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Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

57 points by whack 6y ago

frgtpsswrdlame 6y ago
If you're fine with a system that rewards those who grew up in middle class and above families and punishes those that don't then I disagree but okay. But don't call that a system based on merit when you're quite transparently admitting it's not. Meritocracies are an inhuman system which, to the extent they can be realized, only happen incidentally. How many of the relatively well to do people on this board subvert the meritocracy every day by giving their children every little advantage that tons of families just simply never could give their children. What would it take to make a meritocracy work? Ironically it would take a great flattening. But precisely because they believe in gain from advantage, the biggest proponents of meritocracy can never argue for the one thing that would actually make their system work. So instead we end up in this weird limbo where merit is actually subverted over and over again by a highly stratified social/economic makeup that begins in childhood and has strong persistence throughout life. "Actual" meritocracy may arise from time to time as a result of society spanning tragedy but will also quickly disappear and that doesn't exactly seem like the type of thing we should be aiming for anyways.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  They address this in the article. Meritocracy doesn't mean dropping your children in the forest and stripping all advantage from them. The whole point of a meritocracy is to be the best you can. Giving every advantage to your children that you can afford is the whole point of meritocracy. It's not "fair" but it produces peak performance, like the article says
  - discreteevent 6y ago
    Agreed and overall the article is very good. It is worth emphasising though that it is unfair and that environment plays a huge role in many people's success. At least some of the aristocrats knew that they were lucky and as a result had some kind of noblesse oblige. Some people at the top of the meritocracy think that because they got there on merit then they deserve as much as they can get.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Ironically this is not meritocracy.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      From Merriam Webster: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit. A meritocracy only cares about demonstrated ability. If the kids next door could afford a better tutor, they probably have a greater demonstrated ability than you. They would still succeed under their own merit.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 6y ago
    >They address this in the article. Meritocracy doesn't mean dropping your children in the forest and stripping all advantage from them. If there's no equalizing basis then you can't say it's about merit. Was feudalism actually about merit? After all who's more capable of being the king than his own son? >The whole point of a meritocracy is to be the best you can. I agree but with a very strong emphasis on the "you." >Giving every advantage to your children that you can afford is the whole point of meritocracy. Just a second ago you were saying it was about advancing yourself. Now it's about advancing your bloodline, those are two different things. >It's not "fair" but it produces peak performance, like the article says There's no reason to believe it produces peak performance. Even if you're a big believer in individuals advancing themselves in efficient markets and all that what you actually want is very liquid markets. If certain jobs become chock full of rich kids because they're the only ones who can receive all the training then that's very strong evidence of inefficiency and thus big evidence that we are not receiving "peak performance."
  - sjg007 6y ago
    So.... "Be Best" ???
spacekitcat 6y ago
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- kiba 6y ago
  We do live in a meritocracy, which favor those white, middle class, mediocre males you complained about, because they got all the advantage and thus became good about it. But selecting the best had nothing with fairness or ensuring that everyone is educated.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - svrtknst 6y ago
    But... favoring a certain class of people _by definition_ means that those people arent necessarily the best equipped. Being favored doesn't just mean reaching the best results due to the best circumstances, it also means being given unfair credit etc.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - uberman 6y ago
    A proponent of meritocracy would not favor anyone described as mediocre. That is kind of the whole point.
Bakary 6y ago
The issue of meritocracy often turns semantic. Different realities can be justified with the same word depending on people's conception of justice and efficiency. The other aspect not mentioned is that a society can be meritocratic, but the peak performance that results does not necessarily lead to work that is useful to society in aggregate. I am reminded of Jeff Hammerbacher's infamous quote: "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." That quote is simplistic to humorous effect of course, but it underlies an important natural run-off effect of meritocracy: that much activity is redistributive instead of creative. That's why thinking simply in terms of atomized individuals (as articles on meritocracy written in English usually do) pitted against each other leaves aside too many important questions and outcomes. edit: to add to this, the last paragraph of the article is deeply ironic since you have people fighting over scraps precisely because smart people have captured much of the pie growth, and did so in a way that would be considered meritocratic by the author.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  I am not sure what is ironic about the last paragraph. The point is that growth and distributioin are orthogonal concerns.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    The author's argument is that their conception of meritocracy is laudable because it grows the pie, and growing the pie is the most important thing if we are to avoid fighting for scraps. They're not saying that growth and distribution are orthogonal, just that the former leads to a better latter and ought to be prioritized. This is ironic in the sense that much scrap fighting is the result of growth being captured and allocated by meritocratic elements (as defined by the author) in ways that make fighting for scraps more likely, from nobles wasting the surplus on political struggles to the smartest people today redistributing wealth around instead of creating it. Perhaps a more poignant example would be the deterioration of the environment. Peak performers have created much wealth in the past by harnessing fossil fuels, but the negative externalities can now lead to an equal if not worse destruction of wealth in the future. The author's view does not take into account these situations that go beyond the simple struggle between individuals in a historical, physical, and geographical vacuum.
worewood 6y ago
Problem is, the proponents of meritocracy defend you shouldn't care for those less performant because, well, they don't deserve it.
smitty1e 6y ago
Shot: "Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus."--LT Nicholson Chaser: ". . .general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."--Jon Postel This is how the individual meritocracy helps all: keep the expectations low, and the outputs high. Fairness you locate under the sun has a metaphysical component. People are carnivores by nature. Let your merit, if it be real, build others.
sjg007 6y ago
>Hiring people who are “good enough” is simply not good enough. There has never been, and never will be, a team that won the world cup by selecting players who are “good enough.” This isn't actually true. You can have a team full of good enough players that can win championships. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beats-goliath https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beat...
- remote_phone 6y ago
  Paul Graham says differently. You need to hire A players because otherwise B players hire B and C players and water down the strength of the startup.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > Paul Graham says differently. It was Steve Jobs.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Or was it Joel Spolskey?
svrtknst 6y ago
