A thread on meritocracy & McKinsey: I was friends with Mayor Pete in grad school. We were in the same liberalism reading group and then we were both involved in something called the Democratic Renaissance Project. Pete isn't the candidate I'm supporting, but I respect him 1/x
At Oxford, I felt he was a true believer, in the sense that many of us felt that the Democratic party had lost its way and we wanted to be more ambitious about progressive change. But it gets more complicated. We started with same premises, but then there were different paths 2/x
I don't know. People change. But my sense is that Pete still has progressive objectives, but that his means are "centrist" or pragmatic, and he's emphasized that more as the campaign has gone on. I've become more "anti-centrist" in both means and ends since then 3/x
I look back, and I think about the other Rhodes scholars (beside Pete) at Oxford. And I think there's something about that scene that's inherently problematic. It's the Best and the Brightest Problem: they are in fact brilliant but sometimes they end up really messing shit up 4/x
As @gcaw said, if you get the Rhodes you can do literally anything, so why do so many people go to McKinsey? But there's also something constraining about getting the Rhodes (I think). You probably end up feeling like you have a lot to lose, and your incentive structure shifts 5/
Some of my friends did McKinsey when they were younger. It's same weakness that liberalism has, in a way: endless choice ends up, paradoxically, being constraining and even stifling. McKinsey offers a way to fill the void, if you're not sure what to do b/c you can do anything 6/x
McKinsey & the Democratic "establishment" share a theory of change that's certainly not my own, but it's a theory: nudging + incrementalism. I used to be more like that, but for me the last 8 years have offered the strongest rebuke against nudging that I could have imagined 7/x
But my incentive structures have been different. My ideology is weird, so I never thought much about getting a position in a Hillary administration. If they were interested in me, it would be not in spite of my weirdness, but because of it. That frees you up 8/x
But I think a lot of policy people in DC have to (or feel they have to) be more carefuI. I love writing. Other people put more of a priority on having an impact on policy from within government. But that can push you to be more cautious than you might otherwise be 9/x
It's the Elena Kagan problem: You go through all these top liberal institutions where you're around other people just like you, and you don't have much of a paper trail of interesting (or "radical") opinions because it can be dangerous to be *too* interesting 10/x
This to me is what we have to change: It's the meritocracy's biggest failing. And finally we have a real opening to change it, because more and more Americans are realizing it's a dead end 11/x
