11 ms·

Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does has bad effects

127 points by pm24601 8y ago

jimrhods23 8y ago
Just as bad for you is believing that hard work and intelligence will get you nowhere. The reality is somewhere in between.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  This is the "what about" fallacy or something like that. The article is about meritocracy, which is often overstated. You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
  - happytoexplain 8y ago
    I can't tell which part of this post is getting downvoted, but it rings totally true and relevant to me.
  - darawk 8y ago
    The title of this article is literally "meritocracy doesn't exist". Not "meritocracy is overstated" or "we don't live in a perfect meritocracy".
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      That's because meritocracy is not a synonym for the idea that hard work has any value at all. The article isn't saying what you think it's saying if you read it as "hard work doesn't matter at all and luck is all that gets you anywhere in capitalism".
      - darawk 8y ago
        I did read the article. > Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).
- ddingus 8y ago
  Right where luck is.
  - strictnein 8y ago
    Luck doesn't exist. People take advantage of opportunities, and working hard is one way to be exposed to a greater number of opportunities. What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
    - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
      The post has been heavily downvoted, but I think there is some truth in it: there's no such thing as 100% luck. People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before. There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
    - ta1234567890 8y ago
      > Luck doesn't exist Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
      - threatofrain 8y ago
        The poster may see something worse than luck there; they may see cause. One cannot reroll in life and be reborn as the heir of the Hilton family. Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.
  - prewett 8y ago
    > Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words. I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
    - pteredactyl 8y ago
      I think they perfectly summed up the sadness and terror of modern mainstream leftism. It'll pass
      - dang 8y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially ideological flamebait, to Hacker News? It leads to acrid and predictable discussions that are off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        pteredactyl 8y ago
        I'll try.
    - olefoo 8y ago
      Yes, because everyone who gets into one of our elite institutions gets there on merit and there is absolutely not a predatory aspect to the way the elite networks have arranged society that steals advantage from everyone else. It's just a victim mentality the cost to call out the structural inequities of society that cause so much pain and stress to the unlucky classes. Now hold still while we raise the costs of everything necessary to life while automating your job away. And don't you dare call out your betters for their bad behavior; that's toxic!
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.
  - dictum 8y ago
    > Play the game well enough. An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. (Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
    - aphextron 8y ago
      >An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    Playing the game well enough means A- not B+. I used to think about this in University a lot with the grading system. On the face of it nobody really seems to notice the +/- distinction. There is a more primitive grouping of A/B/C. The difference between being an A grade player and a B grade player is 1 point. If you're 79 points you're B+. If you're 80 points you're A-. But it's a world of difference between being perceived as an A player vs. a B player. By that same token, the effort/reward ratio for striving for A+ is crappy.
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      I just mean be consistent to the full extent of your ability. Don't deliver an unreliable mix of really good and really sloppy work.
- pteredactyl 8y ago
  Thank you I refuse to click that link. What do they suggest? The government decide what station in life we should have?
- PavlikPaja 8y ago
  The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical. Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    We celebrate the winners because it's hard to know how much of winning was chance and how much was skill. There were 57 possible ways of doing something, but the successful person picked the best one. Was their choice fully random, or did they see some specific potential in that option and purposely chose that one to try? What about the choice to try one of the 57 to begin with rather than any of the other infinitely many things they could have done with their time when there was no guarantee any of them would work? There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases. One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it. And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government. So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.
amelius 8y ago
How about believing it can exist, with appropriate changes in fundamental market mechanics?
- rosser 8y ago
  > The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value... They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice. Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
  - asabjorn 8y ago
    This study needs to be replicated before its conclusions are taken seriously, because much of sociology is known to be deciding on a conclusion in line with intersectionality ideology dogma before writing the paper and producing papers with extreme methodology flaws. See the sokal hoax for a recent very clear expose of this academic bankruptcy
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - rosser 8y ago
      I actually already have a copy of the first printing of The Sokal Hoax on my non-fiction bookshelf, thanks. EDIT: I too fail to see its relevance.
      - 8y ago
darawk 8y ago
Pure communism doesn't exist, pure capitalism doesn't exist, pure fascism doesn't exist. Pure ideals of any kind don't exist. Meritocracy exists to varying degrees all over the place, and it's something we should be striving for wherever possible. There are good arguments for temporary exceptions to meritocracy to, say, correct historical inequities, but it's extremely important that those be viewed as temporary roadblocks on the ultimate path towards a society that is as meritocratic as we can make it. Which, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean that those low on 'merit' need to be left to die, we can still provide a good life for even the least economically valuable individuals, but yes, those who are providing the most economic utility to society should get to consume more of that utility. > According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck. This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.
