How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

My wife shared this with me, commenting that I should think about this in the context of our young kids. With our 4 year old just about to reach the age where the social convention is you send them off to public school, we’ve been discussing topics like this.

Elites first confront meritocratic pressures in early childhood. Parents—sometimes reluctantly, but feeling that they have no alternative—sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job.