Meritocracy Is a Myth
reuters.com
reuters.com
People love to believe comfortable myths. For a certain group of people, their comfortable myth is that wealth inequality can be solved by education. It cannot. People become wealthy because of luck. Who your parents are is luck. Where you were born is luck. Your intelligence and physical and mental health are luck. It's all luck. The best schooling in the world can't move this needle much, and its power grows ever weaker as technology and automation eat more and more of the economy.
"Growth" can't save us either. We cannot escape by giving the economy more gas, because the faster the economy goes, the more things get automated, the more jobs vanish, and more wealth gets concentrated. We are rapidly approaching a point where a tiny fraction of the population controls almost all economic activity, and in that future, the only way to fix wealth inequality is to tax that group and spread the money around. Most of that group do not want this to happen of course, and they get to make the decisions. But sooner or later, this will become an untenable position.
Yes, for example, neither of us two were born in the middle of a raging civil war in central Africa and died at the age of 3 of preventable diseases caused by unsafe drinking water. That is luck, definitely.
But plenty of people waste their lucky moments and gain nothing from them. That does not concern wealth alone; people mess up great relationships for trivial reasons, behave recklessly when they should not, commit stupid crimes just for the lulz etc.
As far as comfortable myths go, the concept that luck is the main factor (or even the only factor) in someone's fate is a golden example. Luck is perfectly beyond your control, so if you look at your life and conclude that it sucks, you can rest comfortably in knowledge that it is in no sense your own fault, but a product of impersonal force de majeure that just selected you to be doomed.
I'd rather be cursed by Voldemort than adapt this mindset. It is very self-destructive.
It appears that the other factors you are thinking of are intelligence and temperament. But other people do argue that these are also luck. People do not choose their personality, and while they may change due to external events, that doesn't mean they deserve credit or blame regardless.
You can disagree, but maybe believing in free will is just the sort of person you are and nothing that physically exists chooses to act on itself.
Mark Twain wrote about this in the essay "What Is Man", although I don't take it entirely at face value. I suspect that he felt some (maybe subconscious) need to excuse himself for believing in the injustice of slavery but not taking part in the Civil War.
When I was a kid I complained that my sister was getting a better deal than I was. My dad looked me in they eye and said "Life is not fair"
Becoming wealthy is all about making more money than you spend and investing the rest. Education absolutely helps make more money, especially if you are educated in an in-demand field. Then you have to develop the discipline to spend less than you earn and to know(learn about) how to use an IRA and save from an early age.
My personal finance class in high school was vital for this reason. While not everyone internalized its teachings, those who did have had significantly less stressful lives after they got an emergency fund saved up.
For obvious reasons, if you do not invest your money yourself, that money is being lent out by your bank who invests it on your behalf and that bank then lends it to companies who invest it on the bank's behalf.
When companies stop being borrowers and interest rates drop there is no demand for your savings and you shouldn't let your money sit in a bank account.
I disagree because there is no demand for growth and productivity improvements if you can concentrate your wealth without doing anything.
>We are rapidly approaching a point where a tiny fraction of the population controls almost all economic activity, and in that future, the only way to fix wealth inequality is to tax that group and spread the money around.
That's wrong, there are four options.
The government as borrower of last resort who then subsequently uses the money on improving its infrastructure. This is compatible with fighting climate change.
Negative interest rates for the first $100k you borrow from your bank. (private/business loans only, no mortgages)
The weakening of cash to achieve negative interest rates on deposits (low cash withdrawal rates would be a start e.g. $3000 per month and $1500 max cash deposits per month). People with low savings can take their money out as cash but people with high savings will be screwed and forced to invest.
The central bank as equalizer of last resort, let them send helicopter money until the inflation target has been reached. The helicopter money can be tied to a job guarantee that pays minimum wage. Given enough inflation people will naturally stop working at minimum wage.
Yes, all wealth inequality problems stem from the fact that the Fed isn't powerful enough.
Why can't the "decision makers" make the decision to disregard everyone who isn't a decision maker?
