How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
economist.com
economist.com
Yeah - meritocracy sounds great in principle. And, we can agree that it's leagues better than aristocracy. But, over generational scales, aristocracy and meritocracy are very closely aligned.
Meritocracy begins first with a wave of smart, risk-taking, hard-working, uncompromising, (perhaps immoral) people who usurp the establishment. And, we certainly celebrate that. It brings a shift, and usually rewards many others.
But, it's when those same people put their children and grandchildren in positions where risks nearly vanish that we worry about. They naturally give their descendents their connections, secret knowledge, wealth, safety and other benefits. And, they unconsciously change the rules to favor themselves. And, they seem to dismiss all those elements when their spawns happen to reach similar heights. And, slowly, they begin to believe that it's some genetic component, or something innate in them, that has caused it. And, then the new aristocracy is born.
I think the article is bringing attention to this, and it's good to do so. The new rich should be allowed to let their children and grandchildren live great lives. But, those descendents should not become the gatekeepers of the rest of the world's amazing talent. There are just to many brilliant, hard-working people in the world, who aren't connected, who need a chance.
Meritocracy is a form of aristocracy. The word "aristocracy" comes from the Greek words for "best" and "power," or in other words a system where those who are most fit to rule will be the leaders of society. It sounds great in principle, the only problem is the definition of "best."
The idea is that society in whole should be set up in such a way that connections and secret knowledge isn't valued as highly as it is now. George W Bush didn't become president because of merit, but because of connections and inherited wealth. A better system would have more highly valued leadership skills, rhethorical skills and general smartness and kept dofuses like him out of power.
As if intelligence tests weren't gameable and didn't favor the prepared. What's worse is that they test a very narrow definition of intelligence. That cure would be worse than the disease.
(As an aside, isn't there a thing where the titles of links are changed when they don't match the content that everyone keeps complaining about? Wouldn't this be a prime example of a link whose title should be changed to match the article within?)
Continue this to an extreme: property taxes that I pay are only spent on my household. The city/county maintains my property, educates my children. There's no more progressive distribution.
Smaller swaths of American society are still against the integration of schools, for the record. If you survey and abstract the arguments made, you'll find a lot that have the structure, "If this political action (e.g. bill passes; bill is defeated; president elected, etc.) happens, then our children will be forced to learn that apostasy (e.g. gay agenda, lots of sex, non-Biblical whatevers, etc.)." As has been pointed out repeatedly by pro-gay advocates, this is a verbatim, find/replace repetition of arguments against racial integration.
It is entrenched because only those on the top can afford to pay for good education for their children so they can become good in their professions. Doctors can afford to send their kids to top tier private-schools and Ivy League universities, which means their kids have a better shot at being a good doctor or engineer learning under Nobel Laureates compared to the kids of auto-mechanics and park rangers, whose teachers might not have the best credentials.
What I would agree with you on, is that this isn't too different from the past when children of top ranking military generals got better training and ended up being better soldiers and generals than the children of farmers and blacksmiths. Nobody's saying children of farmers or auto-mechanics are any less able. They just don't get the best training.
The article seems to contradict that:
"Using one-generation measures of social mobility—how much a father’s relative income influences that of his adult son—America does half as well as Nordic countries, and about the same as Britain and Italy, Europe’s least-mobile places."
It's also true, though, that to whatever extent that genetics influence relative income (and despite counter examples such as the Romney family, I'd like to hope that intelligence has _some_ correlation with income) that might explain some of the correlation between parental income and the income of their children. A proper study should try to study the correlation of parental income with the income of the income of adopted children (preferably adopted under the age of two). This is why sociological research is so difficult....
And then;
>Nobody's saying children of farmers or auto-mechanics are any less able. They just don't get the best training.
So it's a meritocracy but the training isn't available to all? Doesn't sound like a meritocracy to me.
Yes, but nothing made out of organized humans ever adheres to mathematically rigorous definition. (1)
Our lot is loads better than that of some poor orphan in Haiti, and our opportunities were distributed with tons more equity. That said, it's far from perfect. There are parts of our messy society that are close to meritocracy, and there's other parts that are headache inducing doppelgangers of it. It's a mess, but you can also think of it as opportunity.
