Why Our Elites Stink

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-elites-stink.html?hp

by bejar37 • 14 years ago

59 70 14 years ago

bediger40003• 14 years ago

Weird. David Brooks in person: rather interesting. David Brooks on paper: easily dismissable.

In this case, I dismiss what he says because he's making exactly zero attempt to control for exogenous variables. There's a lot more going on than just changing from a WASP-only aristocracy to a meritocracy of sorts. Vast cultural shifts have necessitated the change, and cause other things to happen as well. Just to pick a few examples, birth rates have dropped, the US population grows only through immigration, basically. Cell phones happened. That changes a lot. Did the WASP-only aristocracy have computers on their desks? No? Did they have The Internet?

wdewind3• 14 years ago

I think you missed the point. The problem is in having a system which labels itself meritocratic, because it lacks the concept of an elite. When you have such a system, those who rise to power do so with the personal story that they earned it. Brooks is arguing that while we used to have social values that allowed some classes to project themselves as "elites," at least in those days the elites had a sense of responsibility for the culture, and for the institutions they guarded. We had the downside of people legitimately feeling they were better than others, and the upside of a more tightly run ship.

I do agree that he's full of shit. He's being nostalgic for a time he did not even live through, and he makes ridiculous sweeping statements like, "Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character."

ritchiea• 14 years ago

I agree that he's nostalgic and full of shit but you're putting words in his mouth when you say the problem is "those who rise to power do so with the personal story that they earned it." Brooks is arguing that they DID earn it, he says the mechanisms that put people at the top tend to be honest and that people at the top work more than others. What he's saying when he's being nostalgic is that the old people at the top had a sense of responsibility to society. You could call it a patronizing attitude.

But as we seem to agree that's bs for a number of reasons. Most notably that Brooks even says the old "elite" were sexist and racist (at least anti-Semetic). But if you're a racist, sexist leader, you probably don't really have the benefit of those people you're racist and sexist to in mind. Or if in some weird contradiction you do, your bigoted attitude likely makes you a poor steward even with the best of intentions.

rayiner• 14 years ago

> "Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character."

I don't know if it was any different 50 years ago, but that's exactly how they hire now.

tubbo• 14 years ago

Not only that, but we're talking about what the press knows. The press is a lot bigger now, because we're all a member of the press. There's more news now because there's more capability to disseminate information quickly. In the "heady days" of the 50s and 60s that David talks about, our speed of information uptake was much lower than it is today. So to tie our current problems to a meritocratic system that isn't run (well, as deeply) by a caste of elites is just completely ignorant of the fact that the average person knows more than the average person did in the 1960s.

brown9-24• 14 years ago

Here is an excerpt of Chris Hayes' book for anyone interested: http://www.thenation.com/article/168265/why-elites-fail

I think David Brooks is over-summarizing Hayes' thesis and also making it sound like he is interested in violent overthrow of "the elites" by comparing him to the French Revolution.

bwanab• 14 years ago

Thanks for that. Hayes' actual arguments are much more subtle and thoughtful than Brooks gives them credit for.

brown9-24• 14 years ago

That seems to be true for any subject Brooks writes about.

moron• 14 years ago

As far as whether Wall Street is working better than it used to, depends who you ask.

But, really, this talk of "elites" tends to put me on edge, because a lot of times it's really about who you define as the elite. I came of age politically at the time when anybody to the left of Rush Limbaugh was an effete "latte liberal", and the word "elite" basically referred to anyone who had a college degree and saw through the insane rhetoric of the time. Who you call "elite" becomes part of your agenda, essentially.

sp3324• 14 years ago

I think "elites" are people who consider themselves elite, or more specifically, any one who thinks: 1. They can make better life choices, financial decisions etc. than "other" people, and 2. Therefore they should be in charge of other people's lives.

freyr4• 14 years ago

This definition is entirely dependent on the internal mind state of the individual. The guy behind the counter of the local 7-Eleven may think he's smarter than everyone, and may think he should be in charge, but nobody thinks of him as an elite.

