Here's the issue with meritocracies: They pursue individual excellence at the expense of group excellence.

We know[1] that a more diverse group creates better group outcomes than a non-diverse group where specific individuals may have better performance. Even from a wholly selfish perspective for the people running a project, prizing diversity of qualified individuals over a pure meritocracy is the right play.

From a "making the world a better place" perspective where some altruism is shown, it also helps to acknowledge that not everyone has all the same advantages and tailwinds so that it is fundamentally more difficult for them to have had all the same opportunities and advantages, and providing those opportunities and advantages to them gives them that chance to even the playing field. The amount of unconscious bias built in to humans also means it is difficult for us to be effective judges of ability for those that are not like us. You don't have to be racist/exist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. to have built in biases - you just have to be human. They're difficult to overcome without explicitly stating goals around it.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&as_vis=...

I agree with the last paragraph of your comment. However, the “wholly selfish” economic argument for “diverse” workplaces is management consultant bullshit which is not supported by the evidence. Here’s an excerpt from the first article that comes up in those Google Scholar search results:

> The result of [social] categorization processes may be that work groups function more smoothly when they are homogeneous than when they are more diverse … This analysis is corroborated by findings of, for instance, higher group cohesion (e.g., O'Reilly et al. 1989), lower turnover (e.g., Wagner et al. 1984), and higher performance (e.g., Murnighan & Conlon 1991) in more homogeneous groups …

> In contrast to the social categorization (and similarity/attraction) perspective, the information/decision-making perspective emphasizes the positive effects of work group diversity. The starting point for this perspective is the notion that diverse groups are likely to possess a broader range of task-relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities, and members with different opinions and perspectives … Corroborating this analysis, some studies find an association of diversity with higher performance and innovation (e.g., Bantel & Jackson 1989).

> In their simplest form (a main effect of diversity), neither analysis is supported. Evidence for the positive effects as well as for the negative effects of diversity is highly inconsistent (Bowers et al. 2000, Webber & Donahue 2001, Williams & O'Reilly 1998) and raises the question of whether, and how, the perspectives on the positive and the negative effects of diversity can be reconciled and integrated.

The case for workplace diversity needs to be argued on social justice principles, because there isn’t enough evidence for the economic efficiency argument.

The word 'meritocracy' was coined as a derogatory term about the education system in England in the 50s in a satirical text. It mocked the idea that such a thing could exist because the system obviously wasn't designed for it. If you value "intelligence", but only give rich people access to good education, then you've just created a two-step process that selects for rich people.

Ok, so what? It's not used in that context anymore. It's the same pitfall as the master/slave/blacklist/whitelist/etc. arguments: people have a problem divorcing historical meaning from present-day usage. Meanings change and evolve over time. If we follow this stunted logic, then there's going to be a lot of other English words/phrases that need to be banned as well. The only people associating them with their historical meanings are those wanting to ban the phrases. These etymological fallacies do nothing but pointlessly divide people. It needs to stop.

The term was coined in a derogatory manner because the person who coined the term thought it was a ridiculous concept.

No one is saying ban the word meritocracy, but people are saying that if you're arguing for one, you've missed the point.

The concept that was considered ridiculous was only giving rich people access to the resources to make it in a meritocracy.

But for a while, the UK actually didn't do that. New universities were created, "grammar schools" were mostly replaced, new hiring practices adopted, and the stranglehold of the establishment was broken a little bit, for a little while.

That was because as ridiculous as the original idea might have been, good people with good intentions started to believe in "meritocracy", and used the idea to make changes.

The present-day usage of the term still refers to an impossibility.

I don’t think this is an accurate summary of the book. The satirical history of the “modern education system” in chapter 3 describes how funding for public education was increased, and students were aggressively streamed into different schools based only on IQ tests. Eventually expensive private schools went out of fashion because they were attended only by students who couldn’t get into the best public schools, so they no longer conferred academic prestige. Early in the book, capital levies are introduced which prevent the building of new fortunes, and in chapter 7, an Equalization of Income Act is passed so that all citizens receive the same basic income. The meritocracy is transformed into an aristocracy not because “merit” is a proxy for heritable wealth, but because “intelligence” (as defined in the book: “the ability to raise [economic] production, directly or indirectly”) is also heritable, and in the book this effect was amplified through eugenics. You can find a more modern and less satirical take on this argument in Fredrik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart.

it's not like what their doing is rocket science

And, yes, I believe the world would be a better place if we followed these rules with many projects regardless of the field.

Btw, there are some interesting facts about the history of the word, "meritocracy": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy#....

A recent PEL episode went into why meritocracy is not as good as it seems: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2020/10/12/ep-254-1-sandel...