What this thread made me think about was the concept of “skill.”
A point I often hammer at is that innovation is not inherently good. I take this from Castoriadis, who argued the same about creativity. He observed somewhat that both Auschwitz and Beethoven’s 5th are creative outputs. We should not celebrate something simply for being creative. Since innovation is a subset of creation, the same applies.
We should also be thinking this way about “skill.” Think about the skills that appear to be useful in climbing a corporate hierarchy. Yes, there are technical skills, skills associated with command of knowledge, especially domain specific knowledge. But there are also skills of navigating the personalities in the workplace. This is thoroughly entangled with one’s cultural background and the backgrounds of those that occupy the higher rungs of the hierarchy. People coming from backgrounds different from those of the people that typically occupy higher rungs often cite a feeling that the “culture” of the workplace felt alien. Different types of behaviour will be interpreted in different ways. Women talk about seeing aggressiveness in men be rewarded, while aggressiveness in women would often be punished. Those from outsider backgrounds often have to conform in order to succeed. I recall being told of a study of students entering and exiting med school regarding their perspectives on different topics. The men and women entering med school differed in some significant ways, such as on the importance of gender. On leaving med school, those differences were much more compressed. However, the compression was almost entirely about the women’s perspectives converging on the men’s. I suspect similar dynamics are at work in corporate hierarchies. For a woman, a person of colour, a queer person, to climb the ladder, they have to modify much of their behaviour to converge on what is considered “normal” by the gatekeepers who have also been trained and acquired this skill..
But this can also be very workplace specific, which is an important part of the luck factor. An aggressive woman who lucks into a workplace where the bosses appreciate her aggressivenes may be able to breakthrough the gender glass ceiling there, while if she’d started at a different workplace, she would have failed.
As BF has very capably demonstrated, the reasoning of the higher skill = higher placement in the hierarchy = higher income is entirely circular, since the evidence of being higher skilled is being higher in the hierarchy. But we could also dig into what is claimed to constitute “skill.”