11 ms·

Quote Meritocracy Unquote

164 points by raganwald 14y ago

steveklabnik 14y ago
> They have one test, the market has another. This is actually one of the biggest things I appreciate from studying Marx: the reminder that 'use-value'[1] and 'exchange-value'[2] are two, separate things, and while I generally want things based on how I can use them, the market doesn't care about that at all. Startups would be wise to heed Marx's words here, and remember this difference. Your job as a startup is to make money, which means producing something that has a high exchange-value. Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. How many times have I said "That idea is stupid, I'd never use that" and then it became a smashing, overnight success? Too many to count. 1: Basically, "how useful is this thing to me?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value 2: Basically, "how much could I sell this for?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value
- coolsunglasses 14y ago
  >Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. This has been the key lesson of my career as a programmer and entrepreneur. Reading Marx made me a better capitalist. I tell people that ask for book recommendations to read Marx all the time and they sneer at me even though they know I'm not a Marxist.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    I'm aware of the existence of a business school which was until recently was majorly staffed by Marxists. That was basically their response as well. "We know capitalism better than anyone, all we do is study it." I've found that it's a bit better to recommend "Value, Price, and Profit"[1] rather than Capital I because it gives you the gist of the most important part (the first three chapters) while being much smaller and a little less dry. 1: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-...
    - coolsunglasses 14y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion! I usually recommended the Oxford abridgement of Das Kapital to ease the pain. I'll start recommending this one instead. :)
      - steveklabnik 14y ago
        Reading Capital is still totally worthwhile. I've read volume I four or five times at this point, and I always find new things that are relevant to today... that said, it is difficult for a new reader. When you decide to climb that mountain, you could do much worse than have David Harvey as a companion: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/ http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
        coolsunglasses 14y ago
        Harvey was how I went through it.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    How can I resist? http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9200000/Marxism-marx-brothers-9268845-2050-2560.jpg http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9200000/Marxism-marx-...
  - CleanedStar 14y ago
    I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which produces real commodities. Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans believe "every word of the Bible is literally accurate", and that "the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East" are "historically accurate". Over 70% believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, expecting people to understand how wealthy people discretely work the economic system is way, way beyond most people.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like... Your statement implies that economic events must be analyzed from the standpoint of base & superstructure, but there is no rule or law that requires it.
    - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
      > Then again, (...) [o]ver 70% [of Americans] believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, (...) There is a way to phrase this sentiment without alienating quite as many decent people. Try to find it next time. (I, too, am an atheist; but I don't see a need to enforce atheism on HN.)
      - Crake 14y ago
        I personally do not really mind "alienating" the "earth is 5,000 years old" crowd by not respecting their complete and total disrespect for science and logic. If your wife told you that she was pregnant, but it wasn't your kid--would you believe her if she said the sperm just sort of came out of nowhere? Or would you say that it's not how conception (or marital faithfulness) actually works? (note: that's a general non-specific "your" up there, which does not refer to an actual wife, who if you have one I do not mean to in any way impugn)
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away. This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo. The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up with a theory that says some people are systematically skimming the value generated by others and that a series of cyclical crises will cause the total collapse of capitalism at some future date. Every time there's a market crash or a recession, Marxists bestir themselves to tell us all "I told you so!". The problem is the same as the Rothbardian Austrians blaming it all on the Federal Reserve or Keynesians saying it's a slump in demand. Too simplistic. (I'm a Hayekian, an economist who put "I can't explain particular examples and neither can anybody else" at the centre of his theory of economics). Complex, chaotic systems naturally move around their phase space, often with large oscillations. That's the bottom line. You can't eliminate the boom/bust cycle. It exists in every industry and always will. Sometimes bigger industries go through the cycle and everyone feels it.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    Sure, I didn't say that Marx invented it, just that it's from studying Marx that I remember it. > He read Smith and Ricardo. Absolutely. The subtitle of Capital I is "a critique of political economy" for a reason. Marx's innovation being, among other things, the 'socially necessary' component of 'socially necessary labor time.' Also, economics is only a small part of Marxism overall. (1/3 if you ask Lenin.) > The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. We can get into a big argument about how the LTV is not predictive, it'd descriptive, or maybe about how some studies have shown the LTV is just as descriptive as the STV is. That's not really what's important here, though. > That's the bottom line. Your comment has a lot of these assertions without a lot to back it up. Ideology can always shore up weaknesses in theory. ;) That said, I'm not an orthodox Marxist by any means.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in. I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory. I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various lefties I'd mocked during student politics were doing: replacing reality with purity. The cornercase arguments for any strict ideology are always hilarious. I fully expect that if Rothbardian libertarians were given dictatorial powers tomorrow, they'd buggerise it as much as the communists did.
- SilasX 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure that it's long pre-dated Marx for merchants to give superior weighting to what they can sell over their personal use cases ...
1123581321 14y ago
A meritocratic society is a lot of meritocracies chained together, themselves needing to merit success. Each one can only work with their own inputs, and so rely on the outputs of the other organizations. If these organizations do not extend deeply and broadly enough back, then at some point the inputs of an organization won't be the ones that should be there. This needs to go back to families at some point. In a meritocracy, mothers and fathers have an obligation to ensure that the potential of their children is developed and expressed through participation in society. I believe the failure of so many parents to do this is responsible for the ineffectiveness of our supposedly meritous systems, organizations and industries.
