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Comment by jrsj | Hacker News Reader

Very hard for me not to have this opinion now after working in a few different companies where half my coworkers seem to not be doing much more than jerking off all day and at best accomplishing a days worth of work in a week. How could anyone who has had this experience NOT want greater variation in pay that’s at least somewhat correlated to effort/performance?

This stands out more to me in an office environment but the dynamic existed even when I worked at McDonald’s. Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight.

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Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy and competition is bad and everyone should be paid the same. Killing incentive seems like a bad economic policy to me that's already been tried.

It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.

Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy.

They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive.

We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy.

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.

The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.

But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples.

Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments.

Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time.

Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.

The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money.

This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries!

Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much.

"Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.

Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax.

2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.

2 is described based on the government funding startups quite heavily and having heavy inheritance taxes and "no real classes," where rich kids "don't usually just live on investments." This is not how your average Western European economy functions. Yes, they have free education and healthcare, but startups are still very risky and unsubsidized, and rich kids do get to inherit a lot of wealth. Risk and income inequality (in other words, the important factors for wealth creation as in society 1) are very much alive and well in Western Europe.

Commenter in question has yet to articulate their points. You're already pushing "government funding startups quite heavily", which original comment never specified, and "heavy" is still too vague to quantify. Even so, this doesn't answer why 2 wouldn't work. Unlike communism, there are clear incentives for individuals to provide merit and do better other than "hoping to see your hard work trickle back". Unlike modern day capitalism, your future isn't largely decided by your (lack of) inheritance. The only thing that holds is corruption, but really, you'd have an easier time listing things that don't get worse for the commoner when corrupted.

Nevertheless, the point isn't "this is Western Europe". The point is, you were already going off the deep end with a Soviet Union comparison, while 2 the way it is described is still a far cry from it. We don't need to choose between the extremes of capitalism and communism when there's something in the middle that can work out better, and we have yet to explore it. It's pretty evident unbridled capitalism isn't helping in several aspects either, even if it is holding together longer than Animal Farm.

Risk and income inequality still apply to society 2 as important factors.

Sorry, but you picked out the "government funded startups" line. How about the "no real classes" and "don't usually just live on investments"?

Also, it is not true that inheritance defines your wealth in modern capitalism. Most billionaires and almost all millionaires are self made in the US (ie they don't come from billionaire or millionaire parents).

In Soviet Union, the "startups are supported by the governments" was not true. Neither was the "no real classes" part because Nomenklatura existed. The real reason why people had "very few incentives to start new companies" in the Soviet Union was because they were deprived of the benefits of doing so, not because Soviet Union was a "type 2 society" as described above.

I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit?

Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.

I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)

It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.

>This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years.

In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?

No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.

Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.

This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.

Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.

I don't know. I also feel that I work more than let's say half my colleagues at whichever company. Mostly because I really really really enjoy what I'm doing. That being said, I'm not really sure how their salary impacts my life. I negociate to what I want for what I do and that's that.

Your ability to negotiate a salary at all is a function of a diversity of salaries though. Limiting that in favor of more equal pay across the board means you’re more likely to be stuck getting paid what others are getting paid regardless of your personal efforts.

Equal pay for a particular role seems very in line with the market efficiency theme. For better pay, you need a better job where the effort required is actually higher.

Only if the roles are specified with essentially infinite precision. Would you expect "sales representative who makes between $199k-200k in sales" and "sales representative who makes between $205-206k in sales" to be separate roles at a company?

I'd argue that the dynamic you're talking about is a part of a free market though. Like you could use your McDonald's example to make the opposite point that you're using it for. You could say "A lack of pay, recognition of effort, and career growth opportunity at McDonald's means that workers are unmotivated and do not give 100%. More ambitious workers who want to give more effort and be recognized for said effort move on to higher paying opportunities elsewhere".

If this were the case I would expect more people to give a shit in higher paying office environments but I’ve actually seen the exact opposite of that. Having more opportunities available allows people to have even less potential consequence for not actually trying.

If compensation was all about hard work then coal miners would be billionaires. The arguments about income inequality largely come down to the fact that there is very little correlation between hard work and compensation. Instead the large difference in income are correlated with factors generally considered beyond people's control. I would have a hard time becoming a real estate tycoon because I don't have a father who can grant me a small loan of a million dollars, for instance.

