It strikes me as interesting that lots of measures seem to be "IQ plus effort" - practically speaking, though I generally want people to be more intelligent, I primarily want them to be good at what they do. So for me a system that rewards people for performance makes the most sense - smart but ineffectual, lazy, or crooked are all possible (even common), but hardly meritorious...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Definitions

So merit is essentially what I’m seeking. But I have no doubt that the people I interview & the ones we choose to hire are, on average, privileged. It would not surprise me much if I looked back on all my interview scores ever and found a high correlation between my rating and the candidate’s family income.

I think I can see how my own hiring according to merit is a good thing for my company, but potentially bad for society - if what we want is real equality of opportunity.

> That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic.

Then why are like 30% of students at elite colleges admitted as "athletes"? I mean, sure, "best at sports" is "meritocratic" but on a dimension fairly orthogonal to educational success (just like "best at using parent's wealth and connections").

> In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male.

So college being 61% male was a problem, and being 58% female is "solved"?

I read the same article; the message I got is that it's about all of those things. You need privilege, ability, and grit.

When the system became so bitterly competitive you had to have all three, is when any equity of meritocracy started to vanish.

I agree; I was summarizing one side: the argument against meritocracy. The article did discuss other points of view, and it didn’t seem all that impressed with the book either.

This did open my eyes though, because I thought meritocracy was supposed to be a democratic or egalitarian sort of ideal, I had never thought of it as device designed for perpetuating social class divisions. (Though, I guess, what else is going to happen if you have a metric by which to rank people?)

The deeper idea is the realization that true ability and true grit still comes largely from privilege. That perhaps there isn’t equality in meritocracy and never was. Some people who are worried about money have to work super hard to make ends meet but don’t get the opportunity to develop abilities. People who can’t afford to miss a rent check or have to worry about food don’t really have the opportunity to develop grit. It’s pretty hard to have the sort of sticktuitiveness that “merit” calls for if you can’t afford to take any risks, if failing means you lose your phone, car, apartment, etc.

I guess the ‘glass floor’ article is taking the point of view that you don’t need all three of privilege, ability and grit; that privilege keeps some people in the upper echelons despite little ability or grit. I guess I don’t really know, but the question now rattling around in my head is whether ability and grit are mostly byproducts of privilege?

Coined by Lord Young, father of Toby Young.

This satisfies the idea that outsized reward should be available to those who create outsize value, but also ensures that this doesn't pass on to the idiot children.

This is especially true because the social bonds and exchange of values and information that happen between someone who is successful and their family is more likely to be successful than the average person. In other words, while it might seem like nepotism from an outward perspective, it could be merit in actuality.

Instead, I'd support very high luxury taxes. Tax heavily lavish private jets, yachts, and mansions. These are the types of goods that will rapidly drain the funds of a rich trust fund kid who offers little to society. Don't take their startup investment.

I think this is probably the core of most of these disagreements. If you approach taxation with the assumption that it's mostly just money going to waste, then yeah, you're not going to be very supportive of taxation, especially high tax rates for high income, high net-worth people.

But even if you come at it from that point of view, it has to be acknowledged that there are certain kinds of services which are almost impossible to deliver other than via the government. The private sector will not give you healthcare for all, or any meaningful mass transit (much less HSR), or properly maintained roads and bridges, or a military, or any of a thousand other things that your multiple levels of government spend money on. Yes there is some waste due to corruption or bad decisions, but for most people that is an accepted cost to getting the services that can't be had any other way.

It's fairly easy to devise a system where taxation is fair (or at least more fair), e.g. by having "pots" - e.g. tax sugar drinks, but that tax revenue goes into the healthcare pot and can be used only for that purpose. If the ostensible reason for taxing rich people is "more equality", then that money should go into the "helping poor people" pot and be used only for that purpose (scholarships, financial aid / basic income, etc.).

Obviously, there's a reason politicians don't want to do that... because that would mean they no longer have control over money and can't spend/waste it as they want.

The other issue with the pots system is that it can give people a false sense of entitlement about things which benefit them. For example, consider the commonly-held belief that gas taxes pay for all road and highway infrastructure, and that roads and bridges wouldn't be falling apart if the government would stop "raiding" the gas tax pot to pay for other things. This is trivially googleable as untrue, but the pervasiveness of this belief blinds motorists to the reality of how much their preferred mode of transport is subsidized.

So people in this mindset approach a discussion about something like subsidized train fare and it's hard for them understand why it's a good deal for society.

I'm mainly saying that it would be easier for people to accept new taxes if that was the implmementation (and specifically taxes like wealth tax that are ostensibly "to decrease inequality" and not "because we hate the rich").