- foolrush 8y ago
  You are predicating your entire premise on merit already existing. The surge in articles recently dig a little deeper. What is merit? Is it merit if, because someone is of faith, they donate food to those without? That person who is receiving the food has more than they did prior, the person who had the food has less. Merit is a metric, and in contemporary culture, it is one used to reinforce ownership and capital. Yet in the above overly-simplistic example, we can see that not all human interactions are, nor should, be overfit into the idea of “merit” nor “ownership of capital or goods.” In the above scenario, “merit” conveniently tries to avoid disclosing its ethical structure. It’s a fallacy. More folks are waking up to this fact[1]. [1] Avoiding the whataboutisms discussing “talent” or “skills” and other bogus terms.
jesuslop 8y ago
What remains, hustling?
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  That's one of my three pieces of advice for young engineers. Learn to fucking hustle. Learn to say no. Learn to know when to leave.
hprotagonist 8y ago
If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. Chesterton, 1908
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  The quote is great (added it into my collection), but what is the cat in the context of this discussion?
gubbrora 8y ago
> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called “grit,” depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing. It is sad that some people are born dumb as a rock but we shouldn't make them math professors out of pity.
- asabjorn 8y ago
  So they are effectively not using the normal definition of meritocracy that people of same capability and will to work hard born in different classes can succeed at somewhat the same degree in intellectual professions, and instead talk about how people that are either unable or unwilling to do the work can’t compete with someone that does. How is this useful or meaningful? Why are we funding research like this using tax dollars, when an exact paper like this has already been written many times and already shown to be meaninlesss?
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  The original quote strikes me as a strawman. To anyone familiar with the science instead of the dogma, it's obvious that genetics have a huge impact on conscientiousness and IQ. But meritocracy, even in its most hyperbolic idealized form, doesn't strive for everyone getting equal outcomes, but rather outcomes in proportion to their ability. There are certain things that we almost axiomatically consider the property of the individual, and their body is generally one of them (the fairly-universal revulsion at the theoretical idea of "redistribution of sex" rests on this assumption that your body is yours in a way that the product of your labor is not). I'm not aware of anyone arguing for meritocracy encompassing all of society: this would suggest that eg the intellectually disabled shouldn't be taken care of if they can't be economically productive. The application is generally much more limited than resource allocation, to things like production: those who are the best at a job should be the ones doing it (and compensated for doing so), for the benefit of society overall, while a separate belief demands allocation of a baseline of resources to anyone who needs them based solely on their inherent worth as a human. This comment isn't interpreted as a full-throated defense of meritocracy as much as a lament that this gross misunderstanding of the concept has so rapidly become dogma among the stupider (and unfortunately, louder) parts of society.
tacon 8y ago
Commentator Alain de Botton explores the darker side of a western ideal: meritocracy. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3200029 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=320002...
ropeladder 8y ago
Obligatory note that the word "meritocracy" was coined by a sociologist in mid-century England as a distopian ideal, distopian because it was used as a bad excuse for privilege and the withholding of social services. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
mreome 8y ago
I can't help feel like including any discussion of the ultra-rich such as Gates as an example when discussing meritocracy confuses the question. That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck, as there is no possible way one person's skill or merit can exceed that of his peers by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude. Basically, that kind of wealth is more like winning a lottery where their skills bought them a ticket. I suppose the question then becomes, could you still say there is a meritocracy if there are outliers who win the lotto? Do you discard those outliers and look at the general population, is the existence of such of outliers counter-evidence to meritocracy, or does the fact that the kind of "lottery" Gates won still required a high level of skill to even play mean it may to some degree support the idea of a meritocracy?
- _nosaj 8y ago
  I once saw a talk given by Gates where he attributed much of his wild success to timing (luck). In the early years of Microsoft there were no real software companies for them to complete with.
  - YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
    IBM could have had (something like) Windows. They famously misunderstood that they commoditized themselves out of the whole-PC market, and the truly big players to remain would be those to achieve mastery in creation of the components of the market. Like Intel and CPUs, or Microsoft and software.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    What kind of historical revisionism is this? Microsoft has always faced competent and well resourced competitors at every step of the way. Apple, IBM for consumer operating systems. Later on NeXTStep and BeOS. UNIX vendors for Windows Server. Lotus, WordPerfect for office suites. Borland, Sun for developer tools. PalmOS, then Nokia, Apple and Google for Windows Phone. Gates is being modest. Microsoft beat these companies again and again, and only partly through over-aggressive tactics. Mostly his competitors just didn't invest in the right things at the right times, or got distracted, or couldn't hire the right talent, or made other strategic mistakes. Gates wasn't perfect either but he was smart enough to make plenty of good decisions, and turn on a dime when he realised he'd made mistakes (e.g. the internet pivot). The idea that Gates isn't a good example of meritocracy is a strange one indeed. I can't help but think this sort of attack on "meritocracy" comes from SJWs who hate the idea that maybe the people at the top look the way they do because that's who deserves to be there!
tomp 8y ago
Equality doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to have it as a goal / ideal.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  As was pointedly observed in Harrison Bergeron, sameness and equal treatment under the law are not the same. To attempt to have the former is folly; to attempt the latter, sanity.
