The Meritocracy Debate Part B

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-bobos

Table of contents:

1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate

Woody Hochmann writes:

The connections that Brooks makes between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy's power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture that first emerged in the 60s doesn't seem to stand up to even moderate historical scrutiny, in all honesty. Some issues that immediately come to mind off the top of my head:

-The idea that the cultural values that Brooks calls "bohemianism" became dominant in America for essentially parochial reasons limited to the US (a change in university admissions policies, the displacement of a previous aristocracy) doesn't track well with the fact that these social changes happened around the same time in basically every part of the western world (and to a lesser degree in Asia as well).