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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Do we have evidence to back up that assertion? Or more generally, a firm definition of what we mean by "merit" there?
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.
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.
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.