A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s morally wrong
aeon.co
aeon.co
Asians spend twice as much time on homework as compared to Whites, and about three times as compared to Blacks. Kids of high income families spend more time working on homework than low income kids. So the fact that Asians comprise the student body proportionally larger than Whites, and whites more than Blacks is evidence that hard work pays off.
I think these claims that meritocracy is false lack nuance. It's not that meritocracy isn't fair, it's that a pure meritocracy free of bias is too fair: it doesn't attempt to rectify the fact not everyone starts with the same resources and that certain groups have different attitudes towards thinks like education than others.
Granted many of you are probably thinking that the fact that meritocracy doesn't correct for these things makes it inherently unfair, and many are probably thinking that the notion that our processes to allocate opportunitiea should correct for things like disparate time spent on study is itself an act of unfairness. And there's no one right answer to this. This is a kind of question where there is no answer, but rather society continuously develops and evolves a concensus about the right approach.
That statement really rubs me the wrong way. In order to form the concensus that pleases society as much as possible (or put more cynically, the concensus that minimizes social displeasure) we need to hear how every group sees the situation. "He who had eyes let him see" is functionally not much different from saying "those who disagree with me shut up".
Again, apologies if I'm not seeing sarcasm or reductio ad absurdum. It's hard to convey over text comments.
Let's see if college admissions are, at least in part, meritocratic. College admissions depends highly on SAT scores and GPAs, these are probably one of the two strongest factors. Even just spending 20 hours following along with free videos is associated with a >100 point gain on SAT scores [1]. Spending more time on studying does increase grades on average [2]. Test scores and grades are some of the primary factors that determine, for example, college admissions. So, yes there is empirical evidence to suggest that college admissions do depend on several meritocratic factors. Granted you're right that it's not completely a meritocracy. Factors outside of the applicant's control like race, gender, and family background are taken into account. An Asian student and a Black student are going to be judged very differently if they have the same scores - that is at least one instance where the system is not genuine meritocracy.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
2. https://news.osu.edu/the-secret-to-academic-success-hours---...
First - in your homework paragraph, you're associating hard work with merit. It's very common - X deserves more than Y because X worked harder. Why do we consider work to be a virtue?
And second - even if we have a pure measure of merit we could all agree on, how the fruits of everyone's labours are divided is still debatable. How much should the best/average/worst get compared to each other?
* If Alice trains 30 hours a week for a year for a marathon and Candice trains 2 hours a week for a year who do you think has the better chance of winning? Sure, maybe Alice has a disability, or maybe Candice is some running demigod. But if I had to put money on it I'd bet on Alice.
* If half the class studies for 21 hours a week and the other studiss for 7 the which would you bet is going to have the higher class average? I can speak firsthand to the fact that there will still be big variance. Some subjects can't naturally to me, others were like a brick wall. But chances are the students putting in 3x the study will do better.
So pointing out that groups that work harder get ahead is decent evidence that meritocracy does function. Especially when the groups in question are groups like Asians and Jewish people in America that were subject to significant prejudice and discrimination throughout history. Meritocracy can enable groups to overcome prejudice.
Granted there are definitely groups not well served by meritocracy. Groups that don't have as much family support, and don't have a strong cultural emphasis on education (I realize this last point does mirror racial sterotyoes but I did post evidence to show truth behind it) are at a big disadvantage. Any yes, it's probably worth compromising pure meritocracy to even the playing field to a degree.
Distribution of the fruits of labor is a valuable discussion, but it is tangential to the discussion of meritocracy. There will be varing distributions of wealth even if we wholly reject meritocracy.
If Caleb and Makayla study 30 hours a week for a year for SATs suffering parental apathy, lack of means, working an evening job, a bad school district, and Emma and John study 20 hours a week for a year, being primed from birth for college, with understanding parents, a nice weekly allowance, and a good school district, which would you bet is going to have the higher SAT average?
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-penci...
Oppressed minorities have gotten themselves out of poverty by emphasizing hard work and education. I've already listed Jewish Americans and Asian Americans. The Irish also underwent a similar process. Back during the 19th and early 20th century Irish were widely discriminated against and many didn't consider them White. Irish community leaders started emphasizing education in the early to mid 20th century. And by 2018 Irish have succeeded to the point that Irish surnames are considered signs of privilege. Cuban American households by now make about $20k more than the average American households [1]. Latin Americans as a whole are following suit.
