Please note that this study is in the context of extreme poverty in populations such as rural villages in Bangladesh.
It’s an interesting study and worth reading if you’re interested in what it takes to lift these populations out of poverty. The authors propose that their extreme poverty is a meta-stable state that prevents them from accessing wealth-building opportunities. The authors show that time-limited wealth transfers of sufficiently large size can help these people escape the meta-stable poverty state and transition into a wealth-accumulating state.
However, the comments here rushing to project the conclusions on to the relatively wealthy (on a global scale) citizens of countries like the US and Europe are abusing the study’s conclusions. Similar wealth traps may exist in these countries, but the relative thresholds would be akin to a homeless person living on the streets trying to secure a job. Attempts to project these study results on to things like hiring practices at big tech companies, where anyone able to apply at all is already orders of magnitude more wealthy and privileged than the subjects of this study, are missing the point entirely.
I had the same reaction - Silicon Valley is not Bangladesh. I am moving my comment below to you.
Hans Rosling (RIP) did a great job of defining poverty and visualizing the changing nature of poverty. His area of focus was on child mortality - so it tended to focus on the mothers since they have the greatest impact on this statistic. Later he focused on other areas. Sanitation, water, transportation etc.
At the Bangladesh level of poverty, a productive asset is a goat that produces milk. The Heifer Project is doing useful work in giving low income families productive assets. https://www.heifer.org/
Finally there is the whole world of micro loans. I have not looked into this as much.
It would also help to include Bangladesh somewhere in the title, since many people jump straight to the comment section (not saying this is the way to go, but it's the way it is).
I find it hard not to come to the conclusion that similar mechanisms are at work when you see for instance the economic situation of Afro-Americans in the United States.
Countries in the top 20 are "The Lands of Opportunity" where family background matters less compared to 21-40. Cheap, high quality education, healthcare, and inclusive institutions matter.
Being wealthy on a global scale does you no good when you’re in poverty on the local scale. It’s not as if you can move your shopping cart out of Houston and into Bangladesh, after all.
Here's interesting observation by by Nobel prize-winners Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo:
"We have already seen, in the previous chapter, another example of people who had lucrative opportunities to save but did not use them: the fruit vendors from Chennai, who borrowed about 1,000 rupees ($45.75 USD PPP) each morning at the rate of 4.69 percent per day. Suppose that the vendors decided to drink two fewer cups of tea for three days. This would save them 5 rupees a day, which could be used to cut down on the amount they would have to borrow. After the first day with less tea, they would have to borrow 5 rupees less. This means that at the end of the second day, they would have to repay 5.23 rupees less (the 5 rupees they did not borrow, plus 23 paisas in interest), which, when added to the 5 rupees they saved that second day by again drinking less tea, would allow them to borrow 10.23 rupees less. By the same logic, by the fourth day, they would have 15.71 rupees that they could use for buying fruit instead of borrowing. Now, say they go back to drinking their two cups more tea but continue to plough the 15.71 rupees they had saved from three days of not drinking so much tea back into the business (that is, borrowing that much less). That accumulated amount continues to grow (just as the 10 rupees had turned into 10.71 after two days) and after exactly ninety days, they would be completely debt-free. They would save 40 rupees a day, which is the equivalent of about half a day’s wages. All just for the price of six cups of tea! The point is that these vendors are sitting under what appears to be as close to a money tree as we are likely to find anywhere. Why don’t they shake it a bit more?"
From "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty"
Two complicating aspects I just randomly thought up:
- the money lending business may not like the fact that their clients are becoming self sufficient and may increase the interest rate to punish such attempts
- crabs in a bucket phenomenon. Not every culture is like the US. In many places it's considered a bad thing to stick out from your environment, family, neighborhood etc. and in poverty you need the goodwill of those people. If you go the risky route, people may hate you, envy you, think you are crazy, selfish, etc.
These conclusions seem to spit in the face of "meritocracy". It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive, bleeding into our corporate performance reviews and our pro-diversity efforts ("we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>). But it is so internally irrational. I'm reminded of this argument:
> The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
> The case against meritocracy can also be put sociologically: (a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
The idea that "innate" merit should be rewarded (this underlies what we consider meritocracy) is fundamentally a noncontinuable state. Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.
You are so focused on economic inequality that you ignore the greater picture: there will still be a hierarchy. There will still be humans dominating other humans and asserting themselves above them.
