The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve? | Hacker News Reader

The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

theguardian.com

30 pointsnlte38 comments

>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality

No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce steel in their back yards was overall much less productive than a few massive steel plants with dedicated professionals and experts on staff would've been.

Instead meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world, so that those who have more have earned it and those who have less earned that too. It is an impossible ideal, obviously, but the point is to strive for it always even knowing we can never reach it.

>As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve.

The problem with this hypothetical society isn't that the most meritorious have more wealth, but rather that they have all the wealth. Although those with the most merit do deserve a bigger slice of the pie (IMO anyway), they obviously don't deserve all the pie. One of the benefits of meritocracy is the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that isn't true if the top percent eats all the benefits of their own capital investments.

>The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth.

It's not a confusion, it's just how humans are wired. "Moron" originally had no negative connotation, but over time it gained a profound one. Similarly "plebeian" wasn't originally an insult, but now it is. Heck the ultimate evil force in most stories, the "villain", derives his name from the latin term for a low status farm hand (villanus)

Anything associated strongly with the "least efficient" rung of society will inevitably become tainted in this fashion, as human beings are inherently status-oriented creatures looking for some way to put down others and elevate ourselves. It's an unfortunate part of our nature as a species.

A pure meritocracy would result in children starving to death because what are they contributing really?

That's a very shortsighted view, children are (solely economically speaking here) an investment in the future. Their lack of present day economic contributions is not entirely relevant. In addition children have utility effects other than monetary, many parents report increased purpose, fulfillment, and joy from raising children.

Historically, I'm not really seeing meritocracy as "meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world" - instead, it's an observation if you put incompetent people in positions of power, then everyone suffers; and you'd do best to fill all the important roles with people who are actually good at it.

The point of meritocracy is not about the benefit to a capable person who gets to be in a good position; it's about the benefit to the system from a capable person being in that position. This effect is what makes meritocracies more efficient and competitive than other societies.

And there's really no reason to expect that meritocracy would fix unequal distribution of wealth; as equality of outcome is fundamentally incompatible with equality of opportunity; and all kinds of "merit" characteristics (conscientiousness, impulse control and similar personality traits, intelligence, educational achievement, physical traits, propensity to addiction, etc, etc) are all quite heritable; no matter how much of that heritability is nature vs nurture, the "merit" of children inevitably will be highly correlated with the "merit" of their parents - so we should expect a meritocracy to have some "sorting effect" across generations as described in the original article.

Meritocracy will allow for some class mobility anyway, as a significant part of "merit" traits is also essentially random, however, a significant part of them is not. An 'meritocracy-upper-class' kid is not necessarily more qualified than a 'meritocracy-lower-class' kid for some position, so it needs to be evaluated and in a true meritocracy some (!) of the lower class kids would raise up, but statistics indicates that most of them would not.

>And there's really no reason to expect that meritocracy would fix unequal distribution of wealth

I never said it would.

>meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world

Fixing the injustice in the inequality of the world isn't the same as fixing the inequality of the world. Kings and nobles having all the wealth because they were born with it is unjust inequality, while hard workers having all the wealth is just inequality (IMO).

In retrospect I realize this is hopelessly confusing wording and I really should have thought of a better way to describe what I meant. Dang nabbit.

> a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000.

And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market. If everything is better when centralized, then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)?

> Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all

That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes distribution is. It varies from field to field, from time to time, and the ideal is rarely found at the extremes. The problem Young sought to address is that various factors tend to pull us toward a non-ideal extreme, and that tendency must be resisted.

>then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)

Because most governments seem corrupt to some extent or other and we don't trust them. Free markets seem to solve this problem to some extent. The degrees to which people believe these two statements seem to be the basis for a lot of left right / politics IMHO.

> most governments seem corrupt

And a single company effectively functioning as a government (minus democratic accountability) would be better? Free markets only solve that problem through competition, which precludes the kind of centralization the GP was advocating.

>And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market.

How many Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs? How many out of Joe Random's Inventoroum Garage?

This was actually one of the things communists argued was an inherent flaw of capitalism they hoped to fix. Ten companies with ten advertising budgets are basically wasting resources competing with each other when the far more effecient solution from a macro economic is one big company that owns the market that can invest all its budget into research or making movies or what have you without wasting some high fraction of its budget on ads.

The ultimate problem with this idea wasn't the communist's logic about the power of concentrating wealth, but rather their inability to appreciate that humans can't be trusted to behave in that kind of environment. The ten companies with ten ad budgets may not be as effecient as one big company, but they're each a check against the other - if ever one lab becomes incompetent the others out compete it and it either improves or dies. Via this Darwinian process companies, and the economy, remain fit. That the ten small labs aren't as productive in raw numbers as one big lab isn't as important as this free hand of the market being allowed to so its job.

The Soviet Union in the 80s produced more steel, cement, and tractors that America despite having half the population. Efficiency. It was also a massively corrupt state rotting from the inside out wasting massive resources on steel and tractors no one needed because those "one big central companies" has been allowed to run unchecked by market forces for 70 years.

>That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes distribution is.

