
Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does has bad effects - pm24601
https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you
======
mreome
I can't help feel like including any discussion of the ultra-rich such as
Gates as an example when discussing meritocracy confuses the question. That
level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved
by luck, as there is no possible way one person's skill or merit can exceed
that of his peers by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude. Basically, that kind of
wealth is more like winning a lottery where their skills bought them a ticket.
I suppose the question then becomes, could you still say there is a
meritocracy if there are outliers who win the lotto? Do you discard those
outliers and look at the general population, is the existence of such of
outliers counter-evidence to meritocracy, or does the fact that the kind of
"lottery" Gates won still required a high level of skill to even play mean it
may to some degree support the idea of a meritocracy?

~~~
povertyworld
I stopped reading that article when he implied that Gates' wealth should be
considered or measured in relation to programming skill. Debates about
meritocracy are important, but starting from flawed frame like that made me
not want to invest more time reading that particular author. If he wanted to
compare Gates to other technology entrepreneurs, that might have been
worthwhile, but implying that we don't live in a meritocracy because there are
better programmers than Gates shows the author is not interested in a rigorous
look at the issue. I wasn't surprised to see Bill Gates clickbait at the top
of the Apple News app, but I was a little bummed to also see it on the top of
HN. Then again, I still clicked it and commented on it, so mission
accomplished for Fast Company I suppose.

~~~
peterashford
Maybe you shouldn't be commenting if you didn't read the article

~~~
veryworried
I disagree. _Many_ people do not read the articles. You can easily tell by
taking the number of unique users commenting on articles and comparing to
standard marketing metrics for shared articles.

And they don’t need to read anyway, because comments are the real reason
people come to a site like this. If the comments praise the article highly or
make strong references, then perhaps it warrants a read, otherwise the
comments make for much better content. You can often tell what the article’s
main idea is from the headline anyway, otherwise it’s just a bad headline and
probably a bad article.

------
curtis
I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than
many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who
occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in
general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The
problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street
and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am
in no way qualified to be your lawyer.

Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of
doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a
tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we
"abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards
at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at
McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to
find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first
Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to
live in a modern society.

------
jimrhods23
Just as bad for you is believing that hard work and intelligence will get you
nowhere. The reality is somewhere in between.

~~~
Waterluvian
I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work
an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that
means consistently delivering B+ results.

~~~
dictum
> Play the game well enough.

An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an
awful lot like a gambling house.

(Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" —
it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if
one desires to do so)

~~~
aphextron
>An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an
awful lot like a gambling house.

Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games.
You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at
doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to
succeed, so most pick the former.

------
Grustaf
As already stated, Bill Gates and other billionaires are pretty irrelevant to
this question. Nobody really cares what it takes to become a billionaire,
almost nobody will become one anyway.

What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do.
Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_
hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come
from average backgrounds.

So yes meritocracy most certainly exists.

~~~
YjSe2GMQ
If you forget about the question of why is it that someone's parents are rich,
parental socioeconomic status has comparable power in explaining children
success as the child's IQ has. Reference paper: "Intelligence and
socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research", Tarmo
Strenze.

------
stared
I view it more or less that way:

log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck

Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success.

American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.

For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the
above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L).

People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L).

You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an
environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may
not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a
problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be
dead ends?

Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have
achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less
privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest
millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league
university?)

For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L
than most meritocrats would like, vide

"Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be
assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432)

Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills
are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in
the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it
turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for
a person of my profile").

~~~
lotyrin
I'm not really sure how else to see it. It's pretty straightforward to show
that the simplest possible model is some kind of probability density function
with inputs of skill and privilege and a wide distribution and a very long
tail due to cumulative effects. Not having various skills will obviously
preclude certain outcomes (probably can't buy 86-DOS and produce PC-DOS if you
couldn't understand the technology), not having certain privileges will
preclude others (can't sell PC-DOS if you aren't in a position to meet with
anyone to try) and some outcomes beget further possibilities (unlikely to have
grown Microsoft and produced Windows if you hadn't have sold PC-DOS). Luck
being the realization of such a probabilistic model into finite outcomes.

Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some
very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.

------
gweinberg
The authors demonstrate meritocracy doesn't exist by defining it out of
existence: even if your success could be entirely due to intelligence and hard
work, you don't deserve the genes and life experiences that made you
intelligent and hard working.

~~~
Barrin92
so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or
unrepresentative?

Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy
in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who
makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone
else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it
is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.

If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of
meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and
intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?

I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses
the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy,
and it is a blatant myth.

How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?

------
amelius
How about believing it _can_ exist, with appropriate changes in fundamental
market mechanics?

~~~
rosser
> _The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied
> attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based
> compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that
> explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater
> rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance
> evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not
> explicitly adopted as a value..._

 _They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly
adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona
fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine
their own behavior for signs of prejudice._

Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue
monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.

~~~
asabjorn
This study needs to be replicated before its conclusions are taken seriously,
because much of sociology is known to be deciding on a conclusion in line with
intersectionality ideology dogma before writing the paper and producing papers
with extreme methodology flaws. See the sokal hoax for a recent very clear
expose of this academic bankruptcy

~~~
TelmoMenezes
The Sokal Hoax happened in a journal of "postmodern cultural studies", not
sociology. Furthermore, it was an academic essay, not an empiric and
quantitative study.

Can you point to anything akin to the Sokal Hoax that happened in the context
of sociological empirical studies?

Also, if you don't trust sociologists in general, replicating the study will
not convince you anyway. It is a good idea to replicate, but it is not a good
idea to care about the opinion of those who dismiss entire scientific fields
based on ideological prejudice, be the field sociology, immunology, climate
science of evolutionary biology.

~~~
asabjorn
The point I am making is that the premise seems to be politically motivated
and not scientifically. They even redefined meritocracy to fit an
intersectional paradigm in the same way as the sokal hoax papers showed.

I fail to see how it’s interesting that people with different capability as
well as possibly willingness to work doesn’t succeed at equal rate in
intellectually demanding jobs.

Meritocracy is when such people of different class backgrounds succeed at
about the same rate on average. Intersectionality muddles that water in an
unhelpful way.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
I understand your point. I work with sociologists and I also follow the
ongoing "Internet cultural wars". People like Jordan Peterson (who I don't
either dislike nor agree 100%) really brought these matters to the forefront.
His criticisms of postmerdernism are somewhat relevant, but they are also
exaggerated. Some corners of "postmodernist academia" are as bad as he paints
them, but not all of them, by any means.

Even the Sokal scandal is somewhat simplified. It was not so easy for them to
get the paper accepted, in fact they were rejected many times by other
journals. This is rarely mentioned.

The cited work in TFA compares performance evaluations with raises. It found
that _for the same performance evaluations_ , an explicit focus on meritocracy
leads to worse monetary outcomes for women. That seems fairly objective and
methodically sound to me, and not at all related to Sokal-style bullshit.

The income gap is a complex topic, and it is clearly not as simple as either
extremes of the cultural wars paint it. It is not true that the pay gap is
100% due to discrimination against women, but it is also not 100% true that
such discrimination plays no role. As usual in real life, there are nuances
and complexities that cannot easily be reduced to simple slogans.

Silicon Valley has a religion-ideology that we have no name for yet. It is a
very American kind of Protestantism with zero gods. I know the environment and
I know what I'm talking about, even though I accept you might disagree. My
view is that the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalists are not as rational as
they would like to think.

It is true that Sociology has a left-wing bias. In my view, this is true of
all academia. There was a time, not so long ago, when academia had a right-
wing bias. This too is a subject of sociological research :)

~~~
asabjorn
Those are good points. However, I do think we will look back at the large
amount of postmodern literature inspired by Foucault and deidre as obfuscatory
to knowledge seeking.