Maybe in the far future humans will create a social technology to live in true equality but in the immediate future this is clearly not happening.
As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities.
That looks like meritocracy to me.
Unequal distribution of rewards (i.e. according to merit) is fine and desirable (as a motivating force). The problem's roots are when the distribution of rewards becomes hereditary, that the children of the wealthy have near-guaranteed access to the best educational and social institutions, have near-guaranteed access to startup capital (i.e. from their parents), are usually provided with necessities (food, housing, clothing, incidentals) at no out-of-pocket cost by their parents for a considerable portion of their early adult lives, etc. It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.
> It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive,
This study looks at some of the poorest villages in Bangladesh with some additional data from other very poor countries.
Anyone who even has a shot at applying to a USA tech company is already wildly more wealthy than the type of poverty discussed in this study. In fact, they’d be firmly past the threshold the study identified as the minimum wealth necessary to engage with wealth-building jobs.
The conclusions don’t really apply at all to situations like a US tech company, unless you’re trying to understand why homeless people living on the streets aren’t able to get jobs at an Amazon warehouse or other entry-level jobs. Trying to project this on to hiring practices of educated candidates into high paying tech jobs is ignoring the core focus of the study.
Meritocracy is still a factor but the bar is currently very low. My own father came out of the impoverishment of war torn Bangladesh to be a successful real estate developer in the west. Why did his elder brother not have the same results? Very simple: the elder brother was responsible for the family. The family has rewarded the elder brother by taking care of him for years now and he is the happiest old man I know. He will die satisfied.
The truth that no one wants to admit is that we have to put (very minimal) resources behind the youth to become independent of their families so they can grow.
For all his faults, my father understood this for everyone except me (long story) and funded the education of a few people back home. For two boys I'm aware of, that was about $5-7K/year. The two boys lived in a one room shack that routinely got flooded. One is now an accountant, the other is a working chef. Trust me, neither of them are particularly smart.
What's needed is so minimal but the problem we have is too much grifting occurs. Levels and levels of middleman bullshit.
I would start experimenting with Kiva-style microloans if you want to make a difference, tbh.
This is all well and good to argue around a very literal meritocracy, but I don't think anyone actually argues for this. It's not just "lol, 1 - 1 = 0, meritocracy is impossible".
The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer?
Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.
That is not what meritocracy is - it is rule by the cognitive gifted.
The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.
It's not just about "rewarding", or giving out high paying position to who we want to.
There are real and difficult things to do in the world that some other people need. They (employers, clients, customers) decide that this work is so important to them that they exchange money for it.
Then the person can use that earned money to improve their life.
For example if a top surgeon flies to a different country to do a difficult operation, I'd want them to be able to enjoy a relaxing VIP lounge, bigger legroom and direct taxi. Rather than flying low cost and standing in the bus for 3 times longer than the taxi ride.
We want to allocate resources to people who accomplish important things for us. Not just as reward or motivation, but in our own interest, we invest in the most capable and competent to have more of our stuff taken care of.
Jobs aren't just about sitting in a chair and taking cash and we just pick who gets to sit in which chair to enjoy that cash. It's doing things. And we want those things to be done well.
This is the idea behind meritocracy. Not that we praise people for their genetics.
I'm not saying this is how it works currently, just that this is what we mean by meritocracy that we should move toward.
> "we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>
There doesn't have to be anything contradictory here. Diversity efforts can work to offset biases and enable getting closer to meritocracy. For example hiring the best in your network coming from a high-class university doesn't mean you're hiring the best overall. The diversity effort may be for example to make sure that the job offer is visible to the brilliant person who wouldn't even find it otherwise. Or it may be an effort to ensure a less biased review (masking names?) Or it's making sure that people do behave well internally, so the company isn't avoided by the best people for hiring racist assholes for example.
(a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
This is a disingenuous argument. (a) and (b) are not talking about the same kind of rewards:
(a) : when talking about the equalization of environments, the "rewards" are allocated to areas and groups of people, not to individuals.
(b) : the stratification of wealth is talking about "rewards" to individual people.
These two concepts are not the same, the mechanisms are not the same, and the justification for them is not the same. They're only grouped together as "rewards" so they lead to the false conclusion (c).
So, how do you decide who gets the rewards? Assuming not everyone can have every job/house/life.
Do you tell the people who get the rewards that they were given a chance at random (compared to their neighbor who was not) or do you let them believe they earned it?
