This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such, "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic."
Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.
That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses.
However, a belief the world should be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so.
The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.
"Canastilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice."
Exactly. By definition, if you reward competence and hard work, and punish incompetence and lazyness, you will obviously generate different outcomes for the individuals involved, and that is FAIR and efficient. The opponents of a meritocratic society are just gasping at straws.
Is it really only a belief? They support it with research further in the article, and follow with even stronger assertion: "Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour."
The biggest issue with the idea of a meritocracy is defining merit.
One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.
Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that level.
So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
> have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good".
For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
Once you’ve defined merit, there are plenty of problems in measuring merit. The ideal way to measure a teachers efficacy would be measuring their students adult outcomes relative to other teachers, but that timeframe doesn’t work in the short term.
I don't idolize meritocracy as the end all solution to our problems and if that's what came off of my statement then I should have been clearer. My biggest if not only claim is that the article is arguing something that I think is fairly obvious and therefore uninteresting and the title misleads you into thinking its making arguments against meritocracy and the implementation thereof which I do find suitably interesting. Otherwise meritocracy is a tool that should be combined with other systems but has many issues.
It's not just that it's not currently run meritocratically, but that naive attempts to make it meritocratic make it less meritocratic. The easiest-to-achieve meritocratic tools are the ones that benefit the people already benefitting from the current system.
It's not clear that there is any way at all to make a true meritocracy, since "merit" doesn't have an objective definition. The people who make the definition will always be biased, and will usually do so to favor themselves and people like them. After all, they're meritorious enough to be in a position to make the definition, right?
But even if such a thing exists in some hypothetical universe, it's not the universe we live in. The important part of the article is that it's a belief that you can get to a meritocracy piecewise that leads to errors. Doing the easy things first makes it less and less likely that you'll ever get around to noticing the people being excluded.
I don't believe in the idea of a true meritocracy because not only does every system have different things to merit and because often we can't define what those merits should be. Though as someone stated in another comment this isn't all or nothing anyway and the concept of merit can and has been useful at various levels.
That said I do believe that making things more equal inherently requires you to re-evaluate how you value people and makes you lean towards things of substance from a person (though what is of substance is still abstract and varied) and less the superficial ques we very very heavily rely on now such as wealth status, school, profession etc etc.
Edit: Cleaned up the first paragraph I had rolled two separate thoughts into one run on.
For example in the job market one would want people to be hired on merit, i.e. based on their qualifications and skills to perform the job, not based on who they know, race, gender, etc.
In the Olympic Games, merit is how one athlete compares to the others in a fair race.
This is transparent and fair, and the best we can hope for.
Sure and I think I said this in another comment somewhere in the thread, merit is probably fine for smaller systems with homogeneous groups. I think both of those qualify. Even then what I look for in an employee is probably different than what you look for so even our ideas of what constitutes a merit are different.
Merit is fine for society at large, and again we haven't come up with something fairer and more equal while valueing individual freedoms at the same time.
It has also the benefit of ensuring a minimum of competence for people in public office and expert positions.
I just don't agree there is some objective standard of merit because there isn't, its a subjective concept. That leads to issues because not everyone's system is the same arguing otherwise would be blatantly false.
The author's conclusion is also unmoored from larger context. Our society is not perfectly meritocratic--but it's certainly more meritocratic than many others. And what is the alternative to meritocracy as a guiding principle (even if we instill the understanding that our society is not perfectly meritocratic yet and we should strive to make it more so)?
The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities.
One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
> That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes?
It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.
> Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes?
Sometimes they do: while white protestants are the financially and politically dominant American subgroup, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. are the highest earning.
Often, however, those subgroups do not have the same opportunities. That means we're an imperfect meritocracy. But we can acknowledge that without overlooking how remarkable it is to have a semblance meritocracy in the first place. Asian Americans, for example, have incredible upward mobility. An Asian American who grows up in the bottom 20% of income has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income. That's well over double the rate for white Americans. To be sure, they often have substantial cultural capital even if they come to the country without much in the way of financial capital. Maybe their parents are college educated, or were professionals back home. But they certainly do not belong to the dominant ethnicity, they probably don't belong to the dominant religion, they lack ties to important families (they may even lack extended family support at all), they lack political connections, etc. In the parts of the world that don't embrace meritocracy as an ideal, those shortcomings would be fatal. In those parts of the world, nobody even pretends that belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion shouldn't hold you back.
There are also problems with meritocracy as the end goal, it's a subtype type of elitism. Measures designed to combat inequality can be at odds with meritocracy.
Perhaps these authors should suggest some sort of alternative, if they wish to convince people that meritocracy is not only not the case, but is actively harmful. Else it seems no ideal is truly being put fourth, only talking down at the status quo. How would they prefer things worked instead?
The idea that we only should examine and evaluate our systems if we have a better proposal already set is a dangerous one. If you don't understand the flaws in the first system any system you design after is doomed to repeat those flaws. At the same time the people who are criticizing a system may not be the best to design a new one, so putting up imaginary hurdles just works to protect the status quo.
That's a fair point, and I agree there is value in just identifying flaws. The flip side though is that it's easy to find flaws in any system since there's a large surface area - and the author is not just pointing out flaws, but saying the system is wrong. At the very least, I'd argue that we should hold people to at least trying to quantify the flaws they see in the system, especially when making such strong claims about it. Otherwise, how do we affect change?
Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy wholesale or reject it entirely.
Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.
By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.
This is a really good point and I fell for the all or nothing nature of the article hook line and sinker. Very often the correct answer is something of a middle ground and this case seems to be no different.
