
The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve? - nlte
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-meritocracy-who-really-gets-what-they-deserve
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j9461701
>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality

No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital
and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10
research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a
research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great
Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce steel in their back
yards was overall much less productive than a few massive steel plants with
dedicated professionals and experts on staff would've been.

Instead meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world, so
that those who have more have earned it and those who have less earned that
too. It is an impossible ideal, obviously, but the point is to strive for it
always even knowing we can never reach it.

>As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent,
and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main
classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they
deserve.

The problem with this hypothetical society isn't that the most meritorious
have more wealth, but rather that they have _all_ the wealth. Although those
with the most merit do deserve a bigger slice of the pie (IMO anyway), they
obviously don't deserve _all_ the pie. One of the benefits of meritocracy is
the old phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that isn't true if the top
percent eats all the benefits of their own capital investments.

>The ideal of meritocracy, Young understood, confuses two different concerns.
One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth.

It's not a confusion, it's just how humans are wired. "Moron" originally had
no negative connotation, but over time it gained a profound one. Similarly
"plebeian" wasn't originally an insult, but now it is. Heck the ultimate evil
force in most stories, the "villain", derives his name from the latin term for
a low status farm hand (villanus)

Anything associated strongly with the "least efficient" rung of society will
inevitably become tainted in this fashion, as human beings are inherently
status-oriented creatures looking for some way to put down others and elevate
ourselves. It's an unfortunate part of our nature as a species.

~~~
notacoward
> a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete
> with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000.

And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either
is a cornerstone of the free market. If everything is better when centralized,
then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be
equivalent anyway)?

> Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all

That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes
distribution is. It varies from field to field, from time to time, and the
ideal is rarely found at the extremes. The problem Young sought to address is
that various factors tend to pull us toward a non-ideal extreme, and that
tendency must be resisted.

~~~
collyw
>then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be
equivalent anyway)

Because most governments seem corrupt to some extent or other and we don't
trust them. Free markets seem to solve this problem to some extent. The
degrees to which people believe these two statements seem to be the basis for
a lot of left right / politics IMHO.

~~~
notacoward
> most governments seem corrupt

And a single company effectively functioning as a government (minus democratic
accountability) would be better? Free markets only solve that problem through
_competition_ , which precludes the kind of centralization the GP was
advocating.

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roel_v
This article somewhat seems to assume that 'everyone is good at something'
(although at the end it veers towards 'it doesn't matter if someone is good at
anything', so it's a bit unclear at that). But anyway it seems that people
only think that to make themselves feel good, as logic dictates otherwise. Say
there are 10 traits in which one can be good (some of such traits are
enumerated in the article, but let's say for the sake of the argument there
are 10). They are more or less independently assigned; and if they're
correlated at all, that correlation is positive (being good looking and
athletic, for example). Then it follows there will always be people who are
above average on more than 5 traits, and there will be people where it's the
other way around. There will be people who are great at everything, and some
who suck at everything. Yet I don't see that addressed in pieces like this.
What is the counter argument from this school of thought?

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sharemywin
That their is a lot of traits that can't really be measured. There are other
traits that a good for some purpose but are a hindrance to another. Many that
aren't innate. A lot of tasks that only require proficiency. And then how do
you value each trait against another.

Then, there's the whole topic of values. And what values are important to your
organization.

~~~
imustbeevil
But that doesn't address the point. If we take two people, and one person is
better at everything we can measure, the conclusion cannot logically be that
the person who is worse at everything "must be good at something we aren't
measuring". There's absolutely no data to support that conclusion, because the
conclusion is literally based upon the idea that there is missing data. That's
bad logic.

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mkingston
“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the
power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has
become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin

~~~
badpun
It's the only known way to organize society which incentivises people to
develop and use their talents. Hence, the incredible material wealth of
current Western world vs the universal poverty and misery of communist
countries.

~~~
mkingston
I agree. I shared the quote because I found it concise, insightful and
relevant. I do wonder, though, whether meritocracy has gotten away with itself
somewhat. It has enormous utility. But in its current incarnation doesn't seem
to respect the dignity of those it disempowers. I think the point of the
quote, and the article, is that those of us it's empowered ought to bear that
in mind.

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sergefaguet
All this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality
is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough
questioning nowadays.

I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of
suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that
it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives.

Inequality can be described as one of the major drivers and consequences of
progress that has in fact lifted all boats.

And if the best way for society to progress is to be extremely unequal and
dictatorial (e.g. Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore in modern time; an AI-driven
superdictatorship in the future; the Medici family launching the Renaissance
in Florence in the distant past) then equality, democracy etc. should go away.

The best thinking on this subject recently came from Yuval Harari. Humans are
biochemical machines that process information according to the laws of
physics. So – what possible reason is there for us to value these biochemical
machines all earning the same number of points on some abstract metric? And
what happens when we build better machines? Or clone one person a trillion
times?

The idea that equality to another human matters as much (or more) than
technological progress, biological immortality, understanding the universe
etc. is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego. That cannot bear the idea
that another monkey has more bananas or female monkeys.

fuck equality.

~~~
notacoward
When you ignore _degrees_ of in/equality, you're basically setting up a false
dichotomy. Exact equality might be unhealthy, but so is the drastic inequality
of the old aristocracy or (more arguably) the new one. As with many things,
the extremes are stagnant end states, but they have their own sort of gravity
(think "attractors" in chaos theory). Life is found _in between_.

> The idea that equality to another human matters as much ... is a fucking
> stupid remnant of our monkey ego.

Well, sorry, but it's not going away. Study after study has shown that
relative affluence, not absolute affluence or any other factor, is one of the
strongest predictors of happiness. In other words, relative privation is a
predictor of unhappiness. It might not be _suffering_ but, nonetheless, if you
want to offer a superficial and unacknowledged restatement of utilitarianism
("the greatest good for the greatest number") then you have to consider what
actually makes people who are not you happy or unhappy.

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epx
The conflict is simple: parents are stimulated to give the best upbringing
possible to children - the prize is standing out the crowd - but at the same
time it does not make much sense to be #1 in a wasteland.

~~~
quickthrower2
In addition systems are in play that make it impossible for most people in
poorer circles to give their children a kick up into a higher class. Some
people get lucky but on the whole people aren't moving. Anything new that
redreses the balance e.g. education is ultimately for sale to the highest
bidder, plus I'll add another observation that the rich don't need to spend so
much time on survival, they have more time to learn the tricks of staying
rich.

To eloborate on the education for sale. Think of real estate prices near good
high schools for example. Plus the high number of 1%ers in the top
universities. I recently watched The Riot Club and thus film in an exagerated
way sums it all up.

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bassman9000
Once we're all finally equal no one will be special.

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gaius
Self-awareness leading to cognitive dissonance