In my opinion, all talk of meritocracy, when applied, is irrelevant. I mean, it sounds good in principle, but in most applications, there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate in any given situation. Yeah, sure, we have some highly specialized environments, such as sports, where we have parameters to select from, but as much as no team has won by selecting players who are good enough, few teams if any have won by just selecting players who are the best in a narrow metric. You need leaders, you need players with specific skill, you need role players, you need people who can inspire etc. Same when hiring for a job position - Determining who is the "best" candidate is near impossible. The best, according to which metric? Most years spent at uni? In the business? How do you control for biases that have given one candidate undeserved praise and another that has gone unrecognized? How tdo you value social factors, etc?
- jariel 6y ago
  "there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate" There is, it just so happens many people applying are already good by virtue of their credentials. What you are not seeing are the zillions of truly unqualified people show up. If you want to gain some confidence in meritocracy, then simply open up your next dev position to literally 'anyone' and start interviewing 'random people' for that high paying job. Then, you'll quickly realize how very few people are actually qualified. Interviewing is generally about 1) narrowing the pool of actually qualified and then 2) ... well, it's hard from there on in as you point out. But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation. Why view it in isolation? To me, the interesting question is how the hiring manager got into their position. Referring to the sports analogy of the previous comment: how do you become a sports team owner? Not by being great at sports, but simply by having a ton of spare money. And some pro sports team owners are really bad at running a sports team. Most of us in the system are more or less fighting over table scraps. You can't really measure a so-called meritocracy without looking carefully at those in positions of power. We seem to only focus on the lower levels of non-manager worker drone hiring.
esarbe 6y ago
I tried to read the article but within the first paragraphs it sets up a false dichotomy to sell its point of view. If you need fallacies to sell your argument, obviously something's wrong with your argument.
arnvald 6y ago
> The reason meritocracies work so well, is not because they are fair, but because they produce peak performance. This is short-sighted. It optimizes for the "local maximum", the "today's maximum". Yes, if today you don't choose the best candidate based purely on their results, you are technically losing, because you could do better. But here's the thing, if you choose a candidate that is not the best, but that can have a more meaningful impact in the long term, you are optimizing for the future. For example, candidates who are coming from underrepresented groups can have a huge impact on kids who will find it easier to believe they can repeat such success, because someone who looks like them did it. That can unlock a huge pool of candidates who can outperform others in the future, but who would not be available if we didn't choose the n-th best candidate instead of the best one in the first place.
- mikea1 6y ago
  I like that your comment aligns with game theory. It is in the best interest of individual corporations to hire the best candidate. It is in the best interest of the industry to create a strong pool of candidates. An industry consists of individual corporations that act self-interested unless they cooperate to achieve long term goals together. This dovetails with the free rider problem too. A corporation does not want to train (invest in) a subpar individual and then lose them to a free rider corporation in the industry that only hires the best candidates.
- jfengel 6y ago
  It doesn't even require generational returns. Underrepresented groups can bring a perspective to the project that you otherwise lack. Disabled team members can help you discover "curb cut effects" that improve usability for everybody. Women and minorities can point out hidden biases and opportunities. All of them can reveal assumptions you didn't even realize you were making in the way you run your team. That goes far beyond "how fast can you write code" by any measurement because your end goal isn't to write code but to deliver a product -- as a team. Bringing in a diversity of ideas about the end product helps today, not just in the future. If you think of your team just as a bunch of high-performing individual code writers, you will miss opportunities to hit the real goal.
- 6y ago
jkingsbery 6y ago
I think the author has a very different definition of "fair" than what I usually think of it (free from favoritism; conforming to established rules; see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair).
- aidenn0 6y ago
  One reason why life isn't fair is that there are contradictory definitions of fair. Unfairness is a poor criticism of any system, because there isn't a completely fair system.
  - calibas 6y ago
    Which makes all this mainly about personal values and not "objective truths".
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      That's only true if you accept moral relativism.
      - calibas 6y ago
        If morals aren't relative, which ones are correct? To me, moral relativism means that I understand other people have different morals than mine and I have to respect that. It's not some excuse to toss morals out the window.
        aidenn0 6y ago
        If Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible with respect to gravity, which one is correct? The fact that we don't know something does not then imply that that the actual truth is subjective. The less you know the more humble you need to be, but different views do not always justify respect. To use my previous analogy: If a random person shows up to a physicist claiming to have invented anti-gravity, then they aren't going to get much respect. Similarly if someone claims that it's a moral positive to walk into random people's houses and murder their babies, I don't have to respect that.
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
> The reason meritocracies work so well, Wait, who said they work well? Does he mean, for the people receiving the benefit? An aristocracy works well for the aristocrats, that's for sure.
yutopia 6y ago
A rather vague post. > meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy continue to produce optimal performance in the long run? Is the author talking about meritocracy in theory, or meritocracy as practiced? What exactly does the author think should be decided through meritocracy? (College acceptance? Hiring decisions?) Does the author have any concrete recommendations, for any domain?
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
The hardest lesson I ever learned (the hard way!) was that meritocracy doesn't work in practice. At some point in time, some people accumulate more credit/reputation for their work, and can use that to earn more credit more quickly. This then snowballs as these people pull ahead of others out of proportion to their actual contributions. This makes a Meritocracy an unstable equilibrium, and such a system will not remain meritocratic for long. When other parties come along later, they won't be able to displace the incumbents. You might then be tempted to cut off the long tail and hand over the community to the incumbents. But that's really going to be a problem if more than half your work is being done in that long tail! Importantly; if you do hand over to the incumbents, you've very obviously just changed into something other-than-meritocracy. My argument is that all systems that start as a (naive) Meritocracy will tend to fall into this trap.
- jariel 6y ago
  No, meritocracy works fine. It's far from perfect, but the 'special case' you describe is actually rare. There are people who are brilliant and hardworking in the academic sense slinging coffee for life, because both those attributes will result in 'good grades' which is a really good proxy for other things in life.
  - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
    Interesting! Do you have a specific example where it seemed to work fine for you? (The example where I learned was in diverse web communities, including Wikimedia.)
    - jariel 6y ago
