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Comment by viggity | Hacker News Reader

"We suggest four ways in which American society could be made more genuinely meritocratic.

First, current forms of discrimination could be reduced or eliminated. Second, the wealthy could be encouraged to redistribute greater amounts of their accumulated wealth through philanthropy in ways that would provide greater opportunity for the less privileged. Third, the tax system could be redesigned to be genuinely progressive in ways that would close the distance between those at the top and the bottom of the system. Fourth, more government resources could be allocated to provide more equal access to critical services such as education and health care. "

The "North Carolina Sociological Association" sounds socialist. Color me surprised.

A system doesn't have to guarantee results in order to be fair. Some people work a lot harder or smarter than others and that is the ultimate source of any wealth discrepancy.

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In all honestly, the conclusions drawn by the "socialist" authors don't appear to be that different from those drawn by Carnegie, who robustly defended the idea of meritocracy whilst being practically the embodiment of the self-made man.

We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few.... The question then arises...What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?

Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.

The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion...This policy would work powerfully to induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people....

Really, you don't have to be harder or smarter working if you have the fortune to be born into a situation where you're in the top 1% of the population that are worth more than the bottom 90% (the article would benefit from some reference to social mobility though). That's not just a problem if you labour under the delusion that wealth is a zero-sum game; it's also a problem if you're one of us that believe that properly functioning and free markets ought to have a real, tangible link to what the mass of the population demands.

If the conclusions they've draw are illogical then you should point out why. Perhaps the methodology is bad. If so then state why. If you are unable to point out any of these things then why do you not agree with the conclusion?

I found the article to be weak, throughout. Shoddy analysis dressed up with citations of marginal importance. It starts by just asserting that the American dream is that America is a meritocracy. The section with with tables showing American wealth and income distributions concludes with this bit of "reasoning":

> The highly skewed distribution of economic outcomes, however, appears quite in excess of any reasonable distribution of merit. Something that is distributed “normally” cannot be the direct and proportional cause of something with such skewed distributions. There has to be more to the story than that.

Right, so the American Dream is a perfect meritocracy AND that doesn't just mean wealth caused by merit, but it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics).

It's a long article and I'm not going to address everything it contained, but the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.

...it means wealth is supposed to be directly proportional to merit (e.g. contains no winner-take-all dynamics).

And that merit is assumed to be normally distributed. They also seem to make some fairly strong independence assumptions:

If poverty were exclusively due to individual differences, we would expect rates of poverty to be randomly distributed throughout the county.

This of course makes the implicit assumption that individual differences are neither correlated with location, nor do individuals of high merit change their location. The latter is certainly false...

> the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.

That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-s...

It's increasingly depressing the extent to which this isn't news any more. But the truth is, it's not at all clear what, given the global economy, can or should be done about it. We could offer free education and health care to everyone, and that still wouldn't bring factory and construction jobs back.

Doesn't Warren Buffett advocate points two and three? What a socialist he must be! Either that or you're pretty good at throwing around the word "Socialist" to avoid points of view you'd rather not consider. After all, if you can build a straw man, why bother with the hard work of thinking?

Based on the evidence here, you seem to work less smart and less hard than those around you. So that means you're poor, right?

The "North Carolina Sociological Association" sounds socialist. Color me surprised.

Sociology is socialism now?

> First, current forms of discrimination could be reduced or eliminated.

How? (While you're at it, I'd like a unicorn.)

> Third, the tax system could be redesigned to be genuinely progressive in ways that would close the distance between those at the top and the bottom of the system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax "A progressive tax is a tax by which the tax rate increases as the taxable base amount increases."

The US tax system is extremely progressive.

We could have a tax system that said that everyone had the same after-tax income. While one might call that "progressive", it would have other effects.

The authors assume that reducing the distance is necessarily a good thing. They're wrong. Equal does not imply good.

The authors think that envy is good and greed is bad. They have it backwards. Tearing someone else down doesn't build you up.

Why is a "genuinely progressive" tax system always considered inherently more fair? I get the basic argument supporting it. But the reality is that a progressive system introduces additional complexity to the codes. And that complexity allows those with means or time to find the loopholes, reducing their effective tax rates. The Warren Buffet income tax anecdote is particularly relevant here.

It seems to me that setting a flat tax rate that is set to equal the expected federal budget would work to effectively solve the swirling issues. Top tier rates would go down, but the majority of the superrich would see their effective rates go up. Fewer loopholes, more direct correlation between the federal budget and your tax sheet. Better transparency. Simpler returns (seriously -- think about how much time/money people would save by not needing tax accountants!)

There would be some unintended side effects, like the accountants as mentioned above. But overall, i would think the net gain would be huge. Of course, it will never happen -- the vested interests love their complex tax system, because they can exploit it. And they love complaining about tax rates as a red herring, to distract from the fact that very few people in the top income rates pay a high rate. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/taxes-warre...

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