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
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.