curtis 8y ago
I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer. Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
caprese 8y ago
There are two issues I've identified: 1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing to prove otherwise. 2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in isolation. So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.
your-nanny 8y ago
what this author fails to do is propose an alternative that captures what we like about meritocracy, but avoidsvtgese unintended consequences.
ickwabe 8y ago
"On the Media" podcast this week addresses this as well. Worth a listen. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-meritocracy https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-merit...
lukaa 8y ago
Laws of nature are in every person identical so it can't be both luck and hard work in different people in different amount.You cross street on green light and 160 mile per hour car kill you.Everyone would say bad luck determine that man life.If person get money on lotterry everyone would say good luck determine that man life.But if person get richer every day by medium amount people and end up being rich people say hard work determine that man life.If you accept that hard work determine man life than you must accept that lottery winner get his money through hard work.Otherwise you must accept that person that worked hard just got lucky most of days by medium ammount.Sorry for my english.
alphagrowth 8y ago
Next I will be told free will is an illusion as well.
gweinberg 8y ago
The authors demonstrate meritocracy doesn't exist by defining it out of existence: even if your success could be entirely due to intelligence and hard work, you don't deserve the genes and life experiences that made you intelligent and hard working.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or unrepresentative? Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story. If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name? I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth. How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
Grustaf 8y ago
As already stated, Bill Gates and other billionaires are pretty irrelevant to this question. Nobody really cares what it takes to become a billionaire, almost nobody will become one anyway. What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds. So yes meritocracy most certainly exists.
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  If you forget about the question of why is it that someone's parents are rich, parental socioeconomic status has comparable power in explaining children success as the child's IQ has. Reference paper: "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research", Tarmo Strenze.
- bigj0n 8y ago
  A big problem with critics of inheritance in capitalism is that people don't see family for what it is. If your parents work hard and want to give you opportunity, they are entitled to do so. The meritocracy is applied over generations.
stared 8y ago
I view it more or less that way: log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success. American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S. For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L). People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L). You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends? Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?) For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide "Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432 Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").
- lotyrin 8y ago
  I'm not really sure how else to see it. It's pretty straightforward to show that the simplest possible model is some kind of probability density function with inputs of skill and privilege and a wide distribution and a very long tail due to cumulative effects. Not having various skills will obviously preclude certain outcomes (probably can't buy 86-DOS and produce PC-DOS if you couldn't understand the technology), not having certain privileges will preclude others (can't sell PC-DOS if you aren't in a position to meet with anyone to try) and some outcomes beget further possibilities (unlikely to have grown Microsoft and produced Windows if you hadn't have sold PC-DOS). Luck being the realization of such a probabilistic model into finite outcomes. Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.
Glyptodon 8y ago
I think aspiring to the meritorious (ethical, wise, knowledgeable, dedicated, etc.) being successful seems like it'd be good, rather the problem isn't so much "meritocracy" as it is believing that meritocracy is an existing norm, rather than being more of an aspirational Avalon.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
charliebrownau 8y ago
Just yet ANOTHER person on the LEFT that is Anti :- * Equal Opportunity * merit * treat people as individuals * Hold INDIVIDUALS accountable for their actions etc This is why the LEFT and RIGHT are growing so far apart its so diametric in ways to conduct society, life and others ------------------------------------------------------ * LEFT WING = Global Socialism = Equal Outcome & "Diversity" + Censorship + Open Borders + Victimhood/Group blame + Remove Due Process & Evidence * RIGHT WING = National Democracy = Equal Opportunity + Merit + Free Speech + Proper border control + Individual accountability + Due Process & Evidence
raymondh 8y ago
Multiple social priming studies are cited. This is a warning flag given how replication crisis was most pervasive in that entire field.
amelius 8y ago
What would happen if we'd apply PageRank to the problem? I.e., everybody gives N votes to other people. Then we'd put everything in a big matrix, compute the first eigenvector, and obtain a ranking. And then we'd distribute wealth according to that ranking. Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.
- RugnirViking 8y ago
  Even without SEO, I wouldn't say that the best websites are the top results - they tend to be those most broadly applicable. Which works okay perhaps for a search engine
Proven 8y ago
> even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. The ability to discriminate is one facet of freedom. Awful article in any sense.
joeblow9999 8y ago
No one deserves or merits any success they have achieved. Got it.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Per Webster, Meritocracy: a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement Of course meritocracy exists. If it didn't, I'd be a professional athlete instead of a programmer and I'd make a huge salary. Or maybe I'd be an astronaut, or a brain surgeon. Thankfully, meritocracy exists and allows the truly gifted and hard-working people who excel at those jobs to hold those spots. I think I make a pretty decent coder. But I'd just stink on an NBA court, in brain surgery, and probably in a space shuttle.
_bxg1 8y ago
> As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them. I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.

