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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

#51

Post by _qulr »

remote_phone wrote: post #34
sjg007 wrote: post #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...

Paul Graham says differently. You need to hire A players because otherwise B players hire B and C players and water down the strength of the startup.

> Paul Graham says differently.

It was Steve Jobs.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#52

Post by uberman »

kiba wrote: post #8
spacekitcat wrote: post #4

_

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.

A proponent of meritocracy would not favor anyone described as mediocre. That is kind of the whole point.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#53

Post by jakelazaroff »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #46
jakelazaroff wrote: post #41

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 gav…

The article literally lists examples of things that would help people with undiscovered latent talents. Access to education, unemployment insurance, universal basic income...

It mentions those as ways to share meritocracy’s prosperity with everyone. I’m saying that things like that are necessary for meritocracy to exist in the first place.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#54

Post by crististm »

jariel wrote: post #35
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #21

The hardest lesson I ever learned (the hard way!) was that meritocracy doesn't work in practice. At some point in time, some people accumulate more credit/reputation for their work, and can use that to earn more credit more quickly. This then snowballs as these people pull ahead of others out of proportion to their actual contributions. This makes a Meritocracy an unstable equilibrium, and such a system will not rema…

No, meritocracy works fine. It's far from perfect, but the 'special case' you describe is actually rare. There are people who are brilliant and hardworking in the academic sense slinging coffee for life, because both those attributes will result in 'good grades' which is a really good proxy for other things in life.

Hi there! If you pay attention to the ratio of pro vs against meritocracy rants in this page you will find some interesting (anec)data. Make your own conclusions!

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#55

Post by jganetsk »

Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents".

There are a few great books written about this recently:

- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel

- The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day.

Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#56

Post by Bakary »

jganetsk wrote: post #55

Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good…

>Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy

On the contrary, this aristocracy is doing extremely well. It is now served by the labor-driven meritocracy you describe. There is intense competition between elite knowledge workers for the privilege to serve modern-day nobles.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#57

Post by umvi »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #46
jakelazaroff wrote: post #41

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 gav…

The article literally lists examples of things that would help people with undiscovered latent talents. Access to education, unemployment insurance, universal basic income...

I'm sure those things would help some people, but probably not as much as you would think. I always see "access to education" as if lack of good teachers is the main thing holding disadvantaged kids back and not their trainwreck of a family life where the single mom working 2 jobs and didn't graduate high school herself has no idea how to help her kids and lets them slip into truancy like she did.

Making the public school system take on all of the roles 2 parents used to take on is not sustainable. We need to fix the problem at a more fundamental level.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#58

Post by tyu2 »

jganetsk wrote: post #55

Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good…

It's not ironic, such dystopia is particularly liked and promoted by capitalist scumbags, because it lets them justify exploitation, inequality, overwork, etc. But of course for any thinking person it's obvious that it's an awful awful idea, as if a kid raised by well educated parents who can therefore do really well in school deserves more, than a kid raised by uneducated parents who have no idea how to teach kids to do well in school.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#59

Post by _qulr »

jariel wrote: post #38
svrtknst wrote: post #12

In my opinion, all talk of meritocracy, when applied, is irrelevant. I mean, it sounds good in principle, but in most applications, there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate in any given situation. Yeah, sure, we have some highly specialized environments, such as sports, where we have parameters to select from, but as much as no team has won by selecting players who are good enough, few teams if any…

"there is no simple way of determining the "best" candidate" There is, it just so happens many people applying are already good by virtue of their credentials. What you are not seeing are the zillions of truly unqualified people show up. If you want to gain some confidence in meritocracy, then simply open up your next dev position to literally 'anyone' and start interviewing 'random people' for that high paying job.…

> But it's mostly highly meritocratic at least, each hiring mechanism is in isolation.

Why view it in isolation? To me, the interesting question is how the hiring manager got into their position.

Referring to the sports analogy of the previous comment: how do you become a sports team owner? Not by being great at sports, but simply by having a ton of spare money. And some pro sports team owners are really bad at running a sports team.

Most of us in the system are more or less fighting over table scraps. You can't really measure a so-called meritocracy without looking carefully at those in positions of power. We seem to only focus on the lower levels of non-manager worker drone hiring.

Re: Meritocracies Are Unfair – and That's the Point

#60

Post by sanxiyn »

cs702 wrote: post #31

Many people, including me, feel differently about two different kinds of unfairness: * We are OK with the unfairness that stems from "winning the genetic lottery," which confers an unfair advantage regardless of the socioeconomic background of parents . Most of us want a society in which the most able, talented, hard-working, persistent among us can put those qualities to work for their most productive uses. * We are…

I am not okay with unfairness stemming from genetic lottery. Sure, I agree those with genetic lottery should be able to put those qualities to most productive uses, it would be waste otherwise. On the other hand, they probably shouldn't capture the most of produced value, since it is mostly unearned. There is a reason lottery earning is heavily taxed.
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