2. Meritocracy
If classical economics offered the invisible hand, meritocracy offered the invisible ladder. The idea is seductively simple: talent and effort are rewarded with upward mobility, and the most brilliant minds inevitably climb to the summit of wealth and influence. It is a narrative that flatters both individuals and societies---individuals are told that success is within reach if they are clever and hardworking, while societies are reassured that their hierarchies are just.
But meritocracy is perhaps the most dangerous illusion of all, precisely because it disguises structural inequities as personal shortcomings. Under its spell, the impoverished genius is explained away as a failure of ambition, discipline, or adaptability. Tesla was "too eccentric," Van Gogh "too unstable," Ramanujan "too obscure." Their poverty is cast not as a systemic betrayal but as an individual defect. In doing so, meritocracy absolves institutions and markets of responsibility while shifting blame onto those who refuse---or are unable---to conform to market demands.
The reality is far less flattering. Wealth is not distributed according to genius but according to the capacity to navigate, manipulate, and exploit existing structures of power. Edison, with fewer original ideas than Tesla, ascended the ladder because he mastered the language of investors, patents, and publicity. In the twenty-first century, social media influencers with modest intellectual contributions command greater incomes than Nobel laureates. Meritocracy insists that this is justice---that the influencer simply has a form of "talent" more attuned to contemporary society. But this rhetorical elasticity reveals meritocracy's true nature: it is not a scientific description of reward allocation, but an ideological shield protecting systems of inequality.
In truth, the ladder of meritocracy is less an escalator for genius than a stage for performance. Those who can dramatize their abilities, sell their stories, and align themselves with capital are elevated. Those who cannot---or will not---are left behind, regardless of the depth of their contributions. The myth of meritocracy thus reduces the impoverished genius to a moral lesson: if only they had tried harder, they too could have been rich. The cruelty of this narrative is that it masks systemic blindness as fairness, transforming the very suffering of genius into evidence against its worth.
3. Neoclassical Productivism
If classical economics imagines the market as a fair arbiter, and meritocracy imagines society as a fair ladder, then neoclassical productivism imagines productivity itself as the supreme measure of worth. In this paradigm, wealth is the rational byproduct of output: those who generate more, in terms of measurable goods and services, must necessarily accumulate more. The modern corporation is its cathedral, efficiency its gospel, and Gross Domestic Product its scripture.
Yet here, too, the genius vanishes. Intellectual breakthroughs, theoretical elegance, or aesthetic innovations often produce no immediate, countable "output." Tesla's dream of transmitting electricity wirelessly across the globe was not merely technologically radical---it was economically subversive, threatening to undermine the very system of monetizing energy through meters and wires. From the perspective of productivism, this was not value creation but value destruction, for it threatened established profit channels.
Ramanujan's mathematical theorems, though foundational to fields as diverse as string theory and cryptography, produced no "widgets" that could be weighed, priced, or tallied in a national account. Van Gogh, in his lifetime, painted prolifically, yet his canvases were treated as waste material rather than productive capital. By the arithmetic of neoclassical productivism, their work was noise, not signal.
The paradigm's central error is a conflation of productivity with profitability. What counts as "productive" is not an objective measure of human contribution but a socially and temporally contingent category. A factory producing disposable trinkets registers as highly productive, while a lone genius charting equations that will one day underpin satellite navigation systems registers as unproductive until centuries later. The very structure of productivism ensures that genius is discounted precisely because it does not conform to the time horizons of capital.
Thus, neoclassical productivism functions less as a celebration of human creativity than as an erasure of forms of value that resist commodification. It rewards the scalable, the replicable, the monetizable---while marginalizing the singular, the foundational, the prophetic. The paradox is devastating: the very individuals whose insights expand the long-term productive frontier of civilization are condemned as unproductive in their own lifetimes.
