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Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy an

Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy and competition is bad and everyone should be paid the same. Killing incentive seems like a bad economic policy to me that's already been tried.

andrepd 5y ago
It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.
- bostik 5y ago
  I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit? Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.
- pydry 5y ago
  Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy. They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive. We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy. War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.
  - jrsj 5y ago
    The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples. Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments. Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time. Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries! Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much. "Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax. 2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.
mojzu 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)
nemo44x 5y ago
It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.
- modo_mario 5y ago
  >This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?
elliekelly 5y ago
No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.
- jona-f 5y ago
  Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.
  - resonious 5y ago
    This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.
wesapien 5y ago
Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.

andrepd 5y ago

It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.

bostik 5y ago
I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit? Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.
pydry 5y ago
Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy. They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive. We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy. War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.
- jrsj 5y ago
  The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.
Gravityloss 5y ago
But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples. Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments. Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time. Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money. This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries! Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much. "Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax. 2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.

mojzu 5y ago

I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)

nemo44x 5y ago

It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.

modo_mario 5y ago
>This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?

elliekelly 5y ago

No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.

jona-f 5y ago
Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.
- resonious 5y ago
  This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.

wesapien 5y ago

Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.