Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality

theguardian.com

27 pointsmiraj7 comments

The idea that human beings, with all of our evolved biases and social needs, could ever fairly administer a system devoid of merit rewarding but not full of other unsavory selection biases such as nepotism or "ass kissing your way up" simple fails to realistically account for the underlying nature of humanity.

It seems that this article only really asserts that "meritocracy is a myth", without much evidence. Most of the article is just saying "these people we don't like support meritocracy, and these people we do like don't support it".

They give three examples: grammar schools, which use tests of academic ability to determine which school you go to, this seems like a fair test of merit unless you give evidence it isn't. A fair point about Harvard, but from 1920. And an anecdote about Matt Damon insisting that something be based purely on merit, which regardless of what you think of it, doesn't argue that "meritocracy is a myth".

There's also some mentions of inheritance and ability to pay private tutors. In the case of inheritance leading to wealth you could argue that is unfair, but inherited wealth is one area where nobody pretends that it is a meritocracy. For tutors, while they may affect grades, there's not much evidence they affect the kind of aptitude tests that matter like the SAT and grammar school tests. See http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/c... where SAT prep courses are found to have very small effects, in a correlational study that is bound to be riddled with confounds like smart students who care being more likely to take prep courses, so if anything the effect is probably smaller.

Income on the other hand, many contend is a meritocracy, and there is some evidence for this in the form of a large randomized controlled trial where adoptees where randomly assigned to families of widely varying incomes (the threshold for adoption was lower at the time). While the non-adoptees income correlated substantially with family income, the adoptees incomes didn't. Many studies have attempted to find differences in how parents treat adoptees, but so far they've failed to find any difference, including for example how much inheritance they get. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/nat...

That isn't to say that their thesis isn't true, it may well be, this article is just a bad argument for it. For example, there's good studies showing discrimination in resume screening based on the gender/race associated with a name, even with the contents the same.

This is a subject I am deeply ambivalent about. On the one hand, there is merit in the concept. On the other, one has to be blind, willfully or not, to the facts of implicit bias and generational advantage to be a true believer.

The question is: what's the alternative to a meritocracy?

It's pretty much what we have today but the veneer of meritocracy is what makes it insidious. There is rarely anything more dangerous than people who don't realize what they're doing because people can't change what they don't realize they are doing.

Both "meritocracy" and "equality" exist as emotionally loaded terms that in practice exhibit almost otherworldy malleability (Did you like that polysyllabic flourish?)

What the author did essentially was reveal her opposition to Trump, May, and British "grammar schools" (we in the States call it "tracking" or maybe a three or four syllable word has since replaced it.) OK, so be it.

Maybe we have finally a good social use for AI -- as a social ombudsman -- who at least hypothetically is not a "respecter of persons", i.e. does not take markers of social status into account when slinging benefits. Maybe.

http://reagle.org/joseph/2016/myth/myth.html

> Because the word myth has multiple meanings, and the first sense (unfounded) tends to extinguish the second (an ideal), we are better served by speaking of a meritocratic ideal, imperfect implementations, and naive claims of meritocracy. We should never claim to have a meritocracy, only to aspire to have meritocratic methods; to claim any thing else is naive and inimical to progress toward the ideal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com