> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be
The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.
Those seem like legal and not economic matters, unless you're saying all matters are economic matters, to which I'd carve out the matters that are legal as not meritocratic and therefore not "good" that we leave it up to "merit" (however that's defined).
But still, according to your economic meritocracy, it would follow that Alice Walton is of higher merit than, say, the totality of: your five favorite economic think tanks, the entire economic faculty at Harvard, and the CEOs of the Big Four.
Actually, scratch that -- Bezos dwarfs them all. We should defer to his wisdom first and foremost on all matters economic.
...yes? I don't see what the problem is with this. The people you've named own portions of organizations and therefore get to decide (to the degree with which their ownership allows) what those organizations do. I prefer that vastly over the idea of every organization being governed by popular vote.
I think you're getting stuck on the word "merit". It has context; there isn't some universal concept of the worth of a person being discussed here.
> I think you're getting stuck on the word "merit". It has context; there isn't some universal concept of the worth of a person being discussed here.
No, I'm not equating it to worth of a person -- that's why I chose to compare Alice Walton to economics departments and political think tanks and bank CEOs (who I'm sure are not always of the highest moral character). This is about economic merit.
You said this:
> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be, which means some people will and should be left out of decisions... I would love it if the government could grow the number of people who, on their merits, help guide the economy...
I picked these examples because to me personally, it's clear that just because someone has acquired more capital, it doesn't mean that their opinion with respect to guiding the economy is more valuable. Otherwise, George Clooney is of higher merit in this context than the faculty members of top economics schools, and so we should heed his economic decisions and guidance accordingly. That doesn't strike you as... a little odd?
To put it another way, just because you do well at a game (e.g. "the economy") doesn't mean you should be the one dictating and guiding the rules of the game. It's a bit circular -- in what direction do you think such people will guide the rules? What incentive would the winners have to change the rules?
Why are we talking about the rules of how the economy operates in the US? That is not and should not be governed by meritocracy, it should (and is) governed by laws, which are decided democratically.
Jeff Bezos cannot (or should not) unilaterally decide how corporate law works. He has a vote in who governs, legislates, and judicates, just like you have a vote in who governs, legislates, and judicates, and that's it. This is what I mean when I say "you're getting stuck on the word 'merit'".
I believe it's okay that not everyone gets a say in how Amazon is run. Everyone does get a say in the things Amazon is allowed to do in the US economy. Those are different things, though it seems you're conflating them.
First, the two are inextricably linked and always have been. It has been demonstrated time and time again that capital begets political power, so these people are dictating the rules as well. Plus it's naive to think that those that simply "run the economy" (your language) are not affecting everyone else's lives in our society.
But even ignoring this point and going back to an idealized world, maybe I'm misunderstanding you -- can you spell out what you mean by "guide the economy" or making decisions about the economy?
Simply the 10% who own 89% of stocks influence the economy by exerting influence over those organizations they proportionately own.
A company's shareholders don't get explicit control over the entire economy or anything so absolute, they simply speak with whatever control they have over the private organizations that then, themselves, indirectly influence the economy.
I don't think 10% of America should literally have extra voting power in elections, and despite your allusion, they do not.
No matter how much you decry "money has influence in elections" people are free, in a democracy (as implemented by the US), to vote how they want. Any argument around, "People get manipulated" is a non-starter; as long as nobody is literally casting their ballots for them, they are free to choose to harm themselves. It's stupid of them[1], but that's democracy for you.
I think you’re confusing the word “merit” with the word “ownership”. Merit cannot be measured objectively, so you are using ownership stakes in large corporations as a proxy for merit. But you haven’t shown that ownership in a corporation is correlated with merit. You’ve just automatically assumed they have merit because the corporations they own are large and successful, and it seems you’ve defined merit by owning a large and successful corporation. This is circular reasoning, unless you want to try for a better definition of merit.
But large and successful corporations are large and successful precisely because of the work of tens of thousands to millions of people. You are trying to say they shouldn’t have a say in our economy? In the work they do? Even though they are the ones on the ground doing actual work, building actual products and technologies with their hands?
Amazon and Walmart do not exist without this army of workers to make them operate every day. Jeff Bezos could die tomorrow and Amazon would continue unabated, just as Apple did the day after Steve Jobs died. Why? Because Amazon and Apple and Walmart are not one person or even one family. Why then, should we give such an outsized role over our lives to single individuals at these companies, when we can’t even prove the success of these companies is due to their individual “merit”?
It's not circular, it's simply causational. If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit. The goal is not to reward work, the goal is to reward risk. Owning a company is risky. Simply working at a company is not risky.
Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome is what defines merit.
It is perfectly acceptable that the workers who do not take on risk through ownership at Amazon and Walmart do not get to have a say in what Amazon and Walmart do. It's also true that both Amazon and Walmart pay many of their employees with shares of their company, for this exact reason. Employees who become (small percentage) owners of a company demonstrate merit proportional to their risk, and generally proportional to their individual contribution.
