[FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

[Marcus Daniels]

Is this the right question?    What does a society optimize for?

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2020 8:32 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

Thanks, Eric.  He came off better on the podcast.  Glad to be corrected.  This American Life did one of it’s quixotic treatments of systems in which leaders are chosen at random, and, of course, was quite pleased by the result.  By the way, isn’t that how the Dali Lama is  chosen?

I still think we should randomize all the babies at birth, take huge amounts of money off the top and pour it in at the bottom in the form of education and flat-out income adjustment so that no child is disadvantaged by the station of his/her birth.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2020 6:20 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

So.... delayed response to the original... based on the longer reviews I've seen, this is partially a criticism of meritocracy itself, but also a very strong criticism of the neo-liberal bastardization of meritocracy. As it says in the opening line of the review in the original post: The thing being criticized are "pernicious assumptions" about merit. From what I can tell, his TED talk summarizes the book well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_tyranny_of_merit

He starts out with some discussion of moral luck, but in my opinion not a great discussion of it. Then he moves on to criticize a world where pieces of paper are confused for ability. In such a world, those without the right pieces of paper are deemed to lack merit and are told they can't have dignity. That part is criticizing a world in which our leaders continuously message that everyone should go to college, encouraging a false belief that a getting a degree somehow magically makes you successful, and encouraging the implicit (or sometimes explicit) judgement that not getting a degree somehow a personal failure and that getting a degree and then not succeeding is an incoherent position to be in. The failure of that program of thought has been huge. It is hard to explain how many of the students I taught at Penn State Altoona had their lives made worse by getting a degree. They are working the same jobs they could have worked out of high school, but with 4 years less experience, added shame and frustration, crippling debt, and a worse relationship with parents who can't understand why having a degree hasn't made their kids successful. And you can't try to defend this by hand-waving at education being virtuous in its own right, but it won't work, because by any reasonable measure they aren't very educated either.

Even with as right as some parts of that critique are, it is all somehow seething with the suspect rhetoric of the protestant work ethic. There is nothing inherently virtuous in being exploited for your labor (in the Marxist sense of providing profit to a capitalist), and he is somehow lumping all "work" together in a way that obscures that.

When all is said and done, it is an interesting argument, but my Libertarian Goat is doing fine, thank you :- )



On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
This should do it!

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-j-sandel/the-tyranny-of-merit/

The thesis is that “meritocracy” is the cause of the fact that the us is now the least socially mobile country among the western democracies.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/


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