Meritocracy and its discontents: The merits of revisiting Michael Young | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy and its discontents: The merits of revisiting Michael Young

economist.com

51 pointsnopinsight51 comments

There are a lot of interesting ideas to unpack here:

- As the initial meritocrats (does that pass as a word?) benefit from the meritocracy and accumulate wealth, they use that wealth to increase the odds for their children, resulting in a future where the "meritocracy" is made up of people whose merits in education were largely paid for, and so it ceases to be a meritocracy and ends up resembling an oligarchy.

- People outside the meritocracy can't stand the smugness of elites, who have better opportunities and thus better outcomes.

- This results in the breakdown of democratic function over time, because hating elites results in fact-denying when those elites are factually correct. An example is how the uneducated largely voted for Brexit, and won't change their minds in the face of evidence that it was a bad vote, because they don't want to admit that they were wrong and the elites were right.

For me this presents some of the issues brought about by large inequality, whether brought about by traditional feudalism, oligarchy, or new-fangled "meritocracy." It causes unrest such that inevitably results in revolution.

I also question the value of a meritocracy on its basic premise. It seems unfair in a society with so much wealth that "lazy" people or "dumb" people get such a short end of the stick when it is not their fault that they were born that way. Many of us want to build cool things and make money and contribute to the world, and capitalism makes sure we're rewarded for it, but for those of us who don't I see no reason they should be condemned to poverty while there is the means to feed them.

Universal Basic Income sounds like a convenient way to prevent the various ways to create inequality and centralize wealth. Very curious how the experiments in progress will turn out.

Basic income is bullshit that's getting loudly advocated from the top of society as a convenient way to tamper down social discontent while doing nothing about the unfair inequality at the root of many societies.

In the middle of Dallas is a small city never actually incorporated by the city called Highland Park. This is where George W. Bush and the upper middle class lives. The people who grow up in Highland Park will go to some of the best high schools in the nation. They'll be well trained and well prepared to go to colleges like Harvard and Princeton and Yale. These people end up running major corporations and dominating politics.

Meanwhile, if you drive ten miles south, you'll end up looking at public schools that look like prisons, that are desperately underfunded. These students, already having hard lives, will struggle to succeed, a large number will not graduate. There are no million dollar payouts or election victories for these people. They end up being the poor sods that the wealthy academics, politicians, and business people talk about when from their perch they are able to finally read about and observe human misery. But if you look at their actions, they will continue to take and take and take from these people. If not that, they benefit the most from talking about them.

Every city has a Highland Park (Detroit, certainly). Check out the people who run most major companies. They come from those places to a large extent. Name a major politician that doesn't have elite school roots. That's not to say these people are bad or evil, but if we're going to be serious about ending this charade of meritocracy, we've gotta stop rewarding that. Basic income is more of the same. It's bullshit that doesn't strike at the heart of the problem.

Netflix has a new series called Dirty Money. I thought the first episode about VW was pretty damn good, but the second is fascinating and sad. It's meritocracy in action. We have lots of practices in society which are business as usual which are basically scams. The poor are the most vulnerable to these scams.

https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/83?jbv=80118100&jbp=0&j...

Why talk about basic income when we have glaring systematic flaws which can be solved without giving more power to that system?

Absolutely nothing in your screed even talks about a basic income, except your first and last sentences.

It may be a screed. We could get into the numbers of why basic income doesn't work and talk about the realities of implementing it, but nobody needs to hear me blabbering more than I have.

If the tone sounds exasperated, it's because I don't believe "basic income" is a panacea that is a real or considered answer to what the article is addressing which is inequality due to a "meritocratic" system. It's become a meme.

We've got a social ill? Basic income!

[deleted]

It's sad and a sign of our selfist culture that you're getting so many down votes.

"It's bullshit that doesn't strike at the heart of the problem." - so what is the heart of the problem and what would strike at the heart of it? I don't see any convincing answers in the rest of your comment. You rile about Highland Parks - but what about it is that really the root of the problem? And what you propose to do about it?

There are many problems with UBI - one is the cost, another one is that it is only for citizens - but at least it would give everyone a safety net enabling them to think less hand to mouth and maybe take some risks, maybe make some longer term plans. If it worked it would be an improvement.

What is basic income? If you asked 15 people on HN, you're gonna get 15 different answers, because it is a vague belief that throwing money at a system that does not serve the people is going to serve the people.

