"This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons."
> they can’t get ahead on merit
"This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best."
> Princeton telling people they can’t get ahead on merit is …
> I don’t even know the word for it.
You're suffering from a cognitive malfunction: you seem to think that "Princeton" is waving its finger from a lectern, when it is in fact not making a statement at all. You're just reading an article in some kind of publication published by Princeton University Press.
To be fair, Princeton has a pretty robust legacy program where nearly 15% of the Class of 2022 are legacy admits.
(It's insanely easy to get in as a legacy student. Princeton has an acceptance rate of 4% for the Class of 2025, but an acceptance rate of 30%+ for legacy candidates).
The concept of merit itself is phenomenologically suspect. We don’t live in a platonically ideal world. Merit is a subjective distinction and is thus itself able to be gamed, and it is by those with the means and the gumption.
And IMHO the statement Churchill used to describe democracy also applies to meritocracy: "It's the worst of all possible systems... until you consider the alternatives."
Exactly. There is a deep-seated appeal to meritocracy for a reason — it should be cutting out those who would get places and opportunities due to nepotism & favoritism, but who don't have the chops to do the work in comparison to the competition. Yes, there will always be an element of luck — family situation, diet, social or economic states — but giving a chance to those with stronger abilities, as well as to those who are willing to put in the work needed (which certainly can help someone push past those with more inborn ability who don't put in the effort) is a feature of the system, not a bug. The main argument against it is usually that the favored groups/individuals of the arguer won't get the advantages they think they should get. Many in the corporate and government worlds seek to reinstate feudalism; meritocratic advocates don't want such a terrible future for themselves or for anyone else.
I do not think you are presenting the strongest critique of meritocracies in your imagined counter argument. Similarly to you, I like the idea of meritocracy for the reasons you outlined in your first few sentences.
However, in practice meritocracy frequently devolves into classism: yes, the hard working kids of the families of higher class would be awarded more than the lazy kids of the same demographic. But the kids of the lower class would not have the same opportunity to invest in and grow their merit, because they would have to worry about taking a second job to help feed their family (or less extreme examples). I do not see a version of meritocracy in the USA that is not at least partially also classism, given the current state of the social safety nets.
I am not sure your take is correct, but this might be because of my personal views: I do think the "stereotypical Asian student" today is indeed discriminated on merit, pretty much in exactly the same way that the "stereotypical Jewish student" was excluded thanks to "holistic" admission criteria in the last century. So I guess on that front I agree with you. But I also agree with the article that believing meritocracy works is silly, given that all meritocracy I have seen was functionally equivalent to classism: the kids that had merit usually (not always) obtained that merit thanks to their parents being of a higher societal class, which enabled the kid to worry about school, not about a second after-school job they had to take in order to feed their little sibling. Obviously my example is a bit extreme, but most of the kids that have "measurable merit", have it because their family has been sufficiently high class to enable them to invest in their merit and grow it.
talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
Someone wanna tell me what they could be based on other than genetic endowment and upbringing? Is there any factor that isn't encompassed by those two categories? The unknowable will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.
Meritocracy is the worst option there is, except for all the other options.
> Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.
Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, or: since merit is mostly luck, you might as well choose your students at random. Show us how it works, Princeton!
"Another strategy of the supposed nonplayer is to demand equality in every area of life.Everyone must be treated alike, whatever their status and strength. But if, to avoid die taint of power, you attempt to treat everyone equally and fairly, you will confront the problem that some people do certain things better than others. Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who excel. Again, many of those who behave this way are actually deploying another power strategy, redistributing people's rewards in a way that they determine."
This is one of the reasons it's interesting to be married to a former high-level athlete. We've had this very argument about various situations over and over again.
In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".
I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.
(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
She could answer: penalty shoot-outs are a relatively recent addition to soccer. Before them... They'd throw a dice. So I guess they always knew that shoot-outs are just a (more exciting?) replacement for a dice roll :)
Having moved away from such a belief I can intuit why this is: Believing in merit makes you inclined to seek extrinsic motivations to act, which are known to be less powerful than intrinsic ones.
If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.
Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.
I believe in meritocracy as an ideal, but definitely not as a model of reality.
My main criticism of meritocracy as a model of reality is not privilege though; it's politics. As you approach anything resembling real success politics becomes a much stronger force than merit. I think I would have been much better off if I had understood this earlier in life, so I do agree with the idea that "belief in meritocracy (as a model of reality) is bad for you".
The author's chief complaint about meritocratic systems is that they are not meritocratic enough, and it's worth ignoring the clickbait title/thesis to look at why. Making our companies, governments, etc. more meritocratic without falling into the traps the author talks about is a worthwhile endeavour.
