Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

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> I missed the memo on when meritocracy became a bad word

The New Yorker just had a very interesting article on the idea of Meritocracy and it covered some of the reasons why there's negativity associated with the idea. It was enlightening for me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/is-meritocracy...

The article is in part a review of the book "The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite" (Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/y4qhruhc)

The basic argument is that "merit" is a word that pretends to be about innate ability and grit, where in reality it's a deep encoding of privilege.

EDIT: OH and I forgot the most relevant tidbit... this article says that meritocracy was a bad word right from the start: "The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways."

The word may be a recent(-ish) coinage, but the principle certainly has cropped up in various societies throughout history[1], probably the Chinese system of examinations to appoint bureaucrats being the most famous.

It strikes me as interesting that lots of measures seem to be "IQ plus effort" - practically speaking, though I generally want people to be more intelligent, I primarily want them to be good at what they do. So for me a system that rewards people for performance makes the most sense - smart but ineffectual, lazy, or crooked are all possible (even common), but hardly meritorious...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Definitions

I’m currently interviewing people for jobs, and reflecting on what this conversation means to me. Of course I’m trying to hire the most talented people from the group. Like, no question that I’m seeking people who are good at what they do. And we try to actively filter people who are ineffectual, lazy, or crooked.

So merit is essentially what I’m seeking. But I have no doubt that the people I interview & the ones we choose to hire are, on average, privileged. It would not surprise me much if I looked back on all my interview scores ever and found a high correlation between my rating and the candidate’s family income.

I think I can see how my own hiring according to merit is a good thing for my company, but potentially bad for society - if what we want is real equality of opportunity.

Wow, this is a really bad article. So much fakeness...

> That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic.

Then why are like 30% of students at elite colleges admitted as "athletes"? I mean, sure, "best at sports" is "meritocratic" but on a dimension fairly orthogonal to educational success (just like "best at using parent's wealth and connections").

> In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male.

So college being 61% male was a problem, and being 58% female is "solved"?

The basic argument is that "merit" is a word that pretends to be about innate ability and grit, where in reality it's a deep encoding of privilege.

I read the same article; the message I got is that it's about all of those things. You need privilege, ability, and grit.

When the system became so bitterly competitive you had to have all three, is when any equity of meritocracy started to vanish.

> the message I got is that it’s about all of those things

I agree; I was summarizing one side: the argument against meritocracy. The article did discuss other points of view, and it didn’t seem all that impressed with the book either.

This did open my eyes though, because I thought meritocracy was supposed to be a democratic or egalitarian sort of ideal, I had never thought of it as device designed for perpetuating social class divisions. (Though, I guess, what else is going to happen if you have a metric by which to rank people?)

The deeper idea is the realization that true ability and true grit still comes largely from privilege. That perhaps there isn’t equality in meritocracy and never was. Some people who are worried about money have to work super hard to make ends meet but don’t get the opportunity to develop abilities. People who can’t afford to miss a rent check or have to worry about food don’t really have the opportunity to develop grit. It’s pretty hard to have the sort of sticktuitiveness that “merit” calls for if you can’t afford to take any risks, if failing means you lose your phone, car, apartment, etc.

I guess the ‘glass floor’ article is taking the point of view that you don’t need all three of privilege, ability and grit; that privilege keeps some people in the upper echelons despite little ability or grit. I guess I don’t really know, but the question now rattling around in my head is whether ability and grit are mostly byproducts of privilege?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Coined by Lord Young, father of Toby Young.

But if you throw out meritocracy because an advantageous position is partially inherited, what do you replace it with?

Well, an estate tax helps level the playing field over time. You earn money in your life, you get to spend it in your life. You die, and your children get some, but will have to earn a lavish lifestyle based on their merits. Exponential decay of wealth from generation to generation will resolve the advantaged starting position in time, and the proceeds obtained can be used to raise the remaining folks up to a level of relative competitiveness.

This satisfies the idea that outsized reward should be available to those who create outsize value, but also ensures that this doesn't pass on to the idiot children.

Even that only works to a certain level. Just for illustration: say you have a 50% estate tax on anything over $10M. That would still leave a heir that receives a $100M inheritance with $55M to start with. You can easily double your money in your lifetime.

And that money would land in the states' pockets, it won't be distributed in a way that further levels the playing field.

