The Problem with Meritocracy
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All this supposedly so those that are incapable of succeeding in a meritocracy are not sentenced to the terrible fate of believing themselves worthy of their low station. I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing.
Feudalism died for a reason, let's not bring it back.
People who succeed do not just benefit themselves, they often benefit many others, including future generations. And people are motivated to succeed by desiring the rewards that come with success such as wealth, fame, etc. Without such incentives, success and progress suffer. Art, architecture, literature, music, and poetry suffers. The study and practice of medicine, physics, and chemistry suffers. Innovation in industry suffers. Free enterprise suffers. Everyone's quality of life is reduced because the automobile was never invented, penicillin was never discovered, radio was never discovered, the electric light bulb was never invented, the refrigerator was never invented, etc, etc, etc.
Should we discourage the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the John Carmacks, the Sergey Brins, the JK Rowlings, and the Steve Jacksons of the world because there are so many other folks who are perfectly content to spend their lives working at the Try N Save and watching 5 hours of TV a night and some of those folks find their lives dissatisfying in comparison? Quiet down! You're being unruly! You're making everyone else look bad with your success! Here, come slum with us, it'll make everyone happier in the end, honest.
Time and time again history has shown that unfettered individual liberty maximizes progress, both for individuals and for society as a whole. There will always be inequality and tragedy, that's the nature of life. Trying to pretend that we can make everyone identically equal and erase everything that makes people different from one another is a distopian vision, very Borg-like and anti-humane.
I would like to find a way to combine the best of the technological brilliance and economic powerhouse that meritocracy and social mobility have provided, while also looking for a less disconnected, community-focused and psychologically healthier nation. Any discussions that help pinpoint problems in our current system, and propose solutions, are welcome to me. I do not agree with the author's proposed solution, but I do agree that there are problems inherent in the extreme selfishness and greed in our society that we have not adequately addressed.
The community of SQL Server DBAs I participate in is important to me, but that includes members both physically close and around the world. My church group matters to me, and that one is somewhat centered around my general geographic area, but it has people from all over the city. My coworkers are very important in my life, but none of them live anywhere near me (I live in the South part of Las Vegas, work in the North, most of my coworkers live relatively close to the office.)
The people who live in my neighborhood do not play a significant part in my life. They are thankfully all very nice people, and I wish them the best and say "Hello" when I meet them while walking my dog, but I have very little in common and little reason to interact with them. If you mean this group by connected and community focused, then why would we want that?
This leads to the increasing political polarization we see today. A relative handful of people taking society's spoils for itself and isolating themselves from the rest of society. If unchecked, do you think this will end well? The end effect is something like the Feudalism rightly decried elsewhere in this thread.
I do not think I am in a mono-culture though. I am rather focused on few subsets that share some interests with me. That interest is what makes them important to me, but within those communities of importance I am exposed to a variety of viewpoints outside that particular interest.
I do not think that this leads to political polarization. Now, if the only "interest communities" were by political party this may be true, but for someone with non-political party "interest communities" you are likely to be exposed to a wide variety of politicals views. I have both major parties and some independents in my workplace for instance.
A relative handful of people taking society's spoils for itself and isolating themselves from the rest of society.
This is a non-sequitor from your other points. Greater political polarization does not imply a greater divide between rich or poor.
As for how it ends, that depends on how people get their wealth. If they get it by creating new wealth and innovation, then yes it will end well. Yes, there will then be enormous division between the wealthy and the poor, but the wealthy will become wealthy precisely by improving the world for everyone, including the poorest. Also in such a society the poor have at least a chance to become wealthy (perhaps not a statistically good one, but a genuince chance).
If they become wealthy through taking of taxes, wealth redistribution, or outright theft, then the end will be predictably horrible.
One place to look for a well thought out reasoning of this is http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html .
There is trouble in rhetoric like this. You have asserted an equivalence class of taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft, which are three different things. Taxes are the dues you pay to the society in which you live. In a democratic society, you get one vote in how those dues are spent, and a voice to convince others that your way is right. Of course, money talks, and this process can be corrupted in innumerable ways.
Wealth redistribution happens on a large scale through a pattern of market forces, governmental intervention, and other economic and psychological factors. The last forty years have seen a massive wealth redistribution in the U.S., and it's not in favor of the lower 80%. For many reasons, the ethics of which are fervently debated, this wealth redistribution has been one-way.
Theft is a crime involving the unlawful taking of physical goods.
By asserting this equivalence class, you have already partaken in massive rhetorical fraud which is harming our ability to engage in reasonable debate.
What I was saying is that if someone becomes rich through any of those means than it is almost certainly immoral (note the almost) and that it will most likely lead to problems in society. (Again, note I am talking about people beocming rich this way. Using wealth redistribution to say gauruntee a certain minimum income is a much more complicated situation. Having The government step in and take vast amounts of wealth from some people in order to hand it to one or two people specifically to make them rich is almost certainly going to lead to ruin.)
