The punishment of scammers is something that I think vital. I don't think it's a coïncidence that we live in both the time of Trump and when roughly 90% of attempts to communicate with me are obvious fraud.
Probably worth remembering that the modern usage of "meritocracy" was introduced by Michael Young to make the specific point that the idea of distributing advantages "on merit" has the side-effect of making the privileged feel that much more justified in their privileges. That said, he would have jumped under a train at the thought of Liz Truss being prime minister in succession to Boris Johnson.
(Or, I guess, come up with some brilliant idea to get her out of No.10, because after all, wrote the 1945 Labour manifesto, started the Open University and the Consumers' Association, etc)
Of course his son is a standing rebuke to the very idea.
Occasionally it seems that liberal democracy, the good kind of meritocracy and/or the socialism that doesn't mean everyone has to attend endless meetings amount to the non-murderous (a crucial distinction, I hope) flip side of the right-wing vision of the ideal society: I.e., a world without having to make compromises.
2: I think that's why rich people used bribery to get their kids into good colleges here. They are going to give the kids everything regardless, but they want it to look deserved by merit and good colleges are the easiest way to buy that appearance.
[obligatory joke about USC, delivered on behalf of University of California aficionados]
2.1 that is part of what has Burke concerned.
I look at Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng right now and I think to myself, "I have no idea what they think they're doing." Truss' past provides no real clues other than apparent opportunism. It provides no evidence of any merit in any sense, but also not of motivation. It seems Truss is cosplaying at being Thatcher but not in a way that indicates any real understanding of Thatcher as a leader or of the historical moment of her leadership.
[subtle but appreciative nod in the direction of 6]
Could we borrow Truss for like a week? Just want to lower the dollar a bit.
I have mixed thoughts on meritocracy. On the one hand, I did really well on standardized testing. On the other hand, lots of assholes did better.
I think that we need to think of life as two interrelated mappings. First, a mapping from people to positions. Second, a mapping from positions to rewards or benefits. Advocates of meritocracy often have much to say about the first mapping. But they often (deliberately) neglect the second mapping.
For example, it makes sense that we develop some reasonable predictor of neurosurgical aptitude and use that predictor to screen aspirant neurosurgeons (the first mapping). But the fact of that screening does not necessarily require that neurosurgeons be paid 2 million per year (the second mapping). Likewise, I am willing to accept that CEOs are highly selected for their role. But that does not explain why the typical CEO made 80 times the median salary of their employees in the 1950s and makes 700 times the median salary of their employees today.
Too often meritocratic advocacy is a kind of three-card monte.
I think the fundamental flaw of New Deal liberal democracy was it went after incomes toward equality but did not touch wealth, maintaining a sacrosanct status for property such that it could later reassert itself politically and undo the equalization measures. (It was also a little fortunate to get the leveling effects of war, not in the original program.) I think we need to rearrange property relations in some way to have a more stable and humane society. Maybe that's a high LVT, maybe it's more kludgey like capping how much can be owned to what purpose, but the notion of property above all continuously shits in the social pot.
Would it help if I bought a cabin in the woods?
11 and 12 are great points, but both are rather old and don't get at what has changed recently. I'd suggest the big recent challenge of capitalism and meritocracy is the "financialization" of everything made possible by more (though not necessarily better) data, and the way that this has turbo-charged America's cultural inclination towards scams and scammers. It used to be that most people in a company were focused on making the product good, and a small number of people on figuring out how that translates to profit, and now everyone is focused directly on short-term profit. How money is tied up in companies paying each other for fat-finger errors on smartphones? How much of Amazon is counterfeit goods? At my job there's increasing pressure to make college more directly a scam. Most obviously that they want us to start paid masters programs, which are straightforward scams. But also no thought towards what the actual point of a college education is (if we lower the rigor on all our classes to high school level, and we choose all the students classes for them, what are they actually get out of this other than a piece of paper?).
IMO pace of change affects social consequences of meritocracy. We now live in a time of rapid social and economic change-- global progress through locally disastrous dislocation is pretty common now. I'm thinking for instance of people who invested a lifetime into some aspect of film photography. Or local-paper journalism, though that change isn't really progress. That means amoral meritocracy, hard work completely discarded.
I don't know if there's an effective procedural liberalism response to either this new reality of tectonic shifts in what is efficient or to the problem of parasites. The most harmful parasites are the big ones, Murdoch say.
My instinct is to claim eventual emergence of informal methods of ostracism based on a shared sense of what is shameful. But that shared sense of shame existed in the past and was selectively applied, didn't really work for African Americans or women.
Someone smart, maybe Benedict Anderson, said the key was to have different hierarchies that are non-overlapping so that but everything depends on a single measurement of merit.