For the record, I agree that merit is a bad system. Im curious to explore the ramifications of doing away with the system and how it would be different, if at all, from the current system.
For example, in a post-scarcity society, everyone has what they need, but some houses still have nicer views than others.
> We find that in the absence of credit constraints only 2% of households would be best off doing wage labor, while 97% of households are exclusively reliant such work at baseline. Conversely, only 1% work in livestock when 90% would do so if they had access to the same asset wealth as the middle and upper classes. Overall, this implies that 96% of households are forced to misallocate their labor.
So the authors suggest that currently 1% of the labor pool is working in livestock, but an optimal allocation would be 90% of the labor pool? Ridiculous.
No, the authors are debunking the popular theory that poor people are poor because they don't have the skills/gumption needed to not be poor. Turns out that when you give them a productive asset (a cow) that lets them be not-poor, they're perfectly capable of staying not-poor.
In the US: "graduate from high school; get a full-time job; don’t have a child before age 21 and get married before childbearing", this gives you %75 chance of being middle class, about %89 chance of not being poor. This isn't good enough, but seems possible!
> A first indication of this is seen in Figure 1a which shows a kernel density estimate of the distribution of productive assets pooling all wealth classes. The distribution is bimodal, with a mass of households around 0.25 and 6.5, and hardly anyone in between.
This is an important result in understanding how to get people out of poverty in undeveloped countries, but I suspect it won't translate well to industrialized countries like many in the comments are suggesting. The key result seems to be dependent on the bimodal wealth distribution. (Giving a cow to someone in the lower bucket was enough to push her into the next bucket.) Income distributions from industrialized countries look like the cleanest log normal distributions you've ever seen, so there just isn't evidence of a great repulser in higher income countries that you could push poor people over like they do in this study.
Caveat: They imply that income and consumption are bimodal, but never plot them, only wealth. Wealth is notoriously hard to measure, and I can only find good histograms of income for the USA. Income and wealth should track each other, at least over a log scale, but I am not comparing exactly the same thing.
For those who want a TL;DR, below is an extract of the summary. I think they did a good job, the article was well written.
Poverty traps are one of the most fundamental concepts in development economics. The contri- bution of this paper has been to provide evidence for their existence using the combination of a randomized asset transfer and an 11 year follow up in rural Bangladesh. Our key finding is that people stay poor because they lack opportunity. It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances. This has three implications for how we think about development policy.
The first is that big pushes that enable occupational change will be needed to address the global mass poverty problem. Small pushes will work to elevate consumption but will not get people out of the poverty trap. The magnitude of the transfer needed to achieve occupational change may be much larger than is typical with current interventions though importantly it can be time limited. Therefore the fiscal cost of permanently getting people out of poverty through a large, time limited transfer might actually be lower than relying on continual transfers that raise consumption but have no effect on the occupations of the poor.
The second is that big push policies can have long-lasting effects. Our analysis of long-run dynamics indicates that the asset, occupation and consumption trajectories of above threshold beneficiaries diverge from those of below threshold beneficiaries over time. This finding is impor- tant as it indicates that, by engendering occupational change, one time pushes can have permanent effects.
The third is that poverty traps create mismatches between talent and jobs. We have shown that misallocation of labor is rife amongst the poor in rural Bangladesh. Indeed, we show that the vast majority of the poor in rural Bangladesh are not engaged in the occupations where they would be most productive. They are perfectly capable of taking on the occupations of the richer women but are constrained from doing so by a lack of resources. The value of eliminating misallocation is an order of magnitude larger than the cost of moving all the beneficiaries past the threshold. This is important as it implies that poverty traps are preventing people from making full use of their abilities and indeed it is the mass squandering of people’s abilities that is the key tragedy of mass poverty.
How much of this is due to over-population? If the population of Bangladesh was 80 million instead of 160 million - giving each person access to theoretically double the amount of resources and land - would the net improvement be greater than 2x?
What about 40 million - would the improvement be 4x?
The solution may ultimately be a one-child policy, as demonstrated successfully by China.
Adult education is shit for poor people and many people had enough of education when getting out of school/university.
We need to show people that life long learning can be fun and we have to make it affordable.
Even in Germany, were studying is essentially free, poor people have to stay in bad jobs because they couldn't afford to pay their rent when getting a degree.
For those that believe people are poor because they did not work hard, I am curious what importance you attribute parenting to the outcomes of children?
