The Myth of Meritocracy (2018)

The problem with meritocracy is not the merit but the cracy. To be a good manager or doctor or investment banker requires a set of skills that only some fraction of the population will possess, and it make sense that people from that subset should fill those roles. At the same time, being a good welder or mechanic or social worker also require a set of skills which only some fraction of the population will possess. The idea that someone with the investment banker skillset is inherently superior to someone with the car mechanic skillset does not follow naturally from this optimization.

The problem is we subconsciously tend to put the cart before the horse: we assume that skilled and hard working (ie good) people will get good jobs, and thus good jobs are filled by skilled and hard working people. Meanwhile a bad job must be done by someone who couldn't get a good job. Investment banking looks from the outside at least like a good job - you get to sit in a comfortable office looking nice and the heaviest thing you need to lift is probably your cup of coffee. Sure mental exhaustion and stress may take years off your life, but if you've never had to deal with that problem on that scale, it's hardly a deterrent. There aren't many investment banking positions out there, and those that are available require a rare skillset, so it will naturally be a tough job to get but if you are qualified you can negotiate for a nice salary. Anyone who deserves such a position must be quite deserving.

Of course we know this not to be the case. No one in their right mind would consciously associate investment banking with moral perfection. And it's easy to think of examples of objectively terrible jobs that nevertheless require extremely specific and rare skillsets. But it is difficult to reconcile this obvious reality with our deeply held belief, and unfortunately people tend to reject the reality.

However if we stop thinking of jobs in moral terms, allocating them based on skillset becomes much more sensible. Consider a computer: while the CPU acts kind of like a leader, we do not consider it fundamentally more important than the hard drive or the communications bus or the display. If your hard drive isn't getting enough power, it would be absurd to say it should work a little harder and try to emulate the cpu's example, nor would we seek to transition the display into a cpu role after a long period without any dead pixels.