Meritocracy and Its Defects
goldhaber.org
goldhaber.org
It turns out meritocracy is like reason. You can't criticize reason without appealing to reason just like you can't criticize meritocracy without appealing to meritocracy. Notice how everyone who criticizes meritocracy is criticizing a specific meritocracy based on its unfairness (this essay certainly is). So why do they all use the universal form when they're talking about a particular one?
Also, something I don't understand here is the idea that meritocracy is bad because people don't have equal opportunities. It isn't good that people don't have equal opportunities but it doesn't really have anything to do with meritocracy. If John gets straight As, and aces his SATs, and comes up with a novel theorum by age 25 because he has good parents and Jim doesn't because his parents suck, sure that's unfair, but what does it have to do with meritocracy? Is our meritocracy supposed to punish John for having good parents and reward Jim for having bad ones? Is that somehow more fair than rewarding John because of his demonstrated ability?
There are graded policies available. One way around this may be to introduce "grace marks" for underprivileged school districts similar to a handicap in golf, and to reserve some seats for such students. This is not so revolutionary a proposal - there are seats in every Ivy League school for children of influential families, even though they are not really the cream of the crop, intellectually.
The situation isn't always (or ever) so cut-and-dried. Usually you have to compare those 4 applicants across many different and subjective criteria. Moreover your own assessments are, at best, less than perfect.
Sometimes choices between closely matched applicants really do come down to a lottery and this is what some elite schools have to resort to. Sometimes the decision is by referral through a social network, or greased palms. Sometimes other criteria like diversity can be a factor if the candidates are closely enough matched and there is a desire to have more diversity.
For something to be truly meritocratic, it would require that everyone have the same values and that everyone would agree on one "objective" assessment. That's never the case. And worse if it is called "meritocratic" it's always about "merit" as measured by ONE entity and not everyone else.
You're oversimplifying things. You have a list of criteria based on which you select applicants. You're not basing your selection based on a scalar "skill" value in [0, +inf[.
You have different applicants with different skillsets and personalities. You have to gauge whether that set of skill will translate with good performance on the job. However, you also want to gauge whether the person is actually interested in your project or not, and whether or not they'll get along with you and your team, all of which is nontrivial to judge during interviews. All of your measurements are noisy and biased.
I was interviewing someone recently, and they were a friend of mine. I knew they had the knowledge, but during the interview, they came off as not having done their homework and not that interested in the work we were doing, so my friend, who I knew was more than capable enough, flunked the interview, and we ended up selecting someone less skilled but seemingly more interested. However, after having hired the second guy, I'm actually finding I don't like his personality that much. Hiring is complicated and hard to get right, more complicated than just "merit".
Personally, I'm finding personality, friendliness and eagerness to be more valuable than what people have on their CV, their GitHub, or how much they ace whatever we throw at them in programming interviews. There are people out there who are really good but are total dicks. From what I've seen, I don't think I would ever want to work with Linus Torvalds for instance, even though I use git and Linux everyday, and the guy for sure scores a lot of "merit" points, he's had a huge impact on the world. If I interview you and the feel I get from you is that you're arrogant and kind of a dick, it's not going to matter what your SAT scores is or however many patents you have to your name.
Great. You have constructed a meritocracy that prices in "personality, friendliness and eagerness". It's still a meritocracy.
1. Your measurements are noisy and biased
2. People's "true worth" would value over time, but their compensation and status doesn't always follow
3. Everyone doing the hiring has slightly different criteria
What you have is an approximate ranking which by definition cannot be a true a meritocracy, no matter how hard you try.
Plus, to judge results you would need either objective criteria or average of many opinions like in democracy.
In the first generation this is fine - after all there are all sorts of people: tall, short, fat, skinny etc.
In this scenario, though, the 2nd generation of people, aka the kids of the first, will all be equal again, except for the children who happened to be born by those who were the chosen. Those kids will be able to be better prepared, all things being equal. Now add the potential for the kid to be both born by a chosen and also be chosen themselves - the merit will grow exponentially.
Eventually at say generation 100, despite things originally being equal - all of those who are considered to have relative merit will basically just be descendants of those who just happened to be lucky.
Add in reality and things like money, oppression, over consuming fixed resources that allow for improvement and you can perhaps understand the frustration of some.
The point of meritocracy is to select people who can solve problems and make the world better. It's not to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.
To put it another way, if rich people raise their children to be more capable of making the world better then why is that a problem? Let's say Einstein was only a genius because his parents bought a nice house with no lead paint. Who cares? Why does that matter? What matters is the work he did.
Now, if you want to pass a law that says "no more houses with lead paint" that's lovely. But it has nothing to do with meritocracy.
You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.
