Twilight of the Elites : America After Meritocracy (CD-Audio)

from nostalgebraist

A good, brief, easy-to-read survey of the ways in which the pathologies of our current elite have helped produce the various disasters of the past decade (financial, military, etc.)Hayes' big idea is that an overzealous, ideological application of the idea of "meritocracy" is responsible for all ...

from jcbrunner

In a decent political environment, Chris Hayes would be a center-right social democrat. In the United States, he is considered a flaming liberal, at least in the terms his employer, General Electric's MSNBC, still deems acceptable. The strangeness of "Twilight of the Elites" is that Hayes fully s...

from DanTarlin

I was already a fan of Chris Hayes due to his work on MSNBC, so I fully expected to like this book, and I did. He is describing how the "meritocratic elite" that has run things in the US for so long is breaking down in its ability to make good decisions, and how the public at large has grown disi...

from Citizenjoyce

This is a great analysis of the failures of meritocracy, a system that seems impossible to criticize. Hayes shows how a meritocracy does not really allow for all people to rise by their own efforts but rather that those at the top use the system, as all other systems, to protect their own positio...

from larryerick

I really liked this book, but not for it's beginning, which read like a highly academic proposal for a research grant. Nor did I like the ending. Not for the same reason, but because it was clear the author was neither as confident in his statements, as he was in the rest of the book. However, th...