I'd guess most people today consider an elite as somebody who wields influence within a political, corporate, or other type of entity that itself is highly influential within society, and who is well connected to other people of influence.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

I think the word your looking for is politician.

Fortunately the world has shown there are solutions for them, the trouble is the country usually is in a very bad position before the populace acts on that solution.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

That is nearly everyone.

macspoofing• 14 years ago

The article defined "elites".

rubashov4• 14 years ago

The assertion that "elite" status is more meritocratic today than in the past (in America) is highly questionable. Go look at 100 year old university admissions tests. Note that they didn't care what "clubs" you were in.

Brooks goes on about diversity and the decline of WASP dominance as an obvious sign of the shift to meritocracy. This out of hand dismisses the possibility the WASPs just actually were/are elite. Why is this a fair assumption?

http://blog.jim.com/culture/not-the-cognitive-elite-3.html

drumdance3• 14 years ago

Yes, but they cared very much whether you were Jewish, black or female. And they still care if your parents went to school there.

rubashov4• 14 years ago

On black and Jewish I'm not going to take your point as granted. I'd need an unbiased analysis.

lindowe2• 14 years ago

I would love to know by what metric 1950s & 60s elites were 'better'. Brook's seems to be ignoring the fact that elites in these times were more effective because they could ignore other interest groups. It's easy to get a highway built when you can override the largely poor or minority groups who live in these areas (i.e. Robert Moses). Also the widespread lack of transparency meant that the crimes of elites were far less apparent, and so popular conception is that they were a far more 'honorable' bunch. I don't deny that there is a lot wrong with the ruling class today, but that problem emerges from our institutions, and the concentration of power and lack of checks/balances, not because of some mythic, WASPy noblesse oblige that no longer exists.

rubashov4• 14 years ago

Fair point on the disastrous social engineering and urban redevelopment schemes of the 20th century. But, what about sending men to the moon or designing and building the sr-71 in a few years? Or for that matter conquering Japan and Germany in the space of a few years.

I argue these are all things our society today would simply not be able to do if placed in the same circumstances. We are less effective.

lindowe2• 14 years ago

You raise the interesting point of 'Great Projects'. I'm sympathetic with the desire for a new space program, but I think it has less to do with a lack of vision and more to do with competing visions. NASA has a harder time raising money in the government because they have to compete against a multitude of other causes and agencies, who rightly point out that money put towards a trip to mars is money thats not going to social welfare programs, infrastructure, or other, more tangible goods. We went to the moon because there was an overwhelming desire to 'beat' the soviets; if a similar desire competitor existed today, I imagine a similar effort. As for winning WWII, its the same basic point that at that time there was an obvious single good to be pursued, winning the war, whereas now there are many different goods. This isn't the fault of our elites or our efficiency, it just points to the fact that we live in a pluralistic society. It would be better to embrace that, and devolve more power to civil society, than to continue to pine for elites who can overcome opposition.

brown9-24• 14 years ago

I argue these are all things our society today would simply not be able to do if placed in the same circumstances. We are less effective.

What is this based on? Our society today is still capable of great accomplishments - look at what Google has built in 10 years, the amount of knowledge organized there.

I would argue that we seem to be able to accomplish less because as a society our ambitions are smaller. Large government programs get nowhere today because everyone fears socialism.

brown9-24• 14 years ago

He's not basing it on any metric.

His sentiment can be chalked up completely to the nostalgia that all people feel for the era of their childhood. Everyone always thinks that "things were better" during the time when they were growing up - because they were too young to understand what things were like for adults in that time. The time periods of our youth always seem better than today.

awkward• 14 years ago

He manages to hit a lot of the terrible points that normally make his essays unbearable - comparing the 50s favorably to today, and an abject worship for a poorly defined patriarchal elite, but this part was spot on:

"Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment."

Or in the tech press, where multi-billion dollar companies are "disruptive".

bejar37• 14 years ago

The interesting point that I got from this article is that the old aristocracy had a sense of responsibility to society and acknowledged the fact that they were privileged. Now that we're in a society where people tend to not think of themselves as wealthy or privileged, how does this self-ignorant meritocratic elite know that they do have a responsibility?

bediger40003• 14 years ago

Is there any objective indicator (or "proxy") for this sense of responsibility? I'm thinking there isn't, but maybe someone can suggest measures that show it.

