Modern social critics really shouldn't read the Michael Young's 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Yes, it's the book that coined the word. But Young, a veteran British Labour activist, wrote it as a satirical work of fiction, told in the form of bureaucratic memos -- witty enough if you can penetrate the verbiage, but almost unreadable by today's standards. Little plot. No sex.
And it's demoralizing, because, despite its clunkiness, Young foresees practially everything. I mean everything. The hiving off of the credentialed, the inevitable SAT-selected snobbery, the rise of Trump-like populists, Herrnstein-Murray genetics, the push for a guaranteed income (UBI), even a Silicon-Valley style elite. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in there Young told us the winners of next year's Grammys. As the first to describe an important new social phenomenon, he left precious little for those who would come second or third. It’s like Mary McCarthy’s famous review of Nabokov’s labyrinthine puzzle-novel, Pale Fire: She figured it all out right off the bat.
Read on (and h/t Althouse)