Is this obsession with oversimplification of complex topics into two choices a uniquely American problem?
As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people.
1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc.
2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.
No, I think it is intrinsic to human nature. We have a need to simplify our picture of the world; if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do. That doesn't mean we don't acknowledge the complexity of things (in say a research setting), it's just that we can't make a point if we were to always make such concessions in normal discourse.
That said, in certain political climates, such as the US presidential election season, the tendency to see things as black or white certainly gets amplified.
> if we were to see all phenomena in all their various shades our brains would explode when we try to combine or compare two or more phenomena as we do
I actually think this has gotten worse in the past 10 years or so due to social media link sharing, because they realized, and this is purely speculation, that if you have a very sensational extreme article in one direction it will get shared by both the people who vehemently agree and the people who think it's absolutely absurd rather than a "boring" article that people are less likely to act on, especially people from both sides of a debate.
Rejecting meritocracy entirely as an ideal to even strive for is pure poison. How could a society possibly function if it doesn't elevate competence above incompetence and expertise above charlatanism? I think we're going to find out!
I think one of the reasons smarter folks tend to fall into manichean thinking on luck vs. talent is that, as the level of success grows, luck plays a larger and larger role. So it is an emotionally powerful fact for people competing at the higher end of the success curve.
The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.
Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense.
Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.
Success comes from merit, luck, and corruption in some proportion. In successful countries merit is a larger portion than in unsuccessful countries. When people say the entire concept of merit is %PEJORATIVE BUZZWORD% so we should stop striving for it what they are really saying is they want success to be allocated by luck and corruption and they think the corruption will benefit them.
Previously it was solved by wars, those who are more competent conquered those who are less. And once they became less meritocratic themselves were conquered by others.
And there are more types of war than just one country going against another. There’s te culture war and the war against drugs. Some say that business is war.
Elevating incompetence over competence, as a policy, has been tested for at least 75 years in some Asian country. One can see the results in the bureaucracy, the courts, the police, the education system, etc. of that country today; it is catastrophic. Of course, Amartya Sen who writes books on rationality defends the irrationality of such a policy in that country. I am not naming the country or the policy for 'sensitive' reasons.
“And” also helps with some of the upsides and downsides to it. Meritocracy is great as a motivation to push yourself forward and keep working towards a goal. Deciding everything is based on luck really saps from that. Merit is also used to dismiss the life circumstances of other people so being able to recognize that luck plays a part in things can greatly improve empathy.
The point made in the article is that there are different contributions to success made by personal effort (meritocracy) and by external circumstances. The problem is that people intuitively assign weights to these two parts incorrectly. Personal effort, although useful, is in fact a relatively small part of success in a complex society like ours. If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success. But external factors, like the industry you are, your family connections, the neighborhood where you live, personal characteristics that you can't change such as having special needs, your country of origin, your skin color, and other factor of blind luck, can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.
> can easily contribute 99% or more of what is perceived as success in our society.
This is false in two ways:
- Luck is not sufficient.
- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.
A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.
If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.
Are you taking into account the luck of genetics and what income level you're born into?
As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.
I am not prepared to discuss or generalize from your specific situation. I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks. Broadly, in the upper class environments I have been in, luck and connections appear to play a larger role in major success.
If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.
> I have seen very wealthy people lose it all due to laziness and worldliness and I have seen very poor people become successful despite many roadblocks
Everyone knows about anecdotes like this. The real question is: how many rich people lose everything (especially the ones born into wealth)? How many extremely poor people move up a lot? You'll see that these are exceptions rather than a common event.
I do not have any hard numbers on this information, although my general understanding is that social mobility has decreased lately. Unfortunately, that may be due to a number of reasons. Excluded from this conversation (luck vs. merit) is nepotism, for example, which is neither.
> If you put a lot effort you can maybe move 1% in the scale of success.
Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)
I agree with your overall point, but putting in effort accounts for much more than 1% of success in pretty much any domain I can think of.
there's a sizable chunk of middle and upper-middle class families that can afford to send their children to good schools but not to support them indefinitely. it's a big advantage to start out as one of those children, but it can fall apart at pretty much any point if the child isn't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to advance through the pipeline.
1) “Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.“
2) “Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.”
Wait, what? The first “the world should be run” is one hell of a thing. But how did the author get to the rest? So, not only should the world be run, but it can be run and in such a controlled manner that and all luck is squeezed out of it and most people believe this.
Reminds me of my teanage self thinking about the world after a progressive teacher introduced the subject in class - the reasoning is so simplistic and pedantic. But here it is, published in the Princeton press!?!
- a recursively iterative process of compressing billions of dimensions down into a very small number (typically < 5), using mostly predictive heuristics (a highly sophisticated but often incredibly inaccurate process which is typically invisible to the one doing it, and usually observers as well)
Hey, if you can't handle the bull, then don't be a bullfighter.
The answer's pretty dirt simple, although you don't like it: Humans are broadly just one single race, one single species, with roughly the same cognitive abilities as each other. We've been this way for thousands of years, possibly tens of thousands. The major developments in human history since then have been technological and cultural.
Edit: Could you show us more? In particular, could you show how my reasoning is faulty? I know how Socrates would handle my dilemma, for example.
Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point. Eventually we start saying that individuals can have their merit measured, and we move to a totally utilitarian society ala Gattaca. I don't particularly care whether you want this, but it's ridiculous to do; it would bring about the ruin of our gene pool. Because I think that this is a bad outcome, sure, I'm motivated to use reason to examine it. But also, it's only because of reason that I'm able to tell that the outcome will be bad! Don't get upset at reason just because it shows you what you didn't want to know.
