13 ms·

The problem isn't the 'merit' it's the 'ocracy' (2019)

99 points by exolymph 6y ago

collegeburner 6y ago
I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on objective criteria. Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". This is what allows them to frame their classes to fit what they want on a brochure. I had a asian friend who took seven AP classes in one year and was a valedictorian who was rejected from Harvard. When I toured, the guide was a farm girl from rural Oregon with precisely zero credentials (according to her) who said she applied on a lark to frame the rejection letter. Ivies are a terrible example because they don't even pretend to be objective any more. The reality is there's a lot outside the bubbles of ivy league institutions and silicon valley, and this author clearly writes from inside them. I've seen meritocracy almost everywhere I go, even though I'm not from the sort of background the author described. I got hired at my current job because I was the best person for it, though it was un-conventional. I earned scholarships through merit, not because of a particular background. The list goes on. There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance. > There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs. I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...
- kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
  > Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses". Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses". This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process. It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for. The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it. > The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system. The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire. You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine. Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.) How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority. As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country. This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power. I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.
  - wincy 6y ago
    I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.
    - vonmoltke 6y ago
      > George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court She went to Southern Methodist University, not an Ivy but also far from a community college. Also, in the South SMU Law holds as much weight as Ivy Law as far as credentials go.
- wpietri 6y ago
  > don't even pretend to be objective any more Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.
  - ZeroGravitas 6y ago
    But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score? Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time. I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric. Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is. Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept. I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.
zajd 6y ago
Never forget that Meritocracy the term was created to mock the idea of it even being possible, now it's become a mainstream accepted thought. Usually the tragedy comes before the farce, I guess this time is different.
- exolymph 6y ago
  Dunno why this comment started dead, so I vouched it.
  - srl 6y ago
    Comments typically start as dead because the poster is "shadowbanned", for some string of particularly unconstructive comments in the past. (I don't know if enough vouches can cause a user to be un-banned.)
ummonk 6y ago
“The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world. Even with legacy admissions and related scandals, the Ivy League has largely been successful in this. ... Has there ever been a higher concentration of raw intelligence and studious industry than exists right now in America's top 15 universities (and the few industries that selectively pull from them)?“ Ehh, the universities with the best concentration of talent are not the Ivies but MIT and Caltech.
- kthxbye123 6y ago
  Part of the problem is "the ability to do abstract symbolic manipulation" becomes conflated with "talent" which then becomes conflated with "human worth"...
  - exolymph 6y ago
    Intelligence does constitute talent to a large degree. Just not virtue.
- analyst74 6y ago
  > The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world If intelligence can be measured, whether using IQ or SAT scores, I don't think this is true. If intelligence cannot be measured, then this is just some grandiose perception that ivy schools have been successful at projecting.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    My money's on the latter. A familiar example for me is the "Certified Scrum Master" racket. The only actual requirement for those was the ability to keep breathing throughout a short course. But they undeniably had an economic benefit for the holders, in that it made them more hireable by companies that needed some sort of blessing for their top-town control apparatus.
    - 6y ago
fxtentacle 6y ago
TLDR: In a Meritocracy, the "most talented" rule over everyone else. But talented != good person. In other words, it may be the dictatorship of intelligent sociopaths. But go read the article. It's easy to follow along, yet argues well.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > talented != good person But we don't have any better measure of a "good person" than we do a talented one (outside of specific talents like playing piano or juggling chainsaws). We do have an imperfect way to measure intelligence, via performance on written tests and assignments.
  - scollet 6y ago
    Why are these talents and their adjacents excluded? > playing piano or juggling chainsaws
    - mcguire 6y ago
      I would certainly vote for the person who can play the piano while juggling chainsaws for King of Earth.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    We don't have a better measure likely due to lack of trying.
friendlybus 6y ago
Too many black and whites statements left to stand. I don't see 'class' in America as being the saving grace of the workers.
carapace 6y ago
That was really weird. TL;DR: "If smart people govern they will do it badly." I don't think I get it.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  We have created a system that allows ivy graduates to truly believe they are the best humanity has to offer and therefore know what's best for everyone. Yet most of these graduates were raised in sheltered environments and therefore don't understand the thought process of the average person. Not only does this make it hard for them to solve the problems of average people, it also makes them less likely to care about those problems. While everyone chosen to be in the meritocratic upper class is patting themselves on the back for growing the stock market the vast majority of people aren't seeing the gains from that growth.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Thank you! Thank you very much. :-)
  - alexashka 6y ago
    I didn't create this system, did you? :) I was born into it. This subtle self-blaming via alignment with group-identity over self-identity is a dirty mind-virus. Ivy league kids were born into a system of their parents pushing them to go these schools and think a specific way. Solving the problems of average people is an impossible task, because an average person is a selfish moron that is largely interested in winning zero-sum games at the expense of those around them. This is manifested as wanting to get laid among ages 15-30, wanting to make money, wanting power/fame. At ages 30-death it is manifested as 'a better future for my children' which is always measured up against other children, again a zero sum game. How do you solve a zero-sum problem so that everyone wins? The answer is, it is impossible. Sorry to burst that 'rich evil folks are the problem' bubble - the problem is much deeper - most people are morons who do what's best for them, without much thought for what's best for others. This worked in small tribes because the feedback mechanisms for being a selfish asshole were almost immediate and as a result, selfish desire to not get your ass beat by the tribe forced out obvious bad behaviour and aligned everyone to a common goal. Now that we live in big cities - the feedback mechanism is broken - we're living among Gordon Geckos of the world. Only non-idiots like me who actually think about the big picture can even see the problem, the rest will forever be stuck playing zero-sum games without knowing it, until people like me either re-educate them, implant their brains to make them less idiotic, etc, or make them go extinct :)
