At the same time, the relationship between higher education and social leadership has largely broken down. In pre-modern times, university graduates were almost entirely recruited from the upper classes, and their university study was consciously intended to equip them for the exercise of real power and leadership. The pre-modern university was dedicated to the artisanal production of new generations of elite leaders in a handful of roles closely related to the survival of the state. The modern university produces scientists, bureaucrats, managers, and assorted functionaries on an industrial scale to provide governments and the private sector with a range of skilled professionals and knowledge workers, most of whom will spend their lives following orders rather than giving them.

One measure of the change is to contrast the credentials of past generations with what is routinely expected of professionals today. Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10 years old. There were no economics departments or doctorates anywhere in the world when Alexander Hamilton, who was unable to complete his undergraduate studies at the then-Kings College of New York (now Columbia), designed the first central bank of the United States. None of the Founding Fathers were as well credentialed or thoroughly vetted as utterly mediocre, run-of-the-mill lawyers and political scientists are today. Armed only with his genius and his scanty formal educational credentials, a young John Marshall could not land an interview, much less a job, with a major American law firm today. Neither Ulysses Grant nor Robert Lee held a doctorate or had any formal professional training after graduating from West Point. Their lack of credentials would ensure that neither, today, would be considered for senior command in any branch of the armed forces. Through most of the 19th century, American colleges and even elite universities did not require doctoral degrees of their faculty. Today, however, a person with George Washington’s educational credentials could not get a job teaching the third grade in any public school in the United States.

The endlessly rising demand for more experts with higher degrees of expertise had profound social consequences, leading inexorably to a kind of society in which “merit” rather than ancestry or wealth was increasingly the key to advancement. If you are a fumble-fingered incompetent with a limited attention span, it doesn’t matter how rich or well-connected your parents are—you still can’t be a neurosurgeon or an air traffic controller.

Advocates of the rising professional meritocracy pointed to Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of a “natural aristocracy” of talent to underline its grounding in both democratic theory and natural law. But merit in the emerging technocratic society of the Industrial Revolution was a highly specialized thing. This is not merit as traditionally conceived in Western civilization. This was not about achieving a holistic ideal of human merit in which wisdom, judgment, virtu, and intellectual excellence are all appropriately considered.

Merit, for the 20th century, was increasingly dissociated from the older ideals. It was more and more conflated with the kind of personality and talent set that define what we call a “wonk.” Wonks do well on standardized tests. They pass bar examinations with relative ease, master the knowledge demanded of medical students, and ace tests like the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Wonks are not rebels or original thinkers. Wonks follow rules. What makes someone a successful wonk is the possession of at least moderate intelligence plus copious quantities of what the Germans call Sitzfleisch (literally, sit-flesh, the ability to sit patiently at a desk and study for long periods of time).

Wonk privilege is a rarely examined form of social advantage, but progressively over the last century we’ve witnessed a steady increase in the power, prestige, and wealth that flow to people endowed with a sufficiency of Sitzfleisch. The wonkiest among us are deemed the “best” and the goal of meritocracy has been to streamline the promotion of wonks to places of power and prestige while sidelining the fakers: those who use good looks, family descent, wealth, or charisma to get ahead.

The 20th century was the golden age of the wonk, as one profession after another demanded people who had more and more of this ability. People who could do the work to get into and succeed in medical school, law school, accountancy school, engineering school, and other abstruse and difficult pre-professional programs earned high incomes and enjoyed great social prestige. But even as professionals developed greater degrees of specialized knowledge, the nature of their work changed. Early in the 20th century, most professionals operated essentially independent of outside supervision or control. Doctors, lawyers, and many others were often in practice for themselves, and their relationships with their clients were long term, confidential, and generally not subject to review by outside bodies.

In the 19th century, when my great-grandfather finished medical school, medical education was not particularly demanding. This made sense; while important 19th-century discoveries like the use of anesthesia and the germ theory of disease were making themselves felt, there was still not all that much specialized professional knowledge that doctors needed to acquire. On the other hand, medicine was very much a “people” business. What distinguished successful doctors from less successful colleagues was more bedside manner than medical knowledge. Successful doctors were people people. With scientific knowledge about health relatively small, what counted most was wisdom. A physician’s ability to see the whole person, think carefully and wisely about their condition, and then mobilize the extremely limited resources of the medical profession to ease their condition made for the most successful outcomes.

In his son’s day, much of that was beginning to change. Cornell Medical School, which my grandfather Dr. Walter Mead attended in the early days of seriously scientific medical education, prided itself on academic rigor, and the second Dr. Mead was familiar with theories, techniques, and treatment methods that his father would not have known. It took more academic ability and personal discipline to train for the profession in the 1920s than it had a generation earlier. But people skills still mattered. My grandfather, though some of his patients paid him in hams and hickory nuts left on the back porch, was one of the most affluent and respected citizens of his town. He helped bring Alcoholics Anonymous to South Carolina, served as a warden in his church, was called in to examine Franklin Roosevelt as the president’s health deteriorated in the spring of 1944, and played a significant role in the quiet discussions that led to the peaceful desegregation of the town in the Civil Rights era. While he brought the best scientific knowledge of his time to the treatment of his patients, his practice remained people-based. He knew his patients’ life stories and families, and this knowledge played a not-inconsiderable role in his diagnoses and treatments.

Eventually, the explosion of medical knowledge in the 20th century turned medicine into a highly regulated and disciplined profession that demanded a lifelong commitment to study. It is not just that medical school requires a much more rigorous program of intensive study before a physician is ready to go into the field. As a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper put it, “Medical knowledge is growing so rapidly that only 6 percent of what the average new physician is taught at medical school today will be relevant in ten years.” Not many people have the capacity to absorb and retain information at this pace through decades of active professional life.