The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top | Hacker News Reader

The 'glass floor' keeps the children of the rich at the top

huffingtonpost.ca

149 pointselorant208 comments

A lot of the comments here seem obsessively focused on Zach Dell. I can understand why, the author is (perhaps unfairly) hard on him. But the rest of the article seems to be ignored completely, and that's where the real meat of the article lies.

We live in a society where more and more institutions, both public and private, are increasingly becoming dominated by personal connections and family wealth. We are seeing this in academia, in government, and in corporations. I missed the memo on when meritocracy became a bad word, but the children of the wealthy and privileged are taking full advantage of meritocracy's retreat.

There is no one solution that will fix everything, just like there doesn't exist any one drug that can cure cancer. But with sustained effort along many different fronts, we can work towards restoring social mobility and equality of opportunity for all.

There will always be a place for meritocracy because, at lower levels of the employment ladder, someone competent will need to get something done in order to operate a profitable company.

You can't have straight incompetence from the C-suite down without eventually running a business into the ground.

Although family money gives unfair advantages, you can make a nice life for yourself and earn above the median wage through acquiring in-demand skills through the meritocratic system. It isn't perfect, but it at least gives those who don't come from money --which is by and large, most people-- a chance at a decent life.

Another way of seeing it is that we are all denied a decent life unless we are competent and sell our competent labor to uphold a system that keeps idiots at the top.

This supposes that all executive leadership is incompetent. That isn't the case. There are companies that, if you replaced the competent executives with idiots, the company would fall apart.

#NotAllRulingClass

"It isn't perfect, but it at least gives those who don't come from money --which is by and large, most people-- a chance at a decent life."

What are the chances at a decent life anyways? Is the chance a good one? What is the worth of a meritocracy if you do all the right things and stull only get a probability of a right life?

Well, you can just use the Roman approach, and buy an educated slave.

This isn’t a recent trend that’s happening all of a sudden. History has shown time and again that bloodline and birth circumstances have been a dividing line between classes.

I recall Genghis Khan's kids were pretty underwhelming too.

Ogodei did a fine job, as did Chagatai. It's just Kublai and Batu, Genghis' grandsons, were more memorable.

The idea of things being a meritocracy has always been a lie, its just perhaps more obvious now than in the past.

Tell me when exactly was this golden age of black people (for instance) in the USA not facing systematic discrimination, because I don't think that one ever arrived.

Situations like that cant exist, and still have people claiming with a straight face that the system is a meritocracy.

I really hate this stupid argument. Meritocracy is like freedom and equality - it doesn't exist, and it's fundamentally unstable, so it will never exist, but it's a bright and fair ideal that's very worth striving for. Some people being disadvantaged (by birth, abuse, lack of education, ...) also doesn't retract the argument that meritocracy is useful (despite the whining of social justice warriors), at most it informs us that we should be looking for talent and potential in unexpected places (and nurturing it when we find it).

The alternative is: "well there's this one girl that's a sex slave somewhere in the world... FREEDOM IS A FALSE IDEAL, EVERYBODY ABANDON SHIP!!!"

Its a fine ideal, but plenty of people that massively benefit from the myth that it exists and is the primary way that people "get ahead" in the world, get very angry when you question that fact.

Because its not, and the absurd shell games that get played to pretend it is are extremely harmful to society as a whole.

You are making a straw man argument that I am "winging" that one person is disadvantaged, therefore the entire system is flawed. That is not the argument I am making.

The argument I am making is in fact a majority of the population (Black, white, or otherwise) is greatly harmed by the myth that the American economic system greatly rewards "merit", how many poor white rural people become CEOs?

> myth that the American economic system greatly rewards "merit", how many poor white rural people become CEOs?

Um... does anyone actually believe that “myth”? Last American election was a trust fund kid vs wife of former president... so anyone who still thinks it’s “all meritocracy 100% of the time” is beyond stupid.

But that doesn’t make it a bad ideal. In fact, I’d say that, if anything, that would be an argument that we need more meritocracy (again, just like equality and freedom).

We completely agree about that, the problem is that people pretend its already the case, when its so obviously, clearly not.

You may hate the argument because it doesn’t fit your neat view on what your country or society is. But from a purely factual, scientific perspective, studies have repeatedly shown that black families fare worse on all indicators of economic and social wealth. And systemic and widespread racism in America has been the most pervasive cause for that.

Meritocracy is great, but not when you start with unequal conditions, and make it difficult at every stage in their lives for folks to escape their predicament and do better.

The way I see it, proponents and opponents of meritocracy are arguing for/against different things.

Proponents of meritocracy see it as an ideal to strive for based on the idea that the most competent people should fill the most important roles. It's about trying to make society better through competence.

Opponents of meritocracy see it as a cover for privilege. They see people who are unfairly privileged using meritocracy as an excuse to reward themselves for their privilege.

This is how I would characterize the debate, anyway. It's hard to say whether anyone is arguing that only incompetent people should fill important roles. Nor do I see anyone trying to claim privilege doesn't exist at all, that everyone starts from an equal blank slate.

Ultimately, I don't see any way of breaking this impasse. At least not unless we succeed in creating a post-scarcity society where rewards for filling important roles are at best symbolic and everyone has all their needs met, regardless of ability.

I think the issue with meritocracy is when people assume meritocracy exists and then operate completely ignoring that there is no meritocracy. See- the original use was mocking the idea that you can assume you can judge someone's apparent merits in a vacuum.

> we can work towards restoring social mobility and equality of opportunity for all.

Restore to when? Where's the point in history where we had greater social mobility and equality of opportunity?

The late 1940s and 1950s. This was due primarily due to a government program of giving people checks. I am of course, referring to the GI Bill.

https://www.marketplace.org/2009/10/06/how-gi-bill-changed-e...

More people go to college now than during GI Bill era.

College != upward mobility.

I agree, and that's why I point that out: GI Bill is mostly a red herring here.

Yes, that is also one of the legacies of the GI Bill.

If you think you're being clever, you really need to read up on the legacy of the GI Bill. Perhaps, you could start by reading the article I linked to.

Yes, that is also one of the legacies of the GI Bill.

If it's going to college that fuels social mobility, then more people going to college today than in 1940s and 50s should mean more social mobility today. Since allegedly the opposite is true, there must have been something else different between 1940s and 50s and now, that has nothing to do with GI Bill funding more people going to college.

If you think you're being clever

There's no need for snark.

you really need to read up on the legacy of the GI Bill. Perhaps, you could start by reading the article I linked to

If you have a point, please make it explicitly, instead of having me guess it.

The population is markedly higher now. Women are no longer expected to stay at home.

Straight entrance numbers are not the best comparison.

Literally the seventh paragraph in the article:

> America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.

That a child would likely earn more than a parent, when the parent's earning window spans a great depression and two world wars doesn't seem that remarkable.

The 50-50 odds are exactly what I would expect from a nation in some sort of societial equilibrium.

The mid-20th century. For many reasons, which you can emphasise as you see fit:

There was massive government involvement -- the wartime economy was not very Adam Smith, starting with the fact that it could draft its labor. This also set the tone that a CEO's salary & benefits might be like a general's. But also many sectors were tolerated monopolies, or close, for decades. People got promoted up the ranks, rather than having bidding wars.

There was high social cohesion, carefully curated for the purpose of winning big wars, and helped by almost zero immigration for 4-5 decades. There were only a few TV stations and they pushed a wholesome christian vision.