((1) - In fact, whenever you think you are about to make a clever or skeptical point in a societally based intellectual discussion, tell yourself this first, then see if you still want to. Same goes for biology and software engineering.)
How? Please explain what magical elevator makes this happen, because VC-istan seems to be a combination of connections and luck, large organizations tend to be clueless and political, and academia has been dying for at least a generation and a half. What I've seen may be limited and atypical, but I haven't seen anything that looks like this. I've seen the same nonsense that humanity has been repeating for thousands of years.
A good programmer can make 2-3x a poor programmer.
That has more to do with the fact that the good programmers tend to gravitate toward high-COL places. Even those good programmers can't raise a family (in NYC or Silicon Valley) on what they make unless (a) they beat the VC-istan game (see above) or (b) they work for those large companies, in which case advancement is 90% political.
The closest thing to a meritocracy seems to be finance, which is seriously flawed but is more honest about its shortcomings.
So, "most people"?
The problem may well be the "human condition" as substrate. In addition to talent in whatever domain or particular desirable skill-set, a person also needs to negotiate other people. If a large project is to be accomplished, the talents and effort of large numbers of people need to be marshaled. Unfortunately, our heuristics for interaction were tuned to keeping together small bands of people primarily concerned with food and defense. ("Paleo" BS notwithstanding, but this much is certainly true.)
What we have isn't a magical elevator. It's more like our brains doing Boolean algebra and predicate calculus. On average, we humans are notoriously unreliable at logic. So much so, we have terms for dozens of dysfunctions which happen all the time. (Fallacies.) With proper training and attention, we can be quite good, however. So it is with "meritocracy" and all of its various doppelgangers. The "cream" does rise to the top, but so does the scum. Talent can help you. "Talent" in the form of attributes that let you sleep your way to the top also help you. You can make it on sheer talent, but the ability to wage subtle, deniable psychological warfare on your rivals to diminish their confidence and shine will help you too. So will realpolitik maneuverings or just being physically attractive.
Many will just put it down to getting older and bitter, but the older I get, the more I realize that we really are (mostly metaphorical) feces-flinging, screeching, long-legged savannah-apes that just so happen to have exceptional individuals and exceptional moments of godlike beauty, wisdom, and insight. Neal Stephenson: “The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.” The muck and mess of human interaction is every bit as subtle as it is unsavory.
(And the older I get, the stupider I feel.)
Marathons actually get a lot harder as you go on. Miles 0-16 are no different from regular short runs, 17-20 is hard and you start to flag, 21-24 is brutally difficult, and 24-26.2 is easier for psychological reasons.
I don't know you, so I can't; can you provide numbers, or at least an argument with some intuitive strength, rather than just asserting it?
It is a tautology to say that you can lose more money the more money you have, because anyone (rich or poor) can simply choose to throw it away. That doesn't change the mathematical fact that interest compounds and that more wealth translates into more income in our economic system.
First, we aren't the real elite. Founders are yeoman project managers at best, engineers are less than that-- not even able to raise a family in the Valley-- and even the venture capitalists are, for the most part, merely junior elite.
I'm not so sure about that claim, anyway, given that IQ is relative. The intellectual edge of the modern elite is quite thin, by historical standards.
The upper-class average IQ is generally held to be in the upper 100s-- no higher than 110-- even if class is defined to include social connections, respectability, and educational pedigree in addition to income.
So the upper class is only about 0.5-0.7 standard deviations smarter than the general population. That's not that much. They're also a small elite: less than 0.1% is running the world. For every Davos Man, there are 10,000 people wanting to see him fall. In any pool of that size, there are some fiercely smart people.
Compare that to the medieval elite, which had superior nutrition by far. They had what would be close to average height and intelligence today. Charlemagne (Charles the Great) was considered a giant. He was about 6 feet tall. Average people were a foot shorter, and were probably at an IQ level around 70-75.
A foot shorter, yes (we know this from all sorts of physical evidence) but how do we know the average IQ?
They also might have spent their mental processing power differently. Medieval people trained their memory much more - I think this also extended to the average peasant, but I can't find a reference right now.
In the wilds of Papua New Guinea, lots of highlanders meeting us there would consider us clumsy and stupid and wonder how we run a complex civilization.
