[evdev]

There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand.

The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.

This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.

We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.

[d1zzy]

I grew up in a society where merit didn't really matter, most of the time. Regardless of you finished just primary school or you went to college, your expected income in the job assigned by the state (that matched your educational status) would pay mostly the same. Only if you ended up being a director at a (state run) factory or were higher positioned in The Party would you have significantly more benefits (financial and otherwise).

To my mind, that society sucked. It meant that passion, time, obsession wasn't being appreciated. The way the state was treating it was just one aspect of it but it had huge trickle down implications for the rest of the society. It meant that people with 4 classes didn't need to respect those with college, it created this perverse inverse set of values where to spend more time studying and doing things was seen as a sign of weakness, of stupidity, the "smart" people would study or do the least amount of work and "trick" their way to success. As the state assigned you your job, with extremely low risk to lose it (you would have had to be caught stealing, repeatedly) there was no incentive to work hard in your line of work. As you can imagine, if most everyone doesn't do serious work and try to "trick" their way into everything, you don't get a very competitive economy, which had negative consequences for everyone.

The repercussions of that are still felt in the country I grew up today, the value system of older generations hasn't changed. When they see a young person that got hired at am multinational company buy a shiny new foreign car, old retired people talk behind their back saying "who knows how much that young person stole" to get that car (or worse, if the young person is a young lady). When someone does anything extraordinary, the normal reaction isn't to congratulate or praise them, or to show them as an example to be followed, the natural reaction is to be envious and to suggest unsavory ways that could explain their success, because after all, like the state said a long time ago, everyone is equal.

It is a shitty, miserable society, rotten to its core that I wish nobody else would experience in their life.

[pdonis]

> The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status.

I think the trick comes even earlier: in making people think that there has to be a single "system for the distribution of wealth and status".

Wealth is not a zero sum game; there is not a fixed pool of wealth in the world that has to somehow get distributed. Wealth can be created. Indeed, wealth is created every time people make a positive sum trade, a trade in which both sides come out better off.

Status tends to be more of a zero sum game, but it doesn't have to be. For example, status here on HN does not have to be the same as, or even measured by the same criteria as, status somewhere else.

However, if we set up one centralized system that is supposed to "distribute" wealth and status, we are making zero sum games out of things that shouldn't be (wealth) or at least don't have to be (status). The solution is to stop doing that. Stop centralizing power.

[mrow84]

Here is yet another trick: situating the creation of wealth primarily in the exchange of goods, implicitly devaluing the act of producing the goods in the first place; treating allocation as the primary problem, with production a mere by-product.

The line of thought typically proceeds by claiming that it really is the exchange that makes the wealth, because it only after exchange that the person who wants to use a thing can actually get their hands on it. However this is misleading, because production is necessary before exchange can take place.

The idolisation of the problem of allocation structures the world in a particular, and not inevitable, way, with many unsavoury properties. Allocation favours fungibility, as a tool for reducing the time needed to exchange, creating immense difficulties in valuing the act of production itself, because one line of production can just be exchanged for another. This abstraction over production removes almost all incentive to consider the future, or to plan for catastrophe, something we see visibly in the response of allocation-focused countries to the current pandemic, and in their willingness to attempt to mitigate, or even to prepare, for the consequences of human-induced climate change.

[zrobotics]

While I want to agree with the general gist of your argument, there is value created in economic activities besides production. For example, operating a pick & pack line to ship goods to end-consumers is labor intensive.

Speaking as someone who supports such an operation, shipping to end-consumers is expensive. None of the manufacturers I order from want to be in that business, they want to operate assembly lines and ship out truckloads at a time.

While my job is the classic 'middleman' in the supply chain, there is value provided that we do generate. The manufacturers I work with understand this as well; if they wanted to sell to end consumers it would be easy for them to cut us out. All they need to do is to advertise, package, and ship out individual products and provide support for those purchases.

Producers (read: manufacturers) want predictable demand and have long lead times. If I am running out of a product, my lead time is 8-12 weeks coupled with a sizeable minimum order. No end consumer wants to deal with placing an order for 26 skids of product and waiting 2 months. Specialization means some firms produce things and are good at it, others distribute those goods. Distribution is its own challenge, and takes specialization.

