From Jonah Lehrer’s Wired blog who got it from a blog post by Ross Douthat at the New York Times:

Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging.

It raises an interesting point. We take our best an brightest and train them all in the same place or at least in places that share a somewhat similar ideology. What does that do to diversity of opinion or ideas? It’s interesting to think about how this differs from music and art. Yes, there are musicians and artists who go through formal training to become orchestra conductors or–I’m not sure what someone with a higher degree in art would do, feel free to cure my ignorance. But the musicians and artists we know best are often those who have transcended boundaries rather than those who excelled within boundaries. I’m not sure how you would go about doing this type of thing with business, humanities or science graduates but it’s something to think about.

A quick note about our living in a meritocracy: I have problems with that too. It’s supposed to be that who ever wants to attend university, to use that as an example, can. Theoretically, that’s true. But then I start thinking about how children from families of high socioeconomic status (a term used often in these types of studies, Wikipedia definition: an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person’s work experience and of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position relative to others, based on income, education, and occupation) will hear millions more instances of words, not different words but instances of words, than children of low SES families by the time they get to kindergarten. Do you really expect these two children to be equal? Probably not. Is it because one child worked harder than the other? Probably not. Is that a meritocracy? Probably not. There are many other instances where what we think is fair and meritocratic is far from it but these are extremely complex social problems that there are no easy fixes for. I guess we’ll just wait for the non-diversified best and brightest to come up with an answer.