Meritocracy Trap Book Summary

Meritocracy Trap Summary I Read this after hearing an interview with Daniel Markovits initially. (2020-08-23 to 2020-12-12) The Book in Three Sentences Meritocracy replaced direct inheritance style aristocracy after the post World War II baby boomers overwhelmed colleges–forcing them to create the SAT to deal with admissions–and has been snowballing a self reinforcing selection process that has been undoing the middle class ever since. The elite make bank slogging gnarly hours more than by stereotypical capital gains loop holes and “the rest” work fewer hours, involuntarily left out of the economy....

December 12, 2020 · (updated November 3, 2024) · 11 min · 2264 words · Michal Piekarczyk

Summary of Mundanity of Excellence

This is a summary of “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers” by Daniel F. Chambliss. In three sentences The author has spent a lot of time reporting on all levels of swimming competition and writes about observations about the differences between them. The differences in abilities of different levels of competition are not because of quantitative differences like “more training” but qualitative differences like using a flip turn instead of just touching the wall and turning around....

November 21, 2020 · (updated February 26, 2023) · 3 min · 618 words · Michal Piekarczyk