Exactly why I think returning to an 80% top estate tax is fair, which is what we had in the US for the bulk of the 20th century [1]. It's only after Raegan that the rates dropped. And not surprisingly, that's exactly when wealth inequality started to skyrocket. IMO 80% on anything over the first $500K-1M indexed to inflation is totally reasonable.

Money in state pockets is de facto distributed to every citizen. Once it's in the state coffers, citizens can vote on its' use. You can't do that when Bezos' hypothetical idiot child has it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

Money that the state collects is more evenly distributed across the population than money billionaires collect.

It appears to me that you're calculating on only one child per generation. That's possible, but it isn't the norm.

How does this help when generally only the poor don't have estate planning to escape these taxes?

A floor of $500K-1M indexed to inflation will ensure the poor don't have to plan their estates at all. These don't have to be hard questions.

So this generation, the upper middle class and higher will be affected, and next generation everyone above the extreme poor will be affected.

I picked a totally arbitrary number. If we sat down for more than the 30s it took me to make this reasonable sounding number up, I'm sure we could find a satisfactory system :)

Any satisfactory system will be alterable by

(a) inflationary practices

(b) those scheming to take advantage of loopholes

in 10 or less years.

Unless you (a) index it to inflation and (b) make an attempt to close loopholes, rather than surrendering at the starting line ^_^

I like your optimism, but I've failed to witness a law that has never been twisted into some gross contorted display of what it was normally used for at least once.

So long as the harm caused by those taking advantage of it is less than the good created by the change, it should still be put in place.

Texas in so many ways scares me, but the fact that many of their laws have expirations actually makes sense.

The poor don't have estates. When they die, they leave their families wondering how to pay for the funeral, not how to preserve their holdings for the next generation.

The estate tax exemption is $11M, so you do not pay any estate taxes if the wealth you leave behind is less than that.

Do you know many poor people with more than $11M in wealth?

When you own a small business and some land your wealth may be over 11m but not liquid.

I guess I've never thought of a landed businessman as poor.

And of course there’s ways to solve this: tax the land at disposition. You don’t need to collect on the estate tax for land holdings as dollars at time of inheritance, you can just drop fractional ownership into a trust c/o the IRS and even retain right of first refusal if you should be able to pay it off in time. This is how the IRS already handles illiquid assets if an American chooses to expatriate: you get the choice to pay in cash or fractional ownership in trust.

I think spending money on your children shouldn't be culled. There's a good amount of benefit to society in entrepreneurs investing fiscally in their families. Sure, it might not be fair from a cosmic level, but creating new businesses and expanding the private sector is better than feeding the bloated government bureaucracies.

This is especially true because the social bonds and exchange of values and information that happen between someone who is successful and their family is more likely to be successful than the average person. In other words, while it might seem like nepotism from an outward perspective, it could be merit in actuality.

Instead, I'd support very high luxury taxes. Tax heavily lavish private jets, yachts, and mansions. These are the types of goods that will rapidly drain the funds of a rich trust fund kid who offers little to society. Don't take their startup investment.

A wealth tax doesn't prevent spending money on your children, it attenuates it. For a toy example, imagine a logarithmic estate tax. If you make ten times as much as everybody else, you can give your kids twice as much as everybody else. You're still giving them a big leg up, but for the dynasty to continue they have to make something of themselves.

A wealth tax encourages spending, for example on private school tuition, SAT tutors, and other things that can help your kids. It only hits the money/assets you have left at the end of the year. It's also likely unconstitutional in the US (despite being backed by an HLS professor, who you'd think would know better). Andrew Yang is backing a heavy consumption tax, which would be used to give cash to all adult Americans. This would have the opposite effect, since it would encourage savings over spending.

To my knowledge just giving people who need it money doesn’t encourage them to save it, but rather to spend it on what they need, which actually stimulates the economy. This is far more beneficial than leaving it as idle capital or in a savings account.

You're right that the propensity to spend is higher among low-earners, so if you're trying to stimulate the economy it makes sense to allocate there (all other things equal). But my point was about the futility of trying to use a wealth tax to cut down on generational transfers of wealth/advantage. If you tax wealth, that encourages people to spend instead of save. And if their concern is keeping their family in the top 5%, 1%, or .1%, there are plenty of ways for them to spend it in order to achieve that end.

"... better than feeding the bloated government bureaucracies."

I think this is probably the core of most of these disagreements. If you approach taxation with the assumption that it's mostly just money going to waste, then yeah, you're not going to be very supportive of taxation, especially high tax rates for high income, high net-worth people.