The stage of technology was such that big factories could use all the semi-skilled labor they could get, and churn out products which improved everyone's standard of living. It helped that energy was cheap. And transport was expensive, so there was little foreign competition in most goods. And that the pension promises they signed in good years were mostly far from coming due.

There was also the fact that the productive capacity of almost all of the industrialized world besides the US had been destroyed. China and the rest of Asia were mostly subsistence farmers, and China itself was undergoing a huge famine.

It's unlikely we're going to see circumstances like that again. We have to figure out how to make things work with the world we have today, not try to return to some bygone era that was actually really horrible in a lot of ways for a lot of people.

Sure that too. And indeed, re-running WWII to try to solve our inequality problems would be a terrible idea.

I just think it's worth trying to understand all the ways in which society and the world were different back then. In part so as not to be too easily seduced by anyone offering one of them in isolation as a solution.

> I missed the memo on when meritocracy became a bad word

The New Yorker just had a very interesting article on the idea of Meritocracy and it covered some of the reasons why there's negativity associated with the idea. It was enlightening for me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/is-meritocracy...

The article is in part a review of the book "The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite" (Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/y4qhruhc)

The basic argument is that "merit" is a word that pretends to be about innate ability and grit, where in reality it's a deep encoding of privilege.

EDIT: OH and I forgot the most relevant tidbit... this article says that meritocracy was a bad word right from the start: "The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways."

But if you throw out meritocracy because an advantageous position is partially inherited, what do you replace it with?

Well, an estate tax helps level the playing field over time. You earn money in your life, you get to spend it in your life. You die, and your children get some, but will have to earn a lavish lifestyle based on their merits. Exponential decay of wealth from generation to generation will resolve the advantaged starting position in time, and the proceeds obtained can be used to raise the remaining folks up to a level of relative competitiveness.

This satisfies the idea that outsized reward should be available to those who create outsize value, but also ensures that this doesn't pass on to the idiot children.

Even that only works to a certain level. Just for illustration: say you have a 50% estate tax on anything over $10M. That would still leave a heir that receives a $100M inheritance with $55M to start with. You can easily double your money in your lifetime.

And that money would land in the states' pockets, it won't be distributed in a way that further levels the playing field.

Exactly why I think returning to an 80% top estate tax is fair, which is what we had in the US for the bulk of the 20th century [1]. It's only after Raegan that the rates dropped. And not surprisingly, that's exactly when wealth inequality started to skyrocket. IMO 80% on anything over the first $500K-1M indexed to inflation is totally reasonable.

Money in state pockets is de facto distributed to every citizen. Once it's in the state coffers, citizens can vote on its' use. You can't do that when Bezos' hypothetical idiot child has it.

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

Money that the state collects is more evenly distributed across the population than money billionaires collect.

It appears to me that you're calculating on only one child per generation. That's possible, but it isn't the norm.

How does this help when generally only the poor don't have estate planning to escape these taxes?

A floor of $500K-1M indexed to inflation will ensure the poor don't have to plan their estates at all. These don't have to be hard questions.

So this generation, the upper middle class and higher will be affected, and next generation everyone above the extreme poor will be affected.

I picked a totally arbitrary number. If we sat down for more than the 30s it took me to make this reasonable sounding number up, I'm sure we could find a satisfactory system :)

Any satisfactory system will be alterable by

(a) inflationary practices

(b) those scheming to take advantage of loopholes

in 10 or less years.

Unless you (a) index it to inflation and (b) make an attempt to close loopholes, rather than surrendering at the starting line ^_^

I like your optimism, but I've failed to witness a law that has never been twisted into some gross contorted display of what it was normally used for at least once.

So long as the harm caused by those taking advantage of it is less than the good created by the change, it should still be put in place.

Texas in so many ways scares me, but the fact that many of their laws have expirations actually makes sense.

The poor don't have estates. When they die, they leave their families wondering how to pay for the funeral, not how to preserve their holdings for the next generation.

The estate tax exemption is $11M, so you do not pay any estate taxes if the wealth you leave behind is less than that.

Do you know many poor people with more than $11M in wealth?

When you own a small business and some land your wealth may be over 11m but not liquid.

I guess I've never thought of a landed businessman as poor.

And of course there’s ways to solve this: tax the land at disposition. You don’t need to collect on the estate tax for land holdings as dollars at time of inheritance, you can just drop fractional ownership into a trust c/o the IRS and even retain right of first refusal if you should be able to pay it off in time. This is how the IRS already handles illiquid assets if an American chooses to expatriate: you get the choice to pay in cash or fractional ownership in trust.

I think spending money on your children shouldn't be culled. There's a good amount of benefit to society in entrepreneurs investing fiscally in their families. Sure, it might not be fair from a cosmic level, but creating new businesses and expanding the private sector is better than feeding the bloated government bureaucracies.

This is especially true because the social bonds and exchange of values and information that happen between someone who is successful and their family is more likely to be successful than the average person. In other words, while it might seem like nepotism from an outward perspective, it could be merit in actuality.

Instead, I'd support very high luxury taxes. Tax heavily lavish private jets, yachts, and mansions. These are the types of goods that will rapidly drain the funds of a rich trust fund kid who offers little to society. Don't take their startup investment.

A wealth tax doesn't prevent spending money on your children, it attenuates it. For a toy example, imagine a logarithmic estate tax. If you make ten times as much as everybody else, you can give your kids twice as much as everybody else. You're still giving them a big leg up, but for the dynasty to continue they have to make something of themselves.

A wealth tax encourages spending, for example on private school tuition, SAT tutors, and other things that can help your kids. It only hits the money/assets you have left at the end of the year. It's also likely unconstitutional in the US (despite being backed by an HLS professor, who you'd think would know better). Andrew Yang is backing a heavy consumption tax, which would be used to give cash to all adult Americans. This would have the opposite effect, since it would encourage savings over spending.

To my knowledge just giving people who need it money doesn’t encourage them to save it, but rather to spend it on what they need, which actually stimulates the economy. This is far more beneficial than leaving it as idle capital or in a savings account.

You're right that the propensity to spend is higher among low-earners, so if you're trying to stimulate the economy it makes sense to allocate there (all other things equal). But my point was about the futility of trying to use a wealth tax to cut down on generational transfers of wealth/advantage. If you tax wealth, that encourages people to spend instead of save. And if their concern is keeping their family in the top 5%, 1%, or .1%, there are plenty of ways for them to spend it in order to achieve that end.

"... better than feeding the bloated government bureaucracies."

I think this is probably the core of most of these disagreements. If you approach taxation with the assumption that it's mostly just money going to waste, then yeah, you're not going to be very supportive of taxation, especially high tax rates for high income, high net-worth people.

But even if you come at it from that point of view, it has to be acknowledged that there are certain kinds of services which are almost impossible to deliver other than via the government. The private sector will not give you healthcare for all, or any meaningful mass transit (much less HSR), or properly maintained roads and bridges, or a military, or any of a thousand other things that your multiple levels of government spend money on. Yes there is some waste due to corruption or bad decisions, but for most people that is an accepted cost to getting the services that can't be had any other way.

But most taxation does go to waste... if we define "waste" as "whatever elected officials fancy".

It's fairly easy to devise a system where taxation is fair (or at least more fair), e.g. by having "pots" - e.g. tax sugar drinks, but that tax revenue goes into the healthcare pot and can be used only for that purpose. If the ostensible reason for taxing rich people is "more equality", then that money should go into the "helping poor people" pot and be used only for that purpose (scholarships, financial aid / basic income, etc.).

