It's the Brian Air Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series,

A Hundred Years of a Hundred Things.

It's thing number 45 today, 100 years of the

American meritocracy with David Brooks, best known as a longtime New York Times columnist who traces

our current system of college admissions to the 1930s and has the Atlantic Magazine cover

story this month called How the Ivy League Broke America.

This is a very in-depth article that displays on my computer at 48 pages

and includes suggestions for reforming our notions of merit and meritocracy

for maybe the next hundred years in the public interest, so we'll get into that too.

David, thanks for joining

our 100 Years of 100 Think Series and sharing your thinking about this with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Always a pleasure to be with you, Brian. I'm proud to be number 43 or 45, whatever it is,

at least in the top 50. That's good. Forty-five. Some people who are 45 come back as 47,

but that's another show. Your article begins

with the notion that every society has a social ideal, an image of what the superior

person looks like. And you cite one that you say was in effect in the United States from

the 19th century until sometime in the 1950s. Would you start with that as a kind of prehistory

before our modern idea of merit?

Yeah, the idea back then was that the perfect person

to run society was the well-bred man.

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