troughway 6y ago
Very good example of Facts vs. Truth, especially in the quote from Yang's book.
evdev 6y ago
There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand. The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status. This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs. We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.
- rhizome 6y ago
  Do you mean a systematic category error, that people are "ranked" or promoted according to criteria that is irrelevant to the purpose of the ranking (e.g. armwrestling is not politics)?
- jlawson 6y ago
  Think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of needs-like thing. You take care of the lower tiers before worrying about the upper ones. The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well. The upper tier is 'justice'. Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis. Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all. And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.
blobbers 6y ago
This article has inspired me to read Andrew Yang's book. As a silicon valley person, I have become part of this bubble. A lot of the things he said apply to me. I've recently tried to understand what it looks like to leave Silicon Valley, but it is certainly not a simple thing to do. To somehow exit this so-called meritocracy and move to a place that is more focused on a holacracy (not in the Zappos way). I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is. That said, I don't know how I can fit into that society; I don't know how I can move there. I don't even know where there is.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is. Having worked in Silicon Valley for a few decades, that's exactly where I live. Maybe you just need to upgrade your social circle?
- vzidex 6y ago
  I've often felt like I'm somewhere in between worlds - I'm studying at the "top" university in my country, working at a Fortune 500, etc., and on the other hand I know how to use a chainsaw, have done my fair share of home renovation, own a few guns, and hit the range on weekends. There is pretty much any activity or community that doesn't exist within your sphere. If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies". Pick an activity or community that you don't see represented in your sphere, and that's probably what you're looking for. As an aside: my girlfriend and close friends have commented that I speak differently when around, e.g., old boomers at the range. You can use whether you feel like you "fit in" as a litmus test, and if you don't fit in, rest assured you will in due time. In my experience, people outside of "meritocratic" (read: finance, tech, law, etc.) bubbles are very kind and welcoming.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    > If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies" Hahaha. I can spot a "tech worker" (not even just developer—manager, sales, whatever) hiker at half a kilometer (yeah there are plenty I don't spot, but there's definitely a "look" that exists in clothing and affect and is fairly common and non-tech-workers do not have it). If you tasked me with finding as many people as I could with rock climbing gym memberships but I wasn't allowed to go to such a gym to do it, I'd hit the coffee shops in our "startupy" district around lunch time on a weekday (well, not right now, but you get the idea). But I've been told I'm being ridiculous and that these activities don't have a class component to them because quite a few participants aren't involved in software companies or software development. Well yeah, but something doesn't have to be absolute to be a noticeable trend. Lacrosse, crew, skiing, squash—not technically limited to a certain social class but I bet you'd find some class-related trends among their participants, especially people who do or have done two or more of those activities with any frequency. We like what we like in no small part they're the "right" things to like, among "our" people.
praptak 6y ago
The argument from surgeon is so bad that it's borderline eristic. Surgeon has a very clearly defined objective while politics is the total opposite. Politics is about deciding what to optimize for - "what should be" which just cannot be "meritocratically" derived from "what is". If somebody claims they have some special "merit" that makes them fit for this kind of decisions, you should ask them to walk on water or something.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  Politics is also about deciding how to optimize for it. I don't know if it's a good idea that those are the same job.
  - gizmo686 6y ago
    In theory, they are not the same job. The actual decision making is supposed to be deferred to civil servants, who are (in theory) hired or appointed based on their technical qualifications.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Except that politics involves plenty of decision making. And the buck has to stop somewhere. So I'm not sure that there's a real distinction.
commandlinefan 6y ago
The term "meritocracy", like the term "capitalism", was originally coined strictly as a means of criticizing the concept, yet the people doing the criticism don't really say that meritocracy is necessarily bad, just that they don't think we really have one. I have yet to see any suggestions on what to replace the current system with, though. Usually when somebody criticized meritocracy, they suggest stratifying everybody into a few broad categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and then it seems to be implied that the meritocracy competition occurs within those categories.
juped 6y ago
"Meritocracy" always works backwards in practice - the "crats" are anointed as being the ones with "merit". Credentialism is just the most obvious expression of this - e.g., you get a Harvard degree mostly by being in the social class that goes to Harvard - but it happens at every level in every way, and nearly everything which purports to assess merit in fact launders social class. This hits me, personally, hard, because my tribe is the thoughtful, the curious, the problem-solvers, &c., and so many such people take the stated aims of the prestige launderers at face value, only to be disappointed when being smart and dedicated means nothing in reality. To plagiarize a bit, I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by what amounts to a lack of class consciousness combined with the unforgivable sin of hoping that something in the world is fair.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The problem is the "meritocracy" is thinly disguised "aristocracy." There's some minor inward movement towards the core for certain kinds of ruthlessly narcissistic clever types. But you're never going to be president of the US without significant aristocratic money backing you, no matter how good your SATs are. The deeper problem is you can't define "merit" unless you know what your goals are as a culture. What are the long-term goals of the US? How about the planet as a whole? It's fairly obvious that the US is caught up in a surreal game called "Make and keep as much money as possible." But what happens outside of that? Does anyone have a long-term plan? If you don't know where you're going, how are you supposed to pick the right people to help you get there?
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alexashka 6y ago
