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>Meritocracy: a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit [0]
It seems to me that Meritocracy is an unfortunately vague word. Given that, it's difficult to say much definitively about the US with respect to it. The American dream and the idea that if you work hard enough you can succeed are pretty wedded to the idea of Meritocracy.
The confounding factor is that it seems like one's constantly seeing successful, powerful, or influential people whose "demonstrated abilities and merit" are difficult to find.
> It’s because just assigning all power and responsibility and economic reward to the best and brightest is a genuinely bad idea. Very difficult to generalize this as this doesn't apply to 'all' things. Maybe for some types of jobs but not for all types of jobs.
(That said, I also think the article could be much improved in terms of argumentation, it seems pretty off-the-cuff.)
I felt that that part of the article was a little weak and ended up doing what the author criticized others for doing, namely criticizing the implementation of meritocracy rather than the concept itself.
Yes, we don't want an ever increasing wealth gap but dismantling meritocracy strikes me as the worst possible way to deal with that.
Taking the tennis example, sure, it would be beneficial for the top players to have a flatter payout structure. But this ultimately leads to the ATP tour being solidified and newcomers being barred from entry as now the player ranked 250 is now earning an income that they can afford much better training than outsiders. It isn't immediately clear that this system is better from a social point of view.
Relating it back to elite institutions, randomly assigning professors and students to random institutions definitely raises the floor but also lowers the ceiling. Is that socially better? Not immediately obvious. I'm of the opinion that we want to maximize the max possible achievement of an individual to improve the human condition. Very few individuals are responsible for key advancements of civilization.
Finally, the closing statement about Milton Friedman seems rather contradictory to me. The argument that changing the entire cultural attitude of business is somehow different than regulation seems odd to me. Stigmatizing certain actions is just merely the weakest form of regulation that allows for unethical behavior to be rewarded even greater.
> It’s because just assigning all power and responsibility and economic reward to the best and brightest is a genuinely bad idea. Very difficult to generalize this as this doesn't apply to 'all' things. Maybe for some types of jobs but not for all types of jobs.
Sure, maybe not all types of jobs, but to be fair he does say "in the political realm" at one point in the article, and it did occur to me that many people often take the opposite as an a priori assumption, that "meritocracy is good thing for all types of jobs" (myself, sometimes, included!). I'm not a fan of this author, but I did find this little polemic a needed "push-back" (That said, I also think the article cou…
This reads as coming from resentment “sure, they are smarter, more prepared, and more experienced than me… but I want to believe I am more ethical. Yeah, meritocracy is the problem, not me”
I think Matthew Yglesias is saying "Republic is always a bad person and Democrat is always good".
If he could judge someone solely based on his political identity without examining that individual person's merits and character, it says a lot of his world view. Not surprised if he knows nothing about true Conservative principles.
I invite him to read China's history from 1930 to 1980, where he will find many like-minded Chinese communist fellows who also judge people solely based on their economic class and status. The "Cultural Revolution" would be an epic-reading for him.