There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand.
The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.
This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.
We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.
I grew up in a society where merit didn't really matter, most of the time. Regardless of you finished just primary school or you went to college, your expected income in the job assigned by the state (that matched your educational status) would pay mostly the same. Only if you ended up being a director at a (state run) factory or were higher positioned in The Party would you have significantly more benefits (financial and otherwise).
To my mind, that society sucked. It meant that passion, time, obsession wasn't being appreciated. The way the state was treating it was just one aspect of it but it had huge trickle down implications for the rest of the society. It meant that people with 4 classes didn't need to respect those with college, it created this perverse inverse set of values where to spend more time studying and doing things was seen as a sign of weakness, of stupidity, the "smart" people would study or do the least amount of work and "trick" their way to success. As the state assigned you your job, with extremely low risk to lose it (you would have had to be caught stealing, repeatedly) there was no incentive to work hard in your line of work. As you can imagine, if most everyone doesn't do serious work and try to "trick" their way into everything, you don't get a very competitive economy, which had negative consequences for everyone.
The repercussions of that are still felt in the country I grew up today, the value system of older generations hasn't changed. When they see a young person that got hired at am multinational company buy a shiny new foreign car, old retired people talk behind their back saying "who knows how much that young person stole" to get that car (or worse, if the young person is a young lady). When someone does anything extraordinary, the normal reaction isn't to congratulate or praise them, or to show them as an example to be followed, the natural reaction is to be envious and to suggest unsavory ways that could explain their success, because after all, like the state said a long time ago, everyone is equal.
It is a shitty, miserable society, rotten to its core that I wish nobody else would experience in their life.
> The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.
I think the trick comes even earlier: in making people think that there has to be a single "system for the distribution of wealth and status".
Wealth is not a zero sum game; there is not a fixed pool of wealth in the world that has to somehow get distributed. Wealth can be created. Indeed, wealth is created every time people make a positive sum trade, a trade in which both sides come out better off.
Status tends to be more of a zero sum game, but it doesn't have to be. For example, status here on HN does not have to be the same as, or even measured by the same criteria as, status somewhere else.
However, if we set up one centralized system that is supposed to "distribute" wealth and status, we are making zero sum games out of things that shouldn't be (wealth) or at least don't have to be (status). The solution is to stop doing that. Stop centralizing power.
Here is yet another trick: situating the creation of wealth primarily in the exchange of goods, implicitly devaluing the act of producing the goods in the first place; treating allocation as the primary problem, with production a mere by-product.
The line of thought typically proceeds by claiming that it really is the exchange that makes the wealth, because it only after exchange that the person who wants to use a thing can actually get their hands on it. However this is misleading, because production is necessary before exchange can take place.
The idolisation of the problem of allocation structures the world in a particular, and not inevitable, way, with many unsavoury properties. Allocation favours fungibility, as a tool for reducing the time needed to exchange, creating immense difficulties in valuing the act of production itself, because one line of production can just be exchanged for another. This abstraction over production removes almost all incentive to consider the future, or to plan for catastrophe, something we see visibly in the response of allocation-focused countries to the current pandemic, and in their willingness to attempt to mitigate, or even to prepare, for the consequences of human-induced climate change.
While I want to agree with the general gist of your argument, there is value created in economic activities besides production. For example, operating a pick & pack line to ship goods to end-consumers is labor intensive.
Speaking as someone who supports such an operation, shipping to end-consumers is expensive. None of the manufacturers I order from want to be in that business, they want to operate assembly lines and ship out truckloads at a time.
While my job is the classic 'middleman' in the supply chain, there is value provided that we do generate. The manufacturers I work with understand this as well; if they wanted to sell to end consumers it would be easy for them to cut us out. All they need to do is to advertise, package, and ship out individual products and provide support for those purchases.
Producers (read: manufacturers) want predictable demand and have long lead times. If I am running out of a product, my lead time is 8-12 weeks coupled with a sizeable minimum order. No end consumer wants to deal with placing an order for 26 skids of product and waiting 2 months. Specialization means some firms produce things and are good at it, others distribute those goods. Distribution is its own challenge, and takes specialization.
There are very few manufacturers an end-consumer can order goods from, for very good reasons. Honestly, I can't think of a single manufacturer that ships direct to consumers; even most alibaba 'factories' are intermediaries (and alibaba itself also acts as a retail channel).
Yes - I have a tendency to waffle, and it seems that editing came at the expense of my actual opinion, namely that a concern for both production and allocation is vital for a stable society.
