Why Poverty Is Like a Disease - Issue 47: Consciousness - Nautilus
On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry. My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman…
Hasnain says:
This whole article is amazing. I kept changing which quote to highlight because every paragraph kept getting better.
"The standard American myth of meritocracy misinterprets personal narratives like mine. The accumulated social capital of American institutions—stable transfer of power, rule of law, and entrepreneurship—certainly create economic miracles every day. But these institutions are far more suited to exponentially growing capital where it already exists, rather than creating new capital where society needs it. Stories such as mine are treated as the archetype, and we falsely believe they are the path to escape velocity for an entire segment of the population. In doing so, they leave that population behind. I am the face of the self-made rags-to-riches success story, and I’m here to say that story is a myth. The term “meritocracy” was coined in 1958 as a mockery of the very idea of evaluation by merit alone. We’ve forgotten to laugh, and the joke is on us."
Posted on 2017-04-27T00:25:37+0000