Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

The author accidentally touches on the blind spot of American meritocracy, but speeds on and never looks back:

> There’s nothing fair about the fact that some people are born into good circumstances which confer a tremendous headstart in life. There’s nothing fair about the fact that so many of society’s most accomplished individuals grew up in upper-middle-class families that nurtured them, raised them well, and gave them access to highly regarded schools and teachers.

If you consider “meritocracy” to begin when someone applies for their first job, you might not care about that. But there are two glaring problems:

One, on an individual level, selecting the best at a given point in time ignores less measurable attributes, like “grit”. The candidate from a poor background who went to an okay school at night while working to support their family may be more motivated to improve than someone who coasted by at a good school due to parental connections.

Two, on a societal level, being born into good circumstances in no way correlates with innate abilities. By privileging those who grow up in higher socioeconomic classes, we are leaving behind individuals who have undiscovered latent talents that might otherwise make large societal contributions.

Without fixing those two things, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that meritocracy will produce “peak performance”.

For those opposed to meritocracies as described by the author: what alternatives are you suggesting? Should the top performers not be the ones who get the lions share of the spoils?

Interesting!

Do you have a specific example where it seemed to work fine for you?

(The example where I learned was in diverse web communities, including Wikimedia.)

I would offer the friendly suggestion that perhaps the concept of fairness is not even relevant here.

We want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility. This is not a fair distribution of responsibility. The fairest system would be a lottery: picking people completely randomly, without regard to socioeconomic status or "merit".

Given that we want the most competent people to be in positions of responsibility, "winning the genetic lottery" is ok, because some people are just born with natural talents. But "winning the socioeconomic lottery" is not ok, because there's no apparent correlation between the wealth of your parents and your personal competence.

Again, fairness is tangential to this problem.

Meritocracies work in a very formalized context, like sports, where you can have a single criterion that can be measured objectively and determines the whole activity, because it's possible to prevent gaming of the criteria (even in sports you have this problem with illegal stimulants). The point is sophistry, when you say unbiased clearly nobody is including merit as one of the biases, the problem with meritocracy is that people actually believe in it outside of very specific conditions that make it possible and then confuse non-meritous biases that have yielded profit/status for merit.