On Episode 24, there was a discussion of a political party w/ meritocracy. You should check out the book Freedom by Daniel Suarez (note that it’s the follow up to Daemon and you’ll want to read that first). He basically discusses the creation of a fully meritocracy based society. It has the whole gamification of such things.
Another issue is that you need a generally agreed upon place to store said merit and the generation of things that define the merits.
I have indeed read Freedom™ about sixteen times, and he does discuss a different layout of society. It’s not at all clear to me that the plan would work, but even if I spot you for free that it does, it is exceedingly unclear that Sobol’s society is actually a meritocracy. It’s a dictatorship. The dictator just happens to be a computer program. It is hard to describe something as a meritocracy where merit is measured by how closely you adhere to what the dictator wants you to do. Sobol’s society doesn’t have a generally agreed-on place to store merit, it has the Daemon’s opinion of where to store merit which is forced on everyone else. (They might all eventually admit that it’s a good idea, but forcing everyone to do a thing and then saying “look they all did it!” is not agreement.) That’s not to say that it’s a bad society, just that whether it’d work without a semi-omnipotent godhead which owns half the world is an exceedingly dubious prospect.
Maybe we should review Suarez’s books, although I was pretty disappointed in the last two.
I read the Daemon and Freedom(well listened on audible). They were pretty good. The idea of Sobol’s designed socioty was interesting, and I could empathize with the end goal. But however unfourtanate it is that as a species it could take us darn near forever to reach the capacity to live in an equal society. With people working together for each other, instead of working for their own self good. I don’t think Sobol’s methods were worth the results.
I really don’t think we are evolved enough as a species, spititually or intillectually yet to have any form of complete peace and equality on our own. Mankind still has allot of growning up to do. However ubfourtanate that is. But we need to grow up on our own, no machine helping us, or fircing us to do it.
I promise if elected intergalactic space god, I will organize society by stack overflow points. Art will be judged by the nummber of replies on 4chan, of course.
I’ve done quite a lot of personal study on this subject. I think “The Venus Project” has got closer to a workable model of social change. One of the things I like about it, is that it freely admits and encourages dissent and debate about the flaws in its policies.
I also think this TED talk is well worth consideration : http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems?language=en
I shall just leave that there and start reading both books next week ‘Daemon’ and ‘Freedom’.
'Nother interesting Link on Sci-fi Novels off imgur (some are films now) … http://imgur.com/gallery/BoARS