I bet a lot of folks in France between 1789 and 1799 were paraphrasing, "I'm not a real aristo," or "I'm only a minor aristo."
Note that the junior elite is more likely to be left as scapegoats to the mob, while the real elites will have the resources to escape.
And you do realize, as a smart, hip, dare I say elite person, that the ;) was a signal of sarcasm.
Tell that to Harvard and look at Caltech's Asian student enrollment numbers: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/339778/racial-quotas-...
Race should be left out of the qualifications for getting into university, but be prepared for those universities' Asian student populations to grow significantly, probably whether they are rich or poor. That's fine with me (I dislike racial quotas), but it wasn't mentioned.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there really were a way to negate all advantages a person could be born into. No social networks, no additional wealth, no additional opportunities, etc. A place where everyone is born at 25 at the exact same moment: no friends, no past, no parents, no money. We can call this place 'Equalistan', population 1 million. Now, in Equalistan, there is still random genetic mutation. Some people are taller, some people have working memories that store more information, some have long-term memories that store more information, some solve problems by simple heuristics, some follow bodily signals for cues, etc. There's no such thing as 'smarter' or 'better' at birth in Equalistan, however, because these only make sense in hindsight. Each person in Equalistan just has a different, inherited strategy at living. Everyone just showed up at the same moment, 25 years old, no history, no buddies, but just an inherited genetic toolset.
Now, in Equalistan, there's a test to decide who gets the most resources. However, no one in Equalistan designed this test because, remember, we are making sure no one has any advantage; each person only has an inherited, random strategies from birth. So everyone takes this test and there is then a distribution of resource possession. But here is the upshot. Every person completely deserves the outcome they receive on the test. After all, the only thing being tested was each person's 'merits'. Now the question is, does it ever matter whether people "deserve" the amount of resources they possess?
The article isn't saying so much that meritocracy begets old-school elitism after assortative mating as much as it's saying that meritocracy itself is a terrifying thing. That it may be 100% the truth that people deserve the outcome they receive in life, but, who cares?
1) How is it "merit" is strictly about genetic variation, rather than a combination of said genetic ability and a record of the use of it (achievement).
2) How is it that equality is strictly about starting position, rather than starting position resource allocation protection? One can have a meritocracy in which resource allocation is not about more-to better. It can in fact be about responsibility and accountability being greater. Not saying I agree with this, it is just a hole in the argument.
3) Resource distribution need not be 0-sum. There can in fact be more than 2 categories of "mine" and "not mine". There can be categories such as "available to everyone", "available to no one", and variations on "available to some". [1]
4) deserves is always and strictly a moral argument. There is no justification of deserves that doesn't at some point refer directly to axioms (morals). Therefore we again get to assumptions that need be discussed.
[1] Here in lies all the interesting stuff. Interplay between "some people get access" and "mine" categories of resources are where all discussions like this are really happening. How you define "some people get access" really can change the end result of "mine" for various actors. Similarly, "everyone gets access", in reality, is very tricky. For instance you could claim, and be mostly right, that everyone gets access to computers (via public libraries etc). Yet, not everyone gets access to training in effective computer use - that is reserved for "some people get access", where the rules are 'has enough money for proper training' (aka defining access rules on how much is already in your "mine" resoures). It is a complicated interplay.
1) That 'merit' is based on genetic variation was purely for the sake of illustration. Of course this is not the case in reality. Yet to boil down the problem to where we artificially limit the factors can help expose the real issue. In Equalistan, the fictitious illustration, everyone showed up at 25 with no history or connections. They immediately took a test. The genetic variation is just to show that random mutations can produce very varied outcomes. In the real world, the situation is inconceivable worse. You have genetic ability, mentorship, poetical power, network connections, wealth, random physical events, etc, that all affect outcomes.
2) Although, again, the example given was purely artificial, it is not so clear that personal 'accountability' or 'responsibility' is something that someone can help. A person with a super-charged frontal cortex will be very 'accountable' or 'responsible' with their abilities. The knock-on effects of stewardship of traits are very much the cause of other traits, whether inherited genetically or contextually (via parents or social structures). But I might be missing what you're saying here.
