I haven't read it myself, though it looks like I should. It raises the same issues I have been for years and comes to some of the same conclusions I have while being wildly divergent in others. But the Book Review of The Cult of Smart that was up on the first page when I just went over to Astral Codex Ten to get the link is quite interesting. I can't much improve on it, but I may put in comments of my own. After my walk, which is long overdue today. The sacrifices I make for you people...
"More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen." (Scott Alexander)--also--"For conservatives, at least, there's a hope that a high level of social mobility provides incentives for each person to maximize their talents and, in doing so, both reap pecuniary rewards and provide benefits to society. This makes sense if you presume, as conservatives do, that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest." (De Boer)
ReplyDeleteI don't think conservatives believe that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest. People excel for all kinds of reasons. Over a population, however, enough people excel more in the pursuit of self-interest that any success in divorcing excellence entirely from self-interest will decrease the total store of excellence, and therefore prosperity for all, including non-high-achievers. You could say the same for a system that, for some bizarre reason, divorced excellence from any of the common motives for it, such as altruism, idealism, pleasure, duty, habit, or simple inability to stop doing what one is naturally good at. Maybe our assumption is that self-interest is one of the strongest motives, and maybe that's even true. So what? The fact is, we've rarely been dumb enough deliberately to remove any of the other "nice" motives. If we did, we'd probably find that we depressed total prosperity. It's simply stupid to remove motives that typically spur behavior we claim to value, even if thinking about one of the motives (in all those other people, of course, not ourselves) makes us feel icky.
"Over a population, however, enough people excel more in the pursuit of self-interest that any success in divorcing excellence entirely from self-interest will decrease the total store of excellence, and therefore prosperity for all, including non-high-achievers"
ReplyDeleteYou should have italicised or bolded that.
Funny, I feel like it's the point I make here and everywhere else I blog or comment, several times a week at least.
ReplyDeleteI loved this comment: "(Actually, being thick as two short planks when it comes to maths, I would flourish like the green bay tree under an anti-racist maths and addressing social and emotional needs in maths classrooms structure during my schooling, but I still wouldn't learn any maths)." Boy, he has good commenters.
He does. It's one of the few places I am intimidated.
ReplyDeleteTexan99: Over a population, however, enough people excel more in the pursuit of self-interest that any success in divorcing excellence entirely from self-interest will decrease the total store of excellence, and therefore prosperity for all, including non-high-achievers
ReplyDeleteAssistant Village Idiot: You should have italicised or bolded that.
Agree.
Texan99 (quoting): "For conservatives, at least, there's a hope that a high level of social mobility provides incentives for each person to maximize their talents and, in doing so, both reap pecuniary rewards and provide benefits to society."
While we agree with your larger point, this only applies to a certain subset of conservatives. Other conservatives do not support social mobility, e.g. xenophobes.
Is there now an agreed assumption that "social mobility" must be global for it to be social mobility at all? That is to say, the concepts of borders, citizenship and nationality as drivers of political obligation are invalid?
ReplyDeleteOr were you offering a mainly Smithian comparative advantage argument?