7 ms·

The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit

33 points by MaysonL 6y ago

j_walter 6y ago
"There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree." I could not agree more with this statement. There are far too many people that believe they are better than other people because of their job title, education or wealth. Too many university educated people think that because they have a degree that they are smarter than everyone else and their opinion needs to be accepted as fact. I'm not sure if this is what is being taught in universities or if this is what society is telling them...but we would all be better off if we tried understanding other's viewpoints. No one lives without the contributions of others anymore...no one.
- sul_tasto 6y ago
  I’ll be interested to hear who you decide to send a portion of your paycheck to every month.
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    I think you may have replied to the wrong comment - parent didn't mention anything about sending somebody a portion of their paycheck each month. Maybe a different thread?
    - manjana 6y ago
      >"There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree." I could not agree more with this statement.< Money has to come from someone's paycheck, hence the redistribution of money mentioned.
      - defterGoose 6y ago
        Sure, I'll bite. It should come from the paychecks of people like CEOs who have gone from making 30x the average worker to 900x in the past 70 years.
        sul_tasto 6y ago
        I completely agree with you. My concern is that most of the super rich are effectively out of reach, because of their ability to shelter their wealth and income. If memory serves, most of the more recent progressive policy proposals involve raising taxes on the middle and upper middle classes, despite what the political candidates claimed.
        j_walter 6y ago
        You also need to consider that 70 years ago there weren't giant global companies with 100K+ employees like Apple or Amazon. CEOs of companies with < 1K employees are probably still making 30x the average worker. Unfortunately most studies I see of these things are written by authors that seem to have a political point to make and are not unbiased. It would be interesting to see the comparison though.
        doonesbury 6y ago
        A prof of econ stigler (Nobel laureate) made a decent argument that the discrepancy arose with the a movement somewhere in the 60-70s (US) I believe that corporations do the best good by increasing shareholder value measured by stocks and options on same. That's an important factor in real wage growth discrepancy.
        defterGoose 6y ago
        I mean, that's simply not true. In 1955, GM had 576,000. US steel: 268,000. GE: 210,000. If the number of companies with huge amounts of employees has ballooned, well that could easily be a function simply of population growth. I think the argument you're trying to make is that CEO's of larger companies should make more money comparatively. That may be true (you want the best people in charge of the most people), but you would expect that wage growth to be more linear in number of employees, rather than exponential. The point is, no C level executive has squared their performance metric, at least not in an individually attributable way, and especially if you consider the negative externalities those "performance gains" have introduced.
  - stubish 6y ago
    This is called charity. It turns out voluntary charity by individuals isn't enough to redistribute enough worth from the wealthy minority to the poor majority. Charity as a system is only really capable of keeping the poor majority from rebelling. To make it work, sending a portion of your paycheck every month needs to be mandated, and we call that taxation.
    - sul_tasto 6y ago
      I always thought taxation should be for services that benefit the common good: utilities, first responder services, roads, food safety, etc. Are we being taxed as a way to prevent an uprising against the 1%?
      - harimau777 6y ago
        One of society's purposes is also to ensure that all of its members are provided for. That's basically the exchange: contribute to society and society will make sure that your needs are met. Therefore, I would say that taking a portion from those who have an excess and giving it to those who do not have enough is within the legitimate role of society.
8bitsrule 6y ago
The definition of "success" has been very narrowly construed, if it has measured against mere tangibles.
juped 6y ago
Much of it is a backlash against the conflation of anointment by organs of prestige with "merit"; at best, these prestige organs are very noisy proxies for some form of merit, and they get worse by the day. (The article says as much, of course.)
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Educated people usually underestimate how much "having a university diploma" correlates with social class more than with being smart and diligent. For example, in my country, university education is free, but it still means your parents need to pay for your food, travel, and accommodation. Guess what, poor people can't afford that; they need to start making money when they are 18. On the other hand, for relatively stupid people from middle class families, there are safe choices of a university where they will probably succeed. -- And I don't think any of this is difficult to understand. Yet people around me insist that having a university diploma is a measure of intelligence and hard work. (It is especially ironic with the politically correct ones. What is your opinion about people who treat poor minorities with contempt? Absolutely reprehensible! Oh, and what is your opinion about people who don't have a university education? Lazy losers, they deserve what they got! Hey, and you do realize that most members of the poor minorities actually don't have a university education, so you do in fact treat them with contempt? Uhm, that's completely different! Yeah, I am pretty sure they will be happy to hear that the reason they can't get a good job is not the circumstances of their birth, but rather the predictable consequences of the circumstances of their birth.)
rbecker 6y ago
I was surprised he did not address the issues of loyalty and betrayal. To whom does the state owe its loyalty? To its own citizens first, or to everyone (i.e. no-one)? It's no surprise people feel betrayed when the countries they and their ancestors helped build offer them no more than a level playing field on which they are to compete against the world. A world that seldom reciprocates those open and individualist attitudes, as it has not forgotten "united we stand, divided we fall". Of course this does not apply so much to major corporations, but that is a different matter.
- Nthgenimmigrant 6y ago
  I find it funny how the ancestry logic (presumably European) sounds so alien to US ears. Our majority isn't 30th-generation immigrants. But what claim does ancestry truly offer? If my parents are from the UK, do I qualify for Super Citizenship there? What if those parents had only been UK citizens for 2 generations? What if it's my great-grandparents, but they were part of a lineage that spent 22 generations "building" the UK, surely an absence of only 3 generations is just a rounding error!
  - rbecker 6y ago
    You try to paint this as some ridiculous hypothetical proposition, but it's the status quo in most of the world. What are you even trying to say? Because there are ambiguous edge cases, countries shouldn't look after their own citizens first at all? And US immigration policy favored Europeans, based exactly on shared ancestry, all the way up to the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. So for most of its history, this logic didn't sound alien to US ears at all, despite being a young country. It has abandoned it only relatively recently, paradoxically as it got older. In fact, with how often the US is still accused of xenophobia (despite immigration policies that will see its former 90% majority become a minority in a mere 24 years), I find it puzzling how you can make that statement in the first place. As for your question about your grandparents, many countries do indeed recognize a right of return, but the UK is not among them, so you're out of luck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return
ericmay 6y ago
Highly, highly recommend The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz [1] [1] https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/ https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/
mas3god 6y ago
The rise of populism is probably because nobody trusts established politicians, not some abstract reasoning around the left being meritorious.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
exidy 6y ago
Some of the HN crowd might be familiar with the academic Freddie deBoer, who just recently published a book on this very topic with some suggestions of how to address it, _The Cult of Smart_[1] [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389

