John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…Thinking about economic history more generally, if we look at America today, and if our goal is economic growth, what would you say is America’s biggest institutional deficit? What institution would benefit us the most if it were to marginally increase in status? Would it be university? Family? Church? Business? Something else? What’s gone wrong in America from a moral/ideological point of view? That’s getting into too many things, but if we just stick to things I personally care very deeply about, I would like to see a return to an earlier period of pure meritocracy. I would like to see that much more, both at the level of university, at companies, and so forth and so on. I would like to see objective tests and standards used to judge quality whenever possible, and I think that the rise of an anti-meritocratic notion or the idea that meritocracy should be adjusted for social needs has made it very hard to have, I think, state-of-the-art production in many areas. What do you think of the argument that people are, in some ways, not morally strong enough to live with meritocracy? You think of the chess world — people have ratings. The ratings really do reflect how good a player you are. Adam Smith himself suggested that when quality is transparent, people will tend to be depressed. He compared the mathematicians to the poets and said the poets were happier because each could believe he was a great poet. Are we strong enough to live with meritocracy?…

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