Sure, maybe not all types of jobs, but to be fair he does say "in the political realm" at one point in the article, and it did occur to me that many people often take the opposite as an a priori assumption, that "meritocracy is good thing for all types of jobs" (myself, sometimes, included!). I'm not a fan of this author, but I did find this little polemic a needed "push-back"
(That said, I also think the article could be much improved in terms of argumentation, it seems pretty off-the-cuff.)
Surely it’s not that the idea of meritocracy is necessarily wrong just that the concept of what constitutes merit for a job is complex. The article begins essentially conflating merit with intelligence which is clearly pretty one dimensional for all sorts of ideas about merit for a job role. Let alone merit as a part of broader society. So it’s not really that meritocracy is bad but the definition of merit is. Which is one of the more widely held criticisms of meritocracy generally that a stable, shared view of merit doesn’t really exist.
I generally agree with you here, and don't think this article is particularly well researched or argued. I'm no fan of Matty's argumentation in any of his articles in fact... I don't think he "merits" the popularity he has ;)
That said, I don't really think there is any sort of useful distinction between "necessarily wrong" and "impossible to define". That is, I believe many meritocracy-enthusiasts to be "necessarily wrong" since they often imply or casually argue for achieving a meritocratic society, while, as you put it, "a stable, shared view of merit doesn’t really exist". So, seeking something that doesn't exist (like the tooth fairy, or a profitable MLM scam) is necessarily 100% wrong... not 20% wrong, or 50% wrong. All we got is this boring cave :(
So, I guess I welcome any "meritocracy considered harmful" posts, despite who wrote it and how it's written.
Yeah I think the idea of meritocracy is dangerously utopian. It’s beguiling because as a principle it’s succinct to express and hard to argue with on casual acquaintance. Which is why I describe it as not necessarily wrong. A specific enough definition at a narrow enough view might yield meritocratic results but is useless as a general organising principle even though that isn’t easily obvious.
Your single paragraph also holds a much stronger argument that meritocracy is bad than any of those in the article.
This reads as coming from resentment “sure, they are smarter, more prepared, and more experienced than me… but I want to believe I am more ethical. Yeah, meritocracy is the problem, not me”
this is exactly what I came here to say. it took a lot of effort to find work a few years ago because I'd dropped out of college, yet had plenty of personal experience under my belt. I know many other people are in this same boat and it's endlessly frustrating to be rejected from entry-level job after entry-level job when your skillset and experience is above what is being asked. when this is happening to you and at the same time you see articles about how meritocracy is bad and should be abolished, it's hard to see how meritocracy is supposedly working for you when your (self-evaluated) merit (for an entry-level position, possibly doing something fully outside of your intended career trajectory) outstrips your credentials.
I don't understand why everyone trying to tear down "meritocracy" doesn't start by focusing on credentialism instead.
I think that is indeed part of it, but he also missed the bigger picture: PEGs take over nursing homes because they have a legal obligation to do so for their shareholders. This is something that has been baked into American society since inception. Not really sure how to fix something like this. Early in Trump's term, he flirted with the idea of changing these earnings reports from quarterly to biannual. I always wonder how much that would have shaken up corporate culture.
What? Are you actually saying that this is just Matty's sour grapes? I personally disagree with most of his positions in general, but it's silly to imply he's anything but very successful and credentialed in his field [1]
This article is really all over the place about the idea of what smart is to the point of incoherence. Trump is smart because of his eye for grift but Biden isn’t because of his academic record? As a comparison it’s not very compelling, what of Trump’s academics or Biden’s work moves?
Ultimately it doesn’t feel like there is any point to the meritocracy angle either other than self congratulatory back patting. It’s a simplistic “if only we had more moral people” argument.
> Back in 2019, Rafael Nadal earned $16 million in prize money playing tennis. Gael Monfils, in ninth place, earned $3 million.
> These are the kind of sharp income disparities that lead Elizabeth Warren to say the economy is rigged. But of course pro tennis isn’t “rigged” in any normal sense. Fair, tournament-style competitions just tend to produce this kind of outcome where modest differences in ability lead to wild disparities in earnings.
Interestingly, even pro tennis seems to have realized this. The major tournaments have recently restructured their prize money to be less top-heavy and to distribute more cash to those who exit in the early rounds. The idea being, I suppose, that making being a touring pro easier for more people will ultimately benefit the tour.
>Meritocracy: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit [0]
It seems to me that Meritocracy is an unfortunately vague word. Given that, it's difficult to say much definitively about the US with respect to it. The American dream and the idea that if you work hard enough you can succeed are pretty wedded to the idea of Meritocracy.
The confounding factor is that it seems like one's constantly seeing successful, powerful, or influential people whose "demonstrated abilities and merit" are difficult to find.
