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?
> 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 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.
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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.
Comments
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?
> 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.
Wait, what? You don’t think there’s underhanded tricks in the grocery business?!
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.
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.