Meritocracy harms everyone, even the winners | Hacker News Reader

Meritocracy harms everyone, even the winners

vox.com

17 pointslnguyen35 comments

I may be lost here but...

> Meritocracy is the idea that people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, for example, on their parents’ social class.

> Here’s a clarifying stat: At two Ivy League schools that Markovits surveyed, “the share of students from households in the top quintile of the income distribution exceeds the share from the bottom two quintiles combined by a ratio of about three and a half to one.”

Just me or is anyone else reading this as "kids are getting ahead because of their parents' social status. Let me tell you about why having a system based on merits is failing us."? Because it doesn't seem like we're using a system based on merits (alone) if kids are getting so far ahead because of their parents' social status.

I know wealth brings more opportunities, but is this any different (in practice) than nepotism? I think a lot of us want a system where there is more social mobility, but framing a conversation around our society's meritocracy (which clearly doesn't exist and is admitted in the article) feels more like sensationalism and distracts from the root issues.

If the combination of high intelligence and high drive generally leads to gaining more wealth, and if those qualities are generally highly heritable, then we should expect rich kids to, on average, inherit their parents' intelligence and drive, and so do well in things that require intelligence and drive, such as school & work.

But that leads to other uncomfortable questions, that we'd all rather not discuss. And so, we desperately search for other answers.

While it is possible for that to be true, I think the general consensus is that it isn't. AFAIK there is a higher correlation between the school that one is placed in than the genetics. Evidenced by placing young low income children into schools that are generally attended by the wealthy tend to do much better in life. But there's always a clear correlation to health and future potential earnings to parents' wealth. I don't think there's enough genetic variation here, so it seems extremely reasonable that the causation here is environmental (i.e. growing up with more resources and advantages leads - unsurprisingly - to a better financial outcome).

It reminds me of how gas stations generally having the same prices can be interpreted in two ways:

1) Competition is almost perfect, so they are forced to sell at the market price.

2) Competition is almost non-existent, so they are forced to sell at the monopoly price agreed upon.

As far as the questions people debate about upbringing and resources, wouldn't (identical) twin studies be the way to go if you really want to know?

The most interesting yet uncomfortable of those is whether the regression towards mean drags everyone else up (as weakest actors are removed) or the kids of the rich down?

What's the magnitude of chance? Or of inherited genetics rather than social standing and wealth?

Yes and no. The most meritocratic institutions of higher ed in the US are probably CalTech and MIT. These are not perfectly proportional representations of the rich socioeconomic and demographic tapestry of the US or the world.

Even bracketing aside the effects of richer soil and tragic history, assortative mating being what it is, meritocracy generates un-meritocratic outcomes in the long run.

The entire premise here seems to revolve around university admissions.

Who measures success based on which university someone went to? Isn't that just the preamble to one's life after graduation, which is when people actually hit the road and make something of themselves?

Of course going to an Ivy League school has advantages, but constructing an argument against meritocracy based on access to institutional higher education is strange.

I'm not really convinced a true meritocracy would ever be possible. Sure, you can maybe get closer then we are now, but there will always be nepotism, geographical problems, how well someone is parented, etc, even if you somehow equalized wealth.

Additionally, why is a meritocracy even desirable? You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your genetics, you don't choose to be born able-bodied or not, so why should you be rewarded for those things over somebody else? Under a meritocracy, a kid born with a 60 IQ and who's physically disabled would have a pretty bad life compared to an able-bodied person born with an IQ of 150. Since neither choose their lot in life, why reward one over the other?

The only kind of meritocracy that makes sense to me, is to measure how hard a person works, with the understanding that some people will have to work harder to accomplish as much as others. But again, I don't think that's possible to achieve, and likely never will be.

Why do you think that grit or predisposition to hard work is less determined by genetics and environment than iq or physical ability? It seems to me that judging anyone’s value by iq, hard work, physical ability, nationality, height, or skin color hold level of inequality. For me, meritocracy is not about the fairness, but rather about efficiency in utilizing resources.

The usual problem is of defining merit and testing it.

The critical step that is almost always missing is testing the measure - matching it and results. Reality is much more messy than most everything used to decide merit - ultimately even third party judges can be biased or the sample taken might not be representative.

> why should you be rewarded for

It's not that you 'should'. It's that other people will more likely give you their money because you're more likely to create value for them.

> Additionally, why is a meritocracy even desirable? You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your genetics, you don't choose to be born able-bodied or not, so why should you be rewarded for those things over somebody else?

Why do you think in terms of rewarding? Isn't the point to have people doing things they're most suited for individually?

I guess you could say that meritocracy isn't compatible with free market economy.

An interesting thing to think about is that having the best person possible for a job is usually incompatible with that person having the job they are best at. In a "meritocracy", which one predominates?

It's not a reward. If we give the same to a 60 IQ person as to an 150 IQ person the world would be vastly different. trillions of dollars would be wasted purely on incompetence. I can't even fathom desiring such a world.

As a person who grown up and got education in the former Soviet Union, pr Daniel hits a wrong target. In SU, higher education ( except some prestigious areas like international diplomacy, or dental doctors ) was almost completely based on personal performance. Prestigious high school were rare, but did not need any extra money. Yet, the pattern was exactly the same: In universities, in these high schools with better education, all but few students were from highly educated parents. If you from factory workers family, much likely that you will drop from high school and go to factory, after professional training. Soviet Union regarded a little smart people. Engineers and Doctors ( except extraordinary ones ) were among the poorest. My mom as engineer had salary about two times less than ordinary factory workers. US rewards educated people best, this is why strict correlation between education level and income. But the main problem, and this is common for both US and SU, that less educated parents do much less efforts to push their children. Don't remember who said it, but it describes the problem: "To be educated person, You have to graduate three universities. The first one should finish your grandfather, the second do your father, and you graduate the third"

>”To be educated person, You have to graduate three universities. The first one should finish your grandfather, the second do your father, and you graduate the third"

Love this

My grand father and father graduated from a university and growing up it was such a given to me that I too would go to college - 0 doubt

But I know people that no one in their family or neighbors has gone to college - and their parents want them to join the military, they don’t push for college or talk about it

Could be money or being realistic

A review of this book was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20966581

I would differentiate the idea of meritocracy and an implementation. By definition, the idea [1] seems to be a fair and efficient way to encourage effort and achievements.

