Myth Of Meritocracy
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Myth Of Meritocracy
Myth of meritocracy is a phrase arguing that meritocracy, or achieving upward social mobility through one's own merits regardless of one's social position, is not widely attainable in capitalist societies because of inherent contradictions. Meritocracy is argued to be a myth because, despite being promoted as an open and accessible method of achieving upward class mobility under neoliberal or free market capitalism, wealth disparity and limited class mobility remain widespread, regardless of individual work ethic. Some scholars argue that the wealth disparity has even increased because the "myth" of meritocracy has been so effectively promoted and defended by the political and private elite through the media, education, corporate culture, and elsewhere. As described by economist Robert Reich, many Americans still believe in meritocracy despite "the nation drifting ever-farther away from it." Inevitability It has been argued that meritocracy under capitalism will always remain a ...
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Meritocracy
Meritocracy (''merit'', from Latin , and ''-cracy'', from Ancient Greek 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the first known use of the term was by sociologist Alan Fox in the journal ''Socialist Commentary'' in 1956. It was then popularized by sociologist Michael Dunlop Young, who used the term in his dystopian political and satirical book ''The Rise of the Meritocracy'' in 1958. Definitions Early definitions Meritocracy was most famously argued by Plato, in his book '' The Republic'' and stood to become one of the foundations of politics in the Western world. The "most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in t ...
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Economist
An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this field there are many sub-fields, ranging from the broad philosophy, philosophical theory, theories to the focused study of minutiae within specific Market (economics), markets, macroeconomics, macroeconomic analysis, microeconomics, microeconomic analysis or financial statement analysis, involving analytical methods and tools such as econometrics, statistics, Computational economics, economics computational models, financial economics, mathematical finance and mathematical economics. Professions Economists work in many fields including academia, government and in the private sector, where they may also "study data and statistics in order to spot trends in economic activity, economic confidence levels, and consumer attitudes. They assess ...
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Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Cornell is ranked among the top global universities. The university is organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers three satellite campuses, two in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar ...
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Fatherly
Fatherly is a digital lifestyle brand that provides news, expert advice, product recommendations and other resources for parents. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in New York City. Overview Fatherly offers articles, videos, and other digital content tailored to young fathers. The company has been described by ''The New York Times'' as "BuzzFeed meets ''Vice'' for parents". While the site's content is geared toward men, half of Fatherly's audience are women. Fatherly covers a variety of topics across health, science, play, relationships, personal finance, gear and parenting. It also has several content franchises including ''940 Weekends'', which focuses on activities, ''My Father, The…'', which provides first-person narratives from sons and daughters of famous parents, and The Fatherly Podcast, a streaming, conversation-based show. History In October 2014, while Fatherly.com was still in beta, the company created a grant called The Fatherly Fund to help parents ...
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New York Mag
''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'', it was brasher and less polite, and established itself as a cradle of New Journalism. Over time, it became more national in scope, publishing many noteworthy articles on American culture by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, John Heilemann, Frank Rich, and Rebecca Traister. In its 21st-century incarnation under editor-in-chief Adam Moss, "The nation's best and most-imitated city magazine is often not about the city—at least not in the overcrowded, traffic-clogged, five-boroughs sense", wrote then-''Washington Post'' media critic Howard Kurtz, as the magazine increasingly published political and cultural stories of national significance. Since its redesign and relaunch in 2004, the magazine has won more Nat ...
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Upper Class
Upper class in modern societies is the social class composed of people who hold the highest social status, usually are the wealthiest members of class society, and wield the greatest political power. According to this view, the upper class is generally distinguished by immense wealth which is passed on from generation to generation. Prior to the 20th century, the emphasis was on ''aristocracy'', which emphasized generations of inherited noble status, not just recent wealth. Because the upper classes of a society may no longer rule the society in which they are living, they are often referred to as the old upper classes, and they are often culturally distinct from the newly rich middle classes that tend to dominate public life in modern social democracies. According to the latter view held by the traditional upper classes, no amount of individual wealth or fame would make a person from an undistinguished background into a member of the upper class as one must be born into a famil ...
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Harvard Business Review
''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. ''HBR'' is published six times a year and is headquartered in Brighton, Massachusetts. ''HBR'' covers a wide range of topics that are relevant to various industries, management functions, and geographic locations. These include leadership, negotiation, strategy, operations, marketing, and finance. ''Harvard Business Review'' has published articles by Clayton Christensen, Peter F. Drucker, Michael E. Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John Hagel III, Thomas H. Davenport, Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Robert S. Kaplan, Rita Gunther McGrath and others. Several management concepts and business terms were first given prominence in ''HBR''. ''Harvard Business Review''s worldwide English-language circulation is 250,000. HBR licenses its content for publication in thirteen languages besides English. Ba ...
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The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main news ...
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Social Equality
Social equality is a state of affairs in which all individuals within a specific society have equal rights, liberties, and status, possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services. Social equality requires the absence of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the absence of discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of an individual's identity. For example, advocates of social equality believe in equality before the law for all individuals regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health, or disability. Social equality is related to equal opportunity. Definition Social equality is variously defined and measured by different schools of thought. These include equality of power, rights, goods, opportunities, capabilities, or some combination of these things. It may also by ...
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Equal Opportunity
Equal opportunity is a state of fairness in which individuals are treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices, or preferences, except when particular distinctions can be explicitly justified. The intent is that the important jobs in an organization should go to the people who are most qualified – persons most likely to perform ably in a given task – and not go to persons for reasons deemed arbitrary or irrelevant, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, having well-connected relatives or friends, religion, sex, ethnicity, race, caste, or involuntary personal attributes such as disability, age, gender identity, or sexual orientation. According to proponents of the concept, chances for advancement should be open to everybody without regard for wealth, status, or membership in a privileged group. The idea is to remove arbitrariness from the selection process and base it on some "pre-agreed basis of fairness, with the assessment process being related to ...
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Capital In The Twenty-First Century
''Capital in the Twenty-First Century'' (french: Le Capital au XXIe siècle) is a book written by French economist Thomas Piketty. It focuses on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the United States since the 18th century. It was initially published in French (as ''Le Capital au XXIe siècle'') in August 2013; an English translation by Arthur Goldhammer followed in April 2014. The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (''r'') is greater than the rate of economic growth (''g'') over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability. Piketty proposes a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority. At the end of 2014, Piketty released a paper where he stated that he does not consider the relationship between the rate of return on capital and the rate of economic ...
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Thomas Piketty
Thomas Piketty (; born 7 May 1971) is a French economist who is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. Piketty's work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book ''Capital in the Twenty-First Century'' (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. Piketty proposes improving the education systems and considers diffusion of knowledge, diffusion of skills, diffusion of idea of productivity as the main mechanism that will lead to lower inequali ...
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