- kscaldef 14y ago
  While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises. Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.
  - 1123581321 14y ago
    I didn't mean to say only one is responsible; this is in the context of raganwald's essay about how quality meritocracies (presumably not needing much improvement) don't choose the best because they only maximize their inputs and don't necessarily work with all of those with the most potential. So I wrote about improving the inputs by examining the prior systems. What I completely missed, and what you alluded to by mentioning people in prison, with bad parents, and so on, is that the present generation of families also have inputs -- the systems that they went through (education, military, commerce, etc.) and their own parents. The issues we have today are partly the results of mistakes made by parents living a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. It's a depressing thought when expressed that way, but on the bright side, if we do as well as we can given our limited inputs today, we at least give the next generation of parents, teachers and employers a chance to do better than we could possibly have done.
pcalloway 14y ago
Something relevant to note, is that YC's two biggest successes got into YC at least in part because of personal relationships. IIRC, Dropbox was recommended by former roommates and friends from MIT (Xobni guys?). Airbnb was recommended by Michael Seibel from Justin.tv, perhaps others. In both cases it's possible that YC wouldn't have interviewed or perhaps accepted one or both of these companies if not for those recommendations. Or perhaps wouldn't have accepted Dropbox without the MIT credentials. Based on the stories the founders tell, YC was very skeptical of both ideas (but it's probably hard for them to judge). The next question I think of is whether Airbnb would have succeeded without YC. I suspect not. As good as those guys were at staying alive even they had limits, which they seemed in danger of reaching at that point. Dropbox had a better chance probably, since it was already very well received, but maybe they would have fumbled it without the YC help. Certainly they wouldn't have done quite as well. If personal connections was the thing that pushed some of YC's big successes over the application/interview acceptance hurdle it's fair to conclude that they've probably missed out on some others that didn't have those connections.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Incidentally, here's Dropbox's YC application: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html
- rainsford 14y ago
  Even in a meritocracy, those making the decisions need some way to both gather and screen candidates. Properly utilized personal relationships (as opposed to nepotism style situations) can be a good way to do both. Maybe Dropbox and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded without those recommendations, but those recommendations could certainly have led to a MORE merit based process. When it comes to judging quality, it can sometime be hard to beat a personal opinion from someone you trust. That may narrow the field a little bit (nobody has personally experienced all the alternatives) but it may also improve your decision.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
neeee 14y ago
I think you should turn up the contrast on your blog a little. This isn't very readable: http://goput.it/kag.png http://goput.it/kag.png Edit: It's fixed, thank you.
tokenadult 14y ago
A very thoughtful post. I especially like the discussion of the difference between sensitivity and specificity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity (the post uses other words) or in other words the difference between type I and type II errors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors There are so many interesting ways to think about this. Some of us may have Venn diagrams in our minds' eyes, thinking about the set of {all highly competent programmers} and {speakers invited to programming conferences} and just how those sets overlap. Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities. I think there are probably a lot of diamonds in the rough in communities all over the world that never get picked up, much less polished. Programming communities can thrive by being welcoming to people who are other than the usual suspects just like current programmers. Props to the author for reminding us not to neglect anyone.
- raganwald 14y ago
  Duly noted, thank you. Email me if you'd care to have your name and/or URL I can credit.
- milfot 14y ago
  "Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities." This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position or status, the past and what they have built for themselves. I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more, by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.
- crusso 14y ago
  if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities The irony here being that our public education system operates in a way that strictly opposes any sort of "meritocracy". As a result, we completely fail to help young learners develop their abilities... wash, rinse, repeat.
asalazar 14y ago
Meritocracies are great sometimes but they have the nasty side affect of promoting people into jobs they suck at. Just because you're the best at being an individual contributor, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager, and being a good manager doesn't mean you're going to be a good executive or entrepreneur. In organizations that value meritocracies absolutely, you end up losing your best people if they don't scale.
- SwellJoe 14y ago
  This is known as the Peter Principle. But, I would think a meritocracy would strive to test for, or respond to, promotions into levels of incompetence by pushing the person back down into a role where merit is higher than other available candidates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
spikels 14y ago
This is a strawman argument. Forget about Donald Trump as some model of success. Despite his head start he almost went bankrupt - twice. He is much less respected as a real estate developer in the world of real estate than you think. His success has been in PR and celebrity. There are thousands real estate investors who actually are good at it and started with nothing (e.g. Sam Zell). Don't like "meritocracy" then how how should we choose our leaders?
- raganwald 14y ago
  Who said that I didn't like Meritocracy? I said that when we use the word, we should all be on the same page as to what it actually means.
  - spikels 14y ago
    If this was just a post on language I think I totally agree - it is a tricky word to define. And I hope you saw the comment above on the ironic origin of the word. However I got the impression from several things in your post that you don't like the commonly held ideal of choosing leaders based on merit (i.e. meritocracy): (1) Donald Trump is somehow an example of it at work (see my comments about him above). (2) It discriminates against those from disadvantaged backgrounds who likely will accumulate less "merit". BTW - I agree this is a problem with both "meritocracy" and the world generally and should be adressed in various ways. (3) It somehow implies to "some people" that "none of the people in positions of authority are bozos". (4) Meritocracy does not "minimizing false negatives". You seem to be against the ideal not just that particular definition. The only positive thing you say is that it is better than "picking leaders at random or having some dictator appoint his drinking buddies". Do you like the idea of making choices based on merit? You seem to be both criticizing it as a goal and saying that it is not practical. I get the sense you would prefer making decisions based on some sense of "justice" rather than "merit". BTW - Love your many great posts on development. Thanks you very much. I feel awkward debating a hero.
