7 ms·

The Problem with Meritocracy

48 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

pragmatic 17y ago
Bogus. Lowest unemployment is in "flyover" country: http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years. Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.
- pragmatic 17y ago
  Rapid City, which is in the Black Hills Region of South Dakota is #10 lowest unemployment in the Nation. It's also the nastiest part of the state with gangs, crime, etc. I'm making no judgments, etc, just giving you some info. However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city. Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.
  - turkishrevenge 17y ago
    I can vouch for Philadelphia. I live right across the river from it. The city itself is really is a hole. There is rampant crime and the infrastructure is literally crumbling. North Philadelphia, is essentially a war-zone, and across the river in New Jersey, you have the urban decay of Camden and Trenton. And to think, all of this is in the most heavily populated region in the country, the Northeast megalopolis (Northeast megalopolis). Of course, there used to a great deal more manufacturing in those places as well--for instance the shipyard in Philadelphia.
  - chadgeidel 17y ago
    As a Rapid City native, I am surprised to hear this. I have not lived there in about 5 years, but I grew up there and my parents and brother still live there. Sure, there are people on "tough times" but I can't believe that it's the "nastiest part of the state." Of course, these are just my personal observations. I lived on the "good side" of town and my father (who owns a construction company) did fairly well.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  Oops. There go some of the points I was trying to argue else where in this thread. Should have read to the end before replying.
marciovm123 17y ago
I see these situations as people being forced to confront the trade-offs between Equality and Freedom. The prevailing sense in America is that Freedom is the most important value, and that Equality is pretty important too. However, attaining Equality often involves infringing on Freedom and vice-versa. Maximizing economic freedom is one of the core principles of America, which has resulted in amazing wealth and technology, but also means that Equality is inevitably de-emphasized - we have to accept that. The OP thinks that this is a problem, and that Americans should become more local. However, he fails to realize that America is made up of people who were fed up with staying local. That is why they packed up their bags, left their jobs, friends and family and traveled far to come live here. Why would their offspring be any different?
- arethuza 17y ago
  I think you'll find that pretty much all of us are decended from people who were fed up staying local. Otherwise we'd all still be in Kenya.
  - marciovm123 17y ago
    touche
    - arethuza 17y ago
      Interesting fact that I learned from Time Team recently: the UK has apparently had 7 completely separate waves of human habitation, with the population being completely wiped out by Ice Ages in between.
- defen 17y ago
  For a self-professed arch-conservative Catholic monarchist's take on the equality vs. freedom debate I recommend "Liberty or Equality" by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp
etherael 17y ago
The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence. All this supposedly so those that are incapable of succeeding in a meritocracy are not sentenced to the terrible fate of believing themselves worthy of their low station. I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing. Feudalism died for a reason, let's not bring it back.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Imagine the state the world would be in if someone had put into practice his proposed "solution" back in, say, 1500. People who succeed do not just benefit themselves, they often benefit many others, including future generations. And people are motivated to succeed by desiring the rewards that come with success such as wealth, fame, etc. Without such incentives, success and progress suffer. Art, architecture, literature, music, and poetry suffers. The study and practice of medicine, physics, and chemistry suffers. Innovation in industry suffers. Free enterprise suffers. Everyone's quality of life is reduced because the automobile was never invented, penicillin was never discovered, radio was never discovered, the electric light bulb was never invented, the refrigerator was never invented, etc, etc, etc. Should we discourage the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the John Carmacks, the Sergey Brins, the JK Rowlings, and the Steve Jacksons of the world because there are so many other folks who are perfectly content to spend their lives working at the Try N Save and watching 5 hours of TV a night and some of those folks find their lives dissatisfying in comparison? Quiet down! You're being unruly! You're making everyone else look bad with your success! Here, come slum with us, it'll make everyone happier in the end, honest. Time and time again history has shown that unfettered individual liberty maximizes progress, both for individuals and for society as a whole. There will always be inequality and tragedy, that's the nature of life. Trying to pretend that we can make everyone identically equal and erase everything that makes people different from one another is a distopian vision, very Borg-like and anti-humane.
  - drunkpotato 17y ago
ojbyrne 17y ago
Currently, the lowest rates of unemployment are in flyover country. The Dakotas, Wyoming, Oklahoma...
sethg 17y ago
