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"Estonia wants to be a role model and leader for a different way of seeing the world: a world that is more open, meritocratic and reflective of the demands—and

• lwhalen 9y ago
  Is it bad if they just fall by the wayside? If one puts forth zero effort, they should get zero reward.
  • gervase 9y ago
    What if they exert maximal effort, but achieve zero results?
    • whb07 9y ago
      Kind of like any venture where you try as hard as possible and yet fail ? Kind of like an athlete in the olympics who ends up losing by a fraction of a second? Idk, they don’t get the gold right?
      • txsh 9y ago
        So, in your world, the best software developer gets paid the most (gold), the second best gets paid less (silver), the third best gets paid the least (bronze), and everybody else works as slaves because they're losers.
        • pjmorris 9y ago
          "As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired." - from Glengarry Glen Ross
        • crankylinuxuser 9y ago
          There's capitalism in a nutshell. Except first prize was granted by your parents and upbringing. Second prize was partially because of parents and upbringing, but with a bit more luck. And bronze? Yeah, well they're just lazy and bad and they deserve what little they have - cause the Gold and Silver earned what they have.
          • fastball 9y ago
            And this goes all the way back to the proverbial Adam and Eve? Don't we then all have the same ancestors and therefore all equal opportunity?
            • crankylinuxuser 9y ago
              1. I didn't bring religion into this. You did. 2. I reject to what amounts to a nice story with no basis in fact. If I remember my judeao-christian studies, the woman was less than the man in those stories. 3. It is evident that even being born, not all babies are equal. And that's before we consider socioeconomic status. Should humans be considered as equal? Of course. However its quite easily demonstrated that people aren't. This is reductio ad absurdio.
              • prawn 9y ago
                I think you can ignore the religious mention and in good-faith (ha!) take their point to be that we ultimately have common ancestors. Then respond that your family has a strong effect but it's not the only one.
            • s73v3r_ 9y ago
              "Don't we then all have the same ancestors and therefore all equal opportunity?" Just about every study done on the subject shows that the family you're born into has a HUGE effect on how successful you'll be in life.
              • fastball 9y ago
                Yes, and presumably some parents work hard to give their children a good future and some do not. Is this irrelevant? Why is it not acceptable for someone that had better parents to do better?
        • dang 9y ago
          Could you please not post like this? It leads to low-quality flamewars, and there's specifically a guideline against it: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • chipperyman573 9y ago
    No, if you could guarantee that only people who contribute nothing would be affected by this, and there would be no edge cases (people with disabilities, etc) Also, "zero effort" is subjective - is playing video games all day zero effort? I would say so, but some Twitch streamers would disagree.
  • njarboe 9y ago
    "fall by the wayside" is a bit hand wavy. Do you mean they become poor, broke, with nothing to loose, ripe for a revolution? Or that they are killed by automated drones when they come over the fence of your/my/our/their gated community?
    • lwhalen 9y ago
      if they were prone to revolution, you'd think "get a danged job" would be the path of least resistance (pun fully intended).
      • mathgladiator 9y ago
        I've been thinking about this with respect to America's future. Basically, suppose people want a revolution. Well, that would require a competent leader to make the mob effective. This is the rub, if you have leadership skills then you make bank and would be in 'the system'.
        • ACow_Adonis 9y ago
          The implicit assumption here is that American firms actually higher leaders based on some kind of objective leadership skills (and that the market will suck them all up). I'm guessing whoever wrote this hasn't grown up poor/discriminated against, didn't beat their peers and find themselves never-the-less judged/ousted because they "weren't of the right background/proper means/cultural fit". And remember, all it takes is a few key leaders. And that includes those who may have been part of the system but were unjustly ousted...(or those who just think they are getting a wiff of the winds of change and want to be on the right side) /I'm not making any actual prediction of revolution the US incidentally. I'd be inclined against any theories of imminent revolution. Just pointing out that simple theories of "it wouldn't happen here because of our fake-meritocracy" are pretty off the mark.
          • mathgladiator 9y ago
            There are objective things like 'people follow you' Why are you making assumptions about me? What if leadership isn't about beating your peers, but about using influence to bring people together?
  • ACow_Adonis 9y ago
    It never ceases to amaze me how most people in capitalist (all) countries continue to work under the folk-belief of a labor theory of value. How much effort you put in has, at best, a second order relation to reward. Far stronger effects are supply, demand, mechanism of action, distribution of initial resources, and social factors.
    • ixtli 9y ago
      It's pretty shocking. What becomes _infuriating_ is when they say this while also defending their right to own the product of that labor because they were there first or happened to present capital in the right place at the right time.