There are very few manufacturers an end-consumer can order goods from, for very good reasons. Honestly, I can't think of a single manufacturer that ships direct to consumers; even most alibaba 'factories' are intermediaries (and alibaba itself also acts as a retail channel).

[mrow84]

Yes - I have a tendency to waffle, and it seems that editing came at the expense of my actual opinion, namely that a concern for both production and allocation is vital for a stable society.

Significant advantage has been found in organising redistribution of goods (and services, another important mechanism of wealth production, as pdonis mentioned in a sibling comment), and it clearly isn't something to be ignored, my point is only that a lot of the contemporary approach to thinking about economies focuses almost entirely on allocation/distribution - production is taken as a given, driven largely by demand through the allocation mechanism.

And to clarify - it is not even the first order effects (e.g. worse conditions the closer you are to "mere" production) that I find most concerning (though they are serious issues), but the higher-order effects of how society manages and maintains its productive capabilities, and prevents them from causing longer-term harms, simply because those harms aren't handled by the system of allocation.

The common response within the current mental framework is to try and manage those harms through the allocative system, by creating markets for them, but fundamentally the incentives simply aren't there in the way that they are for the allocation of things people want - they have to be coerced, and so people try to game the system.

No easy answers, unfortunately!

[pdonis]

> situating the creation of wealth primarily in the exchange of goods, implicitly devaluing the act of producing the goods in the first place

Producing goods and services also involves exchanges, but it's a fair point that there are other activities besides direct trades that can create wealth, yes. Transformation of raw materials into finished products also can. So can providing services.

[CuriousSkeptic]

There are two kinds of wealth that gets confused in the discussion.

The absolute wealth of having access to high quality services and goods with relatively low efforts. This is the wealth we create by progress.

Then there’s the relative wealth of which share of the economy you wield power over. How much of the current means of production is commanded for your personal priorities and how do they relate to others priorities? What is the opportunity cost?

[pdonis]

> There are two kinds of wealth that gets confused in the discussion.

No, there's just wealth. Which is basically what you are calling "absolute wealth".

What you are calling "relative wealth" is not wealth; it's either simple trade (when you buy a product, you are "commanding the means of production" that produced it, but that's just how a free market works) or brute force (using either overt violence or government power to "command" resources that in a free market would go to other uses).

[CuriousSkeptic]

Relative to your peers. If it clear things up.

[pdonis]

> Relative to your peers. If it clear things up.

I already understood that that's what you meant. It doesn't change anything I said.

[monadic2]

> Wealth can be created.

Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist and the need for disparity to drive the economy doesn’t exist either.

[pdonis]

> Corollary: wealth doesn’t exist

I have no idea how you are getting that from what I said.

[mushufasa]

yeah. i can create a sandwich. that does not imply there are no other sandwiches.

[monadic2]

It does imply that sandwiches are not necessary. I’m not sure what else you can draw from a comparison between an abstract concept and physical expression of one—you certainly didn’t materialize the expression out of thin air.

Incidentally, the benefit of wealth is unclear.

[pdonis]

> It does imply that sandwiches are not necessary.

You're still not making sense.

> the benefit of wealth is unclear.

How are you posting here without taking advantage of various benefits of wealth? Last I checked the Internet doesn't work with paper cups and string.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

I can use raw ingredients to create a sandwich too, and if we prefer the each other's sandwiches more, we can agree to trade sandwiches.

Was anything actually created during the trade though? I think that's what he's getting at. An economist would argue yes, value was created, but it's an abstract concept at best, a bit made-up at worst, because at the end of the day it's the same two sandwiches.

"Wealth isn't real" is a pretty radical take though, and I'm not sure how productive it is to contemplate because you'd have to entirely throw away the concepts of personal property and money before you can get there.

[pdonis]

> at the end of the day it's the same two sandwiches

No, it isn't, because the sandwiches are in the possession of different people than when they started. That's where the wealth gets created: the value of each sandwich is different for different people. Many people fail to understand the concept of wealth creation because they think of "value" as something inherent to the object, instead of something that depends on who is using the object and for what purpose.

[nshepperd]

> This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs.