It occurs to me that one of the effects of meritocratic mobility is that school systems in less-desirable places get caught in a downward spiral. Public schools in Kansas, for example, get the bulk of their revenue from Kansas taxpayers. But if someone rises through the Kansas school system, does extremely well, and ends up with a high-paying job in New York, that person’s taxes will be going to support public schools in New York, not Kansas.
sgoranson 17y ago
That Vonnegut short story is the first thing that comes to mind for the author's solution: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Sukotto 17y ago
Wow, I never thought about things from this perspective before. Quite a lot of things I find weird about American culture -- in particular the politics here -- make a lot more sense viewed through this lens. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.
- billybob 17y ago
  I thought it was interesting too. I would sum it up as "local culture and equality are important, and are being destroyed by an ideal of individual aspiration. Current policies push us toward the latter; they should be made neutral or to favor the former." An interesting point. It's true that our scholarship system tends to pull talent from small towns to large ones, and maybe that has negative implications. But to actively discourage people from their ambition seems wrong. Let THEM decide whether local culture, traditional community, etc, are valuable to them. Another point: is a government-enforced local culture as good as a naturally developed one? Can you ever regain the attitude "that's the way life is around here, just like in great-grandpa's day" by making policies? Or will you just have festering resentment by those with stunted talent? To me, this is part of the inherent flaw of communism.
grellas 17y ago
Semi-bizarre ruminations about why kids from the midwestern U.S. leave home when they grow up and don't come back. As someone who did just that many years ago, I can sum it up in a much shorter way: because there is nothing going on there. Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities. A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.
- jerf 17y ago
  You raise in passing a very good point to consider when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person? It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you think you want to study biology, but you really want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.) Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you can't tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you can tell them that, but you will be lying.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better. You can't have it all. Ever.
  - Kisil 17y ago
    >If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.) > when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person? We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
When the premise is that flyover country is rotting because all the really smart people leave and never come back? I'm bailing out of the article. If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.
- ovi256 17y ago
  I wish it were so, but I do not think it will be for some time. First, even if the technical means for remote work exist (and the means have existed for some time), inertia delays their adoption. Second, even if business switches to remote work, people will still move to business centers for a while, again by inertia. These two delays are considerable enough that I think it is more likely for us to see another paradigm switch than current trends coming to completion. Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.
proemeth 17y ago
Long but worth the read, because insightful, well researched and written. It questions a value that can be so deeply rooted in our paradigms that i got a bit of a "shock" myself. I love to read something so refreshing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
eplanit 17y ago
Not sure at all why this article is this particular forum (neither Hacking nor News is contained). It's socialist proselytism, laced with logical fallacies, pseudo-intellectualism, and bizarre non-sequiturs regarding societies vs. organizations. It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.
- eplanit 17y ago
  Oh - sorry, comrades, to offend the 'collective'.
junklight 17y ago
The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve". What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - which in fairness seems to be the purpose of the civil service), the cost of doing anything tends to be immense and people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen.
- arethuza 17y ago
  The civil service is a meritocracy - they just don't use sane metrics for what merit is.
  - junklight 17y ago
    Well yes - one metric might be characterised as "how well you are able to work in the civil service". Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve". What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen." You just described the Indian Civil Service - which of course we inherited from the British and fucked up in our own unique ways.
Kisil 17y ago
Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility). I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.
- DenisM 17y ago
  It's easy to prove as well - meritocratic societies seem to have survived and won over communal societies.
igorhvr 17y ago
Who is John Galt?
DenisM 17y ago
tl;dr: When judged on their merit stupid people get upset. However if wealth and status are allocated randomly every loser has an excuses in randomness of luck. Author believes the latter is a better world.
azgolfer 17y ago
The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.

