# High pay over the future of humanity? Date: 2026-06-28 --- --- ### High pay over the future of humanity? I ran into the lovely essay, [After Meritocracy](https://beyondmeritocracy.squarespace.com/new-page-4), by Matthew Harper who points out further absurdity in assigning Merit = IQ + Effort where IQ is the pseudoscience, nonsensical measure of intelligence and the equation is from Michael Young’s 1958 novel *The Rise of the Meritocracy*. You could also do Merit = Innovation + Effort which is equally disastrous. Let’s shorthand as M = I + E. Matthew says > It could be argued that the fundamental flaw with the equation IQ plus Effort equals Merit is not so much what it includes, but what it excludes. The act of assessing IQ, much less Effort, in anything resembling an objective manner is intensely problematic. But for IQ plus Effort to equal Merit, everything which cannot be reduced to either IQ or Effort must be denied. The feminist ‘antagonists’ of Young’s novel presumably saw this for the contradiction it was: according to the equation on which the whole of society was supposedly built, women were equal to men; but their role as mothers, which required them to exit the workforce entirely, precluded them from the participation in the meritocracy that their merit entitled them to. Matthew wrote that for the 2018 60th anniversary of the novel when the United States had a total fertility rate, TFR, of 1.73 and Germany, the country Matthew was living in, had a TFR of 1.57. In 2025 Germany had a TFR of 1.35 and the U.S. less than 1.6. The logic is inexorable: if you don’t pay me I won’t do it. Wait who’s paying me to yell at this guy? In a vain attempt to get back to the safe TFR of 2.1 some governments are giving incentives to families to have children. Unfortunately M = I + E prevents fully compensating a family to have children, because you can only roughly estimate their losses. Even if you wait for a woman to have a full career and compensate her wages for years, the effect of time off and the demands of family on a mother or good father’s promotion are incalculable. ![“Your money or your life!” Jack Benny: I’m thinking!](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/high-pay-over-the-future-of-humanity-6110061451.png) *“Your money or your life!” Jack Benny: I’m thinking!* So we need a new equation M = (I + E)\*U + G where U is the utility assigned to what you are doing and G is government incentives. The utility of most jobs is very, very low if not negative. By greatly reducing the merit we ascribe to the idiotic, bullshit most people are doing we get back not only families but also a whole host of other things like arts, education, environment, and basic research that M = I + E was excluding. Would average students take a lesser paying job if it meant the end of educational debt? Of course they would. Would children of elites take a lesser paying job in order to participate in the arts, environment, or basic research? Of course they would. At this point there is really no downside to making the U in M = (I + E)\*U + G a much, much lower number. That’s because high utility jobs have been a thing of the past for some time. At this point our high U is riding on a logic of ``` computers + internet + mobile + cloud + AI = we finally see big benefits ``` We’re all very happy that carrying around a map in the car is a thing of the past. That we can watch shows on demand. That we can share information directly with each other instead of waiting for a report from traditional media (well except for the creators of *Disclosure Day* that apparently are unaware of this ability). However the claim that we could not have achieved the above with low U is sketchy and the idea that we should keep U high in the face of ever declining TFR is insane. Plus even if TFR can be restored in some other way the entire technology chain needs basic research to feed it and high U is just as corrosive to basic research as it is to babies. > You can imagine high U as throwing gasoline on a camp fire; very impressive looking but you can’t stand around that fire or cook on it. #### What levers do we have for lowering U? Once we admit that utility is low and high pay is wasteful, then we have many options. * Public companies already must meet requirements to go or stay public. Executive pay limits can be part of those requirements. * Higher tax rates on high pay. * Government contracts and funding can be restricted to organizations that limit executive pay. * Public options and nationalized industries. Since the executives don’t accomplish much moving work from the public to the private sector makes sense. * Cap the legal protection of incorporation so that individuals can be sued on any profits above a limit. ![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/high-pay-over-the-future-of-humanity-7043e2f36c.png) #### Do lower U countries have higher TFR? No one knows as there are no low U rich OECD countries. The best rich countries in this data set do is to have a college degree worker be making greater than 24% more than a worker without a college degree. ![Generated by AI — right click new tab for larger. Also Mexican TFR might be as low as 1.5.](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/high-pay-over-the-future-of-humanity-42906b6108.png) *Generated by AI — right click new tab for larger. Also Mexican TFR might be as low as 1.5.* Even 24% more is probably enough to generate castes as discussed in my previous blogs [here](https://medium.com/the-polis/are-impoverished-americans-a-caste-c06850244f04) and [here](https://medium.com/the-polis/lets-get-past-the-lie-that-patriarchy-and-rat-race-economy-aren-t-to-blame-for-american-birth-rate-8c5add4672e4). In fact 24% was the college wage premium in America in the early 1970s and it was enough to continue a massive increase in college attendance. Plus in many cases the higher payout for education scales up with more advanced degrees. Plus the real compensation in Sweden is 24% more pay **and** a better type of job. Plus even if 24% was low enough to get a boost in TFR there are other factors to consider like housing. In the United States the another factor to consider is immigration which in the past offset lower TFR. #### Other problems with high U Allowing high tech to for decades assume the mantle of high utility, does more than potentially suppress birth rates. It also skews resource allocations towards incredible amounts of waste. > Global capital expenditures on data centers reached approximately $598 billion in 2025, representing a massive 57% surge from the previous year. > Total spending in the global private jet market reached between $35 and $48 billion in 2025, depending on whether the metric tracks baseline manufacturing billings or total economic market size. Driven by a record-breaking 3.9 million global flights (a 4.6% increase from 2024), the sector experienced unprecedented activity from corporations and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. > Investors and high-income households account for roughly one-third of all single-family home sales. The highest 20% of earners own nearly 59% of all residential housing value in the country. Yet another problem with giving the American upper class such overblown bragging rights is the psychological effect it has on the country. Americans at the bottom must either conclude that they are proportionally close to worthless or that the elite are over paid thieves. As Michael Young explained > It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.