33 points by MaysonL 6y ago

"There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree." I could not agree more with this statement. There are far too many people that believe they are better than other people because of their job title, education or wealth. Too many university educated people think that because they have a degree that they are smarter than everyone else and their opinion needs to be accepted as fact. I'm not sure if this is what is being taught in universities or if this is what society is telling them...but we would all be better off if we tried understanding other's viewpoints. No one lives without the contributions of others anymore...no one.

sul_tasto 6y ago
I’ll be interested to hear who you decide to send a portion of your paycheck to every month.
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  I think you may have replied to the wrong comment - parent didn't mention anything about sending somebody a portion of their paycheck each month. Maybe a different thread?
  - manjana 6y ago
    >"There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree." I could not agree more with this statement.< Money has to come from someone's paycheck, hence the redistribution of money mentioned.
    - defterGoose 6y ago
      Sure, I'll bite. It should come from the paychecks of people like CEOs who have gone from making 30x the average worker to 900x in the past 70 years.
      - sul_tasto 6y ago
        I completely agree with you. My concern is that most of the super rich are effectively out of reach, because of their ability to shelter their wealth and income. If memory serves, most of the more recent progressive policy proposals involve raising taxes on the middle and upper middle classes, despite what the political candidates claimed.
      - j_walter 6y ago
        You also need to consider that 70 years ago there weren't giant global companies with 100K+ employees like Apple or Amazon. CEOs of companies with < 1K employees are probably still making 30x the average worker. Unfortunately most studies I see of these things are written by authors that seem to have a political point to make and are not unbiased. It would be interesting to see the comparison though.
        doonesbury 6y ago
        A prof of econ stigler (Nobel laureate) made a decent argument that the discrepancy arose with the a movement somewhere in the 60-70s (US) I believe that corporations do the best good by increasing shareholder value measured by stocks and options on same. That's an important factor in real wage growth discrepancy.
        defterGoose 6y ago
        I mean, that's simply not true. In 1955, GM had 576,000. US steel: 268,000. GE: 210,000. If the number of companies with huge amounts of employees has ballooned, well that could easily be a function simply of population growth. I think the argument you're trying to make is that CEO's of larger companies should make more money comparatively. That may be true (you want the best people in charge of the most people), but you would expect that wage growth to be more linear in number of employees, rather than exponential. The point is, no C level executive has squared their performance metric, at least not in an individually attributable way, and especially if you consider the negative externalities those "performance gains" have introduced.
- stubish 6y ago
  This is called charity. It turns out voluntary charity by individuals isn't enough to redistribute enough worth from the wealthy minority to the poor majority. Charity as a system is only really capable of keeping the poor majority from rebelling. To make it work, sending a portion of your paycheck every month needs to be mandated, and we call that taxation.
  - sul_tasto 6y ago
    I always thought taxation should be for services that benefit the common good: utilities, first responder services, roads, food safety, etc. Are we being taxed as a way to prevent an uprising against the 1%?
    - harimau777 6y ago
      One of society's purposes is also to ensure that all of its members are provided for. That's basically the exchange: contribute to society and society will make sure that your needs are met. Therefore, I would say that taking a portion from those who have an excess and giving it to those who do not have enough is within the legitimate role of society.

