the myth of meritocracy

[Rockmeister]

excerpt:
“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get that on your own,” President Obama declared four years ago at a campaign rally in Virginia. “If you’re successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”

I would thought it far more likely (tho less conspiratorial) that he meant teachers,enthusiasts, parental support of a non financial kind. You know
Nice people who care about others.

 

[Seanm]

Belief in meritocracy is finally collapsing. Today’s young people have done everything they’ve been told and still have nothing to look forward to but gig work and unaffordable rents. They are much more willing to acknowledge the immense work of collective maintenance, care and investment that goes into every self-made entrepreneur and bullshit startup (partly because half of them are actually care workers). Public opinion is shifting their way IMO. True believers in rugged individualism are becoming increasingly shrill and hysterical as a result – taking back control, sorting out the spongers, demanding that political leaders commit to nuclear holocaust etc.

What scared me about Theresa May was that she was trying to cross the streams: she played to the new sense of realism about care and collective responsibility and to the die hard go-it-alone types (the £350 million NHS bus proved it could be done). Luckily the rest of her party are incapable of hiding their sociopathy and have gone back to what they do best.

 

[Cav]

interesting article in vox:

.

Vuk, do you have any original thoughts? All you seem to do is quote others?

 

[vuk]

Vuk, do you have any original thoughts? All you seem to do is quote others?

when somebody has gone to the effort of writing a nice article, why not share it?

i quoted a couple of people today. on other days (as you can read i the free speech thread), i may write little essays myself -- on those occasions you complain about the opposite. so, the better question, as far as the community here is concerned, is why you are always so aggressive and unpleasant? it's not just with me, btw. doesn't make for a great mood. not a nice mood at all. horrible mood. sad...

 

[Cav]

are you channeling trump now....

 

[vuk]

are you channeling trump now....

just testing if you are a pakistani bot.

 

[Cav]

Pathetic.

 

[davidsrsb]

Taking the aforementioned Mr. Gates, he was a computer geek when such a talent was starting to become valuable, with some entrepreneurial flair. And then he got the colossal break when IBM, in one of the most fundamental business blunders of the century, decided that the future was in hardware and not software, so this little, insignificant MS-DOS thing could be given to this little company - what was the name again?

That Bill Gates parents were connected to senior IBM people being totally unimportant of course

 

[jtrade]

Interesting topic - thanks, vuk.

I'd recommend Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" for a very insightful answer - his best book imho.