This is how society dies

[merithyn]

And again, I'm not saying that those who do incredibly well in college shouldn't be celebrated. I'm saying that it should only be one factor in what's considered a "successful" college experience.

[Berkut]

I'll let Oex speak for himself, but it sounded to me like he was saying something that I've long thought. We give a lot of respect to "high achievers" when a lot of the time the reason they are high achievers is because they have nothing impeding their successes.

In your case, you were working a full-time job, raising small children, supporting a partner and paying for college on your family budget all while working on your degree. That you graduated at all is a significant accomplishment.

Someone who went to university with no concerns over money, jobs, or family, and gets straight As is definitely an accomplishment, but I don't think it warrants more accolades than your "mediocre" grades.

No, we can't know every situation of every student. But to issue a blanket "Wow, those high achievers are incredible!" is no better than issuing a blanket "Wow, those underachievers really aren't very bright" either. It's a non-entity, or should be.

Precisely.

I also think this concern over grades as proxy for worth  is highly detrimental to the students themselves. I care a whole lot about my students, but, as I tell them frequently, I care a lot more about them as human beings and citizens than I care about their "accomplishments" especially when the measure of their accomplishments is often some kind of highly problematic metric. I find it sad that this is not a message they have often received from adults - and it shows.

EDIT: Indeed, that Valmy reads my post as if such a stance equals contempt for students seems indicative of my whole issue with the notion of achievement.

This is in reply, to some extent, with Malthus response to my post.

I think the issue is not that I don't believe that being "virtuously high achieving" is irrelevant. Quite the opposite - I think being smarter, more hard working, more "virtuous" in however we define that is hugely important to an individuals results when compared against someone else in the exact same environment lacking those virtuous attributes.

My point is that having those attributes is a good predictor of the person relative success against others in the same environment. But it is NOT a very good predictor of their success compared to the general populace, because there are just too many other factors involved, many of which are pretty measurable, but a LOT that are not. Hell, some of the inate factors are so poorly understood that it seems dubious to apply much "virtue" measurement to them.

I think that if you gave me a set of say 100 people who all have a somehow magically defined and created "similar" background, I can reasonably predict that the ten smartest will end up with a better outcome than the ten least smart, however that is measured.

What I do NOT think I can do is take 100 random people, rank them by their outcomes, and then back into any kind of meaningful evaluation of their "virtue". The background factors are so varied that without actually digging into the individuals themselves, I don't think there is much correlation between their achievements and their inate virtue that can be reasonable measured.

I would love it if we achieved a society where we've succeeded at true equality of opportunity such that "virtue" did in fact consistently result in achievement without needing to normalize for environment. But while western liberal society as a whole is probably the best it has ever been in that regards throughout human history, I don't think we are really that close in any absolute, objective sense.

[Berkut]

An example of an "innate" attribute that we don't understand well and don't account for well is mental illness.

You can score 10/10 on whatever virtue attributes we might consider critical and laudable for human achievement. You could be wicked smart, super hard working, ambitious, empathetic, charismatic. All of it. The person who god blessed with all the very top attributes. The dice came up 6,6, 5 on all your virtue attribute scores. You are 1 in 10,000 bestest of the best.

But....you have a serious condition of clinical depression. You got screwed on that cosmic dice roll, and no matter how smart you are, you are cursed with this mental illness that in many ways makes all that so much less useful. It is an illness, and not really under your control, you were just not lucky.

Or even something more extreme, bi-polar or some kind of psychosis. As a society, we suck at recognizing these things as illnesses, rather we just lump them in with your general attributes, but we know that in reality they are an illness, not an attribute. It is not fundamentally different than being born missing a foot or being in a car accident as a infant that blinds you. But we look at someone born blind and think "Hey, we have to help them because that isn't their fault, and we should try to make their opportunity NOT be limited by this thing beyond their control!". Someone born with a serious mental illness? Fuck 'em, they can be homeless, because clearly they lack "virtue".

Having grown up around the mentally ill, and having been married to someone whose full time job was advocating for them, I've always considered being born with a serious mental illness one of the worst forms of just straight out bad luck.

[Malthus]

This is in reply, to some extent, with Malthus response to my post.

I think the issue is not that I don't believe that being "virtuously high achieving" is irrelevant. Quite the opposite - I think being smarter, more hard working, more "virtuous" in however we define that is hugely important to an individuals results when compared against someone else in the exact same environment lacking those virtuous attributes.

