These conclusions seem to spit in the face of "meritocracy". It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive, bleeding into our corporate performance reviews and our pro-diversity efforts ("we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>). But it is so internally irrational. I'm reminded of this argument:
> The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
> The case against meritocracy can also be put sociologically: (a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
The idea that "innate" merit should be rewarded (this underlies what we consider meritocracy) is fundamentally a noncontinuable state. Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.
You are so focused on economic inequality that you ignore the greater picture: there will still be a hierarchy. There will still be humans dominating other humans and asserting themselves above them.
Maybe in the far future humans will create a social technology to live in true equality but in the immediate future this is clearly not happening.
As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities.
That looks like meritocracy to me.
It is not the existence of hierarchy that is the problem. It is the type of hierarchy and the effects of that hierarchy. The parent and the study argue that we should give greater resources to those with the least resources in such a way as to broaden access to opportunities.
You can argue that is not worth the expense (it costs X to produce Y outcome and redistributing X would lead to negative impact Z. Y + Z results in a net loss to society). But it seems hard to argue that inequality or hierarchy is inevitable so we should not even try to ameliorate the negative effects of that structure or imagine different ones.
To me, the “inequality inevitable” mindset seems like a frequent way those who benefited from the existing system rationalize not sacrificing anything to help less fortunate people. I am very sympathetic to arguments that redistribution is not effective, but the debate should be about what is or is not effective. “Inequality inevitable” sidesteps that and asks that we just give up before even trying or imagining different possibilities because we’ve failed in the past. It is hard to not see such arguments as a misguided effort to rationalize one’s self interest.
> “Inequality inevitable” sidesteps that and asks that we just give up before even trying or imagining different possibilities because we’ve failed in the past. It is hard to not see such arguments as a misguided effort to rationalize one’s self interest.
I don't agree with this. I tend to agree that inequality is inevitable, but where I think I disagree with you is on the definition of equality.
If we create an even playing field in the environment, then we've just shifted the goalposts from "How wealthy were your parents?" To "How good are your genetics?". Some people will be born smarter than others, and excel. Some people will be born with learning disabilities and relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Judging based on innate ability also means discriminating against people who innately lack that ability. If you were born dyslexic, you're going to have to work twice as hard to achieve as much. The dyslexia is as innate as IQ advantages.
I just don't see a way that hierarchies aren't inherently unequal. You're always judging who has more of a particular thing, so people with less of that thing are worse off. Right now, that's largely money. Is using the genetic lottery a more equal means of doing this? I don't really think so.
I would rather focus on reducing the difference in lifestyle between the haves and have nots. If we can't stop inequality, we can at least lessen the effects.
Complaint about people rising to the top who lack the qualities we want to see in leadership suggests [to me] that we [collectively] already have a complete picture of the qualities we admire. Our problem isn't in measuring the qualities but in rewarding the ratios. On a personal level we know how to pick a breeding partner. Collectively selecting the dna cant be all that different. It seems culturally disturbing to reward beauty for example but if beauty > reproduction is good why not beauty > wealth > reproduction? We already have greed > wealth > reproduction, intelligence > wealth > reproduction and inheritance > wealth > reproduction. Those seem just as lame upon close examination. You play chess for your life vs someone with 3 times the intellect? Or monopoly where the opponent starts with all the money and all the streets?
The phenotype is a confusing angle. We should do some honest objective conversation about it collectively. Do we want people to be their natural self or do we prefer it if one goes out of his way to become something? Do we genetically optimize for the biggest possible struggle or for the slacking? We seem to look at the flexibility as a positive quality but does it really make a healthy breeding stock?
As a human I have to constantly challenge myself mentally and physically or I decay pretty rapidly. I had a sick cat one time that slept on my sofa for 4 years only getting up to eat. Then one day another cat came into the house and she leaped 3 meters off the sofa and ran after it. If I sleep for 4 years I doubt there will be any walking, definitely no running, jumping is out of the question and getting into a fight is unimaginable. We might have really good brains and a good digestive system, the rest of the body could do with some updates.
Economic inequality within a developed nation is one of the least important kinds of inequality. I'd trade one standard deviation of income for one standard deviation of pretty much anything else, such as intelligence or attractiveness. The average person in a developed nation lives better than the kings and emperors of the past in material terms. They had a bigger dwelling, but I'd much rather live in a modern apartment than in a medieval castle. A rich person today can buy a $1200 phone, and a poor person has to make do with a $200 phone. That extra $1000 only marginally improves the quality of the phone. The $200 phone today is still better than the $1200 phone of 10 years ago. The medieval king had no phone, heck, he probably didn't even have running water. The food he ate was worse. We can eat bananas every day, the king perhaps only saw a banana on one of his paintings. The healthcare he had access to was way worse. The transportation he had access to was way worse. The entertainment he had access to was worse.
The standard of living in these developed nations is due to exploitation that is outsourced to other nations. For example, regarding that $1200 cell phone? This is on the front page right now: https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/29/iphone-workers-forced-labor/
We have the best medical care, but results are uneven. If you are so poor that you are rationing your medicine to the point it doesn't work, what does it matter how good it is?
Was the food the king ate really worse? Today's poor eat sugar disguised as "food" that leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. You can say what you want about medieval diets but at least they didn't have an obesity epidemic. I'm not sure who is better off.
At any rate, even if what you say is 100% true, that doesn't really change the fact that homelessness, hunger, and poverty are solvable problems today. To say that things were worse before and therefore the moral failings of society today are tolerable is just baffling to me.
sexual/romantic partners though. if youre living in a shitty apt with a 200 dollar phone, good luck getting interest from potential partners.
whereas the king was swimming in booty, and at the end of it all, that's what moves most of us mostly.
id argue few ppl really want a lambo for the engineering of it as a machine, they just want to be seen riding in it. 500 years ago a lambo was a fancy horse drawn carriage.