But if you actually look at the rhetoric around it, the right wing party that's in opposition slams it as being a "cash grab" and a "tax on everything" that makes life more unaffordable for everyday Canadians. Literally one of the main planks of their platform this election is scrapping a revenue-neutral tax in order to help Canadian families "get ahead".

So was there any value in going to the trouble of doing the rebate? AFAICT claiming the tax was revenue neutral mostly just opened up the gov't to a ridiculous semantic argument about whether it was truly revenue neutral given that sales tax was being applied after the carbon tax. Maybe it would have been easier to just impose the tax and then pair it with an income tax cut or some kind of investment in existing social safety net programmes?

And that money would land in the states' pockets, it won't be distributed in a way that further levels the playing field.

Money in state pockets is de facto distributed to every citizen. Once it's in the state coffers, citizens can vote on its' use. You can't do that when Bezos' hypothetical idiot child has it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

Do you know many poor people with more than $11M in wealth?

(a) inflationary practices

(b) those scheming to take advantage of loopholes

in 10 or less years.

I think those on the outside would prefer merit.

Like, I think last week I might have argued exactly what you’re saying, that there’s some idea of merit that measures and reflects innate talent & effort and can be disconnected from connections and money. But is that really true? Can you actually separate them? Are you sure - certain - that talent isn’t, on average, statistically, something that you have the resources to develop only if you have a support system of money/family/friends that allows you to spend time on it?

The problem with merit for the poor and the middle class is that “merit” means you have to work much much harder than someone who’s rich to have the same merit. Hard enough that it’s rare, and we fetishize the few people who do while ignoring the fact that the net effect of the system really keeps the poor poor.

What if providing truly equal opportunity actually requires not judging people by talent, because pure talent is itself severely biased by money?

(A side note: Talent may be largely derived from riches, but rich parents definitely don't always result in talent. There can be, and are, incompetent children of the rich.)

First issue: We want the people with talent to wind up in the positions that need talent. We (society) actually need talent in those positions, rather than incompetence. It doesn't matter whether the incompetent ones are the children of the rich or of the poor; there are positions where we don't want them.

Second issue: The children of the poor (or even middle class) shouldn't be locked out of success in the economy simply because they're the children of the poor. Those with latent talent or undeveloped talent, or whatever you wish to call it, need to have that developed, so that it becomes actual talent. The school system was supposed to be the way that happened, but the school system has largely failed at that task, at least in much of the country. Now what do we do? Can we fix the school system? Or is it just a reflection of problems in society, and we have to fix the society in order to fix the school system? If we can't fix the school system, what do we do instead?

It seems to me that the biggest variable is the parents' attitude toward education. Children whose parents see the value of education will, on average, get more out of a mediocre school system than children of uncaring parents will get out of a good school system, unless they're rescued by someone - a great teacher, perhaps, or someone that they look up to. But if their social capital doesn't include people who value education, and their schools don't have great, inspiring teachers, from where are they going to get the spark?

I don't have good answers for you. I wish I did.

Yes, we do want talent to rise. But what if we're so overly worried about incompetence that we're overlooking the opportunity to increase talent across the board? What if the way we keep incompetence out is actually preventing ten times as many people with potential from reaching their potential?

Yes, poor kids shouldn't be locked out. The issue is that meritocracy may be providing the illusion that poor kids are not locked out, because they're allowed to "try hard", while in actuality being a major mechanism for locking poor people out. By filtering for the byproducts of privilege, people can claim to not be filtering for advantage while still filtering for advantage, right?

I don't have good answers either. Ideas like basic income and free education seem like potentially good starts, but there's certainly a lot of political agendas and dogmatic opinions surrounding those ideas. This week I'm just feeling like the solution somehow has to invest more in those without as much access without obsessing over the individual returns. It should be okay for society to try to educate and support poorer people and not expect each and every one to make it. For some wealthy people, I suspect their deep down collective cultural fear is that if you gave all poor people enough money to have stable home lives and not have to worry about money, and sent them all to the Harvards of the world, that just as many poor would succeed as rich succeed. That would undermine the idea that we need to filter for talent, and support the idea that we need to nurture talent instead.

Did you see the recent college admissions scandal? All of these institutions present a facade of being merit based, while in reality admitting people who have money, power, connections, are good at gaming the system, or multiple of the above.

>What would a post-meritocratic world look like? Markovits doesn’t know, and neither did Marx know what a post-capitalist world would be like. There will be less alienation and inauthenticity (as Marx believed, too); other than that, we can’t really imagine a post-meritocratic world, because the élite has made its own values everyone’s.

Really says everything you need to know about the article and the book. Taking a hard-line stance against merit as a value is foolish. You can argue the metrics are wrong or the game is rigged or that playing by the rules doesn't guarantee success, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater only guarantees more of the problems you're trying to fix.