My point is that having those attributes is a good predictor of the person relative success against others in the same environment. But it is NOT a very good predictor of their success compared to the general populace, because there are just too many other factors involved, many of which are pretty measurable, but a LOT that are not. Hell, some of the inate factors are so poorly understood that it seems dubious to apply much "virtue" measurement to them.

I think that if you gave me a set of say 100 people who all have a somehow magically defined and created "similar" background, I can reasonably predict that the ten smartest will end up with a better outcome than the ten least smart, however that is measured.

What I do NOT think I can do is take 100 random people, rank them by their outcomes, and then back into any kind of meaningful evaluation of their "virtue". The background factors are so varied that without actually digging into the individuals themselves, I don't think there is much correlation between their achievements and their inate virtue that can be reasonable measured.

I would love it if we achieved a society where we've succeeded at true equality of opportunity such that "virtue" did in fact consistently result in achievement without needing to normalize for environment. But while western liberal society as a whole is probably the best it has ever been in that regards throughout human history, I don't think we are really that close in any absolute, objective sense.

I think we are on the same page with that.

What worries me is that our societies are becoming places in which 'virtue' is rewarded less - as in, social mobility is becoming more difficult, that the better predictor of success is not 'virtue' but a fortunate choice of parents.

I do think though in society at large that the debate is becoming unfortunately polarized, between the 'prosperity gospel' types on the one hand (for whom success = virtue) and the 'progressives' on the other hand (for whom success = wholly predestined by circumstances). Neither position encourages progress towards a just society, in which virtue and success ought to be ever more closely correlated. If virtue already equals success, no change is needed; if success is wholly a creation of circumstances, then virtue is unnecessary and rewarding it is pointless - what is required is to change the circumstances.   

I believe that both a knowledge of circumstances and encouraging virtue are important - one must do the best with the hand that is dealt, while recognizing some are dealt much better hands than others. The job of a just society is to try to even the odds to the extent possible.

[Oexmelin]

the 'progressives' on the other hand (for whom success = wholly predestined by circumstances).

I don't think there are a lot of those - and I certainly don't see them as having any sort of defining role in the political polarization. One of the central hesitation of the current left is precisely to reconcile the heavily prescribed celebration of individual accomplishment (which gains a lot more shine if the deck is stacked against you), with a desire to upend the systemic causes of the deck being stacked. One of the reasons why "virtue-signalling" often works as an accusation is precisely because people want to be individually irreproachable, even as they argue for the weight of a system constraining their own (or perhaps more frequently, the others'...) actions and belief.

This is even leaving aside the thorny problem of what virtue is, and which ones should be encouraged. I find it interesting that you mentioned thriftiness and hard work as old virtues in need of celebration - rather, than, say, forgiveness and cooperation. In many human societies, mediocrity used to be a highly emphasized virtue: pride, and thus selfishness lies in the path of those who want to achieve extraordinary success. Thriftiness and hard work are the virtues of an already quite unequal world...

[Sheilbh]

Precisely.

I also think this concern over grades as proxy for worth  is highly detrimental to the students themselves. I care a whole lot about my students, but, as I tell them frequently, I care a lot more about them as human beings and citizens than I care about their "accomplishments" especially when the measure of their accomplishments is often some kind of highly problematic metric. I find it sad that this is not a message they have often received from adults - and it shows.

EDIT: Indeed, that Valmy reads my post as if such a stance equals contempt for students seems indicative of my whole issue with the notion of achievement.

To an extent it's the rise of the meritocracy point:

Down with meritocracy
The man who coined the word four decades ago wishes Tony Blair would stop using it
Michael Young
Fri 29 Jun 2001 02.59 BST
First published on Fri 29 Jun 2001 02.59 BST

I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair.

The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033.

Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating.

Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society for more than a century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s, when schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.

Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people's birth, status has gradually become more achievable.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.

They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.

It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.

They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.

Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.

With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.

To make the point it is worth comparing the Attlee and Blair cabinets. The two most influential members of the 1945 cabinet were Ernest Bevin, acclaimed as foreign secretary, and Herbert Morrison, acclaimed as lord president of the council and deputy prime minister.

Bevin left school at 11 to take a job as a farm boy, and was subsequently a kitchen boy, a grocer's errand boy, a van boy, a tram conductor and a drayman before, at the age of 29, he became active locally in Bristol in the Dock Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' union.