Yes. Matt's point is that we are in general selecting for intelligence and NOT true merit, e.g., honesty, integrity, bravery, and all of the traditional values. We seem to be selecting based on pure cleverness, and his point is that this alone creates quite a lot of success for people who are by most definitions terrible people. I don't see any issue with his argument, I believe he is on to something here. And because these intelligent but otherwise unprincipled people are raised up, they degrade the larger culture, the politics, and the economy for everyone.
In one portion of the article ("Smart people do bad things"), it seems like the argument isn't really against Meritocracy, it's against using intelligence as the only metric powering your meritocracy. If your meritocracy rewards a combination of ethical and intelligent behavior, you still have a pure merit-based system, you've just picked a particular merit function that you like more.
I felt that that part of the article was a little weak and ended up doing what the author criticized others for doing, namely criticizing the implementation of meritocracy rather than the concept itself.
I was thinking the exact same thing. The article falls into what may be the most immediate danger befalling discussion around meritocracy: an artificially narrow definition of "merit."
The essay bemoans private equity firms increasing death rates in retirement homes to increase profit, because of how "smart" and therefore allegedly "merited" they are. But any proper definition of "merit" would include them behaving ethically.
For some reason this idea that meritocracy is undesirable has been making the rounds recently. I haven't heard any proposed alternatives that would be at all viable in a society where we want critical roles to be performed by competent people. Do we really want incompetent people running things because they will botch their attempts at being unethical? It certainly seems like the author is making that argument.
Yes, we don't want an ever increasing wealth gap but dismantling meritocracy strikes me as the worst possible way to deal with that.
I think the best proposed alternative is to spread out power. You can't have incompetent people running things if no one (or everyone) is running things. Is this viable? I'm not sure, but I think we could distribute power at least somewhat more then we currently are.
How many surgeons do you want operating on a patient? How many pilots should hold the stick? Politics might be particularly suitable for more distributed power but I'd say that's an exception.
> ... we want critical roles to be performed by competent people.
Yes. Over the last few years, we've seen the problems caused by having critical jobs performed by less than competent people. (I'm sure you can fill in your own examples.)
The problem is that there are (at least) two kinds of "fake meritocracy". There's credentialism: "This person must me competent; they graduated from Elite Institution". And then there's elitism: "This person must be competent, their parents are rich and famous". Neither tells us much about their actual competence at any specific role. (All right, credentialism tells you that they were competent at graduating from Elite Institution, but we aren't hiring them to have them do that over and over.)
I wonder if part of the reason for the criticism of meritocracy is because of the failings of fake meritocracy. (I suspect that another part of it is a complaint that those who win the meritocracy game get too much of the rewards, which I think is a fair criticism.)
There's a brief discussion of that: "Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests that the most exclusive colleges should move away from tournament-style admissions. Instead, he’d like to see them set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold." You could apply this thinking society-wide: if you're competent enough to do your job then that's it; there's no rankings.
> set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold
Isn't this what they already do at a theoretical level? If you have 800 seats in a given class, you keep raising your admissions bar until you get ~800 qualified applicants.
Now we can discuss whether donations and legacy status should play into that bar or not, but I think that's a separate issue.
I don't think that's what was intended. I think the idea is "Set your admissions bar to the minimum level, then admit however many students meet it."
Or, if you have only 800 possible seats, "Set your admissions bar, then pick 800 of them randomly". The more you "raise" the bar, the more your definition of "raise" matters. It will tend to select people who can afford (in time, money, connections, etc) to meet your specific criteria. And you run the risk of accidentally setting your criteria to be "more like me" (in looks, patterns of thought, etc.)
If you assume that your school can benefit anybody smart enough to meet your criteria, why not take as many as you can? And why not aim to get more people who couldn't focus on your criteria? Randomness won't seek them out, but it at least won't prefer a 1500 SAT by a student who does nothing but take SAT tests to a 1460 SAT by a student who has to work two part time jobs.
I'm conflicted about this essay. I agree with many of the points but fail to see how it relates to and ultimately disagree with the thesis that meritocracy is bad.
Taking the tennis example, sure, it would be beneficial for the top players to have a flatter payout structure. But this ultimately leads to the ATP tour being solidified and newcomers being barred from entry as now the player ranked 250 is now earning an income that they can afford much better training than outsiders. It isn't immediately clear that this system is better from a social point of view.
Relating it back to elite institutions, randomly assigning professors and students to random institutions definitely raises the floor but also lowers the ceiling. Is that socially better? Not immediately obvious. I'm of the opinion that we want to maximize the max possible achievement of an individual to improve the human condition. Very few individuals are responsible for key advancements of civilization.
Finally, the closing statement about Milton Friedman seems rather contradictory to me. The argument that changing the entire cultural attitude of business is somehow different than regulation seems odd to me. Stigmatizing certain actions is just merely the weakest form of regulation that allows for unethical behavior to be rewarded even greater.