I can offer a specific counter-example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20... Looks like someone on the inside of the CIA's coup-planning process made a killing in the stock market, as well as in Guatemala. That's not aristocracy with a sense of responsibility, it's cold hearted money grubbing.

tomjen33• 14 years ago

It is the way the aristocracy has made money for centuries (stealing it, since they couldn't make it themself).

But the fact that his wealth is stolen may make him more caring of his subjects, knowing that he didn't deserve his fortune, and so they may not deserve their misfortune, whereas someone who build themself up from nothing may very well look down on these people as lazy.

freyr4• 14 years ago

The current system favors easily quantifiable performance metrics (GPA, SAT, ranking of degree-granting academic institution) and social networking. We end up with socially-adept individuals who look good on paper running the show. As we have seen in some stunning recent displays, individuals can rise within this system and succeed despite an off-kilter moral compass or a sense of purpose beyond their own personal gain. Hayes claims that elites are corrupted by meritocracy when they attempt to preserve their power. Brooks argues that the rise of morally bankrupt elites are a cultural byproduct, rather than a inherent issue with meritocracy itself.

It's a potentially interesting distinction, but Brooks doesn't justify it coherently or delve into the implications at all. He compares and contrasts yesterday's elites to today's, but these comparisons hold under either hypothesis. It would have been more interesting if he provided a coherent argument for his claim, or offered any prescriptions to treat the underlying problem (or even to quell the symptoms).

bediger40003• 14 years ago

I like your answer, and maybe, just maybe, that's what Brooks wanted to say. I also agree that "Brooks doesn't justify it coherently". But that's because you're making the distinction that Brooks did not.

Please take over Brooks position as editorial writer.

js2• 14 years ago

This is an old argument, and I frankly think it was better made by the man who coined meritocracy:

[snip]

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.

[/snap]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

excuse-me• 14 years ago

Well what do they expect if they kick out a perfectly good elite hereditary monarchy and try and run their little colony with a bunch of meritocratic presidents!

ubasu• 14 years ago

This is the NYT equivalent of blogspam. Also comes with standard patronizing rhetoric about how today's uppity nouveau riche elites cannot compare with what he knew when he was growing up (as others have also pointed out).

paulsutter• 14 years ago

"Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else"

This is a fascinating point, and predicts the crticisms here about how "elites" are defined. All the successful people i know in the tech industry feel like outsiders and rebels. And as such, it's an interesting question whether the tech industry feels more of a motivation for success than we feel a responsility to society. I don't know that we don't, and I don't know whether some "elites" of the past did. But it's an interesting perspective on meritocracy.

In the tech industry we can be dismissive of bankers, but what an interesting thought if they too feel like rebels and outsiders, rather than being the prep school squares we might envision. When I think of the finance folks I know, they really are more similar to tech folks than different.

I can't help but feel that much of the criticisms here are semantic in nature and result from zeroing in on sentences and phrases rather than the central idea of the article.

I certainly dont have the answer, but David Brooks is making an interesting point. Values are important. And this reminds us of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin advocating for real progress rather than quick wins.

crusso4• 14 years ago

I can't help but feel that much of the criticisms here are semantic in nature and result from zeroing in on sentences and phrases rather than the central idea of the article.

'Who the elites are', 'how they got where they are', and 'what their natures are' are the kinds of topics that people tend to think of in quasi-religious terms.

Breaking through the semantic quibbling and getting past the default set of political assumptions isn't easy -- even on a reasonably contemplative forum like HN.

Like you, I don't know the answer. Brooks' conclusions are a little weak since there isn't any way to gather statistics on the subject that would mean much. Interesting to think about, though.

liber82• 14 years ago

Our Elites have always stunk. Even during perhaps the most creative, innovative, and groundbreaking period in the history of political science (the time around the American revolution), our leaders ran smear campaigns, created laws to freeze out their competitors[1], and even killed each other[2].