But even if you come at it from that point of view, it has to be acknowledged that there are certain kinds of services which are almost impossible to deliver other than via the government. The private sector will not give you healthcare for all, or any meaningful mass transit (much less HSR), or properly maintained roads and bridges, or a military, or any of a thousand other things that your multiple levels of government spend money on. Yes there is some waste due to corruption or bad decisions, but for most people that is an accepted cost to getting the services that can't be had any other way.

But most taxation does go to waste... if we define "waste" as "whatever elected officials fancy".

It's fairly easy to devise a system where taxation is fair (or at least more fair), e.g. by having "pots" - e.g. tax sugar drinks, but that tax revenue goes into the healthcare pot and can be used only for that purpose. If the ostensible reason for taxing rich people is "more equality", then that money should go into the "helping poor people" pot and be used only for that purpose (scholarships, financial aid / basic income, etc.).

Obviously, there's a reason politicians don't want to do that... because that would mean they no longer have control over money and can't spend/waste it as they want.

I don't really agree. There's a lot of value in having general revenue that can be directed toward the needs and priorities of the day— making these decisions is what our elected officials are there for. Especially when you consider the kinds of broad benefits that certain policies can have— for example, consider the billions needed for something like a new rapid transit line. Where should that come from, given that it offers mobility to people without cars, stimulates construction and job growth along the line, etc? It has a lot of broad-reaching benefits and knock-on effects that are hard to even completely quantify (think stuff like public health impacts due to air quality improvement and people making short walks to the station a part of their daily trips).

The other issue with the pots system is that it can give people a false sense of entitlement about things which benefit them. For example, consider the commonly-held belief that gas taxes pay for all road and highway infrastructure, and that roads and bridges wouldn't be falling apart if the government would stop "raiding" the gas tax pot to pay for other things. This is trivially googleable as untrue, but the pervasiveness of this belief blinds motorists to the reality of how much their preferred mode of transport is subsidized.

So people in this mindset approach a discussion about something like subsidized train fare and it's hard for them understand why it's a good deal for society.

Sorry for miscommunication. I completely agree that there should be a "general" pot and that a lot of taxes are spent and used in at least nominally (if not efficiently) good manner (one big exemption IMO is war-related spending).

I'm mainly saying that it would be easier for people to accept new taxes if that was the implmementation (and specifically taxes like wealth tax that are ostensibly "to decrease inequality" and not "because we hate the rich").

Oh I see. Yeah, certainly there's merit in that, but it can be a challenge communicating it effectively. For example, Canada now has a nominal carbon tax that's revenue neutral— all the revenues go into an upfront rebate that's doled out on a per-head basis with a slightly greater amount if you're rural vs urban. All this seems perfectly reasonable and is aligned with what economists recommend as far as ensuring that the system isn't subject to partisan criticisms or whatever else.

But if you actually look at the rhetoric around it, the right wing party that's in opposition slams it as being a "cash grab" and a "tax on everything" that makes life more unaffordable for everyday Canadians. Literally one of the main planks of their platform this election is scrapping a revenue-neutral tax in order to help Canadian families "get ahead".

So was there any value in going to the trouble of doing the rebate? AFAICT claiming the tax was revenue neutral mostly just opened up the gov't to a ridiculous semantic argument about whether it was truly revenue neutral given that sales tax was being applied after the carbon tax. Maybe it would have been easier to just impose the tax and then pair it with an income tax cut or some kind of investment in existing social safety net programmes?

One hopes a system where it is possible for everyone to achieve a basically acceptable standard of living, even if that means a cap on what is possible to achieve for the most advantaged (whether that be in connections, social skills, intelligence, or something else).

We never had it, so it isn't there to replace. You might consider what it would take to approximate the ideals of meritocracy, but paradoxically you may find that calling anything real a meritocracy gets in the way of that goal.

I honestly don't know, the idea that merit specifically might be a sham is brand new to me. But why does it need to be replaced, and what is the goal? We know that social advantage is hugely inherited, evidence for that abounds. Since, according to some, merit is a way to justify the riches of the rich as being deserving, then replacing merit for them means using a different rationalization to justify being rich. Maybe for people who aren't rich, the idea of replacing meritocracy with something else doesn't even seem like a good idea.

If I'm poor or middle class, I can aspire to have merit, and thereby to rise in the world - if "merit" really means merit, not "connections" or "money". But if I'm poor (including in social capital) and have talent, effort, and ambition, but the key to making it is connections rather than merit, I'm just locked out, and there's nothing I can do.