A mildly-embarassing thought. A big part of what's soured my own sense of virtue-rewarded is watching what's happened with the tech industry over the last two decades. This feels like sour grapes because I work as a programmer, and I'm glad for the job and career that I've had but . . .
I graduated from college in 1998. At that point I felt like I'd missed the first wave of the dot-com boom (and had no intention of going into programming at that point -- it felt like a thing that had happened and was leveling out). At that point it felt like there had been some huge windfall rewards to people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, but it also felt like a very neat and very geeky thing. The first item I ordered on Amazon was a D&D rulebook*. I first started using google because I read about it on the Steve Jackson Games blog. I'd spent a bunch of time in college reading the rec.games.frp.advocacy group, and it felt like the dot-com boom was only a couple of steps removed from those communities, and from an amateur hobbyist past** that I wasn't part of, but which resonated.
Since then I have plateaued in my own career, and watched as the tech industry has become more malevolent, more entrenched, and much, much wealthier and it's depressing.
That said, when I wrote the post I was worried that people were going to respond, "you've been seeing too many conservative parodies of liberalism. Of course we look at society and see plenty of examples of virtue rewarded.***"
* And I remember feeling like it was a big deal when WotC bought D&D.
** Long before I did any programming I remember reading Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg and finding it thrilling.
*** In my memory, part of the excitement around Obama in 2008 was that he seemed so clearly to represent a good version of earned success.
11
yeah, reducing inequality will definitely reduce the sting of meritocracy.
There are lots of really dysfunctional meritocratic systems where you test too much or where you fire the bottom performing 10% of workers.
I've been unable to read him. Just can't register the words.
I agree that 14 is describing something that's happening, but I'm wary of calling/explaining it as "financialization" as that is associated with a critique of housing markets that falls apart at the slightest poke from any direction.
Shit-izaiton?
21: I've seen people quoting this paragraph (from here)
I know this is bad but I find something aesthetically beautiful about it. If you have a pot of money that is immune to bank runs, over time, modern finance will find a way to make it vulnerable to bank runs. That is an emergent property of modern finance. No one sits down and says "let's make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!" Finance, as an abstract entity, just sort of does that on its own.
Googling the amazing quote in 22 led me to this thread on ycombinator, where the top comment raises a point I've seen a lot, which is that because of the fall of communism it's been a really long time since there's been a revolution where all the rich people lose their wealth (and/or their lives) and that this lack of fear is driving a lot of the behavior of the extremely wealthy.
And, of course, even if there were a revolution where a bunch of people got killed, those people would be, well, me (college professor red state) and all the actual elites would still have their money safe offshore and be long gone in their private jet before anything bad could happen to them. Worst case they lose half their houses.
Probably depends on what you teach. Math is very proletarian.
I think of meritocracy along the lines of communism and libertarianism: a fantasy that in theory has some merits and a lot of drawbacks, but in practice is just a clusterfuck at best. Its effectively defined in the USA as having done well at the best colleges and followed a conventional career trajectory. I mean, who wouldn't want their society to be governed by people selected on the basis of how they did in high school?
26: Most likely they just attack the whole town, won't matter what job you have or what you teach, just if you live in a blue town in a red state.
27: That is, largely, the point made by Burke's post. My reaction to that is that it's worth being aware of the drawbacks and absurdities of claims to meritocracy, it's also worth having some other story of how virtue gets rewarded. It's not enough to just say (correctly) that lots of obviously terrible people do very well in the status quo, we should (for the purpose of politics) be ready to say, "and here's what it looks like when people who 'work hard and play by the rules' do well. That is the aspect of society that we want to highlight and build on."
There are a lot of cliches in American politics for how that gets talked about (small business owners, veterans, school teachers, etc . . . ) but I feel strongly that a vision for liberal politics needs some element of that.
While also recognizing that many of the many of the ways that wealth and power are currently distributed in society seem terrible.
28: Just shout out that you can show them about integration.
"I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.".
Yeah, the main political development of my lifetime is the complete abandonment by the Conservative movement of any kind of Bennett-style "conservative" virtues (and in particular "masculine" virtues) and in its place an emphasis on conservative (and masculine) *vices*. As long as you're enough of a bully and an asshole, no one will care if you're not a man if his word who works hard and plays by the rules and has common sense and sacrifices for his family. It's the Romney to Trump transition (and conversely, Clinton to Obama). The GA senate race is the ultimate distillation of this trend.
Yes. Trump is contemptible by every value I was raised with and yet some of the people who taught me support Trump. Fortunately not my father, who regarded Trump as contemptible.
There are a ton of really great comments in this thread so far.
You future commenters better not let me down.
Yes. Trump is contemptible by every value I was raised with and yet some of the people who taught me support Trump.