You're right, the king probably had more booty. Remember though that the king's wealth is many standard deviations above average, so we have to compare him to somebody who is many standard deviations more attractive than average.
In the modern world, one standard deviation of physical attractiveness matters way more for attracting sexual/romantic partners than does one standard deviation of wealth, especially so for genuine attraction.
I'm married now, but I had what seemed like roughly an average amount of dating difficulty that wasn't significantly changed when I got a better apartment or better phone.
> As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
This sounds like a bit of a stretch. Let's try and make people a bit more equal first.
Why limit Elon Musk - who is arguably ensuring the long-term survivability of our species - for some arbitrary target like absolute equality? Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward? What is wrong with the youth have little-to-no savings and the elderly/about-to-retire having significant wealth and assets?
Elon Musk carried a lot of the financial risk to get the company into the position it is in now. The engineers did not. Funny how risk is always completely neglected in these "entrepreneur bad, engineers good" narratives.
Ah yeah, much like the bankers of the world, the money-men always claim they are the ones "at risk" with their billions of dollars.
Elon Musk is the second richest person in the world and has raised tens of billions of dollars of outside money to fund his companies. You talk like he's footing the bill; he put less than $10 million into Tesla. It was a brilliant decision, but hardly "risky".
>The engineers did not.
So the engineers who went to work for a project that may not have panned out were taking no risk huh.
It would be less embarrassing for you if you understood basic risk concepts before making snarky comments on the internet. The "bankers" you refer to, for instance, don't personally own the money they disperse but are middle-men for it and consequently don't usually own the risk. Elon, on the other hand, invested $100 million of his own money into SpaceX in the beginning of the company, way before he was a billionaire. AFAIK that was most of what he got out of PayPal.
That is the root meaning of risk - if things didn't pan out, he would have been (financially) ruined. Engineers would go ahead and get another job from somewhere else. If you can't see the difference here, I can't help you further.
Okay, let's take a look at risk. Elon invested $100 million dollars of his own money. If he loses it all he ends up.... just like the rest of us, with nothing. How exactly is that a huge risk? For us, that's daily life. He'd probably end up much better off in reality though. I'm sure he owns his house, for starters. So he'd invest $100 million, lose it all (was it all of his PayPal money, or just most of it? That's important because if he had even $1M left over that he intended a cushion that's not much of a risk at all really, to lose out and end up a millionaire? Not a risk.), and at the end of the day end up living in a house bigger than most of us could ever afford. He could sell that, go from "financial ruin" to being a liquid multi-millionaire. Or he could have asked one of his PayPal millionaire friends for a "small" loan of X million dollars. Or he could have done what you propose those engineers do and just get a job from somewhere else. I just don't see this massive "risk" here that justifies him now being the second most wealthy person on the planet worth more than billions of people combined.
But let's look at risk further. What about the people strapping themselves to the top of Musk's rockets and propelling themselves into outer space? They are literally risking their lives. All Musk did was put in $100 million dollars. Has anyone ever died from investing $100 million dollars? On one side you have a guy would lose a lot of money and land comfortably on his feet. On the other you have someone strapping themselves to a column of rocket fuel and blasting off to outer space, something many people have died doing. Surely if risk determines reward, and Musk is worth $150 billion dollars, these astronauts must at least be billionaires. Right?
Obviously that's a litter hyperbolic, but it's to prove a point. If we're going by risk/reward, why is financial risk the only thing considered? What about scientific risk? Musk's enterprises are premised on mountains of scientific and engineering work that came before him, work that is mostly publicly funded and for which the original pioneers (taking risks) will never be compensated. Take Tesla's much hyped "autopilot". Did Musk come up with that himself? Did Tesla engineers even come up with it? No, that research came from the government, namely DARPA through their autonomous Grand Challenges robot competitions. In 2005 during the first Grand Challenge the robots were running off the road and crashing into each other. By 2007 they were reliably navigating urban environments. This was after millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours were poured into the research. Did Musk fund that research? Did Tesla? No, you and I did as taxpayers, and we put in much more than the $100 million Musk did. The people doing that research on the ground were risking their careers and forgoing paychecks to do that work. Many of the people doing the actual coding on those robots were being paid $20k per year as graduate students. Who is now benefitting from that research? Musk. Tesla. Private interests.
Or look at the Kennedy Space Center. I just watched a SpaceX launch a rocket from there. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who built that? I mean physically, who put hammer to nail there and built that thing. It's huge. "It took 1,500 engineers to design the buildings and launch pads. The drawings alone produced by architects and designers weighed more than a hundred tons" [1]. Did Musk take the risk building that? No, the public did, and now it's there for him to use and benefit from. But the people who built that for him with public money won't be seeing a return on investment proportional to the benefit it today generates. Those benefits are privatized largely into Elon Musk's pocket.
The first part of your rant makes it clear you are confused of the topic at hand.
The second part does follow some sense - but then, how many engineers did it take to build the US road system? Why aren’t you screaming at car companies, logistics companies, taxi drivers or all other appropriate parties for taking advantage of infra built with public money?
Frankly, its fairly obvious you have a massive distaste for Musk, which is fine - I or nobody else should dictate your opinion on him. What I’m extremely tired of is this new ”social democratism movement” which is some very thinly veiled weird combination of utopian socialism and at times vitriolic hatred against the entrepreneurial populace.
Yes, there are bad actors in the current system. But what is it exactly you are advocating as the alternate system?