Your emotionalism is leading you away from the truth, which will lead to bad reasoning and, therefore, bad outcomes.
Edit:
"Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point."
This is one place, among many, where your reasoning is faulty. This may be a limiting case of meritocracy (I am not committing to that, but I can see the argument). But I am not arguing for pure meritocracy. Rather I am arguing for giving both luck and merit proportional consideration, and varying that proportion over success curves. This is more complex than the manichean viewpoint you are arguing, but I believe it conforms with reality more closely.
I oppose both eugenics as well as racial reasoning (race is such a broad genetic category as to be meaningless in most discussions) on both logical and religious grounds.
Okay, could you show it? In particular, while you can point to something like the g-factor, can you show that the g-factor exists? It is currently completely hypothetical that such differences exist.
For a good example of evidence, look at the Flynn effect. One way to read the effect is that people dramatically got smarter over the past century, but...how? What exactly actually changed? The biggest correlate is education, suggesting that the quality of schooling is far more important than any innate ability.
Edit: Ah, you believe in IQ. I presume that you won't simply let me win the argument just because of my high IQ, though? So IQ isn't everything. More importantly, though, note that IQ also correlates with sex and skin color, but a cursory look at the genes says that that correlation must be spurious. So indeed what we see is that IQ actually correlates with quality of education, which then goes on to correlate with both sex and skin color thanks to the sexism and racism inherent in our educational system.
The fact that there has been measured an increase in average IQ of the world population, doesn‘t mean that the differences between individuals don‘t exist. Look up some studies and you will see that there are huge differences in IQ, and intelligence is the number one predictor of an individual‘s success.
The real question in this article is not whether luck or merit determines the success of an individual. The actual purpose of the article is to covertly present a “debate” without proposing anything in place, because we all know that the alternative to meritocracy can only be the ideology of the radical left, which the author seems to embrace (by looking at his other articles). The author argues that other programmers, as skillful as Bill Gates, don’t ever become as rich. This is a false argument, as equality of opportunity can’t and doesn’t guarantee equality of outcome. By making this argument, the author doesn’t take into account the multitude of other factors that contribute to a person’s success. Nobody says that merit is the only factor in predicting the success of the individual.
Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims.
I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.
Hear here! I'm reminded of Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents", wherein he expands his ideas about psychopathology to civilization as a whole. Tellingly, psychologists call what what you describe "splitting"[0], and, increasingly, that's what society is doing in the United States.
The main problem with the way most people look at meritocracy occurs on the fringes. Billionaires deserve that much more because they earned it; if they didn't, it'd mean the system is broken, corrupt, or both. The destitute deserve it, because they earned it; if they didn't "".
Irl some people deserve more than others, but the gap is made up and silly, and everyone is better off when everyone is taken care of. You don't want people who have nothing to lose, but notions of meritocracy make people think it's unfair to take care of everyone.
The author pulls a switcharoo. He starts off arguing that the world believes in meritocracy and then proves this belief is false by demonstrating the world is not perfectly meritocratic. But I imagine very few of the people he refers to who believe in a meritocratic world believe it is perfectly meritocratic.
He then makes a weak argument based on some psychology 301 research that a belief in meritocracy can be harmful. I'm somewhat convinced. But the problem is meritocratic structures are very useful, and if we dismantle meritocratic belief I doubt meritocratic structures would be far behind. And I'd rather live in a world where we at least strive for a meritocracy and fail then one where we give up.
It is important to distinguish between meritocracy, and the ideology of meritocracy. The article fails to make this distinction when it says in int conclusion
> Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.
when the evidence presented attacks the ideology of it, but not meritocracy itself. The former refers to
* Putting people with merit into positions of responsibility, or
* Rewarding people who have merit.
The ideology includes 2nd-order and nth-order effects like:
* believing that people who are rewarded have merit (including that one had merited the success/failure one has)
* believing that proxies for measuring merit are accurate
* believing that our present implementation of meritocratic principles is both widespread and fair
In my opinion, ideally, we should retain the first principle of trying to give responsibility to people of merit, but abolish the ideological notions that meritocracy is successfully being practiced to good moral effect. And because merit and capability itself is so greatly affected by chance, and so too its measurement, we should strive to reduce how much we reward those seemingly with merit vs. those without.
The issue is one of a philosophical kind.
Just aknowledge that there is a vast gap between acting in self-interest and acting in a philantrophic way.
The big game is played in the minds - this ideal or idea of meritocracy is a way to rule.
It is a plain sophistic ideology (sophists were those greek philosophers whom argued that everything in the outside was a projection of what you have on the inside, for expl. the medieval cosmic view is based on this).
On the other hand we have philosophers which believe the outside is what determines us as beeings and thus it's worth being analized and understood. Archimedes for example was one that promoted this way of thinking.
However, we can all be certain that it's neither just the one nor the other way of making sense of our reality that is absolutely 'right'.
It's most likely a mix of both (or more, love maybe apart) - but by 'believing' that every action has always to be in your very own self interest this may gets you rich but everybody else gets poorer in the process.
I'm going to be honest, this is stuff the ruling class knows and has known for millenials (may even before the greeks wrote it down).
They would not be granted such privileges if they didn't act in a philantrophic way (expl. Gates foundation). People would turn on them in a revolution that would harm anyone more than it would help a single soul. Thusfor the ruling class - through university and religion - gives us this self centered (sophistic) believe shemes so we would controll (ourselfs) one another.
And no, I'm actually not talking about rich people when I talk of the ruling class. What I mean by that are big rulers of land. Bcs. you can have as much money as you want - if you live on a certain soil you will have to obey the ruler in one way or another.
