Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does has bad effects
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
In the early years of Microsoft there were no real software companies for them to complete with.
Apple, IBM for consumer operating systems. Later on NeXTStep and BeOS. UNIX vendors for Windows Server.
Lotus, WordPerfect for office suites.
Borland, Sun for developer tools.
PalmOS, then Nokia, Apple and Google for Windows Phone.
Gates is being modest. Microsoft beat these companies again and again, and only partly through over-aggressive tactics. Mostly his competitors just didn't invest in the right things at the right times, or got distracted, or couldn't hire the right talent, or made other strategic mistakes. Gates wasn't perfect either but he was smart enough to make plenty of good decisions, and turn on a dime when he realised he'd made mistakes (e.g. the internet pivot).
The idea that Gates isn't a good example of meritocracy is a strange one indeed. I can't help but think this sort of attack on "meritocracy" comes from SJWs who hate the idea that maybe the people at the top look the way they do because that's who deserves to be there!
I'd guess it applies the initial deal Microsoft had with IBM to write DOS, along with keeping the rights to the IP. A whole lot of luck was involved: being in the right time at the right place, IBM focusing more on hardware, etc.
I ran a business for a while, and I distinctly remember several key moments where I got super lucky. Eventually the business got big enough that less luck was required to make it on a daily basis.
maybe it’s more nuanced...
Remember what happened to GitHub's rug that said "meritocracy" on it? Pictures of the rug reached a bunch of feminist forums and they then started demanding it be got rid of because if GitHub is a meritocracy then why isn't it full of women? They then kicked up such a stink that one of the first acts of the new CEO was to get rid of it - sending a rather powerful message to everyone else about who really runs the place.
It's therefore an extremely relevant term for extremely serious discussions, which is why it crops up so much. There are many people who describe themselves is nearly identical words, such as "social justice activist". If everyone who used the term SJW started using SJA instead, rapidly you'd come to the view that SJA is also a pejorative, simply because so much discussion of these types of people is disapproving in nature.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Lotus employees themselves said they don't recall DOS ever breaking or slowing down their app, and Microsoft gave them betas to test. Any compatibility issues were bugs in DOS that Microsoft fixed. So you're repeating long since debunked myths here. Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is one of the strategic issues Gates got right.
Secondly, IBM not realising the OS was a "gold mine" is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's not luck. Luck is a dice roll, it's something that could happen to anyone. Noticing important opportunities other firms have missed due to lack of strategic insight isn't "luck", that's indeed the heart of merit!
Thirdly, Stacker wasn't stolen. The Stacker lawsuit was about patents, it happened because Microsoft evaluated Stac's technology and decided to go with a different compression engine, which pissed off Stac so they sued. The judge concluded any infringement wasn't "wilful" i.e. the Microsoft people who did DoubleSpace didn't know about Stac's patents. This is the kind of dispute that happens to every software company.
Finally, being in a powerful position didn't automatically "gift them more power". It doesn't work like that. Look at Azure - it doesn't benefit from Windows at all, yet is growing like a weed and beating GCP. That's not something that was gifted to them merely by being there.
What I'm seeing here is a very strange view of business and leadership - good decisions are described as luck, hard work to build new products is zeroed out and described as merely 'gifts', and a bunch of garbled or false urban legends are used to minimise their achievements.
Look, I've never worked for Microsoft and have no particular reason to love them. In the 1990s I was a full on Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy in fact. But with the benefit of age and time, and watching competitors, I can see now just how many good decisions Gates made repeatedly to get him and his firm where he is now. It wasn't luck.
Pretending that one or the other is sufficient on its own is folly. You need both. If you don't have the same opportunities then you can't be Gates no matter how hard you work, and if you don't work hard then you can't be Gates even if you had the same opportunities.
Moreover, having fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the "what should I do" decision tree. If you have the same opportunities as Gates and you make the right decisions then you're a billionaire instead of a millionaire. If you have fewer opportunities then instead it's the difference between having a $140K/year job or a $40K/year job, but that is still a highly relevant difference in your life.
It seems to me that if "fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the 'what should I do' decision tree" then we are not living in a Meritocracy, as your saying the outcomes depend primary on the set of opportunities you either started with or achieved by chance, and no mater what skill is applied you have a limited "optimal" path and can not achieve more then that.