> But this ultimately leads to the ATP tour being solidified and newcomers being barred from entry as now the player ranked 250 is now earning an income that they can afford much better training than outsiders.
No, it would make it more worthwhile to invest in promising players, who now would have the prospect of making a decent living as a top 250-ranked touring pro, rather than needing to be in the top 50 or 100 in order to do so.
I think more generally the idea is that we should focus on equality rather than equity: people should be able to live well even if they "lose" the meritocratic contest.
That logic is the exact opposite approach of VC investing. They invest in moonshot ideas for the chance at a unicorn, not because it makes a solid lifestyle business.
Again, this doesn't solve the meritocracy problem. If the top 250 get a steady source of income, which ones do you invest in? You wouldn't bother with the moonshot talent because the expected payoff is lower. It only becomes worthwhile to invest in those that have a good chance of breaking into the top 250. That is, the well established. It doesn't follow that a flatter pay structure is fairer in any way.
Well yeah, the tennis example is pretty limited as an analogy because it's the players themselves, their parents, and maybe coaches who do the investing. Also, flattening the payouts is better if you want more people playing tennis professionally, but that might not actually be a desirable outcome. I think it's mainly useful as an example to show how minor skill differences can lead to massively different outcomes. It's up to us to decide whether and how much income redistribution will lead to the kind of society we want to live in.
This is exactly the argumentation I would love to see as well. It would be very interesting to compare scientific achievement coming out of Finland compared to, say, Alabama which is the first state to cross 5M people and thus comparable in population. Of course, I'm sure that analysis would be plagued by what subjectively counts as achievement.
Also, I was loose with my words. I didn't really mean few as in you could actually count the individuals. I meant more along the lines of the 1% of the population that has a PhD and at least making some minor contribution to academia.
Well... I think meritocracy is perfect, it mirrors evolution in rewarding superior contributors(ie, on their merit). However, being in the "elite" mentioned in the article does not imply you have merit. People in that "elite" might have merit, but they might also just have rich/powerful parents, connections, and friends. If that's the case, then they aren't "elite" based on their merit, but based on who they know.
>I know some dumb Democrats and some smart Republicans. I hope that when Republican Party politicians are in office, they listen to the smart Republicans about things rather than the dumb ones. But I’d rather have a dumb Democrat win a Senate race over a smart Republican any day. Smarts just don’t matter that much.
I think Matthew Yglesias is saying "Republic is always a bad person and Democrat is always good".
If he could judge someone solely based on his political identity without examining that individual person's merits and character, it says a lot of his world view. Not surprised if he knows nothing about true Conservative principles.
I invite him to read China's history from 1930 to 1980, where he will find many like-minded Chinese communist fellows who also judge people solely based on their economic class and status. The "Cultural Revolution" would be an epic-reading for him.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadVery difficult to generalize this as this doesn't apply to 'all' things. Maybe for some types of jobs but not for all types of jobs.
(That said, I also think the article could be much improved in terms of argumentation, it seems pretty off-the-cuff.)
That said, I don't really think there is any sort of useful distinction between "necessarily wrong" and "impossible to define". That is, I believe many meritocracy-enthusiasts to be "necessarily wrong" since they often imply or casually argue for achieving a meritocratic society, while, as you put it, "a stable, shared view of merit doesn’t really exist". So, seeking something that doesn't exist (like the tooth fairy, or a profitable MLM scam) is necessarily 100% wrong... not 20% wrong, or 50% wrong. All we got is this boring cave :(
So, I guess I welcome any "meritocracy considered harmful" posts, despite who wrote it and how it's written.
Your single paragraph also holds a much stronger argument that meritocracy is bad than any of those in the article.
Which is a really long way to say I agree.
But hey! At least he went to Harvard right?...
I don't understand why everyone trying to tear down "meritocracy" doesn't start by focusing on credentialism instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Yglesias
Ultimately it doesn’t feel like there is any point to the meritocracy angle either other than self congratulatory back patting. It’s a simplistic “if only we had more moral people” argument.
> These are the kind of sharp income disparities that lead Elizabeth Warren to say the economy is rigged. But of course pro tennis isn’t “rigged” in any normal sense. Fair, tournament-style competitions just tend to produce this kind of outcome where modest differences in ability lead to wild disparities in earnings.
Interestingly, even pro tennis seems to have realized this. The major tournaments have recently restructured their prize money to be less top-heavy and to distribute more cash to those who exit in the early rounds. The idea being, I suppose, that making being a touring pro easier for more people will ultimately benefit the tour.