Significant advantage has been found in organising redistribution of goods (and services, another important mechanism of wealth production, as pdonis mentioned in a sibling comment), and it clearly isn't something to be ignored, my point is only that a lot of the contemporary approach to thinking about economies focuses almost entirely on allocation/distribution - production is taken as a given, driven largely by demand through the allocation mechanism.
And to clarify - it is not even the first order effects (e.g. worse conditions the closer you are to "mere" production) that I find most concerning (though they are serious issues), but the higher-order effects of how society manages and maintains its productive capabilities, and prevents them from causing longer-term harms, simply because those harms aren't handled by the system of allocation.
The common response within the current mental framework is to try and manage those harms through the allocative system, by creating markets for them, but fundamentally the incentives simply aren't there in the way that they are for the allocation of things people want - they have to be coerced, and so people try to game the system.
> situating the creation of wealth primarily in the exchange of goods, implicitly devaluing the act of producing the goods in the first place
Producing goods and services also involves exchanges, but it's a fair point that there are other activities besides direct trades that can create wealth, yes. Transformation of raw materials into finished products also can. So can providing services.
There are two kinds of wealth that gets confused in the discussion.
The absolute wealth of having access to high quality services and goods with relatively low efforts. This is the wealth we create by progress.
Then there’s the relative wealth of which share of the economy you wield power over. How much of the current means of production is commanded for your personal priorities and how do they relate to others priorities? What is the opportunity cost?
> There are two kinds of wealth that gets confused in the discussion.
No, there's just wealth. Which is basically what you are calling "absolute wealth".
What you are calling "relative wealth" is not wealth; it's either simple trade (when you buy a product, you are "commanding the means of production" that produced it, but that's just how a free market works) or brute force (using either overt violence or government power to "command" resources that in a free market would go to other uses).
It does imply that sandwiches are not necessary. I’m not sure what else you can draw from a comparison between an abstract concept and physical expression of one—you certainly didn’t materialize the expression out of thin air.
I can use raw ingredients to create a sandwich too, and if we prefer the each other's sandwiches more, we can agree to trade sandwiches.
Was anything actually created during the trade though? I think that's what he's getting at. An economist would argue yes, value was created, but it's an abstract concept at best, a bit made-up at worst, because at the end of the day it's the same two sandwiches.
"Wealth isn't real" is a pretty radical take though, and I'm not sure how productive it is to contemplate because you'd have to entirely throw away the concepts of personal property and money before you can get there.
> at the end of the day it's the same two sandwiches
No, it isn't, because the sandwiches are in the possession of different people than when they started. That's where the wealth gets created: the value of each sandwich is different for different people. Many people fail to understand the concept of wealth creation because they think of "value" as something inherent to the object, instead of something that depends on who is using the object and for what purpose.
> I suggest without underlying thoughts that we exchange the sandwich back after taking a closer look at it.
You can suggest that, but why should I agree if I value the sandwich I now have more than the sandwich you have--which of course I do because that's why I agreed to the first exchange?
> Say you do for sake of argument. It has shellfish on it and you are allergic. Can we reverse the exchange and create more value?
More value relative to the state where I now realize I have a sandwich I can't eat, yes. But that's just because I was unaware, when I made the first exchange, that the sandwich I was getting was one I would be unable to eat. If I had known that before, I would have refused the first exchange.
More value relative to the original state, before the first exchange, no, since if we re-exchange the sandwiches back, we're just returning to the original state.
A simpler way of describing this case is that people can sometimes have mistaken beliefs, which causes the perceived value to them of something to be different from its actual value to them. The actual value is what matters for wealth creation. In the case where the sandwich turns out to be inedible, the first exchange actually did not create wealth; I just thought it did. Then I realized it didn't, so I was willing to undo it. In fact, given the actual facts, the first exchange destroyed some wealth, which undoing the exchange restored.
> We could also take a bite before exchanging again.
How would that make either of us want to exchange the sandwiches back again?
> (I'm not trying to prove a point, just curious how the logic extends)
I think you're missing a key aspect of the logic, which is that people make exchanges, not to satisfy someone's abstract, highly contrived thought experiment, but because they want to. So asking about exchanges that nobody would want to make is pointless.
(At least, that's how it works in a free market, where all transactions are voluntary. If people are forced to make exchanges they would not choose to make, you can no longer count on those exchanges creating wealth even if everyone's beliefs are accurate.)
> This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.
Isn't that because the aspect of merit which is measured by an arm wrestling contest isn't the same as that which is relevant to running a feudal society?
A tournament for selecting a feudal lord would need to measure economic and strategic literacy, intelligence, moral compass, etc.
It begs the question to just assume there is a "feudal society" that needs to be "run". For instance, why not have a "first citizen" who is selected to manage internal coordination and external strategy, but must live in the worst house in the village and wear a hair shirt.