      Take the most broad and crude measure, educational outcomes, as some, albeit imperfect input to the system and you'll see very unambiguously and consistently that kids with better grades will do better in life, in most measures. Next time you are at the office, look to your left, look to your right: you will notice conscientious people, probably educated, probably reasonably hard working, team work oriented, and probably bright. Then hop on the bus and have conversations with the 'average person'. You fill find somewhat less conscientious, less interested, less curious, less intelligent people. We have very clearly and unambiguously a mostly meritocratic system: as you go from coffee maker, to skilled labourer, to creative worker, to middle management to executive, you'll see a pretty obvious trend. It's funny how the meritocratic naysayers, probably already in the top 20% of income earnings, probably would believer firmly they are more 'deserving' of their job than the dude who drove them there on the bus, but that somehow, the system 'above them' is 'not meritocratic'. The issue then becomes one of 'self awareness': we don't like our boss, we are jealous of others who have more, we see some folks 'skip the line' with better access to education i.e. we see flaws or things 'we don't like' to varying degree and so somehow we believe the system is existentially flawed. It's not. The first time you start to hire people, it becomes perfectly clear: either 'you' are fundamentally part of that of that byzantine, unfair system, inflicting your woes onto everyone with unfair hiring/advancement - or - more likely, you're actually trying to hire decent candidates, capable of doing the work. So what's more likely: 1) you are the lone hero in an unfair world, trying to hire 'good people' while everyone else is either dumb or plotting like Mr. Bean a fools dystopia - or 2) that most people are like you, trying to hire reasonably good people (hopefully the best you can) and trying to do a reasonable job - and there is some intelligence in that process. It's the later. Most modern systems are crudely meritocratic. When they are not, it's obvious, but that doesn't mean those failures are normative or existential to the system.
TheIronYuppie 6y ago
The fundamental issue in meritocracies is that we only measure a small part of the merit that needs measuring. I once got in an argument with a manager that we should measure best coders on the team by lines of code generated - is that merit? To extend the analogy in the piece, if the only way a football team measured “best” was for “yards passed” that’d be a pretty bad team on the field. They measure by position to figure out what’s right - and techniques like those made famous by SaberMetrics/Moneyball show even THAT is not all - you REALLY need to measure by team performance and team goals. Teams that are diverse deliver materially better returns[1]; if that’s “merit” then that’s a way to optimize for that. The problem with this article and meritocracies is not diving deeper in what you should measure. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diversity-confirmed-to-boost-innovation-and-financial-results/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diver...
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  Something like this program tends to discourage the "let's pay for KLOCs" line of reasoning. Does $1 per line sound reasonable? :-) #!/usr/bin/env python3 with open("pay_me_lots.py","w") as payme: print ("#!/usr/bin/env python3", file=payme) for i in range(1000000): print ("print('you now owe me $"+str(i)+"')",file=payme)
KukiAirani 6y ago
This is such an odd use of the word "fair" Fair is understood in a meritocracy to be with respect to skill level, not with respect to any particular person's moral standard.
_qulr 6y ago
The article makes the fundamental mistake of confusing economics and ethics. Capitalism is an economic system. It's far from perfect, but it may be the best economic system we've got. Capitalism is not an ethical system. Treated as an ethical system, it may be the absolute worst. It has nothing to do with "fairness". How is massive inequality fair? It's not. We've got to dump the inhumane idea that people ethically "deserve" the money they acquire, as some kind of god-given right. I suspect some people literally believe that the "invisible hand" of the market is God distributing reward and punishment. But that's not economics, it's theology. I've got no objection to capitalism or inequality, if they end up being useful, but the whole point of it is to make everyone better off via economics, not to "fairly" distribute wealth. How fair is it that some people are born smart, or strong, or tall, or beautiful? Nothing really fair about the genetic lottery, but it can certainly be advantageous economically, and there's nothing wrong with utilizing natural talents for societal benefit.
cs702 6y ago
Many people, including me, feel differently about two different kinds of unfairness: * We are OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the genetic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of the socioeconomic background of parents. Most of us want a society in which the most able, talented, hard-working, persistent among us can put those qualities to work for their most productive uses. * We are NOT OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the socioeconomic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of ability, talent, hard work, and persistence. Most of us do NOT want a society in which those who are less able, less talented, less hard-working, and less persistent can get ahead through other means.
- _qulr 6y ago
  I would offer the friendly suggestion that perhaps the concept of fairness is not even relevant here. We want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility. The fairest system would be a lottery: picking people completely randomly, without regard to socioeconomic status or "merit". Given that we want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility, "winning the genetic lottery" is ok, because some people are just born with natural talents. But "winning the socioeconomic lottery" is not ok, because there's no apparent correlation between the wealth of your parents and your personal competence. Again, fairness is tangential to this problem.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  I am not okay with unfairness stemming from genetic lottery. Sure, I agree those with genetic lottery should be able to put those qualities to most productive uses, it would be waste otherwise. On the other hand, they probably shouldn't capture the most of produced value, since it is mostly unearned. There is a reason lottery earning is heavily taxed.
  - username90 6y ago
    Money is a measure of power in society, it lets you choose how society spends some of its resources. Giving more power to competent people so they can direct societies efforts to better use is a good thing, that is why capitalism works. If you take that away we are left with communism. Note I don't say that we should let people be poor etc. I am from Sweden, I think Sweden works great in this regard. Sweden has produced plenty of billionaires, and in terms of successful startups per capita Sweden is among the best in the world. Yet Sweden still takes care of its poor etc, people getting rich isn't a problem, it is necessary for capitalism to work.
what2build 6y ago
The problem is meritocracy can be gamed to be unfair by selling the perception of improved performance. Giving off a perception of peak performance is trivial for those that know how to shmooze, get that title bump. We see it all the time with celebrities getting their kids into nicer schools, dads who own construction companies donating to unis, etc. the list of stereotypes is endless. Biological reality does not really care much for our emotional constructs, as others will always come along with their own. It was fact that pagan gods controlled reality until it wasn’t. At least those ideologies were backed by fun imagery. Meritocracy is also nonsense, but easier to see as it doesn’t distract by flooding the imagination.
- zodiac2 6y ago
  What system can’t be gamed? Communism where everything is distributed evenly regardless of ability?
M2Ys4U 6y ago
I think it's worth remembering that the term meritocracy was created as satire. The Rise of the Meritocracy, where it was first used, is an explicitly dystopian novel.
spacekitcat 6y ago
As a woman in tech, I feel that it isn't actually a meritocracy. I think people have a habit of assuming men did the real work in a project, so they get a disproportionate share of the credit. People also have a habit of pushing women towards front end work, making the assumption that men are more 'technical' than women. It can be difficult to watch men get all of the credit for your blood, sweat and tears. It's especially bitter when they then say it's a meritocracy and you feel like saying 'what exactly did you contribute to this?'. The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. The first issue is that I don't think we are especially good at identifying the best unless it's very easy to measure (sport for example). The second point is that it takes work to overcome your own biases and I think this feeds into how we evaluate 'the best' more than we like to admit.