Minorities have overcome oppression through meritocratic systems. It certainly hasn't worked for every demographic. But I don't think you're giving minorities enough credit in their ability to succeed through their own effort.
Let me clarify this part, then: the post is about nothing particular New Zealandish that's not also the case in the US. It has been reposted and recommended in American media so many times precisely because it is relevant in the US too.
Furthermore, this is more than clear in the comic itself, which is told in a universal manner, and doesn't refer to any particular trait/habit/circumstance/factor of New Zealand life.
If anything, it is more USA than New Zealand (which has much less inequality of the sort the comic criticizes).
>Oppressed minorities have gotten themselves out of poverty by emphasizing hard work and education. I've already listed Jewish Americans and Asian Americans.
Jewish and Asian Americans didn't have 400 years of being abducted from their countries and working to death as slaves in the USA. After the initial racism against them as newcomers subsided they were quickly tolerated.
Blacks on the other had, had the contempt and the prejudice of their ex-owners and their children and grandchildren. They had started from less than 0, as they had their culture stolen from them in 400 years of slavery (as opposed to newer Jewish and Asian immigrants arriving with their old world cultures -- from "bar mitzvahs" and "delis", to "tiger moms").
Asians and Jews had their persecution up around the 40s or so, but they didn't have segregated schools, hotels, restaurants up to the late 60s. They didn't have to put up with redlining when looking for places to live (up to now). They don't have discrimination against them in white collar jobs still. They're not routinely killed without questions asked by cops in percentages unheard of for any western country police force (even accounting those countries total population, not just the black population).
The fact that it hasn't worked for Blacks in America doesn't alter the fact that is has worked for Irish, Germans, Asians, Jews, and Latinos. One can make a decent claim that more minorities have benefitted from meritocracy than have been left behind.
I'm sorry?
How can you, in the same breath, talk about meritocracy - a pure meritocracy, at that, which should only evaluate people based on their own merits - while describing something that doesn't even addresses "the fact not everyone starts with the same resources"? The resources people start with - their location, their family, their upbringing - are not their own merit.
A marathon is a pure meritocracy, short of any dirty shenanigans. You go from point A to point B, the faster the better.
Are marathons fair? Even if we exclude differences like sex and physical disabilities some are going to have a better aptitude for running. Some are going to lead lives that give them a lot more free time to spend on training. Some may be professionals that spend most of their working hours training. That said, if someone genuinely suggests that handicaps be given in the Olympics or other high profile events to counteract these favors people are going to laugh at such a notion.
Things like college admissions isn't exactly the same as a marathon. But many, probably most, agree with the general principle that students that work harder do better and students that do better get stronger chances of being admitted. Allocation of opportunities based on capability and performance has its flaws - and I did suggest that they should be corrected - but it is one of the most accepted way of overcoming clan-based thinking and is accepted by many cultures and societies.
You were not talking about a "meritocracy", which would already be a problem considering that it doesn't hinge on merit[1], but a "pure meritocracy".
If you use "pure meritocracy" to refer to a system where neither pure performance nor merit are used to rank people, and call it "too fair", then you are twisting the meaning of the words "meritocracy" and "fairness" into something unrecognizable.
Such a system does not evaluate people based on capability or performance.
Such a system certainly does not evaluate people based solely on their merits.
Such a system cannot be called meritocratic, or fair. To do so is ridiculous.
[1] Because amongst the "initial resources" you speak of there are also wealth and connections, which do not improve "capability or performance in some task", which only improve the chances of someone obtaining and keeping the job.
The you're not talking about the same kind of meritocracy that I am. I explicitly spelled out that my usage of the world meritocracy refers to a system in which people are evaluated based on capability and/or performance.
If that's not what you're talking about the we're just talking past each other.
> Because amongst the "initial resources" you speak of there are also wealth and connections, which do not improve "capability or performance in some task", which only improve the chances of someone obtaining and keeping the job.
