The issue of meritocracy often turns semantic. Different realities can be justified with the same word depending on people's conception of justice and efficiency.
The other aspect not mentioned is that a society can be meritocratic, but the peak performance that results does not necessarily lead to work that is useful to society in aggregate. I am reminded of Jeff Hammerbacher's infamous quote: "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." That quote is simplistic to humorous effect of course, but it underlies an important natural run-off effect of meritocracy: that much activity is redistributive instead of creative. That's why thinking simply in terms of atomized individuals (as articles on meritocracy written in English usually do) pitted against each other leaves aside too many important questions and outcomes.
edit: to add to this, the last paragraph of the article is deeply ironic since you have people fighting over scraps precisely because smart people have captured much of the pie growth, and did so in a way that would be considered meritocratic by the author.
The author accidentally touches on the blind spot of American meritocracy, but speeds on and never looks back:
> There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers.
If you consider “meritocracy” to begin when someone applies for their first job, you might not care about that. But there are two glaring problems:
One, on an individual level, selecting the best at a given point in time ignores less measurable attributes, like “grit”. The candidate from a poor background who went to an okay school at night while working to support their family may be more motivated to improve than someone who coasted by at a good school due to parental connections.
Two, on a societal level, being born into good circumstances in no way correlates with innate abilities. By privileging those who grow up in higher socioeconomic classes, we are leaving behind individuals who have undiscovered latent talents that might otherwise make large societal contributions.
Without fixing those two things, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that meritocracy will produce “peak performance”.
The article literally lists examples of things that would help people with undiscovered latent talents. Access to education, unemployment insurance, universal basic income...
Many people, including me, feel differently about two different kinds of unfairness:
* We are OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the genetic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of the socioeconomic background of parents. Most of us want a society in which the most able, talented, hard-working, persistent among us can put those qualities to work for their most productive uses.
* We are NOT OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the socioeconomic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of ability, talent, hard work, and persistence. Most of us do NOT want a society in which those who are less able, less talented, less hard-working, and less persistent can get ahead through other means.
I would offer the friendly suggestion that perhaps the concept of fairness is not even relevant here.
We want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility. The fairest system would be a lottery: picking people completely randomly, without regard to socioeconomic status or "merit".
Given that we want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility, "winning the genetic lottery" is ok, because some people are just born with natural talents. But "winning the socioeconomic lottery" is not ok, because there's no apparent correlation between the wealth of your parents and your personal competence.
The unfair advantages compound, though. Kids with stable upper-middle-class parents would probably be better at things than poor kids, just because they have more resources and time, less stress, better role models. That is why equity advocates don't like standardized tests anymore...
Are you ok with unfairness that stems from higher ability that is itself the result of "winning the socioeconomic lottery"?
Like, I was born in Russia, so my theoretical CS knowledge outside of what I learned on my own is crap, because (unlike e.g. maths) the CS curriculum in my ~2nd tier college was completely useless. I am talented enough to work in a big tech co, and my maths is (or rather used to be) top-notch, so it didn't have to be like that, it's purely based on where I could go to college. If you were hiring a computer scientist straight out of college, would you hire me or a MIT grad? He merely won the socioeconomic lottery.
My takeaway from the article is that "fairness" is overrated.
I don't care one bit whether the parents of my surgeon were rich or not. I want the best, most meritorious surgeon to do my operation.
If every niche in society is operated by the most qualified person (even if they became the most qualified by having rich parents) then, by definition, society will be running as well as possible.
I am not okay with unfairness stemming from genetic lottery. Sure, I agree those with genetic lottery should be able to put those qualities to most productive uses, it would be waste otherwise. On the other hand, they probably shouldn't capture the most of produced value, since it is mostly unearned. There is a reason lottery earning is heavily taxed.
The fundamental issue in meritocracies is that we only measure a small part of the merit that needs measuring. I once got in an argument with a manager that we should measure best coders on the team by lines of code generated - is that merit?
To extend the analogy in the piece, if the only way a football team measured “best” was for “yards passed” that’d be a pretty bad team on the field. They measure by position to figure out what’s right - and techniques like those made famous by SaberMetrics/Moneyball show even THAT is not all - you REALLY need to measure by team performance and team goals.