This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about meritocracy from it. There is an ancient tale about a dozen blind met each touching parts of an elephant and describing it, some say elephants are long like a tube, others round like a ball, etc... If you don't have a big picture view, it is best to be aware of it :) Meritocracy is just a politicized term for 'competence'. We want competent people running things, that's obvious. What we also want is for people who were competent but no longer are, to be replaceable - that's the real issue. If idiots from ivy league schools who cheated their way through school or were only good at taking tests got found out afterwards, attendance wouldn't be so hotly contested. This works in sports - the minute LeBron can't play well, he will be replaced by somebody else who can and it doesn't matter that he was the best player of his generation. This doesn't work in politics and many other fields because the people evaluating their competence are largely selfish idiots. If it is in your selfish interest to promote less competent people some of the time and you value your selfish interest above most things - we have a problem. If it were a matter of intelligent people having trouble decoding what competence meant in various fields, it is something we could improve upon as time goes on as we get better at science. Our current problems, are problems of idiots being capable of attaining decision-making power (becoming wealthy, becoming high ranking officials in government, business, academia) and holding on to it, regardless of their competence over time. This is what people are usually mad about - they call it being a parasite, being the 1%, being a wasp, etc and they are right, while also being too dumb to know what to do about it :) People want to work hard to give their kids a better future, while not realizing that other people wanting their kids and their friends to have a better future, is the same mechanism that leads to their kids' future being shitty! People are so dumb - they think they're upset about corruption/inequality/whatever while the vast majority of them are simply wishing the power dynamics were in their favor :) If you want competence over time, you need to abandon the idea of anyone having power over others regardless of their competence level. Georgism [0] is an economic movement that was aware of this problem in regards to land ownership - I'd go on to say it has to cut across all spheres of life - anyone getting to hold on to power regardless of their competence, is something most should agree upon, is a mistake. In order for most to agree upon this - they'd need to not be idiots. It always boils down to too many idiots folks :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
mcguire 6y ago
"The remarkable thing about these numbers (and Yang provides lots of them) is that four of the six industries (consulting, law, finance, and academia) are easily described as parasitic or predatory, secondary adornments to the actual business of human activity on the Earth." One might suggest that one of these things is not like the others. (One might also suggest that a glance at the right column would be one reason why.)
DangitBobby 6y ago
Even this article misses the root injustice of meritocracy. Meritocracy is just another way to grant those born with advantages yet more advantages. The most fortunate people in a meritocracy are those born smarter and with greater capacity to learn, or those born into an environment to foster a mental framework that lends itself to success. Meritocracy rewards the fortunate with wealth and success just as much as a system that provides power by default to those born into wealth or beauty (though arguably the recipients of the benefit are more diffuse). The real difference on which to select such a system is not a matter of justice then, it's a matter of which one provides better outcomes. Here, I agree with the article. The merits we select for in our version of "Meritocracy" are a poor proxy measurement for a measured and just leader.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Meritocracy does not "reward" wealth, beauty or other social advantages (except to the extent that humans will tend to reward those things under any social arrangement whatsoever); it rewards people who make consequential decisions, and are thereby held responsible for those choices. The ideal is that there has to be some sort of flip side to every "reward", so that the arrangement is socially beneficial to all parties.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    Again, many are born with inherent advantages such as innate intelligence, health, mental stability, and an environment that fosters success. The merit they are capable of developing is made possible by a combination of these things. That being the case, it is inevitable that Meritocracy rewards the fortunate for being fortunate. The difference between Meritocracy and other frameworks to select the powerful is that the people born with the advantages listed above tend to win instead of simply those born into wealth/power/beauty/etc. (Though those with wealth/power/beauty/etc. do actually tend to win anyway because this provides them ways to develop merit or proxies for merit or ways to circumvent merit). There is simply no framework that does not provide someone with certain characteristics systematic advantages to gaining power.
jariel 6y ago
"Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born." Yes this. I remember when nerds were outcasts, that really colours the situation. Maybe there's a dark kind of 'fairness' in that! No more! The cool, good looking popular kids now get the best grades! That's the most 'unfair' thing I can imagine! And this: " Our specialty is light-commitment benevolence. We will do something to help but not enough to hurt us or threaten our own standing. We know better than to do that...." This is brilliant.
Booktrope 6y ago
The main point about -ocracy is a really good one, but the article makes so many blanket statements without any real evidence that seem way off base. The Ivy League schools (and quite a few other liberal arts colleges that should be included in this argument) historically were playgrounds for the rich, with academics being one of the games. No, Texas elite weren't shooting for Baylor (unless they were of a particular religious stripe), the super-elites in Texas were shooting for the big Ivy's, and next category was Rice. (Or Vanderbilt in Tennessee, etc.) Stanford has been an important elite institution in the US for a long time. Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad. I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's". Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people. I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better." There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?
6510 6y ago
The problem is the complete lack of goals. (The meaning of life if you like) Thus far people with this merit did a wonderful job subjugating the rest of humanity to their will. (I'm no doubt guilty for a wild share of this.) The best part is where I convince you that I did you a favor! The challenge of it is in trying not to laugh. So yeah, I have merit and you do not. It means you should trade everything you own and your labor for these mirrors and glass beads. You wont know why but you'll thank me later. You will just have to trust me. I mean, don't I look sophisticated with all this stuff I've traded for the beads from other folk? How could you think they all made the wrong choice? Look how many of them are working in my field? Why do all of the other animals have such fun and interesting lives without any of those intellectuals? If people are poor enough there are no rent collectors. Dogs can still be fooled into employment. Cats are doing the exact opposite! With luck you can convince them not to do things. I conclude cats have more merit than people. Now go for the down-vote button!

