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A New Aristocracy: Yale Law School Commencement Address (2015) [pdf]
- jchallis 7y agoI found the link on archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20191023044540/https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/department/studentaffairs/document/markovitscommencementrev.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20191023044540/https://law.yale.... If one is to feel good about meritocracy, it is that the ambitious, talented and hardworking have the greatest chance of changing the system for everyone's shared benefit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jdkee 7y agoIf only there was evidence to support that assertion.
- vixen99 7y agoAs against the the unambitious, talentless and lazy having the greatest chance of changing the system for everyone's shared benefit.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe opposite of that is the stereotypical Soviet style, shoemaker working as a mason, carpenter working as the prime minister. There's a room in between for something sane, but anything sane will also be discriminatory with respect to skills. It seems to me that this pileup against meritocracy is primarily about personal rewards, and not about utility to society.
- plandis 7y agoMaybe in an ideal world. In reality however the world is hardly meritocratic.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoAre my biases deceiving me, or has the Overton window on criticizing “meritocracy” shifted? A few years ago (including in 2015 when I missed this speech) I believe it would have been unthinkable in my social circles. I’ve become convinced that meritocracy as the Yale Law elites would know it has utterly failed 99% of Americans.
- watwut 7y agoI made same observation. Also, it became more easy to argue that world is not actually meritocracy.
- skeptical900067 7y agoI think the speech agrees with you, more or less.
- llamataboot 7y agoI have noticed the reverse actually. In 1999 we had tens of thousands of people in the streets regularly against the WTO, against the IMF, against the World Bank. Working class folks, environmentalists, labor leaders, anarchists and socialists, even fairly mainstream Dems were criticizing that a pure free trade model was letting capital gain too much power at the expense of people (especially as people are locked behind borders largely), locking developing countries into unsustainable and brutal debt and austerity programs, and resulting in inequality ramping up. These days, it would be nearly unthinkable to have that many people in the streets at a WTO meeting (never-mind that they shifted the meetings to far away authoritarian countries). Granted, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do sound more critical of unfettered capitalism and the idea that capitalism is a meritocracy than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did (and so does Trump, in his own way), but they haven't been elected yet.
- EliRivers 7y agoApropos of the theme, when "meritocracy" was coined it was a warning; something damaging to society that was to be avoided. At some point, the term was hijacked and pushed as a force for good (I suspect, but cannot prove, mostly by those who were benefitting from it) and now we seem to be coming back around the circle. Meritocracies are insidious. We can see it in some societies; "this is a meritocracy" therefore rich powerful people deserve their wealth and power and the poor and powerless have only themselves to blame and deserve no help. A positive feedback cycle through the generations that leads to a stratified society of nobility and peasantry.
- nytesky 7y agoMy school and work experience span working class coal power plant techs (a friend used to climb through exhaust channels) to Ivy League educated lawyers and founders. Most people’s career trajectory will be set by the time they are in high school, so the importance of secondary school education and resources of your parents is paramount. Also, wealth from family of origin allows risk taking, funding for law or medical degrees, which for lower income students represent a huge risk so they go to safer less lucrative fields.
- esoterica 7y agoGoing to Yale law is a very low risk strategy.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoOnly if you ignore the costs of getting into Yale (and failing to get into Yale), as well as the costs of not coming out with the necessary connections and pay.
- sjg007 7y agoThe work you need to do to get into Yale has a positive impact even if you don’t go to Yale.
- arethuza 7y agoMy wife went to a top-tier law school here in the UK and one risk that she didn't appreciate is that a significant proportion (I think it was about 30%) of her class simply didn't manage to get a traineeship with a law firm and without that you can't qualify. Getting a traineeship at the time (this was the 1990s) was often heavily influenced by connections and appearance!
- jchallis 7y agoWhat is the risk associated with a medical degree? It seemed to be the default path for risk averse middle class kids with science talent.
- astrofinch 7y agoGraduating from Yale Law sounds like it's for suckers. Let the elites have their crazy working hours and stressful hoop jumping--I'm not envious.
- disabled 7y agoIn the age of big data, the gig economy, and oligrachs dominating the US economy and political sphere--you're next. You should read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits: https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/ https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/ The author is actually a Yale Law Professor, and the book came out about a month ago.
- brillas 7y agoThe author delivered this speech!
- coolio2657 7y agoI hope that poster saw that, lol.
- natalyarostova 7y agoTheir cohort effectively sets the vision for American legislation and justice. You may not be interested in them, but they're interested in you.
- thulecitizen 7y agoThis. These folks are helping to shape new laws that set precedent for every other case. For example: the wealthiest now pay historically low tax rates [1][2] [1] https://twitter.com/DLeonhardt/status/1181004566088814594 https://twitter.com/DLeonhardt/status/1181004566088814594 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
- toasterlovin 7y agoFWIW, the issue with life experience anecdotes is that they don't control for genetic confounding. Most rich kids have both the environment their parent created for them, as well as the genes their parents gave them. So it's impossible to tell which is more important in determining the life outcomes we see. There is a whole discipline called behavioral genetics that uses twin and adoption studies and, increasingly, genome wide association studies (GWAS) to tease these things apart. Most of these studies seem to point to most outcomes being about half genetic and half random (that is, something other than the environment created by the parents).
- onion2k 7y agoThe genetic point could be controlled for by looking at the children of lottery winners.
