
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you - plessthanpt05
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
======
recursivedoubts
Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy
wholesale or reject it entirely.

Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit
is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient,
particularly, for extraordinary success.

By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing
"or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people
usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it,
especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be
given proper account as we morally reason about things.

~~~
gotoeleven
Rejecting meritocracy entirely as an ideal to even strive for is pure poison.
How could a society possibly function if it doesn't elevate competence above
incompetence and expertise above charlatanism? I think we're going to find
out!

~~~
recursivedoubts
I think one of the reasons smarter folks tend to fall into manichean thinking
on luck vs. talent is that, as the level of success grows, luck plays a larger
and larger role. So it is an emotionally powerful fact for people competing at
the higher end of the success curve.

The mistake is generalizing this proportionality across the entire society
and, thus, giving too much weight to luck and not enough to merit.

Discussing luck in the case of billionaires makes a lot of sense. Discussing
luck in the case of a successful franchisee in town makes less sense.

~~~
gotoeleven
Success comes from merit, luck, and corruption in some proportion. In
successful countries merit is a larger portion than in unsuccessful countries.
When people say the entire concept of merit is %PEJORATIVE BUZZWORD% so we
should stop striving for it what they are really saying is they want success
to be allocated by luck and corruption and they think the corruption will
benefit them.

------
Grimm1
This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such,
"Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they
think it is meritocratic."

Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.

That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This
leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and
selfishness the article discusses.

However, a belief the world _should_ be run meritocratically does not
necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even
the playing field" and make it more so.

The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world
is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less
clicks because frankly, no shit.

~~~
pdpi
The biggest issue with the idea of a meritocracy is defining merit.

One recurring issue I've seen throughout my career (and I have to admit to
having fallen for this trap when I was younger) is, as an engineer,
overvaluing technical merit and undervaluing both interpersonal and
product/business skills.

~~~
Grimm1
Yeah I personally believe a senior engineer or lead is defined by the latter
married to the former and that the latter becomes much more important at that
level.

So I agree that defining the useful characteristics to evaluate for merit is
very difficult. I personally don't know what the right system would be I just
more often then not see people who have no business being at the senior level
or management level etc etc have no business being there as I would evaluate
it.

~~~
pdpi
> have no business being there as I would evaluate it.

That's the key insight here. "As I would evaluate it". We simply don't know
enough about most topics to be able to evaluate merit. Likewise, we don't know
enough to choose _the people who can_ , beyond simple heuristics like "they've
been working on this for decades, they should be good".

For example, we can probably agree that Trump is a bad president, but who was
better — Obama or Bush? While I have an opinion on that, I also know that
opinion is dominated by my political leanings, and I don't know nearly enough
to cogently answer that question.

~~~
Grimm1
Oh I'm certainly aware in fact that is probably the seminal issue of the idea
of merit -- it's not an objective quality.

Applied to a small system of homogeneous groups it's probably fine, as applied
to society it falls apart.

------
vorpalhex
Bad citations in this article.

Original article:

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

Linked article (on 'depend') has the following conclusion which explicitly
disagrees with this claim:

> Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples
> representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of
> grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with
> performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with
> conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has
> significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest
> facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic
> performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our
> results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have
> weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit
> is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie
> in the perseverance facet.

Further, the logic here is unsound:

> 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.

The author asserts Gates was successful because he was a good programmer, and
that therefore other good programmers should have equal success. Yet most
people understand Gates is not an amazing programmer but rather has his
strengths in understanding business. Microsoft did well because of business
positioning in a new and rapidly evolving field, not because they were a
revolutionary future codebase.

~~~
1980phipsi
I would add that Malcolm Gladwell talks about how much Gates had been
programming at his age compared to other people at the time. He wasn't
competing with nearly as many people as programmers today are.

------
HuShifang
It's fair and fine to critique the implementations of "meritocracy" that we
see in the world, and also to critique the inflationary aspects of how it's
usually articulated (e.g., person X is good at taking calculated financial
risks that result in lots of money, therefore that person is "good" and should
possess political power and authority).

But the sort of rhetoric presented here risks throwing out the baby with the
bathwater. If you attack also the noble parts of the meritocratic ideal --
impartial, universalist fairness -- what's to stop you from winding up with
what amounts to a caste system wherein unfair a priori privileges go
unexamined and treated as merely "the way things are"? (Which, historically,
is the norm for human societies?)