I actually think I agree with that, while there are Meritocratic elements to the world we live in in that we get to apply skills to our choices, the significant limits to our individual "choice trees" caused by various social and economic factors rule out the possibility that we are living in what could be called a mostly Meritocratic system.
That is just defining meritocracy in a way that causes it to be impossible. Some people are 5'0" and others are 6'6" and that is not a personal choice but it is also a relevant characteristic in the game of basketball.
There are two ways out of that. One is to define merit as including things like genetics and upbringing, so Gates is meritorious because he went to good schools and his parents had the money to expose him to computer hardware at a time when it was very expensive etc. causing him to know about business and code. But that's reaching the point of tautology -- if you're successful you're meritorious because merit is defined as things that produce success.
The other is to recognize opportunity as something separate from merit but still relevant to position. Some people never had the opportunity to go to medical school and so they can't be your doctor. Some people did have that opportunity, but didn't choose it, and they too can't be your doctor.
This allows us to recognize that not everyone has the same opportunities -- and that it is not even possible for everyone have the same opportunities, even if there are ways to improve the opportunities for some people, because there is still no way to make 5'0" people 6'6" -- while at the same time recognizing that the person who did become a doctor/engineer/CEO/etc. did so at significant personal effort when other, similarly situated people did not.
With your definition, a Monarchy would be a Meritocracy. The son of the King has the opportunity to rule because of "genetics and upbringing", he has enough skill that it doesn't lead to deposition or revolution, so he becomes King.
Of course there are limits to this in terms of genetics, and I would agree that to determine if we were in a Meritocracy you would have to look at what differentiates the success/failure of those born with similar physical/genetic characteristics as that is not something we can realistically make equal as a society.
I am also in full agreement in that I think an Absolute Meritocracy is impossible, and I think the question is are we a Mostly Meritocratic society or not, but you can't just redefine something because the definition makes it impossible.
And this gets into the whole question of free will. If you had the "opportunity" to be taught about expected value and opportunity costs and economic theory, do your choices that take into account that knowledge count as merit or opportunity? Did you make the choice, or do your circumstances cause you to?
But those kinds of games aren't revealing anything deep, they're just shuffling paper around. It's a shell game used for political advantage to try to create a conflict between things that shouldn't.
Rewarding is merit is good. If there is a law that says people can't keep enough of what they earn, that is a dumb law, because we will lose good entrepreneurs.
Increasing opportunity is good. If there is a law that says black people can't be entrepreneurs, that is a dumb law, because we will lose good entrepreneurs.
Where politics comes in is that you have people that want to trade one good against the other. So they vilify success to justify reducing its incentives in order to raise money for programs that increase opportunities, even though that is one of the dumbest trade offs available when it is possible to have both. And the rhetoric used convinces people that their circumstances mean that they can't succeed, even though the circumstances only make it more difficult, and then they don't even try.
The straw man is that Gates is a representative example of anything when he is the far extreme outlier. Taxing him at even 99% would generate an inconsequential percentage of government revenue because there are so few people like him, whereas the median family in the "top one percent" is a surgeon who is married to an anesthesiologist. So if you want meaningfully more money, it's really going to come from the large number of doctors and software developers and college professors, not from one Bill Gates.
But the government already raises more than enough money. The problem is that most of it goes to corruption and waste and appeasing the AARP. Use the same money to actually increase opportunities for people and you don't have to take it from doctors and entrepreneurs. (Have a look at what percentage of the federal budget is spent on retirees. Say what you will about the need for those programs at some level, but that percentage is just too high, and it keeps going up. All while the programs are sending big checks to millionaires and inflating healthcare costs. But it's much easier to vilify Bill Gates than anger a large voting block in the major swing state of Florida.)
I feel like that statement is just saying that things are always partly meritocratic. Yes, you have to be skilled and prepared to take the best advantage of opportunities, but how does one get opportunities? Does one meet more/better opportunities because of skill and merit, or because of station and class of birth, or random chance? If the latter two outweigh the first, then I don't think we can say we really live in a Meritocracy.
Obviously, as nearly any reader would grant, there are other dimensions like business acumen, network connections, market timing, etc., that matter hugely in the specific story of Bill Gates, and clearly the article does not have as a goal a desire to discuss all those different dimensions as much as discussing labor productivity.
And that’s fine.
Some essays may focus on one of these aspects or another. This one happens to be among the subset that focus on labor productivity, which is a valid and worthwhile subset of factors to spend an essay focusing on.