I've done this math before on HN, so people are probably tired of hearing it, but if you want to give 300 million Americans $10k a year it's going to cost about 3 trillion dollars. The federal budget this year was 4 trillion dollars (and that is a bloated budget).

The suggestion is that in the middle of implementing the largest spending program ever (we shutdown over passing a budget), we are going to manage to get rid of entitlement programs. This is pie in the sky. Why would either major party do this? Their constituencies are tied to those programs. This 10k a year also does not assume healthcare and removes any true fallback for the poorest of the poor. You spend your 10k somehow, you're straight out of luck. If you don't remove those safety nets, then you're neglecting one of the major arguments for basic income.

This is ignoring how much it would suck to live off of 10k a year. It might let someone middle class buy some new stuff, it's not lifting people out of poverty, many of whom, if you look at the numbers, actually receive much more than 10k in value a year off existing programs. It's taking money from them, bloating the budget, for what exactly?

Why increase the budget by 3 trillion dollars (the bigger question is how), when we have a whole range of options, some targeted, some not, that are much cheaper? Would proper healthcare improve many people's lives? Of course it would. How do you propose increasing the budget that much if not by greatly increasing taxes on the wealthy and big business (and remember, they have the power)? If you're gonna goto that trouble, why not do things like busting up some monopolies first and increasing competitiveness in marts? this is a tried and true tactic.

More importantly, do you believe the major parties and the leaders of those parties serve the people or serve themselves? Unless you're very idealistic, the answer seems obvious. If we reformed government to actually serve people better, maybe that would have some good outcomes, and it wouldn't cost 3 trillion a year to find out someone was selling us a dream and not reality. Has any political plan ever gone as well as advertised? Why would it be different this time?

Basic income has very limited testing at scale. That should make you immediately skeptical of claims about it. Nobody really knows what impact it would have. Most software devs for good reason would not advocate for rewriting an entire system in a new language, they'd advocate gradual refactoring (we've all been young though). Basic income is a blind rewrite in a new framework. We've got many smaller things to try, why not those, instead of dying on the hill that is passing basic income through Congress?

I like the idea of basic income, it's just I've yet to see anyone propose a way of doing it that actually makes sense, that is realistic about political realities. One of those realities is the notion of political capital. You only have so much to spend. Basic income is super expensive and it distracts from solvable problems.

To pass basic income you have to reform the system. Figure out how to reform the system first and then worry about basic income. If you reform the system, maybe basic income isn't necessary at all.

To the dead guy:

Basic income is that everyone is guaranteed not $10k/yr, which is a measly pittance that just entrenches poverty, but a living salary, enough that nobody has to work.

It also certainly does NOT involve getting rid of existing programs like public healthcare, public education, public transport, etc.

That's one of those many definitions of basic income.

It's not a wrong definition, but if you want to keep safety nets, add healthcare, and add basic income, you're looking at an absolutely massive budget. Would the libertarian proponents of basic income be for that? Not sure. But again, the question is: how do you do that?

It is unrealistic now - but that will change. Also 'unrealistic' is quite different from 'not going at the heart of the problem'.

UBI isn't the clear choice everyone makes it out to be. I'm all for lowering inequality and spreading out wealth. But, fundamentally, UBI is just a welfare program with way more money pouring in so it guarantees a livable income to everyone. We could achieve the same effect by just increasing the progressive welfare. We could remove those welfare cliffs where people lose money by making more money by smoothing out the curves. But, UBI does something more by taking money from those who need it and giving it to those who don't. Every dollar going to an upper middle class tech worker is a dollar not going towards uplifting the lowest of our society. We should care a little about efficiency because UBI will be CRAZY expensive and CRAZY anti-business when we increase taxes on them. There are less costly ways to achieve better income equality like better education or increased welfare which don't hurt business. Businesses could operate with way thinner profits sure, but other countries offer other options.

Here's a UBI debate for the interested: https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal-basi...

> I'm all for lowering inequality and spreading out wealth

I'd rather be for lowering inequality by spreading out the means of production, so people could be much more self reliant. This idea is called Distributism (the "Three acres and a cow" slogan of 1910) and stands in contrast to both capitalism and socialism. I see UBI as a demeaning form of help, that infantilises population and makes them state dependent, while self-reliance is based on one's own efforts and leads to better outcomes and increased self-esteem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

This is a great short vid about local self-reliance and the relation of normal people to big corporations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw4dZLSDXg

Remember, if big corporations won't give people jobs any more, we always have one job left - taking care of ourselves directly. Self-reliance is a virtue, UBI is the opposite of that.