Every parent I know invests a significant amount of time and often money in raising their children, and there is a significant amount of empirical evidence that parents play a significant role in how children develop. Do you simply believe the evidence to the contrary? It does exist, I am aware. It often seems to measure obviously superficial interventions, in my opinion, but I understand the debate.
What is the level of parenting beyond which there is no additional return in terms of economic outcome?
Because from what I understand, parents play a significant role in not only cognitive development (reading at an early age, for example) but also in terms of setting expectations for their children.
These conclusions apply to the third world, not the rest of us. Here in Europe for example, anyone can study and become an entrepreneur (I did it, with pretty much 0 wealth in the family).
I've been poor all my life, the thought of having money laying around scares me, I should invest, but giving it away like that scares me even more.
I'm moving next week and part of my reserves will be gone, and weirdly enough I'm relieved that someone else will take care of it. I don't feel fit to handle it.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
It’s an interesting study and worth reading if you’re interested in what it takes to lift these populations out of poverty. The authors propose that their extreme poverty is a meta-stable state that prevents them from accessing wealth-building opportunities. The authors show that time-limited wealth transfers of sufficiently large size can help these people escape the meta-stable poverty state and transition into a wealth-accumulating state.
However, the comments here rushing to project the conclusions on to the relatively wealthy (on a global scale) citizens of countries like the US and Europe are abusing the study’s conclusions. Similar wealth traps may exist in these countries, but the relative thresholds would be akin to a homeless person living on the streets trying to secure a job. Attempts to project these study results on to things like hiring practices at big tech companies, where anyone able to apply at all is already orders of magnitude more wealthy and privileged than the subjects of this study, are missing the point entirely.
[+] [-] maire|5 years ago|reply
Hans Rosling (RIP) did a great job of defining poverty and visualizing the changing nature of poverty. His area of focus was on child mortality - so it tended to focus on the mothers since they have the greatest impact on this statistic. Later he focused on other areas. Sanitation, water, transportation etc.
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/?countries=bd
At the Bangladesh level of poverty, a productive asset is a goat that produces milk. The Heifer Project is doing useful work in giving low income families productive assets. https://www.heifer.org/
Finally there is the whole world of micro loans. I have not looked into this as much.
[+] [-] not_knuth|5 years ago|reply
It would also help to include Bangladesh somewhere in the title, since many people jump straight to the comment section (not saying this is the way to go, but it's the way it is).
Hopefully the OP sees this.
[+] [-] legulere|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
As a starting point, here is infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
Countries in the top 20 are "The Lands of Opportunity" where family background matters less compared to 21-40. Cheap, high quality education, healthcare, and inclusive institutions matter.
[+] [-] falcolas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMc|5 years ago|reply
"We have already seen, in the previous chapter, another example of people who had lucrative opportunities to save but did not use them: the fruit vendors from Chennai, who borrowed about 1,000 rupees ($45.75 USD PPP) each morning at the rate of 4.69 percent per day. Suppose that the vendors decided to drink two fewer cups of tea for three days. This would save them 5 rupees a day, which could be used to cut down on the amount they would have to borrow. After the first day with less tea, they would have to borrow 5 rupees less. This means that at the end of the second day, they would have to repay 5.23 rupees less (the 5 rupees they did not borrow, plus 23 paisas in interest), which, when added to the 5 rupees they saved that second day by again drinking less tea, would allow them to borrow 10.23 rupees less. By the same logic, by the fourth day, they would have 15.71 rupees that they could use for buying fruit instead of borrowing. Now, say they go back to drinking their two cups more tea but continue to plough the 15.71 rupees they had saved from three days of not drinking so much tea back into the business (that is, borrowing that much less). That accumulated amount continues to grow (just as the 10 rupees had turned into 10.71 after two days) and after exactly ninety days, they would be completely debt-free. They would save 40 rupees a day, which is the equivalent of about half a day’s wages. All just for the price of six cups of tea! The point is that these vendors are sitting under what appears to be as close to a money tree as we are likely to find anywhere. Why don’t they shake it a bit more?"
From "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty"
https://www.amazon.com.au/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-...
[+] [-] bonoboTP|5 years ago|reply
- the money lending business may not like the fact that their clients are becoming self sufficient and may increase the interest rate to punish such attempts
- crabs in a bucket phenomenon. Not every culture is like the US. In many places it's considered a bad thing to stick out from your environment, family, neighborhood etc. and in poverty you need the goodwill of those people. If you go the risky route, people may hate you, envy you, think you are crazy, selfish, etc.
