The New Yorker just had a very interesting article on the idea of Meritocracy and it covered some of the reasons why there's negativity associated with the idea. It was enlightening for me. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/is-meritocracy...

The article is in part a review of the book "The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite" (Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/y4qhruhc)

The basic argument is that "merit" is a word that pretends to be about innate ability and grit, where in reality it's a deep encoding of privilege.

EDIT: OH and I forgot the most relevant tidbit... this article says that meritocracy was a bad word right from the start: "The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness. Attributes extraneous to merit, such as gender, skin color, physical ableness, and family income, are not supposed to constrain the choice of educational pathways."

It strikes me as interesting that lots of measures seem to be "IQ plus effort" - practically speaking, though I generally want people to be more intelligent, I primarily want them to be good at what they do. So for me a system that rewards people for performance makes the most sense - smart but ineffectual, lazy, or crooked are all possible (even common), but hardly meritorious...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Definitions

So merit is essentially what I’m seeking. But I have no doubt that the people I interview & the ones we choose to hire are, on average, privileged. It would not surprise me much if I looked back on all my interview scores ever and found a high correlation between my rating and the candidate’s family income.

I think I can see how my own hiring according to merit is a good thing for my company, but potentially bad for society - if what we want is real equality of opportunity.

> That’s because education in the United States is supposed to be meritocratic.

Then why are like 30% of students at elite colleges admitted as "athletes"? I mean, sure, "best at sports" is "meritocratic" but on a dimension fairly orthogonal to educational success (just like "best at using parent's wealth and connections").

> In 1965, the student population in American colleges and universities was ninety-four per cent white and sixty-one per cent male. By one measure, this problem appears to have been solved, despite tireless resistance to the methods that colleges have used to get there. Today, fifty-six per cent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two per cent of students are male.

So college being 61% male was a problem, and being 58% female is "solved"?

I read the same article; the message I got is that it's about all of those things. You need privilege, ability, and grit.

When the system became so bitterly competitive you had to have all three, is when any equity of meritocracy started to vanish.

I agree; I was summarizing one side: the argument against meritocracy. The article did discuss other points of view, and it didn’t seem all that impressed with the book either.

This did open my eyes though, because I thought meritocracy was supposed to be a democratic or egalitarian sort of ideal, I had never thought of it as device designed for perpetuating social class divisions. (Though, I guess, what else is going to happen if you have a metric by which to rank people?)

The deeper idea is the realization that true ability and true grit still comes largely from privilege. That perhaps there isn’t equality in meritocracy and never was. Some people who are worried about money have to work super hard to make ends meet but don’t get the opportunity to develop abilities. People who can’t afford to miss a rent check or have to worry about food don’t really have the opportunity to develop grit. It’s pretty hard to have the sort of sticktuitiveness that “merit” calls for if you can’t afford to take any risks, if failing means you lose your phone, car, apartment, etc.

I guess the ‘glass floor’ article is taking the point of view that you don’t need all three of privilege, ability and grit; that privilege keeps some people in the upper echelons despite little ability or grit. I guess I don’t really know, but the question now rattling around in my head is whether ability and grit are mostly byproducts of privilege?

Coined by Lord Young, father of Toby Young.

This satisfies the idea that outsized reward should be available to those who create outsize value, but also ensures that this doesn't pass on to the idiot children.

This is especially true because the social bonds and exchange of values and information that happen between someone who is successful and their family is more likely to be successful than the average person. In other words, while it might seem like nepotism from an outward perspective, it could be merit in actuality.

Instead, I'd support very high luxury taxes. Tax heavily lavish private jets, yachts, and mansions. These are the types of goods that will rapidly drain the funds of a rich trust fund kid who offers little to society. Don't take their startup investment.

I think this is probably the core of most of these disagreements. If you approach taxation with the assumption that it's mostly just money going to waste, then yeah, you're not going to be very supportive of taxation, especially high tax rates for high income, high net-worth people.

But even if you come at it from that point of view, it has to be acknowledged that there are certain kinds of services which are almost impossible to deliver other than via the government. The private sector will not give you healthcare for all, or any meaningful mass transit (much less HSR), or properly maintained roads and bridges, or a military, or any of a thousand other things that your multiple levels of government spend money on. Yes there is some waste due to corruption or bad decisions, but for most people that is an accepted cost to getting the services that can't be had any other way.

