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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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The problem with meritocracy is that it has Implications.

The best fit for the best able, sure. But what if you aren't? There's also no clue about what's best. If you apply evolutionary logic to society, then who knows what will end up surviving and what won't? As someone else noted, it's easy to talk about meritocracy when you win, and it's very attractive. But what if you lose?

I would think that most meritocratic societies need to have some method of dealing with the people who lose. "You're a loser in a meritocratic system and you lost because other people are better than you in this system" is not a popular message. q.e.d. the woke: why not burn the system down instead?

As an alternative we can have a system with losers but instead of the winners being chosen by merit we can use an alternative criteria like knowing the correct people or being born to the right parents.

But what if you lose?

Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?

Revealed preference suggests that most people would rather "lose" in a wealthy country full of highly-skilled people than "win" in a third-world country run by incompetent people.

Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?

I think it would actually be quite competitive. 95th percentile in Lesotho would put you into literal top 100,000 people in that small nation. We are talking about a country with Gini coefficient of 0.44, being part of top elite would mean being very rich even in nominal terms - probably scion of some well connected family a respected local businessman or government official who studied in South African university (5,6% people have university degree in Lesotho) and goes there for shopping trips. Not to even talk about things like social status or what you can afford - things like your own maids and servants, housing etc.

UBS estimated that in 2022, 96.6% of Lesotho's population had a net worth of less than $10k.

https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf

In 2017, 89% of Lesotho's population lived on less than $10/day:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day?tab=chart&country=LSO

Edit: Also, top n is less informative than top x%. The poorest person in Tuvalu is in the top 10,000 richest adults in the country. Top 100k in Ethiopia (pop 132 million)? Sure, probably richer than the average American. But Lesotho's economy just isn't productive enough or large enough to support 100k genuinely wealthy people.

Revealed preference here is related to switching costs, not to which someone would prefer in a vacuum.

Let's say you currently live in Botswana. You could move to Lesotho, where you'd be 95th percentile, or to America, where you'd be 40th percentile. I think most people in that situation would still choose America, even though there's no substantial difference in switching cost between the two options.

From what I've observed, revealed preference seems to be "make money in America, then retire somewhere much, much cheaper."

Immigration preferences partially demonstrate that it's more than switching costs in most cases.

Every system has losers, and the winners have to be able to do something about them. Meritocracy has an advantage in this in that the losers, by definition, suck.

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