- username90 6y ago
  Meritocracy is a good thing and we should never stop striving for it. The problem isn't that some strive for meritocracy, the problem is when people argue that they are meritocratic when they aren't. It is pretty easy to argue that there is plenty of merit in hiring women, like adding diversity to teams has benefits and so on, I don't see why you need to argue against the concept itself. > The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. Not really, the concept is nice both on paper and in reality. The most successful companies in the world today are much more meritocratic than most organizations that preceded them, they produce great results using it, the concept works great. And I don't see why you think it wouldn't, we humans have two signals, merit and bias. Without merit we just go by our biases. The problems you describe doesn't come from focusing too much on merit but too little on it.
  - spacekitcat 6y ago
    I think proponents of meritocracy are naive.
    - username90 6y ago
      People who think that white men will hire more minorities and women if they focused less on merit are naive.
calibas 6y ago
>A society should delegate its jobs to those who are smartest, most capable, and most accomplished in that field. Because they are the ones who can best lead society through the worldly challenges we face everyday. Corrupting this process by discriminating on the basis of family ties, personal friendships, wealth, race, or gender, is simply cutting your nose to spite your face. I'm confused because it seems like the article is arguing for meritocracy. How else would you measure who's the "most accomplished" in their field without some concept of "merit"? It's confusing as hell to even discuss this if we just switch the terminology all around, and we don't have to. Discrimination based upon family ties or personal friendships is nepotism, based upon wealth it's classism, based upon race it's racism, and based upon gender it's sexism. To me, addressing these issues in our society is the priority.
deleted 6y ago
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jakelazaroff 6y ago
The author accidentally touches on the blind spot of American meritocracy, but speeds on and never looks back: > There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers. If you consider “meritocracy” to begin when someone applies for their first job, you might not care about that. But there are two glaring problems: One, on an individual level, selecting the best at a given point in time ignores less measurable attributes, like “grit”. The candidate from a poor background who went to an okay school at night while working to support their family may be more motivated to improve than someone who coasted by at a good school due to parental connections. Two, on a societal level, being born into good circumstances in no way correlates with innate abilities. By privileging those who grow up in higher socioeconomic classes, we are leaving behind individuals who have undiscovered latent talents that might otherwise make large societal contributions. Without fixing those two things, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that meritocracy will produce “peak performance”.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  The article literally lists examples of things that would help people with undiscovered latent talents. Access to education, unemployment insurance, universal basic income...
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    It mentions those as ways to share meritocracy’s prosperity with everyone. I’m saying that things like that are necessary for meritocracy to exist in the first place.
  - umvi 6y ago
    I'm sure those things would help some people, but probably not as much as you would think. I always see "access to education" as if lack of good teachers is the main thing holding disadvantaged kids back and not their trainwreck of a family life where the single mom working 2 jobs and didn't graduate high school herself has no idea how to help her kids and lets them slip into truancy like she did. Making the public school system take on all of the roles 2 parents used to take on is not sustainable. We need to fix the problem at a more fundamental level.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Unfortunately the rich have been amazingly effective at capturing all the productivity gains since the 1970s. Meritocracy also means allowing those with the means to entrench their position for many decades.
zodiac2 6y ago
For those opposed to meritocracies as described by the author: what alternatives are you suggesting? Should the top performers not be the ones who get the lions share of the spoils?
zzzeek 6y ago
"A meritocracy excels at producing wealth and economic prosperity. " it does? tens of millions of people are going to be evicted next week even though there are vast sums of money that could be used to help these people. So yes there's "wealth" but the "prosperity" is reserved for a select few. the rest are discarded like trash. "Universal basic income" we have that? "universal healthcare" we have that? "unemployment insurance, better public schooling and free job trainings" not much ? "these are the kind of Social Justice programs that can share the resulting prosperity among everyone." but...they DON'T, since there are hardly are any such programs, and what "programs" manage to exist are continuously under threat of being dissolved by those who feel they are "without merit". The ultimate end of a "meritrocratic" system is that when these "meritous" people are rewarded all their well deserved wealth, these lucky few deem everyone else to be "without merit". also commonly referred to as "fuck you, I got mine".
nathias 6y ago
Meritocracies work in a very formalized context, like sports, where you can have a single criterion that can be measured objectively and determines the whole activity, because it's possible to prevent gaming of the criteria (even in sports you have this problem with illegal stimulants). The point is sophistry, when you say unbiased clearly nobody is including merit as one of the biases, the problem with meritocracy is that people actually believe in it outside of very specific conditions that make it possible and then confuse non-meritous biases that have yielded profit/status for merit.
jganetsk 6y ago
Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents". There are a few great books written about this recently: - The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel - The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day. Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.
- Bakary 6y ago
  >Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy On the contrary, this aristocracy is doing extremely well. It is now served by the labor-driven meritocracy you describe. There is intense competition between elite knowledge workers for the privilege to serve modern-day nobles.
alexpc201 6y ago
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Henry Ford and many others who were born poor and succeed are the perfect counterexample of this comunist manifesto. Life is not fair, but if the merit wasn’t rewarded soon there will be no achievement. Why try harder to get what everyone else gets? Look to a society who abolished meritocracy: Cuba.
- raydev 6y ago
  We should look to Cuba as an example of what happens when a neighboring rich and powerful country cuts off trade, and threatens other countries who try to trade.
- px43 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure most of those people were born into homes with plenty of access to good food and education. Elon had a nice computer from an early age in the early 80s, and went to a fancy prep school. Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. Bezos went to Princeon. Woz's dad was a well paid enigeer at Lockheed and went to UC Berkeley. Lots of mobility for sure, but it really does take a couple generations in most cases. None of those people you mentioned grew up poor.
  - alexpc201 6y ago
    Wow.. they built an empire from their own garages and you say “yeah, but they had a nice computer in the 80’s”. I sense the resentment.
    - nottorp 6y ago
      > Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. ... and his mother was very cozy with IBM management :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates "the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, " No relation to Microsoft getting the MS DOS contract, for sure.
tpoacher 6y ago
Define "merit"
deleted 6y ago
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jelliclesfarm 6y ago
the addendum is clearer about the author's position than the article itself.