99 points by exolymph 6y ago

I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on objective criteria. Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". This is what allows them to frame their classes to fit what they want on a brochure. I had a asian friend who took seven AP classes in one year and was a valedictorian who was rejected from Harvard. When I toured, the guide was a farm girl from rural Oregon with precisely zero credentials (according to her) who said she applied on a lark to frame the rejection letter. Ivies are a terrible example because they don't even pretend to be objective any more. The reality is there's a lot outside the bubbles of ivy league institutions and silicon valley, and this author clearly writes from inside them. I've seen meritocracy almost everywhere I go, even though I'm not from the sort of background the author described. I got hired at my current job because I was the best person for it, though it was un-conventional. I earned scholarships through merit, not because of a particular background. The list goes on. There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.

exolymph 6y ago
Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance. > There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs. I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses". Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses". This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process. It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for. The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it. > The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system. The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire. You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.
- deleted 6y ago
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AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine. Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.) How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority. As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country. This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power. I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.
- wincy 6y ago
  I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    > George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court She went to Southern Methodist University, not an Ivy but also far from a community college. Also, in the South SMU Law holds as much weight as Ivy Law as far as credentials go.
wpietri 6y ago
> don't even pretend to be objective any more Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.
0d9eooo 6y ago
The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score? Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time. I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric. Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is. Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept. I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.

zajd 6y ago

Never forget that Meritocracy the term was created to mock the idea of it even being possible, now it's become a mainstream accepted thought. Usually the tragedy comes before the farce, I guess this time is different.

exolymph 6y ago
Dunno why this comment started dead, so I vouched it.
- srl 6y ago
  Comments typically start as dead because the poster is "shadowbanned", for some string of particularly unconstructive comments in the past. (I don't know if enough vouches can cause a user to be un-banned.)

ummonk 6y ago

“The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world. Even with legacy admissions and related scandals, the Ivy League has largely been successful in this. ... Has there ever been a higher concentration of raw intelligence and studious industry than exists right now in America's top 15 universities (and the few industries that selectively pull from them)?“ Ehh, the universities with the best concentration of talent are not the Ivies but MIT and Caltech.

