Right, Yoshie, but just because we haven't got the rewards and incentives right now doesn't mean that we shouldn't have rewards and incentives. No one on thsi list thinks we have the rewards and incentives right now. No one here who defends differential compensation thinks that the current capitalist market produces defensible outcomes. It's not to the point, therefore, to say to someone like me, who thinks that we should differentially reward effort and achievement, or like Catherine, who says we should encourage education by paying the educated more (and I agree), that there are peverse incentives and rewards built into our current way of doing things. However, Yoshie knows this, as her thoughtful post on the lessons of perestroika from yesterday shows. --jks
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Justin,
You've haven't thought this thread all the way down. As Yoshie, Gordon, Peter, Carl, Carrol, and several others have tried to point out---your meritocracy is the core liberal idea, within neo-liberal capitalism. That the idea is a lie and propaganda doesn't make the idea any less less wrong headed and loathsome.
But let's forget that part for a moment. Let's ask what are these differential incentives supposed to be for? I mean what are all the best, brightest, most productive, wonderful deserving people supposed to spend or buy or do with their incentives? What are these incentives supposed to accomplish once they've been doled out?
And another thing. Who are the `we', in such phrases as `we need to encourage', `we need doctors outback..', `we want people to..'? See? There is already a we and a they. It is already a hierarchy of presumptive managerial nonsense. You may not realize it, but your are simply reproducing the same system. As someone put it, socialism with a conscience---which ultimately devolves back into the same old pig capitalism without a conscience.
At first, I thought, comrade Justin, it's off to re-education camp for you in Manteca pulling up sugar beets. Then I realized this would only make you bitter, they use machines now anyway, and you still would not see the error in your thinking. Rationalism doesn't work since Yoshie, Gordon and others have tried that already. This is when I thought of something that might sound ridiculous at first, but consider the implications.
Mandatory ballet class---with your daughter of course. Imagine your chances in a leotard, before a class of ten, eleven and twelve year olds as they assess your progress and evaluate your performative merit in the seven movements: plier, etendre, relever, sauter, elancer, glisser, and tourner. I suspect it would not be long, before such ideas, as how about an A for effort would start to occur to you.
I think what you don't understand is that all the activities required to create and reproduce a living and healthy society can not and should not be analyzed through the ideological filters of neo-liberal capitalism, of which various schemes of so-called merit play a pivotal role---both as apology for existing conditions, as justification for manufactured scarcities, and as blunt instruments of oppression.
Work on your plie, comrade Justin.
Chuck Grimes