Are elites meritocratic and efficiency-seeking? Evidence from MBA students

Religions like Christianity are the natural development at global scale for that. We're losing that scaling in altruism now, but it doesn't have to be this way.

These are good insights. I think it is perhaps also worth noting that even the individuals who succeed on their own merit do so with a lot of luck, and it may not always be obvious to them the luck was there.

Milton Hershey is known for his candy company. Somewhat less known is the fact that his successful candy company was his fourth; his three previous bankrupted (mostly due to fluctuations in prices moving candy from tenable to untenable as a business) and he'd burned through so much of the family fortune pursuing them that his relatives cut him off from further loans. His father before him had liquidated his own piece of the family fortune speculating on opportunities. It could easily have been the case that those speculations might have paid off, which would have made Hershey the son elite category 1 (in status); similarly, if Hershey hadn't found one last source of investment money from a former employee, his candy-making aspirations would have ended when the family cut him off and we wouldn't know his story at all.

The system of stories we tell ourselves highlights the merit and downplays the luck; we don't remember the failure cases, including, often, the failures that predated the success. A lot of people who lacked support, didn't know there was a system to be leveraged, and grinded as far as they could before something critical broke are out there; they just don't get to give TED talks on what complete failure tastes like. Nobody gets to hear the lecture from Henry Hershey on "I mortgaged my family's future on opportunities that, had they paid off, would have made my son and wife wealthy and comfortable for the rest of their days... But none of them paid off and it was all ultimately objectively wasted effort, energy that would have been better spent tending a modest homestead and making it thrive in a small but sustainable way."

There's a now deleted comment that touched upon some of the issues on making compensation information public; I have very similar views as above so I'll write my own:

1. There are skillsets/capabilities that the organization finds difficult to get on the market, as well as brings disproportionate profits to the organization. For example, a database company may need to hire two software engineers, one writing CRUD apps or infrastructure automation, and the other one for distributed systems implementation. In such a setting, while both people's titles may say "software engineer", the reality is that one is paid much higher than the other, both because the database is the bread and butter for that company, while the CRUD/infrastructure thing may be a very small part used by an internal team or by a few customers.

2. People usually like to believe that they're at least better than average and bring the same level of contributions to the team. This is most definitely not the case, and an engineering manager, VP, sales manager who simply appears to talk to people all day long may actually have important contributions such as overseeing key projects, talking to customers etc. which may be the thing that the company needs to lock that large sale or prevent customer attrition, or whatever the case may be.

People will often jump to favoritism or bias or another explanation, and in some cases, they absolutely do happen. But that is not the only explanation, and without data to distinguish between the two, people will gravitate towards the uncharitable interpretation, which allows them to paint themselves in the most positive light.

First off fair and I even agree, but then you sort of concede my point anyway with "it's a common misconception".

A commonly-held belief is that that statement is true and we deal with all of the follow-on effects of that belief as a result.

I imagine that how the students behaved and what "seems fair" is heavily biased by the cultural context.

I agree that 22% redistribution seems about fair, but I'm biased by a lifetime of rates of taxation.

Something I'm very curious about is what should we be trying to optimize for (economic growth, sense of well-being, energy output, raising the economic floor, etc.?) and then what gini coefficient optimally produces that outcome.

I understand it's outside the scope of this study, but my bias is my curiosity for what should we be aiming at and what principles will optimally produce the result, so then at least we know in theory what we should be trying to do.