As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.

Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities. That looks like meritocracy to me.

You can argue that is not worth the expense (it costs X to produce Y outcome and redistributing X would lead to negative impact Z. Y + Z results in a net loss to society). But it seems hard to argue that inequality or hierarchy is inevitable so we should not even try to ameliorate the negative effects of that structure or imagine different ones.

To me, the “inequality inevitable” mindset seems like a frequent way those who benefited from the existing system rationalize not sacrificing anything to help less fortunate people. I am very sympathetic to arguments that redistribution is not effective, but the debate should be about what is or is not effective. “Inequality inevitable” sidesteps that and asks that we just give up before even trying or imagining different possibilities because we’ve failed in the past. It is hard to not see such arguments as a misguided effort to rationalize one’s self interest.

I don't agree with this. I tend to agree that inequality is inevitable, but where I think I disagree with you is on the definition of equality.

If we create an even playing field in the environment, then we've just shifted the goalposts from "How wealthy were your parents?" To "How good are your genetics?". Some people will be born smarter than others, and excel. Some people will be born with learning disabilities and relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Judging based on innate ability also means discriminating against people who innately lack that ability. If you were born dyslexic, you're going to have to work twice as hard to achieve as much. The dyslexia is as innate as IQ advantages.

I just don't see a way that hierarchies aren't inherently unequal. You're always judging who has more of a particular thing, so people with less of that thing are worse off. Right now, that's largely money. Is using the genetic lottery a more equal means of doing this? I don't really think so.

I would rather focus on reducing the difference in lifestyle between the haves and have nots. If we can't stop inequality, we can at least lessen the effects.

The phenotype is a confusing angle. We should do some honest objective conversation about it collectively. Do we want people to be their natural self or do we prefer it if one goes out of his way to become something? Do we genetically optimize for the biggest possible struggle or for the slacking? We seem to look at the flexibility as a positive quality but does it really make a healthy breeding stock?

As a human I have to constantly challenge myself mentally and physically or I decay pretty rapidly. I had a sick cat one time that slept on my sofa for 4 years only getting up to eat. Then one day another cat came into the house and she leaped 3 meters off the sofa and ran after it. If I sleep for 4 years I doubt there will be any walking, definitely no running, jumping is out of the question and getting into a fight is unimaginable. We might have really good brains and a good digestive system, the rest of the body could do with some updates.

Those bananas? Well you can thank children in Ecuador for those: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/04/24/ecuador-widespread-labor...

We have the best medical care, but results are uneven. If you are so poor that you are rationing your medicine to the point it doesn't work, what does it matter how good it is?

Was the food the king ate really worse? Today's poor eat sugar disguised as "food" that leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. You can say what you want about medieval diets but at least they didn't have an obesity epidemic. I'm not sure who is better off.

At any rate, even if what you say is 100% true, that doesn't really change the fact that homelessness, hunger, and poverty are solvable problems today. To say that things were worse before and therefore the moral failings of society today are tolerable is just baffling to me.

whereas the king was swimming in booty, and at the end of it all, that's what moves most of us mostly.

id argue few ppl really want a lambo for the engineering of it as a machine, they just want to be seen riding in it. 500 years ago a lambo was a fancy horse drawn carriage.

In the modern world, one standard deviation of physical attractiveness matters way more for attracting sexual/romantic partners than does one standard deviation of wealth, especially so for genuine attraction.

This sounds like a bit of a stretch. Let's try and make people a bit more equal first.

Elon Musk is the second richest person in the world and has raised tens of billions of dollars of outside money to fund his companies. You talk like he's footing the bill; he put less than $10 million into Tesla. It was a brilliant decision, but hardly "risky".

>The engineers did not.

So the engineers who went to work for a project that may not have panned out were taking no risk huh.

That is the root meaning of risk - if things didn't pan out, he would have been (financially) ruined. Engineers would go ahead and get another job from somewhere else. If you can't see the difference here, I can't help you further.