Do you not believe that there comes an inevitable day where the Earth is no longer inhabitable by any form of life and that, if humans are to escape that outcome, we must become interplanetary and then interstellar? (I think it's still a long shot, but I know with certainty that the "stay on Earth" outcome is exactly the extinguishing of human life.)
You could start with investing heavily in this planet, which is significantly more habitable than mars. Electric vehicles were a great start, but there's a lot more than EVs and reselling battery and solar equipment from China that can be done.
>Do you not see any value in developing the technology necessary to get to Mars - in order to travel elsewhere?
I see some value, and if Mr. Musk wants to pursue it, great. But let's not pretend he's saving humanity here; the God complex of SV is already bad enough.
> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?
Because the "value" they have proven is so often criminal and fraudulent in nature - best case scenario it's down to luck. The world is not even close to the meritocracy you think it is.
> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?
Because the bureaucrat had to prove their merit among the whole population while the rich entrepreneur just had to prove their merit among other kids that were privileged enough. Just think of Bill Gates that went to probably the only school that had a computer in the world.
In ancient China they even went so far to castrate bureaucrats to prevent cross-generational cronyism.
> Why limit Elon Musk
Because he is using cool goals like travelling to mars to motivate his workers to work themselves to exhaustion while ignoring safety measures? He acts exactly like capitalists of the industrial age. The difference is that his workers do not lack money for sustenance, but a purpose in life.
let's say someone is born into extreme poverty, and through decades of hard work becomes wealthy enough to give his child a great education and a 1 million dll inheritance. is it not his right to use his money on his child?
then lets say this child turns this education and inheritance into 1 billion dollars worth of wealth. does this have no merit??
ive seen many people squander privileged upbringings, i think if you 10x what was given to you, you have some merit regardless of where you stared from.
> let's say someone is born into extreme poverty, and through decades of hard work becomes wealthy enough
That seems more luck than hard work to me. Just read the paper.
Even if that was possible. Do you want in a world where people with merit call the shots or a world in which people that cheated their way to wealth or simply inherited wealth call the shots?
Money can be transferred, gained through stealing and luck which all does not require merit. It is not a good proxy for merit.
I don't understand why people go to such great lengths to give current injustices the benefit of the doubt ad infinitum, even constructing ridiculously rare and hypothetical scenarios like that.
The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.
I don't know man... I dont think its that rare for someone to climb out of poverty. Maybe I just see it this way because I did it myself (born in a 3rd world country, single mom, step father with bad addiction issues, barely graduated HS)
Now that Im a father myself, Im of course trying to give my child the best opportunities, but also trying to raise him to be grateful and disciplined.
So I'm not talking about the billionaires. Im talking about regular people who can now grant their children not private jets, but just a good private school.
What would be fair in this scenario? How can we make things equal/just in this case?
Also I dont think its rare or hypothetical at all, that rich kids never learn to work hard and squander their good fortune.
-- EDIT, i completely agree its absurd and completely wrong that 1% of people have 50% of the wealth, that should not be that way.
I also have a working class background, but in Sweden. The last thing I would like to do is to pull up the ladder that enabled me and so many others a better chance to a secure and comfortable life. The inheritance tax was actually recently abolished here, but not due to some popular uproar but because right-wing parties got into power.
One thing I think about is the quality of domination, if I may say it this way.
Someone with a better understanding is a normal authority, it might 'dominate' others in the sense that they have to follow his lead and maybe not feel it's right but in the end it's the best path.
On the other hand there are so much bad authorities that percolate through luck, appearances, bullying, networking.. and it will be 1) very clear their ways are detrimental .. sometimes almost absurdly, 2) very difficult for people below to change this.
When people say that inequality is a problem in society, they are not saying everyone in society should be equal. They're saying maybe it's not a good state of affairs if 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth.
Hierarchy is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. We can reduce levels of inequality without producing the negative outcomes you fear.
I’m not sure whether this applies to you (I’m not implying that it does), but I continually find it interesting to hear Americans expressing the fear that acting to reduce inequality will somehow limit social mobility, as if they don’t realize that much of the developed world has greater social mobility than their country (or that many countries also rate higher in measures of social welfare, despite having greater social mobility and lower inequality).
In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies. You keep harping on the US, but it is one of - if not the most - upwardly mobile societies in history. One of my favorite anecdotes is how the 'unclassy american tourist' is a product of us being the first society to afford sending our middle/lower-class abroad for fun. And I'm proud of that.
> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility
Please enumerate these instances and support the claim that in each of them mobility is reduced due to redistribution.
Without that, this sounds like subjective impression shaped by ideological preference being presented as if it were evidence for the ideological preference that produced it.
I have certainly missed how for example Scandinavian countries fits with this:
> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies.
Care to explain? Or are you just being childishly contrarian which your last sentence seem to suggest?
Unequal distribution of rewards (i.e. according to merit) is fine and desirable (as a motivating force). The problem's roots are when the distribution of rewards becomes hereditary, that the children of the wealthy have near-guaranteed access to the best educational and social institutions, have near-guaranteed access to startup capital (i.e. from their parents), are usually provided with necessities (food, housing, clothing, incidentals) at no out-of-pocket cost by their parents for a considerable portion of their early adult lives, etc. It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.
> It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.
Hereditary wealth is a specific form of rent-seeking which is something liberal economics has no explanation for. It's like one of those things that never left the feudal era whilst everything else did. But I wonder why some who follow this type of economics think this is the sole and most important issue? There are many examples of rent-seeking and this is far from the biggest contributor towards inequality.
> Unequal distribution of rewards (i.e. according to merit) is fine and desirable (as a motivating force).
This assumption sounds nice but isn't backed by psychology research. Extrinsic rewards can motivate and demotivate - and in general contribute to anxiety.
