Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the ranks of society.

This rings true, and explains a couple of the key failings of modern American society. Liberals' wholesale embrace of meritocracy combined with their traditional alignment with public unions has manifested in this bizarre fixation with education. Education has become the sole means for achieving traditional liberal goals within the framework of meritocracy. That trend has directly resulted in the college bubble: a society where everybody spends inordinate amounts of money getting an education that for most of them is a waste if time.

More fundamentally, the leadership of the liberal establishment doesn't seem to really believe in the idea of a flat, egalitarian society. Among the liberal elite in San Francisco, D.C., Boston, etc, there is an intense disdain for the folks who form the backbone of the middle class in other industrialized countries: non-college educated blue and white collar workers. In places like Germany, you can get a white collar job and live a middle class life with just 16 years of formal education. In the U.S., even the liberals don't seem to think that is a desirable state of affairs.

It's worse because 1) even with the "best and brightest" in charge, we've had one disaster after another and 2) the "meritocracy" we have is horribly broken on its own terms. Making the meritocracy we imagine should exist would require fairly radical reforms in terms of taxes, redistribution, college funding and regulation, youth economic and educational support, and a whole host of other interventions that supporters of the present establishment find anywhere from distasteful to anathema.

"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."

"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."

- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites

There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.

Chris Hayes' book is a favorite of mine, and critical to understanding the current paradigm. To those unfamiliar with the book, I recommend Aaron Swartz's review which I was lucky enough to read as my introduction to Chris Hayes: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron-sw...

You should go ahead and read Thomas Frank's book that he pulled this article from. He spends an entire chapter on how regulators and economists from the well-graduated "meritocratic" elite simply aren't held to any kind of empirical standard whatsoever. When they're wrong, they consider it as a civilizational mistake. It's only other people who can be individually incorrect and responsible for intellectual mistakes.

Why do you believe liberals embrace meritocracy?

From what I've seen they are it's primary critics. It was hardly liberals pushing Github to end meritocracy and adopt whatever it's adopting now (there isn't really a name for it). In various recent court cases (Fisher vs Texas, Ricci v DeStefano) it was usually liberals opposed to meritocracy. When high merit people get rewarded it's usually liberals criticizing this outcome.

I can't think of a single modern case where liberals push people to adopt purely merit based systems, in fact. They seem to want some sort of spoils system - the closest word I can think of is corporatism in the old Italian sense (I'm being very careful not to use an alternate term, see this reddit comment for a good explanation of why https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...).

(Lets also distinguish credentialism from meritocracy. The tech industry has something approaching the latter - we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.)

> Why do you believe liberals embrace meritocracy?

It's a little hard to discuss this in this context because the article talks about different kinds of liberalism and different kinds of meritocracy, that without specifics the question is a bit meaningless.

In particular, the word meritocracy itself is hard to describe because it was originally coined as a joke, and specifically defined to mean something that is satirical, ill-defined, and even oxymoronic[1]. Then the question becomes exactly how much of a joke is meritocracy in each circumstance. Many would say that in the GitHub case, meritocracy was a very extreme kind of a joke as it wasn't even self-aware. It was like describing a king's court as meritocratic. The liberals of the kind Frank talks about would be appalled at calling that meritocracy, and would want a "true" meritocracy. Frank would say (as would Michael Young, the sociologist who coined the term in a satirical essay), that even "true" meritocracy is a joke (and is also just a spoils system).

In any case, meritocracy is (intentionally) too ill-defined for comparing different kinds, but I think it is clear from Frank's article that the new kind of professional-class liberals he's talking about is definitely in favor of some sort of meritocracy (which, for Frank, is a bad thing).

> we idolize the dropout/self taught ubergeek - but liberal types generally oppose our culture.

That is a very ridiculous thing to say, as the vast majority of "our culture" is generally liberal. While libertarianism and other right-wing ideologies are more common in tech than in other professional occupations, it is still a small minority. In any case, the criticism from the left of the culture you describe is that there's nothing wrong with idolizing a self-taught ubergeek as long as you don't marginalize other groups with no less "merit".

[1]: After all, every system is some sort of meritocracy -- most people actually believed that noble-born people have more merit than commoners -- and so calling it that shows a lack of self-awareness more than anything else (especially as in all such systems, merit is something that is 90% due to luck of being born to the right family; this is almost as true for ubergeeks as it is for aristocrats).

What's "our culture"? Most of the nerds I know are intensely liberal, enough so that I count as "conservative" simply for favoring Clinton over Sanders. And my social circle in nerdery is infosec, the gun-lovin'est of all the nerds.

There's a really silly rhetorical trick Eric Raymond likes to play, where the definition of a "hacker" devolves pretty much to that of someone who shares Raymond's politics. Seeing him try to deploy it over and over again has made me allergic to attempts to assumptively foreclose arguments with appeals to ill-defined group identity.

...Eric Raymond...Seeing him try to deploy it over and over again has made me allergic to attempts to assumptively foreclose arguments with appeals to ill-defined group identity

The point you are taking issue with is completely tangential to the main point. You could delete that sentence and the rest of the post wouldn't be affected.

Now I don't read ESR except when you or someone links to him on twitter and it sounds like it might be interesting (it rarely is). So maybe I'm missing something here. But do you actually assert that any of my claims are false? Or are you merely attempting to raise your status and lower mine by criticizing ESR and associating me with him?

I'll answer your question when you answer mine. :)

Nobody's reading this thread at this point, so the "status" stakes seem pretty low.

> just 16 years of formal education

16 years is a timeframe that requires tertiary eduction. The longest non-tertiary education I've heard of is 13: K-12. How are you breaking down 16 years into 'non-college' education for white-collar workers?

I think by 'non-college' education they're referring to trade schools and apprenticeships and the like.

Sorry I meant education up to age 16.

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