kthxbye123 6y ago
Part of the problem is "the ability to do abstract symbolic manipulation" becomes conflated with "talent" which then becomes conflated with "human worth"...
- exolymph 6y ago
  Intelligence does constitute talent to a large degree. Just not virtue.
analyst74 6y ago
> The Ivy League admissions system is designed to select the most intelligent and studious students in the world If intelligence can be measured, whether using IQ or SAT scores, I don't think this is true. If intelligence cannot be measured, then this is just some grandiose perception that ivy schools have been successful at projecting.
- wpietri 6y ago
  My money's on the latter. A familiar example for me is the "Certified Scrum Master" racket. The only actual requirement for those was the ability to keep breathing throughout a short course. But they undeniably had an economic benefit for the holders, in that it made them more hireable by companies that needed some sort of blessing for their top-town control apparatus.
  - 6y ago

fxtentacle 6y ago

TLDR: In a Meritocracy, the "most talented" rule over everyone else. But talented != good person. In other words, it may be the dictatorship of intelligent sociopaths. But go read the article. It's easy to follow along, yet argues well.

commandlinefan 6y ago
> talented != good person But we don't have any better measure of a "good person" than we do a talented one (outside of specific talents like playing piano or juggling chainsaws). We do have an imperfect way to measure intelligence, via performance on written tests and assignments.
- scollet 6y ago
  Why are these talents and their adjacents excluded? > playing piano or juggling chainsaws
  - mcguire 6y ago
    I would certainly vote for the person who can play the piano while juggling chainsaws for King of Earth.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  We don't have a better measure likely due to lack of trying.

friendlybus 6y ago

Too many black and whites statements left to stand. I don't see 'class' in America as being the saving grace of the workers.

carapace 6y ago

That was really weird. TL;DR: "If smart people govern they will do it badly." I don't think I get it.

colinmhayes 6y ago
We have created a system that allows ivy graduates to truly believe they are the best humanity has to offer and therefore know what's best for everyone. Yet most of these graduates were raised in sheltered environments and therefore don't understand the thought process of the average person. Not only does this make it hard for them to solve the problems of average people, it also makes them less likely to care about those problems. While everyone chosen to be in the meritocratic upper class is patting themselves on the back for growing the stock market the vast majority of people aren't seeing the gains from that growth.
- carapace 6y ago
  Thank you! Thank you very much. :-)
- alexashka 6y ago
  I didn't create this system, did you? :) I was born into it. This subtle self-blaming via alignment with group-identity over self-identity is a dirty mind-virus. Ivy league kids were born into a system of their parents pushing them to go these schools and think a specific way. Solving the problems of average people is an impossible task, because an average person is a selfish moron that is largely interested in winning zero-sum games at the expense of those around them. This is manifested as wanting to get laid among ages 15-30, wanting to make money, wanting power/fame. At ages 30-death it is manifested as 'a better future for my children' which is always measured up against other children, again a zero sum game. How do you solve a zero-sum problem so that everyone wins? The answer is, it is impossible. Sorry to burst that 'rich evil folks are the problem' bubble - the problem is much deeper - most people are morons who do what's best for them, without much thought for what's best for others. This worked in small tribes because the feedback mechanisms for being a selfish asshole were almost immediate and as a result, selfish desire to not get your ass beat by the tribe forced out obvious bad behaviour and aligned everyone to a common goal. Now that we live in big cities - the feedback mechanism is broken - we're living among Gordon Geckos of the world. Only non-idiots like me who actually think about the big picture can even see the problem, the rest will forever be stuck playing zero-sum games without knowing it, until people like me either re-educate them, implant their brains to make them less idiotic, etc, or make them go extinct :)

troughway 6y ago

Very good example of Facts vs. Truth, especially in the quote from Yang's book.

evdev 6y ago

There is a sleight-of-hand in "meritocracy" evinced by the Scott Alexander quote--we ask "who should do surgery, the best surgeon or the worst?" and agree that surgeons should be chosen by "merit", or better yet, by their instrumental value to the task at hand. The trick comes in when we switch without acknowledgement to describing the system for the distribution of wealth and status. This kind of "meritocracy" is more like if we held an arm-wrestling tournament, declared the victor to be our new feudal lord, the next 6 runners up to be knights, and everyone else to be peasants. Our position in this new society was based on "merit", but that can't necessarily justify the difference between nobles and serfs. We could even re-run the tournament every year. We could make sure no child gets extra time in the weight-room because of her noble parents. We could decide that arm-wrestling is stupid and brutish and so, in a glorious revolution, switch to speed chess. None of it would address the question of justice.

