I don't know if I agree. First, your comment depends on how you define manipulation. A good leader or manager inspires others. Is it manipulative to try to encourage your team to tackle a task, even when you're secretly very discouraged about it? Does it help the team to be mutually miserable? I have had problems with management in the US, but it was never due to a system of merit. In fact, it was usually because outside circumstances forced everything except a meritocracy. For a specific example, I had a really bad boss who everyone disliked. I spoke with his boss, who I was close with, and he explained to me that managers don't always get to hire their teams, and definitely don't get to pick who stays in their teams. The top 30% leave for better paying positions, and the bottom 30% maybe get fired. They have to invest in and develop those who are only somewhat adequate or barely passable because those may be the people still standing when a higher position needs to be filled. It's better for them to have more experience than less, if they're already less than stellar. Make of that what you will. My takeaway was that we can't always rely on a meritocracy, and we can't blame all of our problems on a meritocracy.

I would suggest examining the notion of meritocracy in a more critical light. It is a fundamentally absurd idea and should be rejected entirely. Of course we should always value skill and hard work, but that must not be done within any conception of "meritocracy." This concept unavoidably does the opposite of what it claims. It is simply not possible to value skills and hard work as a society that attempts to create some sort of rewards hierarchy based on those things. It's unavoidable that you end up valuing the rewards more than the skills and hard work.

So you prefer the current kekistocracy. You can't make this stuff up.

@@colonelweird Meritocracy is opening jobs to talent rather than heredity, personal connections, bribes. But if the talent is for forms of rent-extraction like monopolization, union-busting, increasing executive pay, scamming people, ... then it is destructive. High progressive taxes on inheritance is a way of reducing an hereditary elite. Low poverty & inequality promotes social mobility and thereby less inherited status--among many other goods

@@dallassegno How did you get that from what I wrote. I was criticizing the system that the US features.

my first thought too when I heard that

You are assuming that education ends when you become an adult. It does not. Chatting to your neighbor requires no skill and therefore, no one pays for it to be done. First we'd have to define value and reward.

thanks for being someone looking to think a bit broader! we need more of you! be well. :)

I would say a lot of the things the educational radicals critiqued in the 60s and 70s have gotten a hundred times worse in the years since.

Our civilization? Man, that's rough. Look upon this website where access to scholarship and information of a degree which is unparalleled in history is made available to the public for free and weep. Gnash your teeth in despair at the ability for people to make a living off of their passion thanks to the interconnectedness of mass information systems allowing them to expand their reach far beyond their local environs. Truly we have fallen!

It works in a moral society. High trust and homogeneous.

@@Brian-kr1pt Homogeneous doesn't equate to high social trust. As inequality is lower social trust is higher. In 1960 the US was very far from homogeneous yet high in social trust.

In reality, what's clear is that meritocracy is conceptually incoherent and disastrous in practice.

If merit is to be politically actionable then before you can employ it you first have to agree on what it is. That is also a political task but, because it precedes a shared definition of merit, it must be carried out under a regime of -ocracy.

Hahaha.... wow. I think this video is more about "the evils of corrupt paperwork".

Please elaborate how the Philosopher's views that are being expressed and presented here are "completely missing the point". Not sure you understand how this channel operates? Edit: oh, the grand Irony of me reading and commenting on a post before listening to the whole video. So funny how your comment gets addressed directly from like 28:30 on

I watched a lot of Prof. Sandel's lectures and interviews and his points are well made and I tend to agree with him. I should note that I also have a problem with people who criticize meritocracy. I should also note that I do suffer from confirmation bias when I hear other of Sandel's argument: people have an intrinsic value that should never be substituted by how much they have studied or how much money they have. I believe that John Dewey made a similar argument and I found out that even Karl Popper makes arguments in that direction. (Popper's view on education diverge from Dewey's, though).

An actually meritocratic society might cultivate people with the intelligence to formulate a nuanced and elaborate response to address the arguments raised in this video. But we got you instead.

How so? what do you mean by meritocracy?