Taxes are necessary. Not good, but necessary, and I have no hesitation paying a reasonable amount of taxes to provide for necessary functions of government. But, if people are being taxed specifically to make some noble rich then it is both immoral and will lead to problems for society.
Wealth redistribution for the purpose of making some wealthy is tantamount to theft, just government authorized. There are some examples of this that have been in the news lately from Afghanistan were public lands are simply handed over to friends of high government officials either completely free or for a pittance.
To summarize and be completly clear: In the context of being done specifically to make a person or small priveleged group wealthy, taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft are effectively the same. This was a pattern that is mostly seen in ancient feudalisms or some modern third world countries. In the case of being done in an attempt to legitimately improve society then taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft are three very different things.
"The rich people I know drive the same cars, wear the same clothes, have the same kind of furniture, and eat the same foods as my other friends. Their houses are in different neighborhoods, or if in the same neighborhood are different sizes, but within them life is similar."
It is likely that PG's friends are from roughly similar neighborhoods, and have fairly similar lives. However, all of their lives are probably very different from people in inner city Baltimore, or an impoverished small town in the mid-west.
In addition to stealing, I do not think he gives sufficient weight to crony-ism as a means of acquiring wealth. We all know that there are a lot of wealthy people in the finance industry whose wealth was preserved, at least in part, by government intervention. Add to that wealthy executives sitting on each other's boards and voting each other pay raises. And lobbying efforts that maintain the competitive position of existing large companies over smaller businesses. And the inherent advantages in having wealthy family in networking and introductions granting access to high paying jobs.
In short, I think there is a broad gray area between stealing wealth and creating it that is more complex than Graham's essay suggests.
Empirically, there is much evidence to suggest that the fortunes of the media American has been declining for a few decades now. It is difficult to see, then, why the median American should favor the continuation of the current system that promotes increasingly unequal distribution of wealth.
There are many factors that impact your life; you do not live on a cybernetic island. By less disconnected and more community-focused, I mean precisely that you should interact with the people around you. Your children should play with theirs, you should make physical connections as well as virtual ones. As to why you should want that, obviously you do not, and I don't dictate your wants.
For myself and my children, I want them to interact with the kids around them, and I want a nation of civically engaged communities. I believe there is balance to be had, and I am looking for that balance in my own life and how I can help bring more community to the city where I live.
The important question that the author raises is this: why is that offensive? Right now we allocate power according to the chance of genetics and environment, and tell people that we're actually allocating it through personal effort. Which raises two questions:
1) Is it okay to lie to ourselves about what determines the meritocratic hierarchy?
2) Is it more tragic that a bright, smart, knowledgeable person not be able to fully exercise those properties, or for a slow, unintelligent, uninformed person to not be able to have a dignified place in society?
The answers to these questions could be either yes or no, but we need to be honest about our answers to them, and why we answer them the way we do.
Those aren't mutually exclusive and neither is their inverse.
Also, the first one is wrong in a subtle way. We want people to exercise their capabilities to the fullest - bright and smart are merely two kinds of capabilities, two that are far less important than bright and smart people think.
In summary, we want all people going at full tilt and we want dignity regardless of what their "full tilt" is.
The author's mistake is in thinking that you can give someone dignity by treating them as more capable than they actually are.
They certainly aren't in general, but in a meritocracy they are. A meritocracy, almost by definition, assigns more value (and therefore dignity) to those who are more capable. I think the author is arguing for an environment where they are no longer mutually exclusive.
"The author's mistake is in thinking that you can give someone dignity by treating them as more capable than they actually are."
I think the author is saying that dignity should not be tied to how capable a person is.
No, a meritocracy does does not assign more value to the more capable. Moreover, dignity is not value.
In some parts he argued that is what we are education system is doing now, in others he seemed to be advocating exactly that (the traditional farming community, for example).
I find it refreshing that the author readily acknowledges that the people left behind are there because they are not talented enough to go anywhere else. It was very politically incorrect of him to say so.
With that as the premise, what do we do with those people left behind? Our meritocracy allows fewer and fewer people to control ever more of society's wealth and resources. What of the rest of society? Basically, we are witnessing the ghetto-fication of Middle America. Is that not a problem?
I find the notion of organising a social structure around making these people feel better about their uselessness abhorrent, I find the notion that those distributed amongst them capable of greater things being sentenced to living their lives in the immediate presence of these people, as a close-knit good old fashioned "community" as a pretty good argument for euthanasia.
And in case I come across too much someone swimming deep in the dunning-kruger effect, if I am or were afflicted with the same unfortunate situation with regards to my abilities as the group in question, I would still not wish that anyone who had the capacity to make the world better ought to be held back on account of not wounding my pride. I live in the world after all. Feudal serfs had it a lot worst than the modern ignorant and proud of it, and I believe this is largely because the world is a much better place on account of the very meritocratic values the original article decries.