But let's look at risk further. What about the people strapping themselves to the top of Musk's rockets and propelling themselves into outer space? They are literally risking their lives. All Musk did was put in $100 million dollars. Has anyone ever died from investing $100 million dollars? On one side you have a guy would lose a lot of money and land comfortably on his feet. On the other you have someone strapping themselves to a column of rocket fuel and blasting off to outer space, something many people have died doing. Surely if risk determines reward, and Musk is worth $150 billion dollars, these astronauts must at least be billionaires. Right?

Obviously that's a litter hyperbolic, but it's to prove a point. If we're going by risk/reward, why is financial risk the only thing considered? What about scientific risk? Musk's enterprises are premised on mountains of scientific and engineering work that came before him, work that is mostly publicly funded and for which the original pioneers (taking risks) will never be compensated. Take Tesla's much hyped "autopilot". Did Musk come up with that himself? Did Tesla engineers even come up with it? No, that research came from the government, namely DARPA through their autonomous Grand Challenges robot competitions. In 2005 during the first Grand Challenge the robots were running off the road and crashing into each other. By 2007 they were reliably navigating urban environments. This was after millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours were poured into the research. Did Musk fund that research? Did Tesla? No, you and I did as taxpayers, and we put in much more than the $100 million Musk did. The people doing that research on the ground were risking their careers and forgoing paychecks to do that work. Many of the people doing the actual coding on those robots were being paid $20k per year as graduate students. Who is now benefitting from that research? Musk. Tesla. Private interests.

Or look at the Kennedy Space Center. I just watched a SpaceX launch a rocket from there. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who built that? I mean physically, who put hammer to nail there and built that thing. It's huge. "It took 1,500 engineers to design the buildings and launch pads. The drawings alone produced by architects and designers weighed more than a hundred tons" [1]. Did Musk take the risk building that? No, the public did, and now it's there for him to use and benefit from. But the people who built that for him with public money won't be seeing a return on investment proportional to the benefit it today generates. Those benefits are privatized largely into Elon Musk's pocket.

[1] https://www.wesh.com/article/looking-back-at-the-constructio...

The second part does follow some sense - but then, how many engineers did it take to build the US road system? Why aren’t you screaming at car companies, logistics companies, taxi drivers or all other appropriate parties for taking advantage of infra built with public money?

Frankly, its fairly obvious you have a massive distaste for Musk, which is fine - I or nobody else should dictate your opinion on him. What I’m extremely tired of is this new ”social democratism movement” which is some very thinly veiled weird combination of utopian socialism and at times vitriolic hatred against the entrepreneurial populace.

Yes, there are bad actors in the current system. But what is it exactly you are advocating as the alternate system?

Do adult humans honestly believe that going to Mars is a reasonable way to "save our species"?

And to answer your question, yes. Successful, accomplished, professional, adult scientists - like myself and my friends - do honestly believe that.

You could start with investing heavily in this planet, which is significantly more habitable than mars. Electric vehicles were a great start, but there's a lot more than EVs and reselling battery and solar equipment from China that can be done.

>Do you not see any value in developing the technology necessary to get to Mars - in order to travel elsewhere?

I see some value, and if Mr. Musk wants to pursue it, great. But let's not pretend he's saving humanity here; the God complex of SV is already bad enough.

> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?

Because the "value" they have proven is so often criminal and fraudulent in nature - best case scenario it's down to luck. The world is not even close to the meritocracy you think it is.

Yes, as you've told us in a few comments.

Because the bureaucrat had to prove their merit among the whole population while the rich entrepreneur just had to prove their merit among other kids that were privileged enough. Just think of Bill Gates that went to probably the only school that had a computer in the world.

In ancient China they even went so far to castrate bureaucrats to prevent cross-generational cronyism.

> Why limit Elon Musk

Because he is using cool goals like travelling to mars to motivate his workers to work themselves to exhaustion while ignoring safety measures? He acts exactly like capitalists of the industrial age. The difference is that his workers do not lack money for sustenance, but a purpose in life.

then lets say this child turns this education and inheritance into 1 billion dollars worth of wealth. does this have no merit??

ive seen many people squander privileged upbringings, i think if you 10x what was given to you, you have some merit regardless of where you stared from.

That seems more luck than hard work to me. Just read the paper.

Even if that was possible. Do you want in a world where people with merit call the shots or a world in which people that cheated their way to wealth or simply inherited wealth call the shots?