I'm afraid if we run a proper statistical analysis of programming labor vs. the result, we'll see a pretty strong correlation between the two.
There will be outliers, but according to my personal (non-scientific) observation, "negative" outliers are extremely rare: I know very average software developers who raised to the top overtaking their smarter colleagues. I still have to see a great developer who due to the lack of opportunities cannot make ends meet.
Separately to your second point, I think you’re just badly mistaken. Firstly, meritocracy would mean someone receives financial compensation directly proportional to their productivity. I don’t know any software developers for whom this is remotely true. Often developers are paid a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate, nothing remotely approaching a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view.
Secondly, there are many skilled software developers who cannot find work and cannot find competitive wages. Some end up unemployed from chronic burnout or the toll that dysfunctional open plan work environments take, some have family circumstances requiring them to live in places where the job markets are poor, some are unemployed after being fired for ageist cost cutting, and some work for successful companies but are deeply exploited, earning a fraction of what the person in the next cubicle is earning, despite being equally productive.
It’s really harmful to propagate this stereotype that just because a person had training or skill in software engineering, they have a simple path to a middle class life. Absolutely not true.
I would call this a bad strawman of meritocracy if you weren't obviously for meritocracy. The parts I object to are "directly proportional" and the assertion that "a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate" is not "a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view".
And if they are really a skilled developer whose productivity is sincerely a large multiplier beyond their peers’ productivity, they’ll be lucky to earn even 30% more, despite literally accounting for 10x, 100x, 1000x more revenue.
I do not see how any rational argument could be made to suggest this is even the tiniest bit meritocratic. And we’re not even discussing the role of political favorites or nepotism might play in bonuses or promotions, etc. etc.
And they don’t need to read anyway, because comments are the real reason people come to a site like this. If the comments praise the article highly or make strong references, then perhaps it warrants a read, otherwise the comments make for much better content. You can often tell what the article’s main idea is from the headline anyway, otherwise it’s just a bad headline and probably a bad article.
I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got to see how many decisions he had to make to achieve what we did, I'd doubt you'd it attribute it solely to luck. All successful businesses likely experience some form of luck, but you need to be in a position to take advantage of it and that comes from skill and hard work.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to create an industry like PCs or business software. After they're ubiquitous it's easy to look back and say "well of course, anyone could have done that", but the fact is other's were trying and failed or gave up or never started.
If you re-rolled all the dice that defined the random chances and situational conditions in his life, I'd expect someone like Gates to come out reasonably successful in many cases. But he had to get one very specific set of roles to be where he is now, you'd have to re-roll forever for that set to come up again. And It's not unreasonable to think that there are a fair number of people out there who could achieve the same ridiculous level of success if you re-rolled their dice enough times.
Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
Also, while that extreme example is somewhat illustrative, I think for most of us it's that we're one of 20+ engineers, illustrators, business-types, etc in a department, and the "luck" we see around us is explained by what I wrote.
Luck implies unexplainable randomness. Example: The person who got the promotion was "lucky", because they just happened to have knowledge in a field that was needed. There's no luck there, they spent years learning that information.
Or maybe you're just lucky enough that you've never been in a frame of mind to notice its absence?
I know nothing of you as an individual, but if we define "luck" as events unfolding in your life beyond your control in a positive manner it's absurd to say it doesn't exist. We are all brought into existence either lucky or unlucky, relatively speaking. Were you born healthy, attractive, tall, rich, smart, with loving parents with a stable income, in a first world country? Or were you born poor, diseased, addicted to crack, and into sex slavery?
Yes, there are things you can do to improve your lot in life, but saying luck doesn't exist is a harmful truism. You believe it because it makes you feel in control of your destiny, not because it has any basis in reality.
Tell me how you feel about luck after being diagnosed with a terminal illness that will make the rest of your life miserable and deplete the savings you pass onto your grieving loved ones.
This is the idea of "luck" when discussing "meritocracy" and people being promoted, which I think was kind of clear if you read past the first three words.
No wonder you don't believe in it if you don't think luck includes any element of randomness.
I bet you also believe the justice system is fair and that a poor Black teenager caught with weed will be treated the same as a White kid in the burbs...
People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before.
