"But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?"
I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years.
Sharecroppers don't care if the soil is depleted in 20 years. A family that has farmed the same land for 200 years is more likely to care.
This is very insightful. I had a vague feeling for quite some time, that a lot of the "things going wrong" seem to have something to do with more widespread short-term thinking.
Maybe it is not just about b), but other factors too with possible similar effects: More childlessness, less family cohesion, smaller families, more stress on individuality vs. community - basically all the other factors that many commentators bring up about the current generations.
Another factor I'd maybe add is "rootedness", except that apparently bottomed out a few decades ago and Americans move a bit less often now (though this seems less true of elites, who still usually move once for college and then to a third city post-college, if not more times than that). A lack of movement is usually regarded as a negative in terms of lower economic dynamism. But it can also mean that people are given to a more long-term view.
My wife's parents both live in the town they were born in, only a few counties over from where at least one known ancestor was among the earliest English settlers in the state, and I can tell they're a lot more invested in local issues than my family, which has been highly mobile for generations and also has shallower roots in North America.
But it seems it's not really a coincidence that the heart of the old establishment was the Northeast and not anywhere further west. I.e., the place where English settlement in North America had some of the deepest roots. These were people who never went far from where their ancestors first made landfall and consequently were highly invested in the same places and institutions, generation after generation.
"Not moving" is not the same thing as "rootedness". A person can live in a place and not have a lot of connection to it. Don't belong to any local organizations, don't know or care much about local politics (and vote based on national signifiers), don't know your neighbors, have most of your connections online. It seems to me that all the latter have increased even as people have moved less.
I think there is something to this, though I wonder how much you can isolate the effect of meritocracy here as opposed to the simple fact that as the world moves more quickly, it becomes harder to convince ourselves that it is even possible to create and maintain institutions whose form will last long enough for our children to inherit.
Another thought I had about the meritocracy debate point is how Brooks' thesis may intersect with the elite overproduction hypothesis. The old aristocracy created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites our country produced. Meritocracy flung the doors open. This is good insofar as it means that more competent people may replace the "arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting," but perhaps the resulting culture of intra-elite competition and resentment ends up undermining elite institutions in ways that negate those benefits.
If an aristocratic couple.have more than two children , that's elite over production in a sense. But it was understood that the third and fourth sons would have to become army officers.or clergymen,.so the element of resentment was.missing.
I don't have a citation at hand, but if I'm not misremembering or misinterpreting, this sounds similar to 18th-century arguments for government by landed aristocracy. That argument being that landowners (particularly the very wealthy ones) were highly invested in their country, and being the most invested had the greatest incentive to keep it stable and going. Democracies or even mercantile oligarchies, on the other hand, being dominated by classes with relatively little investment (or investments that were easily transportable), were much more likely to let things go to hell, to the bad of all, because they had relatively little to lose. Even monarchs, with a transnational interest, were untrustworthy because they could easily mix up their personal interests with the national interests if they weren't kept firmly in check by something like a parliament.
More generally, the 18th-century argument looks like it's aware of and groping toward a solution to the principal-agent problem. It imagines the aristocrats as the principal "investors" in the country, and argues that they ought to be running things directly, because if they delegate to an agent—a king, a democratic assembly, even a commission of very clever men who aced a set of examinations—they risk delegating to someone who is disincentivized to look out for their interests, and if you neglect the interests of the principal investors you run a much greater risk of crashing the investment vehicle (the country).
Those arguments had a point, there are a number of examples of monarchs with multiple crowns being very exploitative towards the 'lesser' ones.
I think that there's an error in assuming small landholders have 'less to lose' because their landholding is small, the fraction of the person's wealth is what matters; merchants, on the other hand, have definitely been known to cut their losses and run in situations where people whose wealth was primarily in the land stayed and fought instead.