[+] [-] padolsey|5 years ago|reply
> The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
> The case against meritocracy can also be put sociologically: (a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/12/04/meritocrac...
The idea that "innate" merit should be rewarded (this underlies what we consider meritocracy) is fundamentally a noncontinuable state. Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.
[+] [-] orange_tee|5 years ago|reply
As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities. That looks like meritocracy to me.
[+] [-] solatic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
This study looks at some of the poorest villages in Bangladesh with some additional data from other very poor countries.
Anyone who even has a shot at applying to a USA tech company is already wildly more wealthy than the type of poverty discussed in this study. In fact, they’d be firmly past the threshold the study identified as the minimum wealth necessary to engage with wealth-building jobs.
The conclusions don’t really apply at all to situations like a US tech company, unless you’re trying to understand why homeless people living on the streets aren’t able to get jobs at an Amazon warehouse or other entry-level jobs. Trying to project this on to hiring practices of educated candidates into high paying tech jobs is ignoring the core focus of the study.
[+] [-] throwaway8085|5 years ago|reply
Meritocracy is still a factor but the bar is currently very low. My own father came out of the impoverishment of war torn Bangladesh to be a successful real estate developer in the west. Why did his elder brother not have the same results? Very simple: the elder brother was responsible for the family. The family has rewarded the elder brother by taking care of him for years now and he is the happiest old man I know. He will die satisfied.
The truth that no one wants to admit is that we have to put (very minimal) resources behind the youth to become independent of their families so they can grow.
For all his faults, my father understood this for everyone except me (long story) and funded the education of a few people back home. For two boys I'm aware of, that was about $5-7K/year. The two boys lived in a one room shack that routinely got flooded. One is now an accountant, the other is a working chef. Trust me, neither of them are particularly smart.
What's needed is so minimal but the problem we have is too much grifting occurs. Levels and levels of middleman bullshit.
I would start experimenting with Kiva-style microloans if you want to make a difference, tbh.
[+] [-] theelous3|5 years ago|reply
The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer?
Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.
[+] [-] danieltillett|5 years ago|reply
The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.
[+] [-] bonoboTP|5 years ago|reply
There are real and difficult things to do in the world that some other people need. They (employers, clients, customers) decide that this work is so important to them that they exchange money for it.
Then the person can use that earned money to improve their life.
For example if a top surgeon flies to a different country to do a difficult operation, I'd want them to be able to enjoy a relaxing VIP lounge, bigger legroom and direct taxi. Rather than flying low cost and standing in the bus for 3 times longer than the taxi ride.
We want to allocate resources to people who accomplish important things for us. Not just as reward or motivation, but in our own interest, we invest in the most capable and competent to have more of our stuff taken care of.
Jobs aren't just about sitting in a chair and taking cash and we just pick who gets to sit in which chair to enjoy that cash. It's doing things. And we want those things to be done well.
This is the idea behind meritocracy. Not that we praise people for their genetics.
I'm not saying this is how it works currently, just that this is what we mean by meritocracy that we should move toward.
[+] [-] viraptor|5 years ago|reply
There doesn't have to be anything contradictory here. Diversity efforts can work to offset biases and enable getting closer to meritocracy. For example hiring the best in your network coming from a high-class university doesn't mean you're hiring the best overall. The diversity effort may be for example to make sure that the job offer is visible to the brilliant person who wouldn't even find it otherwise. Or it may be an effort to ensure a less biased review (masking names?) Or it's making sure that people do behave well internally, so the company isn't avoided by the best people for hiring racist assholes for example.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|5 years ago|reply
Just to be clear this paper’s about peasants in Bangladesh.
[+] [-] wffurr|5 years ago|reply
Nothing puzzling about it. It's a "just so" story designed to make successful people feel good and justified about their success.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tremon|5 years ago|reply
This is a disingenuous argument. (a) and (b) are not talking about the same kind of rewards:
(a) : when talking about the equalization of environments, the "rewards" are allocated to areas and groups of people, not to individuals.
(b) : the stratification of wealth is talking about "rewards" to individual people.
These two concepts are not the same, the mechanisms are not the same, and the justification for them is not the same. They're only grouped together as "rewards" so they lead to the false conclusion (c).
[+] [-] waihtis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fartcannon|5 years ago|reply
Do you tell the people who get the rewards that they were given a chance at random (compared to their neighbor who was not) or do you let them believe they earned it?