The fact that America is extremely non-racist and business in America is extraordinarily meritocratic might be the most common “it’s true but we can’t admit it” thing these days.
Disappointed that racists (“your race determines what you can accomplish”) are firmly in control these days.
It's fair and fine to critique the implementations of "meritocracy" that we see in the world, and also to critique the inflationary aspects of how it's usually articulated (e.g., person X is good at taking calculated financial risks that result in lots of money, therefore that person is "good" and should possess political power and authority).
But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal -- impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically, is the norm for human societies?)
Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration, that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals at all stages of life (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined, at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y and Z).
> what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"?
I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are".
But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?
> But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?
I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)
I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)
It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.
> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
Linked article (on 'depend') has the following conclusion which explicitly disagrees with this claim:
> Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet.
Further, the logic here is unsound:
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
The author asserts Gates was successful because he was a good programmer, and that therefore other good programmers should have equal success. Yet most people understand Gates is not an amazing programmer but rather has his strengths in understanding business. Microsoft did well because of business positioning in a new and rapidly evolving field, not because they were a revolutionary future codebase.
I would add that Malcolm Gladwell talks about how much Gates had been programming at his age compared to other people at the time. He wasn't competing with nearly as many people as programmers today are.
I am sympathetic to the practical issues & biases at play when discussing the systems we often call meritocracies; especially when those systems result in anti-meritocratic behavior.
However, what is the reader supposed to come away with here as an alternative? Equality of outcome? Should it really be that any given combination of work ethic, dedication, novelty, and a bit of luck will not land you above the mean? I personally am all for improving meritocracies so they live up to the name, but abolishing them due to their implementation failures seems silly and more importantly, the alternatives are dangerous.
Well the traditional alternative is that you inherit your profession from your parent. In terms of political leadership this would be aristocracy but it was pretty common for others too. Men with the last name "smith" expecting to follow their father in becoming smiths for example. But of course levels of employment in different jobs are nowhere near as stable as they were back then. Not too many smiths around and we've gone from 80+% of people working as farmers to less than 5%.
I suppose you could have everybody randomly assigned to jobs. Or you could people have a list of preferences and to the extent that there are more applicants to a given job than open slots randomly assign them then move the other applicants to their next slot.
I don't think people should either deceive themselves about the existence of or the downsides of attempting to follow pure meritocracy. Nor should they ignore people who have been disadvantaged.
But when we create a system for recognizing / rewarding / incentivizing achievement, with rules that are not unreasonable, people want others to follow the rules that have been created! Not creating hole after hole in a system to fix things that are not the direct fault of the system.
Social beings want rules and structure to know how to interact and what to expect from each other, and the systems in which they live. You will produce unexpected bad side effects when you keep shifting people's expectations about what seemed to be a reasonable system, that people lived their lives by.
Otherwise, let the picking and choosing of who your favorite beneficiary (today) of semi-meritocracy is continue.
"The world is a meritocracy" is a bit of a straw man, because who really believes in the Platonic ideal of a meritocracy?
The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.
No one believes this nonsense.
What happens is, individual companies believe they are meritocratic - not the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.
The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the meritocracies cited in the article.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations.
Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation is your merit. They should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them. Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours, consistently, my salary should be too.
I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes 2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make more.
Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in. But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti-meritocratic, after all.
So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - stick to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.
A factory worker who makes 2x as many widgets doesn't make 2x as much money in my experience in US industry work. The way it typically shakes out is that the workers are part of a union, and the union negotiates compensation and benefits based on length of tenure. In some cases, the factory and union determine a "quota" level of production, and any production in excess of that garners a small bonus. Assuming that 1x is the quota, and the median worker makes $15/hr, producing 2x over the course of a shift might result in an extra $5/hr. Even that number would be higher than I've typically seen.
It's very important to have this conversation out in the open - contempt for meritocracy is a persistent undercurrent of the social strife in the west, and left unattended it will derail most efforts to improve our society.
Why do so many people aspire for meritocracy everywhere? Imagine if there really was meritocracy in the political system. All we would have is someone who would pander to the local population and eventually lean to be xenophobic as a process.
This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular. Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.
Free for all will always eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.
Focusing on who "wins" and who "loses" and what role luck plays has an important ideological function. It makes it seem like the outcomes of the game are unquestionable.
Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.
Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the kind of fairness that really matters.
> There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not.
Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.
That still doesn’t explain it. There’s no obvious product reason why Netscape should have won compared to Spyglass. Bill Gates talking about product-market fit when Windows and Office’s success based on illegally leveraging the DOS monopoly, is particularly rich.
There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game
Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.
Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior browser in speed, stability, and CSS support.
At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
I used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic was in-line jpegs.
You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
Well things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer feature.
This article tries to make a moral point by (ab)using intellectually dishonest arguments.
It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a value / goal and as state / belief. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or "justice" or "safe driving" - it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more behind. That's not a paradox, it's just logic.
> the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
False dichotomy; why not both?
> In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead
Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that didn't work hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you die at 5 from malaria.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations
That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations" of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not use that statistics itself to dole out rewards?)
I wasn't a big fan of the article, it feels too nihilistic.
I do agree that recognizing extrinsic vs. intrinsic factors in success is important for empathy and to help others - i.e. looking at work given your circumstances not just work - but it felt like it ended without making a conclusion. Is it asking us all to become fatalists? And does that somehow make for a more empathetic and just society? I feel like it wouldn't - if we believe that none of us are in control at all, why do anything to help others? And doesn't a belief in meritocratic ideals mean that we should be going out of our way to remove barriers? For example, I found this article[1] that talked about income mobility in different countries.