Something that seems to start happening in the 18th C, and becomes common in the 19th C, is elite children insisting on marrying for love rather than as their parents wish. (This is most visible in royalty, eg the endlessly repeated story of Sissi.) Along with similar ideas like “doing what you love” rather than the family business.
One could argue that landed aristocracy and royalty did, in fact, work reasonably well right up until they were infected by these bobs ideas like marrying for love, at which point
- they did their job worse and
- they were no different in kind from everyone else, so why should they be treated differently?
Even when it's not a pure meritocracy (which never happens in the real world), the first generation nouveau riche haven't grown up in the long-term thinking-oriented culture and so don't have aristocratic mindset. They still have middle class sensibilities, which they'll pass onto their kids, along with the billions.
Meritocrats shouldn't have the aristocratic mindset, because they need to re-prove their credentials.with each generation. They may be worse.at preserving , but they are better at adapting.
To push back on this a little bit, it's true that first-generation nouveau riche don't grow up in an aristocratic culture. but it's hard to become nouveau riche without being longterm-thinking-oriented (sacrifice now to become rich later). So the SECOND-generation nouveau riche arguably often DO grow up in a longterm-thinking-oriented culture, at least to the extent they get culture from their parents, who would at least theoretically model their own values to their kids.
For better or worse, today's meritocrats don't have much attachment to any one place or activity.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the professional managerial class and its principal class adversary, the Local Gentry. Local Gentry are very much tied to a geographic location and a specific business, often inherited. That guy who, together with his brother, owns a successful chain of muffler shops in the Omaha region can't just up sticks and move his businesses to South Carolina, nor would he likely be successful if he sold everything and changed his business to electrical contracting.
More to the point, your children will have to pass the tests to join the ruling class, and regression to the mean means that often they have a lot less talent than you do.
Also, when your right to rule is justified by your alleged personal superiority to everyone else rather than a well-established practice of hereditary succession, any sign that you aren't really infallible becomes a reason to overthrow you, and hence it's harder to admit a policy isn't working and reverse course. If a medieval king invaded his neighbour, got beaten, and had to sign a peace treaty, this would be embarrassing, but it wouldn't threaten his or his dynasty's position; if Vladimir Putin loses in Ukraine and has to seek peace, the best-case scenario is that he gets forced into ignominious retirement, and the worst-case scenario is that he gets straight out assassinated.
This is (roughly) a point made by Tocqueville in Democracy in America: aristocracies have a longer time horizon than democracies. (Which, as usual with Tocqueville, he sees has having both positive & negative effects.)
You raise a crucial point, but I think your conclusion overlooks the fact that the aristocrats ARE in charge, and so can be expected to rejigger the meritocratic system as necessary to ensure that their children will be in charge as well. Brooks could make a fine sequel out of the effort to reintroduce the hereditary principle which the WASP aristocracy had and the meritocratic aristocracy originally lacked. (The bloat of the universities, for example, can be seen as a way to provide cognitive-elite positions for the dull-normal children of the previous generation of the cognitive elite.)
But this really isn’t true anymore. Wealthy and powerful people seem much more likely to be the first of their line to achieve their position than a few generations ago. I don’t think the notion that we’re just being ruled by new Rockefellers and DuPonts holds water. Familial turnover really is quite high in elites these days by historical standards.
One way to interpret the push for test optional / no test admissions to elite schools is that this is intended to protect slots in the elite from encroaching Asians and other non-elite competitors.
"But if we grant a long chain of conjectures, they seemed to be better at some aspects of leading the country than their meritocratic successors. Why? Is there a simple patch, or is meritocracy inherently dangerous?"
I'll toss this out: Aristocrats grow up expecting that (a) they will be in charge and (b) that they will pass this on to their kids. Part (b) provides a longer perspective than a pure meritocracy where you hope (but, realistically, don't expect ...) your kids to have similar status and power. As folks think shorter term there is less incentive for maintaining the structures rather than benefiting from them and not worrying about whether they will be around in 50 years.