For the record, I agree that merit is a bad system. Im curious to explore the ramifications of doing away with the system and how it would be different, if at all, from the current system.
For example, in a post-scarcity society, everyone has what they need, but some houses still have nicer views than others.
[+] [-] oytis|5 years ago|reply
What you would consider a better policy? Hiring according to a fair dice roll?
[+] [-] travisoneill1|5 years ago|reply
So the authors suggest that currently 1% of the labor pool is working in livestock, but an optimal allocation would be 90% of the labor pool? Ridiculous.
[+] [-] howlgarnish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
Trying to project the conclusions on to relatively wealthy (on a global scale) societies like the United States isn’t going to make much sense.
[+] [-] bmcn2020|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|5 years ago|reply
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9027195/haskins-sawhill-norms-...
[+] [-] drhagen|5 years ago|reply
This is an important result in understanding how to get people out of poverty in undeveloped countries, but I suspect it won't translate well to industrialized countries like many in the comments are suggesting. The key result seems to be dependent on the bimodal wealth distribution. (Giving a cow to someone in the lower bucket was enough to push her into the next bucket.) Income distributions from industrialized countries look like the cleanest log normal distributions you've ever seen, so there just isn't evidence of a great repulser in higher income countries that you could push poor people over like they do in this study.
Caveat: They imply that income and consumption are bimodal, but never plot them, only wealth. Wealth is notoriously hard to measure, and I can only find good histograms of income for the USA. Income and wealth should track each other, at least over a log scale, but I am not comparing exactly the same thing.
[+] [-] mahathu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] abhinav22|5 years ago|reply
Poverty traps are one of the most fundamental concepts in development economics. The contri- bution of this paper has been to provide evidence for their existence using the combination of a randomized asset transfer and an 11 year follow up in rural Bangladesh. Our key finding is that people stay poor because they lack opportunity. It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances. This has three implications for how we think about development policy.
The first is that big pushes that enable occupational change will be needed to address the global mass poverty problem. Small pushes will work to elevate consumption but will not get people out of the poverty trap. The magnitude of the transfer needed to achieve occupational change may be much larger than is typical with current interventions though importantly it can be time limited. Therefore the fiscal cost of permanently getting people out of poverty through a large, time limited transfer might actually be lower than relying on continual transfers that raise consumption but have no effect on the occupations of the poor.
The second is that big push policies can have long-lasting effects. Our analysis of long-run dynamics indicates that the asset, occupation and consumption trajectories of above threshold beneficiaries diverge from those of below threshold beneficiaries over time. This finding is impor- tant as it indicates that, by engendering occupational change, one time pushes can have permanent effects.
The third is that poverty traps create mismatches between talent and jobs. We have shown that misallocation of labor is rife amongst the poor in rural Bangladesh. Indeed, we show that the vast majority of the poor in rural Bangladesh are not engaged in the occupations where they would be most productive. They are perfectly capable of taking on the occupations of the richer women but are constrained from doing so by a lack of resources. The value of eliminating misallocation is an order of magnitude larger than the cost of moving all the beneficiaries past the threshold. This is important as it implies that poverty traps are preventing people from making full use of their abilities and indeed it is the mass squandering of people’s abilities that is the key tragedy of mass poverty.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fl0tingh0st|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sul_tasto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iridium_core|5 years ago|reply
What about 40 million - would the improvement be 4x?
The solution may ultimately be a one-child policy, as demonstrated successfully by China.
[+] [-] k__|5 years ago|reply
We need to show people that life long learning can be fun and we have to make it affordable.
Even in Germany, were studying is essentially free, poor people have to stay in bad jobs because they couldn't afford to pay their rent when getting a degree.
[+] [-] jasonclaiid|5 years ago|reply
Every parent I know invests a significant amount of time and often money in raising their children, and there is a significant amount of empirical evidence that parents play a significant role in how children develop. Do you simply believe the evidence to the contrary? It does exist, I am aware. It often seems to measure obviously superficial interventions, in my opinion, but I understand the debate.
What is the level of parenting beyond which there is no additional return in terms of economic outcome?
Because from what I understand, parents play a significant role in not only cognitive development (reading at an early age, for example) but also in terms of setting expectations for their children.
[+] [-] lazyjones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehphp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsego|5 years ago|reply
Let's say I want to become a doctor and not an entrepreneur?
[+] [-] usathirdworld|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] aszantu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] danishdev|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phatty|5 years ago|reply
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