48 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

Bogus. Lowest unemployment is in "flyover" country: http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years. Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.

pragmatic 17y ago
Rapid City, which is in the Black Hills Region of South Dakota is #10 lowest unemployment in the Nation. It's also the nastiest part of the state with gangs, crime, etc. I'm making no judgments, etc, just giving you some info. However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city. Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.
- turkishrevenge 17y ago
  I can vouch for Philadelphia. I live right across the river from it. The city itself is really is a hole. There is rampant crime and the infrastructure is literally crumbling. North Philadelphia, is essentially a war-zone, and across the river in New Jersey, you have the urban decay of Camden and Trenton. And to think, all of this is in the most heavily populated region in the country, the Northeast megalopolis (Northeast megalopolis). Of course, there used to a great deal more manufacturing in those places as well--for instance the shipyard in Philadelphia.
- chadgeidel 17y ago
  As a Rapid City native, I am surprised to hear this. I have not lived there in about 5 years, but I grew up there and my parents and brother still live there. Sure, there are people on "tough times" but I can't believe that it's the "nastiest part of the state." Of course, these are just my personal observations. I lived on the "good side" of town and my father (who owns a construction company) did fairly well.
jimbokun 17y ago
Oops. There go some of the points I was trying to argue else where in this thread. Should have read to the end before replying.

marciovm123 17y ago

I see these situations as people being forced to confront the trade-offs between Equality and Freedom. The prevailing sense in America is that Freedom is the most important value, and that Equality is pretty important too. However, attaining Equality often involves infringing on Freedom and vice-versa. Maximizing economic freedom is one of the core principles of America, which has resulted in amazing wealth and technology, but also means that Equality is inevitably de-emphasized - we have to accept that. The OP thinks that this is a problem, and that Americans should become more local. However, he fails to realize that America is made up of people who were fed up with staying local. That is why they packed up their bags, left their jobs, friends and family and traveled far to come live here. Why would their offspring be any different?

arethuza 17y ago
I think you'll find that pretty much all of us are decended from people who were fed up staying local. Otherwise we'd all still be in Kenya.
- marciovm123 17y ago
  touche
  - arethuza 17y ago
    Interesting fact that I learned from Time Team recently: the UK has apparently had 7 completely separate waves of human habitation, with the population being completely wiped out by Ice Ages in between.
defen 17y ago
For a self-professed arch-conservative Catholic monarchist's take on the equality vs. freedom debate I recommend "Liberty or Equality" by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp

etherael 17y ago

The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence. All this supposedly so those that are incapable of succeeding in a meritocracy are not sentenced to the terrible fate of believing themselves worthy of their low station. I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing. Feudalism died for a reason, let's not bring it back.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Imagine the state the world would be in if someone had put into practice his proposed "solution" back in, say, 1500. People who succeed do not just benefit themselves, they often benefit many others, including future generations. And people are motivated to succeed by desiring the rewards that come with success such as wealth, fame, etc. Without such incentives, success and progress suffer. Art, architecture, literature, music, and poetry suffers. The study and practice of medicine, physics, and chemistry suffers. Innovation in industry suffers. Free enterprise suffers. Everyone's quality of life is reduced because the automobile was never invented, penicillin was never discovered, radio was never discovered, the electric light bulb was never invented, the refrigerator was never invented, etc, etc, etc. Should we discourage the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the John Carmacks, the Sergey Brins, the JK Rowlings, and the Steve Jacksons of the world because there are so many other folks who are perfectly content to spend their lives working at the Try N Save and watching 5 hours of TV a night and some of those folks find their lives dissatisfying in comparison? Quiet down! You're being unruly! You're making everyone else look bad with your success! Here, come slum with us, it'll make everyone happier in the end, honest. Time and time again history has shown that unfettered individual liberty maximizes progress, both for individuals and for society as a whole. There will always be inequality and tragedy, that's the nature of life. Trying to pretend that we can make everyone identically equal and erase everything that makes people different from one another is a distopian vision, very Borg-like and anti-humane.
- drunkpotato 17y ago

ojbyrne 17y ago

Currently, the lowest rates of unemployment are in flyover country. The Dakotas, Wyoming, Oklahoma...

