The main point about -ocracy is a really good one, but the article makes so many blanket statements without any real evidence that seem way off base. The Ivy League schools (and quite a few other liberal arts colleges that should be included in this argument) historically were playgrounds for the rich, with academics being one of the games. No, Texas elite weren't shooting for Baylor (unless they were of a particular religious stripe), the super-elites in Texas were shooting for the big Ivy's, and next category was Rice. (Or Vanderbilt in Tennessee, etc.) Stanford has been an important elite institution in the US for a long time.
Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad.
I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's".
Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people.
I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better."
There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?
Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad.
I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's".
Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people.
I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better."
There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?