Then add in a tax system which aggressively taxes labor while leaving capital and inheritance untaxed, if we stopped taxing labor that might be enough to pull a whole chunk of labor out of poverty, just having work is no escape from poverty in a world of high rent and high income tax.
Estates are taxed at 0% up to $11 million dollars in the US. Moreover, that upper bound is indexed to inflation, unlike the minimum wage. I wonder why that is...
Agreed -- it is certainly inheritance that mostly takes the blame here, since it allows massive advantages to accrue, unchecked. However, I do think that there's something to be said against even inner-lifetime accruement of obscene wealth, as that can warp merit as well. Where's the sweet spot? - the level at which there are sufficient rewards required to motivate the gathering of wealth without the risk of accruing such an advantage that would unbalance the playing board.
Which is culturally solvable, but would require require people to give up their children to be raised by the state and never be allowed to know who they are. That sounds horrible, but I submit that said horror is largely driven largely by a culture of possession and selfishness, i.e. people want to raise their own children because they want to shape who they are and ensure their genes have good survival odds. Assuredly there is a biological component that drives us to take an interest in our lineage, but we know that this can be directed towards similar goals via adoption and pets, so it is conceivable that a society could direct it not towards one's individual children but children in general. Of course, the whole 'raised by the state' thing is also a pretty uncomfortable thought to any society that has enshrined "freedom" and most people who lived through the soviet union, however I think it is possible that without the concept of genetically-bound inheritance of property and status that the corruption of such structures might be less likely.
Not that I suggest any of this in serious mind you, it's just the kind of thought experiment day-dream that gets me through my workday. What this one has taught me is this: nobody actually wants a meritocracy.
I'm reading this chain of responses and still haven't seen anybody saying the obvious: that poverty is not the same thing as not being rich. Instead, you keep digging in the misunderstanding, reaching absurd conclusions.
In most first world countries, there is basic free education and children can study for a job with enough pay to provide for a decent life style. That's not to say that there're no problems. There are. Often accomodating immigrants from poor countries. Also because declining population and pensions and all that.
But do you want to go full socialist because only rich family children get to the most expensive colleges? O_o
You should watch the documentary Children of the Sun, which describes attempts by early kibbutz movements in Israel to raise children communally and not directly by their parents. There were upsides (the children grew up with characteristics that we would think of as strong and independent) and downsides (clear early-childhood trauma, with unclear consequences).
It is natural to pass resources onto your children. You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. A stranger might just regard your children as mere “people”, but a parent see’s their children as extensions of themselves, and have a vested interest in ensuring their happiness and well-being.
You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves
Why not? There's plenty of people arguing for exactly that mechanism when it's not about their own children. A 100% inheritance tax (with no loopholes through business or legal constructs) might force a lot of people to rethink how they vote -- because then, they can't use their wealth to shield their children from how society functions any more.
Because there is a bias that cannot be shaken. Look its easy to not give a shit about other peoples kids. Let other people's dirty nasty misbehaved little shits get nothing free in this world. When it's their own children though, people begin to apply exceptions. And that's why we end up with hereditary based transfers of wealth, rather than say donating all your money to all of society upon death. Your own child that you raised from birth deserves your wealth more than the wretched society (basically other people's kids).
If someone else's child was run over and killed in a road, a person may pause to reflect on how sad and unfortunate the event was, but will quickly move on with their life and continue as they were. If their own child though was run over and killed though, they would be shattered, may not even be able to function well for quite some time.
Basic r/K selection. We're a K-selection species: we have a few offspring and we invest our resources in them quite heavily, like most mammals, and the higher the mammal, the bigger the investiture.
As such, your suggestion is quite literally against human nature. We're not insects. This is the usual trap for people with Big Ideologies: they assume that we're all these tabula rasa entities onto which anything might be written (and should be).
> You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves.
Literally the whole premise on which the plot of Inception rests was to convince the child progeny of wealth to forgo it so as to prove that he could make a name for himself on his own merit and not by riding his father's coattails.
There's a very big difference between leaving a child to fend for himself (so to speak) and attempting to help a child develop his own sense of agency, including restricting access to a smaller-than-naturally-limited set of resources.
"Making a name for yourself" is overrated. No one really gives a fuck. And you can still make a name for yourself with any amount of resources anyway, probably even easier to do when you already start with a lot of wealth.
Distributing rewards according to merit may be beneficial, but the problems with unequal distribution go far beyond hereditary rewards. Consider the income distribution according to jobs. Some jobs are assigned greater monetary rewards than others even if they are essential to the functioning of society. Much of that comes from our notions of status. I would argue that distributing wealth according to merit only works as a motivating factor when one is being compared to their occupational peers, which is something rarely seen in lower income occupations.
> Some jobs are assigned greater monetary rewards than others even if they are essential to the functioning of society. Much of that comes from our notions of status.
It does not. It comes from supply and demand, and how important that job is to the cash flow that will end up paying for it.
Do you have any sources on what percentage of wealthy that inherit their wealth? From what I've gathered it's quite small and doesn't necessarily last more than a few generations.
I don't have an answer off the top of my head, but I did some searching for you.
A short article from inequality.org [1] suggests that most of the richest people in the world (Forbes 400) were born with significant financial advantages, if they weren't already wealthy.
Since there are many more rich people than the Forbes 400, that doesn't seem too representative of the usual rich person. It's hard to find anything conclusive - there are a few research memos put out by what seem to be wealth management firms claiming that most rich people are actually self-made. There's a clear conflict of interest here, so I'm not sure we can trust those results.
It seems understudied, and will take a lot more than 10 minutes of searching for relevant results.