We're headed in a technological direction that will empower self-reliance more and more in the future. By using solar energy, 3d-printing, agro-bots, community ISPs, credit co-ops, and automation in all forms, a small community could become self-reliant without backbreaking work. A social-network of skilled people (gigs) would replace regular jobs. We just need to keep these technologies very accessible and to help people develop solutions.

Self-reliance is connected to the startup economy, the bootstrapping mindset, the anti-trust doctrine and creativity. It's the way to a good life without the perils of financial redistribution.

i share your hope that a future where technology allows people to fire their boss rather than just allowing bosses to fire their workers is possible, and would be a wonderful outcome, but agrobots can't grow food without land. that's a problem. an even worse problem is that, given that self-reliant people don't kick anything up to anyone, they're vulnerable to the direct application of violence.

This is really interesting. I wish more people were focused on this as opposed to basic income. It mentions Christian Democrats being proponents of it, is there a major modern political figure you can point to?

The populism that the Republican and Democratic parties ate up in the US from about 1890 to 1920 had a lot of similar ideas. Woodrow Wilson (ignore his racism for the sake of argument) had a similar belief about government, as I understand it.

But, UBI does something more by taking money from those who need it and giving it to those who don't. Every dollar going to an upper middle class tech worker is a dollar not going towards uplifting the lowest of our society.

The tech worker will be paying a lot more in taxes than the amount of their UBI check. It's mathematically equivalent to them not getting UBI at all and having a somewhat lower tax rate.

True, why go through the motions of taking money then giving it back. Sounds like a great way to waste money through government inefficiency. It could possibly be efficient, but we should expect it not to be.

UBI is expensive, but it also looks more expensive than it is, because for many people it's basically a tax rebate. You have to look at what people would get net of taxes.

>Many of us want to build cool things and make money and contribute to the world, and capitalism makes sure we’re rewarded for it.

No it doesn’t. I have been unemployed for a year and a half since suddenly losing my apartment on 30 days notice about 2 weeks after the company I worked for went under. My job was illegally skirted as contract work. The job (creative) necessitated that my work which was done for a major corporation not be included in my portfolio which made it very hard to find new employment overnight. I had to move in with my parents in a rural area so that finding a job and re-relocating to an urban area is a sick game, apparently begging for me to be dishonest, which I haven’t done yet.

I have many very valuable skills (technical and creative, including programming) and very little opportunity to put them to use. Eventually I will crawl my way out but it’s pretty ridiculous so far. I am young, healthy, easy to get along with. My friends who generally all come from wealthier families are, like you may be, dumbfounded by my predicament until they realize I have no choice.

I find it incongruent that you have valuable skills yet can't find work because if they are valuable then people would buy them. I went homeless, and would have remained homeless if I stuck to what I valued. Instead, I shifted my values to work on things that other people value.

The cruelty of our world, imo, is that values shift and there is no good safety net to help everyone bounce back efficiently.

So what did you shift your values from, and to?

From what interested me at the time (game engine, math, computational geometry, algebra) to what interested others like "how can computers help people become more effective", "how does this whole internet marketing thing work", etc...

My first successful business was about helping self storage owners attract customers. It wasn't super interesting, but I focused on making it work and learned many things that were not comfortable to learn. A core lesson I learned is that the first step is find people that have problems and help them solve it.

There is a value of having an entrepreneurial mindset even if one does not end up as the owner of a business, and one of my concerns is that the mindset of today is "get a job" rather than "help people with problems"

Over time, I have built a career by focusing on other people's problems first to build skills, trust, and knowledge. Now, I am effectively a principal working on really cool distributed system problems.

When I started, I had 20K debt in student loans and was living out of my car. However, my story is a case of Survivorship bias, and a difficult aspect is filtering out what was luck versus was could be applicable advice. I do think the focus on building relationships and helping people with their problems is key.

Do you have any thoughts on how to find people that have problems, which the searching party can fix?

I talk to small business owners in community. Here is the thing, most small business owners are people with faults. They start well and know their business, but then conditions change. For instance, they feel they need a website, but they don't know why. Or, they need to be on facebook. Or, they want an edge.