3) Resource distribution, you're right, is not zero-sum. In fact, on an absolute basis, there is no reason why anyone should ever write an article about injustice of outcomes given that overall standards of living are unbelievable high for people at large, and relative to past ages, although still very far form optimal. But this isn't the point of the article. Relative distribution of resources is the issue. But here 'resources' isn't necessarily physical things, it's anything limited. Power is zero sum, no matter what, and is still a resource to be distributed.
4) Yes, 'deserves' is fully-loaded, and that was the point of mentioning it. We somehow, for some bizarre reason feel that some people 'deserve' things and others do not and we should try to make sure people only have what they 'deserve'. But, you're right, this is nuts, at what point could we possible say that someone can really claim they did something independent of chance to have some moral justification to some resource, power or otherwise? Never. If you are hardworking--how can you separate that from genes plus context. If you are smart, how are you anything other than your inborn ability plus instruction. So I'm not saying some people don't deserve stuff, I'm saying this whole notion of deserving anything is ridiculous. Justification of outcomes as anything other than randomness is just what elitism is.
Good, because of course I would want my income to influence that of my children. Yes, yes, I would want them to work hard and be curious and chart their own path, etc., but because I'm their father I'm going to try and stack the deck in their favor as high as I can possibly stack it.
And let's not kid ourselves - everybody who cares about their children, no matter what their political inclination or relative level of wealth, tries to do exactly the same thing. From the hedge-fund billionaire to the immigrant janitor.
Here's the thing: do you want to stack the deck so that only your children have such favor, to the extent you are able, or do you want to stack the deck so that all children have such favor, again to the extent of your ability? Yes, of course, if it's an either-or choice then you'd go with your kids. But if you weren't forced to make such a choice, which would you go with?
Yes, it is true that today's society is by no means a pure meritocracy. Connections matter. That is unlikely to ever change. The problem of "who you know matters" is a problem of information - people would rather hire a slightly-below-competent friend than a supposedly-competent stranger because their friend is a known quantity.
I would say that in an ideal meritocracy, the people with the most knowledge, abilities and intelligence should be the ones making the decisions and carrying the responsibilities. The willingness to work hard, however, should determine income, luxury and comfort.
The problem, of course, is that the powerful usually try to make themselves and their friends wealthy, but maybe this separation of the idea of meritocracy into (knowledge/ability = power/decisions) and (hard work = wealth/comfort) is what we as a society should strife for.
Thoughts?
The tension of a timocracy devolving into an oligarchy depends greatly on the concept of justice in play at the time. I often hear in the valley "work hard, play hard" as a justification of oligarchic excess, when it should actually be "work hard, work harder" or "work hard, play less".
I don't understand how you can be against what seems to be a completely reasonable proposition to me, that everyone should get a fair chance, regardless of where they start from.
I don't see any of this as making it harder for rich children to get a good education, except to remove situations where they currently have an (in my opinion) unfair advantage, like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.
In fact, the precise aim here is to help bright students get good grades, and dumb ones get bad grades, which is the exact opposite of the comparison you seem to be making!
a) All children have equal opportunity.
b) Parents are able to spend money on their children.
I've spoken with many people who are in favor of both a) and b) and don't see the cognitive dissonance, but from this:
> like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.
I guess you really favor a) over b). Unless your point was that exams should be selected to minimize the influence of last minute cram efforts which disproportionally benefit those with expensive tutors, in which case I might agree with you.
In regards to b), not all help is monetary in nature. Some of it can be in the form of social favours, familiarity of cultural norms (national, company and industry culture) and expectations etc.
If Education was free, entrance exams would be much more difficult. Rich kids could still pass the exams, because their parents would pay for more tutoring/education.
How would you do that?
2. Complaining about people not having a fair chance in an age where everybody has access to the internet (which is pretty much all human knowledge) is just wrong.
3. You don't need college to rise to the top - that's just a myth (check out Thiel Fellowship website, they have lot's of materials on this topic).
4. The fact that you don't agree with someone doesn't mean they lack intelligence.
Secondly, lots of people spend a lot of money on tutoring. I believe it helps people get significantly higher exam results, which then allows entry into significantly better universities. Do you disagree?