I think I've mentioned before that the song "The Fitted Shirt feels like a Gen-Xer wrestling with how he feels about the inherited standards of masculinity from a previous generation.
One day it'll take and they'll start to make / Shirts that fit right / Till then I suppose I'll stick out dad's clothes / And that's alright
Those conflicted feelings, themselves, feel dated at this point. Does Gen Z look at their parents and think, "I couldn't adopt the same role that you did, but there is much to admire about it"?
Not just masculinity, but also Christianity and patriotism.
I wonder how much of a role here is played by the conservative base previously being people with jobs and kids at home, to primarily consisting of retirees? It's hard for conservative virtues to resonant among a base of people who sit on their couch watching tv all day. This certainly isn't the whole story, see cultural shifts in police departments, but it's gotta be big part of it.
36: [insert "this is the same picture" meme]
cultural shifts in police departments
What cultural shifts in police departments?
38: I'm still on episode two. No spoilers.
The increase in paranoia-culture and decrease in protect-culture. Shift from supporting moderate gun control measures to, "big toys fun" culture. More whininess and aggression, less stiff upper lip. etc. (Not that there weren't tons of problems with police culture in the past, but I do think you see this same switch in emphasis from (sometimes problematic) "virtues" to straightforward vices.)
No one sits down and says "let's make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs!"
That seems so unlikely. I mean, "Let's make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs so we can make pennies on the dollar by $DOBAD" seems just about guaranteed.
That seems so unlikely. I mean, "Let's make pension funds vulnerable to bank runs so we can make pennies on the dollar by $DOBAD" seems just about guaranteed.
You definitely see people coming up with ways to deliberately underfund pensions, but the argument leading up to that paragraph is that you can see that behavior even from a fund which is well-capitalized.
43 reminds me of what Westinghouse tried to do with its pension obligations back in the 80s/90s (buy CBS, spin off the manufacturing side with no money to support the pensions.).
44, 45 sound like "Let's make pennies on the dollar by $DOBAD even though it leaves the pension fund vulnerable". Does the difference matter? (Not going through a login for the article, sorry. Also I have a big MEGO problem with finance.)
---
But back to the original excellent point; I do like the idea of shaming grifts -> grifts are less profitable -> grifts are easier to shame as a self-reinforcing cycle on the way out. And there are lots of low-hanging grifts to shame, the ones that definitely rely on deceiving the griftee.
And I can think of several proposed better ways to be, but some of them are literally described as dystopias by, uh, seemingly reasonable people? All of my imagined better ways to arrange everything include a cap-auction-rebate system for CO2-emitting fuels, getting to a climate fix and UBI at once, but it makes a lot of people furious because it presumably would cap their energy use.
On meritocracy specifically, does it help if one says that the best neurosurgeon will always be offered the highest-paid job, *but* the total payscale is likely to be compressed? So that the things neurosurgeons want to buy will mostly be cheaper? We have to clip inherited wealth for this to work at all, don't we? Twofer!
46: I think the point is the problem comes up now even when those involved are not trying to steal.
I think grifters are un-shameable, and you have to actually control/manually crack down and punish.
True. And victims of grifters often too ashamed to admit they have been swindled. But the sheer amount of shit you have to eat to stay in Trump's good graces is demeaning to the point that I don't see how anyone who does it can be see by voters as traditionally masculine.
The "merit" that is best rewarded now is a mix of above-average intelligence, hard work or the ability to fake it, and solid interpersonal/political/self-promotion skills. That's well-suited to floating up to where the cream is, but it leaves out vast amounts of hard stuff that needs to be done well, and for which rewards are a lot more random.
48. Agreed, I mentioned shame (which I recognize has not worked in the past, my thoughtwas a possible starting framework for thinking about alternative modes of action other than procedural bureaucracy) thinking that people who associated with grifters or sociopaths would be shamed. In CZ, there's still shame attached to having been an informant for the bolshevik secret police, it's a problem (for half the people) to have your name on those lists. John Lewis was honored not just for being a legislator, but for having fought for decency here. Shame eventually got to Roy Moore I think, even if he personally didn't acknowledge it.
Maybe a tangent, pretty remote from reality here at this point.
I bump up against this post by Timothy Burke about meritocracy
Has anyone suggested he write a book?
As I get old and cranky, my thinking is that all problems are either a) poverty or b) inequality. My perspective is informed by watching the state destroy the university system, and realizing that most people I know from college and grad school won't care, because no one *they* know is going to go there, because their kids have trust funds or enough family money to take it. Housing doesn't matter because their parents will just give them down payments or houses. If they had to worry, they'd have the power to do something about it, but they don't so they won't.
I think people should be treated like human beings even when they're lazy losers.
Don't make me find the lady with the Gom Jabbar.
@29
Stories of how virtue gets rewarded?
