I'm reading The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann right now, and it is fascinating. It is all about the origins of the SAT, it follows a lot of influential characters from the Ivy League and University of California administrations over decades as this regime of admissions by testing was gradually rolled out. It's fascinating that a small handful of old money blue-blooded Ivy Leaguers voluntarily decided that their people's reign as the aristocracy needed to end and be replaced with a meritocracy of the highly intelligent.
So many people now see the meritocracy as broken and unfair because too much inequality persists, and because some highly intelligent but low-functioning people slip through the cracks, but it was a massive progressive win that we stopped selecting who ran the country on the basis of who who the headmaster said had "good character" (or who was a good football player) at a handful of elite boarding schools in the northeast, and we actually identified promising young people from different backgrounds all over the country to enter the elite social club (in the form of elite universities).
It's also remarkable the extent to which our society has been able to preserve this taboo around this system. The most elite colleges really are enormously influential in determining who enters the upper echelon of society, and admissions are largely based on what is functionally an IQ test. The SAT literally grew out of military IQ tests after World War 1. SAT and IQ results are largely correlated. The point of the SAT was and is to sort kids into schools on the basis of IQ. There's a quote in there from an old president of the UC system, who was a labor economist, saying something about how what percentage of workers needed what levels of education, so they should admit the top X% of test scorers to University of California and the next Y% to California State University.
To the guys who master-minded this system, it was all a very logical and orderly method for creating a fair and justified hierarchy to replace the old way. And wouldn't you know, people who aren't blessed with a high IQ don't find it very fair, and even the smart people who are rewarded by the meritocracy are still mad about generational wealth and big inheritances.
