A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you
press.princeton.edu
press.princeton.edu
Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.
By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.
Do we have evidence to back up that assertion? Or more generally, a firm definition of what we mean by "merit" there?
As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people.
1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc.
2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.
That said, in certain political climates, such as the US presidential election season, the tendency to see things as black or white certainly gets amplified.
Or you would achieve some level of enlightenment.
The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.
Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.
And there are more types of war than just one country going against another. There’s te culture war and the war against drugs. Some say that business is war.
This is false in two ways:
- Luck is not sufficient.
- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.
A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.
If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.
As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.
If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.
Everyone knows about anecdotes like this. The real question is: how many rich people lose everything (especially the ones born into wealth)? How many extremely poor people move up a lot? You'll see that these are exceptions rather than a common event.
I am suspicious that this is not unintentional.
Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)
there's a sizable chunk of middle and upper-middle class families that can afford to send their children to good schools but not to support them indefinitely. it's a big advantage to start out as one of those children, but it can fall apart at pretty much any point if the child isn't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to advance through the pipeline.
1) “Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.“
2) “Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.”
Wait, what? The first “the world should be run” is one hell of a thing. But how did the author get to the rest? So, not only should the world be run, but it can be run and in such a controlled manner that and all luck is squeezed out of it and most people believe this.
Reminds me of my teanage self thinking about the world after a progressive teacher introduced the subject in class - the reasoning is so simplistic and pedantic. But here it is, published in the Princeton press!?!
I would say:
- a recursively iterative process of compressing billions of dimensions down into a very small number (typically < 5), using mostly predictive heuristics (a highly sophisticated but often incredibly inaccurate process which is typically invisible to the one doing it, and usually observers as well)
- aggregation
For a good example of evidence, look at the Flynn effect. One way to read the effect is that people dramatically got smarter over the past century, but...how? What exactly actually changed? The biggest correlate is education, suggesting that the quality of schooling is far more important than any innate ability.
Edit: Ah, you believe in IQ. I presume that you won't simply let me win the argument just because of my high IQ, though? So IQ isn't everything. More importantly, though, note that IQ also correlates with sex and skin color, but a cursory look at the genes says that that correlation must be spurious. So indeed what we see is that IQ actually correlates with quality of education, which then goes on to correlate with both sex and skin color thanks to the sexism and racism inherent in our educational system.
Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims.
I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.
Irl some people deserve more than others, but the gap is made up and silly, and everyone is better off when everyone is taken care of. You don't want people who have nothing to lose, but notions of meritocracy make people think it's unfair to take care of everyone.
He then makes a weak argument based on some psychology 301 research that a belief in meritocracy can be harmful. I'm somewhat convinced. But the problem is meritocratic structures are very useful, and if we dismantle meritocratic belief I doubt meritocratic structures would be far behind. And I'd rather live in a world where we at least strive for a meritocracy and fail then one where we give up.
> Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.
when the evidence presented attacks the ideology of it, but not meritocracy itself. The former refers to
* Putting people with merit into positions of responsibility, or
* Rewarding people who have merit.
The ideology includes 2nd-order and nth-order effects like:
* believing that people who are rewarded have merit (including that one had merited the success/failure one has)
* believing that proxies for measuring merit are accurate
* believing that our present implementation of meritocratic principles is both widespread and fair
In my opinion, ideally, we should retain the first principle of trying to give responsibility to people of merit, but abolish the ideological notions that meritocracy is successfully being practiced to good moral effect. And because merit and capability itself is so greatly affected by chance, and so too its measurement, we should strive to reduce how much we reward those seemingly with merit vs. those without.
However, we can all be certain that it's neither just the one nor the other way of making sense of our reality that is absolutely 'right'. It's most likely a mix of both (or more, love maybe apart) - but by 'believing' that every action has always to be in your very own self interest this may gets you rich but everybody else gets poorer in the process.
I'm going to be honest, this is stuff the ruling class knows and has known for millenials (may even before the greeks wrote it down). They would not be granted such privileges if they didn't act in a philantrophic way (expl. Gates foundation). People would turn on them in a revolution that would harm anyone more than it would help a single soul. Thusfor the ruling class - through university and religion - gives us this self centered (sophistic) believe shemes so we would controll (ourselfs) one another.
And no, I'm actually not talking about rich people when I talk of the ruling class. What I mean by that are big rulers of land. Bcs. you can have as much money as you want - if you live on a certain soil you will have to obey the ruler in one way or another.
Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.
That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses.
However, a belief the world should be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so.
The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.
"Canastilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. 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 behaviour for signs of prejudice."
One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.
So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good".
For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.
That doesn't make it a bad ideal though.
This critiques meritocracy. It also coins it.