An interesting question it made me think of though: in separating luck versus grit, what is your prior?
For example, we'd probably all agree one is lucky to be born in a wealthy country, and that if you are you have inherent advantages. And that the circumstances you are born to are pure luck.
If growing up you had strict family (lucky or unlucky depending) that forced you to have good study habits, and you did well in school in a large part because of those habits, which in turn opened up other opportunities - is that luck or grit?
If I stumble across a good mentor, then go out of my way to learn from their teachings is that luck or grit?
If I'm starting a company, and I make 100 cold calls to find my first customer - do we attribute that to luck or grit?
If through exercise, genetic luck and healthy eating I'm able to stay healthy throughout my life, is that luck or grit?
Can someone "on the left" please shed some light on how they reconcile the following three beliefs?
1. Jobs should be handed out on merit.
2. Protected class X has been educationally disadvantaged.
3. Representation of class X in the workplace must
match their representation in the society.
It would seem that one out of three has to be given up, and meritocracy is an obvious choice, as the article suggests.
The article makes very nuanced points that don't transpire in the title, and thus get straw manned in the comments. Here are the salient points:
- The article says nothing against creating a fairer world (aka equality of opportunity)
- Many believe that the world is meritocratic, which is not the case as there are many cofounding factors (plenty of which we don't have control over) that get in the way of finding a causation between hard work and outcome.
- The paradox of meritocracy: believing you acts meritocratically results in less fair outcomes.
- Being grateful to the impact of luck makes you more generous and fair.
- Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as an insult and threat to what we have and are
> Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as an insult and threat to what we have and are
This last point is why I expected to see commenters here indignantly raging against the article.
A lot of comments here point out to some of the more obvious flaws of the article.
To me what shocks me the most is that there isn’t even any discussion on “what is success”. The author apparently measures success just by net worth, which I can’t avoid but feel sad for him/her.
The article relies on an experiment that basically presented a gender stacked (70% male, 30% female) panel of MBA students with hypotetical company with a set of hypothetical "core values" and then looked at how these influenced managerial bonus allocation decisions.
They test three sets of "core values", A,B and C (see below). They labeled A as "meritocratic values" and B and C as "non meritocratic. They find there is a male bias under A, a female bias under B and no bias under C.
They then conclude their pre-assumed hypothesis, that meritocratic values (A) favors males, is valid. When they stumble upon as strong a female bias in their "non-meritocratic" value set (B), they they decide it might be down to wording and look for a wording to make that disappear (C) They never try to do a similar rewording of (A).
They never seem to see how they are fishing for the desired outcome, never consider alternative explanations (people that are prompted they "earned" their position tend to look for similar traits in subordinates) etc.
The conclusion we can draw is MBA students seem to be potentially influenced by the wording of value statements in hypothetical reward games.
As promised, here are the 3 hypotetical "core value" sets as worded:
Set A: labeled "meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be rewarded fairly";
(2) "whether employees deserve a raise is determined by their performance";
(3) "raises and bonuses are based entirely on the performance of the employee";
(4) "promotions are given to employees when their performance shows that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to reward all employees equitably every year.
Set B: labeled "non-meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "whether an employee deserves a raise is determined by their manager";
(3) "raises and bonuses are to be given based on the discretion of the manager";
(4) "promotions are to be given to employees when their manager decides that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
Set C: labeled "non meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "performance evaluation forms include a quantitative as well as qualitative component about the employee's performance";
(3) "performance evaluations are part of the employee's official personnel file";
(4) "performance evaluations are discussed with each employee every year"
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
Many people in the thread seem to be talking past each other, I think because a meritocracy has different presumed purposes.
Purpose #1 is to make society more fair, in that in principle anyone can rise to the top, and you're not held back by your position of birth as in an aristocracy. Even in a true meritocracy though, you may still be held back by innate talent or upbringing.
Purpose #2 is to make society run better. This happens in two ways: More able people are selected for more responsible positions, so that hopefully decisions with more impact are made by more qualified people. Secondly, people have an incentive to try to become more qualified so that they can occupy these more responsible positions.
The two main problems I have with the concept of "meritocracy" are:
Incoherent/circular definition: Nobody can actually tell you what merit really is in a specific way, so we end up just measuring it by existing social status. "This guy made it into Harvard Business School and to F500 CEO, he must have a lot of merit". But maybe he got into Harvard because his rich parents were donors and then leveraged those connections for his CEO job, no merit involved. This thing that is meant to determine social status is measured by social status itself and is thus useless.
Meritocracy doesn't fairness or justice or compassion or dignity: Imagine a society which is one big ongoing gladiatorial tournament, meritocracy is defined purely in terms of combat. This would be a very meritocratic society - but would also be a very brutal, unpleasant, and unequal one. If meritocracy can still result in all of those things, what use is it really?
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[ 0.73 ms ] story [ 1113 ms ] threadSpecifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.
That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses.
However, a belief the world should be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so.
The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.
"Canastilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice."
One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer, overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and product/business skills.
So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate it.
That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know enough to choose the people who can, beyond simple heuristics like "they've been working on this for decades, they should be good".
For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough to cogently answer that question.
Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied to society it falls apart.
That doesn't make it a bad ideal though.
This critiques meritocracy. It also coins it.
It's not clear that there is any way at all to make a true meritocracy, since "merit" doesn't have an objective definition. The people who make the definition will always be biased, and will usually do so to favor themselves and people like them. After all, they're meritorious enough to be in a position to make the definition, right?