Obviously, there's a reason politicians don't want to do that... because that would mean they no longer have control over money and can't spend/waste it as they want.

I don't really agree. There's a lot of value in having general revenue that can be directed toward the needs and priorities of the day— making these decisions is what our elected officials are there for. Especially when you consider the kinds of broad benefits that certain policies can have— for example, consider the billions needed for something like a new rapid transit line. Where should that come from, given that it offers mobility to people without cars, stimulates construction and job growth along the line, etc? It has a lot of broad-reaching benefits and knock-on effects that are hard to even completely quantify (think stuff like public health impacts due to air quality improvement and people making short walks to the station a part of their daily trips).

The other issue with the pots system is that it can give people a false sense of entitlement about things which benefit them. For example, consider the commonly-held belief that gas taxes pay for all road and highway infrastructure, and that roads and bridges wouldn't be falling apart if the government would stop "raiding" the gas tax pot to pay for other things. This is trivially googleable as untrue, but the pervasiveness of this belief blinds motorists to the reality of how much their preferred mode of transport is subsidized.

So people in this mindset approach a discussion about something like subsidized train fare and it's hard for them understand why it's a good deal for society.

Sorry for miscommunication. I completely agree that there should be a "general" pot and that a lot of taxes are spent and used in at least nominally (if not efficiently) good manner (one big exemption IMO is war-related spending).

I'm mainly saying that it would be easier for people to accept new taxes if that was the implmementation (and specifically taxes like wealth tax that are ostensibly "to decrease inequality" and not "because we hate the rich").

Oh I see. Yeah, certainly there's merit in that, but it can be a challenge communicating it effectively. For example, Canada now has a nominal carbon tax that's revenue neutral— all the revenues go into an upfront rebate that's doled out on a per-head basis with a slightly greater amount if you're rural vs urban. All this seems perfectly reasonable and is aligned with what economists recommend as far as ensuring that the system isn't subject to partisan criticisms or whatever else.

But if you actually look at the rhetoric around it, the right wing party that's in opposition slams it as being a "cash grab" and a "tax on everything" that makes life more unaffordable for everyday Canadians. Literally one of the main planks of their platform this election is scrapping a revenue-neutral tax in order to help Canadian families "get ahead".

So was there any value in going to the trouble of doing the rebate? AFAICT claiming the tax was revenue neutral mostly just opened up the gov't to a ridiculous semantic argument about whether it was truly revenue neutral given that sales tax was being applied after the carbon tax. Maybe it would have been easier to just impose the tax and then pair it with an income tax cut or some kind of investment in existing social safety net programmes?

One hopes a system where it is possible for everyone to achieve a basically acceptable standard of living, even if that means a cap on what is possible to achieve for the most advantaged (whether that be in connections, social skills, intelligence, or something else).

We never had it, so it isn't there to replace. You might consider what it would take to approximate the ideals of meritocracy, but paradoxically you may find that calling anything real a meritocracy gets in the way of that goal.

I honestly don't know, the idea that merit specifically might be a sham is brand new to me. But why does it need to be replaced, and what is the goal? We know that social advantage is hugely inherited, evidence for that abounds. Since, according to some, merit is a way to justify the riches of the rich as being deserving, then replacing merit for them means using a different rationalization to justify being rich. Maybe for people who aren't rich, the idea of replacing meritocracy with something else doesn't even seem like a good idea.

If I'm poor or middle class, I can aspire to have merit, and thereby to rise in the world - if "merit" really means merit, not "connections" or "money". But if I'm poor (including in social capital) and have talent, effort, and ambition, but the key to making it is connections rather than merit, I'm just locked out, and there's nothing I can do.

I think those on the outside would prefer merit.

I’d agree, when the only choice is between having a way to achieve social mobility versus no way to achieve it. Personally, I think those on the outside would prefer more choices than two bad ones. We can certainly imagine economic systems that prevent people from being locked out by design, rather than allow people with talent and effort that statistically only comes from having financial advantage.

Like, I think last week I might have argued exactly what you’re saying, that there’s some idea of merit that measures and reflects innate talent & effort and can be disconnected from connections and money. But is that really true? Can you actually separate them? Are you sure - certain - that talent isn’t, on average, statistically, something that you have the resources to develop only if you have a support system of money/family/friends that allows you to spend time on it?

The problem with merit for the poor and the middle class is that “merit” means you have to work much much harder than someone who’s rich to have the same merit. Hard enough that it’s rare, and we fetishize the few people who do while ignoring the fact that the net effect of the system really keeps the poor poor.

What if providing truly equal opportunity actually requires not judging people by talent, because pure talent is itself severely biased by money?

I see two separate issues here.

(A side note: Talent may be largely derived from riches, but rich parents definitely don't always result in talent. There can be, and are, incompetent children of the rich.)

First issue: We want the people with talent to wind up in the positions that need talent. We (society) actually need talent in those positions, rather than incompetence. It doesn't matter whether the incompetent ones are the children of the rich or of the poor; there are positions where we don't want them.

Second issue: The children of the poor (or even middle class) shouldn't be locked out of success in the economy simply because they're the children of the poor. Those with latent talent or undeveloped talent, or whatever you wish to call it, need to have that developed, so that it becomes actual talent. The school system was supposed to be the way that happened, but the school system has largely failed at that task, at least in much of the country. Now what do we do? Can we fix the school system? Or is it just a reflection of problems in society, and we have to fix the society in order to fix the school system? If we can't fix the school system, what do we do instead?

It seems to me that the biggest variable is the parents' attitude toward education. Children whose parents see the value of education will, on average, get more out of a mediocre school system than children of uncaring parents will get out of a good school system, unless they're rescued by someone - a great teacher, perhaps, or someone that they look up to. But if their social capital doesn't include people who value education, and their schools don't have great, inspiring teachers, from where are they going to get the spark?

I don't have good answers for you. I wish I did.

I'd agree with everything you said.

Yes, we do want talent to rise. But what if we're so overly worried about incompetence that we're overlooking the opportunity to increase talent across the board? What if the way we keep incompetence out is actually preventing ten times as many people with potential from reaching their potential?

Yes, poor kids shouldn't be locked out. The issue is that meritocracy may be providing the illusion that poor kids are not locked out, because they're allowed to "try hard", while in actuality being a major mechanism for locking poor people out. By filtering for the byproducts of privilege, people can claim to not be filtering for advantage while still filtering for advantage, right?

I don't have good answers either. Ideas like basic income and free education seem like potentially good starts, but there's certainly a lot of political agendas and dogmatic opinions surrounding those ideas. This week I'm just feeling like the solution somehow has to invest more in those without as much access without obsessing over the individual returns. It should be okay for society to try to educate and support poorer people and not expect each and every one to make it. For some wealthy people, I suspect their deep down collective cultural fear is that if you gave all poor people enough money to have stable home lives and not have to worry about money, and sent them all to the Harvards of the world, that just as many poor would succeed as rich succeed. That would undermine the idea that we need to filter for talent, and support the idea that we need to nurture talent instead.

They have no idea:

>What would a post-meritocratic world look like? Markovits doesn’t know, and neither did Marx know what a post-capitalist world would be like. There will be less alienation and inauthenticity (as Marx believed, too); other than that, we can’t really imagine a post-meritocratic world, because the élite has made its own values everyone’s.

Really says everything you need to know about the article and the book. Taking a hard-line stance against merit as a value is foolish. You can argue the metrics are wrong or the game is rigged or that playing by the rules doesn't guarantee success, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater only guarantees more of the problems you're trying to fix.