I think those on the outside would prefer merit.

I’d agree, when the only choice is between having a way to achieve social mobility versus no way to achieve it. Personally, I think those on the outside would prefer more choices than two bad ones. We can certainly imagine economic systems that prevent people from being locked out by design, rather than allow people with talent and effort that statistically only comes from having financial advantage.

Like, I think last week I might have argued exactly what you’re saying, that there’s some idea of merit that measures and reflects innate talent & effort and can be disconnected from connections and money. But is that really true? Can you actually separate them? Are you sure - certain - that talent isn’t, on average, statistically, something that you have the resources to develop only if you have a support system of money/family/friends that allows you to spend time on it?

The problem with merit for the poor and the middle class is that “merit” means you have to work much much harder than someone who’s rich to have the same merit. Hard enough that it’s rare, and we fetishize the few people who do while ignoring the fact that the net effect of the system really keeps the poor poor.

What if providing truly equal opportunity actually requires not judging people by talent, because pure talent is itself severely biased by money?

I see two separate issues here.

(A side note: Talent may be largely derived from riches, but rich parents definitely don't always result in talent. There can be, and are, incompetent children of the rich.)

First issue: We want the people with talent to wind up in the positions that need talent. We (society) actually need talent in those positions, rather than incompetence. It doesn't matter whether the incompetent ones are the children of the rich or of the poor; there are positions where we don't want them.

Second issue: The children of the poor (or even middle class) shouldn't be locked out of success in the economy simply because they're the children of the poor. Those with latent talent or undeveloped talent, or whatever you wish to call it, need to have that developed, so that it becomes actual talent. The school system was supposed to be the way that happened, but the school system has largely failed at that task, at least in much of the country. Now what do we do? Can we fix the school system? Or is it just a reflection of problems in society, and we have to fix the society in order to fix the school system? If we can't fix the school system, what do we do instead?

It seems to me that the biggest variable is the parents' attitude toward education. Children whose parents see the value of education will, on average, get more out of a mediocre school system than children of uncaring parents will get out of a good school system, unless they're rescued by someone - a great teacher, perhaps, or someone that they look up to. But if their social capital doesn't include people who value education, and their schools don't have great, inspiring teachers, from where are they going to get the spark?

I don't have good answers for you. I wish I did.

I'd agree with everything you said.

Yes, we do want talent to rise. But what if we're so overly worried about incompetence that we're overlooking the opportunity to increase talent across the board? What if the way we keep incompetence out is actually preventing ten times as many people with potential from reaching their potential?

Yes, poor kids shouldn't be locked out. The issue is that meritocracy may be providing the illusion that poor kids are not locked out, because they're allowed to "try hard", while in actuality being a major mechanism for locking poor people out. By filtering for the byproducts of privilege, people can claim to not be filtering for advantage while still filtering for advantage, right?

I don't have good answers either. Ideas like basic income and free education seem like potentially good starts, but there's certainly a lot of political agendas and dogmatic opinions surrounding those ideas. This week I'm just feeling like the solution somehow has to invest more in those without as much access without obsessing over the individual returns. It should be okay for society to try to educate and support poorer people and not expect each and every one to make it. For some wealthy people, I suspect their deep down collective cultural fear is that if you gave all poor people enough money to have stable home lives and not have to worry about money, and sent them all to the Harvards of the world, that just as many poor would succeed as rich succeed. That would undermine the idea that we need to filter for talent, and support the idea that we need to nurture talent instead.

They have no idea:

>What would a post-meritocratic world look like? Markovits doesn’t know, and neither did Marx know what a post-capitalist world would be like. There will be less alienation and inauthenticity (as Marx believed, too); other than that, we can’t really imagine a post-meritocratic world, because the élite has made its own values everyone’s.

Really says everything you need to know about the article and the book. Taking a hard-line stance against merit as a value is foolish. You can argue the metrics are wrong or the game is rigged or that playing by the rules doesn't guarantee success, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater only guarantees more of the problems you're trying to fix.

It's not just that the elite made their values the values that everyone else holds. Everyone else valued competence in the elite even without the elite "making its own values everyone's". Competence among the elite is something the elite claim, but it's something the non-elite want, for their own good.

With an actual meritocracy.

Did you see the recent college admissions scandal? All of these institutions present a facade of being merit based, while in reality admitting people who have money, power, connections, are good at gaming the system, or multiple of the above.

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