Over recent years and even decades, idealists have been holding up the idea of the meritocracy as the most ideal way to get to a “fairer” and more egalitarian U.S. society. They point out that everyone should be judged on their abilities and that will take care of the problem.

The problem with this idea is that we’re fairly close to that right now (that is, in the sense that in hiring for more and more jobs most people are judged on their credentials), and the current semi-meritocracy hasn’t created a fair and more egalitarian workplace, and that won’t happen so long as the system remains as it’s presently structured or as long as such concepts as “personal freedom,” self-determination, and market economy are part of the legal/social framework (and I’m definitely opposed to removing any of those).

One of the problems with the current “meritocracy” is that poorer or disadvantaged children of equal raw talent/native intelligence to those more advantaged (and thus better credentialed) don’t have anywhere near equal opportunity to refine their raw ability into usable and valuable skills that will allow them to benefit from higher education or advanced technical training.

In addition, the students able to benefit the most from college education are those individuals with the most resources, whose families can provide better nutrition, better economic and educational support (such as college and post-graduate degrees, as well as housing and living expenses) so that they enter the workforce with extensive credentials (since we are a society where success requires credentials for most people), with more developed contacts, and without debt. Unless society is going to strip away all income inequality (effectively destroying freedom), offspring of the well-off will always have an advantage in showing “merit.”.

The upper middle class can provide a certain amount of support for their offspring, but many of them will leave higher education with a certain amount of debt and sometimes a great deal more, without any certainty that they’ll be able to pay it off. And for the vast majority of offspring of less affluent or poor families, higher education means crippling debt, if they can even get into higher education.

Then, too, like it or not, studies show that standardized tests measure fairly accurately a student’s ability to handle college level work. The problem is that they don’t measure as well the ability to handle many post-education jobs, because too many college curricula don’t teach students to think or to persevere, and that’s yet another area where the children of the well-off have an advantage because more of them are taught the social codes of the elite and to think by their families.

So… unless one either destroys the elites and the upper middle class, which means total loss of freedom and rigid socialism, or provides more aid for the children of the working poor, we’ll remain an unequal semi-meritocracy

From what I can tell, Phase I of the second Trump presidency is where Trump issues executive orders on every campaign promise Trump made, whether or not those promises can legally be accomplished through executive orders. Some, such as eliminating cabinet-level departments, legally require action by Congress, although Trump will certainly attempt to accomplish as much as he can without Congressional authorization, and the Republicans in Congress would prefer that, for the most part, because it absolves them of responsibility.

Trump has now begun the process of impounding funds, i.e., refusing to spend money on programs he doesn’t like, even though Congress has authorized and appropriated the funds. Richard Nixon tried this in the early 1970s, which resulted in Congress passing the Impoundment and Control Act (ICA), and the U.S. Supreme Court telling the President that he couldn’t withhold funds already authorized and appropriated. Trump is apparently ignoring both the law and the Supreme Court ruling, and it’s likely that even the present Supreme Court will rule against him – but that process will take time, and in the interim, federal employees and programs will be hurt and disrupted. This could prove deadly this summer, if another hot, dry, and windy summer engulfs the western U.S., because more than 15,000 federal firefighters are seasonally employed.

Trump is also proposing firing rank-and-file federal employees in large numbers from long-established federal departments without Congressional approval, something equally against the law, although some “flexibility” is not beyond the realm of possibility, given the makeup of the current Supreme Court.

But if the legal restraints on Trump largely hold, what happens in Phase II? Will Trump continue the barrage of executive orders, attempting to overwhelm the legal system? Will he be able to pressure Congress as a whole to enact what he wants? Or will he attack and or pressure key Republicans and vulnerable Democrats?

If all that fails, will he then attempt to corrode/corrupt the legal system further in order to obtain what he wants? Or will he claim victory? [While that’s possible, in my opinion it’s more likely that he’ll attempt to destroy anything that thwarts his imperial desires.]

How effective will he be when wide-scale price increases begin to erode personal income and family budgets? Will people be smart enough to see that his token tax cuts for working and middle class earners don’t compensate for the increasing consumer prices? Or that getting rid of air traffic controllers, VA doctors and support staff, Forest Service firefighters, and other “excess” federal employees only makes life harder for Americans who aren’t billionaires?

Or will they cheer on Dictator/Emperor Trump?

The other morning in the course of my daily search, I came across this as part of an “AI Overview” on a Google search:

• The Saga of Recluce: A popular fantasy series that follows Rahl, a young apprentice who becomes a powerful mage

As those who’ve read the Recluce books know, Rahl is the protagonist of Natural Ordermage, and the Recluce Saga isn’t about just one protagonist. In fact, Rahl is the ninth protagonist (in publication order) of the saga.

