meritocracy, schmeritocracy

David Brooks:

The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the maximization of individual talent, and that system unwittingly encourages several ruinous beliefs:

Exaggerated faith in intelligence. Today’s educated establishment is still basically selected on the basis of I.Q. High I.Q. correlates with career success but is not the crucial quality required for civic leadership. Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.

All his other points are excellent also, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the damage done to our culture by the trust we place in people simply because they score very high on texts designed to measure g. That’s how you end up with a world run by functionally sociopathic technocrats.

And if you want to know what I mean by “functionally sociopathic,” here you go.