It's fairly easy to devise a system where taxation is fair (or at least more fair), e.g. by having "pots" - e.g. tax sugar drinks, but that tax revenue goes into the healthcare pot and can be used only for that purpose. If the ostensible reason for taxing rich people is "more equality", then that money should go into the "helping poor people" pot and be used only for that purpose (scholarships, financial aid / basic income, etc.).

Obviously, there's a reason politicians don't want to do that... because that would mean they no longer have control over money and can't spend/waste it as they want.

The other issue with the pots system is that it can give people a false sense of entitlement about things which benefit them. For example, consider the commonly-held belief that gas taxes pay for all road and highway infrastructure, and that roads and bridges wouldn't be falling apart if the government would stop "raiding" the gas tax pot to pay for other things. This is trivially googleable as untrue, but the pervasiveness of this belief blinds motorists to the reality of how much their preferred mode of transport is subsidized.

So people in this mindset approach a discussion about something like subsidized train fare and it's hard for them understand why it's a good deal for society.

I'm mainly saying that it would be easier for people to accept new taxes if that was the implmementation (and specifically taxes like wealth tax that are ostensibly "to decrease inequality" and not "because we hate the rich").

But if you actually look at the rhetoric around it, the right wing party that's in opposition slams it as being a "cash grab" and a "tax on everything" that makes life more unaffordable for everyday Canadians. Literally one of the main planks of their platform this election is scrapping a revenue-neutral tax in order to help Canadian families "get ahead".

So was there any value in going to the trouble of doing the rebate? AFAICT claiming the tax was revenue neutral mostly just opened up the gov't to a ridiculous semantic argument about whether it was truly revenue neutral given that sales tax was being applied after the carbon tax. Maybe it would have been easier to just impose the tax and then pair it with an income tax cut or some kind of investment in existing social safety net programmes?

And that money would land in the states' pockets, it won't be distributed in a way that further levels the playing field.

Money in state pockets is de facto distributed to every citizen. Once it's in the state coffers, citizens can vote on its' use. You can't do that when Bezos' hypothetical idiot child has it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

Do you know many poor people with more than $11M in wealth?

(a) inflationary practices

(b) those scheming to take advantage of loopholes

in 10 or less years.

I think those on the outside would prefer merit.

Like, I think last week I might have argued exactly what you’re saying, that there’s some idea of merit that measures and reflects innate talent & effort and can be disconnected from connections and money. But is that really true? Can you actually separate them? Are you sure - certain - that talent isn’t, on average, statistically, something that you have the resources to develop only if you have a support system of money/family/friends that allows you to spend time on it?

The problem with merit for the poor and the middle class is that “merit” means you have to work much much harder than someone who’s rich to have the same merit. Hard enough that it’s rare, and we fetishize the few people who do while ignoring the fact that the net effect of the system really keeps the poor poor.

What if providing truly equal opportunity actually requires not judging people by talent, because pure talent is itself severely biased by money?

(A side note: Talent may be largely derived from riches, but rich parents definitely don't always result in talent. There can be, and are, incompetent children of the rich.)

First issue: We want the people with talent to wind up in the positions that need talent. We (society) actually need talent in those positions, rather than incompetence. It doesn't matter whether the incompetent ones are the children of the rich or of the poor; there are positions where we don't want them.

Second issue: The children of the poor (or even middle class) shouldn't be locked out of success in the economy simply because they're the children of the poor. Those with latent talent or undeveloped talent, or whatever you wish to call it, need to have that developed, so that it becomes actual talent. The school system was supposed to be the way that happened, but the school system has largely failed at that task, at least in much of the country. Now what do we do? Can we fix the school system? Or is it just a reflection of problems in society, and we have to fix the society in order to fix the school system? If we can't fix the school system, what do we do instead?

It seems to me that the biggest variable is the parents' attitude toward education. Children whose parents see the value of education will, on average, get more out of a mediocre school system than children of uncaring parents will get out of a good school system, unless they're rescued by someone - a great teacher, perhaps, or someone that they look up to. But if their social capital doesn't include people who value education, and their schools don't have great, inspiring teachers, from where are they going to get the spark?

I don't have good answers for you. I wish I did.

Yes, we do want talent to rise. But what if we're so overly worried about incompetence that we're overlooking the opportunity to increase talent across the board? What if the way we keep incompetence out is actually preventing ten times as many people with potential from reaching their potential?

Yes, poor kids shouldn't be locked out. The issue is that meritocracy may be providing the illusion that poor kids are not locked out, because they're allowed to "try hard", while in actuality being a major mechanism for locking poor people out. By filtering for the byproducts of privilege, people can claim to not be filtering for advantage while still filtering for advantage, right?

