SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
n1
on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:20AM
from the in-my-day-we-called-it-social-darwinism dept.
from the in-my-day-we-called-it-social-darwinism dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
When the Term Meritocracy was Coined in 1958, it was in a Dystopian Satire
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 59 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I'm wearing PAMPERS!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2016, @12:11PM
Because life requires resources. Air is still free, but in developed societies, water costs (in order to pay for the delivery and disposal infrastructure, testing and purification, etc). Food ... well you could grow or hunt your own ... but that requires land and water (i.e., resources) and the effort of cultivation or capture (i.e., a job). All that stuff ain't free. In modern society (as opposed to primitive, hunter-gatherer), efficiency has been created by division of labor ... specialists function to produce, for example, food, and the aforementioned infrastructure has been built to deliver water and power, vastly improving quality of life. But still, it only appears free to newcomers that lack the experience of and with the build-out of the infrastructure. It all took, and continues to take, a lot of work, i.e., jobs that need be done. This thinking applies much more broadly than the couple of specific cases used for illustration, but the bottom line is, survival and flourishing requires effort, i.e, jobs to be done. We utilize money to account for, and trade, the value of a wide variety of skilled tasks, some involved with the basics of survival, some involved with the wants of flourishing. Everyone gets to share in the bountiful orchestration of all these survival and flourish activities by contributing to the effort in some way, i.e., a job.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 19 2016, @12:30PM
This is not directly related to jobs.
Not if they are automated. Then it's the machines that do those activities. Which was the starting point of this discussion, after all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.