Myth of Meritocracy

It's impossible to define merit in a way that excludes things like social background.

If you're looking for someone to work in, say, yacht sales to wealthy X-ese clients then you might just find that a native X-ese person of a decent social class is a better salesman by definition because the clients respond better to them than they would a lower class Y-ese.

That doesn't mean that merit as a concept doesn't exist or that better people aren't hired for jobs. It means that "better" is not limited to your IQ or book-learning.

This same link was submitted an hour ago and flagged dead, so I'm not sure why it was submitted again 15 minutes later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604924

I'm not sure what the point of the poster is, simply pointing to a wikipedia page.

I could make a wikipedia page titled 'myth of democracy' in which I state 'it is argued by some people that democracy is a myth'. Then I could post it here and see what happens.

That said, meritocracy is definitely not a myth. People encourage their kids to study well for good reasons: make sure they can later contribute to society and hopefully reap the fruits. This is how the (be it imperfect) system works.

In the past, in the days of "early high capitalism," it was the inverse: the capitalists were under such duress from market conditions that their everyday fate was completely unpredictable, one could become rich or poor on a whim of the market. On the other hand, the workers, seeing the uncertainty in the movement of capital, organized themselves and attempted to overthrow the system. Thus, the counter-revolution, the subject of Marx's 18th Brumaire book. This happens in many places, in many times, over and over again, whenever the workers gain some level of consciousness the capitalists realize that they too are a class, and they fight back against them, and they get stronger and more well-organized every time. But the market demands unpredictability, mobility, interchangeability; these counterrevolutions fall apart by their own conditions of possibility, that of the rule of the very class whose sole wealth comes from further destabilizing their own ability to rule. These crises, when they happen, are the only cracks in the counter-revolution; and both the strains of organized labor on the economy and the development of capital itself can create their conditions. On account of that, if one wishes to overturn the rule of capital, they have two choices: as a worker, to become an organizer. As a capitalist, to expand the rule of capital and break through state-controls.

So, while there may not be "meritocracy," there certainly is a virtue in the domination of the market over the domination of the state, and individuals in any class position benefit from the liberalization of an economy.