So yes, we are smart, but not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits. The hobbits do get a bit taller as the pyramid ascends, but it's still the number of hobbits, not the height of particular hobbits, that's allowing us to see farther.

— Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (2016)

Barack Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention is often considered the starting point for his eventual presidential career. He begins the speech with a touching account of his family history (source):

Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place: America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor he signed up for duty, joined Patton's army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents. My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.

What Obama expresses here is a touching sentiment. As an American myself, as a child of immigrants, I want to believe in the promise of "the possibilities of this nation." I want to believe that "in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential." I want to believe in "the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too." Isn't that what this country is all about?

But this is where reality and rhetoric have diverged. Despite its reputation as the "Land of Opportunity," America has lower rates of socioeconomic mobility than many European countries -- including the UK, which is famous for its class constraints (source). Income inequality is approaching record levels. Raj Chetty's Opportunity Atlas offers an interactive demonstration of the extent to which your zipcode influences your eventual outcomes. Put together, these trends show a country drifting ever farther from the "generous America" of Obama's parents, and towards a society where upwards mobility is severely restricted.

I recently brought up these issues with a friend from one of the aforementioned European countries. We agreed that America was clearly failing to live up to its meritocratic ideals. But then he surprised me by asking if meritocracy was even what we should want for our country. How could it not be? I wondered. If not merit, what else should decide how resources are distributed?

One argument for meritocracy focuses on its role in combatting prejudice. Why, for example, should people have certain advantages based solely on where they are born or who their parents are? Or based on their gender or the color of their skin? To me, this has always stood as the strongest argument for meritocracy. In reality, though, what determines the thing that we call "merit"? Typically, a person's abilities are a combination of their genetics and life experiences, such as the activities you do as a kid. We have no control over the first and only some control over the second. So isn't a meritocracy also apportioning resources based on luck?

A second argument for meritocracy focuses on its external benefits. If people are rewarded for doing better work, then they will be motivated to do better work, making life better for everyone. It's often hard to disentangle this kind of meritocratic logic from the logic of the market. For example, if Pfizer makes a breakthrough drug then they should be entitled to the benefits, so that future drugmakers are incentivized to innovate. As you can tell from this example, however, the financial rewards people receive are not always proportional to the value they provide for society. This is the same logic by which CEOs get paid 300x regular employees and high-frequency traders get paid 10 times more than high school teachers.

You might turn around and argue that the rewards of meritocracy are not about financial value. Perhaps what matters more for the meritocrat is that someone with the requisite talent and motivation to become a high-frequency trader can make their dreams come true. But, as Michael Sandel points out in The Tyranny of Merit, the problem happens when that same high-frequency trader looks at their bank account and starts to think of themselves as the winner of a meritocracy. Rather than describing an ideal that we should strive for, meritocracy becomes a way to justify structural inequalities as morally acceptable. If money and power are interchangeable, as they often are, then endorsing meritocracy becomes equivalent to endorsing whatever the market values.

This is the crux of Sandel's argument, and the part that I find compelling: even if meritocracy is admirable in the abstract, instantiating meritocracy in the real world requires that we decide what those merits are. In the neoliberal era, these merits themselves are left largely undefined, which allows what the market values to fill in the gap. In this way, the rhetoric of meritocracy masquerades as a value-neutral position while justifying financial inequalities that undermine the equality of opportunity that we wanted to achieve in the first place.

Indeed, the big mistake is to conflate "land of opportunity" with "meritocracy." Either we leave meritocracy uninstantiated, which makes it highly agreeable, or we tie meritocracy to specific markers like level of education or ability to speak, thus entrenching power structures through cultural values and parental education. I am not sure whether the rhetoric of meritocracy or the neoliberal reliance on market value is truly the root cause of the problem Sandel identiifes. Either way, political thought on both sides is now challenging the neoliberal and meritocratic way of thinking. This doesn't mean we abandon meritocracy entirely. Rather than treating meritocracy as an end in itself, we can appreciate its instrumental value as one tool among many, to help us create the world that we wish to realize.

Thus, the start-up problem means that the conditions under which there's enough cumulative culture to begin driving genetic evolution are rare, because, early on, there wouldn't have been enough of an accumulation to pay the costs of bigger brains. And if there had been, the most adaptive investment would be in improved individual learning, not better social learning or eventually cultural learning. So in order for natural selection to favor improved social learning, there has to be a lot of cultural stuff to learn, but if you don't have much social learning, there's unlikely to be much of an accumulation out there to tap.

— Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (2016)

In Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday retells the story of Epictetus, As a young adult, Epictetus (a notable Stoic) had a cheap earthen lamp that he used regularly. Once he got richer, he bought a nice cast iron lamp to replace the earthen one.

One day, the iron lamp was stolen during his sleep. At first, he was distraught. Then, he realized that his attachment to the lamp was merely tying him down to his anxious feelings. He decided from then on to keep using his old earthen lamp.

Epictetus might find himself partial to the planet Anarres of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed -- a planet on which all private property has been abolished. It's a vision of what could be if we let go of our attachment to ownership.

One blog post that I keep coming back to is Joel Spolsky's article on The Development Abstraction Layer:

The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business. Developers working at the developer abstraction layer need an implementation layer — an organization that takes their code and turns it into products. Dolly Parton, working at the “singing a nice song” layer, needs a huge implementation layer too, to make the records and book the concert halls and take the tickets and set up the audio gear and promote the records and collect the royalties.

Any successful software company is going to consist of a thin layer of developers, creating software, spread across the top of a big abstract administrative organization.

The abstraction exists solely to create the illusion that the daily activities of a programmer (design and writing code, checking in code, debugging, etc.) are all that it takes to create software products and bring them to market. Which gets me to the most important point of this essay:

Your first priority as the manager of a software team is building the development abstraction layer.

I was prompted to think about Cocomelon by a recent interview on the Ezra Klein show with the writer Jia Tolentino. It's a fascinating topic. It's very common these days to see toddlers with their screens glued to an iPad. Having met some of these toddlers myself, I think there's a good chance they're watching Cocomelon. Cocomelon, and shows like it, are part of a new wave of media that specifically targets toddlers. It's ridiculously popular -- increasingly so. But what should we make of its popularity?

On one level, Cocomelon is like any other new product, meeting a consumer need. Parents want to keep their children's attention occupied, and the Cocomelon + iPad combo achieves this nicely. On the other hand, it speaks volumes to the way screen time and attentional capture have affected our lives. What happens when an entire generation devotes its formative years to the toddler equivalent of TikTok? Are we destined to entrench ourselves further? Or is this yet another change we will learn to adapt to? It's likely that the current version of Cocomelon is but a stepping stone on our journey towards the future of children's media. But only by understanding what we have currently can we figure out where to go next.

This morning, I started and finished the memoir A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story by Donald Miller.

Growing up, we often hear the advice to "live a story worth telling." Miller decides to take this advice literally. His pursuit of a better story pulls him into an extreme hike, a cross-country bike ride, and a search for his long-lost father.

Miller is good at making ordinary moments feel profound. One doesn't have to kill the Dark Lord or gather all the infinity stones to live a story worth telling.

The idea of living a story worth telling is also one of the 27 ways to live outlined in Derek Sivers's book How to Live (he calls it "making memories"). It's cool to see these viewpoints fully articulated.

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