57 points by whack 6y ago

If you're fine with a system that rewards those who grew up in middle class and above families and punishes those that don't then I disagree but okay. But don't call that a system based on merit when you're quite transparently admitting it's not. Meritocracies are an inhuman system which, to the extent they can be realized, only happen incidentally. How many of the relatively well to do people on this board subvert the meritocracy every day by giving their children every little advantage that tons of families just simply never could give their children. What would it take to make a meritocracy work? Ironically it would take a great flattening. But precisely because they believe in gain from advantage, the biggest proponents of meritocracy can never argue for the one thing that would actually make their system work. So instead we end up in this weird limbo where merit is actually subverted over and over again by a highly stratified social/economic makeup that begins in childhood and has strong persistence throughout life. "Actual" meritocracy may arise from time to time as a result of society spanning tragedy but will also quickly disappear and that doesn't exactly seem like the type of thing we should be aiming for anyways.

dahfizz 6y ago
They address this in the article. Meritocracy doesn't mean dropping your children in the forest and stripping all advantage from them. The whole point of a meritocracy is to be the best you can. Giving every advantage to your children that you can afford is the whole point of meritocracy. It's not "fair" but it produces peak performance, like the article says
- discreteevent 6y ago
  Agreed and overall the article is very good. It is worth emphasising though that it is unfair and that environment plays a huge role in many people's success. At least some of the aristocrats knew that they were lucky and as a result had some kind of noblesse oblige. Some people at the top of the meritocracy think that because they got there on merit then they deserve as much as they can get.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Ironically this is not meritocracy.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    From Merriam Webster: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit. A meritocracy only cares about demonstrated ability. If the kids next door could afford a better tutor, they probably have a greater demonstrated ability than you. They would still succeed under their own merit.
- frgtpsswrdlame 6y ago
  >They address this in the article. Meritocracy doesn't mean dropping your children in the forest and stripping all advantage from them. If there's no equalizing basis then you can't say it's about merit. Was feudalism actually about merit? After all who's more capable of being the king than his own son? >The whole point of a meritocracy is to be the best you can. I agree but with a very strong emphasis on the "you." >Giving every advantage to your children that you can afford is the whole point of meritocracy. Just a second ago you were saying it was about advancing yourself. Now it's about advancing your bloodline, those are two different things. >It's not "fair" but it produces peak performance, like the article says There's no reason to believe it produces peak performance. Even if you're a big believer in individuals advancing themselves in efficient markets and all that what you actually want is very liquid markets. If certain jobs become chock full of rich kids because they're the only ones who can receive all the training then that's very strong evidence of inefficiency and thus big evidence that we are not receiving "peak performance."
- sjg007 6y ago
  So.... "Be Best" ???

spacekitcat 6y ago

kiba 6y ago
We do live in a meritocracy, which favor those white, middle class, mediocre males you complained about, because they got all the advantage and thus became good about it. But selecting the best had nothing with fairness or ensuring that everyone is educated.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- svrtknst 6y ago
  But... favoring a certain class of people _by definition_ means that those people arent necessarily the best equipped. Being favored doesn't just mean reaching the best results due to the best circumstances, it also means being given unfair credit etc.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- uberman 6y ago
  A proponent of meritocracy would not favor anyone described as mediocre. That is kind of the whole point.

Bakary 6y ago

The issue of meritocracy often turns semantic. Different realities can be justified with the same word depending on people's conception of justice and efficiency. The other aspect not mentioned is that a society can be meritocratic, but the peak performance that results does not necessarily lead to work that is useful to society in aggregate. I am reminded of Jeff Hammerbacher's infamous quote: "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." That quote is simplistic to humorous effect of course, but it underlies an important natural run-off effect of meritocracy: that much activity is redistributive instead of creative. That's why thinking simply in terms of atomized individuals (as articles on meritocracy written in English usually do) pitted against each other leaves aside too many important questions and outcomes. edit: to add to this, the last paragraph of the article is deeply ironic since you have people fighting over scraps precisely because smart people have captured much of the pie growth, and did so in a way that would be considered meritocratic by the author.

sanxiyn 6y ago
I am not sure what is ironic about the last paragraph. The point is that growth and distributioin are orthogonal concerns.
- Bakary 6y ago
  The author's argument is that their conception of meritocracy is laudable because it grows the pie, and growing the pie is the most important thing if we are to avoid fighting for scraps. They're not saying that growth and distribution are orthogonal, just that the former leads to a better latter and ought to be prioritized. This is ironic in the sense that much scrap fighting is the result of growth being captured and allocated by meritocratic elements (as defined by the author) in ways that make fighting for scraps more likely, from nobles wasting the surplus on political struggles to the smartest people today redistributing wealth around instead of creating it. Perhaps a more poignant example would be the deterioration of the environment. Peak performers have created much wealth in the past by harnessing fossil fuels, but the negative externalities can now lead to an equal if not worse destruction of wealth in the future. The author's view does not take into account these situations that go beyond the simple struggle between individuals in a historical, physical, and geographical vacuum.

worewood 6y ago

Problem is, the proponents of meritocracy defend you shouldn't care for those less performant because, well, they don't deserve it.

smitty1e 6y ago

Shot: "Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus."--LT Nicholson Chaser: ". . .general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."--Jon Postel This is how the individual meritocracy helps all: keep the expectations low, and the outputs high. Fairness you locate under the sun has a metaphysical component. People are carnivores by nature. Let your merit, if it be real, build others.

sjg007 6y ago

>Hiring people who are “good enough” is simply not good enough. There has never been, and never will be, a team that won the world cup by selecting players who are “good enough.” This isn't actually true. You can have a team full of good enough players that can win championships. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beats-goliath https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beat...

remote_phone 6y ago
Paul Graham says differently. You need to hire A players because otherwise B players hire B and C players and water down the strength of the startup.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > Paul Graham says differently. It was Steve Jobs.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Or was it Joel Spolskey?

svrtknst 6y ago

In my opinion, all talk of meritocracy, when applied, is irrelevant. I mean, it sounds good in principle, but in most applications, there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate in any given situation. Yeah, sure, we have some highly specialized environments, such as sports, where we have parameters to select from, but as much as no team has won by selecting players who are good enough, few teams if any have won by just selecting players who are the best in a narrow metric. You need leaders, you need players with specific skill, you need role players, you need people who can inspire etc. Same when hiring for a job position - Determining who is the "best" candidate is near impossible. The best, according to which metric? Most years spent at uni? In the business? How do you control for biases that have given one candidate undeserved praise and another that has gone unrecognized? How tdo you value social factors, etc?

