8 ms·

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

by evdev 6y ago

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.

rhizome 6y ago
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)?
jlawson 6y ago
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.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  You see “justice” as the societal equivalent of “self actualization”?
  - vntok 6y ago
    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.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      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)
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
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.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
gizmo686 6y ago
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.
nshepperd 6y ago
> 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.
- harimau777 6y ago
  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.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    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."
- Avshalom 6y ago
  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.
  - Scarblac 6y ago
    What if they happen to be really good at being subjugated serfs?
- evdev 6y ago
  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.
pdonis 6y ago
> 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.
- monadic2 6y ago
  > Wealth can be created. Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist and the need for disparity to drive the economy doesn’t exist either.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist I have no idea how you are getting that from what I said.
    - mushufasa 6y ago
      yeah. i can create a sandwich. that does not imply there are no other sandwiches.
      - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
        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.
seneca 6y ago
> 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice
lemoncucumber 6y ago
"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.
mcguire 6y ago
Alternatively, "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?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
alexashka 6y ago
Huh? 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?
d1zzy 6y ago
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.

by evdev 6y ago

rhizome 6y ago

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)?

jlawson 6y ago

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.

elliekelly 6y ago
You see “justice” as the societal equivalent of “self actualization”?
- vntok 6y ago
  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.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    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)

ZeroGravitas 6y ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

gizmo686 6y ago

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.

nshepperd 6y ago

> 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.

harimau777 6y ago
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.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  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."
Avshalom 6y ago
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.
- Scarblac 6y ago
  What if they happen to be really good at being subjugated serfs?
evdev 6y ago
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.

pdonis 6y ago

> 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.

monadic2 6y ago
> Wealth can be created. Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist and the need for disparity to drive the economy doesn’t exist either.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist I have no idea how you are getting that from what I said.
  - mushufasa 6y ago
    yeah. i can create a sandwich. that does not imply there are no other sandwiches.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      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.

seneca 6y ago

> 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice

lemoncucumber 6y ago

"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.

mcguire 6y ago

Alternatively, "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?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

alexashka 6y ago

Huh? 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?

d1zzy 6y ago

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.