Wealth Can't Be Built On Merit Alone

What makes meritocracy such a long term problem for societal organization? If merit remains the primary workplace option, skills differences among citizens will eventually be magnified in ways which make democracies more fragile than is already the case. I've promoted time arbitrage in part because it could contribute to workplace participation without the present political impulse to sort groups differently, based on prior privilege or the lack thereof.

Granted: To a certain extent, merit based organizational patterns - despite their exclusivity - are logical for getting things done. If institutions can fully compensate employees for their expertise, problem solving on these terms can be quite efficient. When national wealth benefits from extensive use of scale, public and private interests will abundantly reward specialists who - in turn - pay dearly for their human capital investment requirements.

The problem? Dependent markets not only get lots of things done via already existing wealth, extensive price making is also part of the equation. For instance, the Baumol effect includes large percentages of non tradable sector activity at high skill levels. However, this largely rival form of knowledge dispersion can only generate economic dynamism up to a point. Indeed, the barriers to modern economy access are already apparent, for the productive agglomeration of today's knowledge based economy is centered in a relative few prosperous regions. Are we really ready as a society, to impose drastic limits to wealth on these terms?

In the past, "special" locations for skill sorting and applied knowledge weren't so problematic, since millions remained actively engaged in activities where extensive amounts of price taking were also important for social cooperation and economic cohesion. In many of these settings, competition tended to be more pure and transparent. Communities and cities didn't need total integration with high skill knowledge in order to generate prosperity. Now they do. All the same, those who were left behind, will need stronger organizational patterns that utilize the skills capacity which is already in their midst. Fortunately, this also means rediscovering the wealth creation potential of price taking, instead of trying for yet another share of the price making pie - given the claims it has already endured.

Productive agglomeration will need to be conceptualized differently, so that more skills potential might be tapped in time arbitrage context. Since considerable revenue potential has already been apportioned to price making, groups will need to start anew, with price taking mechanisms that allow time value to function as wealth, alongside money. Otherwise, the long term dangers of sorting for skill on price making terms, will only become more evident in the near future.