    - raganwald 14y ago
      I think it is a post about the word "meritocracy" meaning many things to many people, and not being very useful for certain types of discussion. If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other. I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives). My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)
neilk 14y ago
The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system. Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.
- rayiner 14y ago
  > All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are smart and hard working people. But they're also generally very privileged. Not in a "my daddy is a hedge fund manager" privileged (though often that privileged), but almost always in a "my daddy was upper middle class, so I had all the educational support I ever needed, could afford to do extensive community service instead of working in HS and get into an Ivy league school, never had money distracting me from my grades, etc." > Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there. Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/chris-hayes-book-heroes_n_1578661.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/chris-hayes-book-he...
  - pitchups 14y ago
    > All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billionaires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion... In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion, is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if you remove the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0 billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."
mindcrime 14y ago
First of all, I absolutely agree with the general sentiment of this article. And I don't mean to nitpick, but I just want to point out something about this bit: But we don’t ask why they know their stuff. How did they get into a good university? Depending on exactly how you define "good university", I contend that the importance of this may be overstated. For the sake of argument, let's go with the idea that to many people "a good university" means "Ivy League". IF you take that premise, it makes sense to look at where a number of high-level leaders, like, say, the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies, went to college. Luckily, that's been analyzed: http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_... Now, as you might expect, a number of Ivy League schools are very well represented. But, equally important is this: The University of Wisconsin is tied with Harvard for the largest percentage of S&P 500 CEOs, at 3%. This is above Princeton, Stanford and Yale. And the University of Texas is right in there at 2% as well. Now this is not to say that UW or UT are "bad" schools, but are they what most people are talking about when they talk about the whole elite / non-elite dichotomy? Another tidbit: If you look at only the CEOs of the top 100 out of the S&P 500, four schools are tied for "most well represented". Those four are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and, wait for it... The University of North Carolina, all with 3% each. For what it's worth, it appears that it can at least be said that going to a reasonably well regarded State school is borderline just as helpful as going to an Ivy League school, if you plan to be the CEO of an S&P 500 firm. Of course, this all totally overlooking the fact that "CEOs of S&P 500 firms" is a ridiculously small and overly restrictive set to represent "being successful and a respected business leader" in any sense. If you're the guy who owns 6 McDonalds locations in your local small town area, or runs the most successful car dealership in a given area, you're pretty damn successful and - at least in a local sense - well regarded. And I expect you'll find plenty of those folks who went to schools most of us have never heard of, or didn't go to school at all. Anyway, just something to throw out there. I certainly wouldn't mean to discourage anyone from going to Stanford, Yale, Harvard or Princeton if they want to and have the opportunity. But the poor sap left to attend UNC, UT, UVA, UW, UM, etc., certainly should not feel like they've been consigned to the dustbin just because they did not go to an Ivy.
- Evbn 14y ago
  POI: UWisc has 4x the population of Harvard, so it isn't really on par on an odds ratio. I expect similar class size differences for the other state vs Ivy schools.
chrischen 14y ago
Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Define "merit" and whether such a thing is desirable to me. I don't have much love for a cockroach's merit.
  - chrischen 14y ago
    I define merit as deserving to live. Because you can't cheat the universe, if you live then by definition you have merit. You can't create merit, it already is. You can only align yourself with merit.
    - ucee054 14y ago
      No, merit is deserving to live tomorrow when conditions change. Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet. And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid. Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
      - chrischen 14y ago
        > Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet. I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose. > And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid. Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually. > Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity. If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?
davekinkead 14y ago
Reminds me of a good talk by Alain de Botton highlighting the nasty side of believing we live in a meritocracy whilst ignoring the role of chance. http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...
- return0 14y ago
  That's a great talk. Meritocracy doesn't really exist, but it's good to strive for it.
jacques_chester 14y ago
The main problem, as Hayek pointed out, is that folk confuse value and virtue. Value is an economic thing. Virtue is a social or emotional thing. Hayek argued quite comprehensively that value does not flow to the virtuous or vice versa. They are entirely unrelated. Moreover, attempts to align the two fatally break the mechanism which allows value to be created in the first place. People want value and virtue to go together. But they needn't. And they can't be made to.
JacksonGariety 14y ago
The tl;dr at the bottom is elegant. I might start doing that.
- EliRivers 14y ago
  In the old days that's what we used to call a summary. If you like that sort of thing and think you might like to do it yourself, reading up on how to write essays and the like will be very informative.
  - JacksonGariety 14y ago
    I'm not talking about the summary itself, I'm more referring to the way it sits on the page: "Broadly speaking:" Blockquote Italics Line underneath The summary is also well written.
kamaal 14y ago