It's an implementation that fails, as usually. Our society focuses a lot on traditional signals of merit like advanced degrees, previous work at sound companies. We assume that people with those things on their CV are more able than without. The thing is even if there is some correlation, the the process of filtering is far from being optimised on people who can bring maximum benefit to a company and society in general. We can filter out people with weird backgrounds, poor families, no sound education, without polished manners and language.

They mentioned Germany is the article, I would not say Germany has a right and efficient meritocracy model for 21 century. Germany gives an individual a better chance in life by free education. Anyway, the rich Germans would send their children to elite British and US universities. The university education and the notes you got there mean a lot for German companies. Risky ideas, audacity are not encouraged, even switching to a job that is different from your diploma is perceived as very unusual and amateurish move. So German meritocracy is optimised for traditional careers, not for groundbreaking innovations.

Recently, I was impressed with Israel's innovation and business culture [2]. When sending their people to the military or in business in general your personality, ideas, and chutzpah [3] seems to matter much more than your diploma. The focus is more on practical skills and ideas rather then on good notes and sound names. And this meritocracy implementation seems to work good for the country: Israel does not have impressive scores in maths academic excellence comparing to Singapore, Japan, Germany, but they have very impressive results in the number of startups and innovations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

[2] http://startupnationbook.com/

[3] https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062883049/chutzpah/

The point is NOT to mess up the end points (univ entry) so we force some kind of diversity. What we should do is to diversify educational resources. The endpoints, if I may argue, are actually NOT that meritocratic, because powerful people can buy entrances. Univ entry should ONLY be hard GPA, or at least 80% hard GPA, not brownie points like voluntary work that only rich kids have the leisure to do. And then you spread good educational resources around evenly.

The problem with GPA is that the number differs based on school. GPA inflation isn't constant across schools, and how they are weighted is unknown to colleges. Even then, rich people with time to do volunteer work probably have more time to study and do schoolwork as well, giving them a better GPA.

This is so far off from how reality works. School systems in China and India do this, neither country is known for amazing education, though they have their standouts (iit, tshingua). Prestigious universities have long known that the success of their students in the real world is not solely about GPA, because GPA and other measures are measures of memory, not personal excellence in other pursuits or life in general. True critical thought extends beyond GPA. Reducing the education system to a memory based contest is completely antithetical to western thought and what has made the west so prosperous. My biggest grievance is that tech companies have implemented eastern systems of education/verification in their hiring via memory based algorithms problems.

Voluntary work and sports have even less to do with academic or work success. I'm not sure American universities are the best model either.

> School systems in China and India do this, neither country is known for amazing education,

The Chinese (and, I guess, Indian) education system isn't bad because they use performance on a test to assign students to universities. They're bad because they lack the resources to provide a top-notch education to everyone, so only the best students get to enjoy one. At the best Chinese universities, professors with a diverse international background give their students plenty of nuts to crack by doing some thinking on their own, and having some basic facts memorized seems to be more helpful than harmful for that. At the worst Chinese universities, the professors themselves may be unable to do better than just regurgitating the textbook. I expect overall quality to slowly rise over the coming decades as an increasing number of well-educated graduates become educators themselves.

"hard GPA" assumes uniformity of high school academic programs.I watched numerous kids in college that came from elite prep-schools who had 3.0-3.5 GPAs in high school do less work than they did in high school and get better grades, while watching former high school valedictorians with perfect grades grind it out in the library and struggle to get B's...

Admission exams tied to expected educational profile work better, but because they are not standardized among universities, they have been destroyed.

They don't test merit either (perhaps some students would do better after a remedial programme) and are still prone to corruption.

I want the most talented and skilled people performing their best at what they are most talented and skilled at. That's how you make progress. I fail to see how that harms anyone, and certainly not everyone.

I think it starts to fail once you attach different monetary or prestige rewards to different tasks, because people then try to game their way into positions without qualifications - and dismissing merit as a concept is just a more organized and scaled up way of this gaming.

It harms people when there would be a different group of "most talented and skilled people" if they were given the opportunity.

If everyone had the same capacity for achieving greatness, why are there so few geniuses? Do you think everyone is capable of the same level of greatness?

Did you ever stop to consider that we have so few geniuses because it takes money and connections to reach your potential in life, and a significant portion of the population never gets to enjoy an unbridled pursuit of their potential because their immediate concerns are with simply surviving?

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had great ideas, but they were also rich before they made a dime of their own money, and they never would have gotten anywhere without that money and their connections.

Glad to see the word “meritocracy” used for what it was coined for[1]: a dystopia, while almost everyone nowadays seems to use the word positively.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Language changes. Hackers generally aren't "people who use things in unintended ways" anymore either, but evil criminals on computers.

Well, yeah, it does, but that's an odd example I can't say I agree with.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lifehack

That's because of the subculture here. This is "hacker news" after all ;-)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker has the "illegal entry to computers" angle in both #1 (besides "somebody who cuts down vegetation") and #4. Day-to-day use of hacker, e.g. in the news, also concentrates on that (like on https://edition.cnn.com/search?q=hacker).

There are subcultures that keep the original meaning of meritocracy alive, but like with "hacker" that train has left the station a long time ago.

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