Far better to reconstruct meritocracy, or replace it with a new iteration,
that 1) provides genuine, unfettered opportunity to all individuals _at all
stages of life_ (so, for instance, one can obtain education, however defined,
at any age) and 2) grants only domain-specific authority, without making false
generalizations about aptitude (e.g. someone who's good at X isn't sloppily
regarded as having some sort of a priori genius that also makes them good at Y
and Z).

~~~
Miner49er
> what's to stop you from winding up with what amounts to a caste system
> wherein unfair a priori privileges go unexamined and treated as merely "the
> way things are"?

I don't think you have to have meritocracy to avoid this. The way I see
meritocracy is it is a tool for those with priori privileges to fool
themselves and others that they are deserving of those privileges. It's
slightly more convincing (and therefore more sinister) then just justifying it
with "the way things are".

But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where
nobody has these unfair special privileges?

~~~
HuShifang
> But really I don't see why you need either system. Why not a system where
> nobody has these unfair special privileges?

I guess I tend to think that a reconstructed meritocracy would be precisely
such a system -- genuine equality of opportunity, as an ideal constantly
striven for and with far more pressure applied to actually have it realized,
even if it never purely is -- and that there would be no real alternative
means of realizing this in practice. (Reconstructed meritocracy would in my
view require remediation of unfair special privileges for coherence.)

I completely agree re: the problems of the current meritocracy and its
deployment in illegitimate self-justification, and accentuation thereof --
having been a grad student / instructor at a "fancy" school, for instance,
I've seen the awarding of an A- as the mean and mode grade (the modern
incarnation of the "gentleman's C", at least outside of STEM subjects, i.e. an
average performance earns the second-highest possible grade) defended on the
logic that it's "really, really hard to get in" to this school, so _any_
undergrad student who meets the bare minimum requirements of the course must
be deserving of an A-. It's heinous and unfair. But without meritocracy, it
would be worse, as this would be a scenario in which there's not even a need
to defend the unearned grade; rather, it would simply be "the way things are"
\-- hence the use of the term "gentleman" (i.e. someone from the "correct"
socioeconomic background/family/etc.) in the original phrase. (And yes, maybe
grade inflation wouldn't happen without the sinister side of our present
"meritocracy," but "gentleman's C"s didn't stand in the way of many elites who
got them and went on to wield considerable power and authority.)

It's a complicated issue, to be sure, and much depends on how one defines
one's terms, but I guess the bottom-line for me is, without meritocracy
there's no need to "show your work": it's simply accepted that some people
have access to power and others don't. In the early 20th century, if you told
someone you went to a fancy school, they'd probably say "You must be rich"
rather than "You must be smart." Today they'd say the latter, even though the
former is often true, and the latter often not. But before the advent of even
this flawed meritocracy, the person who went to the fancy school would still
have unquestioned access to power in a way that even smart poor people
wouldn't, even if everyone knew it was unearned.

------
tomp
This article tries to make a moral point by (ab)using intellectually dishonest
arguments.

It blatantly attempts to confuse meritocracy as a _value_ / _goal_ and as
_state_ / _belief_. Replace "meritocracy" by "freedom" or "equality" or
"justice" or "safe driving" \- it's a constant struggle, a distant goal that
we're continuously falling short of, and obviously the belief that we've
achieved that goal results in less effort expanded towards it and falling more
behind. That's not a _paradox_ , it's just _logic_.

 _> the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in
the world is demonstrably false._

False dichotomy; why not both?

 _> In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes
survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it
comes to getting ahead_

Again, why not both? How many successful people are there that _didn 't_ work
hard? But yeah, obviously you need to be lucky, you won't achieve much if you
die at 5 from malaria.

 _> 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_

That's not a failure of meritocracy, it's a failure of a specific policy used
to implement meritocracy. Managers / police / judges / assassins are not
impartial? Implement policies that enforce more impartiality (in this study's
case, if you have a statistical benchmark to compare "performance evaluations"
of different employees and contrast them with managers' appraisals, why not
use that statistics _itself_ to dole out rewards?)

------
mindvirus
I wasn't a big fan of the article, it feels too nihilistic.

I do agree that recognizing extrinsic vs. intrinsic factors in success is
important for empathy and to help others - i.e. looking at work given your
circumstances not just work - but it felt like it ended without making a
conclusion. Is it asking us all to become fatalists? And does that somehow
make for a more empathetic and just society? I feel like it wouldn't - if we
believe that none of us are in control at all, why do anything to help others?
And doesn't a belief in meritocratic ideals mean that we should be going out
of our way to remove barriers? For example, I found this article[1] that
talked about income mobility in different countries.