Isn't that because the aspect of merit which is measured by an arm wrestling contest isn't the same as that which is relevant to running a feudal society?

A tournament for selecting a feudal lord would need to measure economic and strategic literacy, intelligence, moral compass, etc.

[evdev]

It begs the question to just assume there is a "feudal society" that needs to be "run". For instance, why not have a "first citizen" who is selected to manage internal coordination and external strategy, but must live in the worst house in the village and wear a hair shirt.

You can say, well that wouldn't work! But now the idea is that the structure of this model feudal society is justified by reasons like "people won't follow someone if they don't have a gold hat and a scary sword" and not by any process that led to selecting the particular feudal lord.

[takinola]

This analysis is incomplete. Assume I am the best (objectively) at "managing internal coordination and external strategy" but I don't want to live in the worst house and I am allergic to hair shirts. Then I won't sign up for the job and the society is worse off for it.

[Avshalom]

Assuming a magical test that actually could pick the best lord... that would justify the lord. It wouldn't do much of anything to justify the subjugation of the serfs.

[Scarblac]

What if they happen to be really good at being subjugated serfs?

[harimau777]

I think that the argument that they are making isn't about the role that the person ends up with but the dramatic difference in wealth, status, and privilege.

[ThrowawayR2]

However, the inverted version of the lord and peasants scenario is not a scenario where the differences in wealth, status, and privileges are leveled out. It is a scenario where, since power corrupts, those appointed to decide how those things are allocated most equally somehow just happen to wind up favoring themselves.

Or, as Orwell so eloquently wrote "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

[Spooky23]

One would think.

But the reality of feudal lords is that merit was measured by whose legs you were born between, if a penis was present and in what order you emerged. Things worked out.

Most of life is like that. Theoretically, we all want the best surgeon on the planet, but the reality is we mostly go to a random draw of a surgeon that meets or exceeds the minimum qualification.

[perl4ever]

I generally agree with your last sentence, but maybe it's a mistake to generalize it to other activities or professions.

If an adequate surgeon has an 85% success rate, and a brilliant one a 90% success rate, then it's arguable that being ten times smarter or more dexterous isn't that important, to be overly rewarded. So in that sense, merit might not matter.

But many activities or professions lend themselves to multiplying others' results. What if someone can teach all the surgeons to have 5% fewer failures? That still has diminishing returns, but what if someone figures out a way to do, say, twice as many surgeries with the same resources, or to eliminate the need for half of them? You might say they still don't need or deserve wealth, but in order to reap the benefits, society has to give those people power in some form to organize the activities of others. And wealth tends to flow to those with power.

[Spooky23]

I think you’re on good track of thinking.

But I would see your scenario as improving process, not doctors. Doctors are the last real guild profession in modern society, and industrialization always beats skill in the long run. As time goes on, IMO their role will get whittled away, first in primary care (already happening) and thing like radiology, and eventually in other areas.

[mcguire]

You optimize for what you actually measure, not what you wish you were measuring.

[inopinatus]

Now you need a tournament for selecting the measures.

It’s tournaments all the way down.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think there's a second substitution, hinted at in your last paragraph where the agreement that the best surgeon should do the surgeries moves to the best people should be wealthy and run society and then to "the people who already have wealth and power right now, are better than everyone else".

They sometimes try to justify that by saying that the children of the rich who've been groomed from birth are better qualified than the children of the poor, but rarely would they venture into suggesting everyone should have an equal investment in their education before merit is decided.

[SpicyLemonZest]

But does anyone actually make the final claim? A lot of people accuse their political opponents of being snobby elitists, but I don't think I've ever heard someone actually say that rich Harvard graduates are better than everyone else.

[gizmo686]

The problem is, to a first approximation, we are using the arm-wrestling tournament to determine who should be our village's chief and deputy arm wrestlers; which (I presume) is important for settling inter-village disputes. We then compensate the well lest they defect to another village; and because the benefit we get from them is so large that we can afford to pay the relatively few of them well. This compensation then gives them power in a diffuse way that is hard to combat.

In more concrete terms, look at "anti-meritocracy" [0] positions. They are talking about making, say, the programming profession more equal; and not about making the wealth and status of programmers more equal to that of, say, teachers.