Teams that are diverse deliver materially better returns[1]; if that’s “merit” then that’s a way to optimize for that. The problem with this article and meritocracies is not diving deeper in what you should measure.
Something like this program tends to discourage the "let's pay for KLOCs" line of reasoning. Does $1 per line sound reasonable? :-)
#!/usr/bin/env python3
with open("pay_me_lots.py","w") as payme:
print ("#!/usr/bin/env python3", file=payme)
for i in range(1000000):
print ("print('you now owe me $"+str(i)+"')",file=payme)
> The reason meritocracies work so well, is not because they are fair, but because they produce peak performance.
This is short-sighted. It optimizes for the "local maximum", the "today's maximum".
Yes, if today you don't choose the best candidate based purely on their results, you are technically losing, because you could do better. But here's the thing, if you choose a candidate that is not the best, but that can have a more meaningful impact in the long term, you are optimizing for the future.
For example, candidates who are coming from underrepresented groups can have a huge impact on kids who will find it easier to believe they can repeat such success, because someone who looks like them did it. That can unlock a huge pool of candidates who can outperform others in the future, but who would not be available if we didn't choose the n-th best candidate instead of the best one in the first place.
It doesn't even require generational returns. Underrepresented groups can bring a perspective to the project that you otherwise lack. Disabled team members can help you discover "curb cut effects" that improve usability for everybody. Women and minorities can point out hidden biases and opportunities. All of them can reveal assumptions you didn't even realize you were making in the way you run your team.
That goes far beyond "how fast can you write code" by any measurement because your end goal isn't to write code but to deliver a product -- as a team. Bringing in a diversity of ideas about the end product helps today, not just in the future. If you think of your team just as a bunch of high-performing individual code writers, you will miss opportunities to hit the real goal.
I like that your comment aligns with game theory. It is in the best interest of individual corporations to hire the best candidate. It is in the best interest of the industry to create a strong pool of candidates. An industry consists of individual corporations that act self-interested unless they cooperate to achieve long term goals together.
This dovetails with the free rider problem too. A corporation does not want to train (invest in) a subpar individual and then lose them to a free rider corporation in the industry that only hires the best candidates.
Ask yourself if you want the medic doing surgery on you, or to a less dramatic example the electrician working on your house, to be the best you can buy and you will quickly understand why in reality no one optimizes for the system's efficiency and everyone optimizes for own interest.
The hardest lesson I ever learned (the hard way!) was that meritocracy doesn't work in practice.
At some point in time, some people accumulate more credit/reputation for their work, and can use that to earn more credit more quickly. This then snowballs as these people pull ahead of others out of proportion to their actual contributions.
This makes a Meritocracy an unstable equilibrium, and such a system will not remain meritocratic for long. When other parties come along later, they won't be able to displace the incumbents.
You might then be tempted to cut off the long tail and hand over the community to the incumbents. But that's really going to be a problem if more than half your work is being done in that long tail!
Importantly; if you do hand over to the incumbents, you've very obviously just changed into something other-than-meritocracy.
My argument is that all systems that start as a (naive) Meritocracy will tend to fall into this trap.
This is the power law dynamic of increased network effects. Incumbents will not be displaced until some fundamental tech revolution or catastrophic (financial crisis or antitrust) remedy. Even then, tech revolutions are far more powerful than legal ones...
It's far from perfect, but the 'special case' you describe is actually rare.
There are people who are brilliant and hardworking in the academic sense slinging coffee for life, because both those attributes will result in 'good grades' which is a really good proxy for other things in life.
As a woman in tech, I feel that it isn't actually a meritocracy.
I think people have a habit of assuming men did the real work in a project, so they get a disproportionate share of the credit. People also have a habit of pushing women towards front end work, making the assumption that men are more 'technical' than women. It can be difficult to watch men get all of the credit for your blood, sweat and tears. It's especially bitter when they then say it's a meritocracy and you feel like saying 'what exactly did you contribute to this?'.
