The Blame Game
29th April 2025
What is this thing called “merit”? And what role did it play during the recent but hopefully bygone age of elite college dominance, runaway financialization, and the rise of competitive blame-shifting? This is the puzzle proffered by Nicholas Lemann in his 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy: Why should competition for slots at a tiny number of selective colleges play a substantial role in how young people come to fill lucrative private sector jobs?
The American meritocracy was created in the mid-20th century by academic administrators such as war gas chemist and sometime Harvard President James Conant not to staff Wall Street but to find the best and the brightest to fill vital government and scientific positions.
We can think about how merit selection can and should work for these few and demanding positions by riffing on the 1943 Warner Brothers propaganda short The Rear Gunner. The small and folksy Burgess Meredith was the star, while the tall, slim, and handsome Ronald Reagan was in a supporting role.