In general the more educated and developed a society is, it is much more meritocratic than others, however i still feel it is not enough especially for those who have everything stacked against them.
May be sometime in the future we would have a universal human rights charter that expands and decides what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide in exchange for basic responsibilities. This way life will not always be a rat race and the poorest and unlucky can at least have some dignity.
If you think success is "be as rich and respected as I desire to be" then that absolutely will not hold.
There simply isn't a link between "working hard" and any measure of success above the lowest baseline. Some people succeed because of a small one million dollar loan from their parents without having to ever work hard.
Then there are places like Vancouver, where the average yearly income is less than the average yearly payments for residential properties.
But if you got in and leveraged yourself to the hilt starting in 2008, you could own a sizable equity stake in a growing stable of 30+ detached dwellings if your relationship with your local mortgage broker was on point.
One of his quotes from memory is "Meritocracy is the myth that justifies inequality", which explains a lot of the current world.
They talk about equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes.
But what can you do?
You're phenotype is mostly determined by stuff you can't control.
If you have low conscientiousness and a low IQ, you're basically f*cked and you can't control this either.
Even if you're high on openness and have a average to high IQ, you're still playing a high risk game.
Its worth following Chris, much of what he talks about is outside the world of regular media ideas, and usually has lots of interesting references.
On this topic - he often says that social mobility is not a great goal to aim for, helping working & middle classes achieve interesting & rewarding work with security is better goal.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli... http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
Even if it were strictly true, this ignores the fact that the ability to work hard is mostly determined by one's genes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2762790/
The main merit there is to have the right genes.
How is this a lie? There is no guarantee, just good odds.
at least people over there do not harbor illusions of meritocracy.
[Citation Needed]
May be sometime in the future we would have a universal human rights charter that expands and decides what are the basic needs of a human that a society should provide in exchange for basic responsibilities.
There was already a Declaration of Universal Human Rights from a commission headed by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Life has always been a rat race. The only reason that it isn't for some people right now is that we are at a very unique time in human history where we have greatly increased our ability to produce food and, at the same time, have extremely low birth rates as a result of being poorly adapted for modern life.
This, too, shall pass.
I think this used to be true decades ago when you could without much effort get a well-paying manufacturing job with just a high school diploma.
It would be foolish these days to rely on just "working hard". Not everyone "works hard" equally - it is important to work hard in the right direction.
To work as say a Starbucks barista even full-time and expect a house, a car, and a luxurious lifestyle, then after failing to achieve that exclaim "meritocracy doesn't work" is narrow-minded at best.
Let's use a few sterotypes for examples: A hard working trucker will take years to set aside $10,000 in savings. An average programmer at a financial institution can do the same in months. A debutante able hire a stock broker to invest their slush fund can do the same in hours.
The trucker, in terms of advancement and opportunities, will probably max out at running their own owner-operator business. Maybe they'll get really lucky and be able to employ other drivers as well.
The programmer can probably keep raising their pay by hopping jobs every few years, until they can retire by playing the financial market with his savings.
The debutante just keeps being a debutante.
We could call the trucker the successful one - they ended up with their own business. And there's a cost, too. All of that long haul driving and manual labor moving freight has left them with severe, if managable, back pain. However in terms of capital, in terms of being able to pay for a loved one's fight against cancer, the truck driver isn't even a blip on the radar.
The author doesn't specifically state it but the problem, at least in my case, is one's definition of work; I don't think I'm alone when I used to think my code spoke for itself and that's that. There are a few problems with that but essentially the issue is many of us myopically ignore other seemingly unimportant work-related tasks such as building relationships, personal marketing (I know that sounds like a buzzword phrase but it's true), among other examples.
Basically, at its core I believe that hard work does lead to success but our definition of work gets in the way.
Hard work is only one component of success. Physical attractiveness and charisma are often at least as important, even though logically they seem irrelevant. Dealing successfully with humans is often not terribly intuitive.
Yes, it is the only way to get a tenured position, but the vast majority of people trying don't get one. And not because they didn't work hard or even because they aren't qualified.
We are humans born with different abilities with different tastes and strive for different things. Equalizing the outcomes of all by artificially holding some back suppresses the very creative life force in each one of us, ends in misery and progress is hampered.
Talking about defining sensible rules to allow a wider range of people to be successful than only those being a member of the local Golf Club, I disagree.
There should be no question that we need rules, and at the same time there should be intense discussions - if not intellectual fights - about which rules we need and how to implement and enforce them.
