Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does is bad for you | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does is bad for you

fastcompany.com

16 pointswalterbell12 comments

While the findings on discrimination based on holding meritocracy as a value are interesting, the premise of the article--that meritocracy is wrong--is itself wrong. Or at least, it's arguing against a strawman version of meritocracy in which everyone gets exactly what they deserve, but I don't know anyone who believes that.

The idea of a meritocracy is that you can improve your outcome by working hard and smart. That doesn't guarantee that you'll do better, or even as well, as everyone who works less hard or smart than you. Weight lifting is a perfect example here. Train hard; gain strength. Train smart; gain more strength with less effort. But, there's always going to be someone who gets stronger with less effort than you. Does that mean you shouldn't bother with weightlifting? That it's all a scam?

With any luck Olympic medals will no longer be handed out based on who crosses the finish line first!

Sure luck plays a part, but to find fault with someones accomplishments because they are lucky? Very weak argument. People succeed due to luck, perseverance, and hard work. In some cases it is smart work.

Imagine no longer finding value in a person who has started and then sold a company. They have value and merit far above someone just out of school. Simple fact.

> Imagine no longer finding value in a person who has started and then sold a company.

This is a great point. One could imagine comparing two candidates for a job, one had started and sold a company, the other just coming out of school. For the meritocracy total-denier the two candidates have equal prospects - since it must have been luck that the one candidate was able to build and sell their company. In practice this is completely false, the candidate that sold their company is light years better than any given recent grad.

I can understand this but at the same time it could possibly go the other way. What if the person sold the company because it was going downhill? What if it wasn't properly managed and the whole thing was sold just to get rid of it? I would say someone who has experience building and selling a company has value but not in every situation and it isn't always 'light years' ahead.

I would say the fact that someone would pay for their company, no matter what the situation is, puts them light years ahead. There's no stronger signal than someone else being willing to part with cash in order to obtain the rights their work.

Although they're light years better because of their experience, not because of any inherent merit that starting a company suddenly revealed. By far the most disgusting implementation of meritocracy is when people believe that some people are simply better than others, and their track record is a way of identifying them, when in truth, most people's track record is dumb luck but that dumb luck shaped them into quite different (and differently useful) humans.

The corollary to this is it's always worth to give a young person who has great desire to help a chance, no matter where they come from, because maybe this dumb luck (or grace on your part) will make them into, well, the kind of person that starts and sells their company.

“In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either “essential” or “very important” when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill.”

The article does not present anything to counter this widely shared belief in the UK and US.

Being rewarded for intelligence and skill is not the same as only being rewarded for intelligence and skill. The fact that luck is a factor does not mean that skill is not a factor. Or that hard work is not a factor.

I’m not sure if the author is accidentally conflating this illogical leap, or purposely trying to mislead.

Meritocracy, to me, does not mean some Star Trek episode world where only merit determines position. I think it means that merit is the most influential determinant. I would like to see some research of the impact of skill vs luck. Meritocracy is preferable, I think, to other systems like heredity or seniority or equity based on random factors.

If you get significantly better grades than your peers, you can land yourself a high income job, no matter how poor you grow up. Many US immigrants take advantage of this, and have achieved single generation jumps from lower class to upper middle class. I have known several, personally. Isn’t this the definition of meritocracy?

I would say that it is a facet of meritocracy. After all, status alone doesn't necessarily represent the reward one might expect for one's achievements.

For certain people, class, or remuneration probably matters much less than recognition, for example. If said recognition goes to whomever shouts the loudest or makes sure to 'appear' best (even though anyone with expert knowledge would immediately know this person isn't the best), then you are no longer living in a meritocracy.

I should note that I find the whole idea of a meritocracy rather flawed, as it would somehow require to perfectly equate all of your actions, every single day, in every walk of life with some kind of reward or easy-to-query metric.

That's just not feasible. And even if it was, who would want another type of China-style sesame credit on steroids?

Maybe, but I still want my surgeon to really good at surgery.

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