Capitalist Meritocracy is Fake and Basically Stupid
In which I argue with the guy from Shark Tank in my head
There’s a nauseating clip going around of the guy from that show Shark Tank being confronted with the fact that a couple dozen parasites own as much the poorest half of the entire world’s population combined (a statistic which used to be shocking but which at this point has pretty much melted into the background noise of late-capitalist apocalyptica). This sweaty fuck is like Yes, and it’s fantastic. This is a great thing because it inspires everybody, and gives them the motivation to look up to the one percent and say, I want to be like them. Direct quote. The clip is astonishing in its utter mask-off embrace of sickening inequality. I feel that up until recently, the lackeys of capital would at least pretend to have the decency to dance around the issue. They’d offer explanations and say it was regrettable but ultimately part of a system that was lifting everybody out of poverty and so on. This guy is just like, Nah this is great. Knowing that some American is making a hundred million times more than you per hour inspires ten year-old uranium miners in Niger to work harder.
It’s enraging that the discourse has gotten to this point. The most basic tenets of left politics or even just baseline human decency have lost so much ground that these leering vampires feel comfortable gurgling this type of bile in public. As usual I feel like I’ve been dropped into some parallel evil clown dimension where everything is insane and stupid, but here I am, about to explain why the Shark Tank guy is wrong about capitalism.
First things first, Kevin (his name is Kevin): you had to drop out of the Conservative Party leadership race because you don’t speak French even though you’re from Montreal. Fucking embarrassing bro. In the words of the immortal @afrowasiu: fuck you Anglish, tokébec icitte.
Alright. Sorry to all the non-Québécois out there, we just had to do that bit of housekeeping. Now that that’s out of the way, I just want to run through some ultra basic reasons why this type of argument about the wonders of capitalism is bullshit.
All of us know somebody who worked crazy hours their entire life and never got ahead. Certainly lots of well-off people also have worked very hard, and many of us know somebody like that, too: a rich uncle who’s always glued to his work phone, an ex’s mom who made bank but was never at home. Fine. But it is also objectively true that enormous numbers of people have dedicated their waking lives to their employers and gone nowhere much. On an individual level you can explain this away by saying that this particular lady didn’t apply herself in the right way, she should have done this or done that. But on a systems level the reason is completely obvious: capitalism is a pyramid and there is only so much room at the top. They don’t just open up a batch of new rich-guy positions in the C-suite when they notice that this year’s underlings are particularly hard-working.
Well maybe they should start their own businesses, if they want to be on top! Okay, well, maybe they should, Kevin. But can we all start our own businesses? Even assuming that we all had the education, training, and capital to do so (oh and somebody to watch the kids), it is still the case that capitalism is a pyramid. Unless you’re the self-employed sole proprietor of a one-person enterprise, companies need workers, who by definition aren’t themselves capitalists. If everyone was a private business owner there would be no one to actually perform the labour.
Alright, Kevin might argue, but some people just aren’t cut out to be a rootin’, tootin’ captain of industry, and that’s okay. Well hang on, there, Kevin, that’s my next point. Even in a perfect world where everyone is reasonably happy and healthy and has somebody to watch the kids and is equally motivated to work hard, there is a natural range in people’s ability. I’m far from the first person to point this out (Freddie deBoer has written about this extensively) but people seem to have a hard time with this. Or at least, they grasp the concept insofar as it allows them to justify dizzying inequality, but fail to follow it to its logical ethical conclusions. Let’s remove the possibility of being a hotshot capitalist for a second and just focus on the prospect of rising up the ranks in some company; and let’s pretend the selection process for promotion is completely fair and 100% unbiased. Some people are just not going to be as bright as others, or as focused, or as good at innovative thinking, or as quick-witted, or whatever. It’s uncomfortable but it’s true. And here’s the thing: it’s uncomfortable because we’ve been trained to think that that means those people are unworthy. If they can’t rise to the top in a meritocracy, what does that say about their merit?
But does that make sense? If somebody through no fault of their own is never, ever going to be able to write snappy marketing reports as well as Brad does, does that make them a less worthy person than Brad? Does that mean Brad is better than them, or, even more importantly for our purposes here, more deserving than them? It might very well be the case that Brad is better at whatever job he got in this hypothetical scenario. But does that imply that for some reason he deserves more money, more security, more material comfort? After all, everybody here is hard-working and highly motivated. All that’s being measured by this selection process is sheer talent. And if you’re just born with it, which we know is how it works to at least some extent, why would you be in any sense more deserving than someone who, just through the lottery of inheritance, wasn’t?