He's not working off the assumption or anything, this channel isn't about personal views, he's sharing the works of philosophers. Your fallacious arguments don't address the points Michael Sanders raised as well. "That worldly men and women of the world are born to worldly men and women of the world is a fact of life, and moaning about how they get accepted more into schools than the child of a brick mason is ridiculous and pandering to the poor and other unfortunates... do better, bro." That cancer exists is a fact of life, and moaning about how people with less fortunate genetics get cancer and die more than healthier people is ridiculous and pandering to the diseased... do better, bro. 29 minutes of content, and that's your response, lol. Then again, I'm not surprised someone who misspells simple words in their native language or cannot even get basic punctuation right is making this kind of argument. The benefit of a meritocratic society, if it worked as intended, is that more intelligent people like me get better opportunities than people like you.

28:41 listen to this. Understand that you are talking absolute nonsense. He’s not working off any assumptions. He’s presenting the thoughts of other writers. If you had a legitimate gripe, it was never with this man. Actually listen to the timestamp I left.

1) Though he speaks in first person, he's not making the points himself - he's putting forth Prof. Michael Sandel's points. 2) Without society there would be nothing. Your point about "society being the sum of all individuals" is not new, has many forms and, most importantly, you learned from someone else. 3) Your last paragraph is - afaik - absolutely correct. The thing is: that's exactly the problem (in the US, in particular). When the French invated Britain they did it through the south of the island and never cared that much to go further north past London. That was 1,000 years ago and to this day southern England is more prosperous than the northern part. I recommend the Philosophize This! video on the John Dewey/Walter Lippmann debate and also the following video on "different types of rat races": kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bL1gZqd-tp3ZqI0.html

The 1st paragraph isn't so much individual thinking but Ayn Rand and reflective of the rising tide of narcissism--and away from concerns about working together for the common good as documented by Robert Putnam in "The Upswing." The 2nd misses the point of how a person starts is highly predictive of life outcomes. Looking around it's clear the degree individuals thrive varies wildly based on the culture they grow up in. Do individuals thrive as much in North Korea as they do in Norway? Lots of systematic studies across domains show institutions, culture... matter greatly Wilkinson & Pickett (KZfaq, books--”The Spirit Level” and “The Inner Level”) show how over 30 forms of welfare decline as inequality rises--and there is much more from others. There is a fast growing body of research that demonstrates the vast damage of high inequality. As inequality rises, countries do worse in terms of death rates/life expectancy, mental illness/illheath, disability, infectious disease, heart disease, cancer, obesity, hypertension, lung disease, child welfare, educational success, social mobility, drug & alcohol abuse, homicide, assault, intentional & accidental injuries, gender inequality, status stress & status competition, bullying, chronic inflammation related to stress, teen pregnancy, longer work hours, patents per capita, social distrust & distrust in government, political extremism/polarization, low public-spiritedness, imprisonment/prison cruelty, private debt, public debt, greed, narcissism… The top 20% suffers less damage to health from inequality than those below--but they are still less healthy than their counterparts in lower inequality countries... and even people in the low & middle classes of Nordic countries. The Nordics show up at the top in most areas. How economic inequality harms societies | Richard Wilkinson kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mcBnf912mNubcqs.html The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity.... kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a7CDbLehqNC8g4U.html The great moral(within the group), mental & physical health of very low-inequality people at band & tribe level-despite low levels of consumption and primitive tech--also illustrates the vast benefit of low inequality. Humans co-evolved in groups characterized by very low inequality-and very high levels of altruism, comradery, cooperation, democracy & freedom. As inequality increases status-competition rises and all of those values come under strain. The work of Dr. Marilyn Essex & Dr. Suzanne King are some of the researchers that add to Noble's work that shows how broad the damage is from chronic stress, linking it to damaged brains and/or epigentics. Dr. Marilyn Essex studied family stress (using stress hormones found in saliva and family reports) in mostly middle-class kids in America. In general lower-class kids in the US are even more likely to grow up under excessive chronic stress--not so much in Denmark. Dr. Suzanne King is one that found damage to gene expression in the womb correlated with stress. (another researcher in this Charlie Rose found epigenetic changes to a newborn baby were higher as the mothers status was lower.) www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-inequality-does-to-the-brain/ www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jul/13/neuroscience-inequality-does-poverty-show-up-in-childrens-brains Kimberly Noble on Socioeconomic Disparities, Children and Brain Development kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hp2Yq6d2y7TWeIE.html charlierose.com/collections/3/clip/29983

bro doesn't understand that he's presenting the thoughts of another philosopher, bro doesn't understand abstraction