It's not perfect, but if your goal is perfection, you will live the rest of your life dissatisfied and frustrated by inequity.
> If a corporation does well, the owners of that corporation have demonstrated their merit.
> [merit is defined as] Successfully taking on risk and navigating from that risk to a successful and sustained outcome
I'm not looking for perfect, I'm looking for well-reasoned. This is not a causal relationship, it is definitional. A tautology. You provided a definition of merit here and then claim that anyone who meets the definition has merit. But so what? This is a circular argument because you have not proven that those people are responsible for the success of the corporations they own. In order to prove a casual relationship, you will have to control for all other factors, including the efforts of other employees and even random chance. And this better be a very robust analysis because if you want to put these people in charge of our lives due to their supposed "merit", they better damn well have it.
Because successful and sustained operation of Amazon is achieved by all workers collectively. The owners of Amazon are not necessarily doing the work of Amazon. They are not even directing that work in many cases. I'm an owner of Amazon and I don't do anything for them. So which owners were responsible for the success of Amazon and how do you determine that? What is the threshold for being attributed merit for Amazon's success? 10% of the company? 20%? A majority? A plurality? You have offered no way to objectively figure this out, and instead defined merit in vague terms. What is "successful"? What is "sustained"?
> Simply working at a company is not risky.
Thanks in large part due to workers having a say over the economy! Travel back to the early days of America or even the early 20th century, and you'll be in a world with no worker protections on the job. Unsafe work environments, no regulations, long hours, child labor, no breaks, no leave, no healthcare, no paid sick days, 6 day work weeks, indentured servitude, private corporate armies, company towns, company stores ... I could go on and on. Oh and let's not forget to mention slavery. Keep in mind the same logic and reasoning you are applying here could have been used in the 1800s to put slave owners in charge of the economy. ("Look at how successful their business is! They should be running the entire economy!"). Here is a taste of the climate created by the very same kind of "meritorious" business owners that you want to put in charge today:
"Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked[1][7] – a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[8] – many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows."
These are the kind of thing that happens when you let "meritorious" owners of corporations do whatever they want. These are the kinds of ideas they come up with. So if you want to put these people in charge of our lives and our economy you will also need to somehow assure us that this kind of violence against workers will not happen again. Would it interest you to know that "CEO" is the job title of a disproportionate number of psychopaths? Take a look at the psychological profiles of a board room and a prison cell block -- you won't find much of a difference in frequency of psychopathic tendencies between the two groups. If we define merit as running a successful corporation, and we select people from that pool to run our economy, you're going to be selecting a disproportionate number of psychopaths in the process. My fear would be that they would go right back to putting chains on the doors and conducting violent attacks against striking workers given the first opportunity.
Reading the argument he does seem right. Simply being the owner of something successful does not prove that you caused the success, and if your definition of merit is "owning a profitable stake" and nothing else then you haven't actually shown them to be meritorious, just asserted it.
He isn't right; owning something successful doesn't prove you caused the success (and I never said it did), but it is a strong indicator you caused the success, and more importantly past successes are leading indicators (not absolute assurance, however) of future performance.
Acting like I claimed some "proof" or "absolute certainty" around this topic is disingenuous and manipulative, which is why I stopped engaging with him, and honestly am suspicious of you as well.
Telling me that I believe something I do not is not a good way to interact with others, and it's not likely to breed positive discourse.
This topic is a lot fuzzier than the language being used by you and the other commenter, and it's not possible to have a civil conversation with people who don't get that.
The issue is that we have a spiral - past successes may only be a predictor of future performance because of the privileges we endow to successful people.
No one is asking for absolute certainty, people are asking for a solid argument, so far they seem very soft. If using specific language causes an argument to be impossible then the argument itself is weak - I assure you that fuzzier topics can be discussed with more specific language, it just has to be thought out carefully.
An argument isn't weak because it relies on specific language, it's specific. If we can't agree on what the word "merit" means (or indeed "weakness"), it's useless to continue to discuss what is and isn't meritorious (or weak).
That is what has happened here, along with a fairly significant number of willful misrepresentations, to the point of assumed malice, of what I've written.
I was willing to leave it where it was since you said "cheers", but this comment is a direct about-face from what you said earlier. Now apparently I'm not having a civil conversation? I didn't attack you or your character personally at all. I engaged with your comment fully and addressed your points. I haven't used any inappropriate language. So I take issue with your characterization of my engagement here.
> This topic is a lot fuzzier than the language being used by you and the other commenter
You started this whole discussion with unsupported, absolutist assertions as to the model for the economy you would prefer (in this whole discussion you haven't provided any evidence to support your claim that democracy is a terrible way to run an economy). This is the tone you set initially. The topic became "fuzzy" when you were pressed and your bold assertions turned into "beliefs".
I reply only to say you're not accurately portraying our conversation (or even what I said in the prior comment), and it's a little sad you think you can lie here now, when what you and I wrote is directly above.
The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.