But even if such a thing exists in some hypothetical universe, it's not the universe we live in. The important part of the article is that it's a belief that you can get to a meritocracy piecewise that leads to errors. Doing the easy things first makes it less and less likely that you'll ever get around to noticing the people being excluded.
That said I do believe that making things more equal inherently requires you to re-evaluate how you value people and makes you lean towards things of substance from a person (though what is of substance is still abstract and varied) and less the superficial ques we very very heavily rely on now such as wealth status, school, profession etc etc.
Edit: Cleaned up the first paragraph I had rolled two separate thoughts into one run on.
For example in the job market one would want people to be hired on merit, i.e. based on their qualifications and skills to perform the job, not based on who they know, race, gender, etc.
In the Olympic Games, merit is how one athlete compares to the others in a fair race.
This is transparent and fair, and the best we can hope for.
It has also the benefit of ensuring a minimum of competence for people in public office and expert positions.
The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities.
One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
Do you think that someone in the United States that is not in one of these subgroups have the same opportunities to get the education, the spare income, the credit, the community that even has the prep classes?
It looks like you’re suffering from survivorship bias, when in fact you should be looking at averages. Assuming individual talent is uniformly distributed across groups, you’d expect to see success uniformly distributes, but it’s not.
Sometimes they do: while white protestants are the financially and politically dominant American subgroup, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Iranian Americans, Jewish Americans, etc. are the highest earning.
Often, however, those subgroups do not have the same opportunities. That means we're an imperfect meritocracy. But we can acknowledge that without overlooking how remarkable it is to have a semblance meritocracy in the first place. Asian Americans, for example, have incredible upward mobility. An Asian American who grows up in the bottom 20% of income has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income. That's well over double the rate for white Americans. To be sure, they often have substantial cultural capital even if they come to the country without much in the way of financial capital. Maybe their parents are college educated, or were professionals back home. But they certainly do not belong to the dominant ethnicity, they probably don't belong to the dominant religion, they lack ties to important families (they may even lack extended family support at all), they lack political connections, etc. In the parts of the world that don't embrace meritocracy as an ideal, those shortcomings would be fatal. In those parts of the world, nobody even pretends that belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion shouldn't hold you back.
Yawn.
Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.
By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.
Do we have evidence to back up that assertion? Or more generally, a firm definition of what we mean by "merit" there?
As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people.
1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc.
2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.
That said, in certain political climates, such as the US presidential election season, the tendency to see things as black or white certainly gets amplified.
Or you would achieve some level of enlightenment.
The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.
Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.
And there are more types of war than just one country going against another. There’s te culture war and the war against drugs. Some say that business is war.
This is false in two ways:
- Luck is not sufficient.
- Luck plays a larger part the larger the success is.
A moderately successful upper middle class person has achieved their position more through merit than Bill Gates has. As we go up the success hierarchy, luck plays more and more of a part.
If you don't keep these facts in mind, you will draw morally incorrect conclusions.
As someone born into a middle class family in a certain area, with certain genetics, I have been able to easily obtain middle class, with very little effort. If it's this easy for everyone why isn't everyone middle class? I don't feel like I've worked any harder then people who are worse off then me. If anything, I think I work far less hard.
If you feel guilty about your relatively easy success, I do think that focusing on both gratitude and charity is an effective moral approach.
Everyone knows about anecdotes like this. The real question is: how many rich people lose everything (especially the ones born into wealth)? How many extremely poor people move up a lot? You'll see that these are exceptions rather than a common event.
I am suspicious that this is not unintentional.
Let‘s put it this way: work hard and you might have a chance at becoming successful; don‘t work hard, and your chances of making it sharply plunge to zero (unless your family is already extremely wealthy, which is the case for a very small percentage of the population.)
there's a sizable chunk of middle and upper-middle class families that can afford to send their children to good schools but not to support them indefinitely. it's a big advantage to start out as one of those children, but it can fall apart at pretty much any point if the child isn't willing to put in the bare minimum effort to advance through the pipeline.
1) “Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic.“
2) “Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.”
Wait, what? The first “the world should be run” is one hell of a thing. But how did the author get to the rest? So, not only should the world be run, but it can be run and in such a controlled manner that and all luck is squeezed out of it and most people believe this.
Reminds me of my teanage self thinking about the world after a progressive teacher introduced the subject in class - the reasoning is so simplistic and pedantic. But here it is, published in the Princeton press!?!
I would say:
- a recursively iterative process of compressing billions of dimensions down into a very small number (typically < 5), using mostly predictive heuristics (a highly sophisticated but often incredibly inaccurate process which is typically invisible to the one doing it, and usually observers as well)
- aggregation
The answer's pretty dirt simple, although you don't like it: Humans are broadly just one single race, one single species, with roughly the same cognitive abilities as each other. We've been this way for thousands of years, possibly tens of thousands. The major developments in human history since then have been technological and cultural.
Edit: Could you show us more? In particular, could you show how my reasoning is faulty? I know how Socrates would handle my dilemma, for example.
Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point. Eventually we start saying that individuals can have their merit measured, and we move to a totally utilitarian society ala Gattaca. I don't particularly care whether you want this, but it's ridiculous to do; it would bring about the ruin of our gene pool. Because I think that this is a bad outcome, sure, I'm motivated to use reason to examine it. But also, it's only because of reason that I'm able to tell that the outcome will be bad! Don't get upset at reason just because it shows you what you didn't want to know.
You seem to know "the truth". Want to share?
Your emotionalism is leading you away from the truth, which will lead to bad reasoning and, therefore, bad outcomes.
Edit:
"Look, the fact is that meritocratic beliefs eventually boil down to eugenics and race realism at some point."