Is that true?
> You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.
Merit doesn't have to be objective. All we can do is subjectiviely do our best to determine merit using whatever tools we can. If we're wrong, we're wrong (and we will often be wrong).
Being wrong is fine and inevitable. It's not an excuse to say "meritocracy is bad".
Also, the example I gave and the problems it illustrate are inherent to the example - there’s no policy you could invoke that would remedy it. Feel free to share an example of how you’d fix the example to remove the dilemma, if you would like.
What makes it a meritocracy is not that there's some objective measure of merit, just that there's an attempt to determine merit severed from factors deemed irrelevant (usually birth, class, race, sex, gender, beauty, etc).
No one is saying we have determined God's own concept of merit. "Merit" can and will shift over time. Different individuals will assess it differently. All we can do is our best.
It starts with placing kids in better schools, cheating, disabling help programs and ends up at modifying tests to serve themselves better.
And most importantly, by design creates an underclass of undesirables. People less able or outright disabled, who could be used by others to seize power.
That’s the problem with iterative meritocracy, late in the game it becomes indistinguishable from aristocracy.
In a functioning meritocracy, if a genius is born into to a poor family, he will be recognized and promoted.
At generation 100, a person will have 633,825,300,114,114,700,748,351,602,688 slots in their family tree going back to generation 1. Everybody will be related to everybody.
Meritocracy is about putting the best person for the job in that job. It's about efficiency. A more efficient society can make everyone better off.
For instance, suppose we're looking for a person capable of managing and devising a high end strategy. How would you even judge someone good at it, with computer simulation games? Definitely college degrees are bad proxy for it.
What happens if you prefer certain kinds of merit over others, like today, where people with social skills and connections can easily outmanouevre others?
How do you even judge certain kinds of merit, like creativity, critical for art and research jobs? Acclaim is not the same thing as merit.
This and other questions make meritocracy actually impossible to implement.
But having a meritocracy isn't about about it being perfect but what philosophy you use to fill positions. Is your goal to find the best person for the job? Or do you have a different goal? And if so what is it?
OK but who decides those are the right measures of "merit"?
As an example, take the NBA. The NBA does feel like it is about as perfect as it gets when it comes to being a real meritocracy. It doesn't matter so much who your connections or parents are, if you can't win on the court, you're out.
But what happens if the whole economy was like the NBA, where the very best of the very best made millions, and everyone else is left to make minimum wage selling concessions. Well, if you're a scrawny 5'4” dude, you know your options are hopeless, no matter how hard you work, and you just may think "Fuck it all, burn the whole system down, I'm screwed in any case."
I don't believe the whole economy is like the NBA, but it's gotten much closer to those dynamics over the past thirty years with the huge concentration of wealth, much of this due to technology being able to reduce the number of "winner" slots be increasing the size of markets.
If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.
Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.
The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world.
It's probably what PG wrote back in April—starting with the Chicago School of economic thought and the Carter administration, the US federal govt. deregulated the economy and took a more lax approach to policing anti-competitive behavior.
Yes, that is the core of the criticisms of meritocracy. Who decides what's worth merit? The ones who have already accomplished certain ends decide that those ends are meritorious.
Everyone has accomplishments. Problems arise when people the people deciding that some accomplishments are better than others overvalue the ones they have and undervalue the ones they don't. Remember when Google only hired people with college degrees? Notice how companies devalue degrees from HBUs? It's a farce to pretend that these are objective measures instead of just ego-stroking.
As long as one can be associated with something that provides a signal of merit, true merit will never be properly measured, as a deviation from the expectation will be considered an aberration by those who judge as opposed to an indication of no aptitude.
Practically speaking, hiring managers know they aren't making theoretically perfect meritocratic decisions, nor are they under any illusions of having a perfect overview of all necessary information. Tasks like hiring are inherently about making educated guesses based on the minimal signal that is available, and hiring managers are well aware that candidates are actively working to game those signals.
My only disappointment, is that Michael Young offers no solution in this particular treatise. Did he do so elsewhere?
If it looks like self dealing, if it sounds like self righteousness, if it stinks like hypocrisy —- it is because it is.
This is a fairly narrow interpretation of merit. It is not simply the acquisition and demonstration of knowledge and wisdom. There are many other facets such as being a hard worker, being honest, being reliable, being a good teammate, and so on. Many of these attributes would be more accurately described as comprising your character.
I don’t think anybody expects meritocratic processes to produce a reasonably egalitarian society either. Some people are going to be dealt a poor hand at birth. Some will be born profoundly dumb. Some people will just be lazy and useless.
To me this is the best argument for why charity and welfare must exist in within a truly free and/or meritocratic society.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/is-meritocracy-myth-ad...