That's not actually the only claim/result in that briefing; but yes, I agree that it doesn't seem representative for the question you're asking. Do you have any better citations? It doesn't seem like there's a conclusive answer from the academic community.
Not to mention that thanks to the government, $1M is a one bedroom apartment in SF. So these people want to give them more power over our resources?! crazy.
Exactly. And people who want wealth inequalities to fade away, can they explain people who have better looks due to better genetics. Then they carry for their next generations. Maybe also force attractive people to mate with less attractive ones so these inequalities also go away? Sounds insane doesn't it? This is equally insane idea.
This is just unfair to everyone. It is wrong, immoral, unethical to tax the wealth of people, if you don't account for other inequalities in life. The inequalities will persist, just that when assets, money isn't that medium of storage, people will only value looks and other things even more, because that's how you'd effectively store your wealth, untaxable. The genes of the people become the platform for storing wealth in that kind of world. The only place where breaking or taxing people' wealth is agreeable is when they become too powerful and above governments. No other excuse.
This is something seriously overlooked.
Why do some guys get all the girls and some don't. Isn't it unfair to those guys that they have their needs emotionally met just like any other successful humans? If you are so fair, fix these problems. Everyone has feelings, and it's not their fault that they're bitter about it.
Is it those men's mistake that they were born in this world? And they couldn't even do anything to rectify that problem when the baseline is so high to reach?
Everyday I read about these people and it makes me sad. Thankfully I don't have any of those problems, but I can't overlook those who do have them. Atleast they'd have a chance in todays world had they pushed themselves and become wealthier.
This isn't only about men, but women too.
When you save money and forgo pleasures, you aren't supposed to be penalized.
Have you heard of Western Europe? It's not a binary choice between "eat or be eaten", "the poor are just lazy" vs. "force attractive people to have sex with unattractive ones", "brave new world" utopia.
Western European programmers still live very well, they just aren't as rich as in the US. And the high taxes do moderate and blunt the cutthroat competition to a degree, which results in less crazy work life balance etc.
Of course these debates get very heated because everyone wants the system that would give them more. I was born to poor parents who could afford their own education because it's free here. My relatives had a social net to bounce back from during rough times (primary school teacher). It's not good for a society to have a large portion who feel existential dread and that the only way up is taking huge risks that often require initial capital.
The reason it is like this in the US is because it's not a nation. It's just atomic families and people from all over the world, tolerating each other and minding their own business. There is no feeling of solidarity, especially across races.
This is a lot of odd, complex moral statements used to denounce a comparatively simple and separate idea, that wealth should be distributed somewhat more fairly. Inequality is going to persist in other areas and probably even in financial areas, but that doesn't make taxes robbery.
I am in the same boat as you. While it is very normal for parents to be defensive, I found the comment a bit unnecessarily aggressive without an immenent threat (heck, we're on some comment section on the internet here, not a dome in hunger games battling for survival).
But then again, I have not had children of my own, so I can't relate to the need to defend my offspring.
And from friends I know that parenting is really hard with lots of sleepless nights. Perhaps the parent commenter just had a bad day.
It seems we indeed do not share morals. I thought I was merely offering a humane/plausible excuse.
Perhaps it's just your laconic phrasing, but I can not stop reading your replies in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice. Maybe I would see them in a different light if I read them with Wall-E's voice.
Are you suggesting you'd kill someone if they tried to tax you slightly more highly? Or if they took some of your child's inheritance according to a means tested solution? That is very weird.
The paper being discussed talks about there being a threshold under which someone might be in a poverty trap. Would simple subsidies and programs to support children's economic future suffice, such as some of the policies advocated for by American progressives?
(Of course, this would require taxes or some other source of funding, but doesn't require confiscation of all inherited wealth)
I guess it's good that you are honest with yourself about it though, that's better than constructing some elaborate justification around some clearly insufficient core "principles".
Of course, the idea that taxation is theft and a fence isn't doesn't hold.
That's kind of funny because communist revolutions start more or less from the same feeling: we work long hours and have nothing and there is not hope for my children.
Not really, because as mentioned the mere fact that the children have access to their parent's wealth while they are growing up already confers significant advantage.
> It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive,
This study looks at some of the poorest villages in Bangladesh with some additional data from other very poor countries.
Anyone who even has a shot at applying to a USA tech company is already wildly more wealthy than the type of poverty discussed in this study. In fact, they’d be firmly past the threshold the study identified as the minimum wealth necessary to engage with wealth-building jobs.
The conclusions don’t really apply at all to situations like a US tech company, unless you’re trying to understand why homeless people living on the streets aren’t able to get jobs at an Amazon warehouse or other entry-level jobs. Trying to project this on to hiring practices of educated candidates into high paying tech jobs is ignoring the core focus of the study.
Meritocracy is still a factor but the bar is currently very low. My own father came out of the impoverishment of war torn Bangladesh to be a successful real estate developer in the west. Why did his elder brother not have the same results? Very simple: the elder brother was responsible for the family. The family has rewarded the elder brother by taking care of him for years now and he is the happiest old man I know. He will die satisfied.
The truth that no one wants to admit is that we have to put (very minimal) resources behind the youth to become independent of their families so they can grow.
For all his faults, my father understood this for everyone except me (long story) and funded the education of a few people back home. For two boys I'm aware of, that was about $5-7K/year. The two boys lived in a one room shack that routinely got flooded. One is now an accountant, the other is a working chef. Trust me, neither of them are particularly smart.
What's needed is so minimal but the problem we have is too much grifting occurs. Levels and levels of middleman bullshit.
I would start experimenting with Kiva-style microloans if you want to make a difference, tbh.
