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Comment by dextralt | Hacker News Reader

I suppose you have similar concerns about men occupying the overwhelming majority of physically taxing and hazardous jobs, correct? Obviously, we both know there are no intrinsic differences between men and women, so this is a great injustice that women's representation among miners, construction workers, metalworkers, truckers, heavy machinery operators, fishermen, foresters, waster disposal workers, and so on, is virtually nonexistent.

And of course you find it outrageous that in the entirety of Asia, Africa and Middle East, white people constitute nonexistent percentage of the population, and there are virtually no white men in the positions of power there.

Right?

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> physically taxing and hazardous jobs, correct?

Do those jobs pay tens of millions in yearly comp and do those men get to decide the faith of hundreds of thousands of their fellow employees? In other words, are those jobs as "powerful" as the jobs held by the people we're talking about? I guess they're not. This is what the whole discussion is about.

And to get back to your question the answer is yes, one of my aunts used to be a industrial-crane operator, my mother used to be a construction works inspector or whatever the official name is in English, which meant that she got to be on construction sites pretty much her whole career, but that happened because I grew up in the non-meritocratic Eastern Europe where the regime in place knew that leaving aside half of the population (in this case women) just because society saw those jobs as "not for women" was plain stupid.

Incidentally that point was first made (afaik) by John Stuart Mill, interesting to see that his ideas were implemented by nominally communist regimes while beacons of capitalism like Amazon hide behind terms like "meritocracy" that happen to put forward the interests of only part of the people involved.

Both of you sound silly. There is no meritocracy nor equality. People get what they get because they have something that somebody else wants: knowledge, skills, connections, whatever. How did they get it? I don’t know. Maybe by hard work, maybe by ingenuity, maybe by risk, maybe by birth, maybe by luck, maybe by theft, maybe by deceit. None of those things are or can be or ever will be equally-distributed.

I personally think that a society that encourages the first two tends to work out better than some of the others, but still probably unrealistic.

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