
Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition - onetimemanytime
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miserable-winners/594760/
======
holografix
Why is scarcity of resources not discussed in this article? There’s a curved
frontier where the return on yet another human to a geographical region or
virtual grouping is negative.

Too little people and you can’t do much, too many people and everyone is
eating each other.

The data on elites preferring not to work harder for a promotion is
irrelevant. They’re not working to be richer, they’re working not to be poor.

The terror of being poor after growing up in comfort is aggravated by a lack
of social services safety net in the US. Lose your job, have a medical
emergency and you’ll die without private health care.

It’s a brutal system.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Author probably has tenure and good benefits.

------
malandrew
> How can that be done? For one thing, education—whose benefits are
> concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents—must
> become open and inclusive. Private schools and universities should lose
> their tax-exempt status unless at least half of their students come from
> families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And public
> subsidies should encourage schools to meet this requirement by expanding
> enrollment.

I wonder if people who propose such lofty ideals reason through the possible
consequences (direct and 2nd and 3rd order effects) of such ideas and how it
might backfire?

Right off the bat, I can see two possible consequences:

\- the schools reject the proposal, lose tax exempt status and just charge
more because many of their students' parents can afford the added cost. The
second order effect of this is that a school that was once financially
accessible to the top 5% maybe only becomes accessible to the top 1% because
of the additional tuition required to make up the lost tax exempt status.

\- the schools admit 50% from the bottom two thirds and the quality of
education suffers because the bar has been lowered and the school can no
longer be as demanding. This is a reasonable expected outcome because the
article cites strong correlations such a "children whose parents make more
than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children
whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000.". Assuming they keep the school as
demanding even with 50% from the bottom, a second order effect of this change
would be extreme anxiety for the students that aren't as capable being thrust
into a system that hasn't attenuated expectations to accommodate their
abilities.

------
AtlasBarfed
Meritocracy?

Talk about an ivory tower.

Sorry for the cynicism, but we are not meritocratic. Maybe once similarly
advantaged people are organized you get a temporary meritocratic competition,
but that ignores all the presorting and all the nepotism that follows.

Exhibit A: our president.

~~~
brianpgordon
The article makes this exact point at considerable length...

------
lanstin
Darn, I was hoping to read the commentary on this. Seems like YC doesn't
cotton to the idea of "mid-skilled" being enough. All these people straining
so hard with the side projects and so on, to achieve a little more, it wears
me out even as I force myself to go home to take my kid to the dentist - It'll
take me longer to master spark shuffling algorithms, but whatever. I got to
hear (and later mock) the dentist scolding my son for having mold in his
braces. He laughed. And my kids are probably going to be more average than I
am - I do hope our society can use their skills and pleasant qualities
effectively. Only providing work for uptight but high-skilled people is not so
great.

------
malandrew
> In his book Oligarchy, the political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters surveys
> eras in human history from the classical period to the 20th century, and
> documents what becomes of societies that concentrate income and wealth in a
> narrow elite. In almost every instance, the dismantling of such inequality
> has been accompanied by societal collapse, such as military defeat (as in
> the Roman empire) or revolution (as in France and Russia).

If societal collapse is inevitable, maybe we're better off accepting that
inequality because it's better to have inequality and a functioning society
than to have societal collapse that leaves everyone more equal but leaving
almost all qualitatively and quantitatively worse off than they were prior to
the societal collapse.

The more I study history, the more inevitable it looks that any system
eventually ends up with an ossified oligarchy running it. Even every attempt
at socialist/communist states whose goal was equality end up with an ossified
oligarchy. No system humanity has created has ever avoided this fate. With
that in mind, maybe the best course of action is to figure out which system,
once it ends up with an ossified oligarchy, does the best job at achieving a
steady rate of improvement in the quality of life for all constituents of that
system.

~~~
cmurf
Once it ends up as such an extreme oligarchy, the entire system is proven
illegitimate. No system succeeds by explicitly acknowledged ideology: some
people are simply better than others, and those better people are wealthy,
it's just an undeniable fact.

And that's because the human primate is competitive and biologically inclined
to violent jealousy when seeing fellow primates have a lot more shit than they
do for no good reason. Not all of them. But enough of them.

------
dannykwells
While nice in thought, this is all a bit rich, coming from a tenured Yale law
professor.

I also think he misses a major counter example to his argument, which is
(some) tech companies, which have generous work life balance and reasonable
expectations. Amazon is (famously) the exception, not the rule, in terms of
how miserable everyone is there.