You can say, well that wouldn't work! But now the idea is that the structure of this model feudal society is justified by reasons like "people won't follow someone if they don't have a gold hat and a scary sword" and not by any process that led to selecting the particular feudal lord.
This analysis is incomplete. Assume I am the best (objectively) at "managing internal coordination and external strategy" but I don't want to live in the worst house and I am allergic to hair shirts. Then I won't sign up for the job and the society is worse off for it.
Assuming a magical test that actually could pick the best lord... that would justify the lord. It wouldn't do much of anything to justify the subjugation of the serfs.
I think that the argument that they are making isn't about the role that the person ends up with but the dramatic difference in wealth, status, and privilege.
However, the inverted version of the lord and peasants scenario is not a scenario where the differences in wealth, status, and privileges are leveled out. It is a scenario where, since power corrupts, those appointed to decide how those things are allocated most equally somehow just happen to wind up favoring themselves.
Or, as Orwell so eloquently wrote "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
But the reality of feudal lords is that merit was measured by whose legs you were born between, if a penis was present and in what order you emerged. Things worked out.
Most of life is like that. Theoretically, we all want the best surgeon on the planet, but the reality is we mostly go to a random draw of a surgeon that meets or exceeds the minimum qualification.
I generally agree with your last sentence, but maybe it's a mistake to generalize it to other activities or professions.
If an adequate surgeon has an 85% success rate, and a brilliant one a 90% success rate, then it's arguable that being ten times smarter or more dexterous isn't that important, to be overly rewarded. So in that sense, merit might not matter.
But many activities or professions lend themselves to multiplying others' results. What if someone can teach all the surgeons to have 5% fewer failures? That still has diminishing returns, but what if someone figures out a way to do, say, twice as many surgeries with the same resources, or to eliminate the need for half of them? You might say they still don't need or deserve wealth, but in order to reap the benefits, society has to give those people power in some form to organize the activities of others. And wealth tends to flow to those with power.
But I would see your scenario as improving process, not doctors. Doctors are the last real guild profession in modern society, and industrialization always beats skill in the long run. As time goes on, IMO their role will get whittled away, first in primary care (already happening) and thing like radiology, and eventually in other areas.
I think there's a second substitution, hinted at in your last paragraph where the agreement that the best surgeon should do the surgeries moves to the best people should be wealthy and run society and then to "the people who already have wealth and power right now, are better than everyone else".
They sometimes try to justify that by saying that the children of the rich who've been groomed from birth are better qualified than the children of the poor, but rarely would they venture into suggesting everyone should have an equal investment in their education before merit is decided.
But does anyone actually make the final claim? A lot of people accuse their political opponents of being snobby elitists, but I don't think I've ever heard someone actually say that rich Harvard graduates are better than everyone else.
The problem is, to a first approximation, we are using the arm-wrestling tournament to determine who should be our village's chief and deputy arm wrestlers; which (I presume) is important for settling inter-village disputes. We then compensate the well lest they defect to another village; and because the benefit we get from them is so large that we can afford to pay the relatively few of them well. This compensation then gives them power in a diffuse way that is hard to combat.
In more concrete terms, look at "anti-meritocracy" [0] positions. They are talking about making, say, the programming profession more equal; and not about making the wealth and status of programmers more equal to that of, say, teachers.
Approximately no one is arguing for major changes to the system for the distribution of wealth and status; so of course the reactionary movement will not frame their arguments in that way.
[0] This is a terrible name, as the "pro-meritocracy" crowd is the more reactionary one; but all the other identifiers I can think of pull in baggage I do not want.
"If your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-?"
If you are choosing a King, would you accept the decision of the class rankings of the Harvard School of Law?
Do you mean a systematic category error, that people are "ranked" or promoted according to criteria that is irrelevant to the purpose of the ranking (e.g. armwrestling is not politics)?
> None of it would address the question of justice.
I'm probably misunderstanding your point, but this is a question of justice. Specifically, it's a question of Distributive Justice, which is "[concerned with] the socially just allocation of resources". Saying "What would we need to change about our absurd arm-wrestling-based distribution system in order for it to be just" is squarely a question of distributive justice.
Are you saying that nothing that determines who gets to be Lord can be tweaked to reach a just distribution because of the winner-take-all nature of the rewards? Further, are you suggesting that the current (American, I assume) system of distribution is equally unjust in distriubtion?
"The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond" by Nancy Fraser is a good (short!) book that talks about similar themes. I'd recommend it.
Think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of needs-like thing. You take care of the lower tiers before worrying about the upper ones.
The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.
The upper tier is 'justice'.
Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis.
Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all.
And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.
> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.
> The upper tier is 'justice'.
I'm not sure about this distinction at all. The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. The "justice" of the system is just another link in the supply chain between a person and what they need to survive, it can be a bottleneck in the same way that low production or waste can diminish access. This means that issues that might seem abstract to us are concrete to people who can't access food, shelter, or healthcare and therefore can't meet their basic needs.
And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.
> producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless
Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.
If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work.
You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.
> Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.
People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Think of all the produce which is thrown away unsold. The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. Life and business involve uncertainty.
> People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer.
Without complete certainty, yes. But nobody has complete certainty about the future. And I didn't claim complete certainty. I'm assuming readers are capable of applying common sense.
> The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand.
The reasons why life is uncertain aren't, yes.
But the reasons why people would either produce something which they know nobody will want but they still get paid for it, or would not produce something that they know people will want? Yes, that pretty much comes down to senseless government actions.
It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.
To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.
> It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.
No, just as a term that is hindering understanding rather than helping it.
> I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.
Coase didn't say free markets couldn't function with high transaction costs. He only said it would be more difficult and take longer for those markets to reach equilibrium.
Also, the true observation that free markets in the real world are always imperfect does not justify the further claim that is usually made, that governments must intervene to "fix" these imperfections. In fact, the government "fixes" almost always make things worse, often much worse. Even on strictly Coasian terms this should be evident, since the most common source of high transaction costs in modern markets is...government regulations.
However, when it comes to basic necessities--things like food, clothing, and shelter, the kinds of things this thread was originally focused on--the issue is not transaction costs for the people who need these things. There are perfectly good, low friction markets for these necessities. The problem is that governments are skewing those markets by paying people not to produce useful things, or to produce useless things instead. Or, in the case of many third world countries, the government simply confiscates all the useful things for government officials and their cronies. I don't think "transaction costs" or "access" is a useful description of those problems.
When transaction costs are too high for transactions to be made that would improve society, the losses don't somehow get made up. You have a lot of produce or something, and you can't get it transported to the people who could use it, and it gets trashed, that's permanently lost.
It seems wrong to me to dismiss this as "taking longer to reach equilibrium", as though you get to the same destination either way. Perhaps you are interpreting "function" in a loose manner, but of course I didn't mean "function" = merely "do something".
> You have a lot of produce or something, and you can't get it transported to the people who could use it
And why not? "High transaction costs" doesn't seem like a viable explanation in a world where goods constantly get shipped around the world at extremely low cost per unit. Something more like "some stupid government regulation is preventing common sense from being applied", or "corrupt officials are stealing stuff instead of letting it get sold on the open market" seems much more likely.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, since in countries which have these attributes, nobody is producing anything that would require trucks to transport, so your hypothetical of someone having a lot of produce that they can't get to people who need it doesn't apply.
If you are simply saying that there are countries which are poor because there is nobody with capital, first, that's still not a problem of "high transaction costs", it's a problem of lack of capital. And second, the problem isn't even lack of capital, since there are plenty of people in rich countries who would be glad to invest capital in poor countries--if the corrupt governments of those poor countries weren't going to steal everything of value that got invested. So we're still looking at a problem of government corruption, not "high transaction costs".
Government corruption is exactly "high transaction costs". I mean, what is the stereotype of a poor corrupt country, but one where you have to bribe someone to get anything done?
A court system that works perfectly still won't be of any help to get you fed when food isn't grown and made available to the civil servants in the first place.
There's a tendency in political philosophy (and economics) to imagine up some kind implicit or explicit of ordering of events that progress from one point or another, the ordering of which is then used to assert something about justice or the "correct" ordering or way of running of society, though on closer inspection certain of the conditions in the progression (often the earlier ones) never actually existed or did so so ephemerally such that they're not really worth worrying about, or even that all the steps kind-of happened but all at the same time or in a different or chaotically mixed-up order. It's encountered all over the place and big names do it all the time—Locke's Natural Law? Yep, built on exactly that kind of dubious base. It's everywhere in political philosophy and such orderings-as-a-foundation-for-further-reasoning or guidance aren't necessarily wrong or useless, but they're often a sign you've wandered into some weak and/or misleading reasoning.
I have a feeling this is one of those. I'm not sure "society producing some food, but unable to produce any justice until they produce a little more food" is really a thing. Humans were decent at food fairly early, and some version of justice seems absolutely central to the functioning of human communities, so I'm not inclined to believe some kind of leveling-up from "food production" to "justice" is a real thing that ever, meaningfully, happened, and if it's not something that actually happens or has happened it's worth calling into question whether that "hierarchy of needs" is real or whether reality's sufficiently more complex (or even inverted—it may be more that you need some amount of justice to have a society of humans producing food in the first place, even if they're all on the verge of starvation at the "start", whatever that even is) that such a model isn't even useful as any kind of abstract, general guide (which I suspect is the case)
What trick - we want to promote being an excellent surgeon, by rewarding them - the rewards that people are most pleased with are wealth and status.