rhizome 6y ago
Do you mean a systematic category error, that people are "ranked" or promoted according to criteria that is irrelevant to the purpose of the ranking (e.g. armwrestling is not politics)?
jlawson 6y ago
Think of it as a Maslow's hierarchy of needs-like thing. You take care of the lower tiers before worrying about the upper ones. The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well. The upper tier is 'justice'. Meritocracy (and related concepts like capitalism) simply isn't about pursuing justice or equality or any of these higher-tier concepts. It's just a way to satisfy those lower-tier requirements - the only way that really works. To criticize it on the basis of justice is simply the wrong level of analysis. Meritocracy is a foundation that satisfies the lower tiers. Once that is handled, and upon that basis, you then worry about how to pursue the upper tiers using the resources that meritocracy has provided. But that doesn't mean you jump off your foundation to do it, down into the pits of scarcity and hunger - that would make no sense at all. And this is how all functional societies work - a meritocratic/capitalist engine of production, paired with other social structures (redistribution, military) to handle other social needs. Right tool for the job.

blobbers 6y ago

This article has inspired me to read Andrew Yang's book. As a silicon valley person, I have become part of this bubble. A lot of the things he said apply to me. I've recently tried to understand what it looks like to leave Silicon Valley, but it is certainly not a simple thing to do. To somehow exit this so-called meritocracy and move to a place that is more focused on a holacracy (not in the Zappos way). I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is. That said, I don't know how I can fit into that society; I don't know how I can move there. I don't even know where there is.

BurningFrog 6y ago
> I'd like to go to a place where a person is not defined by the size of their paycheck, how many hours they work and how big their start-up exit is. Having worked in Silicon Valley for a few decades, that's exactly where I live. Maybe you just need to upgrade your social circle?
vzidex 6y ago
I've often felt like I'm somewhere in between worlds - I'm studying at the "top" university in my country, working at a Fortune 500, etc., and on the other hand I know how to use a chainsaw, have done my fair share of home renovation, own a few guns, and hit the range on weekends. There is pretty much any activity or community that doesn't exist within your sphere. If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies". Pick an activity or community that you don't see represented in your sphere, and that's probably what you're looking for. As an aside: my girlfriend and close friends have commented that I speak differently when around, e.g., old boomers at the range. You can use whether you feel like you "fit in" as a litmus test, and if you don't fit in, rest assured you will in due time. In my experience, people outside of "meritocratic" (read: finance, tech, law, etc.) bubbles are very kind and welcoming.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  > If yours is anything like mine, the people around you play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, "hike", do photography, and are "foodies" Hahaha. I can spot a "tech worker" (not even just developer—manager, sales, whatever) hiker at half a kilometer (yeah there are plenty I don't spot, but there's definitely a "look" that exists in clothing and affect and is fairly common and non-tech-workers do not have it). If you tasked me with finding as many people as I could with rock climbing gym memberships but I wasn't allowed to go to such a gym to do it, I'd hit the coffee shops in our "startupy" district around lunch time on a weekday (well, not right now, but you get the idea). But I've been told I'm being ridiculous and that these activities don't have a class component to them because quite a few participants aren't involved in software companies or software development. Well yeah, but something doesn't have to be absolute to be a noticeable trend. Lacrosse, crew, skiing, squash—not technically limited to a certain social class but I bet you'd find some class-related trends among their participants, especially people who do or have done two or more of those activities with any frequency. We like what we like in no small part they're the "right" things to like, among "our" people.

praptak 6y ago

The argument from surgeon is so bad that it's borderline eristic. Surgeon has a very clearly defined objective while politics is the total opposite. Politics is about deciding what to optimize for - "what should be" which just cannot be "meritocratically" derived from "what is". If somebody claims they have some special "merit" that makes them fit for this kind of decisions, you should ask them to walk on water or something.

FeepingCreature 6y ago
Politics is also about deciding how to optimize for it. I don't know if it's a good idea that those are the same job.
- gizmo686 6y ago
  In theory, they are not the same job. The actual decision making is supposed to be deferred to civil servants, who are (in theory) hired or appointed based on their technical qualifications.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Except that politics involves plenty of decision making. And the buck has to stop somewhere. So I'm not sure that there's a real distinction.

commandlinefan 6y ago

The term "meritocracy", like the term "capitalism", was originally coined strictly as a means of criticizing the concept, yet the people doing the criticism don't really say that meritocracy is necessarily bad, just that they don't think we really have one. I have yet to see any suggestions on what to replace the current system with, though. Usually when somebody criticized meritocracy, they suggest stratifying everybody into a few broad categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and then it seems to be implied that the meritocracy competition occurs within those categories.