It's not just that the elite made their values the values that everyone else holds. Everyone else valued competence in the elite even without the elite "making its own values everyone's". Competence among the elite is something the elite claim, but it's something the non-elite want, for their own good.

With an actual meritocracy.

Did you see the recent college admissions scandal? All of these institutions present a facade of being merit based, while in reality admitting people who have money, power, connections, are good at gaming the system, or multiple of the above.

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

Coined by Lord Young, father of Toby Young.

The word may be a recent(-ish) coinage, but the principle certainly has cropped up in various societies throughout history[1], probably the Chinese system of examinations to appoint bureaucrats being the most famous.

It strikes me as interesting that lots of measures seem to be "IQ plus effort" - practically speaking, though I generally want people to be more intelligent, I primarily want them to be good at what they do. So for me a system that rewards people for performance makes the most sense - smart but ineffectual, lazy, or crooked are all possible (even common), but hardly meritorious...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Definitions

I’m currently interviewing people for jobs, and reflecting on what this conversation means to me. Of course I’m trying to hire the most talented people from the group. Like, no question that I’m seeking people who are good at what they do. And we try to actively filter people who are ineffectual, lazy, or crooked.

So merit is essentially what I’m seeking. But I have no doubt that the people I interview & the ones we choose to hire are, on average, privileged. It would not surprise me much if I looked back on all my interview scores ever and found a high correlation between my rating and the candidate’s family income.

I think I can see how my own hiring according to merit is a good thing for my company, but potentially bad for society - if what we want is real equality of opportunity.

The basic argument is that "merit" is a word that pretends to be about innate ability and grit, where in reality it's a deep encoding of privilege.

I read the same article; the message I got is that it's about all of those things. You need privilege, ability, and grit.

When the system became so bitterly competitive you had to have all three, is when any equity of meritocracy started to vanish.

> the message I got is that it’s about all of those things

I agree; I was summarizing one side: the argument against meritocracy. The article did discuss other points of view, and it didn’t seem all that impressed with the book either.

This did open my eyes though, because I thought meritocracy was supposed to be a democratic or egalitarian sort of ideal, I had never thought of it as device designed for perpetuating social class divisions. (Though, I guess, what else is going to happen if you have a metric by which to rank people?)

The deeper idea is the realization that true ability and true grit still comes largely from privilege. That perhaps there isn’t equality in meritocracy and never was. Some people who are worried about money have to work super hard to make ends meet but don’t get the opportunity to develop abilities. People who can’t afford to miss a rent check or have to worry about food don’t really have the opportunity to develop grit. It’s pretty hard to have the sort of sticktuitiveness that “merit” calls for if you can’t afford to take any risks, if failing means you lose your phone, car, apartment, etc.

I guess the ‘glass floor’ article is taking the point of view that you don’t need all three of privilege, ability and grit; that privilege keeps some people in the upper echelons despite little ability or grit. I guess I don’t really know, but the question now rattling around in my head is whether ability and grit are mostly byproducts of privilege?

Wow, this is a really bad article. So much fakeness...

> That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic.

Then why are like 30% of students at elite colleges admitted as "athletes"? I mean, sure, "best at sports" is "meritocratic" but on a dimension fairly orthogonal to educational success (just like "best at using parent's wealth and connections").

> In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male.

So college being 61% male was a problem, and being 58% female is "solved"?

> I missed the memo on when meritocracy became a bad word

When people realized that the guy who starts with a billion dollar dad and a buy in to harvard is being graded on the same scale as the guy who started in a trailer park with a single mom and community college.

You can't have a meritocracy without the same starting point, and you can't have that in real life.

computers don't care whether you grew up in a trailer. the concept of meritocracy doesn't require that everyone has an even start (whatever that looks like). it just requires that people are selected for positions based on who is most likely to do a good job. it's unfair, but the silver spoon kid who graduated from Harvard with a 4.0 is usually a better bet than the kid who dropped out after the eighth grade.

edit: I actually doubt the son of the billionaire gets graded on the same scale as the trailer park kid. my guess is it's pretty hard to fail a course taught in a building named after your dad, but maybe that's overly conspiratorial.

Meritocracy in principle is a solid idea, but in practice, it simply has never existed. Even in what most would define as meritocracy's golden age, the "merit" of a person still depended massively on their upbringing; even the neighborhood a child grows up in (or the quantity of neighborhoods) can tell you a lot about what someone will be able to achieve in life.

The rich hate this, and have clung to meritocracy to excuse the fact that their children, brought up with staff to see to their needs, with education to explore every curiosity, with hobbies to learn what they like, and with resources to attend college virtually without cost, are somehow not advantaged over a child who's mother has to work two jobs to scrape out a meager living, and sees said child maybe 3 hours a day, to send them to a public school or daycare where they are treated like cattle, until they can sign up for enough debt when they barely understand finance at all, to assure they won't be able to buy a home until their thirties, at best.

It's ridiculous. The core tenet of meritocracy is a level playing field and the rich and poor have never had one, ever, at any point, and arguably could not as long as markets exist. It's just not possible.

As long as there are financial barriers to child care, to housing, to education, you cannot claim we have meritocracy. Simple as.

Meritocracy implies nothing about fairness or a level playing field. Meritocracy implies the person with the best skills gets the job. If someone with worse skills gets the job because they're the bosses son, or even just because of their gender/race, it can no longer be considered a meritocracy.

The only way to fix what you've brought up is to have all children be taken from their parents at birth and raised in an equal opportunity community akin to The Giver. Is that what you want?

> Meritocracy implies nothing about fairness or a level playing field. Meritocracy implies the person with the best skills gets the job.

This only works if you completely disregard the entire process through which someone attains skills. If this is indeed what Meritocracy is then it's even less adequate as a system than I previously believed.

> The only way to fix what you've brought up is to have all children be taken from their parents at birth and raised in an equal opportunity community akin to The Giver. Is that what you want?

False dichotomy. There is no possibility of a system between totalitarian child rearing by the state and a system rigged entirely and completely for the wealthy? Spare me.

>False dichotomy. There is no possibility of a system between totalitarian child rearing by the state and a system rigged entirely and completely for the wealthy? Spare me.

The claim is that any such system would still have biases.

Though I would claim even The Giver is not truly equal as parents are still individuals with unique roles in society and thus what they impart on their children is still unequal.

So I would make a stronger claim. That level of equality is not physically possible.

We can make things more equal, but you get into the messy politics of who do we do it on behalf of (for example, why favor people living in the US over people not).

> The claim is that any such system would still have biases.

Any system built by humans has biases, thankfully we're not discussing The Giver, we're discussing our system here in the states, one that heavily biases the wealthy to the point of punishing the impoverished, and I don't believe either of those were accidental, and I also put forth that the myth of meritocracy is put forward BY those in power to dissuade criticism of it, specifically by invoking the argument you put forward, that absolute equality is impossible. Because apparently, because we can't make everyone absolutely 100% equal in opportunity (which is debatable, but hey) we shouldn't even attempt to address the gross inequality present in our system.

For example, we could provide basic income so that struggling families wouldn't need to sacrifice time with their children to provide a base level of sustaining food and housing.

For another, we could make college free, since society at large benefits from an educated populace, and since dozens of other countries have and have reaped benefits as a result. This eliminates the barriers the impoverished have to education, and stops a gutless and corrupt system from signing up the poor to an impoverished life of servitude in exchange for a modicum of opportunity.

