I suppose for the jobs that are less pleasant to do, the system relies on there being people who will do that because other options are not available to them, and therefore as basically a captive workforce, they can be given ‘take it or leave it’ remuneration.
People take an unpleasant but essential job out of desperation. They are providing essential value to society, arguably true merit, but are not valued for it.
It’s not right. If pursuing a true meritocracy means fixing this, then I am for it, or I am in favour of whatever does actually fix that.
There is also the risk factor here. My classmates who worked 20 hour days and risked all the capital they could raise say that unlimited rewards for success is only fair, compared to my taking a salaried position with a corporation.
But are they actually “better” at their jobs than you are, or are they simply more ambitious? If one of your classmates works 20 hours a day, another takes a less demanding job to spend more time with their family, and a third is brilliant but lazy, which one wins the meritocracy ribbon?
These are all pretty good questions. I don’t know the answers, probably because I don’t think like they do. To me, it’s just absurd to throw yourself into a career as they did.
Yes. That is the essence of a true free market. Either get better at baking (or at least marketing your bakery) or maybe pick a different line of work. Or be content to eke out a meager living doing something you appear to be mediocre at.
It’s not a “punishment” so much as it is a disincentive to continue pursuing a profession where society doesn’t value your skill set.
You appreciate that I’m talking about a competent professional. Someone who sits squarely in the middle of a profession that provides food for the entirety of society. I think it’s fair to say that 60% of all bakers are in the middle 3 quintiles of baking skill. They’re not the top 20% or the bottom 20%, by mathematical definition.
The free market thinks that we should encourage 80% of our country’s trained, professional, bakers to quit baking and search for greener pastures. Are the next group of bakers going to be better? We’ll draw from the bottom 80% of plumbers, truck drivers, account administrators and dentists to become the “new” bottom 80% of bakers.
Society doesn’t gain anything by swapping that middle 60 for a new middle 60, especially if we make it so that the middle 60 can’t provide for their families. We are ALWAYS going to have a bottom 20 and a middle 60 and a top 20, again by definition, and they all gotta eat.
A particular region can only consume so much baked goods and thus there is a limit to the number of bakers it can employ. Competent or not, if none of the bakeries in town need additional staff, you need to either look further afield, step up your game to differentiate yourself as another “Cake Boss” or “Magnolia’s”, or think about a new line of work. It happens all the time. In my town alone I’ve seen waves of all sorts of places - falafel shops, Indian, bubble tea, poke, udon, lobster rolls, so on and so forth. Like a dozen of them show up overnight ridding some new wave. Most are competent. but eventually all but one or two close because they simply can’t do enough business to justify keeping them open.
IOW, it doesn’t matter what percentile you’re in. Whether there are ten or a hundred competent bakers in town, the town only needs a certain number.
And maybe it doesn’t need all of them to be top bakers either (who will presumably command higher salaries). Some stores will be happy to get by with more affordable mid-level bakers.
When I was a young lawyer working for the government, many folk said I was crazy for not working in private industry. I tried it briefly and didn’t like it. Besides, I enjoyed the job security, the prospect of decent retirement benefits, that I got to eat dinner and spend weekends with my family. And, tho private firms paid more, I earned plenty to support my family.
Decades passed, the economy has changed several times, private firms have come and go, and some of those same folk are now suggesting the retirement benefits I am about to receive are excessive.
At my company, we sometimes have a problem finding supervisors in some areas because employees look at the pay and decide a promotion isn’t in their best interest. If I were to move to a supervisory position over my team, my salary would increased by about $10,000, plus it would mean a higher annual bonus, but if the opportunity presented itself I don’t know if I’d jump at the chance. But then I work at a company where being an individual contributor is fine, we’ve got some people who have had the same position for decades, so we don’t have an up or out attitude.
The question Cheesesteak was asking, as I understood it, was why people who are in that certain number, but unexceptional, should have miserable lives because they aren’t the cake boss.
It’s too easy to say that nobody wants bread, and that’s why the average baker is poor. The issue is that people do want bread, which the “free market” recognizes by extracting as much bread from them as it can for as little money as possible. Part of that market is that not everybody can be the cake boss, but some people will still need to bake. They can’t all take marketing classes and grit their way out of the system.
ISTM part of the issue is as has been mentioned in some of the posts along the thread, the moralization of the concept, a conflation of judging on “merit” with assigning “worth”, or with being “just”.
Notice also the question in the last post:
But I’d question, is that meritocracy, or is it just the current flavor of market capitalism claiming ownership of the word? A “real” meritocracy IMO would not necessarily require having those who are not in the top tier be “miserable”. Just that they would not be the ones on top. Now, of course, humans being humans, you can then have the situation where those that do make it to the top, or those that make the rules for the market, decide it’s fair and just to stomp on those who did not. But that is not inherent.
To me, it seems like there needs to be a point at which we don’t let people go below- food, shelter, etc… in the interest of basic humanitarian rights. But I’m very against the idea that society should make that point comfortable. It should NOT be comfortable- it should largely suck, at the same time as it’s entirely adequate to prevent anyone from starving, dying of exposure, suffering health consequences from inadequate care, etc…
The whole idea has two major components- providing basic needs, and being uncomfortable enough in some fashion that people will strive to get out of it. My thinking is along the lines of the WWII specification for the K ration - it was a high energy and nutritious energy bar type ration that was developed to be “a little better than a boiled potato”, with the intent that the soldiers weren’t going to eat it for pleasure. That’s kind of my thinking on public assistance. It shouldn’t be anything anyone wants to live on indefinitely, but it should be entirely adequate for what they need in order to live and function in society.