It's not clear that there is any way at all to make a true meritocracy, since "merit" doesn't have an objective definition. The people who make the definition will always be biased, and will usually do so to favor themselves and people like them. After all, they're meritorious enough to be in a position to make the definition, right?
But even if such a thing exists in some hypothetical universe, it's not the universe we live in. The important part of the article is that it's a belief that you can get to a meritocracy piecewise that leads to errors. Doing the easy things first makes it less and less likely that you'll ever get around to noticing the people being excluded.
That said I do believe that making things more equal inherently requires you to re-evaluate how you value people and makes you lean towards things of substance from a person (though what is of substance is still abstract and varied) and less the superficial ques we very very heavily rely on now such as wealth status, school, profession etc etc.
Edit: Cleaned up the first paragraph I had rolled two separate thoughts into one run on.
For example in the job market one would want people to be hired on merit, i.e. based on their qualifications and skills to perform the job, not based on who they know, race, gender, etc.
In the Olympic Games, merit is how one athlete compares to the others in a fair race.
This is transparent and fair, and the best we can hope for.
It has also the benefit of ensuring a minimum of competence for people in public office and expert positions.
The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities.
One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes?
It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.
Sometimes they do: while white protestants are the financially and politically dominant American subgroup, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. are the highest earning.
Often, however, those subgroups do not have the same opportunities. That means we're an imperfect meritocracy. But we can acknowledge that without overlooking how remarkable it is to have a semblance meritocracy in the first place. Asian Americans, for example, have incredible upward mobility. An Asian American who grows up in the bottom 20% of income has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income. That's well over double the rate for white Americans. To be sure, they often have substantial cultural capital even if they come to the country without much in the way of financial capital. Maybe their parents are college educated, or were professionals back home. But they certainly do not belong to the dominant ethnicity, they probably don't belong to the dominant religion, they lack ties to important families (they may even lack extended family support at all), they lack political connections, etc. In the parts of the world that don't embrace meritocracy as an ideal, those shortcomings would be fatal. In those parts of the world, nobody even pretends that belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion shouldn't hold you back.
Original article:
> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
Linked article (on 'depend') has the following conclusion which explicitly disagrees with this claim:
> Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet.
Further, the logic here is unsound:
> 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.
The author asserts Gates was successful because he was a good programmer, and that therefore other good programmers should have equal success. Yet most people understand Gates is not an amazing programmer but rather has his strengths in understanding business. Microsoft did well because of business positioning in a new and rapidly evolving field, not because they were a revolutionary future codebase.
But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal -- impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically, is the norm for human societies?)
Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration, that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals at all stages of life (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined, at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y and Z).
I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are".
But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?
I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)
I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)
It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.
It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a value / goal and as state / belief. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or "justice" or "safe driving" - it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more behind. That's not a paradox, it's just logic.
> the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
False dichotomy; why not both?
> In the UK, 84 per cent 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
Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that didn't work hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you die at 5 from malaria.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations
That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations" of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not use that statistics itself to dole out rewards?)
I do agree that recognizing extrinsic vs. intrinsic factors in success is important for empathy and to help others - i.e. looking at work given your circumstances not just work - but it felt like it ended without making a conclusion. Is it asking us all to become fatalists? And does that somehow make for a more empathetic and just society? I feel like it wouldn't - if we believe that none of us are in control at all, why do anything to help others? And doesn't a belief in meritocratic ideals mean that we should be going out of our way to remove barriers? For example, I found this article[1] that talked about income mobility in different countries.
An interesting question it made me think of though: in separating luck versus grit, what is your prior?
For example, we'd probably all agree one is lucky to be born in a wealthy country, and that if you are you have inherent advantages. And that the circumstances you are born to are pure luck.
If growing up you had strict family (lucky or unlucky depending) that forced you to have good study habits, and you did well in school in a large part because of those habits, which in turn opened up other opportunities - is that luck or grit?
If I stumble across a good mentor, then go out of my way to learn from their teachings is that luck or grit?
If I'm starting a company, and I make 100 cold calls to find my first customer - do we attribute that to luck or grit?
If through exercise, genetic luck and healthy eating I'm able to stay healthy throughout my life, is that luck or grit?
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the-income-...
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton-...
But when we create a system for recognizing / rewarding / incentivizing achievement, with rules that are not unreasonable, people want others to follow the rules that have been created! Not creating hole after hole in a system to fix things that are not the direct fault of the system.
Social beings want rules and structure to know how to interact and what to expect from each other, and the systems in which they live. You will produce unexpected bad side effects when you keep shifting people's expectations about what seemed to be a reasonable system, that people lived their lives by.
