I can't take the David Brooks column all on at once

I can only do, like, a piece at a time. I'm also waiting for the rest of the internet to wake up and remove some of the responsibility from my shoulders. But for now, I'll start here:

Christopher Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation believes that the problem is inherent in the nature of meritocracies. In his book, “Twilight of the Elites,” he argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy.

Hayes points to his own elite training ground, Hunter College High School in New York City. You have to ace an entrance exam to get in, but affluent parents send their kids to rigorous test prep centers and now few poor black and Latino students can get in....

Far from being the fairest of all systems, he concludes, the meritocracy promotes gigantic inequality and is fundamentally dysfunctional. No wonder institutional failure has been the leitmotif of our age.

It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest.

So, my first reaction is - when it comes to the test prep industry, why are you only comparing upper middle class applicants to other upper middle class applicants? When Chris Hayes talks about Hunter - which is a very elite public school and is therefore one of the few places that poorer kids in the city can go for top education - and Hayes says that test prep means "poor black and Latino students" can't get in - do you think he's comparing upper middle class to slightly more upper middle class? No. He's saying that a system that was set up to be truly open to all students has become distorted so now only kids that start with material advantages have a shot. And Brooks doesn't even refute that - he just changes the question.

And then Brooks's story doesn't even make sense on its own terms. He compares the "organized" families of the upper middle class to "disorganized" poor families - which means he just changed his definitions mid-thought. When he wants to say that family structure and discipline dictates who gets to be elite, he compares poor to rich; when he wants to say that test prep is unimportant, he compares rich to slightly less rich.

And that doesn't even get to the part where I'd like to see the citations for the idea that rich people work harder than poor people. Nor does he even seem to acknowledge that some poor people might not have jobs that allow them to take time off to drive their kids places while they pick up their work on conference calls jesus christ, and they might not be able to afford fucking piano lessons. Or a piano, which is an expensive thing to have. He recognizes that rich people spend money on enriching their kids and doesn't recognize that poor people don't have that money to spend. He doesn't seem to acknowledge that it's a lot easier to focus on your studies when you have no doubt that you'll have a home, food in your refrigerator, and parents with a steady paycheck.

But leaving all of that aside, what this mostly reminds me of is an old psych experiment which I tried to google but I couldn't find it, so just trust me.

You get a bunch of subjects in a room. You randomly select one person to be the "questioner" and the other to be the "answerer." Everyone knows these people were selected randomly - it was a coin toss.

The questioner must come up with 20 trivia questions based on his/her personal knowledge. Any random trivia the questioner happens to know. Then the questioner asks the answerer to come up with the answers.

Of course, because these are questions based solely on the random knowledge of the questioner, the questioner knows the answers and the answerer doesn't. The game is completely rigged. It's not that the answerer is any less smart or educated; it's just that these questions were designed based on the idiosyncratic knowledge of the questioner.

But even though everyone in the room knows the game is rigged, afterwards, they still all rate the questioner as smarter and more knowledgeable than the answerer. It's like, they see it's rigged, they try to discount that, but they don't discount it enough. So the questioner, merely by the random chance of having been put in a position where he/she can show off his/her knowledge, suddenly appears to be smarter. And the answerer appears to be stupider.

And that's what's fundamentally wrong with Brooks's column. He sees people in positions of power and he's unable to see the structural forces that put them there. All he sees is the position, and he assumes it's earned.

ETA: Oh, awesome - mecurtin found the psych experiment for me.

So apparently, David Brooks and Daniel Tosh are competing for worst person in the world awards

I am so glad I never heard of this guy before two days ago.

oh for the love of....

Condi Rice is not going to be Romney's VP pick, and it's not because she's pro choice or because of 9/11 - it's because she's a gay black woman.

So I googled to see what became of Daniel Tosh's attempts to edit his pilot for Comic Con

and what do you know, it turns out that rape jokes - or at least, rape jokes about rape jokes - can actually be pretty damn funny. (Not linking, because some of them ... well, I found them funny but I possibly feel a little guilty about it.)