The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated.
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