{"id":71575,"date":"2012-06-23T22:38:15","date_gmt":"2012-06-24T06:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17005"},"modified":"2012-06-23T22:38:15","modified_gmt":"2012-06-24T06:38:15","slug":"calcification-of-the-merit-castes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/23\/calcification-of-the-merit-castes\/","title":{"rendered":"Calcification of the merit castes"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p>After ragging on Chris Hayes for a week I decided to check out the conversation above between Hayes and Mike Konzal about his new book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0307720454\/geneexpressio-20\">Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy<\/a>. As <a href=\"http:\/\/mikethemadbiologist.com\/\">Mike<\/a> suggested the book does seem more nuanced in its take than the piece in <em>The Nation<\/em> which highlighted the role of high-stakes testing at Hunter College High School. In the conversation above Hayes supports his suppositions that test-prep was excluding blacks and Latinos by asserting that that is what the teachers themselves believe. I wouldn&#8217;t dismiss this out of hand, but it certainly isn&#8217;t enough to make me accept that portion of Hayes&#8217; argument. People have all sorts of weird misconceptions.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0That being said,\u00a0<strong>there are many descriptive and positive elements of Hayes&#8217; narrative which I can agree with<\/strong>. By this, I mean that I do agree that phenomena such as the &#8220;iron law of oligarchy&#8221; do exist, and are pervasive. Additionally, I also accept that merit-based systems <em>eventually<\/em> tend toward corruption, as the measuring-sticks become not the means toward ascertaining productivity, but the ends toward which one optimizes. I&#8217;m not a Leftist, so my prescriptions would be different from those of Hayes, but I see &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After ragging on Chris Hayes for a week I decided to check out the conversation above between Hayes and Mike Konzal about his new book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. As Mike suggested the book does seem more nuanced in its take th&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71575"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71689,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71575\/revisions\/71689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}