The Meritocracy Trap
- Thread starter Robbie3000
- Start date
OfTheCross
Veteran
They're proposing that we get rid of it and replace it with what?
"We should favor ways of organizing our social and economic life so things that are socially productive are more nearly equally rewarded. And we should pick ways of making things, ways of delivering services, ways of running schooling that don’t skew achievement so far at the very top. … We could organize finance so that the middle of the skill distribution, the old home loan officer, is the dominant worker. We could organize medicine in such a way that the difference between the specialist doctor, the nurse practitioner, and the pharmacist is relatively small and most health care is delivered by people in the middle of the skill distribution. ... The core thing to do is to find policies both in education and the labor market that recompress the distribution of economic roles."
In my opinion, we should expand opportunities instead of using meritocracy as a means to exclude.
Why hire one Harvard Law student and make him work 100 hours a week when you can hire two from a state school and have them work 50 hours a week? The workers will be happier and we expand opportunities to those from less privileged backgrounds. I don't believe the gap between a Harvard Law degree and a decent state law school is so great that one can command $250,000 while the other gets like $70,0000. This kind of distribution of income is a big problem.
Plus as we see with our politicians, these top schools produce a lot of dumb ass people.
We dont actually live in a meritocracy. We just call it that because rich white people who have inherited all the things that set them up for success, can lie to themselves and say it was achieved via merit and not by just being lucky and born into the right family.
NZA
LOL
the sentiment is nice, but it is a minor problem. we dont have real meritocracy in so many spheres of influence and economics. flattening the structure of your local paper company will make a few people happier but it isnt going to move the needle for the community around it.
I think there are some things missing but overall his point is strong enough on its own merits that I want to focus on it.
I think there could be some massive benefits from that in medicine. Right now you have these high-paid doctors in limited supply whose time is so crammed that they're rushing patients in-and-out for 15 minute consultations and everyone knows the system isn't working. Everyone is more stressed, neither the doctors nor the patients are happy, and it's all expensive as fukk.
It seems likely that if you trained twice as many people, substantially decreased their education costs (both through government subsidy and cutting out some of the dumb shyt that has caused skyrocking higher ed costs), and gave them lower pay but a far more relaxed working environment and hours with significantly more time available per patient, their lives would be better and the American public would be happier and healthier with much more equality of access to the population.
I think there could be some massive benefits from that in medicine. Right now you have these high-paid doctors in limited supply whose time is so crammed that they're rushing patients in-and-out for 15 minute consultations and everyone knows the system isn't working. Everyone is more stressed, neither the doctors nor the patients are happy, and it's all expensive as fukk.
It seems likely that if you trained twice as many people, substantially decreased their education costs (both through government subsidy and cutting out some of the dumb shyt that has caused skyrocking higher ed costs), and gave them lower pay but a far more relaxed working environment and hours with significantly more time available per patient, their lives would be better and the American public would be happier and healthier with much more equality of access to the population.
Absolutely true. My primary doctor is a Physician’s Assistant and he is more competent than some MDs that I have had in the past. When my nephew was in the hospital, it was the nurses that did the bulk of the work.