The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. The first issue is that I don't think we are especially good at identifying the best unless it's very easy to measure (sport for example). The second point is that it takes work to overcome your own biases and I think this feeds into how we evaluate 'the best' more than we like to admit.
Meritocracy is a good thing and we should never stop striving for it. The problem isn't that some strive for meritocracy, the problem is when people argue that they are meritocratic when they aren't. It is pretty easy to argue that there is plenty of merit in hiring women, like adding diversity to teams has benefits and so on, I don't see why you need to argue against the concept itself.
> The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work.
Not really, the concept is nice both on paper and in reality. The most successful companies in the world today are much more meritocratic than most organizations that preceded them, they produce great results using it, the concept works great. And I don't see why you think it wouldn't, we humans have two signals, merit and bias. Without merit we just go by our biases. The problems you describe doesn't come from focusing too much on merit but too little on it.
I think the author has a very different definition of "fair" than what I usually think of it (free from favoritism; conforming to established rules; see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair).
One reason why life isn't fair is that there are contradictory definitions of fair. Unfairness is a poor criticism of any system, because there isn't a completely fair system.
Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents".
There are a few great books written about this recently:
- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel
- The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits
Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day.
Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.
>Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy
On the contrary, this aristocracy is doing extremely well. It is now served by the labor-driven meritocracy you describe. There is intense competition between elite knowledge workers for the privilege to serve modern-day nobles.
It's not ironic, such dystopia is particularly liked and promoted by capitalist scumbags, because it lets them justify exploitation, inequality, overwork, etc. But of course for any thinking person it's obvious that it's an awful awful idea, as if a kid raised by well educated parents who can therefore do really well in school deserves more, than a kid raised by uneducated parents who have no idea how to teach kids to do well in school.
>Hiring people who are “good enough” is simply not good enough. There has never been, and never will be, a team that won the world cup by selecting players who are “good enough.”
This isn't actually true. You can have a team full of good enough players that can win championships.
In my opinion, all talk of meritocracy, when applied, is irrelevant. I mean, it sounds good in principle, but in most applications, there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate in any given situation.
Yeah, sure, we have some highly specialized environments, such as sports, where we have parameters to select from, but as much as no team has won by selecting players who are good enough, few teams if any have won by just selecting players who are the best in a narrow metric. You need leaders, you need players with specific skill, you need role players, you need people who can inspire etc.
Same when hiring for a job position - Determining who is the "best" candidate is near impossible. The best, according to which metric? Most years spent at uni? In the business? How do you control for biases that have given one candidate undeserved praise and another that has gone unrecognized? How tdo you value social factors, etc?
"there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate"
There is, it just so happens many people applying are already good by virtue of their credentials.
What you are not seeing are the zillions of truly unqualified people show up.
If you want to gain some confidence in meritocracy, then simply open up your next dev position to literally 'anyone' and start interviewing 'random people' for that high paying job.
Then, you'll quickly realize how very few people are actually qualified.
Interviewing is generally about 1) narrowing the pool of actually qualified and then 2) ... well, it's hard from there on in as you point out.
But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation.
> meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance
Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy continue to produce optimal performance in the long run? Is the author talking about meritocracy in theory, or meritocracy as practiced? What exactly does the author think should be decided through meritocracy? (College acceptance? Hiring decisions?) Does the author have any concrete recommendations, for any domain?
"Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus."--LT Nicholson
Chaser:
". . .general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."--Jon Postel
This is how the individual meritocracy helps all: keep the expectations low, and the outputs high. Fairness you locate under the sun has a metaphysical component. People are carnivores by nature. Let your merit, if it be real, build others.
>A society should delegate its jobs to those who are smartest, most capable, and most accomplished in that field. Because they are the ones who can best lead society through the worldly challenges we face everyday. Corrupting this process by discriminating on the basis of family ties, personal friendships, wealth, race, or gender, is simply cutting your nose to spite your face.
I'm confused because it seems like the article is arguing for meritocracy. How else would you measure who's the "most accomplished" in their field without some concept of "merit"?
It's confusing as hell to even discuss this if we just switch the terminology all around, and we don't have to.