I don't think it is. I think concentration of capital is inherently how advances get made. That concentration of capital must be coupled with some mechanism to ensure that capital is being put toward societally productive ends (instead of building ever more tractors in a society that could desperately use a computer) is a different thing. Distribution is one possible solution to the problem yes, but there are others and simply saying "concentration and distribution are both important" doesn't seem t me to capture the spirit of the thing.

> How many Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs? How many out of Joe Random's Inventoroum Garage?

How many new Nobel prizes came out of smaller (mostly university) labs? A lot more. How many billion-dollar companies have their origins in those other labs, or in Bell's own but only because that centralization was undone by the breakup of its parent? Again quite a lot, some now even bigger than that parent used to be. Not a good argument for centralization.

When we're talking about economics, Nobel prizes are completely the wrong metric anyway. Even basic science benefits from having multiple labs, at universities and other orgs all across the world, sometimes competing with one another and sometimes extending or complementing each other's work. If anything, that's even more true when science turns to engineering turns to business. I might have thought that was obvious here at site hosted by a startup incubator.

You're practically arguing that monopolies are good, which is just crazy on both a practical and a moral level.

This article somewhat seems to assume that 'everyone is good at something' (although at the end it veers towards 'it doesn't matter if someone is good at anything', so it's a bit unclear at that). But anyway it seems that people only think that to make themselves feel good, as logic dictates otherwise. Say there are 10 traits in which one can be good (some of such traits are enumerated in the article, but let's say for the sake of the argument there are 10). They are more or less independently assigned; and if they're correlated at all, that correlation is positive (being good looking and athletic, for example). Then it follows there will always be people who are above average on more than 5 traits, and there will be people where it's the other way around. There will be people who are great at everything, and some who suck at everything. Yet I don't see that addressed in pieces like this. What is the counter argument from this school of thought?

That their is a lot of traits that can't really be measured. There are other traits that a good for some purpose but are a hindrance to another. Many that aren't innate. A lot of tasks that only require proficiency. And then how do you value each trait against another.

Then, there's the whole topic of values. And what values are important to your organization.

But that doesn't address the point. If we take two people, and one person is better at everything we can measure, the conclusion cannot logically be that the person who is worse at everything "must be good at something we aren't measuring". There's absolutely no data to support that conclusion, because the conclusion is literally based upon the idea that there is missing data. That's bad logic.

“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin

It's the only known way to organize society which incentivises people to develop and use their talents. Hence, the incredible material wealth of current Western world vs the universal poverty and misery of communist countries.

I agree. I shared the quote because I found it concise, insightful and relevant. I do wonder, though, whether meritocracy has gotten away with itself somewhat. It has enormous utility. But in its current incarnation doesn't seem to respect the dignity of those it disempowers. I think the point of the quote, and the article, is that those of us it's empowered ought to bear that in mind.

All this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough questioning nowadays.

I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives.

Inequality can be described as one of the major drivers and consequences of progress that has in fact lifted all boats.

And if the best way for society to progress is to be extremely unequal and dictatorial (e.g. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in modern time; an AI-driven superdictatorship in the future; the Medici family launching the Renaissance in Florence in the distant past) then equality, democracy etc. should go away.

The best thinking on this subject recently came from Yuval Harari. Humans are biochemical machines that process information according to the laws of physics. So – what possible reason is there for us to value these biochemical machines all earning the same number of points on some abstract metric? And what happens when we build better machines? Or clone one person a trillion times?

The idea that equality to another human matters as much (or more) than technological progress, biological immortality, understanding the universe etc. is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. That cannot bear the idea that another monkey has more bananas or female monkeys.

fuck equality.

Re your last paragraph, well yeah, it sucks, but it's what we have to live/work with. So while it would be nice to live in a parallel universe where it doesn't matter ('it' = inequality), the current reality is that it does.

When you ignore degrees of in/equality, you're basically setting up a false dichotomy. Exact equality might be unhealthy, but so is the drastic inequality of the old aristocracy or (more arguably) the new one. As with many things, the extremes are stagnant end states, but they have their own sort of gravity (think "attractors" in chaos theory). Life is found in between.

> The idea that equality to another human matters as much ... is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego.

Well, sorry, but it's not going away. Study after study has shown that relative affluence, not absolute affluence or any other factor, is one of the strongest predictors of happiness. In other words, relative privation is a predictor of unhappiness. It might not be suffering but, nonetheless, if you want to offer a superficial and unacknowledged restatement of utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") then you have to consider what actually makes people who are not you happy or unhappy.

Egalitarianism is the great unexamined principle of our age. Attack egalitarianism and much of progressive ideology falls apart.

The conflict is simple: parents are stimulated to give the best upbringing possible to children - the prize is standing out the crowd - but at the same time it does not make much sense to be #1 in a wasteland.

In addition systems are in play that make it impossible for most people in poorer circles to give their children a kick up into a higher class. Some people get lucky but on the whole people aren't moving. Anything new that redreses the balance e.g. education is ultimately for sale to the highest bidder, plus I'll add another observation that the rich don't need to spend so much time on survival, they have more time to learn the tricks of staying rich.

To eloborate on the education for sale. Think of real estate prices near good high schools for example. Plus the high number of 1%ers in the top universities. I recently watched The Riot Club and thus film in an exagerated way sums it all up.

Once we're all finally equal no one will be special.

Self-awareness leading to cognitive dissonance

Reply on news.ycombinator.com