This is one place, among many, where your reasoning is faulty. This may be a limiting case of meritocracy (I am not committing to that, but I can see the argument). But I am not arguing for pure meritocracy. Rather I am arguing for giving both luck and merit proportional consideration, and varying that proportion over success curves. This is more complex than the manichean viewpoint you are arguing, but I believe it conforms with reality more closely.
I oppose both eugenics as well as racial reasoning (race is such a broad genetic category as to be meaningless in most discussions) on both logical and religious grounds.
I'll give two:
- you believe things to be true that you have no way of knowing are true.
- you seem to believe you can predict the future.
For a good example of evidence, look at the Flynn effect. One way to read the effect is that people dramatically got smarter over the past century, but...how? What exactly actually changed? The biggest correlate is education, suggesting that the quality of schooling is far more important than any innate ability.
Edit: Ah, you believe in IQ. I presume that you won't simply let me win the argument just because of my high IQ, though? So IQ isn't everything. More importantly, though, note that IQ also correlates with sex and skin color, but a cursory look at the genes says that that correlation must be spurious. So indeed what we see is that IQ actually correlates with quality of education, which then goes on to correlate with both sex and skin color thanks to the sexism and racism inherent in our educational system.
Also, the author argues that meritocracy inevitably leads to more discrimination. This is a completely unfounded conclusion, as we know that meritocracy goes hand in hand with capitalist societies such as the USA. And I think it’s fair to say that discrimination has declined in the last century, and not increased, as the author falsely claims.
I find it ironic that the article that claims meritocracy is bad, is hosted on the website of a university.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Irl some people deserve more than others, but the gap is made up and silly, and everyone is better off when everyone is taken care of. You don't want people who have nothing to lose, but notions of meritocracy make people think it's unfair to take care of everyone.
He then makes a weak argument based on some psychology 301 research that a belief in meritocracy can be harmful. I'm somewhat convinced. But the problem is meritocratic structures are very useful, and if we dismantle meritocratic belief I doubt meritocratic structures would be far behind. And I'd rather live in a world where we at least strive for a meritocracy and fail then one where we give up.
> Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal.
when the evidence presented attacks the ideology of it, but not meritocracy itself. The former refers to
* Putting people with merit into positions of responsibility, or
* Rewarding people who have merit.
The ideology includes 2nd-order and nth-order effects like:
* believing that people who are rewarded have merit (including that one had merited the success/failure one has)
* believing that proxies for measuring merit are accurate
* believing that our present implementation of meritocratic principles is both widespread and fair
In my opinion, ideally, we should retain the first principle of trying to give responsibility to people of merit, but abolish the ideological notions that meritocracy is successfully being practiced to good moral effect. And because merit and capability itself is so greatly affected by chance, and so too its measurement, we should strive to reduce how much we reward those seemingly with merit vs. those without.
However, we can all be certain that it's neither just the one nor the other way of making sense of our reality that is absolutely 'right'. It's most likely a mix of both (or more, love maybe apart) - but by 'believing' that every action has always to be in your very own self interest this may gets you rich but everybody else gets poorer in the process.
I'm going to be honest, this is stuff the ruling class knows and has known for millenials (may even before the greeks wrote it down). They would not be granted such privileges if they didn't act in a philantrophic way (expl. Gates foundation). People would turn on them in a revolution that would harm anyone more than it would help a single soul. Thusfor the ruling class - through university and religion - gives us this self centered (sophistic) believe shemes so we would controll (ourselfs) one another.
And no, I'm actually not talking about rich people when I talk of the ruling class. What I mean by that are big rulers of land. Bcs. you can have as much money as you want - if you live on a certain soil you will have to obey the ruler in one way or another.
Disappointed that racists (“your race determines what you can accomplish”) are firmly in control these days.
But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal -- impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically, is the norm for human societies?)
Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration, that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals at all stages of life (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined, at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y and Z).
I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it with "the way things are".
But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where nobody has these unfair special privileges?
I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized, even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)
I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof -- having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance, I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so any undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are" -- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct" socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present "meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)
It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich" rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.
Original article:
> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
Linked article (on 'depend') has the following conclusion which explicitly disagrees with this claim:
> Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet.
Further, the logic here is unsound:
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
The author asserts Gates was successful because he was a good programmer, and that therefore other good programmers should have equal success. Yet most people understand Gates is not an amazing programmer but rather has his strengths in understanding business. Microsoft did well because of business positioning in a new and rapidly evolving field, not because they were a revolutionary future codebase.
However, what is the reader supposed to come away with here as an alternative? Equality of outcome? Should it really be that any given combination of work ethic, dedication, novelty, and a bit of luck will not land you above the mean? I personally am all for improving meritocracies so they live up to the name, but abolishing them due to their implementation failures seems silly and more importantly, the alternatives are dangerous.
I suppose you could have everybody randomly assigned to jobs. Or you could people have a list of preferences and to the extent that there are more applicants to a given job than open slots randomly assign them then move the other applicants to their next slot.
Humility, for a start.
But when we create a system for recognizing / rewarding / incentivizing achievement, with rules that are not unreasonable, people want others to follow the rules that have been created! Not creating hole after hole in a system to fix things that are not the direct fault of the system.
Social beings want rules and structure to know how to interact and what to expect from each other, and the systems in which they live. You will produce unexpected bad side effects when you keep shifting people's expectations about what seemed to be a reasonable system, that people lived their lives by.
Otherwise, let the picking and choosing of who your favorite beneficiary (today) of semi-meritocracy is continue.
The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.
