Now I really think you're stupid. *I* didn't say jobs made people smart, YOU said only lazy, dumb people can't get good jobs.
This is starting to get very boring.
Read the thread. At no point have I said that “only lazy, dumb people can’t get good jobs”.
Not once. In fact I went to great lengths trying to spell out the fact that the wage you earn only reflects your ability to provide a skill and the value of that ability relative to the rest of the economy. Intelligence and energy are not necessarily reflected in your job role, nor are they necessarily reflected in the wage you earn. That should be obvious – so obvious it makes a dress wearing Geoff Capes look subtle. If an emergency locksmith gets paid fifty pounds an hour, that doesn’t mean he is more intelligent than the PhD student writing a thesis on quantitative analysis methods earning £15k per year. Equally, of course, he might be more intelligent. He might be Ludwig fucking Wittgenstein. It does not matter. It will not be taken into account by his employers, because his employers are not paying him to think, daydream or to write tracts of complex philosophical reflection. His employers are paying him to fix locks. The monetary value given to your job reflects only the value that society places upon it. Your wage is not a judgement on your inherent worth, nor is it a judgement on your intelligence (although I’m grateful for your vacuous attacks on mine, naturally). All that you can definitely infer from the fact that one job receives greater remuneration than another is that the market places a greater value on the former than the later. We might also expect that difficulty maps
broadly onto wage, but there are no guarantees and doubtless many exceptions. (Before anyone starts posting those exceptions, let me just say that I am thinking of unskilled labour earning less than semi-skilled, which earns less than skilled). Nevertheless, although the difficulty of the job you do might reflect on your level of intelligence (maybe it actually
is rocket science), there is no law which says that this must be so. You might be very clever, with no ambition. You might be very clever and yet still work in a patenting office, while spending all your time out of work pretending to be an atom and rethinking physics. Who knows?
Not only is the job you have, its status and its wage, insufficient information for one to begin to make subjective value judgements about another person’s character, there is also no reason why I personally should
want to earn £90k per year (other than the fact that you think I must because you have misread (or, as seems more likely, simply
not read) my posts). I might be happy earning £17k per year, although £90k would surely be nice. In fact, I am happy. I am also happy for other people to earn vast amounts of money for jobs they do not think they deserve, even if they think anyone could do it. There’s no need to be selfish or to look at affluence with rage or impotent disgust (the classic Marxist class-war drive). Poverty in the west today is almost non-existent. What we have is wealth-inequality. The majority of “poor” Americans, for instance, own a car, a colour TV, a VCR, a telephone, a stereo system, a fridge, a microwave oven and a washing machine. To describe that as poverty does an injustice to the real suffering masses throughout history and the rest of the world. So I am not worried. I will earn the wage commensurate with the economic value society places upon the role I fill, and not complain that I “deserve” more (of course you do dear), or that unfair advantages were given to others whilst I received none, or that society deliberately excludes me, whilst simultaneously engaging in obviously self-destructive behaviour, the outcome of which can only reinforce my paranoid-loser mentality and my diminishing lot of choices. There is nothing wrong with being poor, just as there is nothing wrong with being rich. They are both the entirely natural result of different choices, by you and by others.
The irony in all this is that I have
said explicitly that I believe that your wage represents
only the economic value of what you do, which is to say that it only represents the relative difficulty of what you do and the relative ease of getting someone to do it,
and nothing else. For saying this I was accused of putting forward tautological arguments. One last time, hoping the penny drops: a baker and a master baker get paid different amounts. The master baker gets paid more because he bakes better cakes, or at least, because people expect that he will bake better cakes. It has nothing to do with the stupidity or intelligence of either. It is not because the master baker went to a better baking school, either, although he might, and that might even be the reason why, ultimately, he’s the better baker. It might even be the reason that his employer hired him. But the fact is that he bakes the better cakes, and his employer, even if hiring him on the basis of perceived ability based on educational status, only does this because he thinks that this means the master baker will be the better baker. You get paid for the job you do, not the person you are.
And that’s still true. I don’t think anyone has disproved the basic disjunction between feudal genealogical inheritance of rank and wealth, which was the paradigmatic template for most of history and humanity (read
Guns, Germs and Steel if you don’t believe me), and capitalist meritocratic acquirement of the same. There have only been equivocations and exceptions ("Yeah, but I know a banker and he says it's easy...!"), no serious structural arguments. Yes, some people are better at some stuff than others, for a host of different reasons, not limited to access to Oxbridge-style education, by any means. As long as prospective employees are judged on "merit" (i.e. perceived ability), that will always be the case. However, the basic logic is unavoidable. If you want to be a successful business, you should pick the best person you can find for the job, according to the amount you can afford, based on whatever criterea you think pertinent. In earlier times, the aristocratic elite disparaged and distrusted capitalism
precisely because it threatened their status with new money “unjustly” earned through the miserable act of commerce, and not inherited along with name and fief. The elites hated capitalism for this reason: it was creating a new moneyed class outside the traditional norm. Capitalism was seen as the destroyer of traditional (and probably God-given) social bonds and stratification, the bringer of a new structure where nobility was replaced by ability to function within the marketplace, and which, happily,
it was. You yourself, nomadologist, are proof of that. You also allude to this historical disruption or break in your most recent reply:
In America, "names" are not necessarily part of the privilege that's conferred upon people born rich. That's an old world thing.
And that is what I’m saying. In the new world (of capitalism and liberal democracy, represented best by USA) names aren’t important; it’s what you have achieved or can achieve. This was the hope of the much hated European bourgeoisie writ large, and still lives on today in the mythologized “American dream”, which continues to draw migrants to the new world, even when many educated and privileged Americans seem to have lost faith. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the poor immigrant instinctively knows that America is the country where the liberal, Anglo-Saxon ideal holds truest, and that life in America is the surest way to guarantee freedom and control of one's own destiny. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali said in a recent interview with Avi Lewis, “You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on it, because you do not know what it is to not have freedom, I haven’t.”
