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The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

theguardian.com

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#21
post #6
post #2

[flagged]

Please, go back to reddit with those insightful comments.

Not sure if you are mocking reddit or trying to help reddit and hurt hacker news. Reddit is an important part of hacker culture and has plenty of insightful information. I thought that was a good TLdR actually. Summaries are important.

Anyway back to point: article is complaining that meritocracy doesn’t remove class hierarchy, it just reorganizes their classes. Ok, so what ? People are still free to find other tribes that cross meritorious classes, like on reddit or hacker news.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#22
post #15

“What then! Do you think the old practice, that ‘they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,’ is less iniquitous, when the power has become power of brains instead of fist?” - John Ruskin

It's the only known way to organize society which incentivises people to develop and use their talents. Hence, the incredible material wealth of current Western world vs the universal poverty and misery of communist countries.

I agree. I shared the quote because I found it concise, insightful and relevant. I do wonder, though, whether meritocracy has gotten away with itself somewhat. It has enormous utility. But in its current incarnation doesn't seem to respect the dignity of those it disempowers. I think the point of the quote, and the article, is that those of us it's empowered ought to bear that in mind.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#23

>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce…

Historically, I'm not really seeing meritocracy as "meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world" - instead, it's an observation if you put incompetent people in positions of power, then everyone suffers; and you'd do best to fill all the important roles with people who are actually good at it.

The point of meritocracy is not about the benefit to a capable person who gets to be in a good position; it's about the benefit to the system from a capable person being in that position. This effect is what makes meritocracies more efficient and competitive than other societies.

And there's really no reason to expect that meritocracy would fix unequal distribution of wealth; as equality of outcome is fundamentally incompatible with equality of opportunity; and all kinds of "merit" characteristics (conscientiousness, impulse control and similar personality traits, intelligence, educational achievement, physical traits, propensity to addiction, etc, etc) are all quite heritable; no matter how much of that heritability is nature vs nurture, the "merit" of children inevitably will be highly correlated with the "merit" of their parents - so we should expect a meritocracy to have some "sorting effect" across generations as described in the original article.

Meritocracy will allow for some class mobility anyway, as a significant part of "merit" traits is also essentially random, however, a significant part of them is not. An 'meritocracy-upper-class' kid is not necessarily more qualified than a 'meritocracy-lower-class' kid for some position, so it needs to be evaluated and in a true meritocracy some (!) of the lower class kids would raise up, but statistics indicates that most of them would not.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right though. Articles such as this one always push some form of forced equality under the guise of moral decency because the current system is so broken it's impossible to continue(!) Emotional blackmail to manipulate the ignorant or uninformed to their utopian worldview that's jjjust out of reach. Check the authors previous articles, all of them extremely progressive passed off as though the ideas are somehow…

I don't get how this is emotional blackmail one bit. He presents a solid well reasoned point on meritocracy and inequality that's reflected by many and has quantitative evidence. I think the views on the subject that you're peddling might be a little emotionally manipulated.

> I don't get how this is emotional blackmail one bit.

Well that's your problem, not mine.

> He presents a solid well reasoned point on meritocracy and inequality that's reflected by many and has quantitative evidence.

Never suggested otherwise.

> I think the views on the subject that you're peddling might be a little emotionally manipulated.

Classic

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#25

All this discussion automatically assumes that inequality is bad and equality is good. This is a subjective opinion. One that does not get nearly enough questioning nowadays. I would argue that what is good is the presence of happiness and absence of suffering for conscious minds. Less famine, less disease, less war. And that it is not at all certain that equality helps these objectives. Inequality can be described a…

When you ignore degrees of in/equality, you're basically setting up a false dichotomy. Exact equality might be unhealthy, but so is the drastic inequality of the old aristocracy or (more arguably) the new one. As with many things, the extremes are stagnant end states, but they have their own sort of gravity (think "attractors" in chaos theory). Life is found in between.

> The idea that equality to another human matters as much ... is a fucking stupid remnant of our monkey ego.

Well, sorry, but it's not going away. Study after study has shown that relative affluence, not absolute affluence or any other factor, is one of the strongest predictors of happiness. In other words, relative privation is a predictor of unhappiness. It might not be suffering but, nonetheless, if you want to offer a superficial and unacknowledged restatement of utilitarianism ("the greatest good for the greatest number") then you have to consider what actually makes people who are not you happy or unhappy.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#26

>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce…

Historically, I'm not really seeing meritocracy as "meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world" - instead, it's an observation if you put incompetent people in positions of power, then everyone suffers; and you'd do best to fill all the important roles with people who are actually good at it. The point of meritocracy is not about the benefit to a capable person who gets to be in a good position…

>And there's really no reason to expect that meritocracy would fix unequal distribution of wealth

I never said it would.

>meritocracy hopes to fix injustice in the inequality of our world

Fixing the injustice in the inequality of the world isn't the same as fixing the inequality of the world. Kings and nobles having all the wealth because they were born with it is unjust inequality, while hard workers having all the wealth is just inequality (IMO).

In retrospect I realize this is hopelessly confusing wording and I really should have thought of a better way to describe what I meant. Dang nabbit.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#27
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, go back to reddit with those insightful comments.

Not sure if you are mocking reddit or trying to help reddit and hurt hacker news. Reddit is an important part of hacker culture and has plenty of insightful information. I thought that was a good TLdR actually. Summaries are important. Anyway back to point: article is complaining that meritocracy doesn’t remove class hierarchy, it just reorganizes their classes. Ok, so what ? People are still free to find other tribe…

I was mocking reddit as HN is on a completely different level. users are educated and helpful, the debates are good and the comments are almost always better than the articles

reddit this days is just mostly a modern buzzfeed

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#28

>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce…

> a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000.

And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market. If everything is better when centralized, then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)?

> Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all

That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes distribution is. It varies from field to field, from time to time, and the ideal is rarely found at the extremes. The problem Young sought to address is that various factors tend to pull us toward a non-ideal extreme, and that tendency must be resisted.

Re: The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve?

#30

>Sorting people by ‘merit’ will do nothing to fix inequality No one ever said it would, nor would we want it to. Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all - a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. That was one of the fatal flaws of Mao's Great Leap Forward, a billion Chinese farmers trying to produce…

> a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000. And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market. If everything is better when centralized, then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)? > Concentration of capital and talent is…

>then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)

Because most governments seem corrupt to some extent or other and we don't trust them. Free markets seem to solve this problem to some extent. The degrees to which people believe these two statements seem to be the basis for a lot of left right / politics IMHO.

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