An interesting question it made me think of though: in separating luck versus
grit, what is your prior?

For example, we'd probably all agree one is lucky to be born in a wealthy
country, and that if you are you have inherent advantages. And that the
circumstances you are born to are pure luck.

If growing up you had strict family (lucky or unlucky depending) that forced
you to have good study habits, and you did well in school in a large part
because of those habits, which in turn opened up other opportunities - is that
luck or grit?

If I stumble across a good mentor, then go out of my way to learn from their
teachings is that luck or grit?

If I'm starting a company, and I make 100 cold calls to find my first customer
- do we attribute that to luck or grit?

If through exercise, genetic luck and healthy eating I'm able to stay healthy
throughout my life, is that luck or grit?

[1] [https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the-
income-...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/moving-up-the-income-
ladder-takes-generations-how-many-depends-on-where-you-live/)

------
ve55
Perhaps these authors should suggest some sort of alternative, if they wish to
convince people that meritocracy is not only not the case, but is actively
harmful. Else it seems no ideal is truly being put fourth, only talking down
at the status quo. How would they prefer things worked instead?

~~~
tedivm
The idea that we only should examine and evaluate our systems if we have a
better proposal already set is a dangerous one. If you don't understand the
flaws in the first system any system you design after is doomed to repeat
those flaws. At the same time the people who are criticizing a system may not
be the best to design a new one, so putting up imaginary hurdles just works to
protect the status quo.

~~~
mindvirus
That's a fair point, and I agree there is value in just identifying flaws. The
flip side though is that it's easy to find flaws in any system since there's a
large surface area - and the author is not just pointing out flaws, but saying
the system is wrong. At the very least, I'd argue that we should hold people
to at least trying to quantify the flaws they see in the system, especially
when making such strong claims about it. Otherwise, how do we affect change?

------
mathattack
Oh the irony of this coming from Princeton! They accept a third of alumni
children compared to 5.5% of everyone else. Is this meritocracy or luck?

[https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton-...](https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2020/06/princeton-
admissions-legacy-athletics-recruitment-testing-waitlist)

------
kepler1
I don't think people should either deceive themselves about the existence of
or the downsides of attempting to follow pure meritocracy. Nor should they
ignore people who have been disadvantaged.

But when we create a system for recognizing / rewarding / incentivizing
achievement, with rules that are not unreasonable, people want others to
follow the rules that have been created! Not creating hole after hole in a
system to fix things that are not the direct fault of the system.

Social beings want rules and structure to know how to interact and what to
expect from each other, and the systems in which they live. You will produce
unexpected bad side effects when you keep shifting people's expectations about
what seemed to be a reasonable system, that people lived their lives by.

Otherwise, let the picking and choosing of who your favorite beneficiary
(today) of semi-meritocracy is continue.

------
fchu
The article makes very nuanced points that don't transpire in the title, and
thus get straw manned in the comments. Here are the salient points:

\- The article says nothing against creating a fairer world (aka equality of
opportunity)

\- Many believe that the world is meritocratic, which is not the case as there
are many cofounding factors (plenty of which we don't have control over) that
get in the way of finding a causation between hard work and outcome.

\- The paradox of meritocracy: believing you acts meritocratically results in
less fair outcomes.

\- Being grateful to the impact of luck makes you more generous and fair.

\- Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-
worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as
an insult and threat to what we have and are

~~~
DFHippie
> Meritocracy can be used as a justification of our own success and self-
> worth, so in this situation any criticism of meritocracy can be perceived as
> an insult and threat to what we have and are

This last point is why I expected to see commenters here indignantly raging
against the article.

------
ca_parody
I am sympathetic to the practical issues & biases at play when discussing the
systems we often call meritocracies; especially when those systems result in
anti-meritocratic behavior.

However, what is the reader supposed to come away with here as an alternative?
Equality of outcome? Should it really be that any given combination of work
ethic, dedication, novelty, and a bit of luck will not land you above the
mean? I personally am all for improving meritocracies so they live up to the
name, but abolishing them due to their implementation failures seems silly and
more importantly, the alternatives are dangerous.

~~~
Symmetry
Well the traditional alternative is that you inherit your profession from your
parent. In terms of political leadership this would be aristocracy but it was
pretty common for others too. Men with the last name "smith" expecting to
follow their father in becoming smiths for example. But of course levels of
employment in different jobs are nowhere near as stable as they were back
then. Not too many smiths around and we've gone from 80+% of people working as
farmers to less than 5%.