Approximately no one is arguing for major changes to the system for the distribution of wealth and status; so of course the reactionary movement will not frame their arguments in that way.

[0] This is a terrible name, as the "pro-meritocracy" crowd is the more reactionary one; but all the other identifiers I can think of pull in baggage I do not want.

[mcguire]

Alternatively,

"If your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-?"

If you are choosing a King, would you accept the decision of the class rankings of the Harvard School of Law?

[rhizome]

Do you mean a systematic category error, that people are "ranked" or promoted according to criteria that is irrelevant to the purpose of the ranking (e.g. armwrestling is not politics)?

[seneca]

> None of it would address the question of justice.

I'm probably misunderstanding your point, but this is a question of justice. Specifically, it's a question of Distributive Justice, which is "[concerned with] the socially just allocation of resources". Saying "What would we need to change about our absurd arm-wrestling-based distribution system in order for it to be just" is squarely a question of distributive justice.

Are you saying that nothing that determines who gets to be Lord can be tweaked to reach a just distribution because of the winner-take-all nature of the rewards? Further, are you suggesting that the current (American, I assume) system of distribution is equally unjust in distriubtion?

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

[lemoncucumber]

"The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond" by Nancy Fraser is a good (short!) book that talks about similar themes. I'd recommend it.

[jlawson]

Think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of needs-like thing. You take care of the lower tiers before worrying about the upper ones.

The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.

The upper tier is 'justice'.

Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis.

Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all.

And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.

[tdeck]

> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.

> The upper tier is 'justice'.

I'm not sure about this distinction at all. The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. The "justice" of the system is just another link in the supply chain between a person and what they need to survive, it can be a bottleneck in the same way that low production or waste can diminish access. This means that issues that might seem abstract to us are concrete to people who can't access food, shelter, or healthcare and therefore can't meet their basic needs.

[pdonis]

> The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist.

If those things don't exist, nobody can "access" them. All of those things have to be produced before anyone can use them.

[tdeck]

And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.

[pdonis]

> producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless

Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.

If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work.

You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.

[tdeck]

> Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.

Citation needed. People do this all the time.

[perl4ever]

It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.

To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.

[elliekelly]

You see “justice” as the societal equivalent of “self actualization”?

[vntok]

A court system that works perfectly still won't be of any help to get you fed when food isn't grown and made available to the civil servants in the first place.

[karatestomp]

There's a tendency in political philosophy (and economics) to imagine up some kind implicit or explicit of ordering of events that progress from one point or another, the ordering of which is then used to assert something about justice or the "correct" ordering or way of running of society, though on closer inspection certain of the conditions in the progression (often the earlier ones) never actually existed or did so so ephemerally such that they're not really worth worrying about, or even that all the steps kind-of happened but all at the same time or in a different or chaotically mixed-up order. It's encountered all over the place and big names do it all the time—Locke's Natural Law? Yep, built on exactly that kind of dubious base. It's everywhere in political philosophy and such orderings-as-a-foundation-for-further-reasoning or guidance aren't necessarily wrong or useless, but they're often a sign you've wandered into some weak and/or misleading reasoning.

I have a feeling this is one of those. I'm not sure "society producing some food, but unable to produce any justice until they produce a little more food" is really a thing. Humans were decent at food fairly early, and some version of justice seems absolutely central to the functioning of human communities, so I'm not inclined to believe some kind of leveling-up from "food production" to "justice" is a real thing that ever, meaningfully, happened, and if it's not something that actually happens or has happened it's worth calling into question whether that "hierarchy of needs" is real or whether reality's sufficiently more complex (or even inverted—it may be more that you need some amount of justice to have a society of humans producing food in the first place, even if they're all on the verge of starvation at the "start", whatever that even is) that such a model isn't even useful as any kind of abstract, general guide (which I suspect is the case)

[alexashka]

Huh?

What trick - we want to promote being an excellent surgeon, by rewarding them - the rewards that people are most pleased with are wealth and status.

Where is the trick?

What other justice do you imagine, other than the person who brings the goodies to the group, being rewarded for doing so, and those attempting to break this mechanism, getting removed?