Money can be transferred, gained through stealing and luck which all does not require merit. It is not a good proxy for merit.

The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.

Now that Im a father myself, Im of course trying to give my child the best opportunities, but also trying to raise him to be grateful and disciplined.

So I'm not talking about the billionaires. Im talking about regular people who can now grant their children not private jets, but just a good private school.

What would be fair in this scenario? How can we make things equal/just in this case?

Also I dont think its rare or hypothetical at all, that rich kids never learn to work hard and squander their good fortune.

-- EDIT, i completely agree its absurd and completely wrong that 1% of people have 50% of the wealth, that should not be that way.

Someone with a better understanding is a normal authority, it might 'dominate' others in the sense that they have to follow his lead and maybe not feel it's right but in the end it's the best path.

On the other hand there are so much bad authorities that percolate through luck, appearances, bullying, networking.. and it will be 1) very clear their ways are detrimental .. sometimes almost absurdly, 2) very difficult for people below to change this.

Hierarchy? In so far as it currently exists, who cares?

I’m not sure whether this applies to you (I’m not implying that it does), but I continually find it interesting to hear Americans expressing the fear that acting to reduce inequality will somehow limit social mobility, as if they don’t realize that much of the developed world has greater social mobility than their country (or that many countries also rate higher in measures of social welfare, despite having greater social mobility and lower inequality).

> You keep harping on the US, but it is one of - if not the most - upwardly mobile societies in history.

The data doesn't support your conclusions. The US has lower social mobility than many of its (more redistributive) peers in the developed world. [1]

1 - https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

Please enumerate these instances and support the claim that in each of them mobility is reduced due to redistribution.

Without that, this sounds like subjective impression shaped by ideological preference being presented as if it were evidence for the ideological preference that produced it.

Much of Western-Europe show you otherwise, I'm not sure how you could have missed that?

> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies.

Care to explain? Or are you just being childishly contrarian which your last sentence seem to suggest?

Hereditary wealth is a specific form of rent-seeking which is something liberal economics has no explanation for. It's like one of those things that never left the feudal era whilst everything else did. But I wonder why some who follow this type of economics think this is the sole and most important issue? There are many examples of rent-seeking and this is far from the biggest contributor towards inequality.

This assumption sounds nice but isn't backed by psychology research. Extrinsic rewards can motivate and demotivate - and in general contribute to anxiety.

But inheritance tax is 40% above that.

Not that I suggest any of this in serious mind you, it's just the kind of thought experiment day-dream that gets me through my workday. What this one has taught me is this: nobody actually wants a meritocracy.

In most first world countries, there is basic free education and children can study for a job with enough pay to provide for a decent life style. That's not to say that there're no problems. There are. Often accomodating immigrants from poor countries. Also because declining population and pensions and all that.

But do you want to go full socialist because only rich family children get to the most expensive colleges? O_o

Why not? There's plenty of people arguing for exactly that mechanism when it's not about their own children. A 100% inheritance tax (with no loopholes through business or legal constructs) might force a lot of people to rethink how they vote -- because then, they can't use their wealth to shield their children from how society functions any more.

If someone else's child was run over and killed in a road, a person may pause to reflect on how sad and unfortunate the event was, but will quickly move on with their life and continue as they were. If their own child though was run over and killed though, they would be shattered, may not even be able to function well for quite some time.

As such, your suggestion is quite literally against human nature. We're not insects. This is the usual trap for people with Big Ideologies: they assume that we're all these tabula rasa entities onto which anything might be written (and should be).

Literally the whole premise on which the plot of Inception rests was to convince the child progeny of wealth to forgo it so as to prove that he could make a name for himself on his own merit and not by riding his father's coattails.

There's a very big difference between leaving a child to fend for himself (so to speak) and attempting to help a child develop his own sense of agency, including restricting access to a smaller-than-naturally-limited set of resources.

https://work.chron.com/salaries-changed-nurses-23316.html

I don't understand your skepticism.

edit: corrected wrong second link

It does not. It comes from supply and demand, and how important that job is to the cash flow that will end up paying for it.

A short article from inequality.org [1] suggests that most of the richest people in the world (Forbes 400) were born with significant financial advantages, if they weren't already wealthy.

