Capitalism and Perfectionism

The Dangerous Downsides of Perfectionism, by Amanda Ruggeri

“As many as two in five kids and adolescents are perfectionists,” says Katie Rasmussen, who researches child development and perfectionism at West Virginia University. “We’re starting to talk about how it’s heading toward an epidemic and public health issue.” . . .

Perfectionism, after all, is an ultimately self-defeating way to move through the world. It is built on an excruciating irony: making, and admitting, mistakes is a necessary part of growing and learning and being human. It also makes you better at your career and relationships and life in general. By avoiding mistakes at any cost, a perfectionist can make it harder to reach their own lofty goals. . . .

Perfectionism . . . isn’t defined by working hard or setting high goals. It’s that critical inner voice.

Take the student who works hard and gets a poor mark. If she tells herself: “I’m disappointed, but it’s okay; I’m still a good person overall,” that’s healthy. If the message is: “I’m a failure. I’m not good enough,” that’s perfectionism. . . .

[F]or perfectionists, performance is intertwined with their sense of self. When they don’t succeed, they don’t just feel disappointment about how they did. They feel shame about who they are. Ironically, perfectionism then becomes a defence tactic to keep shame at bay: if you’re perfect, you never fail, and if you never fail, there’s no shame.

As a result, the pursuit of perfection becomes a vicious cycle – and, because it’s impossible to be perfect, a fruitless one.

The author points squarely at capitalism as a cause, arguing that we live in a society that demands perfectionism. A society...

Where we are so literally valued for the quality and extent of our accomplishments that those achievements often correlate, directly, to our ability to pay rent or put food on the table. Where complete strangers weigh these on-paper values to determine everything from whether we can rent that flat or buy that car or receive that loan. Where we then signal our access to those resources with our appearance – these shoes, that physique – and other people weigh that, in turn, to see if we’re the right person for a job interview or dinner invitation.

[Social scientists Thomas] Curran and [Andrew] Hill have a similar hunch. “Failure is so severe in a market-based society,” points out Curran, adding that that has been intensified as governments have chipped away at social safety nets. Competition even has been embedded in schools: take standardised testing and high-pressure university entrances. As a result, Curran says, it’s no wonder that parents are putting more pressure on themselves – and on their children – to achieve more and more.

“If the focus is on achievement, then kids become very averse to mistakes,” Curran says. “If children come to internalise that – the idea that we only can define ourselves in strict, narrow terms of achievement – then you see perfectionistic tendencies start to come in.” One longitudinal study, for example, found that a focus on academic achievement predicts a later increase in perfectionism.

Similarly, the gold-star method of parenting and schooling may have had an effect. If you get praised whenever you do something well and not praised when you don’t, you can learn that you’re only really worth something when you’ve had others’ approval.

If other strategies, like making children feel guilty for making a mistake, come in, it can get even more problematic. Research has found that these types of parental tactics make children more likely to be perfectionists – and, later, to develop depression.

Fear of failure is getting magnified in other ways, too. Take social media: make a mistake today and your fear that it might be broadcast, even globally, is hardly irrational. At the same time, all of those glossy feeds reinforce unrealistic standards.

Trump and the authoritarians

Interesting article by Amanda Taub: The rise of American authoritarianism. However, it's stupid to talk about authoritarianism without mentioning Bob Altemeyer.

This video will make you angry

Marx on Alienation

In his early writing, Karl Marx analyzes the concept of alienation. Marx adopts a Hegelian methodology in his analysis. To both Hegel and Marx, history is a dynamic dialectical process. A dialectical stage begins with a negation, a contradiction, and then proceeds to a resolution of the contradiction, i.e. the sublation, transcendence, or, from Feuerbach, “the negation of the negation” (Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” 108). The original negation is not erased, but instead transformed (Tucker, Notes xli). Marx theorizes that alienation, especially the alienation of the worker (and capitalist) from the social activity of production, constitutes a negation, one which Marx believes will be sublated or transcended by the advent of communism. In his analysis, Marx claims, contra Hegel and others, the material basis of alienation, explores the specific material character of alienation, and locates the potential sublation of alienation in the sphere of practice.