These conversations are rarely productive because no attempt to find common ground is made. For example you just assume that a coal miner is hard work. I assume a coal miner is easy work. You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work. The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure. They are told where to go, told what to do, told how to do it. They do it and then get paid. Easy work. Writing a successful novel is hard work. The author just sits in an air conditioned room in front of a computer for 6 months clicking keys on a keyboard. So why is that hard work? Because they are most likely going to fail to complete the novel, or even having completed it, are likely to fail at gaining a significant audience. Most people who try fail, hence hard work.

Neither of us is right or wrong, we just have different world views. Finding common ground between our world views is a critical first step to having any productive conversation.

Miners have a pretty high chance death while on the job - according to https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm, the US death rate in 2007 (because that's the first figure I found) was 24.8 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 4.3 in all private industry. Sounds like a much higher "chance of failure" than most other jobs.

That's not hard work. That's dangerous work. They are completely different things. They didn't fail at attempting to accomplish their goal. They met an unlikely, but well understood risk, of death on the job.

"The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure."

Surely death at their job is failure, and historic chances of coalminer dying on the job used to be extremely high?

'I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work."

I define 3 to equal to 4

If you want to say 'free market reqards risk', thats fine, but don't redefine english language to suit your needs

If you are replaceable, and more coal minera can be hired in 5 minutes, it does not matter how hard you work and how much you risk.

The tip 3 predictors of success are family wealth, what school did you go to and the social connections. None of those are hard work or risk.

> You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work.

So gambling is hard work then? You'll forgive me if I find your definition lacking.

Regardless, even under your definition everyone born into wealth has much lower chance and consequence of failure than other people because of their inherited access to greater resources.

It's about valuable work, not hard work. Valuable as in what other people are willing to pay for your labor, whether it's physically demanding or not.

I get you. I've had that opinion as well. But anymore, I realize that's not my problem. What I want is my share. When a company says, "Best year ever!" and my share is a 2% raise, fuck that.

That is literally what socialism means: you get a stake in the place where you work.

That isn’t quite accurate and it’s dangerous to twist definitions like that.

so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/

noun

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

How much harder than you did the CEO work for how much more pay than you got at any of these companies?

CEOs are not paid for working hard, they are paid for BEING RIGHT, aka making the right strategic decisions. Bad CEO can bankrupt the company, good CEO can grow it's revenue ten times. You pay CEOs for their experience and expertise in running companies, not for the number of hours worked.

CEOs are wrong all the time, they are also paid so much for being fired there’s a term for it: “golden parachute”

Yeah the OP comment doesn’t make sense to me. Right or wrong a CEO will probably make more than you regardless.

If you paid the CEO of McDonald's the same amount as a burger flipper, you are going to get someone who is wrong much more frequently. When we see that CEOs get things wrong, that seems to be more of an artifact of the future being hard to predict than any individual being stupid.

Ask a CEO to flip burgers and you'll find they'll make a lot of mistakes too.

CEOs have specific education and/or experience to help them make better decisions. They suck just as much as anyone else at unknowns.

I'll bite: The CEO would do just fine at flipping burgers if that were their job. Honestly, after only a few weeks of training, the CEO will probably do better at flipping burgers than the average employee. Everyone sucks at a job when they start out and it's a strawman to say that if you took the CEO to flip burgers for a day, they would suck at it compared to someone who has been flipping burgers for years.

It's no more of a strawman than saying that CEOs would be wrong more often if they were paid the same as a burger flipper.

> the CEO will probably do better at flipping burgers than the average employee

this is the same old magical thinking "CEO's are special people" bullshit

IQ helps predict job performance even among unskilled labor. CEO's tend to have high IQ, so you'd expect them to perform better than average people in unskilled labor as well once they have gotten comfortable with the role. (Statistical expect, that is the statistically expected performance of CEO's at the role vs the statistically expected performance of typical current employee, would still be lots of overlap)

The following study shows this connection for low skilled job. It also shows that the connection has to do with IQ correlating with better understanding of the role, so wont show until after the worker has learned it, but the connection is still there so you'd expect the CEO to learn the role better than an average employee.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/

That article concludes that it's very risky to use IQ tests to measure just about anything because there are heaps of weak data around them

> As others have pointed out, statistical corrections are no magical compensation for weak data and that it is risky to reach conclusions about test validities from those currently available (Oswald & McCloy, 2003; Russell & Gilliland, 1995). The only solution is properly conducted primary studies, with larger representative samples, better measures, and so on.