Since there are many more rich people than the Forbes 400, that doesn't seem too representative of the usual rich person. It's hard to find anything conclusive - there are a few research memos put out by what seem to be wealth management firms claiming that most rich people are actually self-made. There's a clear conflict of interest here, so I'm not sure we can trust those results.

It seems understudied, and will take a lot more than 10 minutes of searching for relevant results.

1. https://inequality.org/research/selfmade-myth-hallucinating-...

I wouldn’t call 22% of the richest 400 people in the world having inherited more than $1M to be evidence inheritance dominates the causes of inequity.

I mean, another way to put it is “80% of the richest people in the world DID NOT inherit their wealth.”

[1] https://ips-dc.org/the_self-made_hallucination_of_americas_r...

22% received support and inherited up to a million, and a further 40% inherited at least a million - more than a lifetime's worth of income.

People outside these categories included those whose parents ran a successful business.

What's fascinating is that most of the German name-brand companies that thrived under the Nazis are still owned by the same families.

This is not true, because when you don't have hereditary nature of wealth, there is no wealth. Why would you be motivated to accumulate wealth?

Economically you want people to save money and invest, when there is no target to have wealth, people will over spend.

Spending means economically staying at same level as population, not improving.

This is just unfair to everyone. It is wrong, immoral, unethical to tax the wealth of people, if you don't account for other inequalities in life. The inequalities will persist, just that when assets, money isn't that medium of storage, people will only value looks and other things even more, because that's how you'd effectively store your wealth, untaxable. The genes of the people become the platform for storing wealth in that kind of world. The only place where breaking or taxing people' wealth is agreeable is when they become too powerful and above governments. No other excuse.

This is something seriously overlooked.

Why do some guys get all the girls and some don't. Isn't it unfair to those guys that they have their needs emotionally met just like any other successful humans? If you are so fair, fix these problems. Everyone has feelings, and it's not their fault that they're bitter about it.

Is it those men's mistake that they were born in this world? And they couldn't even do anything to rectify that problem when the baseline is so high to reach?

Everyday I read about these people and it makes me sad. Thankfully I don't have any of those problems, but I can't overlook those who do have them. Atleast they'd have a chance in todays world had they pushed themselves and become wealthier.

This isn't only about men, but women too.

When you save money and forgo pleasures, you aren't supposed to be penalized.

Western European programmers still live very well, they just aren't as rich as in the US. And the high taxes do moderate and blunt the cutthroat competition to a degree, which results in less crazy work life balance etc.

Of course these debates get very heated because everyone wants the system that would give them more. I was born to poor parents who could afford their own education because it's free here. My relatives had a social net to bounce back from during rough times (primary school teacher). It's not good for a society to have a large portion who feel existential dread and that the only way up is taking huge risks that often require initial capital.

The reason it is like this in the US is because it's not a nation. It's just atomic families and people from all over the world, tolerating each other and minding their own business. There is no feeling of solidarity, especially across races.

But then again, I have not had children of my own, so I can't relate to the need to defend my offspring.

And from friends I know that parenting is really hard with lots of sleepless nights. Perhaps the parent commenter just had a bad day.

Perhaps it's just your laconic phrasing, but I can not stop reading your replies in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice. Maybe I would see them in a different light if I read them with Wall-E's voice.

Best of luck to your child.

The paper being discussed talks about there being a threshold under which someone might be in a poverty trap. Would simple subsidies and programs to support children's economic future suffice, such as some of the policies advocated for by American progressives?

(Of course, this would require taxes or some other source of funding, but doesn't require confiscation of all inherited wealth)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess it's good that you are honest with yourself about it though, that's better than constructing some elaborate justification around some clearly insufficient core "principles".

Of course, the idea that taxation is theft and a fence isn't doesn't hold.

If you have capitalism, you end up with communist revolution, if you have communism, you end up with capitalist system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This study looks at some of the poorest villages in Bangladesh with some additional data from other very poor countries.

Anyone who even has a shot at applying to a USA tech company is already wildly more wealthy than the type of poverty discussed in this study. In fact, they’d be firmly past the threshold the study identified as the minimum wealth necessary to engage with wealth-building jobs.