>Meritocracy: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit [0]
It seems to me that Meritocracy is an unfortunately vague word. Given that, it's difficult to say much definitively about the US with respect to it. The American dream and the idea that if you work hard enough you can succeed are pretty wedded to the idea of Meritocracy.
The confounding factor is that it seems like one's constantly seeing successful, powerful, or influential people whose "demonstrated abilities and merit" are difficult to find.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meritocracy
I felt that that part of the article was a little weak and ended up doing what the author criticized others for doing, namely criticizing the implementation of meritocracy rather than the concept itself.
The essay bemoans private equity firms increasing death rates in retirement homes to increase profit, because of how "smart" and therefore allegedly "merited" they are. But any proper definition of "merit" would include them behaving ethically.
Yes, we don't want an ever increasing wealth gap but dismantling meritocracy strikes me as the worst possible way to deal with that.
Yes. Over the last few years, we've seen the problems caused by having critical jobs performed by less than competent people. (I'm sure you can fill in your own examples.)
The problem is that there are (at least) two kinds of "fake meritocracy". There's credentialism: "This person must me competent; they graduated from Elite Institution". And then there's elitism: "This person must be competent, their parents are rich and famous". Neither tells us much about their actual competence at any specific role. (All right, credentialism tells you that they were competent at graduating from Elite Institution, but we aren't hiring them to have them do that over and over.)
I wonder if part of the reason for the criticism of meritocracy is because of the failings of fake meritocracy. (I suspect that another part of it is a complaint that those who win the meritocracy game get too much of the rewards, which I think is a fair criticism.)
Isn't this what they already do at a theoretical level? If you have 800 seats in a given class, you keep raising your admissions bar until you get ~800 qualified applicants.
Now we can discuss whether donations and legacy status should play into that bar or not, but I think that's a separate issue.
Or, if you have only 800 possible seats, "Set your admissions bar, then pick 800 of them randomly". The more you "raise" the bar, the more your definition of "raise" matters. It will tend to select people who can afford (in time, money, connections, etc) to meet your specific criteria. And you run the risk of accidentally setting your criteria to be "more like me" (in looks, patterns of thought, etc.)
If you assume that your school can benefit anybody smart enough to meet your criteria, why not take as many as you can? And why not aim to get more people who couldn't focus on your criteria? Randomness won't seek them out, but it at least won't prefer a 1500 SAT by a student who does nothing but take SAT tests to a 1460 SAT by a student who has to work two part time jobs.
Taking the tennis example, sure, it would be beneficial for the top players to have a flatter payout structure. But this ultimately leads to the ATP tour being solidified and newcomers being barred from entry as now the player ranked 250 is now earning an income that they can afford much better training than outsiders. It isn't immediately clear that this system is better from a social point of view.
Relating it back to elite institutions, randomly assigning professors and students to random institutions definitely raises the floor but also lowers the ceiling. Is that socially better? Not immediately obvious. I'm of the opinion that we want to maximize the max possible achievement of an individual to improve the human condition. Very few individuals are responsible for key advancements of civilization.
Finally, the closing statement about Milton Friedman seems rather contradictory to me. The argument that changing the entire cultural attitude of business is somehow different than regulation seems odd to me. Stigmatizing certain actions is just merely the weakest form of regulation that allows for unethical behavior to be rewarded even greater.
No, it would make it more worthwhile to invest in promising players, who now would have the prospect of making a decent living as a top 250-ranked touring pro, rather than needing to be in the top 50 or 100 in order to do so.
I think more generally the idea is that we should focus on equality rather than equity: people should be able to live well even if they "lose" the meritocratic contest.
Again, this doesn't solve the meritocracy problem. If the top 250 get a steady source of income, which ones do you invest in? You wouldn't bother with the moonshot talent because the expected payoff is lower. It only becomes worthwhile to invest in those that have a good chance of breaking into the top 250. That is, the well established. It doesn't follow that a flatter pay structure is fairer in any way.
Is this true? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_theory_of_invention_and...
Another example is the Finnish education system aiming to raise the floor instead of increasing the ceiling.
I can think of counterexamples in Hungarian mathematicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
A lot of them knew each other growing up, but you could argue they would've succeeded anywhere.
If this question were more carefully explored I think it'd do a lot for the author's argument as a whole.
Also, I was loose with my words. I didn't really mean few as in you could actually count the individuals. I meant more along the lines of the 1% of the population that has a PhD and at least making some minor contribution to academia.
I think Matthew Yglesias is saying "Republic is always a bad person and Democrat is always good".
If he could judge someone solely based on his political identity without examining that individual person's merits and character, it says a lot of his world view. Not surprised if he knows nothing about true Conservative principles.
I invite him to read China's history from 1930 to 1980, where he will find many like-minded Chinese communist fellows who also judge people solely based on their economic class and status. The "Cultural Revolution" would be an epic-reading for him.