Consider how meritocracy leeches the lower and middle class of highly capable people and how this increases the actual differences both in culture and in ability between the various parts of a society. This then increases the gap between them. It seems to make sense that ceteris paribus they will live more segregated from each other than ever before.
Now merit has many dimensions, but lets take the example of a trait that helps you with virtually anything. Highly intelligent people have positive externalities they don’t fully capture. Always using the best man for the job should produce more wealth for society as a whole. Also it appeals to our sense of fairness. Isn’t it better that the most competent man get the job, than the one with the highest title of nobility or from the right ethnic group or the one who got the winning lottery ticket?
Let us leave aside problems with utilitarianism for the sake of argument and ask does this automatically mean we have a net gain in utility? The answer seems to be no. A transfer of wealth and quality of life not just from the less deserving to the more deserving but from the lower and lower middle class to the upper classes. If people basically get the position in society they deserve in life they are also costing people around them positive (or negative) externalities. Meritocratic societies have proven fabulously good at creating wealth and because of our impulses nearly all of them seem to have instututed expensive welfare programs. But consider what welfare is in the real world, a centralized attempt often lacking in feedback or flexibility, it can never match the local positive externalities of competent/nice/smart people solving problems they see around themselves. Those people simply don’t exist any more in those social groups! If someone was trying to get pareto optimal solutions this seems incredibly silly and harmful!
With humans at least centralized efforts don’t ever seem to be as efficient a way to help them as would just settling a good mix of talented poor with them. Now obviously meritocracy produces incredible amounts of wealth and this is probably a good think in itself, but since we can’t yet transform that wealth into happiness and Western societies have proven incapable of turning it into something as vital to psychological well being as safety from violence, are we really experiencing gains in utility? Now some might dispute the safety claim by noting that murder rates are lower in the US today than in the 1960s. But this is an illusion, the rate of violent assault is higher, its just that the fraction of violent assaults that result in death have fallen significantly because of advances in trauma medicine. London today is worse at suppressing crime than was the London of 1900s despite the former presumably having less wealth that could be used to do this than the latter. I find it telling that even advances in technology and erosion of privacy brought about by technology, for example CCTV camera surveillance, don’t seem enough to counteract this. But I’m getting into Moldbuggery here.
Now if society is on the brink of starvation maybe meritocracy is a sad fact of life but in rich modern society where no one is starving and the main cost of being poor is being stuck living with dysfunctional poor people can we really say this is a net utilitarian gain? Recall that greater divergence between the managing and the managed class means that the problem of information and the principal-agent problems are getting worse.
Middle Class society seems incompatible with meritocracy. As does any kind of egalitarianism.
I see at least two other major problems with meritocracy.
First, a meritocracy opens for talented people not only positions of productive economic and intellectual activity, but also positions of rent-seeking. So while it’s certainly great that meritocracy in science has given us von Neumann, meritocracy in other areas of life has at the same time given us von Neumanns of rent-seeking, who have taken the practices of rent-seeking to an unprecedented extent and to ever more ingenious, intellectually involved, and emotionally appealing rationalizations. (In particular, this is also true of those areas of science that have been captured by rent-seekers.)
Worse yet, the wealth and status captured by the rent-seekers are, by themselves, the smaller problem here. The really bad problem is that these ingenious rationalizations for rent-seeking, once successfully sold to the intellectual public, become a firmly entrenched part of the respectable public opinion—and since they are directly entangled with power and status, questioning them becomes a dangerous taboo violation. (And even worse, as it always is with humans, the most successful elite rent-seekers will be those who honestly internalize these beliefs, thus leading to a society headed by a truly delusional elite.) I believe that this is one of the main mechanisms behind our civilization’s drift away from reality on numerous issues for the last century or so.
Second, in meritocracy, unless you’re at the very top, it’s hard to avoid feeling like a failure, since you’ll always end up next to people whose greater success clearly reminds you of your inferior merit.
Second, in meritocracy, unless you’re at the very top, it’s hard to avoid feeling like a failure, since you’ll always end up next to people whose greater success clearly reminds you of your inferior merit.
Not only did the Medieval peasant have good reason to believe that Kings aren’t really that different from him as people, but rather just different in their proper place in society. Kings had an easier time looking at a poor peasant and saying to themselves that there but for the grace of God go they.
In a meritocracy it is easier to disdain and dehumanize those who fail.
Do you mean to suggest that a significant percentage of Medieval peasants in fact considered Kings to not be all that different from themselves as people, and that a significant percentage of Medieval Kings actually said that there but for the grace of God go they with respect to a poor peasant?
Or merely that it was in some sense easier for them to do so, even if that wasn’t actually demonstrated by their actions?
