One person (from the middle east) made the comment to me that this is the difference between America and some other places that she had experience with: in America, competence is needed in order to rise to the top. In some other places, this is less clear: people will often be able to get good positions based on family connections and similar things.
This idea surprised me at the time, for similar reasons to those mentioned in the article. We (at least, those who consider themselves 'intellectual') aren't primed by society to say "the system works"... rather, we are trained to find problems with it.
I think this is somewhat true, as corruption and lack of transparency, in my opinion would ensure that instead of competency , connections and different social skills such as deception would play a more important role.
Today's post, Competent Elites was originally published on 27 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
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