This is a pattern: no one wants to take a risk. Not elected officials. Not 19-year-olds picking college majors. Because in this economy, everything is compliance now. As the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco warned in his essay "Ur-Fascism," social systems don't collapse overnight. They erode through small surrenders, through the gradual... See more

Wherever quantitative yardsticks are used to measure quality, behaviour soon adapts to the system, invariably leading to a loss of diversity. This creates a problem for meritocratic policymakers: the fewer differences there are between candidates, products, or services, the harder it is to rank them. Don’t forget that in a meritocracy, the number

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