forum. I love that he does excellent and accurate research.

But I dislike books like this. He is making an argument either without the 'deep history' he is claiming to know, or this is truly how he sees things: unique to the present time, the elite lately are so corrupt and separated from the rest of us, and feel so superior to us, that we common people are waking up to their power and authority for the first time and we are discon More...

I read most of the first and last chapters last night - easy reading, but with a lot of memorable information.

Hayes, who is editor of The Nation and a friend of my hero Ezra Klein, is concerned with the worrying decline in trust in our society, specifically trust in the maligned elites who, in a meritocracy, are the folks who supposedly are the cream of the crop.

We've all heard the sneering references to the elites from the right-wing, an ironic reality since it's the right-wing who go to the m More...

Chris Hayes has written a book that brings the "failed decade" into depressing perspective. Somebody had to do it, I guess, but it is an emotionally difficult book. We all know the things that have happened that made us cynical--gridlock in DC, Lance Armstrong, the Catholic Church, Wallstreet greed and risk taking, steroids and baseball, Katrina, and on and on, and it is not fun to relive these shocks to our systems. Is there anyway out of this hopeless mess? Are we all now subprime? Chris Hayes More...

Christopher Hayes gives his take on why so many Americans have lost faith in what were once trusted institutions. He doesn't limit his analysis to government, but also includes banking, professional sports, media - any institution with a concentration of people with power, platform and/or money. While the author was good at identifying problems, solutions were a bit thin. An interesting read nonetheless.

Basic idea is that meritocracies are easy to screw up. Author uses the various recent failures of the MLB, the Catholic Church, Wall Street, and Congress to (anecdotally) make the case that in the absence of some kind of competing tension, the incentives for cheating are equal to the incentives for legitimately succeeding, and so the cheaters take over as soon as they get a foot in.

Suggests that the current American crisis of government is the result of being between the decline of traditional i More...

I really liked the ideas and information in this book. It's really bold to question the fundamental belief that people should get as much as they can based on their abilities. But Hayes offers some convincing reasons why we should. I also like how he shows that people in power will find it easier to transfer that power to people they favor regardless if the power comes directly from money or from intelligence since money can help buy the best schools, etc.

The distinction he draws between equali More...

This is a very good book, if somewhat mis-titled. In one sense, Hayes doesn't believe we have ever had a meritocracy. Those with the most merit don't necessarily rise to the top, as studies of American class mobility have demonstrated. In another sense, to the extent that we currently have elites, people of wealth and power, it is not clear that it is their Twilight. To Hayes frustration, they seem as ensconced in power as ever.

But what Hayes does, excellently, is explain why a government and bu More...

Left-wing MSNBC host Chris Hayes writes balanced takedown of the so-called meritocracy that has produced the ruling elites of politics, business, and media in America. While meritocracy implies a broad level of social mobility, the vastly unequal rewards create an inequality which eventually grows large enough to subvert mobility and become... oligarchy. Meritocracy becomes the practice of elites mastering the art of preserving themselves, and the social order in fact combines the worst aspects More...

Hayes examines in close detail one theory for why we've had so many institutional crises in the last decade: the meritocracy. A word which was originally meant as an anti-democratic pejorative (i.e. meritocracy as a new aristocracy) has become a new model for building institutions where people who are talented/work hard are rewarded. The problem with a meritocracy is that it really only works for one generation.

I'm indebted to Hayes for his ability to paint a broad picture and helping me underst More...

Profoundly articulate treatise, laced with social commentary and criticism, which examines America’s growing mistrust and skepticism of our nation’s elite, who have ravaged our most sacred institutions (government, Wall Street, baseball, Catholic Church) by gaming our long trusted meritocratic system of achievement. Hayes makes the argument that our current system of meritocracy has resulted in an unbalanced “aristocracy of talent” which has succumbed to its own excesses and intoxication of powe More...

A socio-political statement from a left perspective that is worth reading. Christopher Hayes main thesis is that the series of sociological and political crises we have experienced in the past two decades clearly demonstrate a crisis in authority. He does a good job of listing and explaining his thesis in several instances (loan & housing financial crisis, Wall Street - hedge funds & junk bonds, loss of faith in political leaders & Catholic Church, steroids in Major League Baseball, More...

Chris Hayes looks at the failure of institutions in the last 20 years in the US as a "crisis of authority" among figures expected to perform for the benefit of all because they were anointed by one of America's most durable social mechanisms-- the meritocracy. Hayes advises us that we should all take a good long look in the mirror when we evoke meritocracy or its chosen tool--education--as a panacea for social ills.

Twilight of the Elites is a significant work of postmodern political theory-- More...

I wish this book was written at a fifth grade level. As it is, it's comically, absurdly well written, with a staggeringly glorious diction. If you watch Hayes' show, you know that diction isn't affected - it rolls off his tongue in the expository segments of his show as easily as it does in this book. Which I love, and I find very satisfying.

