Why *would* an actual meritocracy be bad?

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1

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@LSLGuy says:

A meritocracy sounds nice until you realize how few people have great merit. Or more accurately, given the uneven distribution of inherent merit (brains, ambition, wisdom, ethics) across the population, the top few percent will still stand head and shoulders above the crowd and will quickly gather most all the benefits of that merit unto themselves.

So why is that bad? Is the contention that all wealth is bad, or all inequality is necessarily bad?

The flip side is that if someone is really good at something (faster, more precise, etc…) shouldn’t they be able to reap the rewards of that, versus someone of average or worse competence? Why shouldn’t a smart, competent lawyer out earn the less competent ones? Why shouldn’t a good garbageman get promoted into management and make more money? And so on, and so forth.

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The ideal is liberty, equality, and fraternity, not elitism.

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Obviously the argument against this is that we have done nothing to earn our innate talent, so a talented person does not deserve any more than an untalented person.

The Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” is very much relevant. What would you advocate for the structure of society prior to being born, if you could be born as any randomly chosen member of society?

Original position - Wikipedia

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ISTM the bigger problem is ensuring the “meritocrats” assigned to their positions actually have that merit. The OP’s example of a good garbageperson is on point: while they may be good at being a garbe collecter, that does not mean they are good at managing.

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I did not mean to speak out against meritocracy as such. (and I’m not accusing the OP of mis-stating my position; I’m merely filling in more background on my motivation and thinking here & now).

My intent was foremost to caution some of the more leftish folks, including myself, that if the goal of a just society first and foremost is equality, with everyone pretty well leveled out so no one need feel left behind, that requires that no one be allowed to get ahead. Or at least not allowed to keep any spoils that come from aheadness. But merit, and therefore meritocracy will naturally result in something other than equality.

A world where people fully and naturally embraced the Marxist ideal of “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” would be scarcely recognizable to real world capitalists or communists alike.

If we take as the Prime Directive that all must be equal before the law and equal in their wallet and equal in the respect accorded them as humans by their fellow humans, we’ll be living in a very different world.

The true Platonic Form of a meritocracy devoid of cheating or other human defect will inevitably be made up of a small coterie of winners and a vast underclass of losers. How much of the current complaints on the left are about the manner in which we select the losers versus the fact we have losers at all? And is altering how we select losers an improvement, or just as invidious as what we do now?

That is the question I was implicitly asking.

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A good garbage collector isn’t necessarily a good manager. Or vice versa.

To a point, yes. But why should they be able to damage, and/or to be put in charge of, people who aren’t able to be as fast or as precise?

Indeed. An actual meritocracy, in which those who were actually best at governing to the benefit of all in society were the ones who got the job, would be great. In practice, I don’t know that such a thing has ever happened. An occasional such person does get into office (whether by vote or by appointment or by inheritance or possibly even by force of arms), but an entire government of such, let alone multiple generations of them, seems extremely unlikely.

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That’s part of it, I think, but then of course we wouldn’t have a “true” meritocracy. Still, to the extent we all must live in the real world, not some ideal plain, I think it’s important to recognize the impracticability of any system that demands achieving an ideal (as a “true” meritocracy would).

I don’t know that I would say equality is the goal so much as equity. Which, I think, is closely related to our inability to ever achieve a true meritocracy. It’s not just that people don’t earn their innate talent, it’s that (1) there’s a lot to unpack in just what exactly “innate” talent is or whether it even exists and (2) even if certain individuals are naturally predisposed to greater achievement in certain fields that other individuals, predisposition by itself only gets you so far in a world where one’s socioeconomic circumstances at birth may give more or less advantage to certain individuals as opposed to others. Which brings us back to this problem of equity.

For me, equality of outcomes is merely a means of measuring equity in practice. Not individual equality, mind you, but equality of outcomes for socioeconomically distinct populations.

Bringing it back around, I think the problem with meritocracy, even a “true” meritocracy, is that even if we do achieve it in such an idealized form, it won’t last more than a generation if we don’t also concern ourselves with equity. Meritocracy alone may be self-defeating on generational timescales.

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There would be nothing bad about an actual meritocracy.

The problem is that people are, by nature, sore losers. And if there is a system in which they do not have merit, they tend to grumble against the system.

Note that I mean an actual meritocracy, which rarely ever exists in real life. There are plenty of inequal systems today that masquerade as a meritocracy.

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Indeed. Anyone who has worked in software or any computer-related field will be intimately familiar with the phenomenon of an excellent programmer or other specialty technologist who becomes a raging dumpster fire when they are rewarded for their excellence by being elevated to be in charge of other people.

Leadership is a very specific quality, underrated and misunderstood. It may or may not align with talent or expertise in any other area. Some of the best managers I ever worked with weren’t notably skilled or knowledgeable about the on-the-ground work performed by their people; instead, these managers were good at organizing and motivating people such that those people could do the technical or operational work. I almost said “real” work, but this would just reinforce the incorrect notion that management, properly and efficiently done, is not actual work.