Marx argues that Hegel’s account of the dialectical process must be transformed from an idealistic basis to a materialistic basis. Marx holds that Hegel has the dialectic “standing on its head [and] must be turned right side up again” (Marx, Afterword 302). Marx reads Hegel as saying that an actual idea creates the material reality of, e.g., family and civil society. Instead, Marx argues that Hegel inverts subject and object: actual material human beings create the ideas of family and civil society (“Contribution” 17-18). Marx holds that our social relations are not fundamentally in the human mind but in the material world. Dialectical contradictions arise when the material economic conditions conflict with the social institutions apropos to earlier economic conditions (“Marx on the History” 2). Although Marx follows Feuerbach’s lead in inverting this reading of Hegel, Marx extends Feuerbach’s materialism. In “Theses on Feuerbach,” of Marx claims that Feuerbach does not conceive of human activity itself as material (143). Marx argues instead that human activities, including thought and social relations, are also material (145). Richard J. Bernstein argues that Hegel unifies the material and the ideal in Geist (29-30), so too does Marx unify the physical and the ideal in the material.

After locating the dialectic in the material, Marx characterizes the specific nature of alienation in the material social relations of production under capitalism. In “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” Marx argues that capitalism inverts the relationship of humanity to labor, from the existence of worker for his or her fulfillment in labor, to the use of labor for the existence of the worker. Because of this inversion, labor under capitalism becomes institutionally alienated in four distinct ways. First, the product of labor becomes not merely objectified – Marx argues that it is humanity’s intrinsic nature, our species being, to produce objects, to exert our will on the natural world (75-76) – and not only expropriated, but taken to become actively hostile to the worker, not fulfilling but diminishing her- or himself, sometimes to the point of loss of reality, literal starvation, and death (71-72, 74). Second, capitalism alienates the worker from the labor process itself. Not just the product but the activity of producing no longer belongs to the worker; the worker becomes essentially a machine programmed by those who have purchased his or her labor power (75). Third, because, as mentioned above, it is our species being to be active, engaged, producers, Marx argues that by alienating workers from their product and process of production, capitalism thus alienates workers from their species being (76-77). Finally, capitalism alienates individual people from each other (77). When producing for a wage, the workers and the consumers of the workers’ products no longer interact with each other – they no longer create a social relationship. Marx argues that if labor were not alienated, one who produces for another would have “the direct and conscious satisfaction that [his or her] work satisfied a human need” (qtd. in Bernstein 48). By alienating labor, capitalism transforms production, the most intimate and personal relationship between human beings and nature, other human beings, and humanity itself, into an impersonal, bestial activity.

Marx argues that alienation must be resolved in the material, practical world, not merely the world of ideas. Marx asserts that “Social life is essentially practical,” not ideal, and that labor’s alienation, the contradiction between humanity’s actual practice of production under capitalism and production’s essential human purpose, must be resolved in practice (“Theses” 145). Marx opposes his views specifically to those of Proudhon: in “Society and Economy in History,” Marx condemns Proudhon for invoking mystical, nonsensical phrases to explain history and its development (136). Instead, Marx asserts that our ideas follow, not precede, our actual social relations: the “whole inner organization of nations [and] their international relations” are just “the expression of a particular division of labor” (139-140). Marx argues that our ideas are not eternal; they are always tied to material reality: “economic categories are only abstract expressions of . . . actual relations” (140). Marx concludes that Proudhon believes that only the categories, the “isolated thoughts,” need be changed to revolutionize society (140-141). In his condemnation of Proudhon, Marx implies that the opposite must be true: to change our ideas, we must change the physical reality. As Marx describes in “The German Ideology,” we must proceed from the “first premise of human history,” which is not the existence of eternal categories or ideas in the mind of God, but “the existence of living human individuals” and their physical, material nature. According to Tucker, Marx does not condemn ideas per se, but believes that ideas, theory, can “assist” changes in practice (Introduction xxxii). But, for Marx, physical existence and physical practice, what we actually do, remains primary. It is therefore practice – guided by theory – that must change to sublate the alienation of labor, to negate the negation constituted by alienation.

The focus on the alienation of labor makes clear that the conflict between capitalism and communism is not one of pragmatic efficiency but of the essential nature of humanity. Marx is not arguing here that communism or socialism is a way to produce more stuff than capitalism. Instead, Marx proceeds from a radically different view of the essence of humanity than does capitalism. Capitalism proceeds from the view of humanity as isolated individuals, whose relations are necessarily hostile, e.g. Hobbes’ “war of all against all,” or Rand’s fundamental “precondition of civilized society” as the “right to self-defense” (qtd. in “Civilization”) which can only blunt natural human hostility. Marx instead proceeds from the view of humanity as still individuals, but as social individuals, whose relations are ideally communal and mutually beneficial. The isolated individual is the negation of social humanity; the negation of negation will happen only when the negation of isolation is sublated into social production.