    • jadedhacker 9y ago
      I thought the idea of a labor theory of value wasn't related to the actual effort you put in, but more that value is related to how much average social labor would be currently invested to acquire or produce something. So if you have a machine you can pull a lever to produce 10 items in 1 second, each of those items acquires 1/10th of a human-second of value. I get though that those other conditions matter more in terms of the actual price though. Marx distinguished between "value", "use-value", and "exchange-value", the latter being price, the second being required for value or exchange value, and the first being used as the basis of comparison between goods. I took it to mean that exchange value is like temperature while value is like heat. Can you elaborate? I'd like to know more about how these different theories interact.
  • jadedhacker 9y ago
    It sounds like you are not a fan of landlords or am I misunderstanding something.
    • mathgladiator 9y ago
      Setting up a rental is actually a lot of work that is upfront and has a ton of risk. You also need to pay taxes, so it's not based on effort at steady state. Steady state is based on cashflow management.
      • jadedhacker 9y ago
        This ignores that major developers can absorb a lot of risk and aggregate. It also ignores that foreclosures on ordinary people can be snapped up by banks and developers. It also ignores that tax abatements are very popular and often extremely undeserving. Near where I live, tax abatements are granted regularly and come out of the school budget. If the housing market keeps going up, where's the risk? You'd have to be the dumbest man in NYC real estate to lose money like the president's son-in-law. Small time landlords are a slightly different ballgame, but it's still bizarre that we allow individuals to speculate on where people live and and extract money from the less wealthy in this fashion. EDIT: Also, what other job requires work up-front, but then nearly none? Landlords are famous for terrible upkeep. Even in communities where problems are generally fixed, most of the time, the landlord just collects a check until a problem pops up. They only have to work for rare serious problems and for managing move-in move-out. EDIT2: The craziest thing is that we see that they do this and still collect 25%+ of ordinary people's incomes for an invisible service that is merely holding intellectual property. It's as though people pay to live in a castle keep with no services, pay the local lord, and justify giving 25%+ taxes on top of what you give to the actual democratic government (typically less to much less) because the lord is somehow a great symbol of the economic system.
        • refurb 9y ago
          I'd suggest you do some reading on investing in and managing real estate. It's a lot of work with a lot of risk.
  • prawn 9y ago
    How do you feel about China's forays into social scoring that limits the choices available to those with indiscretions (unpaid fines, etc). They can't fly, access particular services, etc. If the limitations/rewards vary based on who is in power, I can see that becoming quickly challenging. Internet access could be deemed a reward, for example.
• mpweiher 9y ago
  > in a meritocratic world, what happens to the dumb and/or lazy? They don't get to run things? Put another way: assuming you're going to have some sort of hierarchy, and you will, how would you want to organize that hierarchy? Merit seems like the least bad way to do so.
  • stonogo 9y ago
    "Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. All your plan would do is give the power to the people who define "merit." It's like you're advocating for correctpersonocracy. Put another way, literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy. The actual word 'meritocracy' comes from a book that warned about the dangers of creating easily-gamed draconian systems that needlessly exclude people from the process of governing. I wish as many people would read the book as use the word.
    • ffreire 9y ago
      And by book you are referring to "The Rise of Meritocracy"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
      • tome 9y ago
        Undoubtedly
    • mpweiher 9y ago
      > "Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. It's not? What are SAT scores, school grades, entrance exams for the civil service, election results, income etc.? I would say that these are all ways for society to quantify merit. Did you mean perfectly accurately? > literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy. Nope. Most governments used to call themselves monarchies and would have bristled at the idea that they'd have to somehow demonstrate merit to justify their power. Their power was justified by heredity, and in fact, I'd think that if you suggested that they needed to do demonstrate their merit, you might end up short a head. > The book Yep. Have to admit I didn't read it, but I did read what the author wrote: "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit." What he objects to is the following: "It is the opposite [of good] when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others." So merit-based selection: good. Ossified class system: bad. I think Trump, May and Johnson are ample evidence that we leave plenty of room for the incompetent to get a chance at the reins, even if we generally try to organize ourselves by merit. And so exactly the fact that we can't quantify merit with perfect accuracy, and have multiple domains, helps us avoid the problems Young mentions, though here as elsewhere we aren't at all perfect.
• mindslight 9y ago
  Ordering implies nothing about distribution. You could have a system where winner-takes-all, and the second best on down starves. You could also have a system where the upper half is rewarded with 10% more than the lower half. Both of these could be described as meritocratic. Beware of those who use the label of meritocracy to advocate for winner-take-all, as well as those who denounce the concept by equating it to winner-takes-all.