I suppose you could have everybody randomly assigned to jobs. Or you could
people have a list of preferences and to the extent that there are more
applicants to a given job than open slots randomly assign them then move the
other applicants to their next slot.

------
tengbretson
> Luck exists – checkmate people that value hard work!

Yawn.

~~~
vmchale
I also find it plausible that advancement is allocated based on
work/virtue/etc. more in some societies and systems than others.

------
sradman
> 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.

I think Marc Andreessen addressed this when he asked whether team, product, or
market was the secret to success. He concluded that product-market fit was
key. Bill Gates found product-market fit several times; luck it was not.

Perhaps "market meritocracy" is a better way of framing the question.

~~~
jonathankoren
That still doesn’t explain it. There’s no obvious product reason why Netscape
should have won compared to Spyglass. Bill Gates talking about product-market
fit when Windows and Office’s success based on illegally leveraging the DOS
monopoly, is particularly rich.

There are multiple studies that have compared luck with skill, and luck is
always the dominate factor. You can event simulate wealth concentration with
fair coin flips. [https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-
game](https://github.com/jonathankoren/oligarchy-game)

Most damningly there (which sadly I can not find right now) where the
university created a bandcamp like site, and has people listen to the bands,
and recommend them to each other. The idea being that the most talented bands
would be the most successful (plays, stars, whatever). The twist was that they
A/B tested the community. (For example if there were 1000 listeners, they were
split into two 500 person groups, with no interactions between them.) They
found the most important factors determining success were random.

~~~
cameldrv
Spyglass didn't. Microsoft may have started from the Spyglass codebase, but I
don't imagine there was much left by the time IE 4 was released. The Netscape
guys like to talk about how Microsoft's monopolistic practices killed
Netscape, but by the time of Netscape 4.6 vs. IE 4, IE was a far superior
browser in speed, stability, and CSS support.

At the time, it was really Netscape's market to lose. It was not difficult to
download Netscape, and in the IE 2/IE 3 era, that's what everyone did.
Netscape just stopped being the best and didn't recover until Firefox was
released.

~~~
jonathankoren
I used Spyglass back in the Mosaic Communicator and Netscape 1.1N days. There
was no real difference. The big draw of Mosaic Communicator over NCSA Mosaic
was in-line jpegs.