But, those great men actually realized, at least to some extent, how much they stunk. They crafted a limited government because they recognized how easily corrupted people in power are.

This fantasy that everything will be okay if we simply pick the "right" elites has been persistent since FDR's administration. There's no such thing. Brooks argues that we just need to inject some ethics into the process. Good luck. If you can figure out how to do that, we don't need prisons, we don't need 99.9% of the laws we have, and we don't need 99.9% of the government we have. Of course, humans don't work that way. Which is why our government was set up the way it was in the first place.

[1] Our beloved Ben Franklin became postmaster just so he could scoop other peoples' stories for his own newspaper.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_burr

freyr4• 14 years ago

"Of course, humans don't work that way."

Whenever I find myself in doubt regarding liberal viewpoint, it usually can be traced back to this, a fundamental disconnect with the way the majority of humans actually behave.

In fairness, strong conservatives draw from an even crazier palette of false assumptions.

liber82• 14 years ago

The problem is definitely on both sides. Some of the most visible and hilarious examples come just in the last four years. Obama the constitutional scholar (rightly) lambasts the Bush administration for accumulating unauthorized and unchecked executive power. Of course Obama the president doesn't view those newly acquired powers as such evil things. Why would he? Once those powers are in the hands of the "good guys" or the "right elites", it makes it so much easier to do "good". No need to deal with any of the bureaucracy and red tape that would otherwise exist.

And of course the right is now "terrified" that the same powers they enjoyed so freely just four years ago are in the hands of the "bad guys" or the "wrong elites".

It's easy to disconnect yourself with the way humans actually behave when you're the one in power because you believe you won't act the same way that everyone else would.

tryitnow• 14 years ago

This is why I don't pay for access to the NYT.

Brooks is comparing the best elements of the old elites to the worst elements of the new elite. There's certainly a leadership ethos among the new elites. Try walking around an Ivy Leagure campus without being reminded of some politically correct "cause." Even top ranked business schools eagerly embrace "corporate social responsibility" and other concepts implying a sense of "stewardship." They do use the same old-timey language Brooks would prefer, but the basic ethos is still there.

Ignore Brooks's arguments, the book he refers to actually sounds like the real deal. I've long thought that meritocracy has some inherent problems. That's not to say we should throw it out, but rather that we should be aware of the practical and moral limitations of meritocracy.

drumdance3• 14 years ago

"Brooks is comparing the best elements of the old elites to the worst elements of the new elite"

Well said.

niels_olson• 14 years ago

> today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess.

This nicely sums up something that has plagued me for years now. I grew up on the lower middle class side of WASP. My dad is an engineer and my mom waited tables at Zarda BBQ to cover the mortgage. I went the Naval Academy and got the live-in-spartan-quarters treatment and went out into the fleet and felt the responsibility as I looked in a man's eye and said things he didn't want to hear.

When I went to medical school, married with two kids, having completed two tours on ships and a tour on staff back at the Academy, everything got turned on its head. Here were strivers, but, and I remember thinking then "There I was running with a wolf pack. Now I'm swimming with sharks".

johnmichaeleden2• 14 years ago

You knew it was bound to happen. You knew, in your gut, that once David Brooks read Twilight of the Elites (Twilight), he’d have some fundamental quibble with Christopher Hayes’ latest. (Brooks’ piece is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-eli...)

In Why our Elites Stink, Brooks argues that our elites are failing to live up to a “self-conscious leadership code” that a now vanquished vanguard once had. Before we get to whether such a code even makes sense (I think it does, but not in Brooks' sense), consider Brooks’ general critique of Twilight:

It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

To invoke Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live, really? I can see why this complaint might play well with a certain demographic. After all, successful Americans, especially members of the upper-middle class, do spend an inordinate amount of time shuttling their kids to piano lessons, ensuring that their children gain entry into the best high schools and colleges, and generally putting in serious hours at work. They also spend a lot of time ensuring that their own work product exceeds the prevailing standards of their respective fields. They are killing it, I can assure you. These folks are sweating blood everyday to ensure that they don’t lose their place in our economic biosphere, a system that perhaps has less in common with a biological environment – where ecological balance is at least possible – and more with an oil-soaked incline that very much prefers culling over cultivating.