Don't kid yourself. Just because knowledge and information is out there and accessible for free doesn't mean a child will have the ability and motivation to seek it out on their own. They're children, after all. What and how they learn will largely depend on parents and school.
3. You don't need a plane to get from New York to London. There are ships. You can even sail across the Atlantic! (there must be a fancy Latin term for this fallacy?)
I have noticed lots of robin hoods in the world today. Maybe a true communistic and socialistic society would work if we just gave it a proper chance? If everyone just shared one bank account, all suffering would end?
"The other great unfairness has to do with the preferences that elite American universities give to well-connected children, either because their parents went to the university themselves or because they have given money."
"An educational institution should focus on attracting the best people, and then work out how to finance the poorer people in that category."
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Legacy admissions usually come with legacy donations. These donations can be in the millions each year for an organization like Harvard, which in turn pays the tuition of the poorer people in the category.
The issues of legacy admissions and affirmative action are pretty closely linked. So to address one part of the issue without looking at the other is not quite fair.
First, the author has to sleight-of-hand his way into his argument. He's worried that the "elite" will use their money to ensure that their children get such a leg-up on the non-elite children that the non-elite children won't be able to compete and will become (I guess?) the modern equivalent of feudal peasants. Of course, he doesn't present any evidence that this is happening. He states that "the top 1% have seen their incomes soar", but this isn't a statement of a problem.[1]
While it seems intuitive that privileged children will do better than non-privileged children, and even that a cadre of privileged children could keep the non-privileged children non-privileged for eternity, this just doesn't jibe with reality.
For example, across just three generations, the complete loss of inherited wealth is nearly 90%. That means the great-grand children of nearly every founder who had a big exit will never see any of that money. (Note that this same argument is often made with respect to corporations as a basis for stringent anti-trust regulation. But, pick any 50 year increment of the DJIA and see how many companies on the list in the starting year were on the list at the end.) The "problem" of perpetual wealth a specter.
Sure, you can point to the Rothschilds as an example of dynastic wealth. But (conspiracy theories aside) how many “wealthy” Rothschilds are there? Do they wield any real power? What about some of the other richest people in history? If dynastic wealth is a true problem, why aren’t the Hugheses, the Gettys, the Rockafeller’s the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Mellons, and the Fords dominating world politics, finance or culture? (Interesting aside: many of these titans were actually dirt poor themselves before building their own fortunes.)
It’s easy to take a small, 30-year slice of history and claim that, if things continue this way, surely the world will be hell in just a few more short years. Fortunately, it almost never works out that way.
[1] See pg's article re "money is not wealth" here: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)
Exhibit A: George W. Bush
Meritocracies tend to lose their purity due to our propensity for passing on advantages to our friends and relatives. Over time, this yields something less like a meritocracy and more like aristocracy -- though it will perniciously continue to identify as a "meritocracy." Eventually, the contractions give rise to social upheaval. This is generally chaotic and bad, but the good news is that we can now have both the technology and social engineering know-how completely prevent this.
Simply engineer humans and human society such that the ruling classes really are smarter, fitter, and in every way superior to the lower classes. Relocate sources of fresh, nutritious food to big box stores in newly developed neighborhoods only accessible by car. Re-price food generally, such that once normal essentials like fresh produce are now luxury items. Furthermore, use subsidies to flood the market with empty calories in the form of synthetic starch, fat, and sugar, making it a concerted effort and additional expense over market norms to afford nutritious food conducive to intellectual development. (Not to mention subtle and complex gustatory stimulation.) In fact, make it economically advantageous in the short term for a household to buy food that makes its members sicker, fatter, and stupider. Use the media and market forces, such that companies are motivated by higher margins to aggressively market food -- both that of poorer quality to the less affluent and that of higher quality to the more affluent -- so that market forces directly reinforce the goals of the program, greatly leveraging (by orders of magnitude) the government subsidy of raw ingredients with private money.