As somebody who has pondered this problem over a while. You can give different names to this problem. You could also look at this from a Karma perspective. You could also question this in very different ways. I've tried to study this problem in many ways. To an extent I can tell you karma works in very mysterious ways, its slow and there are simply too many factors which are often unknown to us to make a judgement on why a person does or doesn't deserve X in life. Let me explain with an example. Somebody you know didn't study well in college, he is also not known to be very brilliant either. You are a super genius and you get into Google, he attempts every job interview and fails. But finally makes it to a start up as a very low level employee doing some menial job. You both go on to live life as usual. You assume his career his over. Now something strange happens, in the start up the guy is pushed, is put under tough demanding deadlines. Now the guy who wasn't good with books and exams suddenly discovers despite all that. He has something in himself to 'get things done'. The start up becomes a hit, he climbs the ladder pretty quickly ends up making a lot of money. You might ponder how this idiot got so successful, though he wasn't good with books and exams. How come he made it that big without knowing even 10% of what you know? Karma/meritocracy works in its own ways. You don't know how hard the other guy is working, you don't what is valuable to the world or why it is valuable, you don't know how much taking a risk pays off when done properly, you don't know many million things about the other guy to come to any logical conclusion. There are simply too many unknowns to ask 'If it is fair'? The world is actually fair, in its own way. You simply don't have enough data to decide if the world was fair to somebody or not. Or many times you are jealous or biased or whatever. Ultimately karma works. It actually does.
- scarmig 14y ago
  How would one distinguish the karma hypothesis from mean reversion?
- erikpukinskis 14y ago
  > Ultimately karma works. It actually does. What is that, your opinion? What is that based on? Does it apply to the kid who got caught selling pot for the third time, because he didn't know what else to do with his life, because he grew up in a place and a family where no one gave him any other choices, and is now spending the rest of it in prison? Here's my opinion: Karma works sometimes. And other times people are crushed by the ugliness in this world.
kislayverma 14y ago
The "Outliers" argument. The only way for a meritocratic system to work is by creating an absolutely level starting plane for all competitors. Which is in itself somewhat ironic because meritocracy reminds of capitalism (indirectly, I admit) while the level playing field requirement suggests a socialistic-ish system.
louischatriot 14y ago
This situation is very acute in "top tier" firms such as the management consulting big 4. The hiring process is designed to avoid false positives at all costs, even the cost of rejecting extremely good candidates.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
The thing described in the article is what I would call "pull meritocracy". You have a pool of candidates and you pull well-educated, predictable, safe ones from there. Leaving behind both privileged but not able and able but not predictable people. The ideal would be "push meritocracy", where able people push themself into the system and are able to reach their potential by exercising their ability. There are also multiple ways to do it (starting up, corporate/government ladder, non-commercial projects) so they don't get derailed over some personality quirk.
thewarrior 14y ago
After reading the article , uncomfortable thoughts began to float into my consciousness . A sense of unease at having to confront the hypocrite within . We as a species have progressed so far and have built up such complex societies that life seems far removed the Darwinian struggles of the jungle . Perhaps stemming from an innate sense of fairness or hoping to maximise societal potential we try and impose our own mechanisms on top of this existential struggle . Any measure that is at odds with this underlying abstraction is doomed to fail . So we must try and allocate resources and authority to those who can best use it . The ideal system would be where no person has any right to complain about his situation as he has been given what he rightly deserved . How deserving he is depends on his merit which actually depends on the resources the very system gave him in the first place . So meritocracy has to go back all the way back to the beginnings of society and maybe even deeper. But people would still be unequal . In this light Platos solution of the noble lie dosent seem so unfair . From Wikipedia : Plato presented the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a fictional tale, wherein Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato; Socrates speaks of a socially stratified society, wherein the populace are told "a sort of Phoenician tale": "The earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian." The fictional Socrates, created by Plato, proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth . . . it would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another.This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one. . . ." A meritocracy is just a more sophisticated and more fair version of the noble lie where we substitute "merit" instead of a metal without being aware that merit might also be related to being born in a certain class. Then there is the ascertaining "responsibility" or "credit" . The author seems to be differentiating between the two definitions on the basis of how much credit(right to be smug?) the victors in a meritocracy can take for their sucess. Then we disappear down a philosophical wormhole into the land of determinism , nature vs nurture etc . I try resolve this by consoling myself that maybe this meritocratic victory isnt really a victory . Maybe the theory that some people are higher and up and some people are lower down isnt applicable to ranking human beings . Its like asking whether the lion is the meritocratic victor in the jungle foodchain and the rest of the animals are the losers . Its one giant interdependent chain in which everything has its place .
regal 14y ago
The article has some good points. However, it loses a lot of credit by waving off Donald Trump's successes as being the result of a monetary investment not accessible to the many. Trump's real success comes from the education available to him via his father and his father's company, also not accessible to the many - but how many children have successful businessmen birthed who never surpassed or even matched their forebears the way Donald Trump did Fred Trump? While he did have an advantage starting out, Trump succeeded on his merits far more than most children of the wealthy and successful do.
- raldi 14y ago
  I think you've totally missed the point of the article. It's not saying Trump is bad at real estate, but rather that there might be a million people who are even more talented at it, but will never discover that fact.
cbsmith 14y ago
The essay hits on the right notion but I think needs to be expanded further. Bottom line is that the most important quality of a leader is that people will follow them. While the individual is a significant factor in this, context/circumstance are also important. Often the ideal combination of leadership "merit" might not reside in a person who is of particularly great "merit" outside of a particular leadership role (though it is pretty rare in someone who is absolutely useless outside of the role). Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who will speculatively be best able to lead. A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed down, let me know. ;-) At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short: it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned" the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_ accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the record of _past_ accomplishment. This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead to an unstable society...
AlexeiSadeski 14y ago
Meritocracy is a bit childish.
kdazzle 14y ago
I think the example about programming languages and speakers can also be extended to gender and race.
lingben 14y ago
Donald Trump is NOT successful investing in real estate. His projects go bankrupt left and right and his net return overall has been abysmal when compared to others who really are great investors. Trump is good at two things: image and self-promotion.