What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?
RE "explaining "merit" that is best rewarded now is a mix of above-average intelligence, hard work or the ability to fake it, and solid interpersonal/political/self-promotion skills" seemed to be Stewart Brand's whole deal, and his worldview turned out to be dogshit.
46: it was more like "have the pension fund function at all despite low interest rates and a government regulatory treatment that tried to force them to only own assets that perform terribly when interest rates are low". also it is probably worth noting that in the end of the day the Bank of England spent a net £1.6bn to run over the shorts, vastly cheaper than having the pension protection fund actually bail them out.
I have been depressed by reading a book on modal logic lately.
A traditional liberal idea is that we talk through problems. A whole host of people who supposedly need to display rational thinking in their jobs have been taught that "You're a liberal" is a reasonable response to a whole host of questions about what is to be done.
29
It's not enough to just say (correctly) that lots of obviously terrible people do very well in the status quo, we should (for the purpose of politics) be ready to say, "and here's what it looks like when people who 'work hard and play by the rules' do well. That is the aspect of society that we want to highlight and build on."
The left-wing version of this is identical to the right-wing version of this, but with a little more acceptance of LBGTQ+ people. The only problem with this is the right-wing version of this is complete bullshit they haven't worked towards in my lifetime if not my grandparent's.
I just want the people who keep calling me about my car's extended warranty to suffer. Can we start there? Really, not so much them as the people who hire them.
Do we want a society where virtues are materially rewarded? I mean I know *we*, the virtuous unfoggedtariat, want that kind of society, but yeah, I think it runs up against really deep problems of inequality. As Flippanter's comment (maybe I'm misreading?) points out, it's an ideological goal that appeals to the well-educated and well-meaning by promising that all can remain basically as it is, just adjust the incentives in ways that surely everyone must find fair.
64: I'm no sure that I want virtue to be materially rewarded. Certainly 54 - that everyone, regardless of virtue, should have enough to lead a decent life is a higher priority.
"Material Rewards" is the loyalty program for Jo-Ann's.
64: quoting myself from the OP:
Do I actually want to live in a meritocracy? I want a qualified person to do a job, and sometimes, when resources are limited and the job is important, it should be the most qualified person. But mostly I'm more concerned with floors, beneath which no one sinks. (Everyone gets a safe place to live. Everyone gets quality health care and access to nutritious food . Etc.)
I don't want nutritious food. I want Swedish Fish.
69: sorry, Moby! In my utopia, we force you to eat nutritious food.
71: should have added- it's for your own good! You'll thank me later!
My thinking is that if it weren't possible to reward certain types of work with excess of material rewards, no one would be a dentist.
Good point. No one you want to be a dentist would be one.
There are surely nastier jobs than dentistry. I knew a guy worked in a pork pie factory. He wouldn't eat pork pies. I imagine working in a Swedish fish factory would get old pretty quickly too. On the other end of the payscale, how do you survive as a children's oncologist?
77: That's a good question, but I'm pretty sure that even now a person doesn't choose to become a children's oncologist for the material rewards.
77: it's a well-paid, well-respected, high-status job, and you get to save children's lives. (Not all of them, but a lot of them.) The five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia, for example, is above 90%. It's one of the most survivable cancers there is. For all childhood cancers, the rate is 84%. Those are good odds.
And every one you do help save, and there will be a lot of them, won't be just some miserable old sod surviving who's going to get a heart attack or a stroke in the next five years anyway - you'll be averting the worst thing that any parent, any family can imagine happening.
I doubt anyone goes into it just for the money, true.
Dentists, OTOH, are in it entirely for the money, as you can tell by giving an NHS dentist a choice between "kicking out half their patients because they're the ones who need the most treatment, and are therefore the least profitable" and "making merely a lot of money rather than a huge amount". There's no perceptible ethos of public service left there. They follow the money every single time.
re: 80
They also are very big on a complicated upsell racket where they upsell you on some private treatment--because they are allowed to very finely grade which treatments are NHS and which are not--and it turns out the dental practice they refer you to is just the private and massively expensive private wing of their own practice. For example, I spent a truly huge amount of money on a single filling this year, because just one aspect of the treatment turned out not to be available as part of their NHS practice.
80, 81. I sort of take your point, but... Many if not most NHS consultants do a lot of private work, and they mostly ship you off to an NHS hospital as soon as it gets complicated. Why are dentists different, if they are? I have to say most of the NHS dentists I've encountered only try to sell people private treatment for non-essential stuff. Maybe they make enough from vanity treatments without making an effort. The exception was the bastard who turned out to be a drinking mate of the late Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislane, and much nastier).
Maybe Nye just didn't stuff the dentists' mouths with enough gold. Turns out amalgam isn't a satisfactory substitute.