Actually(speaking from experience) these islands of wealth only reinforce such illusions in poor countries.
The logic is as following: apparently that person is exceptional and the fact that they've managed to get wealthy within one generation is proof.
People don't make progress in spite of their struggle, progress is made because of the struggle.
Earning a living should not be a problem in the modern world with basically any kind of job. One of the big problems is people want the latest iphone, the best car, the most luxurious home, holidays, etc.
The expectation of life had been set too high to make it happen even for a small part of the population. What is actually needed is way, way different from what is being promoted by media and society.
Hmm.. I don't believe that the countless Walmart and Amazon warehouse employees on food stamps are at the edge of poverty because they bought the latest iphone, best car and most luxurious home.
But it is.
15% of the population have an IQ of less than 85, that's about 48 million people in the US alone.
Not even the military thinks they can do anything reasonable with them (if you under 83 they don't want you so it's probably 1 in 10 people, I guess) and they try to get as many people as they can.
Most people I meet (across all classes mind you) are scrappy and pretty selective about what they buy.
It would be interesting to see the thought process and methodology that brought you to this conclusion.
An example of this is probably in immigrants. Many people came with practically nothing but he clothes on their back. They took whatever job they could find and worked like crazy and saved like crazy and pushed their children like crazy. Their children in turn started out better than their parents and worked and saved and pushed their children and their children did even better. After a few generations, the descendants of immigrants have entered the highest ranks of society.
What drives the "myth" of the American dream is not necessarily that I who started out with nothing will be well off. It's that through my hard work and their hard work my children will be better than me and my grandchildren and their children will be well off even though I started with nothing.
That version of the American dream has worked far more reliably than the individualistic model. Even once persecuted and discriminated against immigrant communities in the US have succeeded in this version of the American dream.
The student loads have never been such a burden. The cost of housing skyrocketed. If they want to eat for the same price as their grand parents they need to eat junk food.
I mean: my grand parent could buy their own house while only one was working, and a job that didn't require any diploma.
But the flat screen prices are very cheap so they got that going for them.
"my grand parent could buy their own house while only one was working, and a job that didn't require any diploma"
Yes, but they probably couldn't buy a house anywhere in the world they wanted. The house size was probably much smaller than the sizes of today's suburban houses. I would argue that one could by a small, economical home in the midwest.
"If they want to eat for the same price as their grand parents they need to eat junk food."
Again, look at the diet lifestyle choices of Gen Y versus their grandparents. My grandparent (I'm a Gen Xer) told me stories of eating onions for a month because his parents were migrant workers and they worked picking onions when they were in season.
Even today, it is possible to eat simply (rice, beans, in-season vegetables and fruits) for a low-price. You won't be eating much meat, and you won't be eating "luxury" items. But that is very similar to how people ate in the 30's, 40's and early 50's.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
Other forms of athletic talent are less visible than height but I see no reason not to attribute them to luck (genetics, access to nutrition, coaching etc.)
We can apply this reasoning to anything where success can be measured. A great deal of business success comes down to connections which provide access to capital and access to markets. All of these things accrue to the well-connected.
In a free market system there will always be winners, losers, and a lot of us in the middle. That's a result of the system BEING an equal playing field, talent and money are correlated. It'll never be the case that we all go into the workforce on equal footing, because we all start out in different places, with different genetics, and different upbringings. That doesn't mean someone from a poor upbringing can't work hard and raise their market value (thus making more), but it means that not everyone is going to be a millionaire.
Yeah, well I'm seeing a lot of "winner takes all" lately.
It seems to me that if someone who was literally identical to me was put into an identical situation they would act the exact same way which means our actions are deterministic and only depend on the boundary conditions. Anyway, this is all a little off topic but it's interesting that even if you got where you are by working hard you are still lucky to be a person who was in the right conditions (genetically and environmentally) to be someone who works hard.
I don't love the misappropriation of randomness in some social sciences (in this case "luck"). Outside of maybe quantum effects, there is probably no randomness in the world. Maybe those quantum effects can compound in some way to make it truly unknowable to figure out if I'll get hit by a bus today or not, but I doubt it. There're just properties of a system that are unknowable at this point because of our lack access to resources/technology to observe the system.
Part of the answer to the original question is in this line. Normal distribution implies outliers - i.e. some are radically competent. In meritocratic conditions, you expect some to be radically successful, therefore creating a huge wealth asymmetry.
