Ron Unz: When Elites Are Selected In A Corrupt Or Incompetent Manner, You Get Corrupt Or Incompetent Elites
01/24/2013
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Ron Unz writes at the American Conservative

Meritocracy: “Asians as the New Jews, Jews as the New WASPs”

As all writers know, a good title should be both descriptive and provocative, and both these considerations certainly apply to Russell Nieli’s very detailed 2200 word review of my Meritocracy article “Asians as the New Jews, Jews as the New WASPs,” recently published on Minding the Campus, a prominent education-oriented webzine affiliated with The Manhattan Institute.

Dr. Nieli, a Senior Preceptor and Lecturer at Princeton, has written widely about these same issues of the apparent unfairness and institutional biases in current elite college admissions, and his book, Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide was published late last year by Encounter Books, to considerable critical acclaim.  During the preparation of my own article, I found his numerous reviews and columns an invaluable resource, and I would highly recommend his current review as the best single summary of my own research findings, and one provided in a format far more accessible than my own 30,000 word exposition.[More]

So if you read all of Unz's post above, and read Russell Nieli’s review, you'll still save time over reading the original article "The Myth of American Meritocracy".

Why is this important? Well, as Unz writes

One of my arguments has been that when a nation’s elites are selected in a corrupt or incompetent manner, a natural result is the selection of corrupt or incompetent elites, and the recent history of our own unfortunate country does not seem to contradict such a hypothesis.
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