And yet, that selfsame diction makes his very important points less accessible to precisely the people who need to understand them. Like most books that cu More...

Living in China where a student's success in life depends almost entirely on their performance in several key tests, I think about the concept of meritocracy a lot. Also, having grown up in the US during the rise of standardized testing and affirmative action I've found myself on both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I often felt it was unfair that most of the well educated and wealthy people I knew were white and generally came from well educated and wealthy families. But on the other hand More...

This is an important book. Much of the social disarray we are experiencing seem to evince itself in the political divide between right and left. Nearly every problem is seen from the perspective of the beholder, proposed solutions are ideologically driven, and the two sides talk past one another. Hayes posits that this is the wrong framework for understanding the issue. He elucidates the philosophical basis of meritocracy and its strength, but then explicates the manner in which such a system co More...

Hayes (aka "the host of that show on cable news where people don't yell") has one clear and central argument: the culture of meritocracy in this country is both ineffective and actively harmful. He argues this convincingly, both from theory (this is why meritocracies fail us) and recent political history (here are a bunch of meritocratic systems which failed us). The crux:

"The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough t More...

OK…I am a fan of Chris Hayes and think his MSNBC show is brilliant. So why was I reluctant to read his book? I think I was afraid of being disappointed and feared that might color my enjoyment of his show. But, not to worry, the book is fine and therefore I am fine.

At first I thought it might be a just a longer exposition of truisms from his (and mine mostly) worldview. Once I got into it I think he brought enough self-examination to recognize when he was part of the story in that he is part of More...

A very thoughtful analysis of the failure of American elites as seen from a left-wing perspective.

“Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence.”

“We do not trust our institutions because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. The drumbeat of institutional failure echoes among th More...

Chris Hayes does an excellent job of defining the elites, who they are, why we need them and how the public has lost confidence in them. Their failures have led to a loss of respect for religious, sports, financial or governmental institutions where people once looked for guidance and role models.

Hayes describes the ingredients for getting to this point. It is the downside of the meritocracy, which Americans hold dear. It is a predicted outcome of competitive organizations that greatly reward su More...

A truly fascinating analysis of elitism in America, and why our much-adored idea of meritocracy isn't really working.

Hayes looks at many recent failures in the past decade or so (Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, the housing crisis, Wall Street meltdown, Catholic Church problems, etc.), and shows how really smart people got things really wrong. The problem, he says, is that people who make it into the elite become seriously out of touch with the rest of us -- because we reward them so highl More...

Been stalking this book for a while since I read a review of it. Then I heard the author on Rachel Maddow's podcast and bought it on an impulse the next time I was at Books, Inc.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did because it seems right up my alley -- discussing class, meritocracy, education, decline of everything, and why the first decade of the 21st century was so all around sucky.

Reading through a list of went wrong between 2000-2010 is pretty shocking: 9/11, Enron, pre-Iraq war More...

I'm a humble book blogger who happens to be addicted to politics and public policy almost as much as I am to reading. I will never claim to be a policy wonk or to know everything there is to know about the way our government works, but I think I stay abreast more than most. I wish I had the time or made a different career choice when I was in college, but I learn what I can, pay attention to what is being debated, and really try to analyze the way I think about a given topic or situation. Now be More...

A very good read that brings up some ideas that I actually hadn't considered. The argument isn't so much that meritocracy is bad, it's that a true meritocracy is unsustainable without periodic change. The section that got me thinking the most was the section on standardized testing as a means of selecting the best people. Chris Hayes attending a school in New York that allowed anyone from any part of the city to join. You just had to pass the test. Sounds really fair, and when it first started i More...

When the British East India Tea Company learned how China conducted a series of standardized tests to select its elite bureaucrats, they thought it was a great idea, instituted it for their employees, and it spread throughout Western Civilization until it manifested in the cultural value detailed in _Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy_ by Chris Hayes. What the British didn’t realize was that the Chinese elites cheated, by sending their children to cram schools and special tutors, More...

This is oddly an interesting book to read with/after Reality is Broken. A lot of the systemic societal problems discussed are the same in both books. Hayes and McGonigal are coming at the same problem from very different perspectives.

There's a sort of parallel between Hayes' idea of fractal inequality and the progression through difficulty levels in video games that I find fascinating. The system Hayes describes, of endless social climbing with no hope of actually making it to the top because of More...

Good book detailing the consequences of the adherence to an ideology of meritocracy. The message of the book is this: a meritocratic system is far from perfect but it's the best we have. But an unequal society will make that meritocracy untenable by rendering the elite out of touch. The solution to this is to strive for a more equal society.

Here are my notes:


# Meritocracy
In a world where there is a lot of information the people do not have the time or the werewithal to occupy themselves with eve More...