In general, it pays dividends to take a hard look at any selection process to see if it's selecting for the things we actually want. e.g. In politics, elections do not select for leadership or intelligence. They select for the ability to fundraise, sling mud, and evade justifiable blame. There are no easy answers, but it is worth asking how we can improve how we select leaders.
e.g. Fundraising ability is tied to corruption, which is generally bad for the public good. So, it's worth asking if we can limit the influence fundraising ability has on election outcomes. i.e. How do we reduce the influence of money on elections?
> The author's chief complaint about meritocratic systems is that they are not meritocratic enough
Why do you say this? According to the author, "merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."
I agree with OP, and I think we are just arguing semantics, not substance. If we had a way to measure objective merit, things would be great, but today's measures confound merit and "being born in a family of sufficient means to invest in your merit". I am saying we are arguing about semantics because depending on how you define the word "merit" in the previous sentence, it becomes either trivially tautologically true, or contradictory. To avoid this my phrasing would be "any practical form of meritocracy, while better than the alternatives, would involve enormous amounts of classism". Maybe better social safety nets and public education can help fix this issue.
The problem is that merit in the sense of "measurable outcome" isn't what matters -- as any poker player can tell you. In the presence of large random variation (hello, life) you can only judge merit based on process, not outcome. But process is not measurable. Even experts sometimes disagree on optimal process.
So in the end, if you want to judge meaningful objective merit, you have to fall back to subjective opinions.
This is why any attempt at objectively judging merit (in anything but highly artificial situations) is fundamentally flawed, and you might be better of giving things away by lottery, or equally to all.
----
Of course, there are outliers. There are people whose process is so obviously and irreparably bad that nobody would contest that fact. These can be handled separately.
> In general, it pays dividends to take a hard look at any selection process to see if it's selecting for the things we actually want
Before even doing that, I think we should be looking at whether there even needs to be a "selection process" at all. For example, there is no top-down "selection process" for which grocery store people shop at. Everyone makes their own individual choice based on quality and price. And the owners of the stores would find it pointless to worry about whether their store being successful--popular with shoppers and making money--is due to their "merit" or luck or something else. The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The author of this article appears to have completely missed this type of scenario. But it seems to me that the best way to "fix" society, to the extent it needs "fixing", is to make scenarios like this, where "merit" vs. "luck" doesn't even come into play, as common as possible, and to make the opposite type of scenario as rare as possible. But this kind of thinking is completely off the author's radar.
> And the owners of the stores would find it pointless to worry about whether their store being successful--popular with shoppers and making money--is due to their "merit" or luck or something else.
Wait, what? You don’t think there’s underhanded tricks in the grocery business?!
> The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The only thing they have incentive to care about is making money. Sometimes that’s giving customers what they want. Sometimes that’s using psychological tricks to influence shoppers’ behavior. Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
> Sometimes that’s using psychological tricks to influence shoppers’ behavior.
Which means shoppers have an incentive to look for such tricks and ignore them, or go somewhere else to shop.
> Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
Which in a free market basically doesn't happen unless the competition is genuinely failing to compete.
The reason such things happen when the competition is genuinely competing is governments messing with the economy on the theory that top-down dictation of policy is necessary. For example, big box stores and chain restaurants have access to cheap loans using government printed money that smaller mom and pop stores and restaurants don't. And then we argue over whether we should use "merit" to give out the cheap loans using government printed money, or something else, when what we should be doing is preventing the government from messing with the economy in the first place.
The problem here is the author essentially equates merit with luck and claims talent is "grit". There is luck involved with anything in life. But not everything is luck.
They used Bill Gates as an example, claiming other talented programmers didn't become as rich as he did. While Gates had some luck, the merit was more than just being a programmer.
It helps to identify the useful parts from the destructive parts of the philosophy.
Hard work and effort is good and helpful for the individual and society.
Pride, which can be an artifact of such work, is harmful to the individual and society. Pride can also be found in the poor, in political philosophies, sports, etc etc. It is ugly and destructive everywhere it is found.
Finally, in the narrative is also the philosophy that you can't really help who you are. Which ignores or at least minimizes your personal choices and ability to change. You can choose to work hard, it may be difficult where it doesn't come naturally - but that effort can still be made and improvements accomplished.
There is certainly some providence involved in high degrees of success. Not everyone is going to be able to reach the 5th sigma on the top end through sufficient effort. It shifts which curve you're in, it does not not place you on the curve where you'd necessarily prefer to be.
46 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadI don’t even know the word for it.
"This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons."
> they can’t get ahead on merit
"This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best."
> I don’t even know the word for it.
