43 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger
Its not just that the outcomes are quite obviously very often not really directly related to abillity, just think about the span of wealth between the rich and the poor.
Even if we distributed the population to the existing roles in society purely by their abillities and efforts; The span just doesnt add up, no one is talented and hard working to the extend that their existence is worth millions or even just thousands of lives of people who are just average.
As the basis of an actual meritocracy we would need to establish a proper minimum **and maximum** wage, that have some relation with how valueable a person could potentially be.
Comment by Erinaceous at 28/11/2024 at 01:20 UTC
22 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yup. Pretty much all human attributes are normally distributed in the population but compensation follows a power law not a Gaussian distribution. There's no way a Chud like Elon Musk is 10^6 smarter than a middling high school teacher and yet here we are
Comment by [deleted] at 30/11/2024 at 14:06 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Connect-Ad-5891 at 28/11/2024 at 18:10 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
While I somewhat agree with the outcome being unjust, especially for more of the parasitic positions like CEO, id differ to a Paul graham essay about how modernization has allowed for the wide berth in individual productivity
I didn't say in the book that variation in wealth was in itself a good thing. I said in some situations it might be a sign of good things. A throbbing headache is not a good thing, but it can be a sign of a good thing-- for example, that you're recovering consciousness after being hit on the head.
Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.
In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.