Works Cited

“Civilization.” The Ayn Rand Lexicon. The Ayn Rand Institute. 2014. Web. 17 Sep. 2014.

Bernstein, Richard J. “Praxis: Marx and the Hegelian Background.” Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1971. 11-83. Print.

Marx, Karl. Afterword to the Second German Edition. Capital. Vol. 1. By Marx. Tucker 299-302.

---. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Tucker 16-25.

---. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1877.” Tucker 66-125.

---. “Marx on the History of His Opinions.” Tucker 3-5.

---. “Society and Economy in History.” Tucker 136-142.

---. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Tucker 143-145.

Tucker, Robert C. Ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Print.

---. Note on Text and Terminology. Tucker xxxix-xlii.

Innovation

theObserver has some thoughts on innovation. Lightly edited for typographical style.

Innovate. I hate that word. We even have to innovate the grammar we use to talk about innovation (mostly to hide the fact we don't actually have any new ideas).

But consider software. Usually software does not need much start-up capital, so we find a large amount of hobby groups collaborating over the internet and producing decent software under the open software model simply because they enjoy it. Or game modders who produce new content for games just for recognition in their virtual community. Or illegal file shares going to huge trouble to pirate or hack games.

Indeed, during the early days of the information revolution, software was given away free because of the culture during the late 60's and 70's. The guys who invented the spreadsheet gave it away free until Bill Gates swiped it and made billions.

So I don't think the financial carrot is necessary to motivate people to innovate or invent or create. Most writers write because they want to; most painters paint without any expectation of financial rewards. In some cases when financial rewards are offered (commissions, book advances etc), the work actually suffers because of deadlines and pressure.

Even the supermen in the Ayn Rand books don't work purely for financial profit, but because they are exceptional and cannot help themselves. Profit is their just reward, not the motivation. In Atlas Shrugged her revolutionary capitalists were portrayed as making great personal sacrifices by striking and leaving their work.

I think Marx wanted to free people from unnecessary economic labor so they could innovate and self-actualize. I've long considered most corporations parasites because they try to leech every bit of creativity possible from their staff to increase their profits. This leaves staff exhausted or even worse - content ! - at the end of their working day, fit only for the couch, their dreams put off until tomorrow.

Social construction and critical thought

I will boldly assert: every belief held by every person is in one way or another socially constructed: either the belief is directly held causally because it was told to the believer by one or more other people, or it was indirectly socially constructed, formed by observation and experience substantially resting on directly socially constructed beliefs.

Commenter Ben Finney remarks: "I think we have to work hard, and persistently, not only to learn critical thinking (and teach others to do so) but to reinforce habits of critical thinking, precisely because they're counter to our nature." Ben's point isn't bad, but I don't think it hits the bulls eye. I suspect that Ben is confusing the social construction of beliefs with critical thought. If my bold assertion is correct, then critical thinking itself is either socially constructed or — if social construction and critical thought are antithetical — critical thinking is impossible, at least with our present cognitive equipment.

Assuming my bold assertion is correct, and assuming that critical thinking is compatible with (and established by) social construction, what kind of story can we tell about social construction, critical thinking and early childhood cognitive development?

Ben notes plausibly that "Young children demonstrate a massive tendency to believe whatever claims are spoken to them." (Young Children Hear It to Believe It) But does that mean that critical thinking is therefore counter to our nature? One alternative hypothesis is that our "advanced" cognitive tools are intrinsically neither part of nor excluded by our "nature". Our (biological) nature, rather is that we are learners, therefore what we actually learn is itself critically important. We not only learn facts and specific assertions, we learn — indeed we have to learn — how to actually think about and integrate facts and assertions.

In other words, our nature is neither critical nor uncritical; we are only naturally predisposed to acquire the most basic foundation of learning, i.e. acquiring language; how we proceed from there depends sensitively on what we are subsequently taught.

It is hard to understand how, if critical thinking were contrary to our intrinsic, biological nature, how we would ever have developed it at all. Contrawise, if critical thinking were intrinsically part of our nature it is hard to understand why we didn't develop it much sooner. The explanation that the process of critical thinking have to be learned (and therefore had to be initially constructed in an evolutionary manner) nicely explains both how it could be developed, as well as why it developed slowly.

If critical thinking is compatible with social construction, what precisely is critical thinking?