They essentially wrap simple concepts within a format that require immense
effort to parse, maybe to present an intellectual challenge or to obfuscate
what is actually said. Great for staying fashionable as a tool for showing
academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops due to the amount of studying
needed to pierce the veil, but not so great for knowledge seeking.

To me it seems like what they are saying are:

\- culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault
marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)

\- culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)

\- either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power

These are interesting to some degree, but not when used to argue for a
deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists
have.

I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views
contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> Those are good points. However, I do think we will look back at the large
> amount of postmodern literature inspired by Foucault and deidre as
> obfuscatory to knowledge seeking.

Postmodernism, at its core, is precisely a criticism of conventional
epistemology. I am not a postmoderinst, but I do find that some of their views
are interesting, or at least worth considering. I would not be surprised if
you are right, and that postmodernism goes down in history as a fool's errand.
In any case, I think that it is good that people kick the foundations of
knowledge to see what happens. If nobody does that, it becomes very easy to
fall into religion/ideology without noticing.

To borrow a term from another thinker who also hates postmodernism (I think),
knowledge should be anti-fragile.

> showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops

You are absolutely right about this part. Just don't think that Sillicon
Valley's Matcha Tea Boutique Shops are so different. The environment is also
full of terms and clichés that mostly serve to signal tribal alignment, that
really say nothing new and only create a barrier of entry for outsiders: "let
us create a curated list of use-cases for under-the-radar angel round startups
that are attempting to leverage blockchain technologies for adtech verticals."

> culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault
> marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)

Right, but he also has some interesting things to say about our relationship
with the "mentally ill", how that relationship is different in other societies
and why our approach may be pathological for all of us. For example.

> culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)

Some might say this, but overall culture is just taken as a powerful force
that shapes the reality we inhabit. The thing is that, if one doesn't cherry-
pick, some postmodernist ideas actually became mainstream. "We inhabit
narratives."

> either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power

I think this is mostly true. No problem if you disagree, but it doesn't seem
like such a crazy hypothesis to me.

> but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into
> identity groups like postmodernists have

This is a confusion between postmodernism in general and "grievance studies".

> I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world
> views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.

For me, the academic duty is to think seriously and independently. Any other
red line only guarantees that we get stuck in local maxima. I think that the
unusual views should have a place, and knowledge seekers should make an effort
to understand them if they are going to criticize them.

------
RickJWagner
Per Webster, Meritocracy: a system in which the talented are chosen and moved
ahead on the basis of their achievement

Of course meritocracy exists. If it didn't, I'd be a professional athlete
instead of a programmer and I'd make a huge salary.

Or maybe I'd be an astronaut, or a brain surgeon.

Thankfully, meritocracy exists and allows the truly gifted and hard-working
people who excel at those jobs to hold those spots.

I think I make a pretty decent coder. But I'd just stink on an NBA court, in
brain surgery, and probably in a space shuttle.

------
hprotagonist
_If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in
skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two
deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or
he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.

The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny
the cat._

Chesterton, 1908

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
The quote is great (added it into my collection), but what is the cat in the
context of this discussion?

------
raymondh
Multiple social priming studies are cited. This is a warning flag given how
replication crisis was most pervasive in that entire field.

------
amelius
What would happen if we'd apply PageRank to the problem? I.e., everybody gives
N votes to other people. Then we'd put everything in a big matrix, compute the
first eigenvector, and obtain a ranking. And then we'd distribute wealth
according to that ranking.

Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.

~~~
RugnirViking
Even without SEO, I wouldn't say that the best websites are the top results -
they tend to be those most broadly applicable. Which works okay perhaps for a
search engine

------
Glyptodon
I think aspiring to the meritorious (ethical, wise, knowledgeable, dedicated,
etc.) being successful seems like it'd be good, rather the problem isn't so
much "meritocracy" as it is believing that meritocracy is an existing norm,
rather than being more of an aspirational Avalon.

------
ickwabe
"On the Media" podcast this week addresses this as well. Worth a listen.
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-
merit...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-myth-of-meritocracy)

------
tacon
Commentator Alain de Botton explores the darker side of a western ideal:
meritocracy.

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=320002...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3200029)

------
darawk
Pure communism doesn't exist, pure capitalism doesn't exist, pure fascism
doesn't exist. Pure ideals of any kind don't exist. Meritocracy exists _to
varying degrees_ all over the place, and it's something we should be striving
for wherever possible. There are good arguments for temporary exceptions to
meritocracy to, say, correct historical inequities, but it's extremely
important that those be viewed as temporary roadblocks on the ultimate path
towards a society that is as meritocratic as we can make it. Which, by the
way, doesn't necessarily mean that those low on 'merit' need to be left to
die, we can still provide a good life for even the least economically valuable
individuals, but yes, those who are providing the most economic utility to
society should get to consume more of that utility.

> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is
> great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There
> are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed
> to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have
> merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other
programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on
tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he
chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you
go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved.
But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies
provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize
people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if
the rewards weren't enormous.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Gates didn’t take much of a risk, he was never going to be homeless if his
plans didn’t work out. He is pretty much the perfect example if you want to
prove we don’t exist in a meritocracy.

~~~
darawk
Gates absolutely took a risk. He devoted many years of his life to something
that may not have panned out. He could have spent those same years working his
way up at say, IBM. Opportunity cost is a real risk. It's not the same as
being homeless, but that doesn't make it not a risk.

------
lukaa
Laws of nature are in every person identical so it can't be both luck and hard
work in different people in different amount.You cross street on green light
and 160 mile per hour car kill you.Everyone would say bad luck determine that
man life.If person get money on lotterry everyone would say good luck
determine that man life.But if person get richer every day by medium amount
people and end up being rich people say hard work determine that man life.If
you accept that hard work determine man life than you must accept that lottery
winner get his money through hard work.Otherwise you must accept that person
that worked hard just got lucky most of days by medium ammount.Sorry for my
english.

------
tomp
Equality doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad to have it as a goal / ideal.

~~~
hprotagonist
As was pointedly observed in Harrison Bergeron, _sameness_ and _equal
treatment under the law_ are not the same.

To attempt to have the former is folly; to attempt the latter, sanity.

------
_bxg1
> As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo,
> explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order.

I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the
social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life.
That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even
as elites use it to take advantage of them.

I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors
together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random
luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of
wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently
exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You
(or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of
itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to
rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and
connections, etc.

------
gubbrora
> Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called “grit,”
> depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

It is sad that some people are born dumb as a rock but we shouldn't make them
math professors out of pity.

~~~
cortesoft
Agreed... but we also shouldn’t make them suffer and starve.

The bad part of the ‘meritocratic’ world view is not that having people who
are good at certain tasks do those tasks is a bad idea, it is that thinking
those people are more ‘deserving’ of a good life is bad.

People that are good at math should be math professors, but we shouldn’t think
they are morally superior to the person born dumb as a rock, nor do they
deserve a better life.

~~~
liaukovv
They deserve a better life as they can contribute more to the society, in
effect building this better life.

~~~
cortesoft
That is one perspective on what make someone deserving or not. I disagree, but
I understand it.

------
your-nanny
what this author fails to do is propose an alternative that captures what we
like about meritocracy, but avoidsvtgese unintended consequences.

------
joeblow9999
No one deserves or merits any success they have achieved.

Got it.

------
jesuslop
What remains, hustling?

~~~
Gibbon1
That's one of my three pieces of advice for young engineers.

Learn to fucking hustle. Learn to say no. Learn to know when to leave.

------
caprese
There are two issues I've identified:

1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that
people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that
with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement
based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing
to prove otherwise.

2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is
counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized
skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is
trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more
productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme
selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in
isolation.

So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the
pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important
and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.

------
ropeladder
Obligatory note that the word "meritocracy" was coined by a sociologist in
mid-century England as a distopian ideal, distopian because it was used as a
bad excuse for privilege and the withholding of social services.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy)