You setup a straw man by simplifying their grievance to an abstract understanding of ones position. People who are below average live genuinely miserable lives in a meritocracy. WHY shouldn't they ruin the world? It was cruel of the world to create them (never mind fooling them into becoming attached to being alive). HOW is randomly allocating power and privilege any different than the random allocation of cognitive abilities?
Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities.
A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.
It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you think you want to study biology, but you really want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.)
Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you can't tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you can tell them that, but you will be lying.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better.
You can't have it all. Ever.
Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.)
> when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?
We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.
OK, I don't want to be too defeatist - I should try my best to do what I can. But I realize I have limits, and that I am more able than some and less able than others.
Does that make me unhappy? No. And if it did, I think the fault would be mine. Like everyone else, I try to look on the bright side of things. Nobody is perfectly happy, and studies show that beyond the point where you have enough not to worry all the time, more money doesn't make you happier.
We don't need to stop telling people 'you should try to excel.' But it would be good to add 'in whatever makes you happy.' If you love cars, be a great mechanic, not a sullen one who wishes he was an executive. And if you want to be a scientist but don't have what it takes, well, learning to be happy in something else is part of life. We all have to deal with that sort of thing.
Stick with it...(especially in the middle and towards the end)
I'm still very much trying to digest the contents of this article rather than regurgitating the usual flippant answers.
Not everyone can get a job in at their local Google datacenter, even if they train for 2 years. (There was an amazing NPR story recently to this effect.) And while I have moved multiple times, and across two hemispheres to get to Silicon Valley (and yet still can't call myself local to anywhere) I feel some obligation to satiate something I which appears as burgeoning task vacuum in rural America.
That is, there is a tremendous amount of idle "Turking" power going to waste in the heartlands - lifetimes of mechanical acuity being thrown away on television rather than say another Wikipedia/Github for rapid-prototyped goods .
I mean, as much as I love my programming job, if you don't want your job to be your life, something like a garbageman has some advantages. The job doesn't come home with you, it's outdoors, physical, you can make a living. None of this particularly appeals to me (other than the "make a living" part which I'm fine with :) ), but it takes all kinds. (Given that my kid is under two years old, the only consideration I'd have is the relatively high risk of automation, but that's not something we can easily predict now.)
And I do agree with your counterargument on the topic of "women in computer science", for what it's worth. I think it's actually both issues in play, which makes it more complicated.
What if it means that he can't afford health insurance, save for retirement, or make a down payment on a house?
For instance, I'm not sweating trying to put aside vast quantities of money for college education. Why am I doing this horrible thing? Well, tuition has been going up by about twice the rate of inflation for a long time now (http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml ), and projecting that out, it's another 70% increase in real tuition prices over what I already consider the completely unsustainable tuition rates of today. I don't know what will happen, but today's traditional "four-year college you live at" is not going to be the only choice, or possible even the dominant choice, by then.
Similarly, health care insurance simply can not continue increasing at the rate it is currently increasing at for another 20 years. It's physically impossible. Who knows what will happen instead?
Housing prices are also very difficult to predict once it really settles in that housing is not a good investment.
It's a choice he'll make with eyes wide open if I can help it, but it's his choice, not mine, and frankly neither of us sitting here in 2010 have more than a passing clue what sort of world he'd be making that choice in. Care to bet that by 2028 the US won't have some kind of universal health care, for instance?
where does a lawyer fit in the talent pool?
is it wrong to define the whole of a person by the job they have?
There are no people in the world who can do anything in the world. Even if your child had all of the intelligence, physical ability, drive, and opportunity possible, he or she would never have a choice between being a jockey and a basketball player. So, no matter how much of a meritocracy we have, you will be lying when you tell your child, "You can be whatever you want."
I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.
An interesting point. It's true that our scholarship system tends to pull talent from small towns to large ones, and maybe that has negative implications. But to actively discourage people from their ambition seems wrong. Let THEM decide whether local culture, traditional community, etc, are valuable to them.
Another point: is a government-enforced local culture as good as a naturally developed one? Can you ever regain the attitude "that's the way life is around here, just like in great-grandpa's day" by making policies? Or will you just have festering resentment by those with stunted talent? To me, this is part of the inherent flaw of communism.
These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years.
Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.
However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city.
Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.
Sure, there are people on "tough times" but I can't believe that it's the "nastiest part of the state."
Of course, these are just my personal observations. I lived on the "good side" of town and my father (who owns a construction company) did fairly well.
The OP thinks that this is a problem, and that Americans should become more local. However, he fails to realize that America is made up of people who were fed up with staying local. That is why they packed up their bags, left their jobs, friends and family and traveled far to come live here. Why would their offspring be any different?
What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - which in fairness seems to be the purpose of the civil service), the cost of doing anything tends to be immense and people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen.
Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at
What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen."
You just described the Indian Civil Service - which of course we inherited from the British and fucked up in our own unique ways.
If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.
Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.
It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.