You're suffering from a cognitive malfunction: you seem to think that "Princeton" is waving its finger from a lectern, when it is in fact not making a statement at all. You're just reading an article in some kind of publication published by Princeton University Press.
(It's insanely easy to get in as a legacy student. Princeton has an acceptance rate of 4% for the Class of 2025, but an acceptance rate of 30%+ for legacy candidates).
And IMHO the statement Churchill used to describe democracy also applies to meritocracy: "It's the worst of all possible systems... until you consider the alternatives."
However, in practice meritocracy frequently devolves into classism: yes, the hard working kids of the families of higher class would be awarded more than the lazy kids of the same demographic. But the kids of the lower class would not have the same opportunity to invest in and grow their merit, because they would have to worry about taking a second job to help feed their family (or less extreme examples). I do not see a version of meritocracy in the USA that is not at least partially also classism, given the current state of the social safety nets.
Someone wanna tell me what they could be based on other than genetic endowment and upbringing? Is there any factor that isn't encompassed by those two categories? The unknowable will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.
Meritocracy is the worst option there is, except for all the other options.
> This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, or: since merit is mostly luck, you might as well choose your students at random. Show us how it works, Princeton!
If you stay in system and expect to be rewarded for your skills because of believe in meritocracy, this believe is actually harmful.
In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".
I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.
(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.
Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.
My main criticism of meritocracy as a model of reality is not privilege though; it's politics. As you approach anything resembling real success politics becomes a much stronger force than merit. I think I would have been much better off if I had understood this earlier in life, so I do agree with the idea that "belief in meritocracy (as a model of reality) is bad for you".
In general, it pays dividends to take a hard look at any selection process to see if it's selecting for the things we actually want. e.g. In politics, elections do not select for leadership or intelligence. They select for the ability to fundraise, sling mud, and evade justifiable blame. There are no easy answers, but it is worth asking how we can improve how we select leaders.
e.g. Fundraising ability is tied to corruption, which is generally bad for the public good. So, it's worth asking if we can limit the influence fundraising ability has on election outcomes. i.e. How do we reduce the influence of money on elections?
Why do you say this? According to the author, "merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."
So in the end, if you want to judge meaningful objective merit, you have to fall back to subjective opinions.
This is why any attempt at objectively judging merit (in anything but highly artificial situations) is fundamentally flawed, and you might be better of giving things away by lottery, or equally to all.
----
Of course, there are outliers. There are people whose process is so obviously and irreparably bad that nobody would contest that fact. These can be handled separately.
Before even doing that, I think we should be looking at whether there even needs to be a "selection process" at all. For example, there is no top-down "selection process" for which grocery store people shop at. Everyone makes their own individual choice based on quality and price. And the owners of the stores would find it pointless to worry about whether their store being successful--popular with shoppers and making money--is due to their "merit" or luck or something else. The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The author of this article appears to have completely missed this type of scenario. But it seems to me that the best way to "fix" society, to the extent it needs "fixing", is to make scenarios like this, where "merit" vs. "luck" doesn't even come into play, as common as possible, and to make the opposite type of scenario as rare as possible. But this kind of thinking is completely off the author's radar.
Wait, what? You don’t think there’s underhanded tricks in the grocery business?!
> The only thing they have any incentive to care about is giving customers what they want.
The only thing they have incentive to care about is making money. Sometimes that’s giving customers what they want. Sometimes that’s using psychological tricks to influence shoppers’ behavior. Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
Which means shoppers have an incentive to look for such tricks and ignore them, or go somewhere else to shop.
> Sometimes that’s good ol’ fashioned buying out the competition.
Which in a free market basically doesn't happen unless the competition is genuinely failing to compete.
The reason such things happen when the competition is genuinely competing is governments messing with the economy on the theory that top-down dictation of policy is necessary. For example, big box stores and chain restaurants have access to cheap loans using government printed money that smaller mom and pop stores and restaurants don't. And then we argue over whether we should use "merit" to give out the cheap loans using government printed money, or something else, when what we should be doing is preventing the government from messing with the economy in the first place.
Hard work and effort is good and helpful for the individual and society.
Pride, which can be an artifact of such work, is harmful to the individual and society. Pride can also be found in the poor, in political philosophies, sports, etc etc. It is ugly and destructive everywhere it is found.
Finally, in the narrative is also the philosophy that you can't really help who you are. Which ignores or at least minimizes your personal choices and ability to change. You can choose to work hard, it may be difficult where it doesn't come naturally - but that effort can still be made and improvements accomplished.
There is certainly some providence involved in high degrees of success. Not everyone is going to be able to reach the 5th sigma on the top end through sufficient effort. It shifts which curve you're in, it does not not place you on the curve where you'd necessarily prefer to be.