Neither of these does anything really radical other than take back power from the wealthy, which is probably why wealthy interests lobby so hard against them. Because while the rich preach meritocracy, they only do so on the grounds that the merit is money.

> We can make things more equal, but you get into the messy politics of who do we do it on behalf of (for example, why favor people living in the US over people not).

No I'd imagine we couldn't make a system that removes the advantages given from standing NATIONS. Do you have any other ridiculous ideas you'd like to put forth?

Performance and value of performance has always been a thing in all nations, whether or not there's the backdrop of nepotism or corruption.

However, if you're saying that somebody has been starved from youth and is now way behind on the kinds of skills which would help a company compete, then in a sense that person is no longer meritorious. Merit and fairness aren't the same thing, and are intuitively at odds even if you had a magical wand and could reset everyone's "starting position."

If you cannot work because you were subjected to unfair biological risks throughout life, can you continue to be a metaphorical stunt double?

The hard question to resolve is not "if we can have it all, shall we not just have it all?" The question is when merit is in tension with fairness, what do we value more? Whether the metaphorical movie comes out better? Or that the movie provides opportunities for society to correct injustices? In the context of global economy, the ones who vote on this question are the citizens of the world.

> Performance and value of performance has always been a thing in all nations, whether or not there's the backdrop of nepotism or corruption.

Agree.

> However, if you're saying that somebody has been starved from youth and is now way behind on the kinds of skills which would help a company compete, then in a sense that person is no longer meritorious.

While this is true, it's also an ultra-extreme example. I'm not talking about people born with developmental disabilities, physical or mental, or people who suffer accidents or traumas in life rendering them less competitive. I'm talking about perfectly able-bodied, sharp minded, sprung-from-the-uterus youngsters who's parents committed the crime of being poor in America.

Their parents crime (most not even aware it was a crime) sentences them to a youth of substandard living in homes priced far too expensively, substandard education provided by teachers trying their best in a school system that is funded only 30% as well as a neighboring one, despite having twice the students, because property taxes fund schools for some reason, which I'm sure isn't that wealthy people demand better schools and can pay for it. They are also unable to attend extracurricular activities (if they are even available) unless they can transport themselves to and from them, and of course find the money to pay for what's needed for those activities. And they also more than likely come home to either an empty home or a sleeping parent who's trying their very best to provide them a decent life, and is being hamstrung by stagnant wages, poor working conditions, and is almost certainly strung out to the edge of reason themselves, because again, this system sucks.

And even if you're absolutely perfect at navigating this travesty, which again, I emphasize, is entirely man-made and 100% controlled and facilitated by our Government and society, you are still starting out magnitudes behind your wealthy counterparts.

And if you make a mistake!? Hoo boy. Get ready to do years in prison of your most valuable time because you couldn't sleep with your stomach aching and in a moment of desperation, stole a $0.99 hot dog and got caught. That is of course assuming you aren't shot and killed in the process, again, over a dollar hot dog.

> The hard question to resolve is not "if we can have it all, shall we not just have it all?" The question is when merit is in tension with fairness, what do we value more? Whether the metaphorical movie comes out better? Or that the movie provides opportunities for society to correct injustices? In the context of global economy, the ones who vote on this question are the citizens of the world.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

> I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I'm suggesting that the value of wanting the best "stunt double" to make the best "movie" is in tension with thinking about job positions as opportunities to correct injustice, and that consumers around the world vote on this matter with their wallets. People have the same narrative for software positions and minority outreach programs.

But when you can have both values with no tension, then yes, have it all.

Meritocracy was always supposed to be a bad word.

Michael Young put out "The Rise of the Meritocracy", and thereby coined the word, in 1958 to present it as a dystopia. He satirised the then current tiered and selective UK education system, to show it as an alternative class system, just as problematic, just as corrupt. Just as likely to produce an unfit ruling class, and to create a lower or under class.

Edit: I should add that it wasn't arguing against merit per se. In modern context, the evolution of selecting by skill into all the baggage we now have around it, like soft skills and the chasing and gaming of particular measures, or hiring by whiteboard algorithm recollection.

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

There was a time where the wealthy and well connected didn't have a stranglehold on society? All of human civilized history has been about nobility, religion, politics and individual wealth workings on the structure of society.

I dont understand the surprise these days that the exact same thing is happening. Nothing is different. I'm not defending the system. But pretending like it's a new thing will get you nowhere but a new flavor of the same shitty system because you dont understand the underlying functions or causes to the system. The Russians didn't like the tsar and his over reaching police state. They revolted and created a police state that made the tsar's antics look like a deep tissue massage in comparison.

>I missed the memo on when meritocracy became a bad word, but the children of the wealthy and privileged are taking full advantage of meritocracy's retreat.

I'm pretty surprised how people fail to notice the similarities between meritocracy and aristocracy. I don't think it's an obscure fact that aristocracy is meant to be "the rule of the best or the fittest"; and it's so obvious that it failed and degenerated to a hereditary mess that we invented a different word to express the same idea.

Hey, maybe this time will be different and we will get it right, but I don't think mocking those who are skeptics of the term and try to draw attention to the ideological usage will help us.

> In 2016, researchers sent hundreds of résumés to high-end law firms. They were identical in degrees and grade-point averages, but researchers tweaked the extracurricular activities to make some candidates seem rich (sailing, classical music) and others seem poor (track and field, country music). At the end of the study, upper-class men had been invited to 12 times more interviews than lower-class men.

I think that says a lot more about "high-end law firms" than it does about American society at large.

potentially OT: I wonder how they put music on a law resume

edit.. and for that matter sports... uni groups maybe?

New grads naming their club involvements during college is pretty commonplace, esp if they held leadership position in them

An "interests" area is somewhat common as well. Also awards..."NCAA rowing championship" or similar.

Side note: I had no idea track and field was considered a “poor” activity!

It's not "poor" as much as it's "not rich". Also, something to do with skin color.

For most of track and field all you need is a half decent pair of shoes.

Contrast that to hockey, lacrosse, or polo.

As a former top-level high school/college track and field competitor, I can tell you that track and field has a much more "urban" flavor[0] than, say, sailing. I always took sports such as lacrosse to be "sports white people play", but I guess wealth could be an indicator, too. Dunno, I was never rich enough to find out.

[0] Yes, that high-pitched sound you hear is a dog whistle.

Sports can be weird and very fluid indicators. In Australia where I grew up Rugby League was played in public schools and Rugby Union in private ones, so union was associated with wealth. 20 years later union is often played in public schools in the poorest areas by migrants from the pacific islands and the indication is reversing. Every second house a swimming pool there (and beaches), so swimming wasn't seen as a wealthy activity like it is in other parts of the world/country. If you compare between countries it gets even weirder, we inherited almost all sports from England but for them tennis and cricket are they snooty sports, here they're firmly working class.

Soccer and basketball for whatever reason seem to hit that egalitarian sweet spot.

(think of the demographics of many of the people who excel at many of those events...)

I would rather hire a person who likes classical music than the one who likes country/rap/bieber. From my experience, people who prefer classical music are generally smarter.

So basically no one from a rural area and no black people?

There are hardly black people deep in the Ural mountains, where I happen live, near the Siberian border.

Anyway. Affinity to classical music (or classical poetry, for that matter) comes not from cultural background, but from a certain level of intellectual sophistication. I don't buy the thesis that some people are born into an oppressed class and can't escape it. In our age education is easily accessible to anyone who has internet. One can learn any language for free, become a developer or a musician or a photographer, all it takes is some will to make yourself learn some marketable skills.

