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It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in th

It's weird. You're right, but those are still seen as "meritocratic", and one could argue were meritocratic historically, at least in some degree, because in theory you get into the right school by scholastic merit, you get into the right industry by merit of your learned and demonstrated skillset and willingness to work in that industry, and you have money by merit of having created value from your hard work in industry. In practice you get into the right schools because you belong to the right social circles, you get into the right industry because you come from the right schools, or are in the right social circles, and you make enough money because you got into the right schools and industry or inherited by virtue of being born into the right social circles...

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society. It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers. It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter). The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

When meritocracy was being pushed as a social goal in the 1960s, it related more to the question of who end up in positions of power, positions where they could make decisions that would affect society. It was not necessarily about who was going to get rich. It was about no longer picking decision makers from the children of the existing decision makers. It ran into two problems. The first was that we didn't really think through how we were going to establish merit in the first place. What's happened there is that we've adopted a bunch of stupid shorthand ("they graduated Harvard") that essentially is undifferentiated from what we were doing before we tried to build a meritocracy. We never found (maybe never tried to find) any way of establishing that a kid with a degree from a public university in Kansas was actually going to be better at national infrastructure planning than the one from Harvard (or not, for that matter). The second problem is that the people who benefited from the meritocratic goal (I am one of them) have worked quite hard to pull up the ladders behind them (us). We've erected all sorts of barriers (but mostly cost) to ensure that only our descendants and direct beneficiaries get access to the social institutions that are now used to define "merit".