You could have easily replayed the world and Spyglass and Netscape’s fates
would have been switched, because they had identical products in an identical
market.

~~~
cameldrv
Well things moved pretty fast back then, but in my recollection, Netscape had
progressive rendering (i.e. you didn't have to wait for everything to load
before the page was rendered) and Spyglass didn't. I believe IE 1.0 (derived
from Spyglass) also lacked that feature. Spyglass might have worked OK on a
university network, but over dialup, progressive rendering was a killer
feature.

------
djrobstep
The two main problems I have with the concept of "meritocracy" are:

Incoherent/circular definition: Nobody can actually tell you what merit really
is in a specific way, so we end up just measuring it by existing social
status. "This guy made it into Harvard Business School and to F500 CEO, he
must have a lot of merit". But maybe he got into Harvard because his rich
parents were donors and then leveraged those connections for his CEO job, no
merit involved. This thing that is meant to determine social status is
measured by social status itself and is thus useless.

Meritocracy doesn't fairness or justice or compassion or dignity: Imagine a
society which is one big ongoing gladiatorial tournament, meritocracy is
defined purely in terms of combat. This would be a very meritocratic society -
but would also be a very brutal, unpleasant, and unequal one. If meritocracy
can still result in all of those things, what use is it really?

------
qntty
Focusing on who "wins" and who "loses" and what role luck plays has an
important ideological function. It makes it seem like the outcomes of the game
are unquestionable.

Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who
gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and
who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions
that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The
only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.

Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're
going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole
game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the
kind of fairness that really matters.

------
cameldrv
Many people in the thread seem to be talking past each other, I think because
a meritocracy has different presumed purposes.

Purpose #1 is to make society more fair, in that in principle anyone can rise
to the top, and you're not held back by your position of birth as in an
aristocracy. Even in a true meritocracy though, you may still be held back by
innate talent or upbringing.

Purpose #2 is to make society run better. This happens in two ways: More able
people are selected for more responsible positions, so that hopefully
decisions with more impact are made by more qualified people. Secondly, people
have an incentive to try to become more qualified so that they can occupy
these more responsible positions.

------
xondono
A lot of comments here point out to some of the more obvious flaws of the
article.

To me what shocks me the most is that there isn’t even any discussion on “what
is success”. The author apparently measures success just by net worth, which I
can’t avoid but feel sad for him/her.

------
DenisM
It's very important to have this conversation out in the open - contempt for
meritocracy is a persistent undercurrent of the social strife in the west, and
left unattended it will derail most efforts to improve our society.

------
mytailorisrich
Believing that the system is meritocratic is not the same as believing that it
_should_ be meritocratic.

Meritocracy is the fairest system for individuals. Achieving it is an endless
struggle.

------
PeterStuer
Oh my, this required some digging.

The article relies on an experiment that basically presented a gender stacked
(70% male, 30% female) panel of MBA students with hypotetical company with a
set of hypothetical "core values" and then looked at how these influenced
managerial bonus allocation decisions.

They test three sets of "core values", A,B and C (see below). They labeled A
as "meritocratic values" and B and C as "non meritocratic. They find there is
a male bias under A, a female bias under B and no bias under C.

They then conclude their pre-assumed hypothesis, that meritocratic values (A)
favors males, is valid. When they stumble upon as strong a female bias in
their "non-meritocratic" value set (B), they they decide it might be down to
wording and look for a wording to make that disappear (C) They never try to do
a similar rewording of (A).

They never seem to see how they are fishing for the desired outcome, never
consider alternative explanations (people that are prompted they "earned"
their position tend to look for similar traits in subordinates) etc.

The conclusion we can draw is MBA students seem to be potentially influenced
by the wording of value statements in hypothetical reward games.

As promised, here are the 3 hypotetical "core value" sets as worded:

Set A: labeled "meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be rewarded fairly";

(2) "whether employees deserve a raise is determined by their performance";

(3) "raises and bonuses are based entirely on the performance of the
employee";

(4) "promotions are given to employees when their performance shows that they
deserve it";

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to reward all employees equitably every year.

Set B: labeled "non-meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";

(2) "whether an employee deserves a raise is determined by their manager";

(3) "raises and bonuses are to be given based on the discretion of the
manager";

(4) "promotions are to be given to employees when their manager decides that
they deserve it";

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year

Set C: labeled "non meritocratic"

(1) "All employees are to be evaluated regularly";

(2) "performance evaluation forms include a quantitative as well as
qualitative component about the employee's performance";

(3) "performance evaluations are part of the employee's official personnel
file";

(4) "performance evaluations are discussed with each employee every year"

(5) "ServiceOne's goal is to evaluate all employees every year

------
julianeon
"The world is a meritocracy" is a bit of a straw man, because who really
believes in the Platonic ideal of a meritocracy?

The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle
Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct
proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more
meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.

No one believes this nonsense.

What happens is, individual _companies_ believe they are meritocratic - not
the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.

The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the
meritocracies cited in the article.

> 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.

Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation _is_ your merit. They
should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them.
Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours,
consistently, my salary should be too.

I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it
to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes
2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this
department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make
more.

Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in.
But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by
performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based
on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti-
meritocratic, after all.

So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic
language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - stick
to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.

~~~
BrandonM
A factory worker who makes 2x as many widgets doesn't make 2x as much money in
my experience in US industry work. The way it typically shakes out is that the
workers are part of a union, and the union negotiates compensation and
benefits based on length of tenure. In some cases, the factory and union
determine a "quota" level of production, and any production in excess of that
garners a small bonus. Assuming that 1x is the quota, and the median worker
makes $15/hr, producing 2x over the course of a shift _might_ result in an
extra $5/hr. Even that number would be higher than I've typically seen.

------
rydre
Why do so many people aspire for meritocracy everywhere? Imagine if there
really was meritocracy in the political system. All we would have is someone
who would pander to the local population and eventually lean to be xenophobic
as a process.

This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not
allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular.
Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process
works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.

Free for all will _always_ eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more
tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always
chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.

------
WellDuh
Can someone "on the left" please shed some light on how they reconcile the
following three beliefs?

    
    
      1. Jobs should be handed out on merit.
      2. Protected class X has been educationally disadvantaged.
      3. Representation of class X in the workplace must 
         match their representation in the society.
    

It would seem that one out of three has to be given up, and meritocracy is an
obvious choice, as the article suggests.