And here Kevin butts in again. Listen, alright, but if you’re not good at snappy marketing reports there are other things out there you can apply yourself to! I know some very successful people who are dyslexic! Okay Kevin. This argument can fly, again, on an individual level. A specific guy could notice that he’s not great at marketing reports, apply himself to something else, and maybe find an area where he has some special talent. But on a population level this doesn’t work out. Any range has a bottom quartile. There are always going to be some people who just aren’t particularly bright, who don’t stand out in any particular way, who don’t have any particular lucrative inborn talent. No matter how hard they work, all they will ever really accumulate is overtime. In the meantime, in this perfect meritocracy, their smarter and more talented counterparts will be able to build on raise after raise, promotion after promotion, investment after investment; and at that point things start stacking. It’s not a matter of one guy having twice as much as another guy. The money starts to increase exponentially and you end up with one guy who has ten thousand times as much as another guy.
Kevin snorts in disbelief. Well if there’s no financial incentive, how are you going to recruit the most talented people to the most important jobs then, he asks? Or do you want some kind of Harrison-Bergeron-meets-Idiocracy dystopia where toll booth operators run the Pentagon? Ah, Kevin, Kevin. You’re shifting the goalposts. We were talking about people working hard and being rewarded for it. But now you’re talking about something else entirely: getting the most qualified people into positions where they can do the most good (or possibly the most damage, in the case of the Pentagon). Virtually no one would disagree that that kind of thing is important. We want competent people running important institutions. And certainly offering perks and higher salaries to potential candidates for these positions in order to recruit people who have lots and lots of options is a reasonable thing to do. Highly skilled people doing dangerous or sensitive work in the USSR could earn significantly more than people doing simple agricultural work, for example (though they were earning five or ten times as much rather than a hundred or a thousand times as much). But that’s a different thing than just being hard-working, which simply isn’t enough to catapult you into the one percent, either here and now or in the Soviet Union.
All this time we’ve been operating with the assumption that promotions are fair and everybody’s got an equal playing field. But we also know that that isn’t even remotely true. There’s a huge amount of blind luck involved, as well as a good amount of identity-based privilege and discrimination. In terms of luck, being in the right place at the right time and making lucky guesses in the stock market are a major component in rich people becoming hyper-rich people. In terms of background, people whose wealthy parents sent them to good schools and who grew up with connections and a house full of books are going to have a much easier time acquiring skills and talking their way into highly-paid positions than people who were raised by a single teenage mom who never finished high school and who have to code-switch from a low-prestige dialect every time they open their mouth in a formal setting. People whose dad gives them a starter building to get their real estate portfolio off the ground are going to find accumulating wealth a bit more straight-forward than people whose dad’s net worth is negative twenty thousand dollars. Illiterate underage sweatshop workers with tuberculosis are unlikely to become CEOs. And again, sorry to beat this point to death, but: yes, on an individual level people certainly can and do rise above this kind of thing, but on a population level not everybody is going to be able to do so or they would have already.
Interestingly there’s a pretty good case to be made for the idea that socialist economics would reward merit more effectively, and in a fairer way, than the unbridled capitalism Kevin is such a fan of. First of all, if major steps are taken to lift every single person out of poverty and guarantee them all high quality healthcare and education; and other steps are taken to dismantle systems of unearned privilege by, for example, instituting steep progressive taxation on inheritances and redistributing various forms of wealth; then the ability of people from working class backgrounds to compete is hugely improved. Secondly, in a political-economic system which values the contributions and experiences of working-class people, you’re far less likely to end up with important institutions being stacked with the mediocre spawn of the rich. Thirdly, if you have a system of really big state-owned enterprises, you can receive applications from talented people and put them in the best spot for their skills, not just in one company but in any of them. And finally, and in my view most importantly, throughout all this you are ensuring that totally ordinary people have a completely dignified and comfortable existence in which they are not required to sacrifice all their time and health to a capitalist; and who know that even though the director of the space agency or whatever is being paid more than them, she’s being paid eight times more than them, not a thousand times more, and she’s being paid more because she’s genuinely really important and really skilled, not because her dad made a mint in the stock market in 1998.
Anyways that’s it for now Kevin! You suck and I hope you get a chronic pinworm infection.