Discrimination based upon family ties or personal friendships is nepotism, based upon wealth it's classism, based upon race it's racism, and based upon gender it's sexism. To me, addressing these issues in our society is the priority.
Meritocracies work in a very formalized context, like sports, where you can have a single criterion that can be measured objectively and determines the whole activity, because it's possible to prevent gaming of the criteria (even in sports you have this problem with illegal stimulants). The point is sophistry, when you say unbiased clearly nobody is including merit as one of the biases, the problem with meritocracy is that people actually believe in it outside of very specific conditions that make it possible and then confuse non-meritous biases that have yielded profit/status for merit.
"A meritocracy excels at producing wealth and economic prosperity. "
it does? tens of millions of people are going to be evicted next week even though there are vast sums of money that could be used to help these people. So yes there's "wealth" but the "prosperity" is reserved for a select few. the rest are discarded like trash.
"Universal basic income"
we have that?
"universal healthcare"
we have that?
"unemployment insurance, better public schooling and free job trainings"
not much ?
"these are the kind of Social Justice programs that can share the resulting prosperity among everyone."
but...they DON'T, since there are hardly are any such programs, and what "programs" manage to exist are continuously under threat of being dissolved by those who feel they are "without merit". The ultimate end of a "meritrocratic" system is that when these "meritous" people are rewarded all their well deserved wealth, these lucky few deem everyone else to be "without merit". also commonly referred to as "fuck you, I got mine".
[+] [-] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
The other aspect not mentioned is that a society can be meritocratic, but the peak performance that results does not necessarily lead to work that is useful to society in aggregate. I am reminded of Jeff Hammerbacher's infamous quote: "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." That quote is simplistic to humorous effect of course, but it underlies an important natural run-off effect of meritocracy: that much activity is redistributive instead of creative. That's why thinking simply in terms of atomized individuals (as articles on meritocracy written in English usually do) pitted against each other leaves aside too many important questions and outcomes.
edit: to add to this, the last paragraph of the article is deeply ironic since you have people fighting over scraps precisely because smart people have captured much of the pie growth, and did so in a way that would be considered meritocratic by the author.
[+] [-] sanxiyn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakelazaroff|5 years ago|reply
> There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers.
If you consider “meritocracy” to begin when someone applies for their first job, you might not care about that. But there are two glaring problems:
One, on an individual level, selecting the best at a given point in time ignores less measurable attributes, like “grit”. The candidate from a poor background who went to an okay school at night while working to support their family may be more motivated to improve than someone who coasted by at a good school due to parental connections.
Two, on a societal level, being born into good circumstances in no way correlates with innate abilities. By privileging those who grow up in higher socioeconomic classes, we are leaving behind individuals who have undiscovered latent talents that might otherwise make large societal contributions.
Without fixing those two things, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that meritocracy will produce “peak performance”.
[+] [-] wait_a_minute|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|5 years ago|reply
* We are OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the genetic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of the socioeconomic background of parents. Most of us want a society in which the most able, talented, hard-working, persistent among us can put those qualities to work for their most productive uses.
* We are NOT OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the socioeconomic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of ability, talent, hard work, and persistence. Most of us do NOT want a society in which those who are less able, less talented, less hard-working, and less persistent can get ahead through other means.
[+] [-] _qulr|5 years ago|reply
We want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility. The fairest system would be a lottery: picking people completely randomly, without regard to socioeconomic status or "merit".
Given that we want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility, "winning the genetic lottery" is ok, because some people are just born with natural talents. But "winning the socioeconomic lottery" is not ok, because there's no apparent correlation between the wealth of your parents and your personal competence.
Again, fairness is tangential to this problem.
[+] [-] sershe|5 years ago|reply
Are you ok with unfairness that stems from higher ability that is itself the result of "winning the socioeconomic lottery"?
Like, I was born in Russia, so my theoretical CS knowledge outside of what I learned on my own is crap, because (unlike e.g. maths) the CS curriculum in my ~2nd tier college was completely useless. I am talented enough to work in a big tech co, and my maths is (or rather used to be) top-notch, so it didn't have to be like that, it's purely based on where I could go to college. If you were hiring a computer scientist straight out of college, would you hire me or a MIT grad? He merely won the socioeconomic lottery.