The first thing to do is build the relationship and seek to understand their problems. The second thing is to look for the missing platform.

If the platform exists, then you can offer management services. An example of this managing Google Ad Words or Facebook Advertising.

If the platform doesn't exist, then it is opportunity to build something.

Usually, you can do both.

The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, “Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!”

Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, “Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar bill lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.”

The job market is not that efficient. Interviews don’t reliably identify the skilled and the unskilled, and the search process is inefficient for hirers and seekers. I don’t claim to have easy solutions for that, but the inefficiency I’ve observed on both sides makes it easy for me to believe your parent’s experience.

I don’t disagree with you.

I don’t lack job offers but they are all freelance and require me to live in an expensive city. I hesitate to depend on freelance work unless I can make what I used to make, maybe 5 years ago. The job offers went up over the years but the rate went down and now full-time positions are exceedingly rare.

I still get some remote work but I am having to reskill for jobs that have very high demand before moving to a city. But I think that saying capitalism makes sure I am rewarded for wanting to make things is misleading.

My opinion is to take the highest paying job and live in your car. I can say this because I lived in my car, and it isn't that bad. In this, you accomplish three things.

(1) build up assets fast (or, pay off debts fast) (2) make relationships with people who will see and value your skills which could lead to referrals (the tech world is really small) (3) keep skills up and continue building up portfolio

> But I think that saying capitalism makes sure I am rewarded for wanting to make things is misleading.

I don't disagree, but I think capitalism is better than the alternatives. Capitalism rewards people for making things that are relevant. I'm not saying it is easy, but being relevant is hard work.

>The job (creative) necessitated that my work which was done for a major corporation not be included in my portfolio which made it very hard to find new employment overnight

Put it in your portfolio

For the most part, I don’t have the finished products or enough of them to include them well in my portfolio. They were projects only used internally and I did the technical side of things before handing that over. I have good references and everything but I am in an industry that relies almost entirely on a portfolio. I do have a portfolio from side jobs but it misrepresents my experience. This is why I did the side jobs.

> An example is how the uneducated largely voted for Brexit, and won't change their minds in the face of evidence that it was a bad vote,

I'd argue that there's no evidence that Brexit was a bad vote for people without significant savings (designated in sterling.) It's easy to understand why the elites would hate it; it's responsible for a 10% loss in their worth.

I think you're still (accidentally) assuming that the descendants of people of merit still hold that merit somehow, rather than just having divergent interests due to their positions as owners and managers, rather than wage-earners.

edit:

> Many of us want to build cool things and make money and contribute to the world, and capitalism makes sure we're rewarded for it,

Capitalism rewards destruction, deception, and extortion as often, if not more often, as it rewards productive activity. Ransomware is a cool thing, as an application of technology.

The problem is that alternative systems still reward destruction, deception, etc., but do not reward the good things.

Those people without savings are certainly feeling the effects of inflation that are running through the system right now.

There's another thing going on in parallel, namely, physical separation of elites from the rest. You may not agree with Charles Murray's political worldview, but the first part of Coming Apart has a nice analysis of how elites in the US aggregate in specific neighborhoods.

But the problem is much wider IMO. Consider Russia. I read that 7% of its population is living abroad. In other words, the most agile and the most able are not in the country anymore. I imagine that Putin considers this to be a good thing: All possible dissenters just pack up and leave. What's not to like?

For one, they take their wealth and knowledge with them which adds to brain drain and anaemic economy at home.

That would not necessarily concern Putin too much, as the ones with brains almost by definition would not be too happy with him.

I know you are getting a zinger in, but yesterday's HN darling might be evidence against that:

Many scientists protested, but Elbakyan didn’t understand the outrage. As far as she was concerned, Dynasty — particularly through its funding of the LMF — had spread “propaganda against Putin and the Russian authorities.” She describes Zimin’s work through Dynasty, and the organization itself, as “anti-communist,” though she’s vague about how. Elbakyan says the foundation and Sci-Hub are “ideologically opposed,” and contends that Dynasty is somehow Sci-Hub’s capitalistic foil.

Actually it's exactly evidence for that -- anyone who considers "anti-communist" to be a bad thing, especially so in the ex-USSR, lacks both brains and even a single shred of human decency.

Not that I thought much of her before anyway.