No one believes this nonsense.
What happens is, individual companies believe they are meritocratic - not the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.
The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the meritocracies cited in the article.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations.
Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation is your merit. They should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them. Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours, consistently, my salary should be too.
I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes 2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make more.
Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in. But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti-meritocratic, after all.
So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - stick to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.
Meritocracy is the fairest system for individuals. Achieving it is an endless struggle.
This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular. Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.
Free for all will always eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.
Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.
Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the kind of fairness that really matters.
I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not.
Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.
There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with fair coin flips. https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game
Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands, and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They found the most important factors determining success were random.
At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did. Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was released.
You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical market.
It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a value / goal and as state / belief. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or "justice" or "safe driving" - it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more behind. That's not a paradox, it's just logic.
> the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
False dichotomy; why not both?
> In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead
Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that didn't work hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you die at 5 from malaria.
> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations
That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations" of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not use that statistics itself to dole out rewards?)
I do agree that recognizing extrinsic vs. intrinsic factors in success is important for empathy and to help others - i.e. looking at work given your circumstances not just work - but it felt like it ended without making a conclusion. Is it asking us all to become fatalists? And does that somehow make for a more empathetic and just society? I feel like it wouldn't - if we believe that none of us are in control at all, why do anything to help others? And doesn't a belief in meritocratic ideals mean that we should be going out of our way to remove barriers? For example, I found this article[1] that talked about income mobility in different countries.
An interesting question it made me think of though: in separating luck versus grit, what is your prior?
For example, we'd probably all agree one is lucky to be born in a wealthy country, and that if you are you have inherent advantages. And that the circumstances you are born to are pure luck.
If growing up you had strict family (lucky or unlucky depending) that forced you to have good study habits, and you did well in school in a large part because of those habits, which in turn opened up other opportunities - is that luck or grit?
If I stumble across a good mentor, then go out of my way to learn from their teachings is that luck or grit?
If I'm starting a company, and I make 100 cold calls to find my first customer - do we attribute that to luck or grit?
If through exercise, genetic luck and healthy eating I'm able to stay healthy throughout my life, is that luck or grit?
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the-income-...
https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton-...
- The article says nothing against creating a fairer world (aka equality of opportunity)
- Many believe that the world is meritocratic, which is not the case as there are many cofounding factors (plenty of which we don't have control over) that get in the way of finding a causation between hard work and outcome.
- The paradox of meritocracy: believing you acts meritocratically results in less fair outcomes.
- Being grateful to the impact of luck makes you more generous and fair.
- Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as an insult and threat to what we have and are
This last point is why I expected to see commenters here indignantly raging against the article.
To me what shocks me the most is that there isn’t even any discussion on “what is success”. The author apparently measures success just by net worth, which I can’t avoid but feel sad for him/her.
The article relies on an experiment that basically presented a gender stacked (70% male, 30% female) panel of MBA students with hypotetical company with a set of hypothetical "core values" and then looked at how these influenced managerial bonus allocation decisions.
They test three sets of "core values", A,B and C (see below). They labeled A as "meritocratic values" and B and C as "non meritocratic. They find there is a male bias under A, a female bias under B and no bias under C.
They then conclude their pre-assumed hypothesis, that meritocratic values (A) favors males, is valid. When they stumble upon as strong a female bias in their "non-meritocratic" value set (B), they they decide it might be down to wording and look for a wording to make that disappear (C) They never try to do a similar rewording of (A).
They never seem to see how they are fishing for the desired outcome, never consider alternative explanations (people that are prompted they "earned" their position tend to look for similar traits in subordinates) etc.
The conclusion we can draw is MBA students seem to be potentially influenced by the wording of value statements in hypothetical reward games.
As promised, here are the 3 hypotetical "core value" sets as worded:
Set A: labeled "meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be rewarded fairly";
(2) "whether employees deserve a raise is determined by their performance";
(3) "raises and bonuses are based entirely on the performance of the employee";
(4) "promotions are given to employees when their performance shows that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to reward all employees equitably every year.
Set B: labeled "non-meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "whether an employee deserves a raise is determined by their manager";
(3) "raises and bonuses are to be given based on the discretion of the manager";
(4) "promotions are to be given to employees when their manager decides that they deserve it";
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
Set C: labeled "non meritocratic"
(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";
(2) "performance evaluation forms include a quantitative as well as qualitative component about the employee's performance";
(3) "performance evaluations are part of the employee's official personnel file";
(4) "performance evaluations are discussed with each employee every year"
(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year
Purpose #1 is to make society more fair, in that in principle anyone can rise to the top, and you're not held back by your position of birth as in an aristocracy. Even in a true meritocracy though, you may still be held back by innate talent or upbringing.
Purpose #2 is to make society run better. This happens in two ways: More able people are selected for more responsible positions, so that hopefully decisions with more impact are made by more qualified people. Secondly, people have an incentive to try to become more qualified so that they can occupy these more responsible positions.
Incoherent/circular definition: Nobody can actually tell you what merit really is in a specific way, so we end up just measuring it by existing social status. "This guy made it into Harvard Business School and to F500 CEO, he must have a lot of merit". But maybe he got into Harvard because his rich parents were donors and then leveraged those connections for his CEO job, no merit involved. This thing that is meant to determine social status is measured by social status itself and is thus useless.
Meritocracy doesn't fairness or justice or compassion or dignity: Imagine a society which is one big ongoing gladiatorial tournament, meritocracy is defined purely in terms of combat. This would be a very meritocratic society - but would also be a very brutal, unpleasant, and unequal one. If meritocracy can still result in all of those things, what use is it really?