There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
It's not just about parents or upbringing either. Mark Zuckerberg's roommates - Hughes, Moskovitz, and Saverin - were his roommates by luck. What if they'd gone to Yale or Brown or Stanford? Or not been assigned to those rooms? You might say "But they worked hard to get into Harvard and be exposed to those opportunities!" - but so did (almost) everyone else who got into Harvard. Most of the other people from that class aren't billionaires now - they're merely highly successful professionals.
You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
> Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).
Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words.
I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
My current lousy situation is not the result of something internal and unchangeable, so it is worth figuring out how to change it and get into a better situation.
It's easy to take that attitude too far, but maybe keeping a little bit of it around could be helpful for some.
I'm not a take big risks and hope to be lucky kinda guy.
Yet more conclusory statements.
An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house.
(Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases.
One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it.
And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government.
So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.
What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds.
So yes meritocracy most certainly exists.
If your parents work hard and want to give you opportunity, they are entitled to do so. The meritocracy is applied over generations.
log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck
Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success.
American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L).
People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L).
You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends?
Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?)
For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide
"Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432
Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").
Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.
This is important, if you consider that the goal of a meritocracy could be that it drives more output.
> American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
And W. Yes, people want us to believe that hard work brings us success, for obvious reasons.
Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.
If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?
I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth.
How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
EDIT: I too fail to see its relevance.
Choosing someone less qualified for a job because equity is not meritocracy. Rather, there are many less capable and willing to work from that upper class that would wish to take advantage of a less meritocratic system when they can’t competent with someone better from less privileged circumstances
You display a dismissive, even disdainful attitude about the matter, and I really don't feel like fighting uphill like that today. But if you really want to have a good-faith discussion about this then you can start by explaining how you read their position as "redefin[ing] meritocracy into... equal outcome", when the only occurrence of the string "equal outcome" in The Fine Article was:
> Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes.
The context was a "fake game of skill", where players were told they had won. This is about self-belief, not outcome.
EDIT: Phrasing
EDIT 2: And my new favorite: "People that share the intersectional beliefs does not believe in scientific reasoning."
People who make statements like that don't appear to believe in logical reasoning.
You might agree that creationists when expressing something resting on their faith might have some scientific methodology issues. I think we might agree that it is not illogical to point out that some research done by creationists have a religious overtone. Research outside their creationist dogma might not warrant such scrutiny.
Can you after watching the following two videos, which contains core thoughtleaders in intersectionality like DiAngelo, that intersectionality does not have a religious overtone? [1,2] If not, why not?
If so, why is it then illogical to point out that the authors are expressing something that to at least some degree seem to rely on intersectional dogma and that this has a religious overtone?
Primarily that you seem to be making a category error in saying that because people within the movement have acted in bad faith, intersectionality itself — or, possibly worse, the legitimate concerns it's trying to explore — is bullshit.
I'm not here to debate the movement with you, but if your notion of it is something other than "people marginalized along multiple axes have an especially hard time of things", and particularly if it's something more nefarious than that, then you're quite possibly operating from someone's "they're coming to take your $whatever!" narrative, instead.
However, can you at least see how arguing from belief regardless of how true you think it is does not make a convincing argument for someone that doesn’t share those beliefs?
It is ok that intersectionality is a political movemennt, go ahead. Just don’t pretend that arguing from belief is science, and use that to argue that a belief is a fact.
Can you point to anything akin to the Sokal Hoax that happened in the context of sociological empirical studies?
Also, if you don't trust sociologists in general, replicating the study will not convince you anyway. It is a good idea to replicate, but it is not a good idea to care about the opinion of those who dismiss entire scientific fields based on ideological prejudice, be the field sociology, immunology, climate science of evolutionary biology.
I fail to see how it’s interesting that people with different capability as well as possibly willingness to work doesn’t succeed at equal rate in intellectually demanding jobs.
Meritocracy is when such people of different class backgrounds succeed at about the same rate on average. Intersectionality muddles that water in an unhelpful way.
Even the Sokal scandal is somewhat simplified. It was not so easy for them to get the paper accepted, in fact they were rejected many times by other journals. This is rarely mentioned.
The cited work in TFA compares performance evaluations with raises. It found that for the same performance evaluations, an explicit focus on meritocracy leads to worse monetary outcomes for women. That seems fairly objective and methodically sound to me, and not at all related to Sokal-style bullshit.
The income gap is a complex topic, and it is clearly not as simple as either extremes of the cultural wars paint it. It is not true that the pay gap is 100% due to discrimination against women, but it is also not 100% true that such discrimination plays no role. As usual in real life, there are nuances and complexities that cannot easily be reduced to simple slogans.