First, critical thinking could not be that one believes only that which she constructs for herself; she remains radically agnostic about everything that anyone else tells her. Such a construction would require that a critical thinker be radically agnostic about every belief she retrospectively discovered to be directly socially constructed; she would have to recapitulate the intellectual development of at least 10,000 years, if not the hundreds of thousands of years the human species has been extant. Such a task seems at least daunting and probably impossible in practice.

It follows then that critical thought cannot be a belief formation mechanism. If it were a belief formation mechanism, it would have to be an exclusive mechanism; otherwise alternative mechanisms and the beliefs so formed would simply be outside the domain of critical thought, a conclusion contrary to the claims of most advocates of critical thought, myself included, that critical thought should be universal, it should apply at least in theory to all beliefs. No belief ought to be a priori exempt from critical thought. But while critical thought might be compatible with social construction, they are clearly different: we can easily observe that non- or anti-critical thought can be socially constructed. If it is true that all beliefs — including the establishment of critical thought — rest substantively on some socially constructed beliefs, then critical thought either cannot be exclusive or cannot be universal.

Critical thought therefore must be a belief rejection method. This construction eliminates the paradox of exclusivity (subtly embedded in the insufficiency of Logical Positivism). At the most superficial level, constructing critical thought as a rejection method entails only that it is self-consistent: someone who adopts the idea of rejecting beliefs on the basis of critical thought will not therefore reject the idea of using critical thought to reject ideas. And, suitably constructed, critical thought is at least self-consistent.

However, self-consistency is not enough. If we also accept the premise that our socially constructed ideas evolve, we must create a plausible evolutionary story for why critical thought became pervasive when it did, and not before. There are, of course, many different kinds of plausible evolutionary stories in general; the most trivial story is the idea of critical thought just happened to arise by variation at some particular time; once it arose, non-critical thought was therefore rendered less fit and began to be selected against. Another plausible story is that material conditions (including the material conditions of our existing social constructions) were such that for some time critical thought was selected against, and then material conditions changed, which either removed the old selection pressure, allowing the variation to at least spread, or created new selection pressures that selected against non- or anti-critical thought.

Which of these stories (or some other alternative; evolution has more than two mechanisms) is correct is a matter of rigorous scientific investigation. However, I'm a philosopher, so I'm allowed to speculate.

Authoritarianism seems antithetical to critical thought. Authoritarian government entails the strong claim that the interests of a minority (the ruling class) should dominate the interests of the majority (the ruled class)*: when the interests of the ruling class ineluctably conflict with the interests of the ruled, the interests of the ruling class are always fulfilled, sacrificing without compensation at any level the interests of the ruled. Sophisticated democratic protections of minorities fundamentally rests on higher-level protections on the interests of the majority. We protect the right of free speech for unpopular minorities, for example, because the higher-level idea of free speech for everyone protects the interests of the majority. This is a different idea than that the interests of a minority should be preferred over the majority however constructed, just because that minority is somehow privileged. However, critical thought necessarily rejects this abstract social construction of authoritarianism: there is no reason to prefer the interests of any minority to those of the majority. Therefore, authoritarianism should exert (by violence) a selection pressure against critical thought. So long as this negative selection pressure exists, and no alternative selection pressure against non- or anti-critical thought exists, any emergent variation of critical thought will be removed from the pool of socially constructed ideas.

*A weaker claim — e.g. the "physician effect" — is that some minority has special expertise to fulfill the interests of the majority.

We should therefore see some material conditions change to explain the relatively modern rise of critical thought.

We have an obvious candidate: technology. The first important technological advance was the invention of the printing press. This invention is too useful to itself be selected against by authoritarians (because it is an extremely valuable tool in intra-ruling-class conflict), but it makes the suppression of ideas — including the suppression of critical thought — qualitatively more difficult: one cannot intimidate the text of a book, and the printing press makes book-burning an ineffective method of censorship.

The development of modern technology of production, i.e. the industrial revolution, provides the second, crucial impetus to the expansion of critical thought. Once we have stumbled upon a method of drastically improving economic productivity, failing to exploit this method will have obvious selective disadvantage: if one party can produce orders of magnitude more and better guns, and more, better and better-fed soldiers, another party that fails to also improve his production will lose head-to-head conflicts.

The development and improvement of technology requires critical thought. If you do not think critically — if you do not try out a lot of ideas, reject those that fail to conform to observation, and keep the rest — you cannot improve your technology. Authoritarianism is, therefore, in a fatal bind: critical thought is essentially anti-authoritarian, but critical thought itself cannot be completely eliminated without compromising the science and technology necessary to prevail against competing authoritarians. The best they can do is isolate, marginalize and "other" scientists and engineers... which is exactly what we observe in modern society. But this is a poor strategy: if you have any group with a large enough niche, you dramatically increase the variation within that niche, and one way or another variations can tunnel out of the niche. And again, we observe exactly this effect today, with many scientists and philosophers of science leading the charge against the central pillar of authoritarianism: divine sanction.