164 points by raganwald 14y ago

> They have one test, the market has another. This is actually one of the biggest things I appreciate from studying Marx: the reminder that 'use-value'[1] and 'exchange-value'[2] are two, separate things, and while I generally want things based on how I can use them, the market doesn't care about that at all. Startups would be wise to heed Marx's words here, and remember this difference. Your job as a startup is to make money, which means producing something that has a high exchange-value. Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. How many times have I said "That idea is stupid, I'd never use that" and then it became a smashing, overnight success? Too many to count. 1: Basically, "how useful is this thing to me?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value 2: Basically, "how much could I sell this for?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value

coolsunglasses 14y ago
>Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. This has been the key lesson of my career as a programmer and entrepreneur. Reading Marx made me a better capitalist. I tell people that ask for book recommendations to read Marx all the time and they sneer at me even though they know I'm not a Marxist.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  I'm aware of the existence of a business school which was until recently was majorly staffed by Marxists. That was basically their response as well. "We know capitalism better than anyone, all we do is study it." I've found that it's a bit better to recommend "Value, Price, and Profit"[1] rather than Capital I because it gives you the gist of the most important part (the first three chapters) while being much smaller and a little less dry. 1: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-...
  - coolsunglasses 14y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion! I usually recommended the Oxford abridgement of Das Kapital to ease the pain. I'll start recommending this one instead. :)
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      Reading Capital is still totally worthwhile. I've read volume I four or five times at this point, and I always find new things that are relevant to today... that said, it is difficult for a new reader. When you decide to climb that mountain, you could do much worse than have David Harvey as a companion: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/ http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
      - coolsunglasses 14y ago
        Harvey was how I went through it.
- raganwald 14y ago
  How can I resist? http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9200000/Marxism-marx-brothers-9268845-2050-2560.jpg http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9200000/Marxism-marx-...
- CleanedStar 14y ago
  I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which produces real commodities. Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans believe "every word of the Bible is literally accurate", and that "the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East" are "historically accurate". Over 70% believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, expecting people to understand how wealthy people discretely work the economic system is way, way beyond most people.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like... Your statement implies that economic events must be analyzed from the standpoint of base & superstructure, but there is no rule or law that requires it.
  - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
    > Then again, (...) [o]ver 70% [of Americans] believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, (...) There is a way to phrase this sentiment without alienating quite as many decent people. Try to find it next time. (I, too, am an atheist; but I don't see a need to enforce atheism on HN.)
    - Crake 14y ago
      I personally do not really mind "alienating" the "earth is 5,000 years old" crowd by not respecting their complete and total disrespect for science and logic. If your wife told you that she was pregnant, but it wasn't your kid--would you believe her if she said the sperm just sort of came out of nowhere? Or would you say that it's not how conception (or marital faithfulness) actually works? (note: that's a general non-specific "your" up there, which does not refer to an actual wife, who if you have one I do not mean to in any way impugn)
jacques_chester 14y ago
As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away. This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo. The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up with a theory that says some people are systematically skimming the value generated by others and that a series of cyclical crises will cause the total collapse of capitalism at some future date. Every time there's a market crash or a recession, Marxists bestir themselves to tell us all "I told you so!". The problem is the same as the Rothbardian Austrians blaming it all on the Federal Reserve or Keynesians saying it's a slump in demand. Too simplistic. (I'm a Hayekian, an economist who put "I can't explain particular examples and neither can anybody else" at the centre of his theory of economics). Complex, chaotic systems naturally move around their phase space, often with large oscillations. That's the bottom line. You can't eliminate the boom/bust cycle. It exists in every industry and always will. Sometimes bigger industries go through the cycle and everyone feels it.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Sure, I didn't say that Marx invented it, just that it's from studying Marx that I remember it. > He read Smith and Ricardo. Absolutely. The subtitle of Capital I is "a critique of political economy" for a reason. Marx's innovation being, among other things, the 'socially necessary' component of 'socially necessary labor time.' Also, economics is only a small part of Marxism overall. (1/3 if you ask Lenin.) > The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. We can get into a big argument about how the LTV is not predictive, it'd descriptive, or maybe about how some studies have shown the LTV is just as descriptive as the STV is. That's not really what's important here, though. > That's the bottom line. Your comment has a lot of these assertions without a lot to back it up. Ideology can always shore up weaknesses in theory. ;) That said, I'm not an orthodox Marxist by any means.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in. I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory. I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various lefties I'd mocked during student politics were doing: replacing reality with purity. The cornercase arguments for any strict ideology are always hilarious. I fully expect that if Rothbardian libertarians were given dictatorial powers tomorrow, they'd buggerise it as much as the communists did.
SilasX 14y ago
I'm pretty sure that it's long pre-dated Marx for merchants to give superior weighting to what they can sell over their personal use cases ...