Wealth creates larger opportunity to improve performance. A wealthy marathon runner can take more time off work to train than one that scrapes by financially. But it does not directly factor into the meritocratic process. Dollars in your bank account make it easier to put in the effort to train, but they don't immediately improve your running speed.
Nor do connections. Knowing the right people isn't going to make someone a faster runner. At least short of things like colluding with a referee, but if that happens then the system is no longer purely meritocratic.
The main problem with meritocracy (or its lack thereof) is not about those working hard not getting compensated accordingly.
It is about what background, encouragement, financial support, and chances each individual had, from baby to adult, to work hard on their homework/business ideas/development/etc -- and what powers they have against them as well (e.g. racist HR profiling).
You'll find that these ethnic groups had that kind of (statistical average) support (or lack thereof) in a same order as their "working harder on their homework".
If you have a class of people (let's call them W) playing life in easy mode, and another class (let's call them B) playing life in hard more, then the fact that some people in class B still finish the game is irrelevant.
Meritocracy is not about "see, still a person from B class can win".
It's about all players playing at the same difficulty level.
So, not only the fact that an individual can go "beyond and below the average through their own effort and choices" is irrelevant, when discussing meritocracy, but a society would still be meritocratic even if no B ever was able to win the game and W had all the top scores -- as long as B and W played the game at the same difficulty.
What you're arguing for is equality of outcome which is impossible. There are billions of factors in a person's life that are constantly changing and you cannot control for them all, or even a small portion. And you definitely can't think of them as groups to get there.
Taking away individuality is the worst thing you can do to a person.
This isn't an effective analogy to describe the situation. Remember, on average meritocracy has been evening the playing field. Currently, some groups have less average success than others. But this isn't static. A variety of previously poor and underprivileged minorities have achieved success under the system of allocating opportunities based on capability or performance. Irish, Jewish Americans, Asians, Germans, Latin Americans, and others came to the US largely poor and underprivileged and have achieved success through the meritocratic system. Black that did not migrate willingly (as in, former slaves, indentured servants, etc) [1] and Native Americans have not. But a strong argument can be made that meritocracy works to even out social imbalances more often than it doesn't.
And if we do away with meritocracy what are we going to substitute it with? Most proponents of genuinely disposing of meritocracy propose to substitute it with a system of essentially allocating opportunities on ethnic grounds. This is a terrible idea. If this happens then the route to success lies not in hard work but by politicking and trying to increase the opportunity budgeted to their race. Not to mention such a system would probably hurt poorer minorities who have less clout in politics. White Americans, which make up 60-80% of the population depending on the definition used, have enough votes to form a supermajority and direct all the resources to themselves.
1. There's some interesting nuance about Blacks in America. American Africans - as in, blacks who migrated to the US willingly - have seen large success. For example they graduate from college at twice the rate of native born white Americans: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_U...
Most of the author's problems seem to revolve around the fact that real life is not actually a pure meritocracy, not in the idea that meritocracy itself is a bad ideal. Even his examples where people show bias in assessment of others when they believe they are operating in a merit-based system are just examples that the system is not actually merit-based.
What I find disappointing is that the author does not even bother to offer even a hint at an alternative.
As a thought expermiment, what kind of world would most people prefer to live in, one in which success and rewards can be gained by skill and hard work or one in which success is distributed randomly? This article seems to imply that most people prefer the former. If that's true, then meritocracy is an ideal to work toward, no matter how perfectly or imperfectly it exists today.
The other subject discussed is people's perception of effort and skill in success. Most people seem to think that it's an important factor. But isn't this true even if luck and circumstance are large factors as well? It's a well known fact that people who win lotteries often lose their money and end up less happy than they expect. Anyone can be given the world and waste it. It's not wrong to believe that sustained success requires both effort and strong external support.
Therefore, what I learned from this article is that most people want to live in a meritocracy, and I suspect that most people are happier with their lack of success and reward if they believe that their cicrumstances are somewhat under their control and there exists opportunity to better themselves through effort. We should work toward a more meritocratic world so that more people can realize these ambitions.
You mean, the better out of those 2 options. There are more than the 2 options you present though, so the fact that it is ideal doesn't follow.