I am not, of course, a scientist, and I cannot prove this speculation with any sort of rigor. Still, as a speculation, it seems at least superficially plausible:

1. Critical thought is a belief rejection method
2. Critical thought is, like other beliefs, itself socially constructed
3. Socially constructed beliefs evolve according to abstract mechanisms of the evolutionary paradigm (i.e. heritable variation and selection)
4. Changes in technology (subject to different selection pressures) changed the material conditions and began to favor critical thought
5. We are still within that evolutionary process

Freedom and equality

In The True Believer Eric Hoffer makes the case that freedom and equality are opposites: thesis and antithesis. The true believer is drawn to a mass movement precisely because it offers him equality, an escape from freedom into an environment where his worth and value is established without regard to his individual characteristics. His individual self has decisively failed him; the true believer thus must search outside himself for value and worth. This ideal is the antithesis of the the ideal of freedom, that each individual ought to be judged on his individual characteristics.

The problem is that judgments are always relative: We pick out the top 10% (or some small fraction) on some measure as "successful" and judge the bottom 90% as "failures". Self-esteem is, I think, best seen as a dialectical relationship between the individual's own conception of herself and her peers' social regard; the concept of freedom thus ineluctably consigns a substantial portion of the population to the negative regard of society and the corrosive effects such a negative regard has on their self-esteem.

It is both the power and the downfall of capitalism that the precise characteristic that distinguishes the capitalist ruling class — their ruthless economic competitiveness — tends to destroy the institutions that give meaning and purpose to those who fail the judgment of freedom. By elevating freedom to the highest or even the only virtue, they hold each individual up to merciless scrutiny, and offer no escape to those who must necessarily fail that scrutiny. But human beings are not so easily thwarted. The frustrated and disaffected individual does not simply lie down and die; she seeks some alternative means to create a dialectic that will generate positive self-esteem. Freedom has failed her — as freedom must necessarily fail most — so she seeks equality. The only way to combat this tendency under the paradigm of freedom is to force those who fail the judgment of freedom into a daily struggle for life and death.

On the other hand, people are not actually equal. So long as people can be led, leaders will select themselves. They will then label some set of characteristics they happen to posses as "superior" to justify their position as leaders. Equality also must be somehow enforced. Even if all that's required is that one say the prayers; the prayers must still be said, with the appearance of sincerely and without irony. Those who do not say the prayers, those who do not sound or act sincere, must be excluded. But enforcement implies some privileged to actually perform the enforcement, to determine compliance, sincerity and authenticity; those so privileged are manifestly not equal.

It is not enough to say that at some stage of human development people can maintain equality "on their own", that the vast majority of people ever will be actually equal, and small deviations can be corrected without some minority privileged to correct them. Such an attitude is not precisely unrealistic — we can definitely observe social organisms that have near-total equality; even the queen bee is subservient to the hive and her life bound entirely to duty — but such equality seems to lose something ineluctably human.

It is perhaps possible that self-esteem could become independent of social regard, that each person's evaluation of her own self simply did not take into account the judgment of her peers. If one ignores Ayn Rand's hostility and contempt for those she considers sub-human, and her delight in their ruin, the human progression to true socially-independent autonomy is probably her most admirable idea. But I think our evolutionary history works against this idea. More importantly I think the tasks an immense and complex universe affords us require a high degree of social cooperation for even the longest-term foreseeable future. It might be the case that some, even many, individuals will develop socially-independent autonomy, but I suspect those individuals will simply remove themselves from the narrative of history and human development.

I have to say I'm a proponent of neither absolute freedom nor absolute equality. I have to see freedom and equality as existing in a dialectical relationship, both affecting the other with complicated and impossible-to-predict feedback effects.

Elitism

Several blogs I read, notably Daniel Little's Understanding Society and Economist's View have been writing about the correlation between education, skill, and economic "progress".

It is widely accepted that human capital, particularly attained through education, is crucial to economic progress. An increase in the number of well-educated people implies a higher level of labour productivity and a greater ability to absorb advanced technology from developed countries.

Their view is, essentially, bullshit.

