When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched.
Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2016, @11:38AM
Who says scientists are smarter than finance guys? Most science is just crank-turning.
Finance has been doing a brain-drain on gifted people precisely because it pays so well.
Citing politicians and trump is kinda stupid too because a handful of counter-examples aren't statisically meaningful.
As for shareholders and trust-fund babies (which is redundant, dummy) that's capital versus labor. This is about valuing labor.