While doing this, flood the media with trash, to cut off lower classes from excessive intellectual stimulation. Promulgate an ideology that attaches attractiveness and desirability with anti-intellectual attitudes, with the goal of raising the value of subconscious and tribal signaling over actual intellectual accomplishment. Close libraries, eliminating them as a source of unregulated intellectual stimulation. Also put additional pressure on the remaining libraries as locations for ad-hoc social work by eliminating funding for alternative places for underclass adults and children. Grant de-facto (but deniable) media monopolies to create market forces conducive to more trash content produced for the biggest audience at the lowest cost while discouraging the production of competing intellectually stimulating content. Certainly suppress, where it is possible to do so deniably, any media which is not subject to the above market forces. (Public radio and television, for example.)
Also recognize that such a program will succeed in suppressing a large proportion of the population, but additional measures will be needed to suppress the excess population of dangerous intellectually competent persons which will still crop up. Again, market forces can be leveraged with the aid of the right societal manipulations. Push a "nerd-culture" which is misunderstood by (and therefore isolated from) the mainstream, but which (outwardly) welcomes intellectuals. Manipulate this nerd culture, such that its population either largely discounts politics, or is attracted to fringe politics of no consequence. Also attach "coolness" in this segment of the populace with obsessive attention to technical and otherwise misunderstood esoteric pursuits which take up time and energy and act to distance this group from the mainstream. Realize also, that such persons are economically valuable, and further harness their economic potential by promulgating workaholic tendencies in the form of a "work hard, play hard" ideology. Create a norm of long hours, and provide on-site facilities to encourage this. Also promulgate the idea of "side projects" with the idea that the only worthy programmers are passionate enough to have such, and so create social pressures to dissipate yet more time and energy. Market forces can again be harnessed through the mechanism of a "startup scene" which keeps the youngest and most energetic intellectuals working long hours. Synergistic to such a scene and to the overall meritocratic ideology, also establish a nerd underclass sharing the same outward cultural trappings, but stuck in underpaid dead-end jobs or overpaid corporate dead-end jobs.
Note also that the promulgation of a nerd underclass means that many of the nerd/mainstream bifurcation strategies can also be applied within the nerd segment itself, further increasing the control of dangerous excess intelligence. Do this by also promulgating anti-intellectual attitudes within the nerd segment itself. Glorify the unquestioned parroting of memes from certain nodes on the Internet as indicators of cleverness and coolness. For whichever segment of the nerd populace that will buy it, place greater status to faster access to such memes over true skepticism and creativity. Also promulgate ideologies which elevate unquestioned ridicule as a kind of magical ultimate good, so long as it's funny, and which are easily applicable to suppressing complex and controversial topics through noise. Similar effects can be attained with the notion of the intellectual transcendence erroneously placed on a hazy notion of "irony," thereby causing susceptible persons to insulate themselves from reality and issues of social consequence in a bubble of their own smugness.
By throwing up so many dietary and socially engineered cultural barriers/traps working against actual personal development, the overall effect will be twofold. On one hand, the moneyed elites will have the resources to easily escape and side-step most of these traps, resulting in their population actually being largely superior, thereby placing the truth on their side. On the other hand, any individuals who manage to escape all of the above traps are likely to be superior individuals as well, making it easy for the existing elite to co-opt their talents, additionally bolstering the truth of the meritocratic ideology.
I think I have shown that the above scheme is not only extremely robust, but possesses other striking beneficial qualities, some of which may be unprecedented in human history. The scheme can be thought of as a disguised aristocracy which maintains the trappings of meritocracy through the use of numerous disguised and subliminal barriers to personal and intellectual advancement. Most uncontrolled intellectual and personal advancement is handily suppressed, and the remaining advancement is channeled in ways which produce considerable economic gain for the good of society as a whole. For the proportion of the population for which these barriers to personal advancement fail, absorption into the elite diffuses any potential for social upheaval while bolstering the power of the elite and its strength within its stated meritocratic ideology. In particular, this scheme has considerable advantages over a naive meritocracy, in that it successfully suppresses most social mobility while avoiding the ideological and actual contradictions that arise in following generations. By deliberately but deniably engineering the actual inferiority of the lower classes, ideological contradictions are eliminated. In this way, it's "the best of both worlds" -- achieving the social stability of aristocracy while avoiding its long term diffusion of talent and sustaining the ideological cover of "meritocracy" indefinitely. I hope the "merits" of such a system are self evident, and that such a system is adopted by our society in the near future.
