Meritocracy doesn't exist and believing it does is bad for you (2019)
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
His Mom knew the chairman of IBM.
That's a connection no normal person will ever have. Steve Jobs and Steve Woz actually had to start from a middle class.
Comparison is the theft of joy, I haven't been evicted since I got my first apartment at 19 and with any luck I'll retire early. That's enough for me. I'm widely more success than I could of imagined.
Yes someone else is making a million a month, has a beautiful partner and a family.
Someone else just got out of prison and is struggling to stay in housing.
I will never know why the rich ( north of 10 million in the US) feel a need to keep working though. Start a band, travel, etc.
Why deal with VCs breathing down your neck.
Then again, if I woke up rich I'd probably start a game studio as a passion project.
I'd want to release all the code open source. I want the popular games of the future to at a minimum be open core.
It's about inequality creating a worse world for everyone. We all do this exercise of being happy with what we have regularly. This is how you deal with the reality that you live in.
But you shouldn't let this coping mechanism stop you from pushing for a better world with less inequality. Getting comfortable with how broken things are is necessary, but not sufficient.
Imagining that things could be worse is only half the answer. The other half is thinking how things could be better.
I suspect it's selection bias: Non-workaholics rarely build vast wealth.
Merit is not about freedom from circumstance. As the article points out, luck can be stow someone with more merit. Someone can have better parenting, education or genes through no action of their own. This does not mean they lack merit. Merit is a performance metric.
Working hard or having talent won't always result in equal rewards in the real world. Nobody is making this straw man. However, talent and effort improve outcomes relative to lack of talent and lack of effort, all else being equal.
The goal of something like DEI is to round the edges of the arbitrary merit such as systemic disenfranchisement. A just meritocracy would evaluate people on _relevant_ merit to the judgement at hand. Such a society does not exist.
This is most obvious in school admissions. People argue if admissions should be blinded to race, or calibrated to take into account effort.
However, Nobody is arguing that merit doesn't exist, as in a straight F student that can't read should be admitted to Stanford.
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
It is a thumb on the scale. But not of what is considered instead of who is considered.
Actually I think many are, including a lot of politicians.
like with the 'privilege' discussion, even when defined as 'fewer roadblocks', people just realize they weren't born in one socioeconomic bracket so there's no point in bothering.
I'm surprised because when I look at some individual circumstances, I see lots of opportunity available to them that they can't perceive. They didn't 'check their privilege' at all, actually, despite telling trust funders of certain phenotypes that.
Play the cards you're dealt, but actually look at the cards.
On the same vein, there are plenty of people with all of the necessary resources and subsidies that do nothing with their life. Fall into substance abuse, or derailed in some other ways. Many now choose to marginalize themselves in order to "live their truth". Which means someone financially successful or acknowledged for their contributions can still be celebrated for playing the cards they were dealt.
Might as well be going into impoverished schools and cancel classes because math and reading or any other measure of capability has been proven to have zero impact on life outcomes.
Behavior, effort, knowledge, and discipline matter. Even if it is in a probabistic sense.
A remarkable statistic is that Asian Americans raised in poverty have more than double the upward mobility of white Americans raised in poverty. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of income have a 25% chance of growing up to be in the top 20% versus just 10% for similarly situated white kids.
Folks are resistant to studying why, but I strongly suspect part of the reason is that Asian kids are generally taught that hard work produces results, and are discouraged from thinking about whether things are “fair” or not.
Also, your anecdotes are strong evidence of meritocracy! If a doctor or lawyer in old country can start out as a bellhop in the west and then work their way back up to being a doctor (like my uncle) that’s meritocracy!
My mom is from a rich family back in old country, but extensive third-world landholdings don’t count for anything in America. And her master’s degree in chemistry was worth nothing in the U.S., especially given her limited English skills. So she worked in retail her whole career. At her earnings peak 15 years ago she was making $120k+ as a floor associate at a furniture store.
That's a real internal locus of control. Shaping society is just another job, and a lot more rewarding to learn.
Get out, touch grass, do real things, meet real people, help your friends, let them help you. (Confound your enemies.)
("Group" and "solidarity" are such fuzzily broad terms. But I think, not in the sense you intend. Real humans are, of course, social creatures.)