Herbert Morrison was in many ways an even more significant figure, whose rise to prominence was not so much through the unions as through local government.

His first job was also as an errand boy and assistant in a grocer's shop, from which he moved on to be a junior shop assistant and an early switchboard operator. He later became so influential as leader of the London county council partly because of his previous success as minister of transport in the 1929 Labour government.

He triumphed in the way Livingstone and Kiley hope to do now, by bringing all London's fragmented tube service, buses and trams under one unified management and ownership in his London passenger transport board.

It made London's public transport the best in the world for another 30-40 years and the LPTB was also the model for all the nationalised industries after 1945.

Quite a few other members of the Attlee cabinet, like Bevan and Griffiths (miners both), had similar lowly origins and so were also a source of pride for many ordinary people who could identify with them.

It is a sharp contrast with the Blair cabinet, largely filled as it is with members of the meritocracy.

In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.

The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.

Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.

As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality.

Can anything be done about this more polarised meritocratic society? It would help if Mr Blair would drop the word from his public vocabulary, or at least admit to the downside. It would help still more if he and Mr Brown would mark their distance from the new meritocracy by increasing income taxes on the rich, and also by reviving more powerful local government as a way of involving local people and giving them a training for national politics.

There was also a prediction in the book that wholesale educational selection would be reintroduced, going further even than what we have already. My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that "No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes".

At least the fullness of that can still be avoided. I hope.

• Michael Young, when secretary of the policy committee of the Labour party, was responsible for drafting Let Us Face the Future, Labour's manifesto for the 1945 general election

[mongers]

...snip ...

• Michael Young, when secretary of the policy committee of the Labour party, was responsible for drafting Let Us Face the Future, Labour's manifesto for the 1945 general election

[/quote]

Thanks for that, Shelf, an interesting read.

[The Brain]

Old guy supported nepotism almost 20 years ago. Film at 11.

[Malthus]

I don't think there are a lot of those - and I certainly don't see them as having any sort of defining role in the political polarization. One of the central hesitation of the current left is precisely to reconcile the heavily prescribed celebration of individual accomplishment (which gains a lot more shine if the deck is stacked against you), with a desire to upend the systemic causes of the deck being stacked. One of the reasons why "virtue-signalling" often works as an accusation is precisely because people want to be individually irreproachable, even as they argue for the weight of a system constraining their own (or perhaps more frequently, the others'...) actions and belief.

This is even leaving aside the thorny problem of what virtue is, and which ones should be encouraged. I find it interesting that you mentioned thriftiness and hard work as old virtues in need of celebration - rather, than, say, forgiveness and cooperation. In many human societies, mediocrity used to be a highly emphasized virtue: pride, and thus selfishness lies in the path of those who want to achieve extraordinary success. Thriftiness and hard work are the virtues of an already quite unequal world...

I mention them as boring 'virtues', because they are the sort of 'virtues' that in a fair society ought to lead to worldly success, defined by worldly accomplishments.

I are not concerned with other societies in this analysis, but with our own. I know that in other societies and at other times worldly issues were of less importance. However, for this analysis I am not concerned with salvation of souls in the Christian sense, or the gaining of enlightenment in the Buddhist sense. By definition, the 'deck being stacked against people' is the worldly deck.

It is true that from a Christian theological perspective it is the rich who have the deck stacked against them, because "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!" (Matthew 19:34), but I doubt many who are poor in our current society would exactly appreciate being lectured on how they are actually lucky. 

I do not agree that "Thriftiness and hard work are the virtues of an already quite unequal world...", if the implication being made is that in the preferred "equal" world, these would not be virtues. In my opinion, in the preferred equal world, thriftiness, hard work, and the like would be rewarded more and not less - rather than, say, the accident of birth.   

[The Brain]

To an outsider Socialism is amusing. The more you even the playing field the more achievement depends on the individual's own actions, and since personal responsibility is anathema to Socialists their brave new world is found horrible.

[Oexmelin]

I do not agree that "Thriftiness and hard work are the virtues of an already quite unequal world...", if the implication being made is that in the preferred "equal" world, these would not be virtues. In my opinion, in the preferred equal world, thriftiness, hard work, and the like would be rewarded more and not less - rather than, say, the accident of birth. 

These are your preferences, sure - they are the preferences for a certain type of justice to the detriment of another type. I mean, what sort of justice would this produce? Considering all the bad luck that can still mess with hard work and thriftiness, I'd rather we value redemption and forgiveness. Letting someone die because they were lazy may satisfy one's sense of justice, but allow rot at the heart of the collective to grow. 

