Meritocracy Is Bad
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
I felt that that part of the article was a little weak and ended up doing what the author criticized others for doing, namely criticizing the implementation of meritocracy rather than the concept itself.
The essay bemoans private equity firms increasing death rates in retirement homes to increase profit, because of how "smart" and therefore allegedly "merited" they are. But any proper definition of "merit" would include them behaving ethically.
Yes, we don't want an ever increasing wealth gap but dismantling meritocracy strikes me as the worst possible way to deal with that.
Yes. Over the last few years, we've seen the problems caused by having critical jobs performed by less than competent people. (I'm sure you can fill in your own examples.)
The problem is that there are (at least) two kinds of "fake meritocracy". There's credentialism: "This person must me competent; they graduated from Elite Institution". And then there's elitism: "This person must be competent, their parents are rich and famous". Neither tells us much about their actual competence at any specific role. (All right, credentialism tells you that they were competent at graduating from Elite Institution, but we aren't hiring them to have them do that over and over.)
I wonder if part of the reason for the criticism of meritocracy is because of the failings of fake meritocracy. (I suspect that another part of it is a complaint that those who win the meritocracy game get too much of the rewards, which I think is a fair criticism.)
Isn't this what they already do at a theoretical level? If you have 800 seats in a given class, you keep raising your admissions bar until you get ~800 qualified applicants.
Now we can discuss whether donations and legacy status should play into that bar or not, but I think that's a separate issue.
Or, if you have only 800 possible seats, "Set your admissions bar, then pick 800 of them randomly". The more you "raise" the bar, the more your definition of "raise" matters. It will tend to select people who can afford (in time, money, connections, etc) to meet your specific criteria. And you run the risk of accidentally setting your criteria to be "more like me" (in looks, patterns of thought, etc.)
If you assume that your school can benefit anybody smart enough to meet your criteria, why not take as many as you can? And why not aim to get more people who couldn't focus on your criteria? Randomness won't seek them out, but it at least won't prefer a 1500 SAT by a student who does nothing but take SAT tests to a 1460 SAT by a student who has to work two part time jobs.
But hey! At least he went to Harvard right?...
I don't understand why everyone trying to tear down "meritocracy" doesn't start by focusing on credentialism instead.
Taking the tennis example, sure, it would be beneficial for the top players to have a flatter payout structure. But this ultimately leads to the ATP tour being solidified and newcomers being barred from entry as now the player ranked 250 is now earning an income that they can afford much better training than outsiders. It isn't immediately clear that this system is better from a social point of view.
Relating it back to elite institutions, randomly assigning professors and students to random institutions definitely raises the floor but also lowers the ceiling. Is that socially better? Not immediately obvious. I'm of the opinion that we want to maximize the max possible achievement of an individual to improve the human condition. Very few individuals are responsible for key advancements of civilization.
Finally, the closing statement about Milton Friedman seems rather contradictory to me. The argument that changing the entire cultural attitude of business is somehow different than regulation seems odd to me. Stigmatizing certain actions is just merely the weakest form of regulation that allows for unethical behavior to be rewarded even greater.
Is this true? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_theory_of_invention_and...
Another example is the Finnish education system aiming to raise the floor instead of increasing the ceiling.
I can think of counterexamples in Hungarian mathematicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
A lot of them knew each other growing up, but you could argue they would've succeeded anywhere.
If this question were more carefully explored I think it'd do a lot for the author's argument as a whole.
Also, I was loose with my words. I didn't really mean few as in you could actually count the individuals. I meant more along the lines of the 1% of the population that has a PhD and at least making some minor contribution to academia.
No, it would make it more worthwhile to invest in promising players, who now would have the prospect of making a decent living as a top 250-ranked touring pro, rather than needing to be in the top 50 or 100 in order to do so.
I think more generally the idea is that we should focus on equality rather than equity: people should be able to live well even if they "lose" the meritocratic contest.
Again, this doesn't solve the meritocracy problem. If the top 250 get a steady source of income, which ones do you invest in? You wouldn't bother with the moonshot talent because the expected payoff is lower. It only becomes worthwhile to invest in those that have a good chance of breaking into the top 250. That is, the well established. It doesn't follow that a flatter pay structure is fairer in any way.
>Meritocracy: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit [0]
It seems to me that Meritocracy is an unfortunately vague word. Given that, it's difficult to say much definitively about the US with respect to it. The American dream and the idea that if you work hard enough you can succeed are pretty wedded to the idea of Meritocracy.
The confounding factor is that it seems like one's constantly seeing successful, powerful, or influential people whose "demonstrated abilities and merit" are difficult to find.
Very difficult to generalize this as this doesn't apply to 'all' things. Maybe for some types of jobs but not for all types of jobs.
(That said, I also think the article could be much improved in terms of argumentation, it seems pretty off-the-cuff.)
That said, I don't really think there is any sort of useful distinction between "necessarily wrong" and "impossible to define". That is, I believe many meritocracy-enthusiasts to be "necessarily wrong" since they often imply or casually argue for achieving a meritocratic society, while, as you put it, "a stable, shared view of merit doesn’t really exist". So, seeking something that doesn't exist (like the tooth fairy, or a profitable MLM scam) is necessarily 100% wrong... not 20% wrong, or 50% wrong. All we got is this boring cave :(
So, I guess I welcome any "meritocracy considered harmful" posts, despite who wrote it and how it's written.
Your single paragraph also holds a much stronger argument that meritocracy is bad than any of those in the article.
Which is a really long way to say I agree.
> These are the kind of sharp income disparities that lead Elizabeth Warren to say the economy is rigged. But of course pro tennis isn’t “rigged” in any normal sense. Fair, tournament-style competitions just tend to produce this kind of outcome where modest differences in ability lead to wild disparities in earnings.
Interestingly, even pro tennis seems to have realized this. The major tournaments have recently restructured their prize money to be less top-heavy and to distribute more cash to those who exit in the early rounds. The idea being, I suppose, that making being a touring pro easier for more people will ultimately benefit the tour.
Ultimately it doesn’t feel like there is any point to the meritocracy angle either other than self congratulatory back patting. It’s a simplistic “if only we had more moral people” argument.
I think Matthew Yglesias is saying "Republic is always a bad person and Democrat is always good".
If he could judge someone solely based on his political identity without examining that individual person's merits and character, it says a lot of his world view. Not surprised if he knows nothing about true Conservative principles.
I invite him to read China's history from 1930 to 1980, where he will find many like-minded Chinese communist fellows who also judge people solely based on their economic class and status. The "Cultural Revolution" would be an epic-reading for him.