Where is the trick?
What other justice do you imagine, other than the person who brings the goodies to the group, being rewarded for doing so, and those attempting to break this mechanism, getting removed?
I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on objective criteria. Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". This is what allows them to frame their classes to fit what they want on a brochure. I had a asian friend who took seven AP classes in one year and was a valedictorian who was rejected from Harvard. When I toured, the guide was a farm girl from rural Oregon with precisely zero credentials (according to her) who said she applied on a lark to frame the rejection letter. Ivies are a terrible example because they don't even pretend to be objective any more.
The reality is there's a lot outside the bubbles of ivy league institutions and silicon valley, and this author clearly writes from inside them. I've seen meritocracy almost everywhere I go, even though I'm not from the sort of background the author described. I got hired at my current job because I was the best person for it, though it was un-conventional. I earned scholarships through merit, not because of a particular background. The list goes on. There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.
That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process.
It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for.
The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it.
> The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.”
In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system.
The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire.
You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.
I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine.
Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.)
How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority.
As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.
> How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority.
Among current Senators, I find that 29 = 12 (R) + 16 (D) + 1 (I) went to Ivy League Schools and 71 = 41 (R) + 29 (D) + 1 (I) didn't. Only one person in the leadership of the majority party (10 people, including the president of the Senate--himself not a Senator) went to an Ivy League school. Leadership is indicated by an ﹡ below.
This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country.
This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.
If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power.
I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.
I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.
Harriet Miers didn't go to an Ivy League school, but she also never served as any type of judge, and had no other background in constitutional law like litigation or academia. Now, in previous generations people with no direct judicial experience were appointed to the Supreme Court and served well, like Earl Warren, but this has not been customary for quite some time, and Miers did not have massive outside accomplishments like Warren (3-time Governor of California).
Miers was just tremendously unqualified for the job and was nominated because she was really close buddies with GW Bush and GWB lived his whole life based on personal loyalties and relationships.
"Miers met with the Senate Judiciary Committee after her nomination and in those meetings she was ill-prepared and uninformed on the law.[25] Senator Tom Coburn told her privately that she "flunked" and "[was] going to have to say something next time."[25] Miers had difficulty expressing her views and explaining basic constitutional law concepts.[26] Miers had no experience in constitutional law and did not have extensive litigation experience; at her Texas law firm, she had been more of a manager.[27] In addition, Miers had rarely handled appeals and did not understand the complicated constitutional questions senators asked of her.[27] To White House lawyers, Miers was "less an attorney than a law firm manager and bar association president."[28]
"In an unprecedented move, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter and ranking Democrat Patrick Leahy also requested that Miers re-do some of her answers to the questionnaire submitted to her by the Committee, noting that her responses were "inadequate", "insufficient", and "insulting" because she failed or refused to adequately answer various questions with acceptable accuracy or with sufficient detail.[29] Miers also was claimed to have privately expressed a belief in the right to privacy to the pro-choice Arlen Specter, only to later deny that she had communicated that position.[30] Her answers also included an error on constitutional law where she mentioned an explicit constitutional right for proportional representation; though many court rulings have found that legislative and other districts of unequal population violate the equal protection clause, the right to proportional districts is not explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution.[31]"
Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance.
> There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.
I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...
Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.
But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.
The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score?
Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time.
I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric.
Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is.
Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept.
I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.
"Meritocracy" always works backwards in practice - the "crats" are anointed as being the ones with "merit". Credentialism is just the most obvious expression of this - e.g., you get a Harvard degree mostly by being in the social class that goes to Harvard - but it happens at every level in every way, and nearly everything which purports to assess merit in fact launders social class.
This hits me, personally, hard, because my tribe is the thoughtful, the curious, the problem-solvers, &c., and so many such people take the stated aims of the prestige launderers at face value, only to be disappointed when being smart and dedicated means nothing in reality. To plagiarize a bit, I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by what amounts to a lack of class consciousness combined with the unforgivable sin of hoping that something in the world is fair.
“The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world. Even with legacy admissions and related scandals, the Ivy League has largely been successful in this.
...
Has there ever been a higher concentration of raw intelligence and studious industry than exists right now in America's top 15 universities (and the few industries that selectively pull from them)?“
Ehh, the universities with the best concentration of talent are not the Ivies but MIT and Caltech.