When I was a kid, I hated the parable of the prodigal son, because, as a good student and a dutiful, obedient son, I totally shared the outlook of the dutiful, obedient son: why would that idiot be welcome with open arms after having squandered everything? As I aged, I became a lot more sympathetic to the core message, and especially to the delivery. It is good that someone is hardworking. I was blessed with good reasoning ability, and I did well in the sort of school system I was placed in. But it is also good that someone is forgiving - even to lazy bums, spendthrifts, and people who make horrible decisions.

And if we are simply to look at the sort of society we have now as the model from which we ought not to deviate much, then I'd suggest we'd better acknowledge that pious wishes about hard work - which have existed way longer in unequal society than in the relative anomaly of the post-war social democracy - will not do much to solve the consolidation of self-satisfied elites. We are, and will be for the foreseeable future, bombarded with message about success and achievement. I'd rather we start refusing those, in favor of alternative messages - which we can certainly draw from historical precedents and examples.

[Zoupa]

To an outsider Socialism is amusing. The more you even the playing field the more achievement depends on the individual's own actions, and since personal responsibility is anathema to Socialists their brave new world is found horrible.

Your opinion is stupid and you should feel bad.

[Berkut]

I do not agree that "Thriftiness and hard work are the virtues of an already quite unequal world...", if the implication being made is that in the preferred "equal" world, these would not be virtues. In my opinion, in the preferred equal world, thriftiness, hard work, and the like would be rewarded more and not less - rather than, say, the accident of birth. 

These are your preferences, sure - they are the preferences for a certain type of justice to the detriment of another type. I mean, what sort of justice would this produce? Considering all the bad luck that can still mess with hard work and thriftiness, I'd rather we value redemption and forgiveness. Letting someone die because they were lazy may satisfy one's sense of justice, but allow rot at the heart of the collective to grow. 

When I was a kid, I hated the parable of the prodigal son, because, as a good student and a dutiful, obedient son, I totally shared the outlook of the dutiful, obedient son: why would that idiot be welcome with open arms after having squandered everything? As I aged, I became a lot more sympathetic to the core message, and especially to the delivery. It is good that someone is hardworking. I was blessed with good reasoning ability, and I did well in the sort of school system I was placed in. But it is also good that someone is forgiving - even to lazy bums, spendthrifts, and people who make horrible decisions.

And if we are simply to look at the sort of society we have now as the model from which we ought not to deviate much, then I'd suggest we'd better acknowledge that pious wishes about hard work - which have existed way longer in unequal society than in the relative anomaly of the post-war social democracy - will not do much to solve the consolidation of self-satisfied elites. We are, and will be for the foreseeable future, bombarded with message about success and achievement. I'd rather we start refusing those, in favor of alternative messages - which we can certainly draw from historical precedents and examples.

One thing I find interesting about this post.

I would never draw the conclusion from

In my opinion, in the preferred equal world, thriftiness, hard work, and the like would be rewarded more and not less

that there is any kind of implied relative value of those things in contrast to

I'd rather we value redemption and forgiveness

IE, I don't see how you get from his post to the conclusion that he values redemption and forgiveness less because he values thriftiness and hard work period. He never drew any such comparison, rather he made a statement that we ought to value hard work, which only implies (to me) that we ought to value it over not working hard. Not that it is more important than some other value (like forgiveness). I cannot speak for Malthus of course, but I suspect that he would not consider his statement to have *any* content at all relevant to the comparative value of hard work versus some other posited value - just that is ought to be valued rather than its absence.

I think Malthus is saying:

1. Hard work is to be valued

But what you are hearing is

1. Hard work is of greater value than forgiveness.

I wonder how much of disagreement comes from these kinds of interpretations. Is there something cultural here, where there is a implication of relative valuing even when it is not stated that some others simply do not get out of the same statement?

[Eddie Teach]

To an outsider Socialism is amusing. The more you even the playing field the more achievement depends on the individual's own actions, and since personal responsibility is anathema to Socialists their brave new world is found horrible.

Your opinion is stupid and you should feel baaaaaaad.

[grumbler]

but it is human nature to ascribe more virtue to the individual who succeeds in a given situation than one who fails in the same position. 

True but definitions of what constitutes success are not historically invariant.

I am not arguing about what should be, but what is.