I’m not saying we do live in a pure meritocracy, far from it. Only that normal distribution of talent doesn’t imply wealth should naturally become normally distributed.
Anytime you use Netflix, Google, HackerNews is supporting inequality. Every time you bought a Harry Potter book as a kid you supported inequality. You're giving more money to the winners.
If you want to reduce inequality, then buy books from unpopular authors. Use unpopular OSes like TempleOS instead of giving even more market share to Google/Apple/Microsoft. Drive cars made by less popular manufacturers. Don't read the New York Times, Fox News, or Washington Post - only blogs or magazines with a small subscribership. And don't watch anything Disney.
We need to find ways to make smaller organizations more robust and less vulnerable to having their lunch eaten by large organizations. But this advice to not buy anything popular and only go with that which is unpopular is not the right way to do this.
Surely creating laws that try to limit income inequality makes much more sense, especially when looking at cost/benefit?
My definition is perfect. High popularity -> high income -> inequality. If you bandwagon onto a popular author like J.K. Rowling, then you are further enriching her and causing inequality.
If you want to legislate away inequality for say, Twitch streamers, then pass a law that no Twitch streamer can have more than 500 views. Or authors who have sold >100,000 books can no longer sell books.
> Use unpopular OSes like TempleOS instead of giving even more market share to Google/Apple/Microsoft
...Why? You could also just use Linux or BSD. TempleOS seems like a very odd suggestion for people looking to cut out non-free operating systems cold turkey.
Edit: In case this isn't clear, I'm responding to the commenter's commercialism thesis. I mean free as in beer, not as in speech.
But then that would mean that luck is greatly a matter of how hard you are willing to work and that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion these days.
This discussion misses one important element of returns to talent: more capital in the hands of more capable people should result in better allocation of resources, and consequently better outcomes for society as a whole. Too little inequality would, according to this view, result in destruction of capital over time, and in consequence impoverish the society.
Talent is not universal, being a great Doctor has little to do with being a great painter or investor.
You might like to think so, but g says otherwise.
Some athletes may have that talent, and some not — enterprising and disciplined people are broadly effective in life while the merely gifted struggle to tie their own shoes in the morning.
Allocating capital to these latter people often does result in its destruction, as you point out. There is a social cost when capital ends up in the hands of people who can’t grow it.
There are obviously lots of practical conditions outside of our control such as local conditions, state of the job market, being willing to relocate etc. There is also the understanding that you need to look better than the other applicants rather than just look good in isolation.
Another major issue that is rarely covered is personality types and the fact that insecurity, paranoia or other physical conditions that are obvious to the interviewer will cause you to look bad, regardless of whether they actually measure your ability to do a job.
And then there's luck!
Perhaps I misunderstand the situation, but it seems like the author is baking meritocracy directly into the model: if you have high talent then you automatically get a higher paycheck. By increasing the paycheck importance or simply reducing the event probability towards 0, this model will always produce a perfect meritocracy.
So on the one hand we have random events that have a chance to double or halve capital, but somehow a persons paycheck is a constant over their life, nobody is ever between jobs, and paycheck is entirely deterministic. I think the author really missed the opportunity to link paychecks to the random events (but paychecks would otherwise persist between events).
My hypothesis is that the starting capital will impact the distribution of capital more than talent.
Another potential model: Vary the chance to participate in opportunities. Not everyone has equal chance to take advantage of opportunities; someone living in NY will have more opportunities they can leverage than someone living in Iowa (and being able to move to NY is an opportunity in itself).
My hypothesis here is that the chance for being able to take advantage of opportunities will play as big of a role in the final capital distribution as talent.
I've spent a lot of years trying to understand the details of exactly how my gender is a factor and trying to find solutions to those details. I don't believe it has to be a problem, but we know it currently is a problem, and these cleaned up models seem to never include the idea that if you are female or a person of color or gay etc, you will tend to have "demerits" or be handicapped (in the horse racing sense of carrying an extra burden).
If talent, work and luck were everything, then we shouldn't have such consistent outcomes that certain groups overall do better than others.
r1) Actors have normally distributed abilities r2) Actors are chosen randomly based on current winnings, the more you have won, the more you compete. r3) Winner of competition wins one point from the loser
You can find what I wrote about this at
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~arnold/research/80-20/
including the code. It's interesting!
* job/income talent
* exploiting luck talent
* avoiding unlucky event talent
* mitigating unlucky event talent
eg. i got lucky, they gave me an offer letter right after the interview for a developer position!
