NB: This isn’t my typical, more epistemically cautious writing. It’s more like a polemic. It’s channeling something, but I’m not quite sure what. You should read this not as me fully endorsing every sentence if taken literally and out of context, but as a whole that gives expression to thoughts and feelings that I see in myself and others.
Today we live in the shadow of The Sort. I first learned about The Sort from a Patrick McKenzie tweet. The Sort is the emergent system by which talented individuals are identified and relocated to maximize their productivity. It finds people, wherever they are, who have the skills and smarts to produce more of what markets and institutions demand, and it offers them money, prestige, and power in exchange for being Sorted. It’s highly efficient, and it’s operating at scale across the entire globe.
The Sort isn’t a conspiracy, though. Its mechanisms are transparent. It starts in school, where high performing students are Sorted into honors classes. Then, standardized tests, extracurriculars, and various status markers Sort everyone again to determine university admissions. Finally, elite university attendance opens the doors to prestigious careers in academics, politics, and business, and, once a person is hired, the Sort does its best to select among the Sorted for promotion.
But The Sort wasn’t always with us. It emerged gradually after the end of World War II. At first it grew slowly as access to higher education expanded and professional management took the reins of most economic activity. It grew faster in the 1980s when business regulations relaxed and tax rates reduced. And it exploded in the early 2000s when the internet tore down the barriers that kept the would-be Sorted out of The Sort. Today, with most of the old frictions removed, The Sort has reshaped the world and our communities.
Talented individuals are now concentrated in a few sectors like law, tech, medicine, and finance. Other sectors languish, struggling to attract even a small share of Sorted folks. The smartest person in a small town no longer stays to make it better. They can make more money and enjoy greater luxuries by moving to a bigger city. And in those bigger cities, The Sorted form their own communities, isolating themselves from the locals as if they were expats in a foreign country. They may live in New York or London or Shanghai, but they are only in those places, not of them.
If all this makes you afraid of The Sort, you needn’t worry. The Sort is already here, and you have already been sorted. In fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you got sorted near the top yourself, or at least onto the fringes of the Sorted. The only thing we really have left to worry about is how to live well under the watchful eye of The Sort.
Living with The Sort
To be Sorted is to live in fear of being Resorted.
From the outside, being Sorted sounds fantastic. You’re offered money, prestige, and a path to power. Who wouldn’t want that? But the Sorted know they are under Damocles’ sword. They deal with status anxiety, imposter syndrome, and the guilt of entitlement. They’re hyperaware that they could easily lose it all. The Sorted have internalized The Sort, and they’re constantly judging themselves and others by its measures.
They see the cool vacations their peers took on Snap and Instagram. They fret that their own holidays were squandered and that they took too many days off work. They stress over getting their kids into the best schools, not only for their children’s sake, but also because children are a reflection of their parents, and maybe the parents should be Resorted if the children aren’t performing well. And on the job there’s constant competition for limited spots at the top. There’s always someone younger, hungrier, and smarter waiting to advance their career given the slightest opportunity.
In these ways and more, The Sort keeps the Sorted trapped. They understand what the consequences will be if they stop playing the game. They know that if they “follow their passion” they’ll be giving up not only money, but all the markers of status The Sort has given them. It’s not uncommon to hear stories of people who burn out, go live on a farm or in a monastery or run an ice cream stand, and then come back a few years later when they can no longer resist the urge to be among the Sorted. Once The Sort captures your mind, it becomes almost impossible to do anything other than let it direct your actions.
The other “option” is to live the life Unsorted. But it’s not so much a choice as one that’s forced on you.
When The Sort doesn’t pick you, it leaves you behind. To the Sorted, you’re not a person. You’re a product, a consumer, or a source of cheap, temporary labor. At best you are the downtrodden worthy of pity. A fellow human, yes, but not a human capable of great things.
Unsurprisingly, the Unsorted don’t like this. They believe that the world should be fair, and they’re mad as hell that the Sorted think they’re better than them. They want to see the world returned to a time before The Sort, now almost forgotten. So they organize, both on the left and the right politically, to protest and try to fight back. Alas, when they do, the Sorted exploit their anger, orchestrate becoming the leaders of their movements, and use Unsorted unrest as a path to power.
But despite what I said earlier, The Sort is not inevitable. There are pockets of the world The Sort has largely left behind. There’s costs to living outside The Sort, but there are also benefits. And perhaps no place has better resisted The Sort for longer than Japan.
Reforming The Sort
Japan didn’t set out to avoid The Sort. In fact, up until the early 1990s, Japan was on track to become one of the most Sorted countries in the world. And then, the market crashed. They spent three Lost Decades with stagnant wages. It kept Japan the place we know it as today: a beautiful, high trust society where even the lowliest convenience store runs well. Now, changing demographics threaten to bring The Sort back to Japan, and Japan is going to have to change if it wants to thrive.
How did Japan stay out of The Sort? It’s a combination of factors. Lifetime employment norms and compressed wages meant talented people couldn’t be efficiently reallocated. Culture and language barriers made it easier for Japan to isolate itself from full integration into the world system. And economic stagnation took away the free energy The Sort needed to power itself. No one feature was enough to stop The Sort, but combined it made Japan into a bubble of pre-Sort life.
But staying out of The Sort came at a cost. The Sort, for all its downsides, brings real value to the world in the form of dramatically better goods and services available at lower prices than were ever previously possible. During the Lost Decades, productivity lagged, innovation stagnated, and young people had limited access to opportunities. It’s only now, with an aging population forcing the barriers down, that The Sort is beginning to seep back in.
The ideal would be to find a way to get the benefits of both The Sort and the Slack that develops when The Sort isn’t running. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do that, and as far as I know, nobody does. The Sort knows no bounds on its hunger to optimize. Slack only exists in the negative space left behind by the places optimization missed, and it’s hard to design good policies that create just the right amount of Slack.
But maybe there’s something we can do. Maybe it’s a reformed tax code or stronger barriers to immigration or higher tariffs or universal basic income or something else. My hope is that The Sort will be the cause of its own moderation, because there are smart people working in policy who have been Sorted there, they also feel the pain of The Sort, and they, perhaps more than anyone else, have the power to nudge us towards a world that is less aggressively Sorted.