LSE Events | The Meritocracy Trap
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
- Merit is not a genuine excellence but rather a pretence, constructed to rationalise an offensive distribution of advantage. Merit, in short, is a sham.
The meritocratic ideal-that social and economic rewards should track achievement rather than breeding-anchors the self-image of the age. Aristocracy has had its day, and meritocracy is now a basic tenet of civil religion in all advanced societies.
Meritocracy promises to promote equality and opportunity by opening a previously hereditary elite to outsiders, armed with nothing save their own talents and ambitions. But today, middle-class children lose out to rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. At the same time, meritocracy entices an anxious and inauthentic elite into a pitiless, lifelong contest to secure income and status through its own excessive industry.
In spite of its promises, meritocracy in fact installs a new form of aristocracy, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of income and wealth is not land but human capital and free labor. And merit is not a genuine excellence but rather-like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime-a pretense, constructed to rationalize an offensive distribution of advantage.
Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He publishes in a range of disciplines, including in Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal.
Markovits’s latest book, The Meritocracy Trap, places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.
Oriana Bandiera (@orianabandiera) is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics and Director of STICERD.
This event is the Morishima Lecture. This lecture series is held in honour of Professor Michio Morishima (1923-2004), Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics at LSE and STICERD's first chairman.
STICERD (@STICERD_LSE) brings together world-class academics to put economics and related disciplines at the forefront of research and policy.
I think it’s a structural failure that we have a republic ruled by lawyers who write laws in language that excludes the public from accessing the material. When you hand power to lawyers you get a bunch of labyrinthine laws, bureaucratic bloat and disenfranchisement.
We need to have direct democracy where everyone gets one vote in every proposal written in plain language no more than 5 pages long and that vote can be delegated to a trustee for as long as one sees fit and revoked at any time. Then trust the experts we should be guided by science. Not bussiness/religious special interests.
Buckminster Fuller called this LAWCAP, lawyer lead capitalism.
What! Can't scratch their heads... this is a sweatshop of the worst kind
lol
Good topic ! Probably its not a meritocracy trap. It's a trap in execution which bring inequality. We are fortunate in today's times to have many MOOC's & different ways of learning. At the same time, I recognize that there is lot of misinformation & confusion. So, one needs to have a discerning mind which is challenging.
What he's saying has been going on for years & it's only getting worst. Having more teachers, training them, have better pay would help everyone. However, the elite don't care about it, coz it doesn't benefit them & the people in govt are close to the elite who fund their campaigns & visit us once every 4 yrs to plea for votes.
"So, one needs to have a discerning mind which is challenging.
"
Yes! That is well discussed here:
EPISODE #783
07/11/2020
www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts
As Nassim Taleb said, the problem with institutions, and professors, and “experts” that reside within them is the absence of skin in the game. If the decisions proposed by those people result in economic crises, they still get paid, their cushy lifestyle unaffected. That is why ordinary people respect self-made businesspeople more - they put their money on the line and risk losing it all. Beaurocrats and tenured Ivy League professors not so much.
yep i wish they went to africa and see reality.
Maryla, you didn't actually listen to the talk, did you? Pity, there is a lot worthwhile to learn but, oh dear, it went straight over your head.
even businessmen don't have skin in the game anymore i.e. credit, too-big-to-fail.
fellow Taleb fan btw. but you must also realize that Taleb is himself an economic academic. engineering.nyu.edu/faculty/nassim-nicholas-taleb.
D. O. O. He is, but he doesn’t have to be. Taleb made his f you money by trading, and is now teaching just to have something to do. He doesn’t depend on his professor pay for living. If he were to lose his professorship, he would still be fine.
D. O. O. Businessmen still have something lose, look at what happened now during the pandemic, many businesses closed. And I’m sure those business owners would rather be in business. Compared to academics who now teach classes in zoom with no reduction in pay, business owners who had their livelihoods and businesses destroyed during the pandemic and riots - definitely have skin in the game.
Can’t wait for his book to be published!
Can you explain why Wall Street execs were not punished for the 2008 collapse?
Look up Thomas Frank on UA-cam. He explains it well. Basically, Obama was in the same privileged elite class that the Wall Street execs was in.
@@TedApelt Where is the video do you have a link to it please share if you can I really want to see.
Because they were of the rich and powerful class. That bunch is rarely punished, for anything.
They used their influence to get the Govt to bail them out and cover their tracks
Milionaires tend to buy politicians by contributing to their campaigns. Bribery is legal in the US
does this not assume that the top 1% are always the same people?
Yes it does.
Given all our politicians, apparently, had dads that were bus drivers we must have some sort of social mobility.
I think there is a material difference between "merit" and "deserved". I'm from a poor council estate, dad died whilst at primary school, we had to ration food. But went to a grammar school as I am rain man brilliant at maths. I now earn low 6 figures. I def am worth what I am paid, from a competency and utility to the country point of view. But not sure "deserved".
I haven't worked harder than everyone else. I was brilliant at one thing before I was 7 years old. And this one thing is valuable today (6000 years ago strength was more valued). It's pure DNA. I know everything is supposed to be a social construct, but IQ is one of the most consistently measurable traits and is very genetic. But my brothers have "just" slightly above median jobs. So my success is down to genetic luck. Not hard work.
