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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

I really can't understand this mindset, it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic and that only hard work matters. This is demonstrably false with a cursory review of how our (the US) education system, economy, and geographic distributions reward and punish people.

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This idea is false. Intra-generational mobility in the US is quite strong. Half of people in the 1% are not in the 1% a decade later. About 50% of people move up 1 quintile from their starting quintile of income. I don’t have stats on how this compares to EU or other countries, but this shows a majority American people can move between income quantiles in their lifetime.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...

This. The US has an abnormally high social mobility, even compared to the EU. You have a better chance of moving to the top 1% here than anywhere else. I'm a Tier 1 FAANG engineer and worked very hard to get here, coming from a middle income family. By first studying hard and building projects to get into a Tier 1 university.

Tier 1 top-talent engineers are just worth multiples more than lower talent people and deserve to reap from their hard work and expertise. It's unfair to me and other FAANGs to say we don't deserve our lifestyle and are silver spoon.

That comment that tier 1 top talent engineers is way too universal, to put it kindly. I've worked 20 years as a dev and leader across two tier 1 companies and succeeded, think Faang. I'm maybe from a tier 3 undergrad. Intelligence, hard work, experience are all things that help me, but maybe also hubris, kindness, focus were important too. I was worth a lot because I worked hard and produced a lot. But I've also met way more productive and intelligent and capable people who were not at those tier 1 companies and not from tier 1 universities. It's like the old saw from my youth, if you think you are so great, a super genius, then probably you were not in a selective enough group (whether that is high school, college, grad school, company, life).

It can be better than EU while still being dismal. Although I'd love to see some stats (not anecdotes) showing that it's better on the whole, because that's certainly not the case for those I know of.

More importantly, measuring it as a single number for the entire country hides a lot of nuance that matters. It's rarely constant across the spectrum, and those at the bottom of it usually see far less social mobility than those higher up. US is pretty good at social mobility for middle class specifically, but really bad for those below that.

Regarding the "silver spoon" bit - why do you take a complaint about inequality to mean that you should be earning less? The way I see it, others should be earning more, and have quality of life closer to mine. And they would, if all that money wasn't collected as economic rent by their employers (in case of small businesses, the chain goes a bit further up, but there's always somebody skimming of wealth generated by other people at the end of it).

It's not as strong as western Europe or Canada so what are you comparing it to? China? Brazil? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

Also, moving up a quintile is not that great of a move when you have to be in the top 10% to have a nice life in the US.

> it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic

Agreed. There is another dimension to it as well. Labor pricing is set by "replacement cost."

In a country where workers have been made precarious intentionally [1], replacement cost will be much lower than (a) the surplus value created by the worker, (b) the risk a worker bares in work activities.

There is empirical evidence that this is taking place on a grand scale. [2]

[1] https://chomsky.info/20120508/

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12909

Does this imply there aren’t enough employers, so that collusion among employers is feasible?

Feasible and documented [1], but I think that labor monopsony is only part of the issue.

Why are fast food workers signing non-competes, arbitration clauses, and NDA's [2]. The whole balance of power is out of wack.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

[2] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/state-attorneys-general...

Of course we don't have a proper meritocracy or a significant one, and I don't think the OP or anyone advocating it thinks so. Meritocracy is an ideal to strive for and one we'd probably never fully obtain due to the nature of the universe, randomness, and plain out inequality attached to circumstance. What it does mean is that we should aim to reward based on merit in as many places as is feasible and, one could argue, fair.

I.e.: to each according to his value and ability, not purely according to his need. But do so with compassion. I think a fair bit of what goes wrong when this topic and other related ones come up, is that people that advocate for things such as meritocracy are immediately portrayed as heartless and lacking compassion because they advocate for that thing.

On my part I don't consider all inequalities to be fundamentally reducible to a single dimension, so the primary reason I would consider that "inequality is not intrinsically bad" is not so much that it can be "great motivator" [to innovate, if I interpret that as mainly a way to get more money] than that some characteristics are just both plainly dissimilar and impossible to sort, sometimes not even for single individuals considering their taste, even less so for a whole population.

Now it is still interesting to measure a correlation between the income and the ability to work from home and the practical impacts in our current organizations and in specific situations, but this has to be qualified and interpreted very carefully, because I'm not really sure that the conditions for some are specifically worsened in order to be specifically enhanced for others - at least in normal times. Actually, I'm not sure the conditions are even always necessarily enhanced for those who work from home, for example working exclusively from home might be a bad idea for some people; and some companies may have the idea that working from home forever is the new normal, even without pandemic constraints. In that context, that would be one less choice for the workers, compared to a balanced situation. But that has to be completely contextually qualified: it would seem fair to amortize and compensate even otherwise neutral characteristics (not affirming that WFH ability is usually completely neutral) if they become huge disadvantage in specific situations. Because why bother living in a society otherwise?

So it boils down to choice (and I mean root choices: if you have the choice and choose a work occupation that you find extremely fulfilling, but that you can't practice from home, then usually the lack of choice on the work at home subject is only very secondary compared to your original choice of this activity), and in that regard maybe it should be read as a (potential, and very indirect) symptom of real problems rather than a problem on its own: I agree that the ability for individual choices that matter will be greatly improved by e.g. accessible good quality education and health care systems, and the US seems lacking there. The thing is that even if that does not change at all the wage vs. WFH correlation, the overall situation will still be enhanced if that improve the ability for people to chose their job.

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