Of course, now you'll likely say that some people are oppressed and conditioned to be unable to escape their caste, but it's just nonsense.

"I don't buy the thesis that some people are born into an oppressed class and can't escape it."

How does this match with the economist that determined that climbing out of poverty requires 20 years of nothing going wrong on average? [0][1]

0. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economi...

1. HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794514

Of course you can escape, but it is much harder. Love of music style is learned, and you learn it from your immediate social environment.

I recommend to read "Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste" by Pierre Bourdieu.

of course the music is learned from an immediate social environment! Precisely because of it, people who are capable to overcome their learned tastes and learn something else are way more valuable to any business.

You see, very few people these days are taught to like Beethoven, most just find him on his own. That is a sign of a capability to think independently, which comes from higher intelligence.

People who grew up with classical music don't need to jump through that hoop. Or do you require them to acquire a taste for Hip Hop?

If not, then it is exactly as I pointed out before: the bar is much higher if you come from the 'wrong' cultural background.

there's no such thing as "smarter", even. That's a projected property not an innate quality.

People who prefer classical music are trying to project an air of sophistication and intelligence but aren't any better at anything than anyone else

Various studies [1] [2] seem to support the theory that people who prefer more complex music are generally more intelligent.

You also probably missed the part where I said, 'from my experience'. I know several people who rose from the extreme poverty of Soviet Union rural villages and shitty rural schools to university professor positions (basically the highest position you could achieve in USSR without participating in the Communist party activities), and you know what, for some reason, every one of them acquired a taste for classical music at one point of their lives. Coincidence? I think not.

[1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/22/smarter-people-listen-to-instr... [2] https://psmag.com/social-justice/classical-music-linked-to-h...

The opposite could easily be said. If you cannot even try to appreciate country/rap/beiber, then you probably have some mental blocks yourself :)

My personal preference is not important when I hire someone to do a job.

All I am interested as an employer is a person's ability to do the job. The type of job I'm offering requires a person to be intelligent => I'll choose the one who likes Beethoven more than Bieber.

>My personal preference is not important

>I'll choose the one who likes Beethoven more than Bieber.

But that is your personal preference.

For that matter, yes, but it is irrelevant for hiring since I'm not going to listen to music or discuss it at work. If we go to another aspect of my personal preferences, I dislike jazz, and rather indifferent to rap, but jazz beats rap for potential hires.

>it is irrelevant for hiring

>jazz beats rap for potential hires

Are you intentionally contradicting yourself?

I'm not contradicting. Read more carefully. My personal tastes in music are irrelevant when I want the better candidate of the two options. And I will choose jass fan (all other things being seemingly equal) over hiphop fan despite I don't like jazz.

As I understand it, the hip trend among the elite now is to be a “cultural omnivore,” and has been for some time.

“The new…elite listen to classical and to rap; they eat at fine restaurants and at diners. They are at ease everywhere in the world. We even seem to demand this omnivorousness pluralism of our elite. We don’t want a patrician president; we want a man who knows how to act around the queen of England but is just as comfortable sitting in a lawn chair holding a beer summit….[Elites] are comfortable almost anywhere. It is as if the new elite are saying, “Look! We are not some exclusive club. If anything, we are the most democratized of all groups. We are as comfortable with rap as opera. We can dine finely or at a truck stop. We accept all!”

from this book Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (2011), Shamus Rahman Kahn

The only people I know who only listens to classical music are 75 year old Russian math professors and pretentious upper middle class teens

People tend to like others similar to themselves. In this case, the upper-class people responsible for hiring presumably saw themselves in the upper-class resumes, and felt they had a better sense of who they would hire.

It's like golf: in business, playing golf made you more relatable to those able to advance your career, and so golf clubs proliferated. Whether you actually liked the sport itself was often a secondary concern.

I also really doubt that the thing that's being encoded by "classical music" vs country music" is "rich vs poor" rather than "cultured vs uncultured". My immediate gut reaction is better for the "rich" hobbies than the "poor" hobbies as well, but it has nothing to do with me associating them with economic classes; the "rich" hobbies just seem more "sophisticated" and cerebral to me.

No doubt inequality is an issue, but this seems pretty harsh on Zach Dell. His ventures failed... most do. So he tried something else and got what sounds like a pretty reasonable job... 22 year old analyst at a big Corp... not that crazy. I know a few ex-founders who have gone to companies after their ventures failed (and they aren't heirs to bns). the tone of the article sounds like they want to see him go to debtors prison!

also... yes... top schools are pandering to the rich. but how else do they offer scholarships? American gov't stays out of this (mostly), so it's up to the schools to make ends meet. the schools want to pay for many families, but to do so they need donors. I actually think that's better than only letting rich people attend (and not having scholarships). it's not a final solution, but in the big picture, it's a step forward.

Similarly, I was briefly involved in a failed startup in college. We lost, at maximum, something like $20k.

I gained a lot of experience doing it and came out of it much better off skills-wise, increasing my value to future employers. It would be absurd to count that experience against me; being involved in a startup in university really should count in your favor. They almost all fail anyway.

But I don't come from obscene wealth so no one's gonna bother coming after me.

> how else do they offer scholarships

With their massive endowments.

How do they build a massive endowment?

Mostly donations from graduates who have done well. I suppose if you want to look at the data you could figure out how much of that is some kind of quid-pro-quo to get those people's otherwise not terribly worthy kids in vs how many are simply moved to contribute.

In theory by accepting and graduating students on merit, who then become successful and donate back to their institutions. Not by using their tax exempt status to solicit beneficial tax deductions from the rich in exchange for accepting their children who otherwise wouldn't be accepted.

It should be illegal for any school that is either: a) tax exempt; or b) a state institution to admit a student in exchange for money.

Now that I think of it, it should be illegal for any school to enroll a student whose parents donated to the school.

Eliminate "dean's list" admissions in one fell swoop.

Also, the first app started in 2014, making him 17 at the time. Unreal that the author tries to use this to paint him as incompetent rather than precocious.

not sure if that's better or worse but I didn't notice that myself. ty

It was a bit harsh on the Dell kids; they actually seemed to have learned from their mistake and never sought to be on "rich kids of Instagram" in the first place. Except for the fact that he's on a private plane, the thought process isn't that different than any "bro" ordering 100 Chicken McNuggets and getting a picture taken.

Nevertheless, rich kids are clogging up the system, both in competition for capital investment (rich kids know how to ask for money), and in saturating the market with money-losing businesses that crowd out those that actually need to make money.

I think the point is more that he's a useless failson who can just go from thing to thing wasting massive amounts of money and it doesn't matter.

I haven't been able to find the source since but I learned in a philosophy class ages ago that one of the classic philosophers (Plato? Aristotle?) said that a society can never be perfectly fair and just.

* To be just, parents should be free to provide for their own children.

* To be fair, every person should be given an equal opportunity to succeed.

These are fundamentally in opposition: every extra dollar a parent gives to their child is an unfair (in the sense that the child only earned by virtue of "choosing" that parent) benefit.

This was one of those moments that really turned on a lightbulb in my head when I think about how a society collectively raises each generation. I now think that a healthy society shouldn't "solve" this problem, they should just try to find the sweet spot that balances these two opposing forces.

