Before we kick this one off I'd just like to point out that in my last post I said that March will be a terrible trading month and that February will be bullish till the end of the month.
Then like clockwork during the next four hours the market proceeded to dump harder and faster than it had anywhere else on the hourly chart. Amazing. How do I keep doing this? My psychic link to the market is still strong, as it continues whispering lies into my ear. When it comes to gambling and pattern recognition, being wrong 90% of the time is just as good as being right 90% of the time. All that matters is the correlation. Take note.
What was this post about again?
Oh yeah...
Meritocracy is a sham.
This is the idea that people should be rewarded by merit.
Skill and aptitude in a certain area should promote citizens in that area.
It is a utopian dream-world that can never and will never exist.
Because how would it work?
The idealism is sound. Obviously if those with skill and drive and decency ascended to all the available positions of power the world would be in a pretty good spot. But we can't just say things and expect them to happen. How would we reward people for being good at their job?
Being "good at your job" is a totally subjective measurement.
Which means someone must decide if you are good at your job or not.
Which is already the system we have today, and it's garbage.
As long as people control the narrative Meritocracy can not exist.
What about AI?
What if we automate out the people and have an algorithm that ranks how good people are at certain tasks? Again, this is a self defeating algorithm, because if a computer is skilled enough at a certain task to rank other people, why wouldn't we just automate the task completely and leave people out of it?
It's such a simple concept.
People should be rewarded for being good at their job. How can that be so difficult? But it is. In fact, this is quite possibly the root cause for why the world is so messed up today.
There are so many variables.
For example, what if a promotion needs to be given out and there are two people of equal skill vying for that job? What are they going to do? Flip a coin? Ha! No, the boss will just pick the person they like the most or the one who's been with the company the longest or the one who took the least time off or literally whatever other metric they decide is important. Again, it all circles back to centralized control.
Decentralized systems.
The very concept of a "promotion" assumes a garbage centralized corporate structure. In decentralized systems there is no boss and random coveted positions don't just pop up out of nowhere. However, even in decentralized systems, while meritocracy is more likely to happen on smaller scales, the overarching theme remains an impossibility.
Hive is a prime example of this. We value "quality content" in a lot of cases, but we are really just all running around tipping whoever we want because that's how the system works. Some of us like the idea of meritocracy so we try to reward the things we deem to have the highest value, and some people don't. It's a numbers game, and those numbers are never going to be in favor of 100% altruism. That is a fact.
Failing up.
Failing up is the opposite of meritocracy, and it happens all the time. It's a big club, and you're not in it. It's not what you know, it's who you know. These problems are known, and largely we just accept that they exist and there isn't really anything we can do about them.
Fixing this problem even just a tiny bit will have huge ramifications to the global economy. It's one of those things that fixes a lot of problems all at once. If one can get rewarded for merit, things like racism have a tendency to just melt away. Poverty as well. Everyone works harder when actual work-ethic reenters the workforce. Everyone working harder creates more value, for everyone. At least that's the theory.
The reality of these situations is a bit more complex than all that. In a very real way, the system CANT reward people based on merit. What if ten people need to be rewarded but there are only enough resources or promotions for one person? The entire theory falls flat on its face when we look at how business actually works.
Payed by time spent.
This is another thing that makes meritocracy impossible. How can one get paid for their work when their work is paid for by the hour? There's a reason we do things this way. Imagine trying to qualify every single task an employee does and itemize all those values into a spreadsheet and then rank how well the employee did on each task to determine their pay. You'd need another employee just to build the spreadsheet, and even then it would still be completely subjective and full of corruption. Not to mention that the new employee might need another employee to rank their own tasks. It's not hard to see how quickly meritocracy spirals into absurdity and inefficiency.
Idealism is self-defeating
I think one of the biggest problems is that we have people trying to solve everything all at once. Then when they inevitably fail nothing gets done, as they weren't willing to make compromises or achieve incremental successes. People expect too much too fast, and I'm sure that's something that anyone in crypto can agree with. Wen moon?
Capitalism
In theory, capitalism and meritocracy are the exact same thing. Capitalism values good work, and thus good work will be compensated fairly. Again, we see that the theory and the reality of the situation are completely disconnected. Again, getting paid by the hour and stripping workers from ownership of the thing they are helping create is a big part of all of this.
Will crypto fix a lot of this problems?
Probably! But certainly not all of them. We already see how tribalism is taking root. Bitcoin maximalists are comically one of the most toxic tribes in the space (right under XRP). I cringe when I think about Satoshi Nakamoto looking at the direction that his invention has gone in. Nakamoto was not a maximalist, as that is clearly the opposite of decentralization. Luckily we have many options as this flat architecture pours outward away from the source.
Borderless
Things get even weirder when we start factoring in the borderless nature of this emergent economy. I personally know people that would be happy to work for $5 an hour. In fact if the job was fun and if the participants are their own boss and choose their own hours, this becomes a "dream job" situation for many.
Does the competition for work undermine meritocracy? Probably a little bit. If there are thousands of people out there willing to work for $5 an hour it's not going to matter how good you are at the job if you're asking for $50/h. That's just a 'simple' supply and demand issue. But then again perhaps it's foolish to be measuring these things by the hour in the first place. It's quite difficult to quantify systems that don't exist yet.
Fairness
It all comes down to the economy being more fair and less subjective and corruption resistant. It's a tall order, but most people are on board. Everyone thinks the world should be "more fair". Will crypto be a part of that future? I have to assume it will in some capacity or another. However, I do expect that these developments will materialize in very strange ways that we could have never predicted. Technology has a way of maintaining consistent volatility and change over long periods of time.
Conclusion
Meritocracy is a utopian fantasy.
It's a target.
Aim for the stars and you'll hit the moon.
This is a journey, not a destination.