Twilight Of The Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I definitely used the dictionary function on my Kindle more than I ever have before, but this was amazingly well written for a topic that can easily get boring. If you ever watch Chris Hayes on TV, this isn't surprising. To paraphrase the entire book in a few words, most of America's problems, from the financial crisis to the steroids in baseball scandal to the Enron collapse to Catholic priest pedophilia, happen because of the condescension and arrogance of those few at the top. Really powerful people are mostly giant fucking assholes who look out for each other and no one else. The end. He says it much more eloquently though. Great read. It's not that this was a bad book - it was fine and I probably should have given three stars - it's just that it could have been so much better. I suspect it's so highly rated because it tells people largely what they already know - everything is broken / Iraq / Afghanistan / National Security state / Debt / etc - while sprinkling in a little bit of hope for the future. But the title of the book leads one to think about this as an analysis of how and why the people at the top of their game (products of the meritocracy) over the last decade all failed (instead of just noting that they have) - I thought this was going to be a much deeper analysis of cultural shifts, the abdication of responsibility / etc that have defined America since 2000 - and why that happened. Instead, just passing references to that while saying hopefully we can come out of this as we have in the past.
What do You think about Twilight Of The Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012)?
Some familiar observations and arguments here, but also some fresh thinking about social distance.
—Sid
An enlightenly fun read of failures.
—summerlove713