What Brooks does not realize is that the elites Hayes has in mind are not the folks killing themselves to excel as line-contributors at management consulting firms, law firms, and technology companies. Hayes is talking about people who, through a mix of talent, political maneuvering and luck are able to ascend to the top of the mountain and defend it against those (i.e., the line-contributors) who desperately need access to capital and the other resources (political connections, e.g.) to climb further up the mountain. Yes, I am saying that Brooks’ has conflated (deliberately?) upper-middle class strivers with the real elite. And for that reason alone, his direct assault against Twilight fails.

But what of Brooks’ positive argument, the idea that elites today are sorely lacking a code of honor? Consider Brooks’ own words:

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

There is some “truthiness” here. It is true that if you read about the Libor scandal, you will get the sense that a bunch of immature brats are now playing skipper atop large vessels that they do not quite comprehend.

Yet it is also apparent that Brooks does not understand the preconditions to creating and maintaining a self-conscious code of stewardship and honor. That code is only possible where a number of preconditions have obtained. First, wealth and earning disparities between capital and labor have to be reasonable, a point that Hayes repeatedly makes in Twilight.

Second, such a code is possible only where the word “merit” does not mean something like “best able to enrich Zeus and his favored demigods.” Brooks in fact touches on this, but only obliquely. He observes that “Wall Street firms . . . now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character.” Presumably Brooks would agree that experience makes someone truly more meritorious in the world of banking, since experience would inculcate a broad sense of social responsibility.

I don’t know if this is true of executives in the banking world; it’s quite possible that senior bankers are just as prone to take huge risks as their younger counterparts, given the willingness of Congress to wash away billion-dollar gaffes through bail outs. Nonetheless, I would generally agree with Brooks that experience and character are characteristics relevant to a recruiting or hiring decision. But I digress. The point here is that merit must actually be something genuine and (wherever and whenever possible) immune from manipulation. Where such an immunity is impossible, merit must be something that ordinary people can fight to have reinstated, followed or respected within the key institutions that structure and reproduce society over time.

Defining genuineness is not easy. It doesn’t mean gauged by standardized tests, which are suspect as tools of exigency and manipulation (see the history of military recruiting, which I think of as the sordid incubator of modern standardized tests). Ensuring that merit is a “genuine” concept is simply a way of saying that this word should not become co-opted by an existing regime to justify its own immoral conduct. Put another, perhaps stronger, way: Merit must be defined independently of what happens to be beneficial for the existing elite. Is that hard to do? Absolutely. Should we strive to attain this lofty goal? Without a doubt.

The third precondition is related to the second: There must be mechanisms and institutions in place to prevent Zeus, as well as his favored demigods, from (1) controlling the very definition of “merit” – though controlling access to key institutions and capital and (2) living a distant life, a life immune to the fears, concerns, and hopes of those who do not live at the top. In Hayes’ parlance, we need to dismantle the “autocatalytic” infrastructure that allows elites to rig the game in their favor. We need less, not more, social distance.

In a nutshell, then, Brooks’ positive diagnosis fails because he hasn’t done any rigorous thinking about the core problem. Hayes is right: It’s not just that the people in power don’t happen to have a code of honor, it’s that our most important economic and political institutions are architected to reward only those people who are willing to forever flush that code of honor from their psyches. That dear friends, is, unfortunately, today’s price of admission to Mount Olympus.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

If you'd like, I'll write a letter to the editors of the Times and see if they can replace Brooks with you.

johnmichaeleden2• 14 years ago

I'd never get through their gauntlet.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

From the article: "They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service."

Its been my experience that people who believe in service, which is to say they believe they are there to serve the organization/community/nation in order to help it achieve its goals, are the people who make great institutions.

People who believe in wealth acquisition and power make corrupt institutions.

The former live to empower everyone else, the latter live to dis-empower everyone else.

Why Our Elites Stink

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