My money's on the latter. A familiar example for me is the "Certified Scrum Master" racket. The only actual requirement for those was the ability to keep breathing throughout a short course. But they undeniably had an economic benefit for the holders, in that it made them more hireable by companies that needed some sort of blessing for their top-town control apparatus.
But I genuinely enjoy folks who put that crap on their resume. It's immediately a black mark.
Then again I'm mostly interviewing for the startup/small business scene, and I need people who can actually do things other than just "follow the rules".
I've had the pleasure to work with some truly talented folks, and I can promise none of them had the patience with bureaucratic bs to do certified scrum training.
Part of the problem is "the ability to do abstract symbolic manipulation" becomes conflated with "talent" which then becomes conflated with "human worth"...
This article has inspired me to read Andrew Yang's book.
As a silicon valley person, I have become part of this bubble. A lot of the things he said apply to me.
I've recently tried to understand what it looks like to leave Silicon Valley, but it is certainly not a simple thing to do. To somehow exit this so-called meritocracy and move to a place that is more focused on a holacracy (not in the Zappos way).
I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is.
That said, I don't know how I can fit into that society; I don't know how I can move there. I don't even know where there is.
"In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. ... They ... retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. ... In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country."
As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere and currently lives in a different middle of nowhere, I would like to suggest that Yang is several generations out of date. Perhaps several centuries. Or millennia.
"Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities..."
Okay.
I suspect Yang is deep within his own bubble and is like the fish that doesn't know it's wet.
I've often felt like I'm somewhere in between worlds - I'm studying at the "top" university in my country, working at a Fortune 500, etc., and on the other hand I know how to use a chainsaw, have done my fair share of home renovation, own a few guns, and hit the range on weekends.
There is pretty much any activity or community that doesn't exist within your sphere. If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies". Pick an activity or community that you don't see represented in your sphere, and that's probably what you're looking for.
As an aside: my girlfriend and close friends have commented that I speak differently when around, e.g., old boomers at the range. You can use whether you feel like you "fit in" as a litmus test, and if you don't fit in, rest assured you will in due time. In my experience, people outside of "meritocratic" (read: finance, tech, law, etc.) bubbles are very kind and welcoming.
> If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies"
Hahaha. I can spot a "tech worker" (not even just developer—manager, sales, whatever) hiker at half a kilometer (yeah there are plenty I don't spot, but there's definitely a "look" that exists in clothing and affect and is fairly common and non-tech-workers do not have it). If you tasked me with finding as many people as I could with rock climbing gym memberships but I wasn't allowed to go to such a gym to do it, I'd hit the coffee shops in our "startupy" district around lunch time on a weekday (well, not right now, but you get the idea). But I've been told I'm being ridiculous and that these activities don't have a class component to them because quite a few participants aren't involved in software companies or software development. Well yeah, but something doesn't have to be absolute to be a noticeable trend. Lacrosse, crew, skiing, squash—not technically limited to a certain social class but I bet you'd find some class-related trends among their participants, especially people who do or have done two or more of those activities with any frequency.
We like what we like in no small part they're the "right" things to like, among "our" people.
Heh. I have a lousy sense of direction. Once I was in the middle of San Francisco, utterly lost (this was in the days before ubiquitous cell phone maps), trying to make my way to a tech developer conference. I tried and failed to use a paper map. I tried asking people for directions and failed to understand or follow them.
Eventually I gave up and just looked at the people around me. Then I moved backwards along the techie gradient, which took me straight there on the shortest possible path.
(No lanyards at the time, either. Or I was new enough at the game to not know to look for them? I don't recall.)
The argument from surgeon is so bad that it's borderline eristic. Surgeon has a very clearly defined objective while politics is the total opposite.
Politics is about deciding what to optimize for - "what should be" which just cannot be "meritocratically" derived from "what is". If somebody claims they have some special "merit" that makes them fit for this kind of decisions, you should ask them to walk on water or something.
In theory, they are not the same job. The actual decision making is supposed to be deferred to civil servants, who are (in theory) hired or appointed based on their technical qualifications.
Even this article misses the root injustice of meritocracy.
Meritocracy is just another way to grant those born with advantages yet more advantages. The most fortunate people in a meritocracy are those born smarter and with greater capacity to learn, or those born into an environment to foster a mental framework that lends itself to success. Meritocracy rewards the fortunate with wealth and success just as much as a system that provides power by default to those born into wealth or beauty (though arguably the recipients of the benefit are more diffuse). The real difference on which to select such a system is not a matter of justice then, it's a matter of which one provides better outcomes. Here, I agree with the article. The merits we select for in our version of "Meritocracy" are a poor proxy measurement for a measured and just leader.
