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Quote Meritocracy Unquote

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Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#21

Post by SwellJoe »

asalazar wrote: post #19

Meritocracies are great sometimes but they have the nasty side affect of promoting people into jobs they suck at. Just because you're the best at being an individual contributor, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager, and being a good manager doesn't mean you're going to be a good executive or entrepreneur. In organizations that value meritocracies absolutely, you end up losing your best people if they do…

This is known as the Peter Principle. But, I would think a meritocracy would strive to test for, or respond to, promotions into levels of incompetence by pushing the person back down into a role where merit is higher than other available candidates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#22

Post by rhizome »

CleanedStar wrote: post #10
coolsunglasses wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. This has been the key lesson of my career as a programmer and entrepreneur. Reading Marx made me a better capitalist. I tell people that ask for book recommendations to read Marx all the time and they sneer at me even though they know I'm not a Marxist.

I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which produces real commodities. Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans believe…

I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like...

Your statement implies that economic events must be analyzed from the standpoint of base & superstructure, but there is no rule or law that requires it.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#23

Post by neilk »

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea.

The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system.

Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#24

Post by rayiner »

neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.

And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are smart and hard working people. But they're also generally very privileged. Not in a "my daddy is a hedge fund manager" privileged (though often that privileged), but almost always in a "my daddy was upper middle class, so I had all the educational support I ever needed, could afford to do extensive community service instead of working in HS and get into an Ivy league school, never had money distracting me from my grades, etc."

> Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.

Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/chris-hayes-book-he...

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#25

Post by kscaldef »

1123581321 wrote: post #5

A meritocratic society is a lot of meritocracies chained together, themselves needing to merit success. Each one can only work with their own inputs, and so rely on the outputs of the other organizations. If these organizations do not extend deeply and broadly enough back, then at some point the inputs of an organization won't be the ones that should be there. This needs to go back to families at some point. In a mer…

While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises.

Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#26

Post by raganwald »

spikels wrote: post #20

This is a strawman argument. Forget about Donald Trump as some model of success. Despite his head start he almost went bankrupt - twice. He is much less respected as a real estate developer in the world of real estate than you think. His success has been in PR and celebrity. There are thousands real estate investors who actually are good at it and started with nothing (e.g. Sam Zell). Don't like "meritocracy" then ho…

Who said that I didn't like Meritocracy? I said that when we use the word, we should all be on the same page as to what it actually means.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#27

Post by spikels »

neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

That really is one of the great ironies of the English language. And this is not well known - I didn't know this until a few years ago (maybe on HN?).

I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestions.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#28

Post by astrec »

neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

Young's little ditty had a profound influence on me; I'm still a prick, but a considerably less smug prick.

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#29

Post by [deleted] »

neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

[deleted]

Re: Quote Meritocracy Unquote

#30

Post by pitchups »

rayiner wrote: post #24
neilk wrote: post #23

The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above…

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are sm…

> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.

And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion...

In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion, is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if you remove the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0 billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."

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