The point is not skill. I have skill. I'm literate, intelligent, well read, personable, presentable, and I can use a cash register and make change. I've been programming computers for 30 years. I can pick up new technology quickly (I learned C# and .NET in a couple of months, and the Rule Against Perpetuities in five minutes). I have management and executive experience. I've written successful grants. Yet I've been forced to the margins of the professional-managerial middle class. Today, I can't get an interview, much less an actual job.

It's partly because I didn't accumulate capital in my peak earning years. It's a lot easier to transition your way laterally in the middle class if you can buy your way in. That's pretty much nobody's fault but my own: I thought I could rely on skill and experience... which worked well for 20 years; the last 10, not so much.

It's mostly because I didn't accumulate status. I never got the "sexy" jobs at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sun, etc. And that's mostly because I don't have a college degree — indeed, I'm a high-school dropout. I'm simply not even considered for any middle-class job outside IT (and certainly not general management. I'm often excluded by actual regulation (I cannot, for example, become a paralegal or teach ESL). I won't even be considered for a position outside my exact paid skill set in the computer business (now long obsolete) even though I've taught myself a variety of IT-related skills, including network engineering and administration.

If the Western economy today were hungry for skill, they would be beating down my door. In my prime they actually were beating down my door: I'd put my resume on Monster at 9:00 AM and have 50 calls by noon... and a top 10% paying job the following week.

The point is not whether students learn skills in college (I'm sure they do). The point is not whether I should go back to school and get a degree (I'm reasonably happy farting around in the margins of the bourgeois economy).

The point is that the idea that it's nonsense that the world is hungry for skill, intelligence, judgment, leadership or any other actual intellectually productive skill. The world happened to really be hungry for computer skills in the 90's, and they sure as hell found me. If they were still hungry for skills, they would find me now. If the world were hungry for skills, the professional-managerial middle class would be doing well. It is not: It is (at best) stagnant and many formerly skilled professions have been nearly eliminated.

My profession is a perfect example. The economic driving force in the 80's and 90's was IT, especially software development. And it exploded so quickly that credentials and status didn't matter. And what happened? Ten million Chinese, Indians and Russians learned how to program, flooded the market, and the bottom dropped out. (Indeed, my last two middle-class jobs were managing Russian programmers for very... er... marginal enterprises.)

Skill is (relatively) easy. If we needed ten million brain surgeons, we'd have them in ten years... and they'd make $10/hour. But we don't need ten million brain surgeons, we need only a few thousand, so we can pick out the best of the best — and the luckiest of the lucky — and pay them beaucoup bucks. Capitalism pays on scarcity, not on value, not on skill, not on hard work.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for education (however you get it, and school works for a lot of people, just not me). It's a basic human right. But if we push everyone through high school, a high school diploma won't be worth jack shit economically. If we push everyone through college, a diploma and $2,95 will get you a latte at Starbucks. We just raise the bar: A JD and passing the bar is ho-hum: now you have to be in the top 10% of a good law school and network like crazy to get a good job as a lawyer.

Life is graded on a curve: we pick out the "top" 10%, call it "scarce", and condemn the "bottom" 90% for being "common". It doesn't matter what they do, what they know, what they produce. If everyone were as smart as Einstein, we'd pick out the top 10% of the "super"-Einsteins to live in privileged prosperity and the rest would toil in misery. (Look at the market for scientists. A handful get tenure and a few get Nobel prizes (and half of these are hacks); meanwhile an army of graduate students and post-docs toil in obscurity and poverty. And science is the closest thing we've ever had to a sensible and rational meritocracy.)

Colleges do, of course, teach people a lot of useful stuff. But teaching is a college's secondary economic function: their primary economic function is (aside from collecting economic rent on the middle class) to act as a filter, to keep the supply of college graduates artificially scarce relative to demand. And the demand is not for people with skill, it's for people who have college degrees, precisely because college degrees are scarce. When college degrees are common, the demand will be for graduate degrees, or class standing, or networking skill... or, more likely, for how much money your parents had. The demand will be for what is scarce because it is scarce.

It sounds irrational, but it's not (in a certain sense). This kind of elitism for its own sake emerges from the economic selection forces operating under conditions of primitive accumulation. But we're no longer under conditions of primitive accumulation.

The "problem" with evolution is that when selection pressures change, what was selected for by the previous pressures is still around. It's one thing for animals. Millions of individuals die off, species go extinct: if that's the way God wants it, who am I to criticize. But I must admit to considerably more sentimentality and much higher expectations for human beings. We can think about what we're doing, and how we relate to each other. And we can do better.