jariel 6y ago
"there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate" There is, it just so happens many people applying are already good by virtue of their credentials. What you are not seeing are the zillions of truly unqualified people show up. If you want to gain some confidence in meritocracy, then simply open up your next dev position to literally 'anyone' and start interviewing 'random people' for that high paying job. Then, you'll quickly realize how very few people are actually qualified. Interviewing is generally about 1) narrowing the pool of actually qualified and then 2) ... well, it's hard from there on in as you point out. But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation. Why view it in isolation? To me, the interesting question is how the hiring manager got into their position. Referring to the sports analogy of the previous comment: how do you become a sports team owner? Not by being great at sports, but simply by having a ton of spare money. And some pro sports team owners are really bad at running a sports team. Most of us in the system are more or less fighting over table scraps. You can't really measure a so-called meritocracy without looking carefully at those in positions of power. We seem to only focus on the lower levels of non-manager worker drone hiring.

esarbe 6y ago

I tried to read the article but within the first paragraphs it sets up a false dichotomy to sell its point of view. If you need fallacies to sell your argument, obviously something's wrong with your argument.

arnvald 6y ago

> The reason meritocracies work so well, is not because they are fair, but because they produce peak performance. This is short-sighted. It optimizes for the "local maximum", the "today's maximum". Yes, if today you don't choose the best candidate based purely on their results, you are technically losing, because you could do better. But here's the thing, if you choose a candidate that is not the best, but that can have a more meaningful impact in the long term, you are optimizing for the future. For example, candidates who are coming from underrepresented groups can have a huge impact on kids who will find it easier to believe they can repeat such success, because someone who looks like them did it. That can unlock a huge pool of candidates who can outperform others in the future, but who would not be available if we didn't choose the n-th best candidate instead of the best one in the first place.

mikea1 6y ago
I like that your comment aligns with game theory. It is in the best interest of individual corporations to hire the best candidate. It is in the best interest of the industry to create a strong pool of candidates. An industry consists of individual corporations that act self-interested unless they cooperate to achieve long term goals together. This dovetails with the free rider problem too. A corporation does not want to train (invest in) a subpar individual and then lose them to a free rider corporation in the industry that only hires the best candidates.
jfengel 6y ago
It doesn't even require generational returns. Underrepresented groups can bring a perspective to the project that you otherwise lack. Disabled team members can help you discover "curb cut effects" that improve usability for everybody. Women and minorities can point out hidden biases and opportunities. All of them can reveal assumptions you didn't even realize you were making in the way you run your team. That goes far beyond "how fast can you write code" by any measurement because your end goal isn't to write code but to deliver a product -- as a team. Bringing in a diversity of ideas about the end product helps today, not just in the future. If you think of your team just as a bunch of high-performing individual code writers, you will miss opportunities to hit the real goal.
6y ago

jkingsbery 6y ago

I think the author has a very different definition of "fair" than what I usually think of it (free from favoritism; conforming to established rules; see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair).

aidenn0 6y ago
One reason why life isn't fair is that there are contradictory definitions of fair. Unfairness is a poor criticism of any system, because there isn't a completely fair system.
- calibas 6y ago
  Which makes all this mainly about personal values and not "objective truths".
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    That's only true if you accept moral relativism.
    - calibas 6y ago
      If morals aren't relative, which ones are correct? To me, moral relativism means that I understand other people have different morals than mine and I have to respect that. It's not some excuse to toss morals out the window.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        If Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible with respect to gravity, which one is correct? The fact that we don't know something does not then imply that that the actual truth is subjective. The less you know the more humble you need to be, but different views do not always justify respect. To use my previous analogy: If a random person shows up to a physicist claiming to have invented anti-gravity, then they aren't going to get much respect. Similarly if someone claims that it's a moral positive to walk into random people's houses and murder their babies, I don't have to respect that.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

> The reason meritocracies work so well, Wait, who said they work well? Does he mean, for the people receiving the benefit? An aristocracy works well for the aristocrats, that's for sure.

yutopia 6y ago

A rather vague post. > meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy continue to produce optimal performance in the long run? Is the author talking about meritocracy in theory, or meritocracy as practiced? What exactly does the author think should be decided through meritocracy? (College acceptance? Hiring decisions?) Does the author have any concrete recommendations, for any domain?

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

The hardest lesson I ever learned (the hard way!) was that meritocracy doesn't work in practice. At some point in time, some people accumulate more credit/reputation for their work, and can use that to earn more credit more quickly. This then snowballs as these people pull ahead of others out of proportion to their actual contributions. This makes a Meritocracy an unstable equilibrium, and such a system will not remain meritocratic for long. When other parties come along later, they won't be able to displace the incumbents. You might then be tempted to cut off the long tail and hand over the community to the incumbents. But that's really going to be a problem if more than half your work is being done in that long tail! Importantly; if you do hand over to the incumbents, you've very obviously just changed into something other-than-meritocracy. My argument is that all systems that start as a (naive) Meritocracy will tend to fall into this trap.