The conclusions don’t really apply at all to situations like a US tech company, unless you’re trying to understand why homeless people living on the streets aren’t able to get jobs at an Amazon warehouse or other entry-level jobs. Trying to project this on to hiring practices of educated candidates into high paying tech jobs is ignoring the core focus of the study.

Meritocracy is still a factor but the bar is currently very low. My own father came out of the impoverishment of war torn Bangladesh to be a successful real estate developer in the west. Why did his elder brother not have the same results? Very simple: the elder brother was responsible for the family. The family has rewarded the elder brother by taking care of him for years now and he is the happiest old man I know. He will die satisfied.

The truth that no one wants to admit is that we have to put (very minimal) resources behind the youth to become independent of their families so they can grow.

For all his faults, my father understood this for everyone except me (long story) and funded the education of a few people back home. For two boys I'm aware of, that was about $5-7K/year. The two boys lived in a one room shack that routinely got flooded. One is now an accountant, the other is a working chef. Trust me, neither of them are particularly smart.

What's needed is so minimal but the problem we have is too much grifting occurs. Levels and levels of middleman bullshit.

I would start experimenting with Kiva-style microloans if you want to make a difference, tbh.

Is microfinancing still a thing in Bangladesh? What are the effects since then?

The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer?

Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.

Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor.

A well connected person can bring many many times the value to a company of someone without connections.

The right strong personality can be a performance amplifier for the rest of the company, Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that.

The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.

I am. It's not me being careless. We reward both by the same means - money. Not my fault it's this way. I think it's perfectly reasonable of me to work from the means of compensation outwards, when making comparisons.

> The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.

In my opinion, this is nothing more than business based, pyramid scheme level, cult-like thinking. I'm a well paid webdev. The company is fairly flat, there are only two distinct levels above me - engineering management, and founder-ceo(s).

My day to day work is designing and building out random systems, and handling tech debt. I would be doing this in a vacuum too, and to the same standard. The personality and input of the ceo has little to no bearing on my performance. Me and my team would perform equally well under any given non-maniac. CEOs are not like, high level gods or something. They aren't remotely as rare a set of personality traits as the voodoo-thinking of SV seems to think. C-tier management is not literally multiplying my output. Sensible feature requests from users and sensible filtering by product managers has ten times the impact that C-tier has on my work.

> deserves a proportional [...]

> Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that

The resignation and subsequent death of Jobs had, in the macro perspective of apple's stock prices, literally no impact on the value of the company. Apple stock is currently over x10 what it was when he was there. An essentially infinite number of things took place that were far more important than Job's personality, which lead to the success of apple. He was more like a train driver railing down the tracks than some maverick cutting through the jungle. At least Bill Gates has the introspection to realise this. General luck, and luck of timing is what generated nearly all of that value, and the rest was generated by labour. Somewhere in there is some ephemeral and unquantifiable sliver of value coming from the specific personality of the founders / ceos.

So, what proportion do we dole out? Who do we compensate for luck? For all of the endless work done before that wasn't compensated to the moon but was absolutely required for this moon-level capital generation? It's all too up in the air to try and rationalise that CEOs should earn one million times what a farmer earns and think that makes any kind of sense at all.

Think of all of the wealth, (generational too) that came from equally traited men setting out for oil. Literal random chance would go on to create mega-empires that have lasted a hundred years. Our current system of compensation, is pretty close to being nothing more than a load of bollocks, when it comes to this kind of thing.

Aside from that, I don't really believe in the musks and zucks of the world. Our society shouldn't rely on charismatic leaders, who for all we know could be fronts for the NSA/CIA operations. Shock workers or strike workers could be used to motivate and promote labor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik).

The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.

There are real and difficult things to do in the world that some other people need. They (employers, clients, customers) decide that this work is so important to them that they exchange money for it.

Then the person can use that earned money to improve their life.

For example if a top surgeon flies to a different country to do a difficult operation, I'd want them to be able to enjoy a relaxing VIP lounge, bigger legroom and direct taxi. Rather than flying low cost and standing in the bus for 3 times longer than the taxi ride.

