The American Dream is a Lie
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- Опубликовано: 18 авг 2021
- Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat. (General Norman Schwarzkopf).
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. (Colin Powell)
The hard work definitely paid off and hard work always does. (Gabby Douglas)
We can spend the next hour putting up inspirational quotes from famous people about how working hard will lead to success. We’re told at work that we’ll get promoted if we work harder. We’re told in sports that if we just train more we’ll win that medal. And we’re even told that if we just put ourselves out there enough, we’ll find romantic partners that will fulfill all of our wildest dreams. This idea of success rewarding those who work for it is called meritocracy. It’s the idea that rewards are merit based, rather than based on something else like who you happen know, who your parents are, or just dumb luck. And this idea is both incredibly appealing and the foundation of what most of us think of as the American Dream.
But is America really a meritocracy? Are we really rewarded solely based on how much effort we put into our lives? Welcome to Data Demystified. I’m Jeff Galak, and in this episode we’re going to look at data about success and see what it says about just how meritocratic our country is. And in case you can’t stick around for the details, the short answer is that our country DOES have some meritocratic features, but they are far less robust than you might think. In this episode, I’m going to try and provide the intuition to help you understand if and where meritocracy exists in our society. And if you stick around to the end, I’ll even provide a partial solution to how we can make our country more meritocratic, something I think all of us likely
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CONNECTIONS + MONEY = SUCCESS over EDUCATION + HARD WORK = STAY POOR
Not sure if a meritocracy is a good idea in the first place. I see a few problems (assuming there is actually equal chances!):
1) It put's work in the first place to succeed in life. The value of a person lies in the education/work. It lead to people living to work instead of working to live. American work culture is exactly that.
2) Not all jobs are equally valued/paid. The irony is that the most important jobs, that actually add value to society (police, nurses, cleaners, manual labour etc. etc.) as a whole are paid much less than jobs that add the least value to society (bankers, managers, PR people etc. etc.).
3) To be able to survive, people in the lowest paying jobs have to work lots of hours or even multiple jobs to survive. Even though they most likely do actually important stuff, in other words: they put a lot of merit into it, there merit doesn't pay off.
4) If you pay jobs differently, this system is unsustainable, because it is impossible for ALL people to have high paying (less useful) jobs. Who does the "dirty jobs" that are underpaid and undervalued? Nobody wants to live in a city full of garbage or work in an office that's not cleaned.
5) What about people with disabilities? Maybe (and most likely so) within their abilities they show more merit than a person with disabilities. But they can only work so much hours, have a need for some alterations to a workplace etc. And that is: when they even get a job.
All in all, a merit society leads to a pyramid scam. Since only a few can actually get to the top, the rest will be in the middle and the majority at the bottom. Even when people from the same background actually have equal chances (which is basically what this video addresses, rightfully so!) it's still impossible for everyone to reach that "dream". So you need another system. I think the first thing that should be fixed is that jobs that add real value to the society get valued and paid a lot more and jobs that add less or even subtract value get paid much less. It shouldn't be a shame to be a cleaner of garbage collector. And managers mainly in meetings or bankers coming up with new schemes to lure people into lending against high interest should be ashamed they "earn" so much.
I dont agree the only idea of a meritocracy is simply giving equal opportunity to all in the end around 20% will be rich and poor and it will still have around the same number of people in each class meaning that jobs wont become an issue and that all this is simply having the right to an equal chance of success
I'm disabled and on a low fixed income. There is a system that is fixed that is fixed on purpose that keeps people poor even if you are just a penny over the 2,000.00 dollar mark.
We live in knowledge based economy, not a work hard society.
This chart seems to show how much we value education, a very expensive benchmark for potential success. Could this be paired with data on how successful people are with and without a diploma after they have entered the work force. Do bottom quintiles get promoted less after they have entered the work force? Do the wealthy perform better if they get hired in a similar position. How does our meritocracy work if we adjust for education? I think what I would like to know is how much of that disparity is accessibility to education and a diploma and how much of that disparity is work ethic and insight.
Thank you for a really good video! I'm in my first year at uni studying sociology, whitch dives very deep into this and similar topics. For those that are interested in the topic, I recommend reading up on Pierre Bourdieu's work, e.g. his book called "Distinksjon". His terms capital, habitus, taste etc. explains a lot about the underleying variables that lead to this uneven distribution of 'sucsess'. Further Erving Goffman's work with social rituals in daily life also touches on this subject. Really exciting stuff!
This data visualization approach does much better to compare the meritocracy and alternative hypotheses. Thanks!
Thank Nick!
Love your videos.
Thank you!
Excellent video
Would love a more deep dive in class/race divide and history of those issues.
