> how dare these serfs with good test scores defile our institutions

It's worth noting that the term "meritocracy" was actually coined by somebody criticizing the serfs defiling sacred institutions.

I still haven't figured out why meritocracy is supposed to be a bad thing or exactly what is going on with it.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. - the man who coined the term.

Basically meritocracy can turn into classism, and due to accumulated advantage it can entrench. Everyone has a chance in theory, but in practice advantage compounds.

There's also the simple human welfare problem that vicious never-ending competition every minute of your life is exhausting & demoralizing.

Basically the average person hears it and thinks "smartest/best for the job objectively" which sounds fine, but in practice is often shorthand for "prestigious is better" aristocracy. One of those things where there are multiple levels of interpretation talking past each other.

Except that it’s a replacement for literal aristocracy.

In a truly genuine meritocracy, everyone would have the same opportunities in terms of upbringing, schooling, college etc. If resources were scare (such as an elite private school for kindergartners) then the most talented children would go there, not those whose parents had lots of money.

In practice this doesn't happen - some children have massive advantages compared to others. To then take all of these children and one day try to use an objective measure to decide who gets access to yet more advantages is obviously going to massively favor the non-meritocratic-to-that-point advantaged children.

So yes, a true meritocracy may be completely fine, but in the real world "meritocracy" is. anything but.

What you're describing is an equal opportunity society. That's a worthy goal, but trying to redefine "meritocracy" to also mean that results in confusion at best.

Without a common language communication becomes impossible.

The normal definition of the word is that those who are best at a task should perform it. The most competent applicant should be hired for a job. If a billionaire's kid happen to be best, because of all the private tutoring they got, that's not really relevant for a meritocratic decision.

Meritocracy makes it harder to select to meet political/social justice goals.

Meritocracy is unfair because most merit is unearned. For example, I am very smart, I won national math olympiads, but I didn't spend much effort to be good at math. Showering me with advantages feels deeply unfair.

I mean, if some job requires being good at math, I agree math ability should be considered. It's just that I don't think it should be high status or prestigious.

There are a lot of tasks where quality and correctness is more important than fairness. If we could even agree what fair actually is.

Meritocracy requires established experts to select candidates based on merit, which is quite different from the masses selecting candidates based on popularity (democracy).

I disagree with the experts part, after all under meritocracy Einstein is the greatest scientific mind of the 20th century however he wasn't even able to get a job in academia until after he produced ground breaking results.

I think that was the implication -- that experts are often wrong. One could go the No True Scotsman route and say that a true expert would occasionally select randomly following a Bayesian Bandit approach for optimal decision-making.

Is a Harvard education really that spectacular anymore or is it more a social indicator? Feels like it’s prominence has wained over the past couple decades.

The education is probably nothing special but it's more about the social network.

If you cut down on legacies then you lose the advantage of the social network. Kind of a catch-22.

Not entirely. If the selection process ensures that the brightest (and luckiest) minds are all together, they will still be able to benefit one another over time, even if they didn't gain access to capital or connections beyond their cohort.

Amazing to think that one movie could change a college's appearance so profoundly!

What movie?

> Is a Harvard education really that spectacular anymore or is it more a social indicator?

Harvard has always been a social indicator that is also decent educationally in some areas (but not, AFAIK, superlative in any undergraduate field.)

It is not clear that formal education in general is a causal factor for lifetime income, or merely a symptom of the same underlying cause(s).

if Harvard is not spectacular then what is? I mean what is replacing it’s role?

MIT

Princeton

IIT

When IIT research is knocking people's socks off, let me know.

I was thinking more about power shifts, not inequitable comparisons :D

They probably believe that their target market (i.e. donors) would consider it an advantage if their offspring would study together with people with "good lineage" (e.g. children of foreign leaders) - and I don't think that they're mistaken, I think that they likely know their market characteristics better than me or you.

It has more to do with the donations to the university that came from their bloodline predecessors.