Otherwise, let the picking and choosing of who your favorite beneficiary (today) of semi-meritocracy is continue.
- The article says nothing against creating a fairer world (aka equality of opportunity)
- Many believe that the world is meritocratic, which is not the case as there are many cofounding factors (plenty of which we don't have control over) that get in the way of finding a causation between hard work and outcome.
- The paradox of meritocracy: believing you acts meritocratically results in less fair outcomes.
- Being grateful to the impact of luck makes you more generous and fair.
- Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as an insult and threat to what we have and are
This last point is why I expected to see commenters here indignantly raging against the article.
However, what is the reader supposed to come away with here as an alternative? Equality of outcome? Should it really be that any given combination of work ethic, dedication, novelty, and a bit of luck will not land you above the mean? I personally am all for improving meritocracies so they live up to the name, but abolishing them due to their implementation failures seems silly and more importantly, the alternatives are dangerous.
I suppose you could have everybody randomly assigned to jobs. Or you could people have a list of preferences and to the extent that there are more applicants to a given job than open slots randomly assign them then move the other applicants to their next slot.
Humility, for a start.
Yawn.
I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not.
Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.
There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game
Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.
At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
Incoherent/circular definition: Nobody can actually tell you what merit really is in a specific way, so we end up just measuring it by existing social status. "This guy made it into Harvard Business School and to F500 CEO, he must have a lot of merit". But maybe he got into Harvard because his rich parents were donors and then leveraged those connections for his CEO job, no merit involved. This thing that is meant to determine social status is measured by social status itself and is thus useless.
Meritocracy doesn't fairness or justice or compassion or dignity: Imagine a society which is one big ongoing gladiatorial tournament, meritocracy is defined purely in terms of combat. This would be a very meritocratic society - but would also be a very brutal, unpleasant, and unequal one. If meritocracy can still result in all of those things, what use is it really?
Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.
Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the kind of fairness that really matters.
Purpose #1 is to make society more fair, in that in principle anyone can rise to the top, and you're not held back by your position of birth as in an aristocracy. Even in a true meritocracy though, you may still be held back by innate talent or upbringing.
Purpose #2 is to make society run better. This happens in two ways: More able people are selected for more responsible positions, so that hopefully decisions with more impact are made by more qualified people. Secondly, people have an incentive to try to become more qualified so that they can occupy these more responsible positions.
To me what shocks me the most is that there isn’t even any discussion on “what is success”. The author apparently measures success just by net worth, which I can’t avoid but feel sad for him/her.
Meritocracy is the fairest system for individuals. Achieving it is an endless struggle.
The article relies on an experiment that basically presented a gender stacked (70% male, 30% female) panel of MBA students with hypotetical company with a set of hypothetical "core values" and then looked at how these influenced managerial bonus allocation decisions.
They test three sets of "core values", A,B and C (see below). They labeled A as "meritocratic values" and B and C as "non meritocratic. They find there is a male bias under A, a female bias under B and no bias under C.
They then conclude their pre-assumed hypothesis, that meritocratic values (A) favors males, is valid. When they stumble upon as strong a female bias in their "non-meritocratic" value set (B), they they decide it might be down to wording and look for a wording to make that disappear (C) They never try to do a similar rewording of (A).
They never seem to see how they are fishing for the desired outcome, never consider alternative explanations (people that are prompted they "earned" their position tend to look for similar traits in subordinates) etc.
The conclusion we can draw is MBA students seem to be potentially influenced by the wording of value statements in hypothetical reward games.
As promised, here are the 3 hypotetical "core value" sets as worded:
Set A: labeled "meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be rewarded fairly";
(2) "whether employees deserve a raise is determined by their performance";
(3) "raises and bonuses are based entirely on the performance of the employee";
(4) "promotions are given to employees when their performance shows that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to reward all employees equitably every year.
Set B: labeled "non-meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "whether an employee deserves a raise is determined by their manager";
(3) "raises and bonuses are to be given based on the discretion of the manager";
(4) "promotions are to be given to employees when their manager decides that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
Set C: labeled "non meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "performance evaluation forms include a quantitative as well as qualitative component about the employee's performance";
(3) "performance evaluations are part of the employee's official personnel file";
(4) "performance evaluations are discussed with each employee every year"
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.
No one believes this nonsense.
What happens is, individual companies believe they are meritocratic - not the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.
The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the meritocracies cited in the article.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations.
Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation is your merit. They should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them. Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours, consistently, my salary should be too.
I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes 2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make more.
Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in. But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti-meritocratic, after all.
So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - stick to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.
This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular. Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.
Free for all will always eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.
1. Jobs should be handed out on merit.
2. Protected class X has been educationally disadvantaged.
3. Representation of class X in the workplace must
match their representation in the society.