Michael Young, the Red Baron | Hacker News Reader

Michael Young, the Red Baron

nybooks.com

27 pointsmagda_wang14 comments

This is an article about the economist who coined 'meritocracy'. Not a fighting ace.

Worth mentioning, I think, that he absolutely did not consider a meritocracy to be a good thing; contrast with today, where it is casually assumed to be so.

It's become one of those terrible words where people get into debates each using different definitions of the word without being aware of the difference.

I think you just described more than half of all political debate, as e.g. libertarians and socialists define "capitalism" differently.

When debating these terms I define them and/or add qualifiers, e.g. "voluntarist capitalism" or "non-authoritarian capitalism" for the libertarian concept (which is not what we have!) and "state capitalism" or "corporatism" for what socialists usually mean.

Making matters worse it's become popular to deliberately muddy the waters by attempting to steal or corrupt definitions or use bland meaningless dog whistle terms. The latter I call 'duckspeak' after the term from 1984.

That's the weird part: “I.Q. + effort = merit” sounds pretty positive, right?

But,

"A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations."

The intended result doesn't sound very appealing.

Yes, he intended it as dystopian. That's one reason the article is worth reading.

"Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts,” and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again…. If they have been labeled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”"

That sounds familiar.

"But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.” And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “I.Q. + effort = merit.”"

And so does that.

If you're not British, you might not get that 'red' here is associated with the Labour party who are left wing. Blue is the colour associated with our Conservative party (right).

Right now, with Brexit and leadership fights and other stuff, the main parties are all over the place though.

Thank you for that clarification.

Interesting, in America both the red and blue parties are right wing, one is just much more extreme.

In what sense do you mean “blue” (i.e Dem) to be right-wing in America?

I guess he means relative to left-wing parties in Europe etc.

> Right now, with Brexit and leadership fights and other stuff, the main parties are all over the place though.

They've been all over the place for a while now, at least since Blair. The Conservatives haven't been traditionalist, and Labour haven't been socialist, for a while (excluding perhaps Corbyn but that's a new development). Both parties have existed in a kind of middle zone messing around with individual policies but with no cohesive message.

His son is Toby Young the right-wing journalist [1] and the subject of the film "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" [2]. He's also continued his father's public engagement by creating several new free schools in London.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Young

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lose_Friends_%26_Aliena...

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