jariel 6y ago
No, meritocracy works fine. It's far from perfect, but the 'special case' you describe is actually rare. There are people who are brilliant and hardworking in the academic sense slinging coffee for life, because both those attributes will result in 'good grades' which is a really good proxy for other things in life.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  Interesting! Do you have a specific example where it seemed to work fine for you? (The example where I learned was in diverse web communities, including Wikimedia.)
  - jariel 6y ago
    Take the most broad and crude measure, educational outcomes, as some, albeit imperfect input to the system and you'll see very unambiguously and consistently that kids with better grades will do better in life, in most measures. Next time you are at the office, look to your left, look to your right: you will notice conscientious people, probably educated, probably reasonably hard working, team work oriented, and probably bright. Then hop on the bus and have conversations with the 'average person'. You fill find somewhat less conscientious, less interested, less curious, less intelligent people. We have very clearly and unambiguously a mostly meritocratic system: as you go from coffee maker, to skilled labourer, to creative worker, to middle management to executive, you'll see a pretty obvious trend. It's funny how the meritocratic naysayers, probably already in the top 20% of income earnings, probably would believer firmly they are more 'deserving' of their job than the dude who drove them there on the bus, but that somehow, the system 'above them' is 'not meritocratic'. The issue then becomes one of 'self awareness': we don't like our boss, we are jealous of others who have more, we see some folks 'skip the line' with better access to education i.e. we see flaws or things 'we don't like' to varying degree and so somehow we believe the system is existentially flawed. It's not. The first time you start to hire people, it becomes perfectly clear: either 'you' are fundamentally part of that of that byzantine, unfair system, inflicting your woes onto everyone with unfair hiring/advancement - or - more likely, you're actually trying to hire decent candidates, capable of doing the work. So what's more likely: 1) you are the lone hero in an unfair world, trying to hire 'good people' while everyone else is either dumb or plotting like Mr. Bean a fools dystopia - or 2) that most people are like you, trying to hire reasonably good people (hopefully the best you can) and trying to do a reasonable job - and there is some intelligence in that process. It's the later. Most modern systems are crudely meritocratic. When they are not, it's obvious, but that doesn't mean those failures are normative or existential to the system.

TheIronYuppie 6y ago

The fundamental issue in meritocracies is that we only measure a small part of the merit that needs measuring. I once got in an argument with a manager that we should measure best coders on the team by lines of code generated - is that merit? To extend the analogy in the piece, if the only way a football team measured “best” was for “yards passed” that’d be a pretty bad team on the field. They measure by position to figure out what’s right - and techniques like those made famous by SaberMetrics/Moneyball show even THAT is not all - you REALLY need to measure by team performance and team goals. Teams that are diverse deliver materially better returns[1]; if that’s “merit” then that’s a way to optimize for that. The problem with this article and meritocracies is not diving deeper in what you should measure. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diversity-confirmed-to-boost-innovation-and-financial-results/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diver...

Kim_Bruning 6y ago
Something like this program tends to discourage the "let's pay for KLOCs" line of reasoning. Does $1 per line sound reasonable? :-) #!/usr/bin/env python3 with open("pay_me_lots.py","w") as payme: print ("#!/usr/bin/env python3", file=payme) for i in range(1000000): print ("print('you now owe me $"+str(i)+"')",file=payme)

KukiAirani 6y ago

This is such an odd use of the word "fair" Fair is understood in a meritocracy to be with respect to skill level, not with respect to any particular person's moral standard.

_qulr 6y ago

The article makes the fundamental mistake of confusing economics and ethics. Capitalism is an economic system. It's far from perfect, but it may be the best economic system we've got. Capitalism is not an ethical system. Treated as an ethical system, it may be the absolute worst. It has nothing to do with "fairness". How is massive inequality fair? It's not. We've got to dump the inhumane idea that people ethically "deserve" the money they acquire, as some kind of god-given right. I suspect some people literally believe that the "invisible hand" of the market is God distributing reward and punishment. But that's not economics, it's theology. I've got no objection to capitalism or inequality, if they end up being useful, but the whole point of it is to make everyone better off via economics, not to "fairly" distribute wealth. How fair is it that some people are born smart, or strong, or tall, or beautiful? Nothing really fair about the genetic lottery, but it can certainly be advantageous economically, and there's nothing wrong with utilizing natural talents for societal benefit.

cs702 6y ago

Many people, including me, feel differently about two different kinds of unfairness: * We are OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the genetic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of the socioeconomic background of parents. Most of us want a society in which the most able, talented, hard-working, persistent among us can put those qualities to work for their most productive uses. * We are NOT OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the socioeconomic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of ability, talent, hard work, and persistence. Most of us do NOT want a society in which those who are less able, less talented, less hard-working, and less persistent can get ahead through other means.

_qulr 6y ago
I would offer the friendly suggestion that perhaps the concept of fairness is not even relevant here. We want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility. The fairest system would be a lottery: picking people completely randomly, without regard to socioeconomic status or "merit". Given that we want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility, "winning the genetic lottery" is ok, because some people are just born with natural talents. But "winning the socioeconomic lottery" is not ok, because there's no apparent correlation between the wealth of your parents and your personal competence. Again, fairness is tangential to this problem.
sanxiyn 6y ago
I am not okay with unfairness stemming from genetic lottery. Sure, I agree those with genetic lottery should be able to put those qualities to most productive uses, it would be waste otherwise. On the other hand, they probably shouldn't capture the most of produced value, since it is mostly unearned. There is a reason lottery earning is heavily taxed.
- username90 6y ago
  Money is a measure of power in society, it lets you choose how society spends some of its resources. Giving more power to competent people so they can direct societies efforts to better use is a good thing, that is why capitalism works. If you take that away we are left with communism. Note I don't say that we should let people be poor etc. I am from Sweden, I think Sweden works great in this regard. Sweden has produced plenty of billionaires, and in terms of successful startups per capita Sweden is among the best in the world. Yet Sweden still takes care of its poor etc, people getting rich isn't a problem, it is necessary for capitalism to work.

what2build 6y ago

The problem is meritocracy can be gamed to be unfair by selling the perception of improved performance. Giving off a perception of peak performance is trivial for those that know how to shmooze, get that title bump. We see it all the time with celebrities getting their kids into nicer schools, dads who own construction companies donating to unis, etc. the list of stereotypes is endless. Biological reality does not really care much for our emotional constructs, as others will always come along with their own. It was fact that pagan gods controlled reality until it wasn’t. At least those ideologies were backed by fun imagery. Meritocracy is also nonsense, but easier to see as it doesn’t distract by flooding the imagination.

zodiac2 6y ago
What system can’t be gamed? Communism where everything is distributed evenly regardless of ability?

