Nils Gilman:" A largely hereditary elite: "A largely hereditary elite is anathema to the principles of meritocracy. But this much must be said: 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, the one @nytdavidbrooks celebrates, 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. Pace Brooks, 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. One effect of the rise of (partial) meritocracy has been to make incumbent elites feel much less secure about their positions within the system, and especially about their ability to ensure a similar position for their children. 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. Given the choice of working in ways that create positive externalities for system maintenance, or local optimization for them and theirs, the latter seems like a much wiser choice to many elites.
In a way, this shift can be seen as nastily inverted version of the meritocracy, where the sort of “merit” that gets rewarded consists not so much in gaining and applying productive skills, as in a ruthless willingness to commit “the necessary crimes”. In game theory terms, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma at a systemwide scale—every individual elite has an incentive to game the system for him and his, even though all would be better off if they invested in making the system as a whole better.
In a different theoretical idiom, we can follow Gramsci’s line that this is the central internal contradiction of capitalist reproduction: elites eventually self-deal to the point where they bring the system crashing down around their heads. This is the underlying logic of #PlutocraticInsurgency: personally maximizing even if it means screwing the system. Which naturally creates massive elite irresponsibility toward their fellows. The result is a push toward what we may call a “Devil Take the Hindmost” State...
#shouldread
