I can't help feel like including any discussion of the ultra-rich such as Gates as an example when discussing meritocracy confuses the question. That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck, as there is no possible way one person's skill or merit can exceed that of his peers by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude. Basically, that kind of wealth is more like winning a lottery where their skills bought them a ticket. I suppose the question then becomes, could you still say there is a meritocracy if there are outliers who win the lotto? Do you discard those outliers and look at the general population, is the existence of such of outliers counter-evidence to meritocracy, or does the fact that the kind of "lottery" Gates won still required a high level of skill to even play mean it may to some degree support the idea of a meritocracy?
I stopped reading that article when he implied that Gates' wealth should be considered or measured in relation to programming skill. Debates about meritocracy are important, but starting from flawed frame like that made me not want to invest more time reading that particular author. If he wanted to compare Gates to other technology entrepreneurs, that might have been worthwhile, but implying that we don't live in a meritocracy because there are better programmers than Gates shows the author is not interested in a rigorous look at the issue. I wasn't surprised to see Bill Gates clickbait at the top of the Apple News app, but I was a little bummed to also see it on the top of HN. Then again, I still clicked it and commented on it, so mission accomplished for Fast Company I suppose.
Meritocracy is a thing that distinguishes between people who had the same opportunities. There are many people who had all the same opportunities as Gates but only one of them is Gates, because the other people who had the same opportunities made different choices. There are others who might have made the same choices but didn't have the same opportunities.
Pretending that one or the other is sufficient on its own is folly. You need both. If you don't have the same opportunities then you can't be Gates no matter how hard you work, and if you don't work hard then you can't be Gates even if you had the same opportunities.
Moreover, having fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the "what should I do" decision tree. If you have the same opportunities as Gates and you make the right decisions then you're a billionaire instead of a millionaire. If you have fewer opportunities then instead it's the difference between having a $140K/year job or a $40K/year job, but that is still a highly relevant difference in your life.
> That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck
I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got to see how many decisions he had to make to achieve what we did, I'd doubt you'd it attribute it solely to luck. All successful businesses likely experience some form of luck, but you need to be in a position to take advantage of it and that comes from skill and hard work.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to create an industry like PCs or business software. After they're ubiquitous it's easy to look back and say "well of course, anyone could have done that", but the fact is other's were trying and failed or gave up or never started.
I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer.
Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical.
Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.
You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.
As already stated, Bill Gates and other billionaires are pretty irrelevant to this question. Nobody really cares what it takes to become a billionaire, almost nobody will become one anyway.
What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds.
If you forget about the question of why is it that someone's parents are rich, parental socioeconomic status has comparable power in explaining children success as the child's IQ has. Reference paper: "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research", Tarmo Strenze.
log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck
Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success.
American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L).
People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L).
You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends?
Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?)
For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide
"Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432
Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").
I'm not really sure how else to see it. It's pretty straightforward to show that the simplest possible model is some kind of probability density function with inputs of skill and privilege and a wide distribution and a very long tail due to cumulative effects. Not having various skills will obviously preclude certain outcomes (probably can't buy 86-DOS and produce PC-DOS if you couldn't understand the technology), not having certain privileges will preclude others (can't sell PC-DOS if you aren't in a position to meet with anyone to try) and some outcomes beget further possibilities (unlikely to have grown Microsoft and produced Windows if you hadn't have sold PC-DOS). Luck being the realization of such a probabilistic model into finite outcomes.
Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.
The authors demonstrate meritocracy doesn't exist by defining it out of existence: even if your success could be entirely due to intelligence and hard work, you don't deserve the genes and life experiences that made you intelligent and hard working.
so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or unrepresentative?
Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.
If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?
I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth.
How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
> The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value...
They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
What would happen if we'd apply PageRank to the problem? I.e., everybody gives N votes to other people. Then we'd put everything in a big matrix, compute the first eigenvector, and obtain a ranking. And then we'd distribute wealth according to that ranking.
Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.
Even without SEO, I wouldn't say that the best websites are the top results - they tend to be those most broadly applicable. Which works okay perhaps for a search engine
I think aspiring to the meritorious (ethical, wise, knowledgeable, dedicated, etc.) being successful seems like it'd be good, rather the problem isn't so much "meritocracy" as it is believing that meritocracy is an existing norm, rather than being more of an aspirational Avalon.
Pure communism doesn't exist, pure capitalism doesn't exist, pure fascism doesn't exist. Pure ideals of any kind don't exist. Meritocracy exists to varying degrees all over the place, and it's something we should be striving for wherever possible. There are good arguments for temporary exceptions to meritocracy to, say, correct historical inequities, but it's extremely important that those be viewed as temporary roadblocks on the ultimate path towards a society that is as meritocratic as we can make it. Which, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean that those low on 'merit' need to be left to die, we can still provide a good life for even the least economically valuable individuals, but yes, those who are providing the most economic utility to society should get to consume more of that utility.
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.
Gates was as obsessed about business almost asmuch as about programming. His father was a recognized lawyer. And he was immensly strong willed.
He didn't really take huge risks. If his business had not succeeded the worst that would have happened to him (likely) would have been an upper-middleclass career and life.
He was immensly shrewd, bold, hard working and smart. But ... I'm not sure what he exactly can be held for as an example since he had the right genes and the right topics of interest and the right place in history.