[+] [-] dahfizz|5 years ago|reply
I don't care one bit whether the parents of my surgeon were rich or not. I want the best, most meritorious surgeon to do my operation.
If every niche in society is operated by the most qualified person (even if they became the most qualified by having rich parents) then, by definition, society will be running as well as possible.
[+] [-] sanxiyn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheIronYuppie|5 years ago|reply
To extend the analogy in the piece, if the only way a football team measured “best” was for “yards passed” that’d be a pretty bad team on the field. They measure by position to figure out what’s right - and techniques like those made famous by SaberMetrics/Moneyball show even THAT is not all - you REALLY need to measure by team performance and team goals.
Teams that are diverse deliver materially better returns[1]; if that’s “merit” then that’s a way to optimize for that. The problem with this article and meritocracies is not diving deeper in what you should measure.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2020/01/15/diver...
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnvald|5 years ago|reply
This is short-sighted. It optimizes for the "local maximum", the "today's maximum".
Yes, if today you don't choose the best candidate based purely on their results, you are technically losing, because you could do better. But here's the thing, if you choose a candidate that is not the best, but that can have a more meaningful impact in the long term, you are optimizing for the future.
For example, candidates who are coming from underrepresented groups can have a huge impact on kids who will find it easier to believe they can repeat such success, because someone who looks like them did it. That can unlock a huge pool of candidates who can outperform others in the future, but who would not be available if we didn't choose the n-th best candidate instead of the best one in the first place.
[+] [-] jfengel|5 years ago|reply
That goes far beyond "how fast can you write code" by any measurement because your end goal isn't to write code but to deliver a product -- as a team. Bringing in a diversity of ideas about the end product helps today, not just in the future. If you think of your team just as a bunch of high-performing individual code writers, you will miss opportunities to hit the real goal.
[+] [-] mikea1|5 years ago|reply
This dovetails with the free rider problem too. A corporation does not want to train (invest in) a subpar individual and then lose them to a free rider corporation in the industry that only hires the best candidates.
[+] [-] thefz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|5 years ago|reply
At some point in time, some people accumulate more credit/reputation for their work, and can use that to earn more credit more quickly. This then snowballs as these people pull ahead of others out of proportion to their actual contributions.
This makes a Meritocracy an unstable equilibrium, and such a system will not remain meritocratic for long. When other parties come along later, they won't be able to displace the incumbents.
You might then be tempted to cut off the long tail and hand over the community to the incumbents. But that's really going to be a problem if more than half your work is being done in that long tail!
Importantly; if you do hand over to the incumbents, you've very obviously just changed into something other-than-meritocracy.
My argument is that all systems that start as a (naive) Meritocracy will tend to fall into this trap.
[+] [-] sjg007|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
It's far from perfect, but the 'special case' you describe is actually rare.
There are people who are brilliant and hardworking in the academic sense slinging coffee for life, because both those attributes will result in 'good grades' which is a really good proxy for other things in life.
[+] [-] spacekitcat|5 years ago|reply
I think people have a habit of assuming men did the real work in a project, so they get a disproportionate share of the credit. People also have a habit of pushing women towards front end work, making the assumption that men are more 'technical' than women. It can be difficult to watch men get all of the credit for your blood, sweat and tears. It's especially bitter when they then say it's a meritocracy and you feel like saying 'what exactly did you contribute to this?'.
The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work. The first issue is that I don't think we are especially good at identifying the best unless it's very easy to measure (sport for example). The second point is that it takes work to overcome your own biases and I think this feeds into how we evaluate 'the best' more than we like to admit.
[+] [-] username90|5 years ago|reply
> The concept of a meritocracy sounds nice on paper, but I think it ignores how humans work.
Not really, the concept is nice both on paper and in reality. The most successful companies in the world today are much more meritocratic than most organizations that preceded them, they produce great results using it, the concept works great. And I don't see why you think it wouldn't, we humans have two signals, merit and bias. Without merit we just go by our biases. The problems you describe doesn't come from focusing too much on merit but too little on it.
