In summary, while perhaps uncommon, it is possible to for a meritocracy to flourish given excessive care and thoughtfulness is spent designing fair and useful i

In summary, while perhaps uncommon, it is possible to for a meritocracy to flourish given excessive care and thoughtfulness is spent designing fair and useful incentives and metrics. When I get back to blogging (probably in a week or so) one of the topics I want to hit is Smart People x War. War is the stupidest thing imaginable: a negative-sum slugfest. It's inhumane, unjust, and wrong. So, naturally, most Smart People hate it. However, what is the best thing for Smart People? For an irreparable fissure to occur within the Elite, splitting it into two or more pieces that want nothing more to destroy each other. (This tends to result in War.) If you look at history, the times of greatest meritocracy are also times of war. When was the golden age of American scientific and technological R&D? The Cold War. If you let the Elite function as one, they collude to keep Smart People down. They take all the resources and society stagnates. If you rip them in two and put the halves in mortal conflict, it creates jobs for Smart People. So there is a weird symbiosis going on. War itself is horrendous, but the only thing that gives Smart People a chance (opportunities to ascend, rather than being preemptively shot down by a defensive Elite) is severe crisis, which War tends to produce. Capitalism is supposed to have this effect (fissures in the Elite, creating competition and opportunity for middle-class talent) but corporate capitalism doesn't, because even if firms compete economically, they collude on who's cool and who's not. See also: VC-istan, which is more like a postmodern corporation (with founders as semi-independent PMs) than what it claims to be.