Silicon Valley has a religion-ideology that we have no name for yet. It is a very American kind of Protestantism with zero gods. I know the environment and I know what I'm talking about, even though I accept you might disagree. My view is that the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalists are not as rational as they would like to think.
It is true that Sociology has a left-wing bias. In my view, this is true of all academia. There was a time, not so long ago, when academia had a right-wing bias. This too is a subject of sociological research :)
They essentially wrap simple concepts within a format that require immense effort to parse, maybe to present an intellectual challenge or to obfuscate what is actually said. Great for staying fashionable as a tool for showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops due to the amount of studying needed to pierce the veil, but not so great for knowledge seeking.
To me it seems like what they are saying are:
- culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
- culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
- either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
These are interesting to some degree, but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have.
I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
Postmodernism, at its core, is precisely a criticism of conventional epistemology. I am not a postmoderinst, but I do find that some of their views are interesting, or at least worth considering. I would not be surprised if you are right, and that postmodernism goes down in history as a fool's errand. In any case, I think that it is good that people kick the foundations of knowledge to see what happens. If nobody does that, it becomes very easy to fall into religion/ideology without noticing.
To borrow a term from another thinker who also hates postmodernism (I think), knowledge should be anti-fragile.
> showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops
You are absolutely right about this part. Just don't think that Sillicon Valley's Matcha Tea Boutique Shops are so different. The environment is also full of terms and clichés that mostly serve to signal tribal alignment, that really say nothing new and only create a barrier of entry for outsiders: "let us create a curated list of use-cases for under-the-radar angel round startups that are attempting to leverage blockchain technologies for adtech verticals."
> culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
Right, but he also has some interesting things to say about our relationship with the "mentally ill", how that relationship is different in other societies and why our approach may be pathological for all of us. For example.
> culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
Some might say this, but overall culture is just taken as a powerful force that shapes the reality we inhabit. The thing is that, if one doesn't cherry-pick, some postmodernist ideas actually became mainstream. "We inhabit narratives."
> either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
I think this is mostly true. No problem if you disagree, but it doesn't seem like such a crazy hypothesis to me.
> but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have
This is a confusion between postmodernism in general and "grievance studies".
> I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
For me, the academic duty is to think seriously and independently. Any other red line only guarantees that we get stuck in local maxima. I think that the unusual views should have a place, and knowledge seekers should make an effort to understand them if they are going to criticize them.
It is therefore reasonable to treat this kind of academic papers exactly as what it looks like, basically as politically motivated reasoning useful only to people that believe in those ideological tenets. Basically, as a secular theology for the intersectional faith.
You can also imagine that the rewards in this system become a solid part of the legal system, and so workers could sue their managers for assigning unjust rewards. This basically means that there is always an external "eye" that keeps things in check.
For me, I don't really care whether meritocracy exist or not so it more advantageous for me to believe it doesn't exist.
Of course meritocracy exists. If it didn't, I'd be a professional athlete instead of a programmer and I'd make a huge salary.
Or maybe I'd be an astronaut, or a brain surgeon.
Thankfully, meritocracy exists and allows the truly gifted and hard-working people who excel at those jobs to hold those spots.
I think I make a pretty decent coder. But I'd just stink on an NBA court, in brain surgery, and probably in a space shuttle.
The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
Chesterton, 1908
Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=320002...
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.
What is merit? Is it merit if, because someone is of faith, they donate food to those without? That person who is receiving the food has more than they did prior, the person who had the food has less.
Merit is a metric, and in contemporary culture, it is one used to reinforce ownership and capital. Yet in the above overly-simplistic example, we can see that not all human interactions are, nor should, be overfit into the idea of “merit” nor “ownership of capital or goods.” In the above scenario, “merit” conveniently tries to avoid disclosing its ethical structure.
It’s a fallacy. More folks are waking up to this fact[1].
[1] Avoiding the whataboutisms discussing “talent” or “skills” and other bogus terms.
Merit is extremely easy to define. Merit is providing economic value to society. We have an imperfect, but quite impressive system for measuring this, called pricing. If I can create something you want, you pay me for it. I capture part of the excess value of that transaction, commensurate with the uniqueness of what I created.