This is all well and good to argue around a very literal meritocracy, but I don't think anyone actually argues for this. It's not just "lol, 1 - 1 = 0, meritocracy is impossible".
The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer?
Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.
> it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company
Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor.
A well connected person can bring many many times the value to a company of someone without connections.
The right strong personality can be a performance amplifier for the rest of the company, Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that.
The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.
> Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor.
I am. It's not me being careless. We reward both by the same means - money. Not my fault it's this way. I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to work from the means of compensation outwards, when making comparisons.
> The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than business based, pyramid scheme level, cult-like thinking. I'm a well paid webdev. The company is fairly flat, there are only two distinct levels above me - engineering management, and founder-ceo(s).
My day to day work is designing and building out random systems, and handling tech debt. I would be doing this in a vacuum too, and to the same standard. The personality and input of the ceo has little to no bearing on my performance. Me and my team would perform equally well under any given non-maniac. CEOs are not like, high level gods or something. They aren't remotely as rare a set of personality traits as the voodoo-thinking of SV seems to think. C-tier management is not literally multiplying my output. Sensible feature requests from users and sensible filtering by product managers has ten times the impact that C-tier has on my work.
> deserves a proportional [...]
> Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that
The resignation and subsequent death of Jobs had, in the macro perspective of apple's stock prices, literally no impact on the value of the company. Apple stock is currently over x10 what it was when he was there. An essentially infinite number of things took place that were far more important than Job's personality, which lead to the success of apple. He was more like a train driver railing down the tracks than some maverick cutting through the jungle. At least Bill Gates has the introspection to realise this. General luck, and luck of timing is what generated nearly all of that value, and the rest was generated by labour. Somewhere in there is some ephemeral and unquantifiable sliver of value coming from the specific personality of the founders / ceos.
So, what proportion do we dole out? Who do we compensate for luck? For all of the endless work done before that wasn't compensated to the moon but was absolutely required for this moon-level capital generation? It's all too up in the air to try and rationalise that CEOs should earn one million times what a farmer earns and think that makes any kind of sense at all.
Think of all of the wealth, (generational too) that came from equally traited men setting out for oil. Literal random chance would go on to create mega-empires that have lasted a hundred years. Our current system of compensation, is pretty close to being nothing more than a load of bollocks, when it comes to this kind of thing.
Public services in my country (like teacher, police, nurses etc) have salary coefficients (job complexity ratio) depending on qualifications and duties. Not sure what the proper terminology is in english and if it's the same in other countries. There are socialists in Europe supporting the max 1:12 ratio between minimum & maximum income. Although, there is an old saying in my country: "They couldn't pay me so little that I couldn't work even less" (not sure about the rough translation), so that's definitely a danger of such schemes.
Aside from that, I don't really believe in the musks and zucks of the world. Our society shouldn't rely on charismatic leaders, who for all we know could be fronts for the NSA/CIA operations. Shock workers or strike workers could be used to motivate and promote labor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik).
That is not what meritocracy is - it is rule by the cognitive gifted.
The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.
It's not just about "rewarding", or giving out high paying position to who we want to.
There are real and difficult things to do in the world that some other people need. They (employers, clients, customers) decide that this work is so important to them that they exchange money for it.
Then the person can use that earned money to improve their life.
For example if a top surgeon flies to a different country to do a difficult operation, I'd want them to be able to enjoy a relaxing VIP lounge, bigger legroom and direct taxi. Rather than flying low cost and standing in the bus for 3 times longer than the taxi ride.
We want to allocate resources to people who accomplish important things for us. Not just as reward or motivation, but in our own interest, we invest in the most capable and competent to have more of our stuff taken care of.
Jobs aren't just about sitting in a chair and taking cash and we just pick who gets to sit in which chair to enjoy that cash. It's doing things. And we want those things to be done well.
This is the idea behind meritocracy. Not that we praise people for their genetics.
I'm not saying this is how it works currently, just that this is what we mean by meritocracy that we should move toward.
Agree with everything you said on the surface. Sounds reasonable. Of course we want the surgeon to be prepared for his job. It's important.
But then there are those in this thread arguing that Elon Musk's reward should be unlimited because he's "arguably ensuring the long-term survivability of our species." Wow, that sounds very important. I guess he should have the most money then.
Nevermind the fact that the majority of his wealth is literally gained by "sitting in a chair and taking cash". That's the job of a capitalist after all - they don't work for their money, they sit in a chair and let the ownership of assets make them money. I mean, sure he's "doing things" but are the things he's doing worth $140 billion? What has he "done" in the last 9 months that made him $88 billion richer? Is the planet saved yet?
Providing up-front funding for crazy ideas like electric cars and reusable rockets when everyone else is too stupid and shortsighted to is itself productive activity. In fact it is the most important productive activity: figuring out what to do, what is a good idea, and being willing to bet the returns of your previous labour on it and wait.
The return on investment is the payment it is in our self-interest to give for this activity, because we want and need such work to be done (so that we can make use of the fruits of such ventures, instead of getting nothing at all when wealth is squandered on bad ideas or just plain old consumption).
But how do we know who will come up with good ideas about what to do? Why Musk? Because he managed to earn a lot through PayPal? Does that business skill (and luck) carry over to decisions about rockets and populating Mars and developing AI?
Why not give a billion to a random business owner to come up with what to do?
Why Musk what? The point is that it's not about Musk. We're talking about whether Musk "deserves" his billions in profit and the answer is it's not about Musk, and it's not about "deserve". It's about all the people who benefit because of the existence of spacex/tesla/etc, who wouldn't benefit if we refuse to pay for the work of intelligent investment (by, say, seizing profits), because that would prevent their existence in the first place.