Meritocracy does not "reward" wealth, beauty or other social advantages (except to the extent that humans will tend to reward those things under any social arrangement whatsoever); it rewards people who make consequential decisions, and are thereby held responsible for those choices. The ideal is that there has to be some sort of flip side to every "reward", so that the arrangement is socially beneficial to all parties.
Again, many are born with inherent advantages such as innate intelligence, health, mental stability, and an environment that fosters success. The merit they are capable of developing is made possible by a combination of these things. That being the case, it is inevitable that Meritocracy rewards the fortunate for being fortunate. The difference between Meritocracy and other frameworks to select the powerful is that the people born with the advantages listed above tend to win instead of simply those born into wealth/power/beauty/etc. (Though those with wealth/power/beauty/etc. do actually tend to win anyway because this provides them ways to develop merit or proxies for merit or ways to circumvent merit).
There is simply no framework that does not provide someone with certain characteristics systematic advantages to gaining power.
"Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born."
Yes this. I remember when nerds were outcasts, that really colours the situation. Maybe there's a dark kind of 'fairness' in that! No more! The cool, good looking popular kids now get the best grades! That's the most 'unfair' thing I can imagine!
And this: " Our specialty is light-commitment benevolence. We will do something to help but not enough to hurt us or threaten our own standing. We know better than to do that...."
"The remarkable thing about these numbers (and Yang provides lots of them) is that four of the six industries (consulting, law, finance, and academia) are easily described as parasitic or predatory, secondary adornments to the actual business of human activity on the Earth."
One might suggest that one of these things is not like the others. (One might also suggest that a glance at the right column would be one reason why.)
The problem is the complete lack of goals. (The meaning of life if you like)
Thus far people with this merit did a wonderful job subjugating the rest of humanity to their will. (I'm no doubt guilty for a wild share of this.)
The best part is where I convince you that I did you a favor! The challenge of it is in trying not to laugh.
So yeah, I have merit and you do not. It means you should trade everything you own and your labor for these mirrors and glass beads. You wont know why but you'll thank me later. You will just have to trust me. I mean, don't I look sophisticated with all this stuff I've traded for the beads from other folk? How could you think they all made the wrong choice? Look how many of them are working in my field?
Why do all of the other animals have such fun and interesting lives without any of those intellectuals? If people are poor enough there are no rent collectors. Dogs can still be fooled into employment. Cats are doing the exact opposite! With luck you can convince them not to do things. I conclude cats have more merit than people.
The problem is the "meritocracy" is thinly disguised "aristocracy."
There's some minor inward movement towards the core for certain kinds of ruthlessly narcissistic clever types. But you're never going to be president of the US without significant aristocratic money backing you, no matter how good your SATs are.
The deeper problem is you can't define "merit" unless you know what your goals are as a culture. What are the long-term goals of the US? How about the planet as a whole?
It's fairly obvious that the US is caught up in a surreal game called "Make and keep as much money as possible." But what happens outside of that? Does anyone have a long-term plan?
If you don't know where you're going, how are you supposed to pick the right people to help you get there?
The term "meritocracy", like the term "capitalism", was originally coined strictly as a means of criticizing the concept, yet the people doing the criticism don't really say that meritocracy is necessarily bad, just that they don't think we really have one. I have yet to see any suggestions on what to replace the current system with, though. Usually when somebody criticized meritocracy, they suggest stratifying everybody into a few broad categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and then it seems to be implied that the meritocracy competition occurs within those categories.
The main point about -ocracy is a really good one, but the article makes so many blanket statements without any real evidence that seem way off base. The Ivy League schools (and quite a few other liberal arts colleges that should be included in this argument) historically were playgrounds for the rich, with academics being one of the games. No, Texas elite weren't shooting for Baylor (unless they were of a particular religious stripe), the super-elites in Texas were shooting for the big Ivy's, and next category was Rice. (Or Vanderbilt in Tennessee, etc.) Stanford has been an important elite institution in the US for a long time.
Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad.
I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's".
Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people.
I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better."
There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?
TLDR: In a Meritocracy, the "most talented" rule over everyone else. But talented != good person. In other words, it may be the dictatorship of intelligent sociopaths.
But go read the article. It's easy to follow along, yet argues well.
But we don't have any better measure of a "good person" than we do a talented one (outside of specific talents like playing piano or juggling chainsaws). We do have an imperfect way to measure intelligence, via performance on written tests and assignments.
Never forget that Meritocracy the term was created to mock the idea of it even being possible, now it's become a mainstream accepted thought. Usually the tragedy comes before the farce, I guess this time is different.