1123581321 14y ago

A meritocratic society is a lot of meritocracies chained together, themselves needing to merit success. Each one can only work with their own inputs, and so rely on the outputs of the other organizations. If these organizations do not extend deeply and broadly enough back, then at some point the inputs of an organization won't be the ones that should be there. This needs to go back to families at some point. In a meritocracy, mothers and fathers have an obligation to ensure that the potential of their children is developed and expressed through participation in society. I believe the failure of so many parents to do this is responsible for the ineffectiveness of our supposedly meritous systems, organizations and industries.

kscaldef 14y ago
While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises. Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.
- 1123581321 14y ago
  I didn't mean to say only one is responsible; this is in the context of raganwald's essay about how quality meritocracies (presumably not needing much improvement) don't choose the best because they only maximize their inputs and don't necessarily work with all of those with the most potential. So I wrote about improving the inputs by examining the prior systems. What I completely missed, and what you alluded to by mentioning people in prison, with bad parents, and so on, is that the present generation of families also have inputs -- the systems that they went through (education, military, commerce, etc.) and their own parents. The issues we have today are partly the results of mistakes made by parents living a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. It's a depressing thought when expressed that way, but on the bright side, if we do as well as we can given our limited inputs today, we at least give the next generation of parents, teachers and employers a chance to do better than we could possibly have done.

pcalloway 14y ago

Something relevant to note, is that YC's two biggest successes got into YC at least in part because of personal relationships. IIRC, Dropbox was recommended by former roommates and friends from MIT (Xobni guys?). Airbnb was recommended by Michael Seibel from Justin.tv, perhaps others. In both cases it's possible that YC wouldn't have interviewed or perhaps accepted one or both of these companies if not for those recommendations. Or perhaps wouldn't have accepted Dropbox without the MIT credentials. Based on the stories the founders tell, YC was very skeptical of both ideas (but it's probably hard for them to judge). The next question I think of is whether Airbnb would have succeeded without YC. I suspect not. As good as those guys were at staying alive even they had limits, which they seemed in danger of reaching at that point. Dropbox had a better chance probably, since it was already very well received, but maybe they would have fumbled it without the YC help. Certainly they wouldn't have done quite as well. If personal connections was the thing that pushed some of YC's big successes over the application/interview acceptance hurdle it's fair to conclude that they've probably missed out on some others that didn't have those connections.

steveklabnik 14y ago
Incidentally, here's Dropbox's YC application: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html
rainsford 14y ago
Even in a meritocracy, those making the decisions need some way to both gather and screen candidates. Properly utilized personal relationships (as opposed to nepotism style situations) can be a good way to do both. Maybe Dropbox and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded without those recommendations, but those recommendations could certainly have led to a MORE merit based process. When it comes to judging quality, it can sometime be hard to beat a personal opinion from someone you trust. That may narrow the field a little bit (nobody has personally experienced all the alternatives) but it may also improve your decision.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

neeee 14y ago

I think you should turn up the contrast on your blog a little. This isn't very readable: http://goput.it/kag.png http://goput.it/kag.png Edit: It's fixed, thank you.

tokenadult 14y ago

A very thoughtful post. I especially like the discussion of the difference between sensitivity and specificity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity (the post uses other words) or in other words the difference between type I and type II errors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors There are so many interesting ways to think about this. Some of us may have Venn diagrams in our minds' eyes, thinking about the set of {all highly competent programmers} and {speakers invited to programming conferences} and just how those sets overlap. Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities. I think there are probably a lot of diamonds in the rough in communities all over the world that never get picked up, much less polished. Programming communities can thrive by being welcoming to people who are other than the usual suspects just like current programmers. Props to the author for reminding us not to neglect anyone.

raganwald 14y ago
Duly noted, thank you. Email me if you'd care to have your name and/or URL I can credit.
milfot 14y ago
"Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities." This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position or status, the past and what they have built for themselves. I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more, by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.
crusso 14y ago
if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities The irony here being that our public education system operates in a way that strictly opposes any sort of "meritocracy". As a result, we completely fail to help young learners develop their abilities... wash, rinse, repeat.

asalazar 14y ago

Meritocracies are great sometimes but they have the nasty side affect of promoting people into jobs they suck at. Just because you're the best at being an individual contributor, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager, and being a good manager doesn't mean you're going to be a good executive or entrepreneur. In organizations that value meritocracies absolutely, you end up losing your best people if they don't scale.

SwellJoe 14y ago
This is known as the Peter Principle. But, I would think a meritocracy would strive to test for, or respond to, promotions into levels of incompetence by pushing the person back down into a role where merit is higher than other available candidates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

spikels 14y ago

This is a strawman argument. Forget about Donald Trump as some model of success. Despite his head start he almost went bankrupt - twice. He is much less respected as a real estate developer in the world of real estate than you think. His success has been in PR and celebrity. There are thousands real estate investors who actually are good at it and started with nothing (e.g. Sam Zell). Don't like "meritocracy" then how how should we choose our leaders?

raganwald 14y ago
Who said that I didn't like Meritocracy? I said that when we use the word, we should all be on the same page as to what it actually means.
- spikels 14y ago
  If this was just a post on language I think I totally agree - it is a tricky word to define. And I hope you saw the comment above on the ironic origin of the word. However I got the impression from several things in your post that you don't like the commonly held ideal of choosing leaders based on merit (i.e. meritocracy): (1) Donald Trump is somehow an example of it at work (see my comments about him above). (2) It discriminates against those from disadvantaged backgrounds who likely will accumulate less "merit". BTW - I agree this is a problem with both "meritocracy" and the world generally and should be adressed in various ways. (3) It somehow implies to "some people" that "none of the people in positions of authority are bozos". (4) Meritocracy does not "minimizing false negatives". You seem to be against the ideal not just that particular definition. The only positive thing you say is that it is better than "picking leaders at random or having some dictator appoint his drinking buddies". Do you like the idea of making choices based on merit? You seem to be both criticizing it as a goal and saying that it is not practical. I get the sense you would prefer making decisions based on some sense of "justice" rather than "merit". BTW - Love your many great posts on development. Thanks you very much. I feel awkward debating a hero.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    I think it is a post about the word "meritocracy" meaning many things to many people, and not being very useful for certain types of discussion. If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other. I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives). My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)

neilk 14y ago

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system. Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.