Sharecroppers don't care if the soil is depleted in 20 years. A family that has farmed the same land for 200 years is more likely to care.
This is very insightful. I had a vague feeling for quite some time, that a lot of the "things going wrong" seem to have something to do with more widespread short-term thinking.
Maybe it is not just about b), but other factors too with possible similar effects: More childlessness, less family cohesion, smaller families, more stress on individuality vs. community - basically all the other factors that many commentators bring up about the current generations.
Meritocracy -> Red Queen's race -> constant goodharting of status metrics
Another factor I'd maybe add is "rootedness", except that apparently bottomed out a few decades ago and Americans move a bit less often now (though this seems less true of elites, who still usually move once for college and then to a third city post-college, if not more times than that). A lack of movement is usually regarded as a negative in terms of lower economic dynamism. But it can also mean that people are given to a more long-term view.
My wife's parents both live in the town they were born in, only a few counties over from where at least one known ancestor was among the earliest English settlers in the state, and I can tell they're a lot more invested in local issues than my family, which has been highly mobile for generations and also has shallower roots in North America.
But it seems it's not really a coincidence that the heart of the old establishment was the Northeast and not anywhere further west. I.e., the place where English settlement in North America had some of the deepest roots. These were people who never went far from where their ancestors first made landfall and consequently were highly invested in the same places and institutions, generation after generation.
"Not moving" is not the same thing as "rootedness". A person can live in a place and not have a lot of connection to it. Don't belong to any local organizations, don't know or care much about local politics (and vote based on national signifiers), don't know your neighbors, have most of your connections online. It seems to me that all the latter have increased even as people have moved less.
I think there is something to this, though I wonder how much you can isolate the effect of meritocracy here as opposed to the simple fact that as the world moves more quickly, it becomes harder to convince ourselves that it is even possible to create and maintain institutions whose form will last long enough for our children to inherit.
Another thought I had about the meritocracy debate point is how Brooks' thesis may intersect with the elite overproduction hypothesis. The old aristocracy created arbitrary constraints on the number of elites our country produced. Meritocracy flung the doors open. This is good insofar as it means that more competent people may replace the "arrogant boors who spent most of their energy conspicuously consuming and yachting," but perhaps the resulting culture of intra-elite competition and resentment ends up undermining elite institutions in ways that negate those benefits.
If an aristocratic couple.have more than two children , that's elite over production in a sense. But it was understood that the third and fourth sons would have to become army officers.or clergymen,.so the element of resentment was.missing.
I don't have a citation at hand, but if I'm not misremembering or misinterpreting, this sounds similar to 18th-century arguments for government by landed aristocracy. That argument being that landowners (particularly the very wealthy ones) were highly invested in their country, and being the most invested had the greatest incentive to keep it stable and going. Democracies or even mercantile oligarchies, on the other hand, being dominated by classes with relatively little investment (or investments that were easily transportable), were much more likely to let things go to hell, to the bad of all, because they had relatively little to lose. Even monarchs, with a transnational interest, were untrustworthy because they could easily mix up their personal interests with the national interests if they weren't kept firmly in check by something like a parliament.
More generally, the 18th-century argument looks like it's aware of and groping toward a solution to the principal-agent problem. It imagines the aristocrats as the principal "investors" in the country, and argues that they ought to be running things directly, because if they delegate to an agent—a king, a democratic assembly, even a commission of very clever men who aced a set of examinations—they risk delegating to someone who is disincentivized to look out for their interests, and if you neglect the interests of the principal investors you run a much greater risk of crashing the investment vehicle (the country).
Those arguments had a point, there are a number of examples of monarchs with multiple crowns being very exploitative towards the 'lesser' ones.
I think that there's an error in assuming small landholders have 'less to lose' because their landholding is small, the fraction of the person's wealth is what matters; merchants, on the other hand, have definitely been known to cut their losses and run in situations where people whose wealth was primarily in the land stayed and fought instead.