Comments typically start as dead because the poster is "shadowbanned", for some string of particularly unconstructive comments in the past. (I don't know if enough vouches can cause a user to be un-banned.)
This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about meritocracy from it. There is an ancient tale about a dozen blind met each touching parts of an elephant and describing it, some say elephants are long like a tube, others round like a ball, etc...
If you don't have a big picture view, it is best to be aware of it :) Meritocracy is just a politicized term for 'competence'. We want competent people running things, that's obvious.
What we also want is for people who were competent but no longer are, to be replaceable - that's the real issue. If idiots from ivy league schools who cheated their way through school or were only good at taking tests got found out afterwards, attendance wouldn't be so hotly contested.
This works in sports - the minute LeBron can't play well, he will be replaced by somebody else who can and it doesn't matter that he was the best player of his generation.
This doesn't work in politics and many other fields because the people evaluating their competence are largely selfish idiots. If it is in your selfish interest to promote less competent people some of the time and you value your selfish interest above most things - we have a problem.
If it were a matter of intelligent people having trouble decoding what competence meant in various fields, it is something we could improve upon as time goes on as we get better at science. Our current problems, are problems of idiots being capable of attaining decision-making power (becoming wealthy, becoming high ranking officials in government, business, academia) and holding on to it, regardless of their competence over time.
This is what people are usually mad about - they call it being a parasite, being the 1%, being a wasp, etc and they are right, while also being too dumb to know what to do about it :) People want to work hard to give their kids a better future, while not realizing that other people wanting their kids and their friends to have a better future, is the same mechanism that leads to their kids' future being shitty!
People are so dumb - they think they're upset about corruption/inequality/whatever while the vast majority of them are simply wishing the power dynamics were in their favor :)
If you want competence over time, you need to abandon the idea of anyone having power over others regardless of their competence level. Georgism [0] is an economic movement that was aware of this problem in regards to land ownership - I'd go on to say it has to cut across all spheres of life - anyone getting to hold on to power regardless of their competence, is something most should agree upon, is a mistake. In order for most to agree upon this - they'd need to not be idiots. It always boils down to too many idiots folks :)
We have created a system that allows ivy graduates to truly believe they are the best humanity has to offer and therefore know what's best for everyone. Yet most of these graduates were raised in sheltered environments and therefore don't understand the thought process of the average person. Not only does this make it hard for them to solve the problems of average people, it also makes them less likely to care about those problems. While everyone chosen to be in the meritocratic upper class is patting themselves on the back for growing the stock market the vast majority of people aren't seeing the gains from that growth.
I didn't create this system, did you? :) I was born into it.
This subtle self-blaming via alignment with group-identity over self-identity is a dirty mind-virus.
Ivy league kids were born into a system of their parents pushing them to go these schools and think a specific way. Solving the problems of average people is an impossible task, because an average person is a selfish moron that is largely interested in winning zero-sum games at the expense of those around them.
This is manifested as wanting to get laid among ages 15-30, wanting to make money, wanting power/fame. At ages 30-death it is manifested as 'a better future for my children' which is always measured up against other children, again a zero sum game.
How do you solve a zero-sum problem so that everyone wins? The answer is, it is impossible.
Sorry to burst that 'rich evil folks are the problem' bubble - the problem is much deeper - most people are morons who do what's best for them, without much thought for what's best for others. This worked in small tribes because the feedback mechanisms for being a selfish asshole were almost immediate and as a result, selfish desire to not get your ass beat by the tribe forced out obvious bad behaviour and aligned everyone to a common goal. Now that we live in big cities - the feedback mechanism is broken - we're living among Gordon Geckos of the world.
Only non-idiots like me who actually think about the big picture can even see the problem, the rest will forever be stuck playing zero-sum games without knowing it, until people like me either re-educate them, implant their brains to make them less idiotic, etc, or make them go extinct :)
>most people are morons who do what's best for them, without much thought for what's best for others.
I very much agree with this. That's the problem. Us meritocracy winners truly believe we're smarter than everyone else. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter, because even if it is that doesn't mean we know what's best for the losers, even if they are unintelligent and immoral. That's the point of the article, this view that you and I share is toxic, especially because there's some truth to it.
function unkownPersonOnTheInternetBenefitsFromSystemHeSheWasBornInto(person: Person) -> Boolean
Please provide the body of the function and a description of the type Person you're using to ask such a question. Is the body of your function equal to 'return true' by any chance? I shudder at your description of type Person.
Please provide your qualifications for making wisdom claims, other than presumably having read a bumper sticker you thought was clever that had words 'wisdom' and 'idiot' in it?
The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.
This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.
We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.