The summary also states that I attended Williams College, which is slightly misleading because I graduated as well as attended.

Since that first occurrence, that same “AI Overview,” or one similar, has reoccurred on several occasions.

Obviously, such errors irritate me, but, more than that, they disturb me because an artificial intelligence (supposedly) is providing incorrect information at the same time that Google is touting its AI capabilities.

I didn’t even ask for a summary in my search. It was provided unasked for. So…not only is the information thrust upon me, but it’s wrong, and likely provided incorrectly to other searchers as well.

I’m also fairly certain that other erroneous information is being supplied by other AI overviews on differing subjects, simply because these AI overviews are based on internet-posted information, much of which isn’t fact checked in any way, but such “overviews” lend a credence to dubious or erroneous “facts.”

I wonder if DeepSeek would do any better.

Last week, President Trump effectively stated that the nation’s air safety was degraded by federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, even going on to say that FAA air traffic controllers needed to be “brilliant,” in a context implying that anyone benefiting from DEI policies was unqualified.

While federal DEI programs were designed to promote equal access, opportunity, employment, and inclusion of underrepresented people in the workplace, they did not override or supersede existing job or position requirements based on ability to do the job. Nor did they mandate replacing existing employees with underrepresented individuals. What they did attempt to override was a long-standing and unspoken cultural assumption that the best person for a position was a straight white male.

The problem with DEI was that it went too far, especially on the state level and elsewhere, with an assumption that diversity, equity, and inclusion can and should be mandated, and achieved instantly and without adverse legal effects, rather than requiring efforts to attain DEI objectives.

The state of California enacted a law requiring corporations to place members of unrepresented groups on their corporate boards. That requirement was struck down by a federal judge in California, but the state is pursuing an appeal. The Nasdaq Stock Market had required corporations listed on the exchange to report that they had, or explain why they did not have, racial, gender or LGBTQIA+ diversity among the directors on their boards. That requirement was struck down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Both decisions were based on earlier Supreme Court rulings that racial and ethnic quotas are unconstitutional.

The examples of DEI overreach created a backlash, primarily from conservative white males, who saw and apparently continue to see DEI policies as a threat, with the result that Trump issued an executive order not only eliminating all federal DEI policies and actions, but also effectively removing most federal affirmative action programs and threatening to remove federal educational aid to colleges and universities that do not remove all DEI policies and programs. (Of course, Utah already did that last summer).

In the end, overreach by either side usually results in overreaction, certainly as it has in this instance. Unfortunately, it appears that this was just the beginning.

The Amazon “survey” that I conducted last week revealed the emphasis and market power of series or linked books, but I didn’t say much about one of the most negative aspects – the fact that books not linked to “series” don’t sell well (at least not in the fantasy genre). Out of the 500 fantasy novels I looked through, so far as I could determine, less than a score, possibly less than that, were stand-alone novels.

I’m well aware of that problem. My last two stand-alone novels were Solar Express (2015) and Quantum Shadows (2020), neither of which sold anywhere near what my “series” books do. Every once in a while, a “series” author does write a stand-alone novel that’s wildly successful (such as V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue), but that’s the rare exception and not the general rule.

Even modest-selling linked books are being pushed out of the marketplace. I was thinking about writing another novel in my Ghost world, but Tor had no interest in such a book, and I know several midlist authors who can no longer sell novels to commercial U.S. publishers because their work doesn’t sell enough against the impact and marketing of multi-volume mega series.

Series books written by a single author have been around from the beginning of science fiction as a genre, but became more prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, including E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest series, Doc Smith’s Lensman books, and Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books, but these were essentially science fiction (if with often dubious science). The first popular English fantasy series is likely that of L. Frank Baum, beginning with The Wizard of Oz in 1900 and continuing with other authors for roughly 30 years, but after that, there wasn’t that much interest in multiple fantasies in a continuing setting until after the U.S. publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in 1965, although the first widely popular non-Tolkien-spinoff fantasy series was The Wheel of Time, after which all manner of fantasy series proliferated (including the Saga of Recluce).

This proliferation has turned into an unkempt jungle, in which very few stand-alone fantasies rise out of the canopy of intertwined series. One of the ironies of the Recluce Saga is that, unlike The Wheel of Time, which was planned as a series from the beginning, The Magic of Recluce was written as a stand-alone novel, and after its initial publication, David Hartwell, my long-time editor until his death, asked for a sequel.

So, in a way, I’m also part of the problem, but I still continue to worry about the over-emphasis on mega-selling series and the way in which the internet and the marketing strategies of Amazon and Barnes & Noble effectively force traditional publishers to minimize stand-alone novels and make it ever more difficult for unknown authors to self-market.