We want to allocate resources to people who accomplish important things for us. Not just as reward or motivation, but in our own interest, we invest in the most capable and competent to have more of our stuff taken care of.

Jobs aren't just about sitting in a chair and taking cash and we just pick who gets to sit in which chair to enjoy that cash. It's doing things. And we want those things to be done well.

This is the idea behind meritocracy. Not that we praise people for their genetics.

I'm not saying this is how it works currently, just that this is what we mean by meritocracy that we should move toward.

But then there are those in this thread arguing that Elon Musk's reward should be unlimited because he's "arguably ensuring the long-term survivability of our species." Wow, that sounds very important. I guess he should have the most money then.

Nevermind the fact that the majority of his wealth is literally gained by "sitting in a chair and taking cash". That's the job of a capitalist after all - they don't work for their money, they sit in a chair and let the ownership of assets make them money. I mean, sure he's "doing things" but are the things he's doing worth $140 billion? What has he "done" in the last 9 months that made him $88 billion richer? Is the planet saved yet?

The return on investment is the payment it is in our self-interest to give for this activity, because we want and need such work to be done (so that we can make use of the fruits of such ventures, instead of getting nothing at all when wealth is squandered on bad ideas or just plain old consumption).

Why not give a billion to a random business owner to come up with what to do?

Certainly, if you think you can identify people who are particularly qualified to pick good ideas and make investments in them, it's not a bad idea to give them some money (but where do you get that money? hopefully not somewhere with negative externalities such as stealing it from different random business owners). Although structurally it's better if the billion itself is given as an investment instead of a gift, because then the person giving the billion has "skin in the game" themselves. Which is basically what I think VCs do, although I don't know how effective they usually are.

(Yes, this whole thing assumes a regulatory framework where businesses that have negative externalities or are otherwise bad for the world do not make profit. Indeed, companies that use dark patterns or rent seeking tactics to make profit should be legally punished, and if such punishments make them bad investments it's a good thing, because it means they were on net bad for the world.)

No one benefits by the mere "existence" of SpaceX/Tesla. People benefit only from what those companies produce, and the things those companies produce only come into this world by way of people selling their labor to design, engineer, and manufacture the rockets/cars. We can go all the way down the supply chain and say that people only benefit from Tesla due to the people mining lithium in other countries. And yet the CEO of Tesla believes that the people mining his lithium deserve to have their government replaced by a US-backed coup to be more friendly to his corporation.

The point isn't that we should "seize profits". The point is that the guy at the top isn't producing as much value as he thinks he is compared to everyone below him. They are producing the real value, they should be getting the wealth. Maybe Musk still comes out of the equation the richest one of them all. Fine. But he doesn't have to come out a demi-god with more money than he could spend in 100 lifetimes. There's no reason that needs to happen.

There are things that make people more efficient as a homo sapiens and we want them to enjoy those things and not to worry and stress various annoyances so they can concentrate on what they are best at.

But as you say it's obviously not like that for CEOs of big companies. Just because Bill Gates was good at selling software doesn't mean he should hold this immense power in the world and decide how to allocate resources between vaccines and cancer research etc. It has nothing to do with his meritocratic expertise (of course he pays his own experts, but he does maintain the high level control). Some would argue that this value was all created as additional value by him via the efficiencies enabled by the software and that it wasn't merely captured out of existing value. It's obviously a combination, but based on ideology people estimate it differently. We know that rent seeking and dark pattern business practices exist, as do lobbying and other forms of corruption.

The billionaire examples aren't examples of meritocracy but of rewarding luck. Nobody would say that as a human Elon Musk is literally that much more competent than, say, the best senior engineer at Tesla.

But also, beyond a certain point rich people aren't people any more, more like institutions. They just channel that wealth in different directions, they cannot "enjoy" a significant potion of it as a human being. All that money gets rotated back into salaries of others, else it would remain just numbers in databases. It cannot meaningfully accumulate. Just like if you burn a bag of cash, you induce minuscule inflation effects and everybody else's money increases in value a little bit. If a billionaire sits on his cash, it's as if he didn't have it. But when he uses it, he pays salaries and makes people do stuff. The problem is when this stuff is "the wrong thing".