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jganetsk|5 years ago|reply
There are a few great books written about this recently:
- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel
- The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits
Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day.
Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.
[+] [-] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
On the contrary, this aristocracy is doing extremely well. It is now served by the labor-driven meritocracy you describe. There is intense competition between elite knowledge workers for the privilege to serve modern-day nobles.
[+] [-] tyu2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|5 years ago|reply
This isn't actually true. You can have a team full of good enough players that can win championships.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beat...
[+] [-] remote_phone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esarbe|5 years ago|reply
If you need fallacies to sell your argument, obviously something's wrong with your argument.
[+] [-] svrtknst|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, sure, we have some highly specialized environments, such as sports, where we have parameters to select from, but as much as no team has won by selecting players who are good enough, few teams if any have won by just selecting players who are the best in a narrow metric. You need leaders, you need players with specific skill, you need role players, you need people who can inspire etc.
Same when hiring for a job position - Determining who is the "best" candidate is near impossible. The best, according to which metric? Most years spent at uni? In the business? How do you control for biases that have given one candidate undeserved praise and another that has gone unrecognized? How tdo you value social factors, etc?
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
There is, it just so happens many people applying are already good by virtue of their credentials.
What you are not seeing are the zillions of truly unqualified people show up.
If you want to gain some confidence in meritocracy, then simply open up your next dev position to literally 'anyone' and start interviewing 'random people' for that high paying job.
Then, you'll quickly realize how very few people are actually qualified.
Interviewing is generally about 1) narrowing the pool of actually qualified and then 2) ... well, it's hard from there on in as you point out.
But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
Meritocracy also means allowing those with the means to entrench their position for many decades.
[+] [-] yutopia|5 years ago|reply
> meritocracies work so well … because they produce peak performance
Does the author have any evidence for this? Supposing that this is true, does meritocracy continue to produce optimal performance in the long run? Is the author talking about meritocracy in theory, or meritocracy as practiced? What exactly does the author think should be decided through meritocracy? (College acceptance? Hiring decisions?) Does the author have any concrete recommendations, for any domain?
[+] [-] M2Ys4U|5 years ago|reply
The Rise of the Meritocracy, where it was first used, is an explicitly dystopian novel.
[+] [-] smitty1e|5 years ago|reply
"Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus."--LT Nicholson
Chaser:
". . .general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."--Jon Postel
This is how the individual meritocracy helps all: keep the expectations low, and the outputs high. Fairness you locate under the sun has a metaphysical component. People are carnivores by nature. Let your merit, if it be real, build others.
[+] [-] calibas|5 years ago|reply
I'm confused because it seems like the article is arguing for meritocracy. How else would you measure who's the "most accomplished" in their field without some concept of "merit"?
It's confusing as hell to even discuss this if we just switch the terminology all around, and we don't have to.
Discrimination based upon family ties or personal friendships is nepotism, based upon wealth it's classism, based upon race it's racism, and based upon gender it's sexism. To me, addressing these issues in our society is the priority.
[+] [-] nathias|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KukiAirani|5 years ago|reply
Fair is understood in a meritocracy to be with respect to skill level, not with respect to any particular person's moral standard.
[+] [-] zzzeek|5 years ago|reply
it does? tens of millions of people are going to be evicted next week even though there are vast sums of money that could be used to help these people. So yes there's "wealth" but the "prosperity" is reserved for a select few. the rest are discarded like trash.
"Universal basic income"
we have that?
"universal healthcare"
we have that?
"unemployment insurance, better public schooling and free job trainings"
not much ?
"these are the kind of Social Justice programs that can share the resulting prosperity among everyone."
but...they DON'T, since there are hardly are any such programs, and what "programs" manage to exist are continuously under threat of being dissolved by those who feel they are "without merit". The ultimate end of a "meritrocratic" system is that when these "meritous" people are rewarded all their well deserved wealth, these lucky few deem everyone else to be "without merit". also commonly referred to as "fuck you, I got mine".