127 points by pm24601 8y ago

Just as bad for you is believing that hard work and intelligence will get you nowhere. The reality is somewhere in between.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
This is the "what about" fallacy or something like that. The article is about meritocracy, which is often overstated. You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
- happytoexplain 8y ago
  I can't tell which part of this post is getting downvoted, but it rings totally true and relevant to me.
- darawk 8y ago
  The title of this article is literally "meritocracy doesn't exist". Not "meritocracy is overstated" or "we don't live in a perfect meritocracy".
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    That's because meritocracy is not a synonym for the idea that hard work has any value at all. The article isn't saying what you think it's saying if you read it as "hard work doesn't matter at all and luck is all that gets you anywhere in capitalism".
    - darawk 8y ago
      I did read the article. > Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).
ddingus 8y ago
Right where luck is.
- strictnein 8y ago
  Luck doesn't exist. People take advantage of opportunities, and working hard is one way to be exposed to a greater number of opportunities. What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    The post has been heavily downvoted, but I think there is some truth in it: there's no such thing as 100% luck. People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before. There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
  - ta1234567890 8y ago
    > Luck doesn't exist Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      The poster may see something worse than luck there; they may see cause. One cannot reroll in life and be reborn as the heir of the Hilton family. Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
Gibbon1 8y ago
You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.
- prewett 8y ago
  > Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words. I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
  - pteredactyl 8y ago
    I think they perfectly summed up the sadness and terror of modern mainstream leftism. It'll pass
    - dang 8y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially ideological flamebait, to Hacker News? It leads to acrid and predictable discussions that are off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - pteredactyl 8y ago
        I'll try.
  - olefoo 8y ago
    Yes, because everyone who gets into one of our elite institutions gets there on merit and there is absolutely not a predatory aspect to the way the elite networks have arranged society that steals advantage from everyone else. It's just a victim mentality the cost to call out the structural inequities of society that cause so much pain and stress to the unlucky classes. Now hold still while we raise the costs of everything necessary to life while automating your job away. And don't you dare call out your betters for their bad behavior; that's toxic!
Waterluvian 8y ago
I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.
- dictum 8y ago
  > Play the game well enough. An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. (Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Playing the game well enough means A- not B+. I used to think about this in University a lot with the grading system. On the face of it nobody really seems to notice the +/- distinction. There is a more primitive grouping of A/B/C. The difference between being an A grade player and a B grade player is 1 point. If you're 79 points you're B+. If you're 80 points you're A-. But it's a world of difference between being perceived as an A player vs. a B player. By that same token, the effort/reward ratio for striving for A+ is crappy.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I just mean be consistent to the full extent of your ability. Don't deliver an unreliable mix of really good and really sloppy work.
pteredactyl 8y ago
Thank you I refuse to click that link. What do they suggest? The government decide what station in life we should have?
PavlikPaja 8y ago
The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical. Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  We celebrate the winners because it's hard to know how much of winning was chance and how much was skill. There were 57 possible ways of doing something, but the successful person picked the best one. Was their choice fully random, or did they see some specific potential in that option and purposely chose that one to try? What about the choice to try one of the 57 to begin with rather than any of the other infinitely many things they could have done with their time when there was no guarantee any of them would work? There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases. One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it. And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government. So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.