8bitsrule 6y ago

The definition of "success" has been very narrowly construed, if it has measured against mere tangibles.

juped 6y ago

Much of it is a backlash against the conflation of anointment by organs of prestige with "merit"; at best, these prestige organs are very noisy proxies for some form of merit, and they get worse by the day. (The article says as much, of course.)

Viliam1234 6y ago
Educated people usually underestimate how much "having a university diploma" correlates with social class more than with being smart and diligent. For example, in my country, university education is free, but it still means your parents need to pay for your food, travel, and accommodation. Guess what, poor people can't afford that; they need to start making money when they are 18. On the other hand, for relatively stupid people from middle class families, there are safe choices of a university where they will probably succeed. -- And I don't think any of this is difficult to understand. Yet people around me insist that having a university diploma is a measure of intelligence and hard work. (It is especially ironic with the politically correct ones. What is your opinion about people who treat poor minorities with contempt? Absolutely reprehensible! Oh, and what is your opinion about people who don't have a university education? Lazy losers, they deserve what they got! Hey, and you do realize that most members of the poor minorities actually don't have a university education, so you do in fact treat them with contempt? Uhm, that's completely different! Yeah, I am pretty sure they will be happy to hear that the reason they can't get a good job is not the circumstances of their birth, but rather the predictable consequences of the circumstances of their birth.)

rbecker 6y ago

I was surprised he did not address the issues of loyalty and betrayal. To whom does the state owe its loyalty? To its own citizens first, or to everyone (i.e. no-one)? It's no surprise people feel betrayed when the countries they and their ancestors helped build offer them no more than a level playing field on which they are to compete against the world. A world that seldom reciprocates those open and individualist attitudes, as it has not forgotten "united we stand, divided we fall". Of course this does not apply so much to major corporations, but that is a different matter.

Nthgenimmigrant 6y ago
I find it funny how the ancestry logic (presumably European) sounds so alien to US ears. Our majority isn't 30th-generation immigrants. But what claim does ancestry truly offer? If my parents are from the UK, do I qualify for Super Citizenship there? What if those parents had only been UK citizens for 2 generations? What if it's my great-grandparents, but they were part of a lineage that spent 22 generations "building" the UK, surely an absence of only 3 generations is just a rounding error!
- rbecker 6y ago
  You try to paint this as some ridiculous hypothetical proposition, but it's the status quo in most of the world. What are you even trying to say? Because there are ambiguous edge cases, countries shouldn't look after their own citizens first at all? And US immigration policy favored Europeans, based exactly on shared ancestry, all the way up to the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. So for most of its history, this logic didn't sound alien to US ears at all, despite being a young country. It has abandoned it only relatively recently, paradoxically as it got older. In fact, with how often the US is still accused of xenophobia (despite immigration policies that will see its former 90% majority become a minority in a mere 24 years), I find it puzzling how you can make that statement in the first place. As for your question about your grandparents, many countries do indeed recognize a right of return, but the UK is not among them, so you're out of luck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return

ericmay 6y ago

Highly, highly recommend The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz [1] [1] https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/ https://www.themeritocracytrap.com/

mas3god 6y ago

The rise of populism is probably because nobody trusts established politicians, not some abstract reasoning around the left being meritorious.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

exidy 6y ago

Some of the HN crowd might be familiar with the academic Freddie deBoer, who just recently published a book on this very topic with some suggestions of how to address it, _The Cult of Smart_[1] [1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389