John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…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? I think the problem with that is the following. I agree with you, it really upsets people, and for that reason, we don’t see meritocracy in most venues, even in academia. But I think the real problem that you get in the United States is, given the ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, then what you get is, you get tribalism along lines that recreate many of the things that I think the liberal republic was designed to get rid of. You basically recreate factionalism. Some questions from American economic history. If we think of the decline of slavery in the 19th century and then the Civil War, was that the result, ultimately, of economic factors? Or it simply was political force, and there was a war, and the South lost? But was slavery evolving out of the South for economic reasons?…

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