Isn't there also a major component that involves the opportunity to take risk including things like a sufficient social safety net? Certainly, different people have different downsides in the case of failure. Many of those factors are not based on merit.
1. We live in a partial meritocracy. Success is strongly correlated with effort and skill, but by strong I mean maybe in the 30-50% range.
2. Meritocracy is good, and we should strive to make that 30-50% correlation rise up to 100% (even if we can't ever quite get there).
3. Believing in meritocracy is extremely important, and has produced the tremendous economic largesse we all enjoy today.
Did the children of the parents who paid $250K to get their children into school by bribing administrators have more skill?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/economic-mobility-of-fami...
Forty-two percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain in the bottom, while 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top.
Children of middle-income parents have a near-equal likelihood of ending up in any other quintile, presenting equal promise and peril for those born to middle-class parents.
The “rags to riches” story is much more common in Hollywood than on Main Street. Only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income at the very bottom move to the very top.
Percentile cutoffs.
2nd - $24000
3rd - $46400
4th - $76500
5th - $127400
It’s not that hard to go from the 1st to the 2nd but that’s not exactly a livable wage for a household.
The third is also not hard for a household if you have two earners. But good luck with that $46K if you have children needing child care.
What most hear consider “middle class” and what is the statistical middle class $46K - $76.5K is completely different.
There are entire countries, at least the Nordic countries, where you are never going to be homeless, no matter the business risks you take.
He didn't really take huge risks. If his business had not succeeded the worst that would have happened to him (likely) would have been an upper-middleclass career and life.
He was immensly shrewd, bold, hard working and smart. But ... I'm not sure what he exactly can be held for as an example since he had the right genes and the right topics of interest and the right place in history.
You can't approach just the business as a form of lottety since, although it's a game of chance, it's not a single roll of the die. The stars must be aligned, lot of small things need to come together just right.
Balderdash. His parents were wealthy, his father was a successful lawyer and his mother was on the board of IBM and was very well connected socially. From Wikipedia: "Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard, saying '... if things [Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence].'" According to Gates, the decision was fairly riskless.
Sorry to say, but nothing in this world is perfect. However, a lack of perfection doesn’t prove that something doesn’t exist.
The world doesn't lack highly skilled entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk.
Gates, besides being very talented, was extremely lucky - being at the right school at the right time, having a mom at the board of directors of the largest computer company in the world(IBM), and having IBM make the worst business decision probably ever - feeling that there won't be much money in the operating-system - so licensing it out.
He was a highly skilled programmer and entrepreneur.
> The world doesn't lack highly skilled entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk.
Erm, what? It absolutely does.
> Gates, besides being very talented, was extremely lucky - being at the right school at the right time, having a mom at the board of directors of the largest computer company in the world(IBM), and having IBM make the worst business decision probably ever - feeling that there won't be much money in the operating-system - so licensing it out.
Yes, my point exactly. He was both lucky and talented and hard-working. There were tens of thousands of kids as well off as him and more, who didn't amount to a hundredth of his success.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad to have it as a goal / ideal.
To attempt to have the former is folly; to attempt the latter, sanity.
I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them.
I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.
It is sad that some people are born dumb as a rock but we shouldn't make them math professors out of pity.
How is this useful or meaningful? Why are we funding research like this using tax dollars, when an exact paper like this has already been written many times and already shown to be meaninlesss?
I'm not aware of anyone arguing for meritocracy encompassing all of society: this would suggest that eg the intellectually disabled shouldn't be taken care of if they can't be economically productive. The application is generally much more limited than resource allocation, to things like production: those who are the best at a job should be the ones doing it (and compensated for doing so), for the benefit of society overall, while a separate belief demands allocation of a baseline of resources to anyone who needs them based solely on their inherent worth as a human.
This comment isn't interpreted as a full-throated defense of meritocracy as much as a lament that this gross misunderstanding of the concept has so rapidly become dogma among the stupider (and unfortunately, louder) parts of society.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equal-opportunity/#EquOpp...
The bad part of the ‘meritocratic’ world view is not that having people who are good at certain tasks do those tasks is a bad idea, it is that thinking those people are more ‘deserving’ of a good life is bad.
People that are good at math should be math professors, but we shouldn’t think they are morally superior to the person born dumb as a rock, nor do they deserve a better life.
Got it.
Learn to fucking hustle. Learn to say no. Learn to know when to leave.
1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing to prove otherwise.
2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in isolation.
So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.