juped 6y ago

"Meritocracy" always works backwards in practice - the "crats" are anointed as being the ones with "merit". Credentialism is just the most obvious expression of this - e.g., you get a Harvard degree mostly by being in the social class that goes to Harvard - but it happens at every level in every way, and nearly everything which purports to assess merit in fact launders social class. This hits me, personally, hard, because my tribe is the thoughtful, the curious, the problem-solvers, &c., and so many such people take the stated aims of the prestige launderers at face value, only to be disappointed when being smart and dedicated means nothing in reality. To plagiarize a bit, I see the best minds of my generation destroyed by what amounts to a lack of class consciousness combined with the unforgivable sin of hoping that something in the world is fair.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

The problem is the "meritocracy" is thinly disguised "aristocracy." There's some minor inward movement towards the core for certain kinds of ruthlessly narcissistic clever types. But you're never going to be president of the US without significant aristocratic money backing you, no matter how good your SATs are. The deeper problem is you can't define "merit" unless you know what your goals are as a culture. What are the long-term goals of the US? How about the planet as a whole? It's fairly obvious that the US is caught up in a surreal game called "Make and keep as much money as possible." But what happens outside of that? Does anyone have a long-term plan? If you don't know where you're going, how are you supposed to pick the right people to help you get there?

deleted 6y ago
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alexashka 6y ago

This article looks one one tiny aspect of society (ivy league school attendance) while ignoring society at large, and tries to draw conclusions about meritocracy from it. There is an ancient tale about a dozen blind met each touching parts of an elephant and describing it, some say elephants are long like a tube, others round like a ball, etc... If you don't have a big picture view, it is best to be aware of it :) Meritocracy is just a politicized term for 'competence'. We want competent people running things, that's obvious. What we also want is for people who were competent but no longer are, to be replaceable - that's the real issue. If idiots from ivy league schools who cheated their way through school or were only good at taking tests got found out afterwards, attendance wouldn't be so hotly contested. This works in sports - the minute LeBron can't play well, he will be replaced by somebody else who can and it doesn't matter that he was the best player of his generation. This doesn't work in politics and many other fields because the people evaluating their competence are largely selfish idiots. If it is in your selfish interest to promote less competent people some of the time and you value your selfish interest above most things - we have a problem. If it were a matter of intelligent people having trouble decoding what competence meant in various fields, it is something we could improve upon as time goes on as we get better at science. Our current problems, are problems of idiots being capable of attaining decision-making power (becoming wealthy, becoming high ranking officials in government, business, academia) and holding on to it, regardless of their competence over time. This is what people are usually mad about - they call it being a parasite, being the 1%, being a wasp, etc and they are right, while also being too dumb to know what to do about it :) People want to work hard to give their kids a better future, while not realizing that other people wanting their kids and their friends to have a better future, is the same mechanism that leads to their kids' future being shitty! People are so dumb - they think they're upset about corruption/inequality/whatever while the vast majority of them are simply wishing the power dynamics were in their favor :) If you want competence over time, you need to abandon the idea of anyone having power over others regardless of their competence level. Georgism [0] is an economic movement that was aware of this problem in regards to land ownership - I'd go on to say it has to cut across all spheres of life - anyone getting to hold on to power regardless of their competence, is something most should agree upon, is a mistake. In order for most to agree upon this - they'd need to not be idiots. It always boils down to too many idiots folks :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

mcguire 6y ago

"The remarkable thing about these numbers (and Yang provides lots of them) is that four of the six industries (consulting, law, finance, and academia) are easily described as parasitic or predatory, secondary adornments to the actual business of human activity on the Earth." One might suggest that one of these things is not like the others. (One might also suggest that a glance at the right column would be one reason why.)

DangitBobby 6y ago

Even this article misses the root injustice of meritocracy. Meritocracy is just another way to grant those born with advantages yet more advantages. The most fortunate people in a meritocracy are those born smarter and with greater capacity to learn, or those born into an environment to foster a mental framework that lends itself to success. Meritocracy rewards the fortunate with wealth and success just as much as a system that provides power by default to those born into wealth or beauty (though arguably the recipients of the benefit are more diffuse). The real difference on which to select such a system is not a matter of justice then, it's a matter of which one provides better outcomes. Here, I agree with the article. The merits we select for in our version of "Meritocracy" are a poor proxy measurement for a measured and just leader.