Like everything in life this is a very nuanced subject and you should think very carefully before making the knee-jerk reaction to try and eliminate rewards for people who work hard.
That the connected and high born should turn this to their advantage by creating measures of merit that they buy just like indulgences is not surprising.
Because of this, I tend to think of merit as the ability of someone to make the most of their circumstances, as someone with a pedigree of indulgences is of suspect aptitude.
Meritocracy isn't perfect. Nothing is. What may replace meritocracy when it comes to hire? Condemning it bluntly for being imperfect without proposing any other way seems a Nirvana fallacy to me.
Fire politicians and lawyers and managers at will too, instead of terms or no change. In fact, even more readily than line workers since impact is greater.
Wait, that's not what we have? Then we don't have a meritocracy. We have a system of credentialism.
Testing anyone, whatever his achievements, may attract many candidates and therefore cost more than a bit of efficiency.
Moreover testing also induces biases, those of the people who specify/conduct/assess the tests. I'm not sure it is less subjective than meritocracy, especially meritocracy with commonly-accepted (long reviewed) criteria.
> Accept more redundancy. Take chances with people.
I agree, however it doesn't condemn any selection method which can be applied, as usual as a sieve, while retaining a larger fraction of selected candidates.
> Fire politicians
I fully agree, recall elections are a must-have and a tool to alleviate bad choices, however it also doesn't particularly plays against meritocracy as a selection tool.
A lot of the time, the difference in merit is, as you have noted, irrelevant for the task at hand, or the task/person fit is wrong. Applying this strategy would allow vastly more people from nontraditional backgrounds to work, and ultimately improve efficiency by weeding out worse performers over time (hiring for already taken positions).
AFAIK in most industries the overall cost would be prohibitive: some allowances for being new, redundancy, formal training... it adds up. Some potential side-effects (particularly for jobs involving contact with any prospect/customer/partner or knowledge of some confidential information) aren't to be neglected.
However it may indeed lead to a better overall context (more performant and pleased employees), and adding new nontraditional backgrounds to existing teams often produces interesting or even wonderful results (for all involved).
Essentially the companies overhired by a factor and then did practices such as pair or team programming. Credentials were seen but not given special treatment, and while there was an entry test, it was minimal and meant only to not waste time of the people hiring.
The elite positions were always handled very differently for no particularly good reason beyond conservatism and elitism.
The elite positions are indeed heavily elitism-tainted, and 'merit' often means 'identical/similar diploma than the ones detained by the staff'.
There is so much "achievement laundering" where wealthy people can pass on status to their children in a way that makes it look like the children earned it. Being able to afford to do an internship at something like the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is an example.
I have lately enjoyed the 2010 TV show "Three Kingdoms" from the PRC which is based on a 14th century novel based on the events at the end of the Han dynasty. Some major themes in it (which must be tolerable to the CCP if not driven by the CCP) are the heroism and villany of figures such as Cao Cao and Pang Tong who turned their back on Confucian values, and how the war triggers a desperate search for talent in a world where opportunities were distributed by family inheritance.
A case I think about is theoretical physics where it can take 50 or more years for an important result such as neutrino oscillations (predicted by a physicist who stole atomic bomb secrets and defected to the USSR) or the Blandford–Znajek theory of black hole jets to be experimentally confirmed.
Albert Einstein made a prediction of light being bent by the sun that was confirmed by Sir Arthur Eddington before Albert Einstein got old. That's a founding legend of physics, but today nobody can get ahead by entering into a dialogue with nature, rather you have endure a brutal job market and please old men until you yourself are old.
I don't think this is true. Access to credentials is not equally distributed, but access to knowledge and information is probably one of the most equally distributed assets we have.
In many cases the skills of one meritocrat are indistinguishable from another, which leads to ever-increasing hoops that one must jump through to succeed in society.
A lotto could be combined with meritocratic measures like Texas's University 10% rule which ensures geographic and racial diversity.
You have it right there, most businesses that claim to favor meritocracy actually favored signalling / credentials / pedigree. Why? Maybe they assume credentials are a good proxy measurement for capability.
Regardless, I don't think people are capable of evaluating people more capable than themselves. Kind of like Dunning Kruger at work, or how a writer isn't capable of writing a character more intelligent / capable than themself.
So, the only place where you can find 'genuine meritocracy' is where the most capable and individuals have not only risen to the top, but also haven't succumbed to the Peter Principle along the way. These are highly creative and adaptable. They aren't afraid of making and learning from mistakes. Rare.
All that to say, just because meritocracy is hard and most businesses fail to achieve it in any meaningful form, doesn't mean it does not exist, nor does it mean it isn't worth striving for