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> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed some

> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.

TameAntelope 5y ago
Those seem like legal and not economic matters, unless you're saying all matters are economic matters, to which I'd carve out the matters that are legal as not meritocratic and therefore not "good" that we leave it up to "merit" (however that's defined).
- mahogany 5y ago
  But still, according to your economic meritocracy, it would follow that Alice Walton is of higher merit than, say, the totality of: your five favorite economic think tanks, the entire economic faculty at Harvard, and the CEOs of the Big Four. Actually, scratch that -- Bezos dwarfs them all. We should defer to his wisdom first and foremost on all matters economic.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    ...yes? I don't see what the problem is with this. The people you've named own portions of organizations and therefore get to decide (to the degree with which their ownership allows) what those organizations do. I prefer that vastly over the idea of every organization being governed by popular vote. I think you're getting stuck on the word "merit". It has context; there isn't some universal concept of the worth of a person being discussed here.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      I think you’re confusing the word “merit” with the word “ownership”. Merit cannot be measured objectively, so you are using ownership stakes in large corporations as a proxy for merit. But you haven’t shown that ownership in a corporation is correlated with merit. You’ve just automatically assumed they have merit because the corporations they own are large and successful, and it seems you’ve defined merit by owning a large and successful corporation. This is circular reasoning, unless you want to try for a better definition of merit. But large and successful corporations are large and successful precisely because of the work of tens of thousands to millions of people. You are trying to say they shouldn’t have a say in our economy? In the work they do? Even though they are the ones on the ground doing actual work, building actual products and technologies with their hands? Amazon and Walmart do not exist without this army of workers to make them operate every day. Jeff Bezos could die tomorrow and Amazon would continue unabated, just as Apple did the day after Steve Jobs died. Why? Because Amazon and Apple and Walmart are not one person or even one family. Why then, should we give such an outsized role over our lives to single individuals at these companies, when we can’t even prove the success of these companies is due to their individual “merit”?
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        It's not circular, it's simply causational. If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. The goal is not to reward work, the goal is to reward risk. Owning a company is risky. Simply working at a company is not risky. Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome is what defines merit. It is perfectly acceptable that the workers who do not take on risk through ownership at Amazon and Walmart do not get to have a say in what Amazon and Walmart do. It's also true that both Amazon and Walmart pay many of their employees with shares of their company, for this exact reason. Employees who become (small percentage) owners of a company demonstrate merit proportional to their risk, and generally proportional to their individual contribution. It's not perfect, but if your goal is perfection, you will live the rest of your life dissatisfied and frustrated by inequity.
        5y ago
selimthegrim 5y ago
Ann Walton could try donating to the HBCU she got her nursing degree from for starters.
zip1234 5y ago
I get your point, but you don't have to be rich to get away with killing someone with a car. Double the speed limit in a residential area, kills kid, acquitted: https://www.kmov.com/news/former-st-louis-county-officer-found-not-guilty-in-12-year-old-girls-death/article_2d792aa6-2c14-11ec-9722-4b8ab92cde9c.html https://www.kmov.com/news/former-st-louis-county-officer-fou...

TameAntelope 5y ago

Those seem like legal and not economic matters, unless you're saying all matters are economic matters, to which I'd carve out the matters that are legal as not meritocratic and therefore not "good" that we leave it up to "merit" (however that's defined).

mahogany 5y ago
But still, according to your economic meritocracy, it would follow that Alice Walton is of higher merit than, say, the totality of: your five favorite economic think tanks, the entire economic faculty at Harvard, and the CEOs of the Big Four. Actually, scratch that -- Bezos dwarfs them all. We should defer to his wisdom first and foremost on all matters economic.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  ...yes? I don't see what the problem is with this. The people you've named own portions of organizations and therefore get to decide (to the degree with which their ownership allows) what those organizations do. I prefer that vastly over the idea of every organization being governed by popular vote. I think you're getting stuck on the word "merit". It has context; there isn't some universal concept of the worth of a person being discussed here.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I think you’re confusing the word “merit” with the word “ownership”. Merit cannot be measured objectively, so you are using ownership stakes in large corporations as a proxy for merit. But you haven’t shown that ownership in a corporation is correlated with merit. You’ve just automatically assumed they have merit because the corporations they own are large and successful, and it seems you’ve defined merit by owning a large and successful corporation. This is circular reasoning, unless you want to try for a better definition of merit. But large and successful corporations are large and successful precisely because of the work of tens of thousands to millions of people. You are trying to say they shouldn’t have a say in our economy? In the work they do? Even though they are the ones on the ground doing actual work, building actual products and technologies with their hands? Amazon and Walmart do not exist without this army of workers to make them operate every day. Jeff Bezos could die tomorrow and Amazon would continue unabated, just as Apple did the day after Steve Jobs died. Why? Because Amazon and Apple and Walmart are not one person or even one family. Why then, should we give such an outsized role over our lives to single individuals at these companies, when we can’t even prove the success of these companies is due to their individual “merit”?
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      It's not circular, it's simply causational. If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. The goal is not to reward work, the goal is to reward risk. Owning a company is risky. Simply working at a company is not risky. Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome is what defines merit. It is perfectly acceptable that the workers who do not take on risk through ownership at Amazon and Walmart do not get to have a say in what Amazon and Walmart do. It's also true that both Amazon and Walmart pay many of their employees with shares of their company, for this exact reason. Employees who become (small percentage) owners of a company demonstrate merit proportional to their risk, and generally proportional to their individual contribution. It's not perfect, but if your goal is perfection, you will live the rest of your life dissatisfied and frustrated by inequity.
      - 5y ago

selimthegrim 5y ago

Ann Walton could try donating to the HBCU she got her nursing degree from for starters.

zip1234 5y ago

I get your point, but you don't have to be rich to get away with killing someone with a car. Double the speed limit in a residential area, kills kid, acquitted: https://www.kmov.com/news/former-st-louis-county-officer-found-not-guilty-in-12-year-old-girls-death/article_2d792aa6-2c14-11ec-9722-4b8ab92cde9c.html https://www.kmov.com/news/former-st-louis-county-officer-fou...