But they can't take the oil wells and other natural resources with them.

That's the problem of countries with many natural resources -- they can afford to get rid of their best people.

I don't know if the first point is accurate.

If a system is meritocratic, doesn't that mean that merit is the filter?

Unless it's not based on merit (ability to deliver + actual delivery) then it does not guarantee that offspring of the meritous will merit advantageous position.

I think the presumption is everyone is given access to tools and then its up to the participants to take advantage of those tools. Not everyone has the same aptitude or ability, so not everyone will merit the desired achievements. What the spread between achievement and non achievement is, depends on their rules (taxes, other handicaps, etc).

Regarding Brexit, does it not potentially narrow the divergence between wealthy and non-wealthy? I.e. it has an opportunity to decrease inequality, even if it may result in diminished wealth for both?

That first point is one of the main thrusts of The Rise of the Meritocracy.

A true meritocracy is unlikely because of the advantages that the entrenched higher classes pass on to their descendents.

In part this can be higher ability due to better education.

However, another feature is by shaping the attitudes of a society to favour particular forms of achievement over others.

The only way to achieve a "pure" meritocracy as you describe it, would be to separate children from their parents before age 1, raise them all collectively, and instigate a 100% inheritance tax.

Calling a system meritocratic is like describing one as democratic it’s a statement of values rather than outcomes. The 11 plus is an example of implementation of meritocracy as parliamentary democracy is of democracy. Neither value is sufficient to prevent negative outcomes in implementation. So we see entrenched ‘worth’ divides and entrenched political parties. As per the article Michael Young actually coined the term meritocracy in order to criticise it and the negative outcomes it had produced. A lot of online debate seems overly focused on the idea that valuing merit can only bring positive outcomes.

Meritocracy is just a bare-bones version of a "founding myth" that a society adopts when enough people reject the traditional narrative.

The problem is that it is so absolutist that it is easy to find holes and internal inconsistencies in its story. Hence it can scarcely perform its function--namely, to provide a narrative that establishes the legitimacy of the ruling class--for very long.

Look only at the examples given in the article.

>The most effective way to rile the meritocrats is to attack their faith in expertise: Lord Turnbull, a former Cabinet secretary, has said that Brexiteers’ willingness to question current Treasury forecasts of the impact of Brexit was reminiscent of pre-war Nazi Germany.

Of course there is nothing wrongheaded about contesting the findings of government economic forecasts--governments produce such forecasts out of necessity, not because they exemplify any paragon of scientific truth. Reasonable people often disagree about them.

>The easiest way to rile the populists is to imply that their attachment to symbols of national identity, such as blue passports or the Cross of St George, is a sign of low intelligence.

This is so absurd it barely needs any mention. Nation-states have existed for a long time, and preference for their symbols has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof.

So you have a dissident group making a claim about a point of fact, and the soi-disant intellectually superior group responding with an ad hominem that slurs vasts swaths of the population. This is not a sustainable situation.

It's an interesting situation in the UK because the civil service which created those forecasts cannot respond to the criticism, they are not allowed to under their remit. Normally politicians would defend this work but what government politician would defend something so bleak, no matter how accurate it may or may not be.

It's not a true meritocracy if some people have better access to opportunities such as education and jobs because of where they were born or who their parents are.

That's not to say that the criticism of meritocracy isn't valid.

I think we can agree meritocracy means the best people for the job get the job. But, your contention points out what factors we evaluate when we say "best". Do we take "best" to mean when they apply for the job after years of some environment? Or "best" to mean the original genetic disposition independent of environment?

Good point. The article suggests that the original definition was more oriented to finding those with the "best" attributes at a young age and putting them at the top. E.g., 'They were the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report, which opened civil-service jobs to competitive examinations, and the Education Act of 1944, which decreed that children should be educated according to their “age, ability and aptitude”.'

The word "meritocracy" also implies that its a way of running government. I'm not sure if it's proposed as an alternative to democracy. I doubt that many people would think the leaders of government, the politicians, are carefully selected from the entire population base, the best of the best, so it seems that what we have now isn't meritocracy.

The point is that a true meritocracy would end up being like the situation you are talking about. In a perfectly meritocratic world, the first generation of people would succeed based on their merit, but they would use the power they gained to make sure their children have an advantage over others.

If a meritocracy wanted to remain a meritocracy, it would need to find a solution to that.