amelius 8y ago

How about believing it can exist, with appropriate changes in fundamental market mechanics?

rosser 8y ago
> The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value... They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice. Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
- asabjorn 8y ago
  This study needs to be replicated before its conclusions are taken seriously, because much of sociology is known to be deciding on a conclusion in line with intersectionality ideology dogma before writing the paper and producing papers with extreme methodology flaws. See the sokal hoax for a recent very clear expose of this academic bankruptcy
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - rosser 8y ago
    I actually already have a copy of the first printing of The Sokal Hoax on my non-fiction bookshelf, thanks. EDIT: I too fail to see its relevance.
    - 8y ago

darawk 8y ago

Pure communism doesn't exist, pure capitalism doesn't exist, pure fascism doesn't exist. Pure ideals of any kind don't exist. Meritocracy exists to varying degrees all over the place, and it's something we should be striving for wherever possible. There are good arguments for temporary exceptions to meritocracy to, say, correct historical inequities, but it's extremely important that those be viewed as temporary roadblocks on the ultimate path towards a society that is as meritocratic as we can make it. Which, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean that those low on 'merit' need to be left to die, we can still provide a good life for even the least economically valuable individuals, but yes, those who are providing the most economic utility to society should get to consume more of that utility. > According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck. This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.

foolrush 8y ago
You are predicating your entire premise on merit already existing. The surge in articles recently dig a little deeper. What is merit? Is it merit if, because someone is of faith, they donate food to those without? That person who is receiving the food has more than they did prior, the person who had the food has less. Merit is a metric, and in contemporary culture, it is one used to reinforce ownership and capital. Yet in the above overly-simplistic example, we can see that not all human interactions are, nor should, be overfit into the idea of “merit” nor “ownership of capital or goods.” In the above scenario, “merit” conveniently tries to avoid disclosing its ethical structure. It’s a fallacy. More folks are waking up to this fact[1]. [1] Avoiding the whataboutisms discussing “talent” or “skills” and other bogus terms.

jesuslop 8y ago

What remains, hustling?

Gibbon1 8y ago
That's one of my three pieces of advice for young engineers. Learn to fucking hustle. Learn to say no. Learn to know when to leave.

hprotagonist 8y ago

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat. Chesterton, 1908

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
The quote is great (added it into my collection), but what is the cat in the context of this discussion?

gubbrora 8y ago

> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called “grit,” depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing. It is sad that some people are born dumb as a rock but we shouldn't make them math professors out of pity.