(Addendum - This system is not without flaws. For one thing, it can be easily distinguished from a true meritocracy from its lack of social mobility. However, dissent resulting from this information can be readily suppressed by the same mechanisms outlined above.)
If anything, the "dumb", brutal aristocracy of medieval Europe had more of a claim of innate superiority ("merit") than the current elite. Because of superior nutrition and better working conditions, they were half a foot taller, probably 20 IQ points smarter, and overall more physically, aesthetically, and intellectually fit than the peasants.
If you're "in the know" about these sorts of things, you realize that raw intelligence isn't what's valued by our society. It's still about connections. More specifically, it's about adopting the behavioral patterns and attitudes of well-connected people.
What we actually have in the US is some degree of social mobility within the middle class. The parasitic upper class is still a problem, and resistant to improvement. The lower class (which is about half) is still screwed. But it's relatively easy to move from the 50th percentile to the 95th percentile either through unusual talent or extreme sacrifice.
The article seems to contradict that:
"Using one-generation measures of social mobility—how much a father’s relative income influences that of his adult son—America does half as well as Nordic countries, and about the same as Britain and Italy, Europe’s least-mobile places."
That pretty much describes the situation in the UK - very few people describe themselves as working class these days, you can't really become proper upper class (although your grandchildren might) so we're all left debating the silly distinctions between lower, middle and upper middle class!
[NB I usually joke to my wife that the easiest way of spotting "proper" upper middle class men is their trousers - nobody else seems to wear cords in quite those distinctive colours of pink and startling bright green.]
I've noted for a while that a significant fraction of those successful in business, especially in certain sectors, are basically glorified street hustlers. They're very good at rapidly building social networks, smoke and mirrors, and shell games that create the illusion of value. The game they play could be called "lie, leverage, flip."
Is this the merit that we want?
I would argue that all societies are meritocracies for some value of "merit." Defining merit in any objective sense is not easy. In fact, it's probably capital-H Hard and reduces to the same effectively-infinite-dimensional search problem solved by evolution itself.
I think meritocracy is a great example of a simple idea that is incredibly appealing but wrong in a way that creates pathologies. Economics and biology are just chock full of that stuff.
Exactly. The Economist article lost me at the point where it said this:
The top 1% have seen their incomes soar because of the premium that a globalised high-tech economy places on brainy people.
No, the top 1% have seen their incomes soar because they have been allowed to game the system in order to siphon wealth from other people's pockets into their own. Exhibit A: Wall Street investment banks.
Anger and jealousy toward the "1%" is a dangerous road for a country to go down. Besides, without investment banks and private equity firms, an essential part of the economy -- namely, buying and selling companies -- would be missing and we would be worse off.
The place where you should direct your ire is toward corrupt government policymakers who allow corporate interests to override the basis of our civil society, which is equal protection under the law. Corporations do not want free markets; they want government-sponsored monopolies. We the people should hold our government responsible for succumbing to corporate special interests instead of blaming the companies once they are granted such privilege.
The entire society is guilty for the current state of economic affairs as civil servants don't stand up to Congress, Congress wants to get re-elected, the public is easily distracted, and the 1% or .001% fund the lobbies.
I wasn't claiming investment bankers don't make sacrifices. I was claiming that they don't create wealth; they just siphon it from other people's pockets into their own. The fact that they work 80 hour weeks so they can siphon more wealth doesn't make it right.
without investment banks and private equity firms, an essential part of the economy -- namely, buying and selling companies -- would be missing and we would be worse off.
Investment banks do make money on mergers and acquisitions, but that's not where they make most of it. Most of it is made by finding suckers to take the wrong end of zero sum trades.
Corporations do not want free markets; they want government-sponsored monopolies.
Quite true; they want them so much that they are willing to pay good money for them.
We the people should hold our government responsible for succumbing to corporate special interests instead of blaming the companies once they are granted such privilege.
I disagree; we should blame both. The corporations for buying government favors, and the government for allowing them to be for sale.
Then you're thinking of the top 0.01%.
The people right at the 99th percentile are still considered peons by Wall Street investment banking standards. And the kind of money that puts you at 1% (about $500k annually for a household) isn't enough to get you special access to powerful politicians. That costs a lot more.