rayiner 14y ago
> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are smart and hard working people. But they're also generally very privileged. Not in a "my daddy is a hedge fund manager" privileged (though often that privileged), but almost always in a "my daddy was upper middle class, so I had all the educational support I ever needed, could afford to do extensive community service instead of working in HS and get into an Ivy league school, never had money distracting me from my grades, etc." > Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there. Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/chris-hayes-book-heroes_n_1578661.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/chris-hayes-book-he...
- pitchups 14y ago
  > All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billionaires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion... In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion, is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if you remove the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0 billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."

mindcrime 14y ago

First of all, I absolutely agree with the general sentiment of this article. And I don't mean to nitpick, but I just want to point out something about this bit: But we don’t ask why they know their stuff. How did they get into a good university? Depending on exactly how you define "good university", I contend that the importance of this may be overstated. For the sake of argument, let's go with the idea that to many people "a good university" means "Ivy League". IF you take that premise, it makes sense to look at where a number of high-level leaders, like, say, the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies, went to college. Luckily, that's been analyzed: http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_... Now, as you might expect, a number of Ivy League schools are very well represented. But, equally important is this: The University of Wisconsin is tied with Harvard for the largest percentage of S&P 500 CEOs, at 3%. This is above Princeton, Stanford and Yale. And the University of Texas is right in there at 2% as well. Now this is not to say that UW or UT are "bad" schools, but are they what most people are talking about when they talk about the whole elite / non-elite dichotomy? Another tidbit: If you look at only the CEOs of the top 100 out of the S&P 500, four schools are tied for "most well represented". Those four are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and, wait for it... The University of North Carolina, all with 3% each. For what it's worth, it appears that it can at least be said that going to a reasonably well regarded State school is borderline just as helpful as going to an Ivy League school, if you plan to be the CEO of an S&P 500 firm. Of course, this all totally overlooking the fact that "CEOs of S&P 500 firms" is a ridiculously small and overly restrictive set to represent "being successful and a respected business leader" in any sense. If you're the guy who owns 6 McDonalds locations in your local small town area, or runs the most successful car dealership in a given area, you're pretty damn successful and - at least in a local sense - well regarded. And I expect you'll find plenty of those folks who went to schools most of us have never heard of, or didn't go to school at all. Anyway, just something to throw out there. I certainly wouldn't mean to discourage anyone from going to Stanford, Yale, Harvard or Princeton if they want to and have the opportunity. But the poor sap left to attend UNC, UT, UVA, UW, UM, etc., certainly should not feel like they've been consigned to the dustbin just because they did not go to an Ivy.

Evbn 14y ago
POI: UWisc has 4x the population of Harvard, so it isn't really on par on an odds ratio. I expect similar class size differences for the other state vs Ivy schools.

chrischen 14y ago

Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.

Evbn 14y ago
Define "merit" and whether such a thing is desirable to me. I don't have much love for a cockroach's merit.
- chrischen 14y ago
  I define merit as deserving to live. Because you can't cheat the universe, if you live then by definition you have merit. You can't create merit, it already is. You can only align yourself with merit.
  - ucee054 14y ago
    No, merit is deserving to live tomorrow when conditions change. Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet. And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid. Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
    - chrischen 14y ago
      > Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet. I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose. > And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid. Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually. > Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity. If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?

davekinkead 14y ago

Reminds me of a good talk by Alain de Botton highlighting the nasty side of believing we live in a meritocracy whilst ignoring the role of chance. http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success.html http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...

return0 14y ago
That's a great talk. Meritocracy doesn't really exist, but it's good to strive for it.

jacques_chester 14y ago

The main problem, as Hayek pointed out, is that folk confuse value and virtue. Value is an economic thing. Virtue is a social or emotional thing. Hayek argued quite comprehensively that value does not flow to the virtuous or vice versa. They are entirely unrelated. Moreover, attempts to align the two fatally break the mechanism which allows value to be created in the first place. People want value and virtue to go together. But they needn't. And they can't be made to.

JacksonGariety 14y ago

The tl;dr at the bottom is elegant. I might start doing that.

EliRivers 14y ago
In the old days that's what we used to call a summary. If you like that sort of thing and think you might like to do it yourself, reading up on how to write essays and the like will be very informative.
- JacksonGariety 14y ago
  I'm not talking about the summary itself, I'm more referring to the way it sits on the page: "Broadly speaking:" Blockquote Italics Line underneath The summary is also well written.