Certainly, if you think you can identify people who are particularly qualified to pick good ideas and make investments in them, it's not a bad idea to give them some money (but where do you get that money? hopefully not somewhere with negative externalities such as stealing it from different random business owners). Although structurally it's better if the billion itself is given as an investment instead of a gift, because then the person giving the billion has "skin in the game" themselves. Which is basically what I think VCs do, although I don't know how effective they usually are.
(Yes, this whole thing assumes a regulatory framework where businesses that have negative externalities or are otherwise bad for the world do not make profit. Indeed, companies that use dark patterns or rent seeking tactics to make profit should be legally punished, and if such punishments make them bad investments it's a good thing, because it means they were on net bad for the world.)
> It's about all the people who benefit because of the existence of spacex/tesla/etc
No one benefits by the mere "existence" of SpaceX/Tesla. People benefit only from what those companies produce, and the things those companies produce only come into this world by way of people selling their labor to design, engineer, and manufacture the rockets/cars. We can go all the way down the supply chain and say that people only benefit from Tesla due to the people mining lithium in other countries. And yet the CEO of Tesla believes that the people mining his lithium deserve to have their government replaced by a US-backed coup to be more friendly to his corporation.
The point isn't that we should "seize profits". The point is that the guy at the top isn't producing as much value as he thinks he is compared to everyone below him. They are producing the real value, they should be getting the wealth. Maybe Musk still comes out of the equation the richest one of them all. Fine. But he doesn't have to come out a demi-god with more money than he could spend in 100 lifetimes. There's no reason that needs to happen.
I think inheritance and unchecked wealth accumulation work against meritocracy actually.
There are things that make people more efficient as a homo sapiens and we want them to enjoy those things and not to worry and stress various annoyances so they can concentrate on what they are best at.
But as you say it's obviously not like that for CEOs of big companies. Just because Bill Gates was good at selling software doesn't mean he should hold this immense power in the world and decide how to allocate resources between vaccines and cancer research etc. It has nothing to do with his meritocratic expertise (of course he pays his own experts, but he does maintain the high level control). Some would argue that this value was all created as additional value by him via the efficiencies enabled by the software and that it wasn't merely captured out of existing value. It's obviously a combination, but based on ideology people estimate it differently. We know that rent seeking and dark pattern business practices exist, as do lobbying and other forms of corruption.
The billionaire examples aren't examples of meritocracy but of rewarding luck. Nobody would say that as a human Elon Musk is literally that much more competent than, say, the best senior engineer at Tesla.
But also, beyond a certain point rich people aren't people any more, more like institutions. They just channel that wealth in different directions, they cannot "enjoy" a significant potion of it as a human being. All that money gets rotated back into salaries of others, else it would remain just numbers in databases. It cannot meaningfully accumulate. Just like if you burn a bag of cash, you induce minuscule inflation effects and everybody else's money increases in value a little bit. If a billionaire sits on his cash, it's as if he didn't have it. But when he uses it, he pays salaries and makes people do stuff. The problem is when this stuff is "the wrong thing".
I think the main argument against billionaire power is that the distributed wisdom of crowds and markets are better at allocation and deciding what's worth doing than centralizing it without limit. It's good to centralize it as long as it's about merit and related to expertise or capacity, but not beyond that. Billionaires are way beyond human scale regarding that.
> "we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>
There doesn't have to be anything contradictory here. Diversity efforts can work to offset biases and enable getting closer to meritocracy. For example hiring the best in your network coming from a high-class university doesn't mean you're hiring the best overall. The diversity effort may be for example to make sure that the job offer is visible to the brilliant person who wouldn't even find it otherwise. Or it may be an effort to ensure a less biased review (masking names?) Or it's making sure that people do behave well internally, so the company isn't avoided by the best people for hiring racist assholes for example.
(a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
This is a disingenuous argument. (a) and (b) are not talking about the same kind of rewards:
(a) : when talking about the equalization of environments, the "rewards" are allocated to areas and groups of people, not to individuals.
(b) : the stratification of wealth is talking about "rewards" to individual people.
These two concepts are not the same, the mechanisms are not the same, and the justification for them is not the same. They're only grouped together as "rewards" so they lead to the false conclusion (c).
I'm not suggesting we should have absolute equality but is system we have in place really merit-based?
Last I checked, about a fourth of millionaires inherited their wealth and the vast majority had the opportunity to become wealthy due to factors completely out of their control (where they were born, to whom they were born and natural cognitive abilities).
So, how do you decide who gets the rewards? Assuming not everyone can have every job/house/life.
Do you tell the people who get the rewards that they were given a chance at random (compared to their neighbor who was not) or do you let them believe they earned it?
For the record, I agree that merit is a bad system. Im curious to explore the ramifications of doing away with the system and how it would be different, if at all, from the current system.
For example, in a post-scarcity society, everyone has what they need, but some houses still have nicer views than others.
I don't think that "innate" merit should be rewarded. I think that applied merit should be. You could be the smartest, most capable person in the world, but if you won't work to apply that, you're useless to me and the world. If you do apply it effectively, you are likely to be rewarded for that, which seems eminently reasonable.
Why wouldn't it? In the end this is a people problem, not a tech problem. And both Silicon Valley and Bangladesh have some form of "local" meritocracy. Meritocracy applied and working within your stratum but not across the boundaries.
Whether you're poor or in a lower caste you still get some form of meritocracy within your group to keep you content and motivated. But crossing the boundary to the next level, while not impossible, is designed to be highly unlikely because people in all layers like the security those boundaries provide them.
The paper identifies one threshold at ~500 USD. That is, in Bangladesh, those with more than 500 USD assets tend to accumulate more assets, while those with less than 500 USD assets don't.