zozbot234 6y ago
Meritocracy does not "reward" wealth, beauty or other social advantages (except to the extent that humans will tend to reward those things under any social arrangement whatsoever); it rewards people who make consequential decisions, and are thereby held responsible for those choices. The ideal is that there has to be some sort of flip side to every "reward", so that the arrangement is socially beneficial to all parties.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  Again, many are born with inherent advantages such as innate intelligence, health, mental stability, and an environment that fosters success. The merit they are capable of developing is made possible by a combination of these things. That being the case, it is inevitable that Meritocracy rewards the fortunate for being fortunate. The difference between Meritocracy and other frameworks to select the powerful is that the people born with the advantages listed above tend to win instead of simply those born into wealth/power/beauty/etc. (Though those with wealth/power/beauty/etc. do actually tend to win anyway because this provides them ways to develop merit or proxies for merit or ways to circumvent merit). There is simply no framework that does not provide someone with certain characteristics systematic advantages to gaining power.

jariel 6y ago

"Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born." Yes this. I remember when nerds were outcasts, that really colours the situation. Maybe there's a dark kind of 'fairness' in that! No more! The cool, good looking popular kids now get the best grades! That's the most 'unfair' thing I can imagine! And this: " Our specialty is light-commitment benevolence. We will do something to help but not enough to hurt us or threaten our own standing. We know better than to do that...." This is brilliant.

Booktrope 6y ago

The main point about -ocracy is a really good one, but the article makes so many blanket statements without any real evidence that seem way off base. The Ivy League schools (and quite a few other liberal arts colleges that should be included in this argument) historically were playgrounds for the rich, with academics being one of the games. No, Texas elite weren't shooting for Baylor (unless they were of a particular religious stripe), the super-elites in Texas were shooting for the big Ivy's, and next category was Rice. (Or Vanderbilt in Tennessee, etc.) Stanford has been an important elite institution in the US for a long time. Meanwhile, the Ivy's have moved in a dramatic way to be more inclusive with lots more minorities and scholarships. To the point about meritocracy, who cares? If you pick an -ocracy on a less discriminatory basis, it's still an -ocracy. I would argue that a less discriminatory -ocracy that's more socially mobile is somewhat better than a more racist one that's based more on accident of birth. Still possibly not good, but not as bad. I'm sure there are companies where your job 5 years out of college still depends on where you went undergraduate, but really, you don't get a shot if you're not from one of the Ivy's? Hah. Most people are well aware that many public universities in this country offer great education to some or all of their students. Let's just mention UC Berkely, UCLA, Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas (Austin) and so forth. Degrees from these and many, many more institutions can be an entry to very lucrative and powerful positions. And please don't forget Cal Tech, Purdue, West Point or Anapolis, etc. etc. (Oh, and maybe include YC) Yeah, there's something of a pecking order -- for several decades all of our presidents came from Yale, for example (well they were Bushes and Clinton) and certainly there's a gradient of prestige. My point is, all this stuff about the "Ivy's" is overstated and weakens the argument, which actually depends in no way on the assumption that the country is run by graduates of the institutions designated as "Ivy's". Someone said that the Ivy's developed their "holistic" admissions policy in the 30's to prevent the schools from being overrun by Jews. That's a stretch. My uncle, a Jew, actually managed to be admitted to one of the two (2) spots open to Jews at MIT at that time. (Remember, open discrimination was perfectly legal back then) He turned it down, incidentally, and went on to build a very large chain of stores. It was quotas and open racism and of course raw exclusion of women that were used to keep people out in the 30's, actually. Today's concepts of diversity were set up to avoid letting the Supreme Court's Bakke decision exclude large parts of our society from the elite academic world, not to exclude those people. I mention this because the Ivy League institutions are less discriminatory today. You can equate the admission policy today to the 1930's but it's just not the same. Yes there are still biases, but purposefully much less. No the perfect system isn't at all perfect. But going for perfection usually leads to disaster. As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the better." There are definitely problems with being ruled by an -ocracy, but what alternative is actually being proposed, other than doing what's practical and sensible to open the -ocracy to broader participation and trying to limit its inevitable excesses of power?

6510 6y ago

The problem is the complete lack of goals. (The meaning of life if you like) Thus far people with this merit did a wonderful job subjugating the rest of humanity to their will. (I'm no doubt guilty for a wild share of this.) The best part is where I convince you that I did you a favor! The challenge of it is in trying not to laugh. So yeah, I have merit and you do not. It means you should trade everything you own and your labor for these mirrors and glass beads. You wont know why but you'll thank me later. You will just have to trust me. I mean, don't I look sophisticated with all this stuff I've traded for the beads from other folk? How could you think they all made the wrong choice? Look how many of them are working in my field? Why do all of the other animals have such fun and interesting lives without any of those intellectuals? If people are poor enough there are no rent collectors. Dogs can still be fooled into employment. Cats are doing the exact opposite! With luck you can convince them not to do things. I conclude cats have more merit than people. Now go for the down-vote button!