A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you (2020)
press.princeton.edu
press.princeton.edu
Someone wanna tell me what they could be based on other than genetic endowment and upbringing? Is there any factor that isn't encompassed by those two categories? The unknowable will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.
Meritocracy is the worst option there is, except for all the other options.
In general, it pays dividends to take a hard look at any selection process to see if it's selecting for the things we actually want. e.g. In politics, elections do not select for leadership or intelligence. They select for the ability to fundraise, sling mud, and evade justifiable blame. There are no easy answers, but it is worth asking how we can improve how we select leaders.
e.g. Fundraising ability is tied to corruption, which is generally bad for the public good. So, it's worth asking if we can limit the influence fundraising ability has on election outcomes. i.e. How do we reduce the influence of money on elections?
Why do you say this? According to the author, "merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."
So in the end, if you want to judge meaningful objective merit, you have to fall back to subjective opinions.
This is why any attempt at objectively judging merit (in anything but highly artificial situations) is fundamentally flawed, and you might be better of giving things away by lottery, or equally to all.
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Of course, there are outliers. There are people whose process is so obviously and irreparably bad that nobody would contest that fact. These can be handled separately.
Before even doing that, I think we should be looking at whether there even needs to be a "selection process" at all. For example, there is no top-down "selection process" for which grocery store people shop at. Everyone makes their own individual choice based on quality and price. And the owners of the stores would find it pointless to worry about whether their store being successful--popular with shoppers and making money--is due to their "merit" or luck or something else. The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The author of this article appears to have completely missed this type of scenario. But it seems to me that the best way to "fix" society, to the extent it needs "fixing", is to make scenarios like this, where "merit" vs. "luck" doesn't even come into play, as common as possible, and to make the opposite type of scenario as rare as possible. But this kind of thinking is completely off the author's radar.
Wait, what? You don’t think there’s underhanded tricks in the grocery business?!
> The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The only thing they have incentive to care about is making money. Sometimes that’s giving customers what they want. Sometimes that’s using psychological tricks to influence shoppers’ behavior. Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
Which means shoppers have an incentive to look for such tricks and ignore them, or go somewhere else to shop.
> Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
Which in a free market basically doesn't happen unless the competition is genuinely failing to compete.
The reason such things happen when the competition is genuinely competing is governments messing with the economy on the theory that top-down dictation of policy is necessary. For example, big box stores and chain restaurants have access to cheap loans using government printed money that smaller mom and pop stores and restaurants don't. And then we argue over whether we should use "merit" to give out the cheap loans using government printed money, or something else, when what we should be doing is preventing the government from messing with the economy in the first place.
Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, or: since merit is mostly luck, you might as well choose your students at random. Show us how it works, Princeton!
> This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
If you stay in system and expect to be rewarded for your skills because of believe in meritocracy, this believe is actually harmful.
And IMHO the statement Churchill used to describe democracy also applies to meritocracy: "It's the worst of all possible systems... until you consider the alternatives."
However, in practice meritocracy frequently devolves into classism: yes, the hard working kids of the families of higher class would be awarded more than the lazy kids of the same demographic. But the kids of the lower class would not have the same opportunity to invest in and grow their merit, because they would have to worry about taking a second job to help feed their family (or less extreme examples). I do not see a version of meritocracy in the USA that is not at least partially also classism, given the current state of the social safety nets.
My main criticism of meritocracy as a model of reality is not privilege though; it's politics. As you approach anything resembling real success politics becomes a much stronger force than merit. I think I would have been much better off if I had understood this earlier in life, so I do agree with the idea that "belief in meritocracy (as a model of reality) is bad for you".
Hard work and effort is good and helpful for the individual and society.
Pride, which can be an artifact of such work, is harmful to the individual and society. Pride can also be found in the poor, in political philosophies, sports, etc etc. It is ugly and destructive everywhere it is found.
Finally, in the narrative is also the philosophy that you can't really help who you are. Which ignores or at least minimizes your personal choices and ability to change. You can choose to work hard, it may be difficult where it doesn't come naturally - but that effort can still be made and improvements accomplished.
There is certainly some providence involved in high degrees of success. Not everyone is going to be able to reach the 5th sigma on the top end through sufficient effort. It shifts which curve you're in, it does not not place you on the curve where you'd necessarily prefer to be.
In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".
I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.
(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.
Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.
I don’t even know the word for it.
"This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons."
> they can’t get ahead on merit
"This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best."
> I don’t even know the word for it.
You're suffering from a cognitive malfunction: you seem to think that "Princeton" is waving its finger from a lectern, when it is in fact not making a statement at all. You're just reading an article in some kind of publication published by Princeton University Press.