Do you mean to suggest that a significant percentage of Medieval peasants in fact considered Kings to not be all that different from themselves as people,
That sounds like something I’d keep to myself as a medieval peasant if I did believe it. As such it may be the sort of thing that said peasants would tend not to think.
(Who am I kidding? I’d totally say it. Then get killed. I love living in an environment where mistakes have less drastic consequences than execution. It allows for so much more learning from experience!)
Or merely that it was in some sense easier for them to do so, even if that wasn’t actually demonstrated by their actions?
The latter. The former is an empirical claim I’m not yet sure how we could properly resolve. But there are reasons to think it may have been true.
After all the King is a Christian and so am I. It is merely that God has placed a greater burden of responsibility on him and one of toil on me. We all have our own cross to carry.
I’d say you’re looking at the history of feudal hierarchy through rose-tinted glasses. People who are high in the instrumental hierarchy of decisions (like absolute rulers) also tend to gain a similarily high place in all other kinds of hierarchies (“moral”, etc) due to halo effect and such. The fact that social or at least moral egalitarianism logically follows from Christian ideals doesn’t mean that self-identified Christians will bother to apply it to their view of the tribe.
Remember, the English word ‘villain’ originally meant ‘peasant’/‘serf’. It sounds like a safe assumption to me that the peasants were treated as subhuman creatures by most people above them in station.
Remember, the English word ‘villain’ originally meant ‘peasant’/‘serf’. It sounds like a safe assumption to me that the peasants were treated as subhuman creatures by most people above them in station.
A yeoman was the lowest rank of landowner, one who worked his own land or his families land, in modern terminology a peasant farmer. A villain was a sharecropper, a farmer with no land of his own, semi free, more free than a serf, though not directly equivalent to the modern free laborer. Naturally yeomen had a strong vested interest in the rule of law, for they had much to lose and little to gain from the breakdown in the rule of law. Villains had little to gain, but less to lose. People acted in accordance with their interests, and so the word yeoman came to mean a man who uses force in a brave and honorable manner, in accordance with his duty and the law, and villain came to mean a man who uses force lawlessly, to rob and destroy.
It makes quite a bit of sense. Since incentives matter I would tend to agree.
Since I know about the past interactions you two have had here, I would appreciate you just focused on the argument cited not snipe at James’ other writings or character.
Hm… so to clarify your position, would you call, say, Saul Alinsky a destructive rent-seeker in some sense? Hayden? Chomsky? All high-status among the U.S. “New Left” (which you presumably—ahem—don’t have much patience for) - yet after reading quite a bit on all three, they strike me as reasonable people, responsible about what they preached.
(Yes, yes, of course I get that the main thurst of your argument is about tenured academics. But what you make of these cases—activists who think they’re doing some rigorous social thinking on the side—is quite interesting to me.)
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
Is meritocracy inhumane?
Consider how meritocracy leeches the lower and middle class of highly capable people and how this increases the actual differences both in culture and in ability between the various parts of a society. This then increases the gap between them. It seems to make sense that ceteris paribus they will live more segregated from each other than ever before.
Now merit has many dimensions, but lets take the example of a trait that helps you with virtually anything. Highly intelligent people have positive externalities they don’t fully capture. Always using the best man for the job should produce more wealth for society as a whole. Also it appeals to our sense of fairness. Isn’t it better that the most competent man get the job, than the one with the highest title of nobility or from the right ethnic group or the one who got the winning lottery ticket?
Let us leave aside problems with utilitarianism for the sake of argument and ask does this automatically mean we have a net gain in utility? The answer seems to be no. A transfer of wealth and quality of life not just from the less deserving to the more deserving but from the lower and lower middle class to the upper classes. If people basically get the position in society they deserve in life they are also costing people around them positive (or negative) externalities. Meritocratic societies have proven fabulously good at creating wealth and because of our impulses nearly all of them seem to have instututed expensive welfare programs. But consider what welfare is in the real world, a centralized attempt often lacking in feedback or flexibility, it can never match the local positive externalities of competent/nice/smart people solving problems they see around themselves. Those people simply don’t exist any more in those social groups! If someone was trying to get pareto optimal solutions this seems incredibly silly and harmful!
With humans at least centralized efforts don’t ever seem to be as efficient a way to help them as would just settling a good mix of talented poor with them. Now obviously meritocracy produces incredible amounts of wealth and this is probably a good think in itself, but since we can’t yet transform that wealth into happiness and Western societies have proven incapable of turning it into something as vital to psychological well being as safety from violence, are we really experiencing gains in utility? Now some might dispute the safety claim by noting that murder rates are lower in the US today than in the 1960s. But this is an illusion, the rate of violent assault is higher, its just that the fraction of violent assaults that result in death have fallen significantly because of advances in trauma medicine. London today is worse at suppressing crime than was the London of 1900s despite the former presumably having less wealth that could be used to do this than the latter. I find it telling that even advances in technology and erosion of privacy brought about by technology, for example CCTV camera surveillance, don’t seem enough to counteract this. But I’m getting into Moldbuggery here.