I think the main argument against billionaire power is that the distributed wisdom of crowds and markets are better at allocation and deciding what's worth doing than centralizing it without limit. It's good to centralize it as long as it's about merit and related to expertise or capacity, but not beyond that. Billionaires are way beyond human scale regarding that.

There doesn't have to be anything contradictory here. Diversity efforts can work to offset biases and enable getting closer to meritocracy. For example hiring the best in your network coming from a high-class university doesn't mean you're hiring the best overall. The diversity effort may be for example to make sure that the job offer is visible to the brilliant person who wouldn't even find it otherwise. Or it may be an effort to ensure a less biased review (masking names?) Or it's making sure that people do behave well internally, so the company isn't avoided by the best people for hiring racist assholes for example.

Just to be clear this paper’s about peasants in Bangladesh.

Nothing puzzling about it. It's a "just so" story designed to make successful people feel good and justified about their success.

This is a disingenuous argument. (a) and (b) are not talking about the same kind of rewards:

(a) : when talking about the equalization of environments, the "rewards" are allocated to areas and groups of people, not to individuals.

(b) : the stratification of wealth is talking about "rewards" to individual people.

These two concepts are not the same, the mechanisms are not the same, and the justification for them is not the same. They're only grouped together as "rewards" so they lead to the false conclusion (c).

Last I checked, about a fourth of millionaires inherited their wealth and the vast majority had the opportunity to become wealthy due to factors completely out of their control (where they were born, to whom they were born and natural cognitive abilities).

Do you tell the people who get the rewards that they were given a chance at random (compared to their neighbor who was not) or do you let them believe they earned it?

For the record, I agree that merit is a bad system. Im curious to explore the ramifications of doing away with the system and how it would be different, if at all, from the current system.

For example, in a post-scarcity society, everyone has what they need, but some houses still have nicer views than others.

What you would consider a better policy? Hiring according to a fair dice roll?

"Evidence on Poverty Traps from Rural Bangladesh" - are you suggesting the situation in rural Bangladesh is applicable to Silicon Valley?

Whether you're poor or in a lower caste you still get some form of meritocracy within your group to keep you content and motivated. But crossing the boundary to the next level, while not impossible, is designed to be highly unlikely because people in all layers like the security those boundaries provide them.

As people in Silicon Valley have more than 500 USD assets (citation needed), I don't see how this paper applies to Silicon Valley at all. There can be another such threshold, but the paper doesn't provide any experimental support for one.

Whether it's $500 in Bangladesh where Google tells me the "typical" salary is ~$150-$300, or $500k in SV where the typical pay might be $150k-$300k the principle is still very much the same.

Everyone claims meritocracy but in the end it's proven it's not individual merit we're actually looking for. We're looking to maintain barriers around our layer of society and allow some form of real meritocracy only within a layer.

If you don't have access to schooling and someone else does then that's something that will make you always start with a handicap when competing with them. The boundary, whether education or medical services, is there so one layer feels safe from the inferior one. People want it there even if this means they start off with a handicap compared to the superior layer. Most people are more afraid of losing what they have than they are keen on winning something they don't already have.

The problem is that they're not necessarily the best i.e. some poor person if given the same resources, education, access etc. might in fact do a lot better with what they have, we'll just never know.

I mean if you look at the state of today's world, handling of COVID, shams like Nikola etc. are these really the 'best' people humanity has to offer?

You could call placing 99 green balls and 1 red ball into a bin and picking out 2 green balls a “lottery”, I suppose.

Please consider that you are advocating for communism. I hope you will consider reviewing the histories of China and the USSR, et al. after World War 2. The critique and solution you offer do not lead to “actual equality.”

No, meritocracy likely is not the best system. It just happens to be better than the others we've tried at scale so far-- including attempting to give everyone the same opportunities regardless of ability. What else is being described there, if not communism? What am I missing?

The real underlying problem is that we are strongly predisposed to naturally arrange into hierarchies. That's not something you're going to take out of people. When you try, they spontaneously form their own. In a system where you say you're giving everyone equal opportunity, people will still pursue acquiring power over others, and will try to hold on to it when they get it. We aren't likely to stop this behavior, and if we do, at that point I'd argue we would essentially be a different species.