> though he is polite about it, he paints a damning portrait of how the "winners" of the meritocratic gauntlet end up using in their victory: they work in one o

> though he is polite about it, he paints a damning portrait of how the "winners" of the meritocratic gauntlet end up using in their victory: they work in one of six industries (consulting, law, finance, tech, medicine, or academia) in one of five places (Boston, New York City, Washington DC, the Bay Area, or Los Angeles). The remarkable thing about these numbers (and Yang provides lots of them) is that four of the six industries (consulting, law, finance, and academia) are easily described as parasitic or predatory, secondary adornments to the actual business of human activity on the Earth. We have not only engineered a system that trades wealth and honor for an incredibly narrow range of human attributes; once the trade is made, we ship the winners off to careers that provide only marginal benefit to country writ large. ("But it'd be worse if they're doing bad stuff efficiently!," Liam whispers).