asabjorn 8y ago
So they are effectively not using the normal definition of meritocracy that people of same capability and will to work hard born in different classes can succeed at somewhat the same degree in intellectual professions, and instead talk about how people that are either unable or unwilling to do the work can’t compete with someone that does. How is this useful or meaningful? Why are we funding research like this using tax dollars, when an exact paper like this has already been written many times and already shown to be meaninlesss?
wutbrodo 8y ago
The original quote strikes me as a strawman. To anyone familiar with the science instead of the dogma, it's obvious that genetics have a huge impact on conscientiousness and IQ. But meritocracy, even in its most hyperbolic idealized form, doesn't strive for everyone getting equal outcomes, but rather outcomes in proportion to their ability. There are certain things that we almost axiomatically consider the property of the individual, and their body is generally one of them (the fairly-universal revulsion at the theoretical idea of "redistribution of sex" rests on this assumption that your body is yours in a way that the product of your labor is not). I'm not aware of anyone arguing for meritocracy encompassing all of society: this would suggest that eg the intellectually disabled shouldn't be taken care of if they can't be economically productive. The application is generally much more limited than resource allocation, to things like production: those who are the best at a job should be the ones doing it (and compensated for doing so), for the benefit of society overall, while a separate belief demands allocation of a baseline of resources to anyone who needs them based solely on their inherent worth as a human. This comment isn't interpreted as a full-throated defense of meritocracy as much as a lament that this gross misunderstanding of the concept has so rapidly become dogma among the stupider (and unfortunately, louder) parts of society.

tacon 8y ago

Commentator Alain de Botton explores the darker side of a western ideal: meritocracy. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3200029 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=320002...

ropeladder 8y ago

Obligatory note that the word "meritocracy" was coined by a sociologist in mid-century England as a distopian ideal, distopian because it was used as a bad excuse for privilege and the withholding of social services. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

mreome 8y ago

I can't help feel like including any discussion of the ultra-rich such as Gates as an example when discussing meritocracy confuses the question. That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck, as there is no possible way one person's skill or merit can exceed that of his peers by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude. Basically, that kind of wealth is more like winning a lottery where their skills bought them a ticket. I suppose the question then becomes, could you still say there is a meritocracy if there are outliers who win the lotto? Do you discard those outliers and look at the general population, is the existence of such of outliers counter-evidence to meritocracy, or does the fact that the kind of "lottery" Gates won still required a high level of skill to even play mean it may to some degree support the idea of a meritocracy?

_nosaj 8y ago
I once saw a talk given by Gates where he attributed much of his wild success to timing (luck). In the early years of Microsoft there were no real software companies for them to complete with.
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  IBM could have had (something like) Windows. They famously misunderstood that they commoditized themselves out of the whole-PC market, and the truly big players to remain would be those to achieve mastery in creation of the components of the market. Like Intel and CPUs, or Microsoft and software.
- repolfx 8y ago
  What kind of historical revisionism is this? Microsoft has always faced competent and well resourced competitors at every step of the way. Apple, IBM for consumer operating systems. Later on NeXTStep and BeOS. UNIX vendors for Windows Server. Lotus, WordPerfect for office suites. Borland, Sun for developer tools. PalmOS, then Nokia, Apple and Google for Windows Phone. Gates is being modest. Microsoft beat these companies again and again, and only partly through over-aggressive tactics. Mostly his competitors just didn't invest in the right things at the right times, or got distracted, or couldn't hire the right talent, or made other strategic mistakes. Gates wasn't perfect either but he was smart enough to make plenty of good decisions, and turn on a dime when he realised he'd made mistakes (e.g. the internet pivot). The idea that Gates isn't a good example of meritocracy is a strange one indeed. I can't help but think this sort of attack on "meritocracy" comes from SJWs who hate the idea that maybe the people at the top look the way they do because that's who deserves to be there!

tomp 8y ago

Equality doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to have it as a goal / ideal.

hprotagonist 8y ago
As was pointedly observed in Harrison Bergeron, sameness and equal treatment under the law are not the same. To attempt to have the former is folly; to attempt the latter, sanity.

curtis 8y ago

I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer. Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.

caprese 8y ago

There are two issues I've identified: 1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing to prove otherwise. 2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in isolation. So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.

your-nanny 8y ago

what this author fails to do is propose an alternative that captures what we like about meritocracy, but avoidsvtgese unintended consequences.

ickwabe 8y ago

"On the Media" podcast this week addresses this as well. Worth a listen. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-meritocracy https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-merit...

lukaa 8y ago

Laws of nature are in every person identical so it can't be both luck and hard work in different people in different amount.You cross street on green light and 160 mile per hour car kill you.Everyone would say bad luck determine that man life.If person get money on lotterry everyone would say good luck determine that man life.But if person get richer every day by medium amount people and end up being rich people say hard work determine that man life.If you accept that hard work determine man life than you must accept that lottery winner get his money through hard work.Otherwise you must accept that person that worked hard just got lucky most of days by medium ammount.Sorry for my english.

alphagrowth 8y ago

Next I will be told free will is an illusion as well.

gweinberg 8y ago

The authors demonstrate meritocracy doesn't exist by defining it out of existence: even if your success could be entirely due to intelligence and hard work, you don't deserve the genes and life experiences that made you intelligent and hard working.

