Think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of needs-like thing. You take care of the lower tiers before worrying about the upper ones.
The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.
The upper tier is 'justice'.
Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis.
Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all.
And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.
> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.
> The upper tier is 'justice'.
I'm not sure about this distinction at all. The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. The "justice" of the system is just another link in the supply chain between a person and what they need to survive, it can be a bottleneck in the same way that low production or waste can diminish access. This means that issues that might seem abstract to us are concrete to people who can't access food, shelter, or healthcare and therefore can't meet their basic needs.
And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.
> producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless
Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.
If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work.
You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.
> Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.
People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Think of all the produce which is thrown away unsold. The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. Life and business involve uncertainty.
> People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer.
Without complete certainty, yes. But nobody has complete certainty about the future. And I didn't claim complete certainty. I'm assuming readers are capable of applying common sense.
> The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand.
The reasons why life is uncertain aren't, yes.
But the reasons why people would either produce something which they know nobody will want but they still get paid for it, or would not produce something that they know people will want? Yes, that pretty much comes down to senseless government actions.
It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.
To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.
> It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.
No, just as a term that is hindering understanding rather than helping it.
> I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.
Coase didn't say free markets couldn't function with high transaction costs. He only said it would be more difficult and take longer for those markets to reach equilibrium.
Also, the true observation that free markets in the real world are always imperfect does not justify the further claim that is usually made, that governments must intervene to "fix" these imperfections. In fact, the government "fixes" almost always make things worse, often much worse. Even on strictly Coasian terms this should be evident, since the most common source of high transaction costs in modern markets is...government regulations.
However, when it comes to basic necessities--things like food, clothing, and shelter, the kinds of things this thread was originally focused on--the issue is not transaction costs for the people who need these things. There are perfectly good, low friction markets for these necessities. The problem is that governments are skewing those markets by paying people not to produce useful things, or to produce useless things instead. Or, in the case of many third world countries, the government simply confiscates all the useful things for government officials and their cronies. I don't think "transaction costs" or "access" is a useful description of those problems.
When transaction costs are too high for transactions to be made that would improve society, the losses don't somehow get made up. You have a lot of produce or something, and you can't get it transported to the people who could use it, and it gets trashed, that's permanently lost.
It seems wrong to me to dismiss this as "taking longer to reach equilibrium", as though you get to the same destination either way. Perhaps you are interpreting "function" in a loose manner, but of course I didn't mean "function" = merely "do something".
> You have a lot of produce or something, and you can't get it transported to the people who could use it
And why not? "High transaction costs" doesn't seem like a viable explanation in a world where goods constantly get shipped around the world at extremely low cost per unit. Something more like "some stupid government regulation is preventing common sense from being applied", or "corrupt officials are stealing stuff instead of letting it get sold on the open market" seems much more likely.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, since in countries which have these attributes, nobody is producing anything that would require trucks to transport, so your hypothetical of someone having a lot of produce that they can't get to people who need it doesn't apply.
If you are simply saying that there are countries which are poor because there is nobody with capital, first, that's still not a problem of "high transaction costs", it's a problem of lack of capital. And second, the problem isn't even lack of capital, since there are plenty of people in rich countries who would be glad to invest capital in poor countries--if the corrupt governments of those poor countries weren't going to steal everything of value that got invested. So we're still looking at a problem of government corruption, not "high transaction costs".
Government corruption is exactly "high transaction costs". I mean, what is the stereotype of a poor corrupt country, but one where you have to bribe someone to get anything done?
A court system that works perfectly still won't be of any help to get you fed when food isn't grown and made available to the civil servants in the first place.
There's a tendency in political philosophy (and economics) to imagine up some kind implicit or explicit of ordering of events that progress from one point or another, the ordering of which is then used to assert something about justice or the "correct" ordering or way of running of society, though on closer inspection certain of the conditions in the progression (often the earlier ones) never actually existed or did so so ephemerally such that they're not really worth worrying about, or even that all the steps kind-of happened but all at the same time or in a different or chaotically mixed-up order. It's encountered all over the place and big names do it all the time—Locke's Natural Law? Yep, built on exactly that kind of dubious base. It's everywhere in political philosophy and such orderings-as-a-foundation-for-further-reasoning or guidance aren't necessarily wrong or useless, but they're often a sign you've wandered into some weak and/or misleading reasoning.
I have a feeling this is one of those. I'm not sure "society producing some food, but unable to produce any justice until they produce a little more food" is really a thing. Humans were decent at food fairly early, and some version of justice seems absolutely central to the functioning of human communities, so I'm not inclined to believe some kind of leveling-up from "food production" to "justice" is a real thing that ever, meaningfully, happened, and if it's not something that actually happens or has happened it's worth calling into question whether that "hierarchy of needs" is real or whether reality's sufficiently more complex (or even inverted—it may be more that you need some amount of justice to have a society of humans producing food in the first place, even if they're all on the verge of starvation at the "start", whatever that even is) that such a model isn't even useful as any kind of abstract, general guide (which I suspect is the case)
The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.
The upper tier is 'justice'.
Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis.
Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all.
And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.