Some people would prefer the option, for example, where rewards aren't random but evenly distributed.
I wonder if people would even prefer fewer rewards for success if that success could be made more merit-based as a result. Maybe companies should reduce salaries and redirect that money toward more robust systems to recognize skill and merit in employees. It would make an interesting experiment. Would you take, for example, a 10% pay cut if in exchange you and everyone else at your job were given weekly evaluations with opportunities for advancement, with at least one person being given more responsibilities with no pay raise and the bottom earners gaining a raise as a result of increased efficiency and reduced pay for the top earners? That might not sound like a great deal, but maybe it could be crafted in a way to be appealing to people.
Some would also prefer the option of having it rain $100 bills every morning...however wildly unrealistic that might be.
This argument seems to create a strawman version of merit which means some kind of inner quality gained through pure willpower with no external influences from the world whatsoever. This might have some meaning in a certain kind of religious thinking which interprets the world as a reflection of a higher spiritual reality, but if we're confining our definitions to tangible things, it's an incomprehensible idea.
It might be a good thing to push towards the "pure meritocracy" you mention, though the article does offer arguments that it's not possible. If it's not possible, then some things that push towards it potentially make the problem worse. One of the virtues of pure meritocracy is that it is simple, and if a system accepts an impure meritocracy while rejecting complications based on that virtue, then it will fail to achieve what you want a pure meritocracy to do and enshrine the evils of an impure one.
Even if it is possible, it won't happen immediately, and you will have to deal with that. Don't be surprised if people reject it when you say "Oh, I'm working towards a pure meritocracy, in a way that just happens to benefit me first, and I promise that as soon as I've got that I'll be sure to make it a pure meritocracy for you, too."
Essentially, I'm saying that if you want pure meritocracy as your alternative, you need to offer some evidence that there's a practical way to get there from here. And all the way there, not just a few things in that direction, unless you can show that they really do benefit everybody (or at least that most people would agree is a better state, not just some, and especially not when those "some" are those who are already better off).
There's different perspectives and trade offs.
It assumes that when _you_ make up a scale, the people that deserve to be at the top of it tend to be there. There's no reason for it to imply there's one universal scale of good people versus bad people.
For instance, if you want to understand why some people make more money than others (a trait that _is_ well-ordered, and can be put into a list), then somebody who believes in meritocracy would say that the people who make the most money earned it. If you want to understand why different people hold different positions in a company, then the meritocrist would say that between all the people who wanted each position, the person who was best for it tends to be the one that gets it.
Each of those scales may be more or less sympathetic to an explanation by way of meritocracy. But anyone who wants to make that argument doesn't have to construct an a priori global list of goodness for all people to give you an answer.
But what I am referring to with "nature vs. nurture" is that you can't separate them. Take away the physical basis of a person, all the DNA, and there would be no person. Put a newborn in a box, i.e. no nurture, a person would also not develop. So you can't assign a fraction to either one.
Similarly, there is no separating randomness from selection/merit, in my opinion, because the latter acts on the former and both pervade everyone's life.
That is what I mean by a false dichotomy. It's not just that life involves both randomness and selection, but that they are not opposed things.
Ok but I don't see why the just world fallacy is a false dichotomy. It is precisely a fallacy, because people don't acknowledge randomness and selection.
So it doesn't make any sense to me to say the world is just rather than unjust, or vice versa. Thus, I reject the dichotomy, as applied to the world. Something specific could be just or unjust, of course.
The most competent surgeon may seem the most competent because she only takes easier cases. A good surgeon might work 36 which might be worse for his patients survival than if he works 12 hour shifts. You might get individual surgeons that are very lucky in terms of their success rate, not for any other reason than survivor bias. You might get a team of surgeons where a leader takes credit but it's the juniors that are actually really good at what they do.
Says you. Even an average talent can identify an excellent talent. People who stand against meritocracy are the people who have never even reached average talent.
> The most competent surgeon may seem the most competent because she only takes easier cases.
That is the kind of trick you think works when you are a child, but actually doesn't work among peers.
https://cramster-image.s3.amazonaws.com/definitions/DC-2238V...
