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Comment by gallerdude | Hacker News Reader

The "paradox of meritocracy." Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most. But at a certain point, if you want to stand out at anything, you have to basically put every waking moment into something.

There was a really interesting article on Polygon recently[1] about how making video games is basically impossible now. There are so many developers making so many great games. Studios with 3 hits in the past go bankrupt off of a 4th game which is (only) alright.

But what's the alternative? We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go? That's no good either!

The scary thing about the efficient market hypothesis is that it basically guarantees a feedback loop of people pushing themselves to the edge, farther and farther out, in order to do what they like.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/28/17911372/there-are-too-man...

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>Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most.

This is not what meritocracy is about. Meritocracy is about achievements, not just working hard.

Yes, in fact because you can work infinitely hard at digging a hole and filling it back up again we would certainly not want a world that distributed rewards according to the labor theory of value.

It's my understanding that the labor theory of value is only concerned with "socially necessary labor," and not completely valueless labor -- digging and filling in a hole ad nauseam.

That isn't that much of a fix, because you can add hole digging/filling in any amount to the schedule of any socially necessary worker. Someone who digs and fills a hole in the course of welding a pipeline will engage in more labor than someone who just welds the pipeline, but they will both accomplish the same goal of welding the pipeline.

You might say, "by labor I mean the difficulty of accomplishing the task when operating at the greatest possible efficiency," but an idealized, infinitely smart programmer could write perfect, bug-free code as fast as they could type, and an ideal physicist could make all possible theoretical inferences instantly.

I don't understand your counter-argument; time spent doing useless things on a schedule in which non-useless work is accomplished doesn't mean that the time doing useless things is suddenly valuable. Any capitalist knows that they don't want to be paying someone to do work that doesn't produce value. The person who only welds the pipeline spends less time getting the task done, which is obviously the aim here.

Socially necessary labour is defined as labour performed under normal ("averagae") conditions of production using tools of average production potential. At least in the Marxian schema (which I'm not really here to defend) skilled difficult labour is only a greater magnitude of simple, unskilled labour. For Marx, the quantitative relationship between them (and indeed between value and socially necessary labour time) was not only not necessary to derive, but arguably impossible in a complex economy. The important part was that it worked. Value works "behind the backs" of participants in an economy to shift their labour to more profitable regions of the economy.

I'd recommend Cockshott et al.'s "Classical Econophysics" chapter on Value which clears up a lot in the Ricardian and Marxian schemas: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ecn265/value.pdf

You're right in that the further you get from "the labor theory of value" the better you do, like mixing a bowl of Doritos with a bowl of celery. Smith admitted a little bit of market valuation, and in doing so was a little bit better than completely wrong.

Quoting from your link,

>For the modern reader an alternative version of Smith’s calculation may seem more natural: the ‘labour commanded’ by a commodity represents the time you would have to work (say, at the average wage) in order to buy the commodity. In both cases – Smith’s version and the modern one – the calculation of labour commanded is the price of the item divided by some measure of the wage, usually an average.

Clearly, N hours of work at an average wage W is just a roundabout way of expressing a quantity of money NW, and from there Smith believed in market pricing.

Smith's error (which turned him to "market pricing") was not recognising the dual character of labour, which is solved in the Marxian schema; capitalists purchase labour-power, which is a commodity with an exchange value (i.e the labour commanded by it is the amount required to reproduce it) of W and a use value (value in use) of concrete labour itself, which is the capacity to create value. Unlike Smith's idea, this is compatible with both varying value of money, varying wages (assuming there is something to vary the wages) and useful in explaining the role of profit.

On the whole, though, I dispute the notion that the LTV must be abandoned; you are already starting from the position that a bowl full of celery is a good thing, but I'd say that we'd do just fine with the Doritos, and the case for a bowl of celery lacks the explanatory power of the bowl of Doritos.

This is true; it's very confusing to me why people insist that useless labour counts as valuable. Neither Adam Smith nor Ricardo and certainly not Marx actually held a labour theory of value in which objects which are not firstly of demand are valuable. Not only that, but the theory doesn't even attempt to draw normative conclusions about whether the theory is just or not.