sethg 17y ago

It occurs to me that one of the effects of meritocratic mobility is that school systems in less-desirable places get caught in a downward spiral. Public schools in Kansas, for example, get the bulk of their revenue from Kansas taxpayers. But if someone rises through the Kansas school system, does extremely well, and ends up with a high-paying job in New York, that person’s taxes will be going to support public schools in New York, not Kansas.

sgoranson 17y ago

That Vonnegut short story is the first thing that comes to mind for the author's solution: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

Sukotto 17y ago

Wow, I never thought about things from this perspective before. Quite a lot of things I find weird about American culture -- in particular the politics here -- make a lot more sense viewed through this lens. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.

billybob 17y ago
I thought it was interesting too. I would sum it up as "local culture and equality are important, and are being destroyed by an ideal of individual aspiration. Current policies push us toward the latter; they should be made neutral or to favor the former." An interesting point. It's true that our scholarship system tends to pull talent from small towns to large ones, and maybe that has negative implications. But to actively discourage people from their ambition seems wrong. Let THEM decide whether local culture, traditional community, etc, are valuable to them. Another point: is a government-enforced local culture as good as a naturally developed one? Can you ever regain the attitude "that's the way life is around here, just like in great-grandpa's day" by making policies? Or will you just have festering resentment by those with stunted talent? To me, this is part of the inherent flaw of communism.

grellas 17y ago

Semi-bizarre ruminations about why kids from the midwestern U.S. leave home when they grow up and don't come back. As someone who did just that many years ago, I can sum it up in a much shorter way: because there is nothing going on there. Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities. A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.

jerf 17y ago
You raise in passing a very good point to consider when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person? It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you think you want to study biology, but you really want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.) Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you can't tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you can tell them that, but you will be lying.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better. You can't have it all. Ever.
- Kisil 17y ago
  >If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.) > when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person? We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

When the premise is that flyover country is rotting because all the really smart people leave and never come back? I'm bailing out of the article. If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.

ovi256 17y ago
I wish it were so, but I do not think it will be for some time. First, even if the technical means for remote work exist (and the means have existed for some time), inertia delays their adoption. Second, even if business switches to remote work, people will still move to business centers for a while, again by inertia. These two delays are considerable enough that I think it is more likely for us to see another paradigm switch than current trends coming to completion. Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.

proemeth 17y ago

Long but worth the read, because insightful, well researched and written. It questions a value that can be so deeply rooted in our paradigms that i got a bit of a "shock" myself. I love to read something so refreshing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

eplanit 17y ago

Not sure at all why this article is this particular forum (neither Hacking nor News is contained). It's socialist proselytism, laced with logical fallacies, pseudo-intellectualism, and bizarre non-sequiturs regarding societies vs. organizations. It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.

eplanit 17y ago
Oh - sorry, comrades, to offend the 'collective'.

junklight 17y ago

The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve". What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - which in fairness seems to be the purpose of the civil service), the cost of doing anything tends to be immense and people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen.

arethuza 17y ago
The civil service is a meritocracy - they just don't use sane metrics for what merit is.
- junklight 17y ago
  Well yes - one metric might be characterised as "how well you are able to work in the civil service". Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at
plinkplonk 17y ago
"The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve". What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen." You just described the Indian Civil Service - which of course we inherited from the British and fucked up in our own unique ways.

Kisil 17y ago

Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility). I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.

DenisM 17y ago
It's easy to prove as well - meritocratic societies seem to have survived and won over communal societies.

igorhvr 17y ago

Who is John Galt?

DenisM 17y ago

tl;dr: When judged on their merit stupid people get upset. However if wealth and status are allocated randomly every loser has an excuses in randomness of luck. Author believes the latter is a better world.

azgolfer 17y ago

The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.