It's not meaningful to say an abstract ideal is a myth when it's not fully realised, because meritocracy still exists as a relative measurement between different times and places. It still means something to say "our workplace should be more meritocratic." It would also be meaningful to say "our country should be freer," even if absolute freedom doesn't exist.
I still doubt it is something that we want in our society, because meritocracy is about promotion of ability above all other consideration, which exactly favored anyone with resources, and spending resources on the most capable members of society.
It depends on the position. I do want this when it comes to surgeons as I’m concerned with outcome not with fairness to all the surgeons who weren’t born with a silver spoon.
Or when I’m hiring a programmer. I want the best programmer and don’t want to even out all the candidates based when some are worse but have good reasons why.
I also think it’s a good ideal once everyone is in the door and are competing for bonuses or whatnot. If I have a sales organization, I want to incentivize high sales achieved within an ethical, sustainable manner. If one person makes $10 in sales and one makes $5, the person with higher sales gets the bonus. I don’t want to give the bonus to the $5 person because it was harder for them to earn that $5. It’s unclear to know what’s truly fair, but clear to know who sells more.
This is an ideal and not perfect. But if not striving for merit and quality, what’s the goal? The goal isn’t that everyone gets the same. The goal is that the organization excels.
This only works because there are more suitable candidates than you want to hire. If you only need to fill one position but there are 10 good candidates out of 1000 applicants you want to pick the cherry.
If the position inverses and you have 10 positions to fill but only 5 candidates you are going to get all 5 even if the 5th is terrible but can do the job.
This has been pushed by the Enlightenment and even before because that's the fairest and most just. For example, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789:
"All the citizens, being equal in its (the law) eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents." (Article 6)
That's what meritocracy means. In the same way as in a fair competition you want the best player(s) to win, not those who know or pay the referee. It does not mean leaving the poorer and less able fend for themselves on the thinking that perhaps it's their fault if they poor.
It doesn't matter because the elite always have advantage. They have better access to tutors and education and can go very far.
If all that we care about is awarding the best for every position, then that's fine, but that's not entirely how we want to structure society.
That's unavoidable but can still be kept in check by investing in good public education. It's more important to make sure that the most disadvantaged have the opportunity to progress on their own merit than to hit the most advantaged.
If you don't like the elite having too big an advantage because of their wealth and background then you want more meritocracy.
There'll always be an elite. That's not a problem. The fair way, though, is for that elite to be made of people who got there based on their own merit, not birth, not connections, not background, not corruption. That's what meritocracy is.
> that's not entirely how we want to structure society.
No, that's how we want to structure society, as I mentioned in my previous comment. That's the fairest and most just way we've found and it is massively better than the alternative (birth rights, privileges, connections, etc)
I'm okay with spending resources in an inefficient way if it helps the poor. I'm less okay with bringing back hereditary aristocracy. I'm very much not okay with Harrison Bergeron.
All of the proposals other than meritocracy so far gives the rich even more of a leg up over everyone else, which is why meritocracy continues to enjoy widespread support. Meritocracy focused on objective measures and unbiased assessment at least gives talented ordinary people a chance at outcompeting the rich.
I feel like I've read somewhere that free markets should, in theory, enforce exactly this constraint - that it should be more profitable to not hire people who have greater skills or talent than the minimum.
I doubt it's possible to solve without removing humans from the equation.
That said, I would gladly be convinced otherwise.
There is no inheritance tax. This tax would provide equal opportunities for students to start afresh in a meritocratic society. Instead they are getting a huge headstart.
Getting rich is mostly driven by inheritance, class, luck and sociopathy, not by individual people on the basis of talent, effort and achievement.
The US has extremely expensive schools.
The US favors private contracts over civil rights, which is the base definition of fascism. Your worker is your slave because he signed this contract out of his free will.
The only advantage is the lack of middle management. But calling that freedom is hysterical.
Are you going to tax my parents away from me? They gave me 18 years of care. You'd have to tax those 18 years for things to be truly fair.
