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 than the piece in The Nation 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’t dismiss this out of hand, but it certainly isn’t enough to make me accept that portion of Hayes’ argument. People have all sorts of weird misconceptions.
That being said, there are many descriptive and positive elements of Hayes’ narrative which I can agree with. By this, I mean that I do agree that phenomena such as the “iron law of oligarchy” do exist, and are pervasive. Additionally, I also accept that merit-based systems eventually tend toward corruption, as the measuring-sticks become not the means toward ascertaining productivity, but the ends toward which one optimizes. I’m not a Leftist, so my prescriptions would be different from those of Hayes, but I see …