I agree with you that we have a corrupt elite. But I prefer we use realistic statistics in defining them. The people right at the 99th percentile are not the problem.
You are absolutely right, by the way. The enemies are the Davos Men, not the people who worked their asses off to get a few million.
I think one property that our economy ought have as we head into a future of machines increasingly displacing human workers is this: If all human work in the economy stopped, wealth should converge to an approximately fair distribution, preferably within a small number of lifetimes.
I'd concede that the word itself may have been used questionably to capitalize on the associated ideological goodwill. However, simply stating it may have been abused, does not automatically preclude an actual meritocratic group from existing.
For example, while many generally dishonest individuals (eg sociopaths) may profess to being totally honest, it does not follow that a generally honest person, does not exist.
Similarly, it's quite possible to build something close to a true meritocracy. How do I know? Because this happened at my previous company. Merit, at it's core, was defined by outputs. Nothing more. Was it perfect? No, but we are dealing with messy humans, and subjectivity obviously occurs, but the point is to actively and continually encourage a culture of objectivity.
Over many years the track record bore this out.
There were those that started in 'serfdom' and yet over time, rose up. Actually, not always "up", as in traditional line management sense, but certainly in responsibilities assigned to them. Hence they received associated increases in compensation, benefits and peer respect.
Many know the theory, but how well it works in practice, depends on the ability of those leading, to truly believe and continually act in a way that promotes and entrenches the behavior, so that it becomes the culture.
An example, we had (and they still do), employees on the exec management team that started their professional journey's as junior call center agents. Conversely, those persons that partook in politicized self promotion, tended to enjoy a rather brief tenancy at the company. Either they were actively pushed out by peers and managers, or they passively drifted apart on their own accord, as their natural skills of manipulation and politicking, bore scarce fruits.
In summary, while perhaps uncommon, it is possible to for a meritocracy to flourish given excessive care and thoughtfulness is spent designing fair and useful incentives and metrics. Shallow or ill-conceived incentives and insincere leadership, could set the organization on a ruinous path over the longterm.
When I get back to blogging (probably in a week or so) one of the topics I want to hit is Smart People x War.
War is the stupidest thing imaginable: a negative-sum slugfest. It's inhumane, unjust, and wrong. So, naturally, most Smart People hate it.
However, what is the best thing for Smart People? For an irreparable fissure to occur within the Elite, splitting it into two or more pieces that want nothing more to destroy each other. (This tends to result in War.) If you look at history, the times of greatest meritocracy are also times of war.
When was the golden age of American scientific and technological R&D? The Cold War.
If you let the Elite function as one, they collude to keep Smart People down. They take all the resources and society stagnates. If you rip them in two and put the halves in mortal conflict, it creates jobs for Smart People.
So there is a weird symbiosis going on. War itself is horrendous, but the only thing that gives Smart People a chance (opportunities to ascend, rather than being preemptively shot down by a defensive Elite) is severe crisis, which War tends to produce.
Capitalism is supposed to have this effect (fissures in the Elite, creating competition and opportunity for middle-class talent) but corporate capitalism doesn't, because even if firms compete economically, they collude on who's cool and who's not. See also: VC-istan, which is more like a postmodern corporation (with founders as semi-independent PMs) than what it claims to be.
On the other hand, if you make it too easy for a young person to climb the ladder (working like a dog), than what's the point of getting to the top? There are no benefits to being there except you will be living a life with more hours at the office than ever before. The reason people work to climb the latter is because there is a reward where you can work less and tell others what to do, and they can't dethrone you.
Remove that reward, and you may find a population regarding climbing the career latter as foolishness. Why would you want to take on a second job, for no extra pay, where the workload increases exponentially with the new upstarts out of college, and the right to take it easy is gone. Like a second job at McDonalds, the moment you take it easy, you are replaced. Why strive to get that?
All things being equal, effort can well be a deciding multiplier, however.
The myth of meritocracy is more akin to predestination. A person is in power or successful, therefore they were more deserving of the position than others, regardless of privilege, nepotism, special opportunity, luck, originating class, etc.
There is a vast difference between the people who push to make society MORE of a meritocracy than the people who push the false narrative that we ARE a meritocracy, especially those who use themselves as evidence of this.