I don't believe in inheritance taxes because someone has to own all the stuff a person with low wealth enjoys. The government builds streets that are worth millions but even the poorest of society benefit from the wealth inequality of state and citizen. There are similar situations where wealth inequality benefits the poor and rich alike but things have been rigged so that these situations are rare or non existent.
I do believe in a cap on the maximum amount a single person can inherit in their life. We don't want to take wealth away, we want it to spread. Everyone is born poor. People only become wealthy during their life. Some get wealthy earlier than others but that is not the problem. It's the quantity of wealthy people that is important. If everyone could be wealthy a day after they were born that would be fantastic.
Then of course there's the whole "the guy who first coined term considered it a joke." Too many people missed the satire and took it way too seriously.
It's worth noting that the Wikipedia page itself contains the following quote from the author:
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
In other words, the guy who first coined the term says meritocracy works. (Those who have read the book would know that it resulted in tremendous cultural and scientific achievements within its fictional world.) What the author is saying that a meritocratic system needs to be mindful of the hubris and arrogance of those given power just because they happened to be gifted with merit through an accident of birth and circumstance and to also show kindness and consideration to those less endowed with merit, lest they tear society apart.
I'm not exactly sure what the argument against meritocracy actually was. Are these highly educated students NOT better workers? Are they better workers but they only got to be that way through the unfair favoritism of parents towards their own children and an insufficient social support network? Usually when I see complaints about meritocracy the solution is to put your fingers on the scale of adult employment because of the non-meritocratic nature of it but if the argument is the latter than one can raise many objections to this idea. If the idea is the former the argument has not been sufficiently made.
Is it being argued that nuture can't raise intelligence? That's questionable as well. Is meritocracy and egalitarianism supposed to be the same thing for reasons? I really don't know the arguments are clear as mud. I don't feel like me reading this article happened through any meritocratic process.
But moreover, intelligence is too broad to rank. There's STEAM intelligence, which is what most people consider "intelligence". But there's also emotional intelligence, "quick-thinking" intelligence, "street smarts", etc. and even STEAM is kind of broad. So when you say meritocracy, do you mean that someone who's very analytical, but has no empathy or emotional understanding whatsoever, should rule the world?
I think an ideal society would be more in line with John Rawls' philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice).
But it does not make for a good society if you let unintelligent/not hard working people become the top of society all in the name of egalitarian ideals. I think the best thing is to encourage people to try their best with their given abilities, and to have a culture in society where those who reach the top of society have some measure of responsibility to those who did not inherit any gifts.
Thus "merit" is very circumstantial. Why does one group "deserve" to be wealthy in one circumstance, and another in a different circumstance?
Everyone in our deeply capitalist culture uses the words "merit" and "deserve" in a deeply moral sense to describe something that isn't moral at all. As Inigo Montoya once said, "You keep using that word..."
You have a group of good friends. A group of friends that genuinely cares about each other as individuals as well as the health of the group as a whole. One of you is better at leading, or mediating disputes, is calm under stress, or has a car or a bigger house or more money. The group deciding/allowing this person should generally lead, or is the one that drives everyone around, or pays for more things, doesn't mean they are "at the top of the group". There is simply no need for that. It's simply a group being both loving and smart, one that understands fairness isn't about bean counting, and it was luck in the first place that gave one member those advantages.
A healthy, unselfish, "egalitarian" group or family will naturally, without ever having knowing about “socialism” or “communism”, will end up embodying "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". This ideal does not imply allowing anyone to take advantage of the others.
In fact I'll claim that all healthy families embody this kind of socialistic ideal. Whether and how this can scale to a society is debatable, but we should have that debate honestly, and without being constrained by presupposing the current way of looking at things is somehow an absolute truth. People once thought that the divine right of kings was absolute truth. Or that white people were superior (even Lincoln believed this). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590540
One of my most favorite words is “solidarity”. I don’t think many people in this selfist day and age really knows what that means.
Why is it unfair? If the capable people can pull themselves ahead they can pull the rest along with them. The opposite is impossible. Of course, I am assuming a functioning economic system with reasonable inflation and interest rates. We don't have that luxury.
