
Down with meritocracy (2001) - walterbell
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
======
javajosh
I'm having a really hard time understanding what this article is about. I've
re-read it like 3 times. I think it has something to do with the UK's civil
service and it's connection ( _connexion_ , excuse me) to the education
system, and in particular the kinds of degrees and certificates required to
enter civil service. The author seems concerned (although I'm not entirely
sure) that these hallmarks of merit are out-of-sync with the qualities that
actually make a good civil servant. E.g. government becomes increasingly
staffed by people who themselves have passed these official tests, gained the
Official Seal of Competence, and therefore only empathize with other people
who've passed these tests, leaving the rest to their fate.

So, you get a government full of people who are brilliant test-takers.

The first Men-in-Black movie when Will Smith's character is being tested for
induction was kind of a commentary on this, in that Smith was the outsider
candidate, non-conformist, street-wise but perhaps not big on theory, and his
competition were all hyper-competent well-educated civil servant types; and
Smith's unique perspective was key to passing that battery of tests! A triumph
against the meritocracy.

But then again, was it? At the end of the day, Smith got his "MiB" badge of
Merit, and no doubt he would someday proctor the self-same test that got him
into the organization.

I am still confused.

~~~
awakeasleep
The base assumption of the article: We've moved away from ancestral privilege
(think: inherited titles of nobility) to an era of ability based privilege
(think, the smartest and hardest workers can advance their position in
society).

Important sub-assumptions: 1) In Great Britain we believe people can be
roughly said to fall in 'classes' 2) Nobles of the past were aware their
position was a bit random, and they felt an obligation to the classes below
them. AKA "noblesse oblige".

The points the author tries to make are: 1) We lose "noblesse oblige" because
the successful people are now taught that they're successful because they
deserve it, and unsuccessful people are unsuccessful because of their faults.
2) The lower classes lose the ability to speak for themselves, because their
natural leaders or people of talent are recognized in school, and bumped up a
class instead of being forced into the positions and careers of their parents
regardless of aptitude.

~~~
javajosh
Cool. That sounds reasonable. What, then, is the solution? Do you go back to
random, birth-based social status?

------
nitwit005
If there is a new upper class today, their oppression doesn't seem all that
severe. I don't recall the former nobility handing our free health care or
education.

Sure, the people in power today believe they deserve what they have, but so
did the people in power before. If you're worried about that sort of
arrogance, at least we don't have kings believing they rule by divine right
and nobility believing they're carrying out God's will through their king.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
> I don't recall the former nobility handing our free health care or
> education.

Don't be fooled. Those things only exist because the people have an avenue of
influence through the government.

Typically, people had to die in their fight for concessions and recognition of
rights from the upper classes.

Both state sponsored healthcare and public education are actively fought
against by the rich.

~~~
nitwit005
Honestly, I doubt that. Even if you arbitrarily removed all voting power from
the poor in the UK today, you'd still have public schools and some form of
public health a decade later. Those ideas are quite popular even among the
wealthy.

If you look back, you'll see public education became a thing partly because
the wealthy pushed for it. They understood they would benefit.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
Look at the US. Public school funding is being gutted in favor of vouchers or
charter schools.

~~~
nitwit005
That's still handing out free education. They have political beliefs about
that approach providing better results, but it's not as-if they want to scrap
the idea of government funded education.

~~~
cmurf
College education isn't free in the U.S. There isn't enough capacity for
everyone who wants to go to college, to actually get to go to college. Those
too poor to afford it, have to compete amongst each other for limited grants
and low cost loans. Those rich enough, pay cash. Everyone else gets a loan.

~~~
nitwit005
Or, stated more positively, the government gives the poor subsidized loans so
they can go university.

I'm not really seeing heavy handed oppression by a cruel upper crust.

~~~
cmurf
No that's not true, not everyone who wants to go gets to go.

Why bother being overtly oppressive when the vast majority go into massive
debt to get a college education, enriching banks in the process; while the
upper crust use pocket change to get the same because, afterall, their family
is so deserving of this merit.

~~~
nitwit005
I didn't say everyone who wants to go gets to go did I? I just re-stated
things positively.

Guaranteeing that debt costs the US government quite a bit of money, which
means there is an overall transfer of wealth from rich to poor through taxes.
Again, it seems more like this has to do with American political ideas, rather
than not wanting the poor to be educated.

Incidentally, it would appear that you are out of date, as they started
lending directly in 2010, instead of lending through banks.

------
Houshalter
Did he really coin the word? I found a few results searching Google books in
the 19th century. Sadly Google won't let me read them. Are books that old
really copyright protected?

~~~
brownbat
I found some journal articles that were published after Young, but the journal
was founded in, say, 1890, so Google ngram viewer gets confused.

Also, I found some entries with the word "mediocracy" or "mordacious" giving
false positives on the search (bad OCR I guess).

------
shrewduser
so what's the point of this article? that merit is good but maybe we don't
always measure it well?

because honestly: duh.

Look at tech companies vs say law firms, one will employ you even if you've
never been to university they only care what you can do, the other considers
merit to be being a straight shooter from a young age getting into a
prestigious university then grad program etc etc.

meritocracy is an ideal, it's something hard to achieve but something to
continually strive for.

also this author does not clearly present an argument.

~~~
Dr_tldr
Alternatively, a top company will hire someone straight out of undergrad with
a CS degree from a top engineering school, but they won't hire the guy who
created Homebrew because he doesn't have the algo for reversing a binary
search tree memorized.

The problem with meritocracy is that it implicitly depends upon a heuristic,
and heuristics can always be gamed or inadvertently biased, no matter the
industry.

I think this was part of what the author was trying to say, but I agree with
you, it's a poorly written and wishy-washy op-ed.

~~~
seivan
They didn't implemented meritocracy then. They just compared the value of
papers.

Max could have lost to someone who has spent all their life as a social
activist and has degree in humanism, womyns studies and various other bullshit
with friends at Google. That's the point of what meritocracy is trying got
avoid.

~~~
Dr_tldr
They didn't compare papers at all, they compared proficiency at a well-defined
and concrete task with an objective standard, and he was worse than a recent
CS grad. But who decides a task is or is not a measure of merit?

And really, who decides a career social activist with good soft skills who can
save the company 50 million in lawsuits and bad press has less merit than the
engineer who may work for years on a project that ultimately gets canceled?

