When Meritocracy Breeds Greed

As a retired art professor, the longer I live, the more convinced I am that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.

If Congress had to get their healthcare from the open market we would see an efficient healthcare system very quickly.

Do not attribute to malevolence what can be explained with incompetence. I worked as a ski instructor for the billionaires in Saint Moritz, Switzerland. I noticed that most of these people have no clue of how the rest of us live or what our problems are. They have succeeded in insulating themselves in gated communities, private jets, exclusive Swiss boarding schools or worse, homeschooling with private teachers for their kids. They only frequent people of their own class to the point that I could barely relate to them as our cultural references and interests were so different. In time, they might even diverge genetically to form a different species (ironic tone).

"Merit" is never a neutral quality. Those higher up the ladder have enormous influence on deciding which merits are valued, and the merits they value tend to be those that they themselves find useful for advancing their own self-interests , not what is most valuable for the organisation or society as a whole. Thus merit becomes whatever the rich and powerful find useful to preserve and advance their own wealth and power while the individual becomes the scapegoat for systemic failings and have the blame and guilt for things outside their control foisted upon them. Instead of being a "great leveller", meritocracy entrenches and rationalises deep socioeconomic disparities and legitimises the oligarchic power structures that arise from them.

Meritocracy is a lie. People rarely rise through the ranks based on merit, but on usefulness to the person(s) with the power to grant the promotion. After that, it’s simply a self perpetuating machine.

When your politicians spend 70% of their time fundraising, when do you expect them to find the time to run the country?

There are two major types of Meritocracy in the world. One based on hard work and gaining the trust of the population, the other is mostly about birth right and wealth. Guess which one is practiced in China and which in the US.

The trouble is that the press do not hold our politicians to account. The press represent power more than they ever have.

"They're the victims of good government", that hit home hard.

This whole notion of Meritocracy only worked at a time when business owners need to appease the working class in order to maintain their profits and position. Since the 1970's, we're in a world where labor can be outsourced all over the world or is automated. The incentive to appease the working class (those who do not own the output of their labor, but just get a wage) is dwindling to nothing. This is going to be worse than the Gilded Age we emerged from at the beginning of the last century, because at least then, capitalism needed labor, skilled labor to generated profits. That is rapidly changing. These guys in this video seem to think that appealing to principled elites to restore a sense of shared ownership in society will help fix things. It will not. That will not be anywhere near enough. What we really need is for the working class, the vast majority that work and earn a wage to make a living, to realize they have to start taking control, taking charge and taking ownership of this society, or they are going to get trampled. Long gone is the time we could rely on principled, or at least sensible elites to keep things working for us. It's not sustainable when the system is set up to award being a self-centered bastard. The working class needs to take control, run for office, vote, protest, demand the things we need to live and provide for our children. No one is going to do it for us.

Interviewer is a class of his own 👍!

“As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.” - Alexander Hamilton

Considering corporations as persons by law is a basic flaw. It is just a way, for the owners, to be able to put the blame on someone else, here, on a physical entity devoided of consciousness. The perfect magic trick...!

Those ‘guard rails,’ quite so. Noam Chomsky’s main idea for remedying this lethal over-extension of neoliberal capitalism (Reagan, Thatcher etc) is simply to put them back! But my main reason for writing was to thank our host in particular, such a class act, and this site for giving me some entry into economics suited to lay people like myself. Thank you.

The economic investment into our future decline was started by Reagan and the GOP with the shift from a working/labor bottom up economy to Reagan’s trickledown top down economy. Which shifted our public/societal economic growth to an economic system that allowed this at the top to have first take on our economy which led to the hoarding of wealth and tax laws that enabled them to use that wealth to further secure their control of our financial structure and system to their benefit at the expense of a further depleted and indebted societal structure. They get the financial advantages and benefits and the public is left holding the debt and are further disadvantaged and weakened in their ability to control their future because its those parts of government services that are the first to be scrapped due to the created debt of the top down trickledown policies. Like corporate raiders our country’s treasury and future is being raided

When? As if any form of material gain based competition does not breed greed, avarice and frustration. Why do economist always inject hope in hopeless systems ..

When meritocracy breeds envy.

I would add that the meritocracy, being higher achievers than the slackers of the past, have done so by neglecting aspects of learning that they view as useless: literature, art, music. Aspects of learning that cultivate sensitivity to ordinary mans plight and certain aesthetic values are absurdly out of context in that group....at least among the most embedded in our Nation's power structure. Never has there been a greater indifference to speaking and writing styles among lawyers and politicians than today's. Oratory is a dead art and a 3rd rate speak like Obama can pass for being accomplished. When was the last time there was any reference to a great philosopher or poet in any speech? They pride themselves in technocratic jargon, which at times is purposefully opaque, and stooping towards flattering that which they perceive to be common people's vanities. They get ahead by being malleable to any disposition adopted by authority, or idea proposed by teachers and mentors - particularly, they are adept at riding the waves of group think. These are not the types that promote a Beethoven, a Michelangelo, and certainly not a Martin Luther or Martin Luther King. The problems we face are compounded by there being a crisis in authentic leadership in this country....one who lacks any imagination, nor who can conceive of a better run society.

Most peoples idea of "Merit" is how well people did in school. The reality is is that school up until about the graduate school level is just an obedience test. If you've internalized the system and proven your obedience to do any work assigned (even when its boring, irrelevant and stupid) and proved your willingness to beat your classmates in a zero sum competition, then you get the prestige and the money and ultimately the "microphone". So in a way, our "meritocrats" are those who sold out to and then internalized the system that told them "you get what you deserve because you got those darn "A's", and those losers who didn't get those A's get exactly what they deserve." So I don't believe our societies way of selecting "merit" is valid and even if it was so, just because some people are less "meritous" doesn't mean that you're justified treat them like garbage and that they don't exist. What was Trumps election? He was the result of the "losers" grabbing at the only microphone they had left (the vote), and using it to insult the "meritous".

What I got from this is that meritocracy is essential in the US but you can only get up to a certain point after which then the lure of money can blind us from restoring balance for others. If we do choose to restore the balance, we may loose out on being a high earner like our capitalist colleagues. 🤔 It's everyone for themselves at the top