I don't have good answers either. Ideas like basic income and free education seem like potentially good starts, but there's certainly a lot of political agendas and dogmatic opinions surrounding those ideas. This week I'm just feeling like the solution somehow has to invest more in those without as much access without obsessing over the individual returns. It should be okay for society to try to educate and support poorer people and not expect each and every one to make it. For some wealthy people, I suspect their deep down collective cultural fear is that if you gave all poor people enough money to have stable home lives and not have to worry about money, and sent them all to the Harvards of the world, that just as many poor would succeed as rich succeed. That would undermine the idea that we need to filter for talent, and support the idea that we need to nurture talent instead.

Did you see the recent college admissions scandal? All of these institutions present a facade of being merit based, while in reality admitting people who have money, power, connections, are good at gaming the system, or multiple of the above.

>What would a post-meritocratic world look like? Markovits doesn’t know, and neither did Marx know what a post-capitalist world would be like. There will be less alienation and inauthenticity (as Marx believed, too); other than that, we can’t really imagine a post-meritocratic world, because the élite has made its own values everyone’s.

Really says everything you need to know about the article and the book. Taking a hard-line stance against merit as a value is foolish. You can argue the metrics are wrong or the game is rigged or that playing by the rules doesn't guarantee success, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater only guarantees more of the problems you're trying to fix.

Michael Young put out "The Rise of the Meritocracy", and thereby coined the word, in 1958 to present it as a dystopia. He satirised the then current tiered and selective UK education system, to show it as an alternative class system, just as problematic, just as corrupt. Just as likely to produce an unfit ruling class, and to create a lower or under class.

Edit: I should add that it wasn't arguing against merit per se. In modern context, the evolution of selecting by skill into all the baggage we now have around it, like soft skills and the chasing and gaming of particular measures, or hiring by whiteboard algorithm recollection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

The rich hate this, and have clung to meritocracy to excuse the fact that their children, brought up with staff to see to their needs, with education to explore every curiosity, with hobbies to learn what they like, and with resources to attend college virtually without cost, are somehow not advantaged over a child who's mother has to work two jobs to scrape out a meager living, and sees said child maybe 3 hours a day, to send them to a public school or daycare where they are treated like cattle, until they can sign up for enough debt when they barely understand finance at all, to assure they won't be able to buy a home until their thirties, at best.

It's ridiculous. The core tenet of meritocracy is a level playing field and the rich and poor have never had one, ever, at any point, and arguably could not as long as markets exist. It's just not possible.

As long as there are financial barriers to child care, to housing, to education, you cannot claim we have meritocracy. Simple as.

The only way to fix what you've brought up is to have all children be taken from their parents at birth and raised in an equal opportunity community akin to The Giver. Is that what you want?

This only works if you completely disregard the entire process through which someone attains skills. If this is indeed what Meritocracy is then it's even less adequate as a system than I previously believed.

> The only way to fix what you've brought up is to have all children be taken from their parents at birth and raised in an equal opportunity community akin to The Giver. Is that what you want?

False dichotomy. There is no possibility of a system between totalitarian child rearing by the state and a system rigged entirely and completely for the wealthy? Spare me.

The claim is that any such system would still have biases.

Though I would claim even The Giver is not truly equal as parents are still individuals with unique roles in society and thus what they impart on their children is still unequal.

So I would make a stronger claim. That level of equality is not physically possible.

We can make things more equal, but you get into the messy politics of who do we do it on behalf of (for example, why favor people living in the US over people not).

Any system built by humans has biases, thankfully we're not discussing The Giver, we're discussing our system here in the states, one that heavily biases the wealthy to the point of punishing the impoverished, and I don't believe either of those were accidental, and I also put forth that the myth of meritocracy is put forward BY those in power to dissuade criticism of it, specifically by invoking the argument you put forward, that absolute equality is impossible. Because apparently, because we can't make everyone absolutely 100% equal in opportunity (which is debatable, but hey) we shouldn't even attempt to address the gross inequality present in our system.

For example, we could provide basic income so that struggling families wouldn't need to sacrifice time with their children to provide a base level of sustaining food and housing.

For another, we could make college free, since society at large benefits from an educated populace, and since dozens of other countries have and have reaped benefits as a result. This eliminates the barriers the impoverished have to education, and stops a gutless and corrupt system from signing up the poor to an impoverished life of servitude in exchange for a modicum of opportunity.

