Quote Meritocracy Unquote

We as a species have progressed so far and have built up such complex societies that life seems far removed the Darwinian struggles of the jungle . Perhaps stemming from an innate sense of fairness or hoping to maximise societal potential we try and impose our own mechanisms on top of this existential struggle . Any measure that is at odds with this underlying abstraction is doomed to fail . So we must try and allocate resources and authority to those who can best use it .

The ideal system would be where no person has any right to complain about his situation as he has been given what he rightly deserved . How deserving he is depends on his merit which actually depends on the resources the very system gave him in the first place . So meritocracy has to go back all the way back to the beginnings of society and maybe even deeper. But people would still be unequal .

In this light Platos solution of the noble lie dosent seem so unfair . From Wikipedia :

Plato presented the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a fictional tale, wherein Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato; Socrates speaks of a socially stratified society, wherein the populace are told "a sort of Phoenician tale":

"The earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian."

The fictional Socrates, created by Plato, proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth . . . it would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another.This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one. . . ."

A meritocracy is just a more sophisticated and more fair version of the noble lie where we substitute "merit" instead of a metal without being aware that merit might also be related to being born in a certain class.

Then there is the ascertaining "responsibility" or "credit" . The author seems to be differentiating between the two definitions on the basis of how much credit(right to be smug?) the victors in a meritocracy can take for their sucess. Then we disappear down a philosophical wormhole into the land of determinism , nature vs nurture etc . I try resolve this by consoling myself that maybe this meritocratic victory isnt really a victory . Maybe the theory that some people are higher and up and some people are lower down isnt applicable to ranking human beings . Its like asking whether the lion is the meritocratic victor in the jungle foodchain and the rest of the animals are the losers . Its one giant interdependent chain in which everything has its place .

Meritocracy is essentially a statement that people are rewarded according to their merits, whatever those might be. It carries baggage in the form of an unstated moral component riding shotgun. If you ask people whether "meritocracy" is the same as "natural selection", they will tend not to agree, because merit implies a degree of human agency that is more than merely current emergent phenomena.

The confusion of value and virtue, or natural selection and meritocracy, causes all sorts of trouble. The philosophers have had long beard-stroking discussions about all this under the heading of "teleology".

This, indeed, is where things get very dicey. Meritocracy tends to converge on winner-takes-all markets, which result in an extreme inequality of outcomes and all the socioeconomic harms that entails.

Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who will speculatively be best able to lead.

A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed down, let me know. ;-)

At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short: it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned" the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_ accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the record of _past_ accomplishment.

This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead to an unstable society...