- marcoseliziario 7y agomaybe not. Probably lottery winners are addicted gamblers, have poor impulse control and so on.
- onion2k 7y agoThat's exactly the point. That should mean their children won't succeed if genetics rather than money are the most important factor. If their children do succeed then money was (probably) more important. EDIT: If 'being good with money' is an issue, for example if lottery winners don't spend their winnings on their kids, then an alternative would be to look at the successes of children who are adopted in to wealthy families.
- marcoseliziario 7y agoHmmm. yeah, good point.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- trashtester 7y agoTLDR: "Hail, victors of the meritocratic tournament! But beware that the fruits of your talent and hard labor is laden with the blackest sin! Though fear not, your sins will be cleansed if you do proper Penance, inspect your Privilege, signal your Virtue with your Symbolism (if not in your actions), and join our Crusade against the Wicked! Go forth Comrades!"
- gpestana 7y agoIf you prefer to listen the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCfe8VrCX4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCfe8VrCX4E
- knolax 7y agoThere was a dead comment in this thread that I can't respond to now. It came from legitimate grievances but embodied what I think is a dangerous and now popular sentiment. It seemed to have been mocking the language of the speech when there really isn't anything objectively wrong with the speech. The speech was in a high register but I thought it was very concise. The parody in the comment on the other hand seems to try to immitate religious language, and didn't attack the speech but the speakers and their values. It's as if the commenter perceives the academic register used in the speech as marking its contents unworthy of engaging with, the ivory tower ramblings of the elites as nonsensical and contemptible as religious rhetoric. This sort of contempt for everything associated with the upper class leads to the kind of cultural destruction we saw in Communist revolutions. Hate the elite all you want but the culture they embody is also your culture; don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
- est31 7y agoThis was a really inspiring speech. The entire speech is very valuable to read, but to give a TLDR: the new aristocracy is defined as the elite that gains their wealth through their labour rather than their assets. It's new because 50 years ago, the elite was more based on capital than their own work. It points out that you can exploit your capital without damage to yourself, but you can't exploit your own capacity to work as then you use yourself up, but that's precisely the trend as work amount expectations for elite lawyers have doubled in recent decades. The consequence of this situation is pointed out this way: > To live in this way is, quite literally, to use oneself up. Such a life proceeds under a pervasive shadow: at its worst, it squanders the capacity to set and pursue authentically embraced, intrinsically valued, goals; even at its best, this life invites deep alienation. With alienation they probably mean something like not seeing your parents, friends, family, etc for years. The proposed solution to this dilemma is then presented in the key paragraph: > The new aristocracy promotes human flourishing for no one: certainly not for the excluded rest; nor even for the ensnared rich. We are trained to think of economic inequality as presenting a zero sum game: to suppose that redistribution to benefit the bottom must burden the top. But this is not such a case: reforms that democratize training and talent would benefit everybody. Such democratic reforms would restore the bulk of Americans to full participation in an economic and social order from which they have been, for several decades now, increasingly excluded. And democratic reforms invite the elite—you all—to accept an almost costless diminution in wealth and status in exchange for a massive, precious increase in leisure and liberty, a reclaiming of your authentic selves.
- leto_ii 7y agoThe speech also points out that most people who achieve meritocratically do so because they have access to enormous amounts of resources, since birth. In essence the rich used to just hand their wealth to their children (and most still do that too), but now some actually dedicate part of their wealth to training their children to excel in a process that is often nothing more than a dog and pony show.
- fergie 7y agoI think that was the best speech I have ever read.
- fallingfrog 7y agoThis is the sort of self congratulatory pablum that every ruling class believes about itself.
- raynr 7y agoI can totally see where your comment is coming from. That speech was carefully and deliberately written and targeted and pandering to its audience, the meritocratic elite. Each sentence phrased /just so/, like the historical reference compressed into an adjective because /this/ audience is expected to know and unpack the context in real time ("Stakahnovite hours", how pithy, how self-congratulatory, and yet at the same time it is clearly intended to convey negativity by association with communism). I can't agree that it was just a self congratulatory speech. You have to speak to your audience. Some degree of pandering is expected and necessary. And, the final message was still very clear: here are the problems, you folks are supposed to be the best and the brightest, work towards finding the solution. Whatever else, you have to admit that's one damn well written speech.
- baybal2 7y agoSounds very posh to me. Giving top government position to people like that will not lead to any good.
- Ancalagon 7y agoThere is a lot of commentary in this thread about the speech being self-congratulatory in nature, but I think the actual overall tone for it is much darker. The speaker is essentially congratulating all of the graduates for working extremely hard for their entire lives, and that, despite all that hard work, they and everyone else around them will continue to work extremely hard with no end in sight. This is especially true for any of the graduates that want to earn lots of money or that want to make big changes to the system. All-the-while the speaker says that everyone else - the 99% - have essentially already lost the rat-race, and lost it before they were born. The rich are stuck in a laborious 'gilded cage' of their own creation, and everyone else is struggling to pay rent. I highly recommend you read the entire article. It presents a lot of very good points that are relevant with regard to the macro-structure of the new American economy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- js2 7y agoMarkovits came to my attention when he was a guest on Ezra Klein's show: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/64086855 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/6... He's also now published a book, The Meritocracy Trap: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/meritocracy-book-daniel-markovits-inequality-rich https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...