I would suggest that meritocracy is probably a false goal to begin with. You define meritocracy based on reward for hard work, but many would instead say that a meritocracy rewards ability/talent. Obviously it is important that a society rewards both hard work and talent, to incentivize the former and disseminate the benefits of the latter; but talent by definition, whether bestowed by nature or nurture, is not merited, and talent frequently so offsets the effects of hard work, positively or negatively, that the latter is by no means a sufficient cause of success. Hard work itself is typically born as much of inherited culture and ability as of private inclination. All in all, I find it a dubious assumption that merit alone, defined either way, ought to dictate access to society's resources.
As an educator, therefore, I also question the simplified "more education = fix the meritocracy" paradigm. Clearly, education matters, not merely for financial success but for personal growth--I wouldn't be a teacher if I didn't believe that. But some kids simply don't have the natural gifting to be successful in our system, however hard they work. (To be clear, I see this as an indictment of the present system.) And then, even for many of those who do have the necessary talent, simple socioeconomic realities hinder them from developing it fully. Even beyond that, foisting more education in the abstract on kids in the hope of improving their financial prospects often just makes their lives less livable. I don't wish to sound excessively critical of your video--I basically sympathize with the point being made--but I do have issues with the kind of technocratic finagling that seems to lurk in the background of this approach.
As long as you're money's green...you have 'merit.'
The most important aspect to the success is the success rate and quality in your 😂
Who is he talking too when he say Our Country?
Well, I'd argue that people can go to the top... when we're using quintiles to determine de top.
If we used deciles or (even better) percentiles, then I'd bet we'd see an even worse situation, where the bottom and the upper quantiles would be almost determinate.
And I don't buy it that this is education in the sense of access to cultural capital (even though I find it vitally important). Right now, education means not only access to cultural capital, but also to networking/social capital. It is still a privilege. So, if there are more people with college education, then we'd see a diminishing return for these effects.
Inheritance tax and fixing loopholes for financial capital, on the other hand...
Todos los países mienten. No es gran cosa.
Fuck college debt..be a tradesman,get good at it and you can make a handsome living.
I'd like to see longitudinal data. Are we becoming more or less meritocratic?
Great question. That wasn't in the report I referenced, but I will dig around. My guess is that we are far less meritocratic (as measured by wealth/income mobility), but that is just a guess.
No
Dear Professor Galak,
I am from the bottom rank poor family- I can tell you that BESIDES having a college education in America, other factors that can help the bottom folks like me to escape from poverty are:
1. DON'T GET MARRIED!!
2. DON'T HAVE CHILDREN!!!
If you are poor, please don't have kids!! Children cost money, energy, attention, and time!! It will drain you from self-improvement!! Besides, what's the point to have kids if it means contiune the cycle of poverty? It is just sad!! The best gift I can give to my kid is to NOT EXIST in the first place so they don't have to suffer the pain from poverty like myself!!
This is completely absurd how he doesn't understand that being born into wealth just means you were born into your family saving the outcome of their labor 💯 which you can utilize as a head start but basically the work was put in just not by you.
while money can be inherited individual merit cannot be inherited because one does not chose the family they are born in nor can their actions chance their family, any real meritocracy cannot accept inherited wealth as meritocratic that is pure nepotism
@@colorpg152 understand that life is not fair that if you're born into life no matter where you are born into what type of situation you are born into you only get out of life the effort you are willing to put into it I will give you an example let's get rid of all government and any other type of established structures so we will go back to hunter-gatherer times if you don't move your feet you will not eat you in that type of structured society you would be expected to start producing as soon as you are physically capable of doing so by whatever means possible be it carrying water back to your house from the river. What you're doing is saying some people made better choices than other people so now we should chastise the children of those people that made better choices I find that utterly disgusting 🤢
That's exactly what he does understand. A meritocracy is not handing down merit as a freebie. Merit cannot be handed down; only freebies. And getting freebies -- especially if you think you've earned them -- is exactly what merit is not.
9:28
You are overlooking the fact that people have different goals in life. You can't assume that people all want to be in the top quintile, for example. Perhaps family and community are more important to you than wealth. Maybe poor people want to be middle class, rather than stinking rich. Maybe you want to be an artist more than you want to be rich. Maybe you want to live in a van down at the beach and go surfing everyday.
Thanks for the comment. All of that is possible, but unlikely. You're assuming that a child born to a poor family somehow inherently wants to be, say, an artist, more than a child born to a wealthy family. It's critical to remember a meritocracy implies that anyone can succeed, regardless of which parents they happen to be born to. That is very clearly not the case.
@@DataDemystified I think it is reasonable to assume that people will inherit their parents values to some degree. Those values will shape what success looks like. I doubt people's vision of a successful life is the same among quintiles. People are not a generic 'Homo economicus'.
I agree that poor children are disadvantaged and we should strive to give everyone the opportunity to succeed.
@@DataDemystified but why should the percentile of people who want to work hard be 20% for every quintile? a person born into a poor family is less likely to work hard than somebody born into a higher quintile because it is entirely possible that hard work is a skill that children learn from their parents.