[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.

[pdonis]

> People do this all the time.

Example needed.

[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.

[pdonis]

> 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.

No, just as a term that is hindering understanding rather than helping it.

> I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.

Coase didn't say free markets couldn't function with high transaction costs. He only said it would be more difficult and take longer for those markets to reach equilibrium.

Also, the true observation that free markets in the real world are always imperfect does not justify the further claim that is usually made, that governments must intervene to "fix" these imperfections. In fact, the government "fixes" almost always make things worse, often much worse. Even on strictly Coasian terms this should be evident, since the most common source of high transaction costs in modern markets is...government regulations.

However, when it comes to basic necessities--things like food, clothing, and shelter, the kinds of things this thread was originally focused on--the issue is not transaction costs for the people who need these things. There are perfectly good, low friction markets for these necessities. The problem is that governments are skewing those markets by paying people not to produce useful things, or to produce useless things instead. Or, in the case of many third world countries, the government simply confiscates all the useful things for government officials and their cronies. I don't think "transaction costs" or "access" is a useful description of those problems.

[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)