Barrin92 8y ago
so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or unrepresentative? Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story. If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name? I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth. How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?

Grustaf 8y ago

As already stated, Bill Gates and other billionaires are pretty irrelevant to this question. Nobody really cares what it takes to become a billionaire, almost nobody will become one anyway. What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds. So yes meritocracy most certainly exists.

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
If you forget about the question of why is it that someone's parents are rich, parental socioeconomic status has comparable power in explaining children success as the child's IQ has. Reference paper: "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research", Tarmo Strenze.
bigj0n 8y ago
A big problem with critics of inheritance in capitalism is that people don't see family for what it is. If your parents work hard and want to give you opportunity, they are entitled to do so. The meritocracy is applied over generations.

stared 8y ago

I view it more or less that way: log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success. American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S. For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L). People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L). You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends? Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?) For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide "Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432 Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").

lotyrin 8y ago
I'm not really sure how else to see it. It's pretty straightforward to show that the simplest possible model is some kind of probability density function with inputs of skill and privilege and a wide distribution and a very long tail due to cumulative effects. Not having various skills will obviously preclude certain outcomes (probably can't buy 86-DOS and produce PC-DOS if you couldn't understand the technology), not having certain privileges will preclude others (can't sell PC-DOS if you aren't in a position to meet with anyone to try) and some outcomes beget further possibilities (unlikely to have grown Microsoft and produced Windows if you hadn't have sold PC-DOS). Luck being the realization of such a probabilistic model into finite outcomes. Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.

Glyptodon 8y ago

I think aspiring to the meritorious (ethical, wise, knowledgeable, dedicated, etc.) being successful seems like it'd be good, rather the problem isn't so much "meritocracy" as it is believing that meritocracy is an existing norm, rather than being more of an aspirational Avalon.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

charliebrownau 8y ago

Just yet ANOTHER person on the LEFT that is Anti :- * Equal Opportunity * merit * treat people as individuals * Hold INDIVIDUALS accountable for their actions etc This is why the LEFT and RIGHT are growing so far apart its so diametric in ways to conduct society, life and others ------------------------------------------------------ * LEFT WING = Global Socialism = Equal Outcome & "Diversity" + Censorship + Open Borders + Victimhood/Group blame + Remove Due Process & Evidence * RIGHT WING = National Democracy = Equal Opportunity + Merit + Free Speech + Proper border control + Individual accountability + Due Process & Evidence

raymondh 8y ago

Multiple social priming studies are cited. This is a warning flag given how replication crisis was most pervasive in that entire field.

amelius 8y ago

What would happen if we'd apply PageRank to the problem? I.e., everybody gives N votes to other people. Then we'd put everything in a big matrix, compute the first eigenvector, and obtain a ranking. And then we'd distribute wealth according to that ranking. Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.

RugnirViking 8y ago
Even without SEO, I wouldn't say that the best websites are the top results - they tend to be those most broadly applicable. Which works okay perhaps for a search engine

Proven 8y ago

> even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. The ability to discriminate is one facet of freedom. Awful article in any sense.

joeblow9999 8y ago

No one deserves or merits any success they have achieved. Got it.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Per Webster, Meritocracy: a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement Of course meritocracy exists. If it didn't, I'd be a professional athlete instead of a programmer and I'd make a huge salary. Or maybe I'd be an astronaut, or a brain surgeon. Thankfully, meritocracy exists and allows the truly gifted and hard-working people who excel at those jobs to hold those spots. I think I make a pretty decent coder. But I'd just stink on an NBA court, in brain surgery, and probably in a space shuttle.

_bxg1 8y ago

> As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them. I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.