My advice is that if one is going to talk about political economy (or the history of economics) then one ought to read the text themselves rather than assuming caricatures as if the proponents of such theories were truly idiots. Smith, Ricardo and Marx were extremely intelligent people.

Neither Smith, Ricardo nor Marx wrote the line that is being discussed in this thread.

The line being discussed in this thread can be abstracted to the question of useful labour in the LTV; if we are discussion the LTV then we are discussing the theory which was advanced by the Western European political economists, and the objections which they countered or in some cases didn't counter.

At the very least, it seems ignorant to discuss a theory while not taking into account the established literature on the topic.

Wouldn’t the labor theory of value HAVE to have taken into account not only the work (physics term) but also the “velocity” of the work?

In other words, the utility of the work.

Running four laps on a quarter mile track gets you nowhere (same as digging a hole) but it’s obvious to see one experiences physical gain from performing such an activity.

Increased physical strength is a result. Judging the product of the work instead of the difficulty of the work is a departure from the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value is not very highly regarded for this reason.

>Meritocracy is seen, universally, as a good thing - the people who work the hardest get the most

As far as I know, when the term was coined by Michael Young it was not intended to be a positive at all. To me it's strange that people see it as a positive, even in the theoretical principle, which for better or worse never actually manifests itself in real life.

Meritocracy turns out to be a lot like the harm principle - it is in a sense "hollow"[0], a principle which everyone would agree with, and to be used like a vessel to carry existing ideas (the definition of merit, absence of the effect of societal and external factors, that those with more merit can and will use their power wisely and justly etc.), which are taken as givens; any existing structure is deemed to be constructed through merit if the person advocating meritocracy is well positioned within it. A structure is not meritocratic if the person is not positioned well within it. Its proponents continually add ad-hoc specifications to the conception of merit.

For instance, when people point out that those who work hard aren't at the top, the response is "working hard is not working smart, and only working smart has merit", even in cases where there is little scope to "work smart".

When people point out that merit is hard or even impossible to objectively quantify in the case of several branches of a project that depend on each other, the response is that certain branches of the project (usually the factors the respondee is responsible for) are more worthy of merit than others.

When people point out that the concept of pure equality of opportunity is untenable because it requires correcting discrimination already in society, and that new inequalities arise with regard to ownership of assets even if everyone starts off with the same, the response is that the system is already set up the way it ought to be and we shouldn't worry about the process by which merit is accrued.

[0] Smith, Steven Douglas, The Hollowness of the Harm Principle (September 2004). U San Diego Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-07.

>certain branches of the project (usually the factors the respondee is responsible for) are more worthy of merit than others

The same exact thing would happen in a world of "pure equality of opportunity".

Not if compensation was delivered in another manner (e.g. equally across the project team after a team-wide code review and not based on some manager's estimation of which of the inter-mingled facets of a project is more worthy).

I think it's not, it's just about better people grabbing everything. At least in the IT field, richest people i know hardly work a lot (or better said, at some points of their careers they did work whole lot, but what they did then didn't make them any money).

what is your definition of "hardly work a lot". When I look at rich people off the top of my head they are all extremely busy. They might not be busy writing code or something like that but they are nearly always in meetings, always someone needs their attention. They aren't just playing golf in their office.

>They aren't just playing golf in their office.

A lot of them are doing just that too (playing golf and delegating most of the work), all across the globe, in very rich positions.

But that's a red herring. Even the other stuff, meetings, negotiations, decisions, etc, are part of what they do by choice, not as work in the way billions of people do work.

Unless you'll go hungry or homeless if you've stopped working, you're not working, you're just doing what you want to do in the way you want to do it.

>We go back to a world where connections and your parents determine how far you can go?

go back? I don't believe we ever left such a world behind. but this probably varies across different cultures.

I would not trust anything that polygon would write. If anything, it was never as simple to create a game before as it is now, if you look at Steam it is basically an indie renessance.

That's exactly the point though - it's an indie renaissance for consumers, but for creators it gets harder and harder. As creating games gets easier, competing against everyone else to make them gets harder. It's the same reason as why creating a best-selling book is hard, because everyone can and wants to write a book.

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