Now if society is on the brink of starvation maybe meritocracy is a sad fact of life but in rich modern society where no one is starving and the main cost of being poor is being stuck living with dysfunctional poor people can we really say this is a net utilitarian gain? Recall that greater divergence between the managing and the managed class means that the problem of information and the principal-agent problems are getting worse.
Middle Class society seems incompatible with meritocracy. As does any kind of egalitarianism.
[unfinished draft]
I see at least two other major problems with meritocracy.
First, a meritocracy opens for talented people not only positions of productive economic and intellectual activity, but also positions of rent-seeking. So while it’s certainly great that meritocracy in science has given us von Neumann, meritocracy in other areas of life has at the same time given us von Neumanns of rent-seeking, who have taken the practices of rent-seeking to an unprecedented extent and to ever more ingenious, intellectually involved, and emotionally appealing rationalizations. (In particular, this is also true of those areas of science that have been captured by rent-seekers.)
Worse yet, the wealth and status captured by the rent-seekers are, by themselves, the smaller problem here. The really bad problem is that these ingenious rationalizations for rent-seeking, once successfully sold to the intellectual public, become a firmly entrenched part of the respectable public opinion—and since they are directly entangled with power and status, questioning them becomes a dangerous taboo violation. (And even worse, as it always is with humans, the most successful elite rent-seekers will be those who honestly internalize these beliefs, thus leading to a society headed by a truly delusional elite.) I believe that this is one of the main mechanisms behind our civilization’s drift away from reality on numerous issues for the last century or so.
Second, in meritocracy, unless you’re at the very top, it’s hard to avoid feeling like a failure, since you’ll always end up next to people whose greater success clearly reminds you of your inferior merit.
Not only did the Medieval peasant have good reason to believe that Kings aren’t really that different from him as people, but rather just different in their proper place in society. Kings had an easier time looking at a poor peasant and saying to themselves that there but for the grace of God go they.
In a meritocracy it is easier to disdain and dehumanize those who fail.
Do you mean to suggest that a significant percentage of Medieval peasants in fact considered Kings to not be all that different from themselves as people, and that a significant percentage of Medieval Kings actually said that there but for the grace of God go they with respect to a poor peasant?
Or merely that it was in some sense easier for them to do so, even if that wasn’t actually demonstrated by their actions?
That sounds like something I’d keep to myself as a medieval peasant if I did believe it. As such it may be the sort of thing that said peasants would tend not to think.
(Who am I kidding? I’d totally say it. Then get killed. I love living in an environment where mistakes have less drastic consequences than execution. It allows for so much more learning from experience!)
The latter. The former is an empirical claim I’m not yet sure how we could properly resolve. But there are reasons to think it may have been true.
After all the King is a Christian and so am I. It is merely that God has placed a greater burden of responsibility on him and one of toil on me. We all have our own cross to carry.
I’d say you’re looking at the history of feudal hierarchy through rose-tinted glasses. People who are high in the instrumental hierarchy of decisions (like absolute rulers) also tend to gain a similarily high place in all other kinds of hierarchies (“moral”, etc) due to halo effect and such. The fact that social or at least moral egalitarianism logically follows from Christian ideals doesn’t mean that self-identified Christians will bother to apply it to their view of the tribe.
Remember, the English word ‘villain’ originally meant ‘peasant’/‘serf’. It sounds like a safe assumption to me that the peasants were treated as subhuman creatures by most people above them in station.
James A. Donald disagrees.
It makes quite a bit of sense. Since incentives matter I would tend to agree.
Since I know about the past interactions you two have had here, I would appreciate you just focused on the argument cited not snipe at James’ other writings or character.
I’m curious what you thing more generally of the article you linked to? Specifically the notion of natural rights.
Someone thinks the usage originates from an upper-class belief that the lower class had lower standards of behavior.
Hm… so to clarify your position, would you call, say, Saul Alinsky a destructive rent-seeker in some sense? Hayden? Chomsky? All high-status among the U.S. “New Left” (which you presumably—ahem—don’t have much patience for) - yet after reading quite a bit on all three, they strike me as reasonable people, responsible about what they preached.
(Yes, yes, of course I get that the main thurst of your argument is about tenured academics. But what you make of these cases—activists who think they’re doing some rigorous social thinking on the side—is quite interesting to me.)