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> Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem. If we had a more merit
by onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem.
If we had a more meritocratic society, I doubt people would pride themselves in their ignorance.
But as it stands, our society rewards both luck and misfortune - and we privatize gains and socialize losses.
Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the
way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky.
Only one of those requires the type of intelligence you get in school (execution). And if you have enough luck or corruption, you don't even need to execute.
Why do the hard work on trying to find cures for common forms of cancer, make breakthroughs toward fusion energy, or increase crop yields on staple crops - when you can take on excessive risk in property speculation and your odds of financial success are many times higher?
I'm a strong believer that the world is getting better every day - even in recent times. But I'm not sure how much longer that trend will last in a world that gives smart people very few incentives to do things that actually benefit society.
Maybe with enough people we're destined to get lucky and progress no matter what.
- enkid 5y agoI don't think that type of corruption is most prevalent in Western societies.
- xyzzyz 5y ago> Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky. Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?
- throwdecro 5y agoReal-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck. If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoI guess if you can only imagine a society structured like it is today. If we all accepted that luck is the driving force, decided that we would rather live in a world where hard work and intelligence pays off - then it's possible to imagine a world in which you're rewarded for hard work (on areas of importance) and gains are socialized instead of losses. The socialized gains could pay people who worked hard and their ideas didn't pan out. I'm not saying this is a world that would work and is better. But it's pretty unimaginative to think it's just flat out impossible to have progress in any society that isn't structured around luck.
- notquitehere 5y agoI think the hard part of that is socializing the definition of "areas of importance" Also getting everyone to accept one worldview. Maybe the most important area of importance would be educating people to see things the way you see...
- enaaem 5y agoI am all for it as long as I can decide what is important!
- bradleyjg 5y agoIntelligent people tried central planning and it didn’t work. Repeatedly. If you are going to propose banging our head into that wall again you can’t just naively point out how great it sounds from first principles. Been there, done that. Instead you need to seriously grapple with those failures and convincingly explain why this time will be different.
- srean 5y agoSeems to be working well for Walmart. A major problem with central planning is timely flow of accurate information. Although this is still a problem, it has become much easier to do so than in the past.
- inglor_cz 5y agoLuck sort of rewards itself, it is a part of its very definition. But I would not be so hostile to luck. We need it. The Lord of the Rings would never exist if Tolkien wasn't lucky enough to come down with a trench foot and thus survive the Great War. mRNA vaccines might not exist if Katalin Karikó did not beat that cancer in the late 1990s. Etc.
- djbebs 5y agoThe reason we don't have a meritocracy society is because failure is being rewarded. Cut the welfare, stop punishing success with higher taxes and you'll see just how much better people can be.
- isodude 5y agoThat would be great for society but awful for it's citizens. Failure is not being rewarded, being a member of sociery is, it's not about performance.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- djbebs 5y agoFailure is being rewarded with free services, lower taxes and a whole bunch of other benefits, this isnt really in question here. Dollar for dollar poor people pay 1 sixth of the income taxes that high income earners pay. If that's not rewarding failure, what is?
- isodude 5y agoYou put an equal sign between failure and low income, which in my mind is quite baffling. You could be a failure and pay a lot of taxes too. But it's not uncommon, we do it with our kids all the time. "If you don't perform good grades, you are not good enough". My point being that changing that view to, "look at what opportunities you (will) have now". Someone being a failure according to you may be quite demotivated at reaching a high income due to the fact that it seems impossible, why do the effort? For what is more important than playing a role in society, and be a good human? Is really income a value of how human you are?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoYou're assuming market prices for labor aren't artificially low because the system works against them. You're also assuming high incomes are completely independent of Central Banks subsidizing asset prices.