This is terrific

One of the better national blogs out there is BOPNews, where Ian Welsh has a terrific post today about the type of society we are building in the US, and how it's hurting all of us.

Here's a dead-on point:

Success in our society is, in the vast majority of cases, about relationship management. It’s about securing your place, pleasing the right people and everybody scratching each others backs. I’ve even come to see the ways in which it makes sense, and how if it doesn’t devolve into complete corrupt cronyism it can work. (After all, you don’t want to recommend someone who doesn’t work out, do you?)
But I add this personal knowledge of both types of work to an understanding of the structure of the economy as a whole – a structure that demands that there be a lot of people who have low paying jobs where they are treated like shit. Those jobs are “necessary” in the sense that the economy is simply set up that way. For that matter, unemployment is necessary, Marx didn’t get it wrong when he talked about the “reserve army of the unemployed” and deliberate government policy makes people unemployed. You can ask Volcker about that.

So when people talk to me about merit, I have a hard time not spitting in their face. It’s not that merit doesn’t exist, even merit that is not related to your “relationship management” skills and it’s not that it’s never rewarded. In fact the rule of merit, is that you do have to be competent enough to not actually screw up anything more than your relationship management skills are capable of smoothing over. (FEMA's Brown may wish to consider this rule when picking future jobs.)

Bingo.