Neither of these does anything really radical other than take back power from the wealthy, which is probably why wealthy interests lobby so hard against them. Because while the rich preach meritocracy, they only do so on the grounds that the merit is money.

> We can make things more equal, but you get into the messy politics of who do we do it on behalf of (for example, why favor people living in the US over people not).

No I'd imagine we couldn't make a system that removes the advantages given from standing NATIONS. Do you have any other ridiculous ideas you'd like to put forth?

However, if you're saying that somebody has been starved from youth and is now way behind on the kinds of skills which would help a company compete, then in a sense that person is no longer meritorious. Merit and fairness aren't the same thing, and are intuitively at odds even if you had a magical wand and could reset everyone's "starting position."

If you cannot work because you were subjected to unfair biological risks throughout life, can you continue to be a metaphorical stunt double?

The hard question to resolve is not "if we can have it all, shall we not just have it all?" The question is when merit is in tension with fairness, what do we value more? Whether the metaphorical movie comes out better? Or that the movie provides opportunities for society to correct injustices? In the context of global economy, the ones who vote on this question are the citizens of the world.

Agree.

> However, if you're saying that somebody has been starved from youth and is now way behind on the kinds of skills which would help a company compete, then in a sense that person is no longer meritorious.

While this is true, it's also an ultra-extreme example. I'm not talking about people born with developmental disabilities, physical or mental, or people who suffer accidents or traumas in life rendering them less competitive. I'm talking about perfectly able-bodied, sharp minded, sprung-from-the-uterus youngsters who's parents committed the crime of being poor in America.

Their parents crime (most not even aware it was a crime) sentences them to a youth of substandard living in homes priced far too expensively, substandard education provided by teachers trying their best in a school system that is funded only 30% as well as a neighboring one, despite having twice the students, because property taxes fund schools for some reason, which I'm sure isn't that wealthy people demand better schools and can pay for it. They are also unable to attend extracurricular activities (if they are even available) unless they can transport themselves to and from them, and of course find the money to pay for what's needed for those activities. And they also more than likely come home to either an empty home or a sleeping parent who's trying their very best to provide them a decent life, and is being hamstrung by stagnant wages, poor working conditions, and is almost certainly strung out to the edge of reason themselves, because again, this system sucks.

And even if you're absolutely perfect at navigating this travesty, which again, I emphasize, is entirely man-made and 100% controlled and facilitated by our Government and society, you are still starting out magnitudes behind your wealthy counterparts.

And if you make a mistake!? Hoo boy. Get ready to do years in prison of your most valuable time because you couldn't sleep with your stomach aching and in a moment of desperation, stole a $0.99 hot dog and got caught. That is of course assuming you aren't shot and killed in the process, again, over a dollar hot dog.

> The hard question to resolve is not "if we can have it all, shall we not just have it all?" The question is when merit is in tension with fairness, what do we value more? Whether the metaphorical movie comes out better? Or that the movie provides opportunities for society to correct injustices? In the context of global economy, the ones who vote on this question are the citizens of the world.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I'm suggesting that the value of wanting the best "stunt double" to make the best "movie" is in tension with thinking about job positions as opportunities to correct injustice, and that consumers around the world vote on this matter with their wallets. People have the same narrative for software positions and minority outreach programs.

But when you can have both values with no tension, then yes, have it all.

You can't have straight incompetence from the C-suite down without eventually running a business into the ground.

Although family money gives unfair advantages, you can make a nice life for yourself and earn above the median wage through acquiring in-demand skills through the meritocratic system. It isn't perfect, but it at least gives those who don't come from money --which is by and large, most people-- a chance at a decent life.

What are the chances at a decent life anyways? Is the chance a good one? What is the worth of a meritocracy if you do all the right things and stull only get a probability of a right life?

I dont understand the surprise these days that the exact same thing is happening. Nothing is different. I'm not defending the system. But pretending like it's a new thing will get you nowhere but a new flavor of the same shitty system because you dont understand the underlying functions or causes to the system. The Russians didn't like the tsar and his over reaching police state. They revolted and created a police state that made the tsar's antics look like a deep tissue massage in comparison.

I'm pretty surprised how people fail to notice the similarities between meritocracy and aristocracy. I don't think it's an obscure fact that aristocracy is meant to be "the rule of the best or the fittest"; and it's so obvious that it failed and degenerated to a hereditary mess that we invented a different word to express the same idea.

