The problem with America’s upper-middle class and meritocracy

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart

by tonyedgecombe • 5 years ago

18 20 5 years ago

Meritocracy exists for people with money.

It takes money to fulfill your potential and be able to participate in meritocracy which by definition reward people according to their merit.

If you can't even fulfill your merit, like a huge part of the world, youre not really in a meritocracy.

For most people instead of meritocracy, it's take what limited opportunities you have in your life and use those to eke out whatever success you can.

Some few average people get lucky.

But far more rich 'get lucky' by virtue of their resources.

Meritocracy is just marketing.

xhkkffbf• 5 years ago

Hmmm. Is it really a problem that some people work hard and take care of their kids? That seems to be the point at the core this article.

And then there's the claim that the so-called 9.9% "lack imagination." This seems disconnected from reality because I think one of the biggest job requirements these days is imagination and adaptability.

tonyedgecombe2• 5 years ago

It's a problem that they can buy their way into better opportunities at the cost of the rest of the population.

rc2634• 5 years ago

What’s the point of money if you can’t buy your way into a happier and more prosperous life with it, especially for your children?

avmich• 5 years ago

Is it really a problem that some people work hard and take care of their kids?

Sort of. The article is about unhappiness in the society - including hard working child carers. It's not the reason for the problem, but it's a symptom.

This seems disconnected from reality because I think one of the biggest job requirements these days is imagination and adaptability.

A person can be very imaginative at his or her work and took for granted some over-simplified models, like "unproven vaccines cause autism". Similarly, here imagination is needed to see the bigger picture.

seattle_spring3• 5 years ago

Author just strikes me as another person tricked into focusing on the upper middle class instead the actual elite. This is why "tax the rich" ends up hitting working professionals like doctors while billionaires get tax cuts.

The relative difference between the middle class and the upper middle class is miniscule compared to the difference between the 1% and the 0.1%.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

No, the upper middle class is the one screwing everything up. Not the billionaires.

Want to have cheap healthcare? You can't have that with doctors earning 400K and nurses earning 120K. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.

Want affordable university education? You can't have that with universities that have 3 non-academic full time staff for every full time professor. It's impossible. But you can have that with a few billionaires.

Want a genuine left party in the US? The professional classes are what co-opted the progressive movement, not billionaires.

Who does outsourcing benefit? Primarily managers and business process outsourcers. They are the ones driving outsourcing, as it creates a swollen professional class and the blue collar workers they manage are viewed as cogs. This is also why there is the rise of culture wars as the professionals need a justification to let them sleep at night as they screw the domestic working class, and that justification is that the working class people deserve to be screwed because they don't support trans rights or some other niche cause that serves as a moral differentiator between the urban professional classes and the working class.

Tired of the Administrative state? That's not happening because of billionaires, it's happening because the professional classes have extracted all that the market will allow, and now need to extract even more, using the power of the state to increase their control over society and extract more resources from it.

I recommend reading Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. He has some choice words for the professional class, and a good history of their ascendancy.

nobodyandproud3• 5 years ago

You’ve inhaled the kool-aid.

seattle_spring3• 5 years ago

It kind of sounds like you believe that we should prevent everyone from become successful (upper-middle class), rather than implementing policies that try and enable upward mobility for everyone.

rz2k• 5 years ago

It sounds reasonable to anyone who doesn't work with macro data to say that "a few billionaires" cannot have a measurable effect.

There are approximately one million physicians earning an average income of about $300k. That accounts for approximately 7% of $3.8 trillion spent on healthcare.

Another way to look at it. The total assets of individuals earning over $540k increased by over 30% from $27.58T to $36.23T from 2020q2 to 2021q2. That is, the net worth of just the 1% of highest earners in the country increased by an amount equivalent to 28 years of physicians' salaries in a single year.

Political discourse on the distribution of wealth in the US does seem intent on convincing people who make a few hundred thousand dollars that they feel economic stress because they are propping up the truly destitute, and convincing the destitute that they feel economic stress because professionals are making $300k or $400k. Actual data relating to the percentage share of wealth in the United States[1] spanning 1989q3 to 2021q2 by income percentiles show that people in the 60th up to the 99th percentiles have hardly changed their percentage ownership of assets in the country, but everyone below the 60th percentile in income has lost ground, and that wealth ownership has been almost exclusively been acquired by those in the top percentile.

    80-99th: 43.6 -> 43.6
    60-80th: 16.7 -> 15.4
    40-60th: 12.3 ->  7.2
    20-40th:  7.4 ->  4.0
     0-20th:  2.9 ->  2.7
    99-100 : 17.2 -> 27.0

Note that these data begin in 1989, which was already the first year in the post-WWII period that the gini ratio exceeded 0.4 following economic policies intended to shift wealth away from lower earners (it is 0.458 in 2020, and was most equitable in 1968 at 0.348). (Table F-4 [2])

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

[2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

naveen99• 5 years ago

Good luck running society without professionals. how do you propose to distinguish the best from the not so best of the labor class, if to just call them to do overtime because the others didn’t show up for work. And who will call them to show up to work ? Or who will decide where to work and what to do ? Oh , why does anyone have to work. Good point. Never mind.

VictorPath• 5 years ago

the actual elite

The class position of the 0.1% (Vanderbilt heirs, Mars heirs, Koch heirs etc.) matters, but they themselves don't matter much. The bulk of the population are unskilled or semi-skilled labor, and ~10% of the population are in the professional-managerial class.

The efforts and ideology of a highly trained, highly educated, somewhat meritocraticaly placed vanguard matters, they are an existing social force, whereas the 0.1% is totally dependent on others for their position.

nobodyandproud3• 5 years ago

It’s the 0.1% that drives the vast majority of the white collar profession.

nobodyandproud3• 5 years ago

A bullshit class-war driven by the absolutely wealthy:

https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...

GaryTang• 5 years ago

Yup. And nevermind the top 1%, it’s the top 0.01% that are calling the shots. Taxation any lower is just misguided.

The problem with America’s upper-middle class and meritocracy

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