They don't get to run things?
Put another way: assuming you're going to have some sort of hierarchy, and you will, how would you want to organize that hierarchy? Merit seems like the least bad way to do so.
It's like you're advocating for correctpersonocracy. Put another way, literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy.
The actual word 'meritocracy' comes from a book that warned about the dangers of creating easily-gamed draconian systems that needlessly exclude people from the process of governing. I wish as many people would read the book as use the word.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tcvp4
Some interesting people interviewed and points raised.
"exhorted", perhaps?
And it may be exactly the fact that you can't measure it accurately that makes it not "harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
It's not? What are SAT scores, school grades, entrance exams for the civil service, election results, income etc.?
I would say that these are all ways for society to quantify merit.
Did you mean perfectly accurately?
> literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy.
Nope. Most governments used to call themselves monarchies and would have bristled at the idea that they'd have to somehow demonstrate merit to justify their power. Their power was justified by heredity, and in fact, I'd think that if you suggested that they needed to do demonstrate their merit, you might end up short a head.
> The book
Yep. Have to admit I didn't read it, but I did read what the author wrote:
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit."
What he objects to is the following:
"It is the opposite [of good] when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
So merit-based selection: good. Ossified class system: bad. I think Trump, May and Johnson are ample evidence that we leave plenty of room for the incompetent to get a chance at the reins, even if we generally try to organize ourselves by merit.
And so exactly the fact that we can't quantify merit with perfect accuracy, and have multiple domains, helps us avoid the problems Young mentions, though here as elsewhere we aren't at all perfect.
These are incompetent.
I'll take town board/administrator form of government, you take "meritocracy."
In my form of government the board members run for office periodically. The ones who get the most votes win. Then they hire a professional bureaucrat to handle the day to day business of keeping a municipality up and running.
Here's what I've got:
* a discrete (and anonymous!) method to determine who will become the board members
* local community members who campaign and are subject to citizens by virtue of elections
* at least one professionally-trained bureaucrat who more likely than not is competent in the job and given the power by the board to make day-to-day decisions like hiring and firing people
So... How does your meritocracy function?
What's the way you measure and get consensus on community leaders' merit?
How are those leaders held accountable?
How do you ensure at least one of those leaders is trained in a relevant field as opposed to being trained only in the art of rhetoric (shout out to Socrates for this question)?
Edit: clarification
Dunno, elections, maybe? Seems like a common way to get community consensus on personell decisions. For things like public office. So people get to vote for who they think is best suited, who has the most merit. And for lower level positions, you could have entrance exams and a mechanism for promotion that takes into account job performance.
And for the economic sphere, we could let people vote with their wallets...
I find the model of liquid democracy enticing: Every decision is voted on by the people of the community and because that would be overwhelming you can delegate your vote (in general, for a certain topic or just for a single vote) to someone you trust, like an expert in that area. Maybe people might get a little money for voting so experts who vote with many votes can do this professionally in full time.
So now you have people competing for the expert status for certain topics (like health care or foreign affairs) and everyone in the community can have direct influence on the outcome of every decision. Every bit of power is earned and most decisions are effectively made by trusted experts.
As for democracy, however, what we don’t have (yet) is anything demonstrably better. A meritocracy will not be an improvement over a democracy. The critical function of a democracy is affording the governed a guaranteed means to evict bad adminstration.