And, interestingly, this is something that really affects me in a material way. My kids go to a public elementary school. My taxes fund schooling for all children in the area. The school also does donation drives and other things that let me opt in to giving money to benefit all children. But I also can choose to spend money on private classes, tutors, and other extra-curricular activities that only benefit my own children. So I have a very direct set of levers where I can choose my own particular moral position on this continuum.

Personally, my feeling is that we should mostly lean towards justice and equal opportunity. Most resources spent towards educating children should go in ways that benefit all kids. Fewer private schools, more public funding. My argument is that being a child of wealthy parents is already a tremendous ambient benefit. The child has a more comfortable, stable home environment, and fewer worries around material needs. They are more likely to get quality, prompt mental and physical healthcare. All of those give them a huge advantage compared to other kids.

Thanks for sharing this. I had similar thoughts/feelings on the philosophical perspective on providing for your children and this is really well presented.

This assumes that parents know what's best for their children. Is it just to the children that parents can spend a fortune on miseducating their children? (The Dutch family wasn't rich, but there can be seen that parents can totally go astray. [1])

Being a rich son (70% work for their father according to a linked study in the article) is essentially like being Tim Cook. It's a nice job that pays handsomely but who has the character to walk away and do what they really want to do? This links back to the beginning of my comment: do rich parents prepare their children for that move or do they try everything to lock their children into their heritage?

This is not an argument for standardized schooling. I am just wondering if being a rich kid actually comes with a huge price.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21260112

> Fewer private schools, more public funding.

Those who send their children to private schools also pay taxes that pay for public schools. They just receive no education for their children from it (by choice). Pay the same in, take fewer resources out - that doesn't seem like a negative to me.

It's more complex than that, though. There's a whole constellation of things that come when a parent chooses a school for their kid, including the kid themselves. Parents are still paying taxes for public schools, but they aren't joining the PTA, donating at the jog-a-thon, sponsoring the sports team, chaperoning band field trips, networking with other parents, etc.. Wealthy parents have a lot of resources they bring to bear and when their kid doesn't go to a public school, the only resource they leave behind is their taxes.

It's not obvious to me that downward social mobility and upward social mobility are the same things. Lamenting the fact that Michael Dell's son "just hasn't become poor like me yet" sounds like sour grapes. This mindset that in order for people like me to make it people at the top have to fall only makes sense if you consider the economy a fixed-sized pie. It's obviously not.

the american dream is built on the ideal (myth?) of meritocracy, so it's not surprising that people want the world to adhere to that ideal: bright and hardworking people rise, dull and lazy people fall. we expect it to work both ways. it's not about the pie.

> bright and hardworking people rise, dull and lazy people fall

I'm with you on the first part where hardworking people rise, but I don't think the second part necessarily follows. Consider the actual reason at the heart of why we work to accrue wealth in the first place. We try to accrue wealth so that our failings and misfortunes don't set us back. If we accrue $300 dollars we don't lose our apartment when we have to pay for a flat tire. If we accrue $30,000 maybe we gain the confidence to tell our boss to get lost if they ask us for too much overtime. If we accrue $3 billion we can afford to take some risks and still land on our feet. That's the point of being wealthy!

so if you're dull and lazy, but have unearned wealth, you should never fail? why do you want to believe so hard that wealthy people should never lose their wealth in any circumstance?

it's a classic misallocation of resources, and how monarchies have time and again fallen into despotism, decay, and eventually overthrow. it's why democracy and capitalism came into being in the first place.

It's more about questioning the system in which after certain point your bad decisions have no consequences like losing your wealth and becoming poor for instance. It's not about, and I don't see anyone arguing the point, me being unable to move up the chain without someone moving down.

> It's not about, and I don't see anyone arguing the point, me being unable to move up the chain without someone moving down.

It's right here in the article

> Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung

The assumption the author is making is that both things (sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder AND the wealthy retaining their grip on the highest rung) cannot be true.

In most of the same articles - American cannot be a meritocracy, social mobility isn't 100%! The assumption that a perfect meritocracy would be shown by your income having no correlation to your parents is about as opposite true as can get. If there is any heritability to ability/"merit", that will show up as correlation between parent and child incomes.

"Meritocracy" is a poor term regardless, because I have a different definition of "merit" than you do, and so do the authors. I've yet to see an article lamenting inequality that even attempts to define "merit"

Except Harvard has limited slots and the failsons of the rich buying in takes away a spot from someone who is actually competent and driven.

> This mindset that in order for people like me to make it people at the top have to fall only makes sense if you consider the economy a fixed-sized pie. It's obviously not.

It's not over the long timescale, but over the short-term it is. Rich kids frittering money away really is preventing others who may need that wealth more from having access to it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "having access" to it. What does it mean to "have access" to wealth? Do you mean offering them financing with favorable rates?

Nope, I mean owning or having control over money (which is effectively a share of societies productive output). The alternative to rich people (in this case kids) having control over this money, is to tax them. That money could then be redistributed to others. The Universal Basic Income is a concrete proposal based around this kind of insight.

> Lamenting the fact that Michael Dell's son "just hasn't become poor like me yet"

My thoughts exactly. This isn't some generations-long dynasty, with a genius at the top and buffoons all the way down. This kid is literally one generation removed from the guy who made all the money. Even with an Elizabeth Warren-style wealth tax, there is no way that someone who grew up the son of a billionaire would not himself be very, very wealthy (unless his parents cut him off entirely).

What makes the economy obviously not a fixed sized pie? Every dollar that Michael Dell's son has came out of somebody else's pocket.

Well, no. His father has honestly earned his fortune by creating a big business that employs thousands.

I suggest you stop preaching this Marxist crap. I was born in the Soviet Union and I tell you what: countries built with such "Rob the rich, give back to the poor" mindset are extremely bad to live in.

As opposed to the US where it's rob the poor give to the rich and it's so wonderful?

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and using HN for ideological battle, so we don't have to ban you again?

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post in the spirit of this site, we'd be grateful. It's not hard to use HN as intended if you want to.

When that money came out of those people's pockets they went home with a computer that they obviously valued more than the money itself. By their own judgement they walked out of a store carrying more wealth than they walked in with. Michael Dell made himself wealthy but he made his customers even more wealthy.

Or they worked for 40 hours assembling computers for minimum wage while the company made billions and billions off that worker labour.

When someone takes silicon and produces a computer chip, it's pretty clear to me that value has been created that didn't exist before. Within my memory, we've gone from Z80s to 4GHz multi-core. How can you look at that and see a fixed sized pie? It's obviously growing.

It's more about wealthy incompetent idiots running everything into the ground and destroying our institutions, governments, and economy for everyone except them.

Also, theoretically the economy is not a fixed pie, but for many years now it has been a fixed or shrinking pie for everyone not at the top of the income distribution.

maybe they wouldn't be idiots if the top schools took more rich kids!

(scarcasm... cue downvotes)

> The app failed almost instantly

Hell, at least he’s trying to do something. I can’t imagine many billionaire’s children trying that much.

He could be making stylish shirts to wear out to the discoteca

> discoteca

Move over grandpa! They're called clubs now./s

> And yet, despite helming two failed ventures and having little work experience beyond an internship at a financial services company created to manage his father’s fortune, things seem to be working out for Zach Dell. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is now an analyst for the private equity firm Blackstone. He is 22.

I was rewatching Mad Men lately and it reminds of Peter Campbell. Early on, Peter screws up something badly and Don wants to fire him, but he can't because the firm owner Sterling explains, Peter comes from a wealthy family and his family connections bring business to the firm.

