Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
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Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
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Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#2If you're fine with a system that rewards those who grew up in middle class and above families and punishes those that don't then I disagree but okay. But don't call that a system based on merit when you're quite transparently admitting it's not.
Meritocracies are an inhuman system which, to the extent they can be realized, only happen incidentally. How many of the relatively well to do people on this board subvert the meritocracy every day by giving their children every little advantage that tons of families just simply never could give their children. What would it take to make a meritocracy work? Ironically it would take a great flattening. But precisely because they believe in gain from advantage, the biggest proponents of meritocracy can never argue for the one thing that would actually make their system work. So instead we end up in this weird limbo where merit is actually subverted over and over again by a highly stratified social/economic makeup that begins in childhood and has strong persistence throughout life. "Actual" meritocracy may arise from time to time as a result of society spanning tragedy but will also quickly disappear and that doesn't exactly seem like the type of thing we should be aiming for anyways.
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#3If you're fine with a system that rewards those who grew up in middle class and above families and punishes those that don't then I disagree but okay. But don't call that a system based on merit when you're quite transparently admitting it's not. Meritocracies are an inhuman system which, to the extent they can be realized, only happen incidentally. How many of the relatively well to do people on this board subvert t…
They address this in the article. Meritocracy doesn't mean dropping your children in the forest and stripping all advantage from them.
The whole point of a meritocracy is to be the best you can. Giving every advantage to your children that you can afford is the whole point of meritocracy. It's not "fair" but it produces peak performance, like the article says
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#4_
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#5The issue of meritocracy often turns semantic. Different realities can be justified with the same word depending on people's conception of justice and efficiency.
The other aspect not mentioned is that a society can be meritocratic, but the peak performance that results does not necessarily lead to work that is useful to society in aggregate. I am reminded of Jeff Hammerbacher's infamous quote: "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." That quote is simplistic to humorous effect of course, but it underlies an important natural run-off effect of meritocracy: that much activity is redistributive instead of creative. That's why thinking simply in terms of atomized individuals (as articles on meritocracy written in English usually do) pitted against each other leaves aside too many important questions and outcomes.
edit: to add to this, the last paragraph of the article is deeply ironic since you have people fighting over scraps precisely because smart people have captured much of the pie growth, and did so in a way that would be considered meritocratic by the author.
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#6Problem is, the proponents of meritocracy defend you shouldn't care for those less performant because, well, they don't deserve it.
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#7Shot:
"Fa(ir|re) is what you pay to ride a bus."--LT Nicholson
Chaser:
". . .general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."--Jon Postel
This is how the individual meritocracy helps all: keep the expectations low, and the outputs high. Fairness you locate under the sun has a metaphysical component. People are carnivores by nature. Let your merit, if it be real, build others.
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#8_
We do live in a meritocracy, which favor those white, middle class, mediocre males you complained about, because they got all the advantage and thus became good about it.
But selecting the best had nothing with fairness or ensuring that everyone is educated.
Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point
#9>Hiring people who are “good enough” is simply not good enough. There has never been, and never will be, a team that won the world cup by selecting players who are “good enough.”
This isn't actually true. You can have a team full of good enough players that can win championships.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beat...