I'm not sure if that is meritocratic?
Wow! At least, keep you stupidity private.
When you say you're brilliant at maths, I would imagine this translates to a considerably above average working memory. By contrast, your brothers likely have modest working memories. Working memory is a component that roughly gets lumped in with IQ, but is not irreducible to it. Working memory correlates with income. IQs can be the same, with differences in working memory, especially if one factors in learning disabilities that effect working memory such as dyslexia. To be genetically gifted a vast working memory is enough to secure a well paying job. Indeed, super skilled jobs demand extra slots in working memory to carry out complex work, especially, in our tech and math heavy working world. Moreover, one's ability to learn faster and more efficiently equates with working memory. The ability to hold in one's mind 7 chunks of information as opposed to 3 creates vast differences in academic and work outcomes over time. This is not to say that you are not head and shoulders above your brothers in intelligence. But, I have read IQ does not drastically fluctuate broadly between siblings. At the same time, I think working memory may be quite different and fluctuate drastically if rogue recessive genes of modest memory abound in one's parents genes. It's likely above average working memory in your families dna is a recessive gene. That would make sense. Therefore, we see in the modern world, a few genes in regards to memory can be the difference between a plum job, a nice house, and happy children for one sibling, and well, slim pickings for the others.
What can one do? Redistribute money within one's family. Why? So each genetic branch of your family tree remains strong. I think the person who carried out such a strategy would be high in intelligence. Why? They are not only adapting to their environment to increase their own survival, but also increasing the intergenerational survival of all their family members. A subordinate alpha male maintains the group; a dominant alpha, maintains himself, and therein lies the difference.
@@sockysworld8010
I feel like my brain is a computer with RAM and a hard drive after reading that))
I do pay my mother's mortgage and for her to go 4 days a week. Also bought both her and my brother a car. Why is a good question. I do think it is my "job to". Kin selection would be my answer to why, but know some don't like that sort of talk.
That's exactly what John Rawls argue in his theory of justice. There is a brilliant lecture abouy it in Micheal Sandel online course at Harvard on youtube
Thanks!
Ayega toh OBC prime minister hi.
Brahmin+Dalit combo aur power play jyada hogaya. Ab OBC ki bari hai.
OBC UNITY LONG LIVE.
IT WAS NEVER ABOUT RELIGION. IT WAS ALWAYS A FIGHT BETWEEN PRIESTS OF ALL RELIGIONS. ONE END IS PRIESTS, THE OTHER END IS THOSE WHO AID PRIESTS. THE FIGHT SEEMS AS IF RELIGIONS ARE JUSTIFYING THE STANCE. BUT IN TRUTH, THEY ARE JUST PRESERVING THEIR PRIEST MARKETS.
SEE WHO IS MORE IN NUMBER IN POLITICAL PARTIES. THE BALL IS ALWAYS IN THEIR COURT.
EVERY OBC WHO IS READING THIS, FIGHT FOR YOUR IDENTITY.
QUESTION MANUSMRITI, QUESTION CONSTITUTION, QUESTION QURAN, QUESTION EVERY TEXT BECAUSE THERE LIES THE IDENTITY AND MARKET OF PRIESTS. THESE PRIESTS HAVE NO SYMBOL, THEY HAVE NO RELIGION OR METHOD OF WORSHIP OR ANY AFFILIATIONS WITH ANY IDEOLOGY. THOSE THINGS ARE FOR YOU TO FOLLOW CREATED BY THEM. THEY ALWAYS ARE CREATORS OF CONCEPTS AND THEIR CONCEPTS ALWAYS KEEP YOU AS THEIR FOOT SOLDIERS. THINK.
The fight is always between them. But they never fight it. YOU DO.
THEY THRIVE ON IT. ONE BURNS SOMETHING, OTHER DEFENDS IT, INHERENT IN IT IS A DEFENSE FOR PRIESTS. ONE FKING CASTE IS RULING OVER YOU, COLONISING YOU AND YOUR MIND. THINK.
LONG LIVE OBC UNITY.
Great
This guy totally killed it with his highly sophisticated historical and economic analysis
He is brilliant. I do very much admire him.
I am passionate about studying at LSE. I hope I can get a PhD Offer in Sociology.
Did you? I want to go to Stanford next year.
Meritocracy is a better system than affirmative action and quotas.
As long as we make education affordable and attainable, and equalize the quality of public schools I agree with you. If not, then no meritocracy is not a more equitable system.
@@MrLandonweber
Im fine with equal opportunity, but do not support equality of outcomes.
There are bright people and there are dull people and all the people in between. There is no reason to expect that given equal opportunities everyone will perform equally well. Meritocracy ensures that the highest achieving people get their just rewards.
@@DaveWard-xc7vd Agreed!
@@DaveWard-xc7vd but what about hereditary meritocracy
@@ashutoshchouhan8380
Hereditary Meritocracy Is Not Meritocracy
You are thinking of hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth.
If you are able bodied and poor in America it is most likely your own fault.
You clearly do not understand the consequences of your own actions.
You need to watch this video.
ua-cam.com/video/HdJwHx-QofA/v-deo.html
Have A Plan If You Plan To Have
Why would I trust anyone in academics who uses Microsoft and not Apple computers :)
🤣