Normal curve as in measuring IQ. Most people on it are in the middle. The people on the extremes are exceptional. Plenty of studies show that the correlation between being on the edge on that curve and being extremely successful are tenuous at best, most very successful people have average IQ. How do you explain that if there is a real meritocracy. Shouldn't people who are extremely exceptional in terms of their IQ be extremely successful?
> That is the kind of trick you think works when you are a child, but actually doesn't work among peers.
It's a common practice in medicine or law... to take on cases that they can actually win. Do you live under a rock?
> It's a common practice in medicine or law... to take on cases that they can actually win. Do you live under a rock?
Of course. Common practice for some. But then the hard cases are still there and someone needs to take them, right? And those who do, gain respect. That's merit.
Sources please. That's not my understanding of the literature at all.
>Shouldn't people who are extremely exceptional in terms of their IQ be extremely successful?
People who are extremely meritorious should be extremely successful. High IQ can be a contributing component to being effective, but other aspects would contribute too. You'd naively expect a correlation, though not a strict causal link. Which I believe you do find.
[1] http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intellige...
Or just people, who experience(d) a highly competitive environment, where excellent performance doesn't imply advancement, and advancement was often preluded by average performance.
Simply being more conscious of the possibility you are wrong is not a useful way to improve your decision. There was an episode of the Seinfeld sitcom where a character decides to do the opposite of his first impulse, because he's so often wrong. It was funny because that is obviously not a good way to improve decisions in real life where there are nearly infinite ways to do things badly.
If you are trying to pass a math class, and you keep getting problems wrong by doing what you think is correct, choosing to do things you think are wrong is not likely to improve your results.
Of course it does, meritocracy is the process of discriminating good candidates from bad candidates.
I'm so fed up with people attaching emotions to the word discrimination. It is not an inherent evil.
"Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate."
Then they haven't implemented meritocracy properly then, have they?
By warts, I mean that merit, as shorthand for "assessment of skill, talent, or capability", has other factors mixed in because flawed people decide who gets life's prizes.
The Gates example shows the missing ingredient - not luck, but recognition of luck's role in success, what some might call humility. The article referred to gratitude research, which probably means the same thing.
It's a missing ingredient because it doesn't seem too valuable anymore, especially when compared to other qualities, such as the ability to "talk smack."
And it's associated with sackcloth and ashes, or being a "loser." Moreover, it's often called false.
Coming back to meritocracy, what do we have as alternatives? Random selection? Suppression of individual differences (aka C.S. Lewis' "Parity of Esteem")? I don't know.
Parity of Esteem ref = http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf
Meritocracy-as-strong-just-world-hypothesis is a weak-man argument.
I am a believer in meritocracy. But, I note, I'm not a believer in any ideological big-M Meritocracy. Rather, I think meritocracy is the best practical way we know to organize things. In a liberal society, rather than get everybody to agree on the latent virtues they love the most, I think it makes sense to have demonstrated capability as a common ground evaluation metric. As another poster in the thread suggests, what do you want from your surgeon if not demonstrated capability?
He was referring to major flaws of the two stream, grammar and secondary modern, school system in place in the UK at the time. That it led to "an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications". So we still inhabit it.
That two tier education was supposed to be a three stream system including technical schools for engineering and trades, except almost none of those were built. So the UK spent decades wondering aloud why our education couldn't turn out engineers and tradespeople like Germany.
Subsequent UK attempts at school specialisation have been even worse.
Meritocracy is not ethically defensible under argumentative logic -- Hans Herman Hoppe has provided the framework for that.
Or, could you explain why you think ethics are not based on values and beliefs?
Bill Gates may be lucky in that he had little choice over the circumstances in which he was born into, but did not his parents make decisions that led to a better outcome? His luck could be said to be the merit of his ancestors.
A balanced playing field doesn't mean that luck plays no role. It also doesn't mean that you can't provide a safety net and do some balancing of outcomes. It just means you have eliminated systematic biases.
But it's pretty bizarre that people actually believe that being exploited is just hard work they have to do to get ahead and not being able to meet basic needs to live a normal life is just not working hard enough or not being talented enough to deserve a normal life.
It's morally acceptable to believe in meritocracy only as long as everyone's basic needs are met and they can't be exploited.