This is not meritocracy. Every argument made is just how much meritocracy has died in the U.S. not how meritocracy does not work. If it worked properly, the rich wouldn't have a leg up just because they have money, because in theory there wouldn't be elite schools to begin with. Schools themselves would be rewarded based on merit, instead of having these generational gatekeeping mechanisms that literally produce the ruling class in America. This is "the swamp" in politics, it's a bunch of elite people coming from elite schools, which might have some education, but are not necessarily the best for those jobs, just the ones with the best access... so not meritocracy.
The best educated will be the rich and self amplify themselves by giving them the resources needed to succeed. They earned their merit by being better than anyone else.
The poor will always be disadvantaged, whether that's broken homes or lack of access to resources.
Meritocracy is a toxic idea if you don't understand the tradeoff. It will always exacerbates inequality.
> self amplify themselves by giving them the resources needed to succeed
That's corrupt meritocracy. Also are you telling me you don't select restaurants, mechanics, food products, opinions of others, etc., etc., based on whether they're better than others or not? Are you saying you just go around never thinking of who does it better than others to then benefit from that? Think about how you reward peopel on a daily basis, and how that ends up contributing to meritocracy.
The tech version of this is extremely frustrating, because intelligent people are very good at letting their brains blind their biases and insulate their egos.
Being rich and well-connected creates a self-amplifying, "virtuous" circle much like a population differential equation where the rate of increase is proportional to the amount present.
I do believe that someone who out-competes and out-achieves the "lazy rich students who buy their homework" have the grit to overtake anyone who isn't focused, experienced, and used to working hard. It's easier if you're well-connected except it's not worth giving-up because unfairness, connectedness, and advantages exist.
Victimology isn't productive for achievement, it's an excuse.
A simple search comes up with a far more comprehensive article on exactly this topic:
“The Myth of American Meritocracy” by Ron Unz https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of...
I admit that I haven’t read to the end; it’s nearly a book. But what is interesting to me is the source and focus of the complaint, today versus a decade ago.
Is it liberal or conservative to decry the lack of meritocracy? Is it okay to skew admissions to redress privilege, while not okay to skew admissions in favor of privilege, or does the simultaneous practice of both make it okay?
Teaching at state schools (I’m from the UK) is utterly crap and 30 years of continuous reform has merely ensured that it keeps getting worse even as grade inflation is encouraged to make it seem like it’s getting better.
I would say the potential payoff of improving "lesser" schools is far greater than simply letting different people into elite schools. That just seems obvious by the fact that there are way more mediocre state schools and other C and D list schools out there than there are Stanfords and Caltechs. What I doubt is that it's even possible in a practical sense to raise the bar on the non-site schools to an extent that would offset the overall effect of elite schools in aggregate on people who attend them. In other words, I suspect that opening up elite schools is simply the more practical option, however I am not an education policy wonk, so I am totally willing to be convinced otherwise.
Tl;dr being poor isn’t as good as rich and luck matters more than zero.
According to some people's definition - those who emphasize the proximate cause of the decision - yes, this is absolutely a meritocracy.
According to others, no, it isn't, because of the genetic lottery and other antecedent causes outside of the control of the hiree.
Who is right here? The answer is that both parties are right. They don't disagree on the underlying reality. They just disagree on what aspects of that reality the word "meritocracy" should refer to.
The elite school -> elite (or important) jobs pipeline is something you see in every country, and that's how it's been forever, but I think things are getting a bit better. My only concern would be that we're not getting enough "class" diversity.
If outcomes are better at elite schools and it is not due to the students themselves then what is the elite school's secret sauce that cannot be replicated?
But I somehow doubt that all the people commenting would accept that free will is not a thing.
That's the crux of the issue: luck is far more important than intelligence or hard work, and many people become fantastically successful with only luck (often by being born into a wealthy family).
How is it coherent that generational wealth in an invalid in determining merit because it's luck based but intelligence is valid in determining merit despite being luck based? If you have a determinist outlook luck and merit are inseparable.