As people in Silicon Valley have more than 500 USD assets (citation needed), I don't see how this paper applies to Silicon Valley at all. There can be another such threshold, but the paper doesn't provide any experimental support for one.
That's a bit pedantic, the principle is exactly the same showing humans operate on the same principles regardless of geography. OP clearly discussed "the idea of meritocracy", not "the exact threshold" and the study just pinpointed a threshold while confirming the universality of the mechanism.
Whether it's $500 in Bangladesh where Google tells me the "typical" salary is ~$150-$300, or $500k in SV where the typical pay might be $150k-$300k the principle is still very much the same.
Everyone claims meritocracy but in the end it's proven it's not individual merit we're actually looking for. We're looking to maintain barriers around our layer of society and allow some form of real meritocracy only within a layer.
You don't think things like access to education, medical care, clean water, nutritious food, vaccinations, quality public schools, subsidized colleges, rule of law, minimal corruption, limited impact of religious identify, avaiable reliable housing might have an impact on the outcomes?
That's... absolutely not what I said, or implied. Access to all of that is the boundary between the layers. People in layer n will make sure people in layer n-1 are missing at least one thing so they can't compete on equal footing. People in layer n+1 will do the same to people in layer n.
If you don't have access to schooling and someone else does then that's something that will make you always start with a handicap when competing with them. The boundary, whether education or medical services, is there so one layer feels safe from the inferior one. People want it there even if this means they start off with a handicap compared to the superior layer. Most people are more afraid of losing what they have than they are keen on winning something they don't already have.
I suspect many who believe in meritocracy are already successful people who like to tell themselves they got there by merely being so much smarter than everyone else around them, dismissing the access, luck, (i.e. quality of schools they were born near), family wealth etc. almost entirely as a factor.
I personally just think everything works better when the best people are in charge and rewarded for being the best. Yes, there's tons of luck, and it's not fair in any "everyone deserves a shot" sense. Still a better strategy, because most people are bad at most things. We should take care of them, but we should not pretend they're competent if they're not.
> I personally just think everything works better when the best people are in charge and rewarded for being the best.
The problem is that they're not necessarily the best i.e. some poor person if given the same resources, education, access etc. might in fact do a lot better with what they have, we'll just never know.
I mean if you look at the state of today's world, handling of COVID, shams like Nikola etc. are these really the 'best' people humanity has to offer?
How is "being smart" a genetic lottery? Are you serious? That brings up all sorts of implications with race and whatnot. "Being smart" is often a proxy for the things the GP mentions: strong stable family, access to good schooling, and a sprinkle of luck.
The previous comment's argument appears to be that heritability of "being smart" is not strictly limited to genetic factors, that measures of "smartness" such as an IQ score also measure other factors that are not strictly related to genetics
Heritability and genetic factors are overlapping but distinct things - for example, socioeconomic status influences many aspects, is hereditary but not genetic.
“ Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.”
Please consider that you are advocating for communism. I hope you will consider reviewing the histories of China and the USSR, et al. after World War 2. The critique and solution you offer do not lead to “actual equality.”
It's difficult for me to believe this observation is being trashed so hard.
No, meritocracy likely is not the best system. It just happens to be better than the others we've tried at scale so far-- including attempting to give everyone the same opportunities regardless of ability. What else is being described there, if not communism? What am I missing?
The real underlying problem is that we are strongly predisposed to naturally arrange into hierarchies. That's not something you're going to take out of people. When you try, they spontaneously form their own. In a system where you say you're giving everyone equal opportunity, people will still pursue acquiring power over others, and will try to hold on to it when they get it. We aren't likely to stop this behavior, and if we do, at that point I'd argue we would essentially be a different species.
This is a logical leap i'm afraid. We have been trying to give people what they need using government welfare for a century now. It's not communism to correctly understand that some people need to be given opportunities to prove themselves in the market regardless of their race, wealth, etc.
I understand what you’re saying, and technically you’re correct. However, the quote I referenced is typical of the coded language being used to justify and advocate for much more extreme policies of redistribution that I’m not convinced many would agree with.
What you call "redistribution" is what others would call "returning stolen wealth to those who created it". The people who use what you refer to as "coded language" believe that as laborers, they create wealth which is stolen by those who don't labor but instead merely own assets. They believe that wealth and value are created through labor, not by ownership, and therefore labor deserve a larger portion of the wealth than they are getting right now. Therefore it's not "redistribution" of wealth at all, as those who currently hold this wealth had no right to it in the first place.
That’s a ridiculous equivalency. You can provide high quality education to all without USSR style communism. In fact I’d argue the long term success of a capitalist system relies on it.
I’m not so sure about “high-quality” being possible for all. “Reasonable quality” I’d agree with, but truly high-quality education is incredibly labor and resource intensive to provide as it must be tailored to the student to a significant degree.
In my experience, providing “a high quality education for all” just isn’t possible, because it’s dependent upon what caliber of students are in the classroom. Stipulating an equal distribution of ability levels doesn’t raise all boats, it drags the most capable students down. What I don’t understand is why it’s often considered acceptable to disregard the needs of strong students. Don’t they also have a right to be challenged in the classroom?
In my experience education has been defunded for decades while wealth inequality has been exacerbated. One only has to look at the fact that the inheritance tax is indexed to inflation, while the minimum wage and teacher expense deduction aren't to understand where our national priorities are. I'm not willing to say "a high quality education for all just isn’t possible" until we've invested equivalent resources into education as waging war. Imagine if our education budget was $700 billion annually. What could be possible?
> The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
> The case against meritocracy can also be put sociologically: (a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/12/04/meritocrac...
The idea that "innate" merit should be rewarded (this underlies what we consider meritocracy) is fundamentally a noncontinuable state. Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.