kamaal 14y ago

As somebody who has pondered this problem over a while. You can give different names to this problem. You could also look at this from a Karma perspective. You could also question this in very different ways. I've tried to study this problem in many ways. To an extent I can tell you karma works in very mysterious ways, its slow and there are simply too many factors which are often unknown to us to make a judgement on why a person does or doesn't deserve X in life. Let me explain with an example. Somebody you know didn't study well in college, he is also not known to be very brilliant either. You are a super genius and you get into Google, he attempts every job interview and fails. But finally makes it to a start up as a very low level employee doing some menial job. You both go on to live life as usual. You assume his career his over. Now something strange happens, in the start up the guy is pushed, is put under tough demanding deadlines. Now the guy who wasn't good with books and exams suddenly discovers despite all that. He has something in himself to 'get things done'. The start up becomes a hit, he climbs the ladder pretty quickly ends up making a lot of money. You might ponder how this idiot got so successful, though he wasn't good with books and exams. How come he made it that big without knowing even 10% of what you know? Karma/meritocracy works in its own ways. You don't know how hard the other guy is working, you don't what is valuable to the world or why it is valuable, you don't know how much taking a risk pays off when done properly, you don't know many million things about the other guy to come to any logical conclusion. There are simply too many unknowns to ask 'If it is fair'? The world is actually fair, in its own way. You simply don't have enough data to decide if the world was fair to somebody or not. Or many times you are jealous or biased or whatever. Ultimately karma works. It actually does.

scarmig 14y ago
How would one distinguish the karma hypothesis from mean reversion?
erikpukinskis 14y ago
> Ultimately karma works. It actually does. What is that, your opinion? What is that based on? Does it apply to the kid who got caught selling pot for the third time, because he didn't know what else to do with his life, because he grew up in a place and a family where no one gave him any other choices, and is now spending the rest of it in prison? Here's my opinion: Karma works sometimes. And other times people are crushed by the ugliness in this world.

kislayverma 14y ago

The "Outliers" argument. The only way for a meritocratic system to work is by creating an absolutely level starting plane for all competitors. Which is in itself somewhat ironic because meritocracy reminds of capitalism (indirectly, I admit) while the level playing field requirement suggests a socialistic-ish system.

louischatriot 14y ago

This situation is very acute in "top tier" firms such as the management consulting big 4. The hiring process is designed to avoid false positives at all costs, even the cost of rejecting extremely good candidates.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

The thing described in the article is what I would call "pull meritocracy". You have a pool of candidates and you pull well-educated, predictable, safe ones from there. Leaving behind both privileged but not able and able but not predictable people. The ideal would be "push meritocracy", where able people push themself into the system and are able to reach their potential by exercising their ability. There are also multiple ways to do it (starting up, corporate/government ladder, non-commercial projects) so they don't get derailed over some personality quirk.

thewarrior 14y ago

After reading the article , uncomfortable thoughts began to float into my consciousness . A sense of unease at having to confront the hypocrite within . We as a species have progressed so far and have built up such complex societies that life seems far removed the Darwinian struggles of the jungle . Perhaps stemming from an innate sense of fairness or hoping to maximise societal potential we try and impose our own mechanisms on top of this existential struggle . Any measure that is at odds with this underlying abstraction is doomed to fail . So we must try and allocate resources and authority to those who can best use it . The ideal system would be where no person has any right to complain about his situation as he has been given what he rightly deserved . How deserving he is depends on his merit which actually depends on the resources the very system gave him in the first place . So meritocracy has to go back all the way back to the beginnings of society and maybe even deeper. But people would still be unequal . In this light Platos solution of the noble lie dosent seem so unfair . From Wikipedia : Plato presented the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a fictional tale, wherein Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato; Socrates speaks of a socially stratified society, wherein the populace are told "a sort of Phoenician tale": "The earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian." The fictional Socrates, created by Plato, proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth . . . it would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another.This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one. . . ." A meritocracy is just a more sophisticated and more fair version of the noble lie where we substitute "merit" instead of a metal without being aware that merit might also be related to being born in a certain class. Then there is the ascertaining "responsibility" or "credit" . The author seems to be differentiating between the two definitions on the basis of how much credit(right to be smug?) the victors in a meritocracy can take for their sucess. Then we disappear down a philosophical wormhole into the land of determinism , nature vs nurture etc . I try resolve this by consoling myself that maybe this meritocratic victory isnt really a victory . Maybe the theory that some people are higher and up and some people are lower down isnt applicable to ranking human beings . Its like asking whether the lion is the meritocratic victor in the jungle foodchain and the rest of the animals are the losers . Its one giant interdependent chain in which everything has its place .

regal 14y ago

The article has some good points. However, it loses a lot of credit by waving off Donald Trump's successes as being the result of a monetary investment not accessible to the many. Trump's real success comes from the education available to him via his father and his father's company, also not accessible to the many - but how many children have successful businessmen birthed who never surpassed or even matched their forebears the way Donald Trump did Fred Trump? While he did have an advantage starting out, Trump succeeded on his merits far more than most children of the wealthy and successful do.

raldi 14y ago
I think you've totally missed the point of the article. It's not saying Trump is bad at real estate, but rather that there might be a million people who are even more talented at it, but will never discover that fact.

cbsmith 14y ago

The essay hits on the right notion but I think needs to be expanded further. Bottom line is that the most important quality of a leader is that people will follow them. While the individual is a significant factor in this, context/circumstance are also important. Often the ideal combination of leadership "merit" might not reside in a person who is of particularly great "merit" outside of a particular leadership role (though it is pretty rare in someone who is absolutely useless outside of the role). Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who will speculatively be best able to lead. A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed down, let me know. ;-) At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short: it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned" the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_ accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the record of _past_ accomplishment. This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead to an unstable society...

AlexeiSadeski 14y ago

Meritocracy is a bit childish.

kdazzle 14y ago

I think the example about programming languages and speakers can also be extended to gender and race.

lingben 14y ago

Donald Trump is NOT successful investing in real estate. His projects go bankrupt left and right and his net return overall has been abysmal when compared to others who really are great investors. Trump is good at two things: image and self-promotion.