IS MERITOCRACY failing America? I’m not sure that what we’ve got is a meritocracy. Our people seem to be credentialed, more than educated. But I don’t think that affirmative action and higher taxes are likely to make things better.

I’d say shrink the playground of the “elites” — government — so that they can do less harm. Notice that that’s never the answer to any of their failings, though?

UPDATE: From the comments: “It strikes me that, in no small part, modern American meritocracy has been so watered down and stylized that ‘smart’ now amounts to little more than mastery of a few subcultural norms and presuppositions. The norms and presuppositions themselves have little, if any, predictive power of native intelligence and generally serve to designate its participants as one of ‘us’ versus one of ‘them’. It has much less to do with the identification and nurturing of native intelligence than it does with the perpetuation of status.”