Something that seems to start happening in the 18th C, and becomes common in the 19th C, is elite children insisting on marrying for love rather than as their parents wish. (This is most visible in royalty, eg the endlessly repeated story of Sissi.) Along with similar ideas like “doing what you love” rather than the family business.
One could argue that landed aristocracy and royalty did, in fact, work reasonably well right up until they were infected by these bobs ideas like marrying for love, at which point
- they did their job worse and
- they were no different in kind from everyone else, so why should they be treated differently?
Even when it's not a pure meritocracy (which never happens in the real world), the first generation nouveau riche haven't grown up in the long-term thinking-oriented culture and so don't have aristocratic mindset. They still have middle class sensibilities, which they'll pass onto their kids, along with the billions.
Meritocrats shouldn't have the aristocratic mindset, because they need to re-prove their credentials.with each generation. They may be worse.at preserving , but they are better at adapting.
To push back on this a little bit, it's true that first-generation nouveau riche don't grow up in an aristocratic culture. but it's hard to become nouveau riche without being longterm-thinking-oriented (sacrifice now to become rich later). So the SECOND-generation nouveau riche arguably often DO grow up in a longterm-thinking-oriented culture, at least to the extent they get culture from their parents, who would at least theoretically model their own values to their kids.
For better or worse, today's meritocrats don't have much attachment to any one place or activity.
This is one of the fundamental differences between the professional managerial class and its principal class adversary, the Local Gentry. Local Gentry are very much tied to a geographic location and a specific business, often inherited. That guy who, together with his brother, owns a successful chain of muffler shops in the Omaha region can't just up sticks and move his businesses to South Carolina, nor would he likely be successful if he sold everything and changed his business to electrical contracting.
Good point. And consider the differences in the messages:
(1) "You're a member of the ruling class because your father was, and his father before that. Don't fuck up and disgrace the family name."
(2) "You're a member of the ruling class because you're smarter and better than any of your peers. If you fuck up we might have to revise the tests."
More to the point, your children will have to pass the tests to join the ruling class, and regression to the mean means that often they have a lot less talent than you do.
But then North Korea should be the best maintained country in the world...
Except for c) "You can just have anyone who calls you out on your failures killed."
Kinda dampens the need to maintain conditions for anyone other than yourself and close followers...
Also, when your right to rule is justified by your alleged personal superiority to everyone else rather than a well-established practice of hereditary succession, any sign that you aren't really infallible becomes a reason to overthrow you, and hence it's harder to admit a policy isn't working and reverse course. If a medieval king invaded his neighbour, got beaten, and had to sign a peace treaty, this would be embarrassing, but it wouldn't threaten his or his dynasty's position; if Vladimir Putin loses in Ukraine and has to seek peace, the best-case scenario is that he gets forced into ignominious retirement, and the worst-case scenario is that he gets straight out assassinated.
This is (roughly) a point made by Tocqueville in Democracy in America: aristocracies have a longer time horizon than democracies. (Which, as usual with Tocqueville, he sees has having both positive & negative effects.)
You raise a crucial point, but I think your conclusion overlooks the fact that the aristocrats ARE in charge, and so can be expected to rejigger the meritocratic system as necessary to ensure that their children will be in charge as well. Brooks could make a fine sequel out of the effort to reintroduce the hereditary principle which the WASP aristocracy had and the meritocratic aristocracy originally lacked. (The bloat of the universities, for example, can be seen as a way to provide cognitive-elite positions for the dull-normal children of the previous generation of the cognitive elite.)
But this really isn’t true anymore. Wealthy and powerful people seem much more likely to be the first of their line to achieve their position than a few generations ago. I don’t think the notion that we’re just being ruled by new Rockefellers and DuPonts holds water. Familial turnover really is quite high in elites these days by historical standards.
One way to interpret the push for test optional / no test admissions to elite schools is that this is intended to protect slots in the elite from encroaching Asians and other non-elite competitors.