(facebook crosspost; originally posted January 10, 2017)

American "Socialism" and Meritocracy

There really is very little conflict between what Americans think of as "socialism" (which isn't really socialism, but generally translates to "a robust social welfare package and safety net") and individual achievement. I would argue pretty strenuously that you can't have the latter without the former, in fact, and that the modern-day GOP actively undercuts any semblance of real meritocracy at every opportunity.

This is going to be obvious to a lot of you, I realize, but let's spell it out all the same: If you're born into poverty in the U.S., you're running with a parachute in the marathon of life.

Your mother will probably have worse prenatal care and baseline health, putting you behind the ball before you're even born. Once out, you will probably eat less nutritious food and learn less healthy dietary and exercise habits. Your home environment is more likely to be polluted, deprived, and dangerous. You will probably go to underfunded public schools (or, if you're even unluckier, predatory scammer schools of the type Betsy DeVos holds so dear), and you will almost certainly have no chance to go to private school. These effects will compound year after year.

Your friends and family will likely be poor, which carries a whole raft of consequences. These range from higher incidences of adverse childhood experiences (even things as small as your parents arguing nastily in front of you because of money stress, or the embarrassment of being the dirty kid at school because nobody had time to bathe you and there weren't any clean clothes in the house), which have been shown to cause lasting and observable brain changes, to simply not having a lot of books around the house or anybody with the free time, subway tokens, or gas money to take you to the library.

If you do beat the odds and break out, you will need time and practice to acquire the manners and social capital you weren't born with, and every failure will cost something. You're likely to be less adventurous about switching jobs or moving to new places, because you don't have a cushion to fall back on if things go wrong. You may find it harder to sustain relationships, due to lack of good role models and the psychological scars of those childhood experiences (which, again, leave lasting changes ranging from outsize stress responses to poor impulse control: might not be enough to get you locked up, may well be enough to make it hard to maintain a stable relationship with a stable person). And you will, again, find yourself in the position of having to float your extended networks more often than being floated by them.

If you are born into affluence, you can flip a whole lot of those factors. Maybe not all of them, and not every time, but all those probabilities tilt toward you instead of against you.

If you're born *rich,* you can be an outright mediocrity and succeed. You can be an utter drug-addled psychotic failure of a person and live in luxury your whole life. Generational wealth will carry you along. And that is just how the GOP, in its current iteration, wants things to be.

Socioeconomic inequality has a number of negative effects throughout society, ranging from increased death rates from preventable ills to (seriously) lower rates of patent applications, suggesting that inequality stifles creativity both among artistic types and among inventors of a more practical bent. It's not great!

We've never had a particularly strong social safety net in the U.S., and our government is not (contrary to rhetoric) all that active in redistribution -- and it's become far less so now than it was in generations past. We are way behind the world average on that front. But to the extent the government *does* play a little bit of Robin Hood, taxing the rich to give back to the poor, many of those harms are mitigated. Not cured (because all we're doing is opening the door a little wider for individual agency to matter, which means some number of those individuals are going to make garbage dumbass choices*), but mitigated.

And if you care about individual meritocracy and fair competition, then it really needs to be about individuals and merit and fairness. Not tilting the playing board so people keep winning just because their grandparents won, even though they themselves are garbage at the game. And not keeping good, talented people hobbled because we're too spiteful or shortsighted to give them a fair chance.

(* -- an important thing to remember here, btw, is that individuals are not isolated. You give the junkie clean needles because maybe he'll kick the habit and maybe he won't, but either way society doesn't need his girlfriend to get AIDS. You don't kick people off welfare for dirty piss tests not only because it's a waste of taxpayer money to do those tests [although it conclusively is], but because their kids don't need to starve just because they got born to a parent who's using. You give free contraception to teenagers not because we *want* them banging, but because they're going to be curious or lonely or thrillseeking or [in the real world, much as we might like to pretend otherwise] trading on their bodies for food and a warm place to stay, and none of that needs to end up in STDs or babies.

Individual choices have consequences beyond those individuals, and sometimes they're not truly free choices. Any real and effective social policy should be clearsighted about that, as much as possible.)