Here's the important bit that basically advises not using IQ tests in the exact way that you're using them:

> Until they are available, investigators should be extremely cautious about disseminating conclusions about IQ test validities, from correlations between IQ and job performance.

CEO is a job title, not a measure of intelligence, or even job performance. There are no shortage of shitty CEOs, just as there are no shortage of shitty performers in just about every possible job.

That's an idealistic, maybe even naive point of view. There are plenty of CEOs who generally make bad decisions and take increasingly more money while their companies lose money, their best workers, their most innovative projects and so on. Hierarchical power structures are always prone to corruption and value extraction from the bottom to the top.

In fact the above is so prevalent that I'm specifically admiring leaders who are exceptions, actually take responsibility and care more about their workers, clients and the many other people they impact as opposed to their individual gains via compensation and social currency at the top (board, shareholders etc.)

Also CEOs generally work hard regardless of the quality of their work. But they generally have a ton of responsibilities and people to talk to. In terms of time invested per day, it is not uncommon for them to do several hours more work than say an engineer.

(It's not the same _kind_ of hard though, I personally find social activities, reading and communication much less exhausting than technical work, but it's also less fun.)

Also likely that your average CEO is not spending time washing dishes, doing the laundry or grocery shopping. There is more capacity for "work" when the only work you do is your day job.

Working hard is not inherently valuable. You have to do something with your labor that other people value, which may require hard work. It might also require working smarter, creativity, taking advantage of a rare opportunity, making the right connections, etc. Of course luck is involved. Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?

>> Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?

If this means that this will increase morale of others, then why not?

For me mere existence of luck factor means that the system is not build for the people but for the benefit of the owners of the system. Its a bit like with the casino - in the end house always wins because the system is build with them in mind and not the players.

The existence of the luck factor is life. The house is the universe. Who you're born to, where you're raised, who you meet, what sort of advantages and disadvantages your particular biology affords you in whatever environment, what sort of ideas you might randomly come across, etc. There's no gaming that and there's no system that can make it all equal out. Someone buys a lottery ticket and they win, we don't take all their winnings and redistribute it because there would be no reason to play the lottery. Or gamble. Or create a startup. That we even exist as a species instead of some non-avian dinosaur descendant is the luck of a mass extinction event.

Sure, luck inherent to the nature and reality. We cannot get rid of it and cerate totally deterministic system. But that does not mean that we cannot minimalize it and that somehow it has inherently good value. I could argue that almost all our civilization exists because we eliminated randomness from our primal lifes.

Were it pure luck. Unfortunately, capital and connections are heritable.

Very nice sentiment, but unfortunately that's not how reality works. Do you honestly look at the world and see that incomes are correlated to merit/effort/performance/work?

Obviously, but your examples are too obvious.

Should a subpopulation of entrepreneurs be able to coast by on brand recognition and first mover advantage after an initial burst of effort?

Should manual laborers be paid jack for doing a job which puts them at high risk of being stuck socioeconomically, despite putting in loads of effort?

People want harder work to be more rewarded, but the saying is "work smarter, not harder" for a reason.

In a simple poll like this though more complex topics won’t be on peoples minds, that’s a flaw in how this was conducted.

I don't think that is a flaw when the majority of people don't even have the knowledge to think further on these topics, and people tend to act rather simplistically most of their lives anyway. In your own example, think about what would happen if all these dead weights suddenly became more competitive. I don't think the working class fully realizes what will happen when we boost it some more, despite recent events in the 20th century inflating the working class at the benefit of entrepreneurs and the detriment of (already participating?) workers.

Like ideally, if I was in such a situation, I'd want my coworkers to work more so I could slack. In reality, I don't think them working harder would benefit me in the long term, due to numerous other factors (myself, the boss, wealth pipelines, etc.)

> Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight.

But there's a lot of "dead weight" to carry. And it has a voice and a vote.

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