Hey, maybe this time will be different and we will get it right, but I don't think mocking those who are skeptics of the term and try to draw attention to the ideological usage will help us.

Restore to when? Where's the point in history where we had greater social mobility and equality of opportunity?

There was massive government involvement -- the wartime economy was not very Adam Smith, starting with the fact that it could draft its labor. This also set the tone that a CEO's salary & benefits might be like a general's. But also many sectors were tolerated monopolies, or close, for decades. People got promoted up the ranks, rather than having bidding wars.

There was high social cohesion, carefully curated for the purpose of winning big wars, and helped by almost zero immigration for 4-5 decades. There were only a few TV stations and they pushed a wholesome christian vision.

The stage of technology was such that big factories could use all the semi-skilled labor they could get, and churn out products which improved everyone's standard of living. It helped that energy was cheap. And transport was expensive, so there was little foreign competition in most goods. And that the pension promises they signed in good years were mostly far from coming due.

It's unlikely we're going to see circumstances like that again. We have to figure out how to make things work with the world we have today, not try to return to some bygone era that was actually really horrible in a lot of ways for a lot of people.

I just think it's worth trying to understand all the ways in which society and the world were different back then. In part so as not to be too easily seduced by anyone offering one of them in isolation as a solution.

> America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.

The 50-50 odds are exactly what I would expect from a nation in some sort of societial equilibrium.

https://www.marketplace.org/2009/10/06/how-gi-bill-changed-e...

If you think you're being clever, you really need to read up on the legacy of the GI Bill. Perhaps, you could start by reading the article I linked to.

If it's going to college that fuels social mobility, then more people going to college today than in 1940s and 50s should mean more social mobility today. Since allegedly the opposite is true, there must have been something else different between 1940s and 50s and now, that has nothing to do with GI Bill funding more people going to college.

If you think you're being clever

There's no need for snark.

you really need to read up on the legacy of the GI Bill. Perhaps, you could start by reading the article I linked to

If you have a point, please make it explicitly, instead of having me guess it.

Straight entrance numbers are not the best comparison.

When people realized that the guy who starts with a billion dollar dad and a buy in to harvard is being graded on the same scale as the guy who started in a trailer park with a single mom and community college.

You can't have a meritocracy without the same starting point, and you can't have that in real life.

edit: I actually doubt the son of the billionaire gets graded on the same scale as the trailer park kid. my guess is it's pretty hard to fail a course taught in a building named after your dad, but maybe that's overly conspiratorial.

Tell me when exactly was this golden age of black people (for instance) in the USA not facing systematic discrimination, because I don't think that one ever arrived.

Situations like that cant exist, and still have people claiming with a straight face that the system is a meritocracy.

The alternative is: "well there's this one girl that's a sex slave somewhere in the world... FREEDOM IS A FALSE IDEAL, EVERYBODY ABANDON SHIP!!!"

Because its not, and the absurd shell games that get played to pretend it is are extremely harmful to society as a whole.

You are making a straw man argument that I am "winging" that one person is disadvantaged, therefore the entire system is flawed. That is not the argument I am making.

The argument I am making is in fact a majority of the population (Black, white, or otherwise) is greatly harmed by the myth that the American economic system greatly rewards "merit", how many poor white rural people become CEOs?

Um... does anyone actually believe that “myth”? Last American election was a trust fund kid vs wife of former president... so anyone who still thinks it’s “all meritocracy 100% of the time” is beyond stupid.

But that doesn’t make it a bad ideal. In fact, I’d say that, if anything, that would be an argument that we need more meritocracy (again, just like equality and freedom).

Meritocracy is great, but not when you start with unequal conditions, and make it difficult at every stage in their lives for folks to escape their predicament and do better.

Proponents of meritocracy see it as an ideal to strive for based on the idea that the most competent people should fill the most important roles. It's about trying to make society better through competence.

Opponents of meritocracy see it as a cover for privilege. They see people who are unfairly privileged using meritocracy as an excuse to reward themselves for their privilege.

This is how I would characterize the debate, anyway. It's hard to say whether anyone is arguing that only incompetent people should fill important roles. Nor do I see anyone trying to claim privilege doesn't exist at all, that everyone starts from an equal blank slate.

Ultimately, I don't see any way of breaking this impasse. At least not unless we succeed in creating a post-scarcity society where rewards for filling important roles are at best symbolic and everyone has all their needs met, regardless of ability.