You can't approach just the business as a form of lottety since, although it's a game of chance, it's not a single roll of the die. The stars must be aligned, lot of small things need to come together just right.
> What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk.
Isn't there also a major component that involves the opportunity to take risk including things like a sufficient social safety net? Certainly, different people have different downsides in the case of failure. Many of those factors are not based on merit.
> What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk.
Balderdash. His parents were wealthy, his father was a successful lawyer and his mother was on the board of IBM and was very well connected socially. From Wikipedia: "Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard, saying '... if things [Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence].'" According to Gates, the decision was fairly riskless.
Gates didn’t take much of a risk, he was never going to be homeless if his plans didn’t work out. He is pretty much the perfect example if you want to prove we don’t exist in a meritocracy.
Laws of nature are in every person identical so it can't be both luck and hard work in different people in different amount.You cross street on green light and 160 mile per hour car kill you.Everyone would say bad luck determine that man life.If person get money on lotterry everyone would say good luck determine that man life.But if person get richer every day by medium amount people and end up being rich people say hard work determine that man life.If you accept that hard work determine man life than you must accept that lottery winner get his money through hard work.Otherwise you must accept that person that worked hard just got lucky most of days by medium ammount.Sorry for my english.
> As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order.
I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them.
I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.
[+] [-] mreome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] povertyworld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|7 years ago|reply
Pretending that one or the other is sufficient on its own is folly. You need both. If you don't have the same opportunities then you can't be Gates no matter how hard you work, and if you don't work hard then you can't be Gates even if you had the same opportunities.
Moreover, having fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the "what should I do" decision tree. If you have the same opportunities as Gates and you make the right decisions then you're a billionaire instead of a millionaire. If you have fewer opportunities then instead it's the difference between having a $140K/year job or a $40K/year job, but that is still a highly relevant difference in your life.
[+] [-] _nosaj|7 years ago|reply
In the early years of Microsoft there were no real software companies for them to complete with.
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awb|7 years ago|reply
I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got to see how many decisions he had to make to achieve what we did, I'd doubt you'd it attribute it solely to luck. All successful businesses likely experience some form of luck, but you need to be in a position to take advantage of it and that comes from skill and hard work.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to create an industry like PCs or business software. After they're ubiquitous it's easy to look back and say "well of course, anyone could have done that", but the fact is other's were trying and failed or gave up or never started.
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curtis|7 years ago|reply
Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
[+] [-] jimrhods23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PavlikPaja|7 years ago|reply
Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pteredactyl|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ddingus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|7 years ago|reply
You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
[+] [-] Grustaf|7 years ago|reply
What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds.
So yes meritocracy most certainly exists.
[+] [-] YjSe2GMQ|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigj0n|7 years ago|reply
If your parents work hard and want to give you opportunity, they are entitled to do so. The meritocracy is applied over generations.
[+] [-] stared|7 years ago|reply
log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck
Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success.
American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L).
People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L).
You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends?
Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?)
For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide
"Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432
Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").
[+] [-] lotyrin|7 years ago|reply
Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
This is important, if you consider that the goal of a meritocracy could be that it drives more output.
> American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
And W. Yes, people want us to believe that hard work brings us success, for obvious reasons.
[+] [-] gweinberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|7 years ago|reply
Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.
If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?
I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth.
How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosser|7 years ago|reply
They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
For me, I don't really care whether meritocracy exist or not so it more advantageous for me to believe it doesn't exist.
[+] [-] foolrush|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|7 years ago|reply
Of course meritocracy exists. If it didn't, I'd be a professional athlete instead of a programmer and I'd make a huge salary.
Or maybe I'd be an astronaut, or a brain surgeon.
Thankfully, meritocracy exists and allows the truly gifted and hard-working people who excel at those jobs to hold those spots.
I think I make a pretty decent coder. But I'd just stink on an NBA court, in brain surgery, and probably in a space shuttle.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
Chesterton, 1908
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raymondh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.
[+] [-] RugnirViking|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Glyptodon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ickwabe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacon|7 years ago|reply
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=320002...
[+] [-] darawk|7 years ago|reply
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.
[+] [-] fsloth|7 years ago|reply
He didn't really take huge risks. If his business had not succeeded the worst that would have happened to him (likely) would have been an upper-middleclass career and life.
He was immensly shrewd, bold, hard working and smart. But ... I'm not sure what he exactly can be held for as an example since he had the right genes and the right topics of interest and the right place in history.
You can't approach just the business as a form of lottety since, although it's a game of chance, it's not a single roll of the die. The stars must be aligned, lot of small things need to come together just right.
[+] [-] rileymat2|7 years ago|reply
Isn't there also a major component that involves the opportunity to take risk including things like a sufficient social safety net? Certainly, different people have different downsides in the case of failure. Many of those factors are not based on merit.
[+] [-] prewett|7 years ago|reply
Balderdash. His parents were wealthy, his father was a successful lawyer and his mother was on the board of IBM and was very well connected socially. From Wikipedia: "Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard, saying '... if things [Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence].'" According to Gates, the decision was fairly riskless.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukaa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|7 years ago|reply
That doesn’t mean it’s bad to have it as a goal / ideal.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
To attempt to have the former is folly; to attempt the latter, sanity.
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them.
I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.
[+] [-] gubbrora|7 years ago|reply
It is sad that some people are born dumb as a rock but we shouldn't make them math professors out of pity.