M2Ys4U 6y ago

I think it's worth remembering that the term meritocracy was created as satire. The Rise of the Meritocracy, where it was first used, is an explicitly dystopian novel.

spacekitcat 6y ago

As a woman in tech, I feel that it isn't actually a meritocracy. I think people have a habit of assuming men did the real work in a project, so they get a disproportionate share of the credit. People also have a habit of pushing women towards front end work, making the assumption that men are more 'technical' than women. It can be difficult to watch men get all of the credit for your blood, sweat and tears. It's especially bitter when they then say it's a meritocracy and you feel like saying 'what exactly did you contribute to this?'. The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. The first issue is that I don't think we are especially good at identifying the best unless it's very easy to measure (sport for example). The second point is that it takes work to overcome your own biases and I think this feeds into how we evaluate 'the best' more than we like to admit.

username90 6y ago
Meritocracy is a good thing and we should never stop striving for it. The problem isn't that some strive for meritocracy, the problem is when people argue that they are meritocratic when they aren't. It is pretty easy to argue that there is plenty of merit in hiring women, like adding diversity to teams has benefits and so on, I don't see why you need to argue against the concept itself. > The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. Not really, the concept is nice both on paper and in reality. The most successful companies in the world today are much more meritocratic than most organizations that preceded them, they produce great results using it, the concept works great. And I don't see why you think it wouldn't, we humans have two signals, merit and bias. Without merit we just go by our biases. The problems you describe doesn't come from focusing too much on merit but too little on it.
- spacekitcat 6y ago
  I think proponents of meritocracy are naive.
  - username90 6y ago
    People who think that white men will hire more minorities and women if they focused less on merit are naive.

calibas 6y ago

>A society should delegate its jobs to those who are smartest, most capable, and most accomplished in that field. Because they are the ones who can best lead society through the worldly challenges we face everyday. Corrupting this process by discriminating on the basis of family ties, personal friendships, wealth, race, or gender, is simply cutting your nose to spite your face. I'm confused because it seems like the article is arguing for meritocracy. How else would you measure who's the "most accomplished" in their field without some concept of "merit"? It's confusing as hell to even discuss this if we just switch the terminology all around, and we don't have to. Discrimination based upon family ties or personal friendships is nepotism, based upon wealth it's classism, based upon race it's racism, and based upon gender it's sexism. To me, addressing these issues in our society is the priority.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jakelazaroff 6y ago

The author accidentally touches on the blind spot of American meritocracy, but speeds on and never looks back: > There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers. If you consider “meritocracy” to begin when someone applies for their first job, you might not care about that. But there are two glaring problems: One, on an individual level, selecting the best at a given point in time ignores less measurable attributes, like “grit”. The candidate from a poor background who went to an okay school at night while working to support their family may be more motivated to improve than someone who coasted by at a good school due to parental connections. Two, on a societal level, being born into good circumstances in no way correlates with innate abilities. By privileging those who grow up in higher socioeconomic classes, we are leaving behind individuals who have undiscovered latent talents that might otherwise make large societal contributions. Without fixing those two things, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that meritocracy will produce “peak performance”.

wait_a_minute 6y ago
The article literally lists examples of things that would help people with undiscovered latent talents. Access to education, unemployment insurance, universal basic income...
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  It mentions those as ways to share meritocracy’s prosperity with everyone. I’m saying that things like that are necessary for meritocracy to exist in the first place.
- umvi 6y ago
  I'm sure those things would help some people, but probably not as much as you would think. I always see "access to education" as if lack of good teachers is the main thing holding disadvantaged kids back and not their trainwreck of a family life where the single mom working 2 jobs and didn't graduate high school herself has no idea how to help her kids and lets them slip into truancy like she did. Making the public school system take on all of the roles 2 parents used to take on is not sustainable. We need to fix the problem at a more fundamental level.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Unfortunately the rich have been amazingly effective at capturing all the productivity gains since the 1970s. Meritocracy also means allowing those with the means to entrench their position for many decades.

zodiac2 6y ago

For those opposed to meritocracies as described by the author: what alternatives are you suggesting? Should the top performers not be the ones who get the lions share of the spoils?

zzzeek 6y ago

"A meritocracy excels at producing wealth and economic prosperity. " it does? tens of millions of people are going to be evicted next week even though there are vast sums of money that could be used to help these people. So yes there's "wealth" but the "prosperity" is reserved for a select few. the rest are discarded like trash. "Universal basic income" we have that? "universal healthcare" we have that? "unemployment insurance, better public schooling and free job trainings" not much ? "these are the kind of Social Justice programs that can share the resulting prosperity among everyone." but...they DON'T, since there are hardly are any such programs, and what "programs" manage to exist are continuously under threat of being dissolved by those who feel they are "without merit". The ultimate end of a "meritrocratic" system is that when these "meritous" people are rewarded all their well deserved wealth, these lucky few deem everyone else to be "without merit". also commonly referred to as "fuck you, I got mine".

nathias 6y ago

Meritocracies work in a very formalized context, like sports, where you can have a single criterion that can be measured objectively and determines the whole activity, because it's possible to prevent gaming of the criteria (even in sports you have this problem with illegal stimulants). The point is sophistry, when you say unbiased clearly nobody is including merit as one of the biases, the problem with meritocracy is that people actually believe in it outside of very specific conditions that make it possible and then confuse non-meritous biases that have yielded profit/status for merit.

jganetsk 6y ago

Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents". There are a few great books written about this recently: - The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel - The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day. Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.

Bakary 6y ago
>Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy On the contrary, this aristocracy is doing extremely well. It is now served by the labor-driven meritocracy you describe. There is intense competition between elite knowledge workers for the privilege to serve modern-day nobles.

alexpc201 6y ago

Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Henry Ford and many others who were born poor and succeed are the perfect counterexample of this comunist manifesto. Life is not fair, but if the merit wasn’t rewarded soon there will be no achievement. Why try harder to get what everyone else gets? Look to a society who abolished meritocracy: Cuba.

raydev 6y ago
We should look to Cuba as an example of what happens when a neighboring rich and powerful country cuts off trade, and threatens other countries who try to trade.
px43 6y ago
I'm pretty sure most of those people were born into homes with plenty of access to good food and education. Elon had a nice computer from an early age in the early 80s, and went to a fancy prep school. Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. Bezos went to Princeon. Woz's dad was a well paid enigeer at Lockheed and went to UC Berkeley. Lots of mobility for sure, but it really does take a couple generations in most cases. None of those people you mentioned grew up poor.
- alexpc201 6y ago
  Wow.. they built an empire from their own garages and you say “yeah, but they had a nice computer in the 80’s”. I sense the resentment.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    > Gates had parents who were successful lawyers, and who got him into Harvard. ... and his mother was very cozy with IBM management :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates "the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel, " No relation to Microsoft getting the MS DOS contract, for sure.

tpoacher 6y ago

Define "merit"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

the addendum is clearer about the author's position than the article itself.