Comment by lapcat
13 hours ago
> It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value. To do otherwise requires living one’s life in cognitive dissonance; how could they be worthy of such riches while others struggle to just pay the bills? Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame.
I've never understood the idea that winning the genetic lottery somehow makes a person more "deserving" or "worthy" than another. To me, the whole idea of "meritocracy" is a moral abomination.
How do you understand meritocracy? It seems natural that those that do valuable things get rewarded a lot.
Ideally everyone would get the same chances to do valuable things but that's not how the world is setup. Unfortunately.
However trying to change that must be done with care as it's easy to increase injustice (looking at most communist systems)
> It seems natural that those that do valuable things get rewarded a lot.
I'm not fond of the term "rewarded." I understand how prices are determined by supply and demand in economics. Obviously in the labor market, some skill that is in high demand and/or short supply will bring a high price. However, economics are largely amoral. The economic system is not an ethical system to reward the worthy and punish the unworthy, just a method of distributing resources.
There's both an uncontroversial and a controversial interpretation of "meritocracy." Uncontroversially, those who are best qualified for a job should do that job, especially for life-and-death jobs like in medicine. This is how the argument usually starts, with the uncontroversial interpretation, but then it slyly shifts to the controverisal interpretation, that certain people "deserve" more money than others, often a lot more money, due to their qualifications. And while we may want economic incentives for the most qualified people to persue certain jobs, overall it doesn't appear to me that the economic incentives align with societal benefit. For example, we massively reward professional athletes and entertainers much more than doctors and nurses.
Ultimately, the controversial notion of meritocracy is used to justify enormous disparities of wealth, where a few people have so much money that they can buy politicians and elections, whereas others are so poor that they have trouble affording the basics like food, shelter, and medical care. And supposedly that's all based on "merit", which I think is crap.