Of course, this would be different for people who genuinely can’t work- the elderly, the disabled, orphans, etc.
In whose view? I chose a career path, much like @Dinsdale, where I earned much less than I could have earned because it was less stressful, had better hours, etc. But also because material things didn’t mean that much to me–I’m happy living in a small apartment, I don’t enjoy restaurants much, I don’t need an extensive wardrobe, and so on. But people (mainly prospective girlfriends) would ask me “How can you LIVE like this?” I shrugged my shoulders.
Was I comfortable or did my life suck? Depends on who you ask, but more to the point, there will always be someone who can live comfortably on very little money, and society will always be asking “Why does this lazy bum get to live a life of ease on my tax dollars?”
This I suspect is based on the theory that nobody will do anything other than sit on their asses, eat, and screw unless they’re forced into it.
And I think that’s entirely false. Nearly everybody has things that they love to do; and also nearly everybody wants the respect of other humans; and quite a lot of people like actual luxuries, not things just necessary so your life doesn’t actually suck because all you get to eat are K rations and/or the only place you can live is in a barracks. Lots of people, given the chance to do nothing, will do so for a short while, especially if they’re exhausted from what they’ve been doing – but very few of them will make a life out of it.
There are very few jobs that nobody actually wants to do if the jobs are set up right. Probably nobody wants to do nothing other than shovel manure; but quite a few people want to raise livestock, and are very willing to shovel shit as part of the job. Skilled plumbers (not to mention parents) often have to deal with human shit, but there are people who choose to be plumbers and parents. If it turns out that there are some jobs that can’t be set up so that enough people want to do the jobs, then offer more pay for those, not less, so that people who do them can get luxuries; and offer more respect for them, not less. There will be takers.
We have a setup in which the jobs that are considered physically easiest and involve taking the least shit from others also get the most pay and the most respect; and the jobs which are physically harder to do usually get the least pay and the least respect and because of that last also involve taking the most shit from bosses and customers; and also very often allow the least control over how the job is done. It’s no wonder that many people don’t want to do them. But trying to force people into them by telling them that otherwise they need to live on Krations or equivalent is just plain nasty.
And we need a lot of people doing those jobs, so don’t tell me that if people don’t want that choice they just need to try harder. If it were possible for everybody to get out of them that way, the rest of society would collapse in a hurry.
It seems like the idea that soldiers in World War II are a useful model for an idealized situation where everyone gets what they in fact deserve… bears further examination.
I would have to disagree to an extent. Sure, people want to do things they love and they want respect and luxuries. But quite a few people’s desire for such is low enough that if, given a stable income without their having to work, they’d opt not to work. On top of that, the jobs that they’d love to do are often in short supply - not everyone can do what they want to do.
If you were to give out a substantial UBI right now - say, $50,000 a year for every American with no need for work - a large chunk of the population would simply, in fact, sit on their hands and not work. Sure, another chunk of people would be so utterly driven by their dream to become a doctor, pharmacist, airline pilot or lawyer that they’d spend the effort to do so. But many wouldn’t.
For clarification, I’m completely in favor of UBI. But if generous enough, it would lead to a lot of people refusing to work, yes. That’s just human nature.
Of course we do. It’s not a mystery why that is. It’s because nearly everyone can shovel manure. Not everyone can conduct an audit of a company’s books and certify that they’re in compliance with whatever regulations they need to be in compliance with. Everyone can flip burgers, but not everyone can hit 40 home runs a year in the major leagues. Many people can work in a factory, fewer can be good programmers. It’s at its heart a market for labor. There are parts that aren’t transparent, but for the most part, the wage someone is paid is directly related to how fungible they are.
And that’s part of what I don’t understand- where are the lines for people whose skills and experience are such that they can’t do anything other than shovel manure or flip burgers? I feel like the solution is actually a living minimum wage rather than government subsidy. That way, we’d get the government out of the business of playing Robin Hood and essentially punishing the successful, and from there, we’d let things play out.
Nearly everybody in good physical shape, anyway; and with a reasonable degree of coordination (and some practice at the job, though that can be learned). If the manure’s to be moved at a reasonable rate of speed, that actually leaves out a lot of people.
But not everybody can raise livestock. Part of the problem is that we split up jobs so that we wind up with a lot of jobs that only involve shovelling manure, and not any of the rest of the work that should go along with that.
And part of the rest of it is that we say, ‘Oh, anybody can shovel manure! You’re not going to get any respect for that; you’re going to get terrible wages and get sneered at on top of that!’ No matter how badly we need to get the manure shovelled. We don’t give respect to people for being willing to take on necessary jobs; especially the ones thought of as unpleasant.
You just have to look at how many 18th-19th C science/tech achievements were accomplished by people who came from the leisure/gentry classes. A life of leisure and comfort enables achievement, it doesn’t stifle it.
Yes, many will just sit on their arses. So what? They weren’t going to be the achievers anyway.