Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
1,609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Dec 2022
Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So we have an unequal distribution of talent, of course.
So if we lived in a society in which there was some level of acceptable inequality, and it's a normative kind of question of how much we would say is acceptable, right?
And that inequality was based on this unequal distribution of talent, then I think that would be fine with me, right?
That would actually be a meritocracy.
What I see in the US is often...
Okay, so if you are a upper middle class or rich kid and you get a good education, you know, K through 12, out of those people, there will be some that work extra hard and go on to do incredible things or are very successful.
And there'll be other people that do not, right?
And decide for whatever reason or go down a different path.
And you could say maybe among that group of the upper middle class, you know, there is a meritocracy, right?
but they're actually given those opportunities to make their own decisions and to fail, whereas many, many other people, the vast majority of American society, I would say 60 plus percent, don't really get those opportunities to make those choices to begin with.
And I would aspire to the type of world, at least as a first step, in which our only inequalities are based on our unequal, innate kind of distributions of talent.
Think about it this way.
The workers themselves are incentivized and are shaped by meritocracy.
market forces too, right?
They're trying to respond to consumer needs and preferences.
They're trying to expand market share.
They're trying to make money.
So it requires no kind of leap into these people are going to be more altruistic or whatever else, even on purely bourgeois terms, the same way you would maybe justify competitive capitalist firms.
I think you could justify this system as long as you think that elected management can perform just as well.
I think
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