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posted by n1 on Saturday June 18 2016, @06:20AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 19 2016, @12:30PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 19 2016, @12:30PM (#362407) Journal

    Because life requires resources.

    This is not directly related to jobs.

    Everyone gets to share in the bountiful orchestration of all these survival and flourish activities

    Not if they are automated. Then it's the machines that do those activities. Which was the starting point of this discussion, after all.

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