Sounds like maybe the same thing? Even if Zach Dell just sat a desk and stared at a wall all day, he'd probably be invaluable because his father is a billionaire and he knows other billionaires and he can introduce them to the principals at the firm.

In the biz, its called a "relationship hire."

Deutsche got caught hiring the dumb kids of Chinese bureaucrats to win over business recently, but it happens basically everywhere.

Most major financial services companies also make sure to hire a few minor members of the Saudi royal family for the same reason.

If society could admit that this networking has value, instead of trying to awkwardly access it without naming it, I think we would all be a little saner. A person's social network -- particularly when they know billionaires -- is inherently valuable in and of itself. Even in more meritocratic engineering firms, being able to refer competent engineers is often financially rewarded.

So let the elite monetize their social networks and let us stop having to not point out they are blatantly bad at their proclaimed job.

By the way, this is why a Harvard education is more valuable than one from Random State University - you get much more valuable contacts there, even if the education is no better.

I would expect nothing less of people than to help their kid succeed in life. It seems like parents are spending money as expected. Of course, the article doesn't look at what happens to those kids once the parents are gone or what happens to the grandchildren.

It's worth remembering that these rich kids don't have a perspective other than the one they grew up with. Hating on them specifically isn't helpful.

The flower shirt guy is probably really trying, and he probably really believes that his hard work and passion is driving his success (assuming he's still doing that thing). But it's hard to ignore the possibility that his success is just based on connections, financial backing (which means no lean times, no failure moments, etc.).

Even on a level playing field, people would occupy a bell-curve. There will always be have-nots, at least as long as they're being measured relative to the haves. And to be sure, the have-nots will always be able to claim some disadvantage, even in a "perfect" meritocracy. Your skill and personality provide for opportunities, which are the groundwork for future opportunities. ie, excellent performance in school allows for a scholarship to the best universities. Excellence at the best universities lines you up for your pick of the litter to the best jobs. The best jobs are filled with the best people, and allow for 1) far better networking opportunities, and 2) far more experience and opportunities for advancement, which in turn provides for even better jobs.

I'm certainly NOT suggesting that the world is currently fair, or devoid of favoritism. I just want to note that even in a true meritocracy there will be a stringent class divide. It's almost unavoidable, unless people with less skill are afforded the same opportunities as people with more skill.

In this sense, it would be hard for a theoretical "perfect" meritocracy to survive multiple generations. The most talented people would quickly accumulate wealth and prestige.

The issue is you're not really measuring skill at any step just past performance which is what leads to the feedback loop of privilege begetting privilege.

> Eight of the nine Supreme Court justices graduated from just two law schools.

The latest two went to the same high school.

This paragraph captures what I think is the most worthwhile substance in the article:

> “The greater the inequality, the greater the impact on opportunity,” Fishkin said. “There’s a self-fulfilling class anxiety among the middle- and upper-middle class because they sense that the spaces are scarce now. There are fewer secure jobs. And the scarcer they are, the more valuable they are.”

But in my opinion, it's a bit much to call "class anxiety" a self-fulfilling prophecy for middle-class people, since most of what we're seeing economically is due to the decisions of those in power -- either government or corporate (i.e. not the middle class) -- especially around international trade and outsourcing.

I have a really hard time believing someone else's fortune means that I cannot also be fortunate. I find the premise of articles like this sad. It's riddled with overtones of jealously, mediocracy, and comparison (which is the thief of joy).

> I have a really hard time believing someone else's fortune means that I cannot also be fortunate

I don’t. There is a limited amount of wealth in the economy at any given moment. There is also a limited amount of well-paying jobs, which can lead to social mobility, and there is also a limited amount of wealth for investing in new ventures. Since these things are finite, one person being 20x richer than you or me means they are sitting on money and taking opportunities that others cannot. Time and money are not infinite because Earth’s resources are not infinite.

And yes, Zach Dell alone being wealthy or taking a lucrative job does not substantively affect everyone’s wealth. He is just one person. But I hope you can realize that the author is employing a literary device known as an anecdote or an example to start off their piece in order to illustrate a larger issue, which is that the wealthy are able to get opportunities and more wealth just by virtue of what family they were born into. Whether this is a problem or not is up to you, but I think reducing the article to “overtones of jealously” and “mediocracy” is misleading, although in an unintentionally amusing way; the author is actually calling out the blatant “mediocracy” that is inherent to privilege in our so-called merit-based society. I think this is a valid issue to write about and discuss.

Bold claim for a person with potable running water, internet access, flushable toilets and living above the poverty line.

That’s a pretty low bar in a world where a handful of people have literally hundreds (if not more) of times the amount of wealth as you and I, and yet still a significant portion of Americans live below or near the poverty line. I contend, not unreasonably, that we can do better than internet access, drinkable water, and other basic necessities of post-industrial living and still have plenty of inequality to make rich people feel superior or whatever. The U.S. economy is tremendously more productive than it was even 20 years ago, but have wages and prosperity risen proportionately among the lower and middle classes over that timespan? No. Yet wealthy children are able to exploit their privilege to get positions that “ladder climbers” could have gotten.

But yes, let us thank our benevolent masters, who throw pennies from their high castles at us commoners as we bow and scrape for their favor. Nothing to see here, folks, poor children get potable water and rich children get seven figure salaries! What inequality and nepotism do you speak of?

I can only imagine how much more charitable you would be with his level of wealth, given how charitable you are with the _literal vast expanse_ of your current.

People online need to be more like you. I appreciate your thoughtful response to my comment, as well as your willingness to discuss this issue in good faith so far

That's because people like Michael Dell have truly absurd sums of money. 30 billion dollars.

His failson can piss away money all day every day and never even make a dent.

> His [son] can piss away money all day every day and never even make a dent.

His son is 22. Life expectancy right now is about 93 I think, so he has 71 years of life left. Ignoring interest, he could spend $1,000,000 a day every day for the rest of his life.

Yeah, he could spend an awful lot of money. Must be nice!

Christ, I had to actually sit here for a moment and imagine how I could even possibly manage to spend $1M a day. I can only think of two things: 1) hiring people to work on things I know are unprofitable but want done, and 2) giving it away.

It's not (all) his money

"One of Reeves’ studies found that 43% of the members of upper-class households had skills and intelligence that predicted lower incomes."

Wow, that is a large percentage! There are some interesting data points, but that percentage stands out to me. There must be some sort of evolutionary-economic angle to this.

This is simply regression towards the mean. Same reason why children of two tall parents, while taller than general population, will on average be shorter than their parents.

Rich, undisciplined kids go on to be big spenders who need to hire people to cater to their needs.

What kind of 'answer' could there possibly be? The system works, as it always has. The huge majority of wealthy families squander it all away in a few generations. It's a self-correcting problem.

I don't see the connection as to how a rich kid not being able to create market value as an entrepreneur keeps a poor kid from providing value as an entrepreneur. Is there a fixed number of ideas and the rich kids with poor insight are using them all up leaving none for the less fortunate?

“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,”

So lets just water things down so the "kids who aren’t that smart" can get a college degree.

Good! Good! At least someone has some security...

I'm not sure what's controversial here.

This is capitalism.

Get money put away and your whole family will accumulate wealth at (give or take) 8% per year (and thus stay rich), save for gross incompetence and catastrophically bad bets.

Short of replacing capitalism itself this will always be the case.

Actually you could just remove the notion of "family" and it would go away too. If you don't raise your children and never know who they are, you can't give them any money.

This is objectively true but it broke my brain.

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