A meritocracy sounds good on paper. But it presumes that people will be elevated to leadership who have demonstrated themselves best at fulfilling the responsibilities of being leaders. And all available evidence shows that people, collectively, are not very good at identifying and elevating such individuals; it’s a crap shoot in which good and bad leaders are elevated in more or less equal measure. Sometimes a nefarious actor camouflages himself and tricks others into supporting him; sometimes a well-intentioned actor is simply not suited for the new role, with no one at fault.

So while it seems sensible in principle to say we should favor people according to their merit, this concept crashes into the reality that we have proven ourselves really bad at actually doing that.

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I agree, but meritocracy doesn’t have to be about leadership or promotion. It could mean pay and benefits, for instance. If your company has an outstanding software programmer but you know he’ll be a raging dumpster fire of a manager, then he should/could be rewarded with an exceptionally high salary and cushy benefits compared to the lousy programmers, but given no rank promotion.

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There is no such thing as objective, neutral, “merit”

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There’s a book on this: “The Rise of the Meritocracy” by British sociologist Michael Young. It was written in 1958 and in part is a somewhat dated satire on educational policy of the time, but it’s good enough that some clear points about the horror of actual meritocracy still stand.

In the book, testing for “merit” is a solved problem. Both at school and throughout their working lives, people are weighed and measured and placed in the roles most suited to them. This includes political power - democracy, unscientific and inefficient, has died. It is still the case, of course, that some jobs are better paid and more important and more powerful than others. Therefore:

  1. People in power have a sense of total righteous justification. The arrogance and contempt this breeds for those who did not make the cut is off the charts. And of course, these are the people who are deciding who gets paid what, whose interests are worthy of state resources etc. How even-handed and disinterested do we actually expect them to be? We know what it’s like when the ruling class consider themselves to be of a naturally superior type to the people they rule. It goes badly! Thus far, that notion of merit has been false. And we tend to focus on that falseness because its offensive and because its an easy attack on whichever elite to point out that they are not in fact better than the people they despise. But does that mean that it’s ok to act to have a righteously superior governing class if they genuinely are superior? Or do you get all same problems you had in the Raj or Tsarist Russia, but even more so because the stratification is so well justified?
  2. By corollary - those of low merit know that it’s their own damn fault. They are not unlucky, they are failures. Detritus. Literal wastes of space. You might think, “Well, that’ll teach them” but we’re talking about innate merit here. They haven’t missed a chance, they just never had one. And they live their whole lives in this hopeless defeat.

The book also suggests that testing for merit is constant. A judge may end his days as a taxi driver - not through choice, but because he started failing tests. And this is where I think the author misses a trick. Because people in power absolutely will not allow this to happen.

I’m talking about a heightened satirical portrayal of pure meritocracy here. But dial it down a bit. If we believe in meritocracy, in ensuring that naked ability is the only qualification that matters, then clearly we need a fair system for measuring that ability. If your plan for hiring the quickest runner is to pick the person who gets over the finishing line first, you’d be a damn fool not to make sure no-one had a head start. So let’s put everyone on an even footing. Not out of some naive sense of fairness, but out of our naked self-interest in promoting genuine merit.

So, private schools got to go. We don’t want exam results to be confounded by the variable of parental income. In fact, private tutoring is out too. But we can learn a lot from private schools - they offer the best education and they tell us exactly what that costs. So all schools to receive per pupil funding equivalent to private school fees, taxes going up accordingly. Then everyone’s getting a good education so we can measure merit fairly.

You can take this further, of course but we already know none of the above will happen. The point is: whatever you do to even the playing field, loving parents will always do what they can to give their offspring the best chance in life. Of course they will! This isn’t even bad! But parents with more resources - money, but also social capital, tacit knowledge etc. - will be better able to give their kids those chances. So where’s the meritocracy?

And of course, this operates at a systemic level. Once you have an elite, they’re going to make sure their children stay in the elite, merit be damned, and use their considerable political, economic and social power to tilt the field in their favour.

13

The previous post was getting too long, but here’s a fun note on this.

Michael Young had a son, Toby. Toby applied to Oxford. He got a standard conditional offer - get such and such marks in your exams and you get in, don’t and you don’t. Toby didn’t. But due to an admin error, he received both the merited rejection letter and an acceptance letter sent by mistake,. So his father the distinguished sociologist called up the admissions tutor and using his considerable academic clout, cajoled him into actually accepting Toby on the grounds that an admin error created a moral obligation to let Toby in - instead of someone who did qualify - despite his not meriting a place.

Toby Young has since failed upwards at a considerable rate, up to and including being appointed to a senior government job he was fired from a week later. Meritocracy in action!

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Are we setting up a straw man to bash here? I don’t understand what an “actual meritocracy” would be.

I think even the most virulent proponents of meritocracy concede that it is an ideal, a goal to be striven towards, not an actual system of governance.

15

Firstly, it’s generally not good for society to have extreme inequality, regardless of the reason for that inequality. At the end of the day, there is a social contract that we all need to sign up to, and if 90% of people think it’s making their lives worse, then that’s where society starts to fall apart.
(The US is arguably already there, but there has been a pretty smart campaign of making people disillusioned with their place in society blame it all on minorities and communists).

Secondly I presume what the OP is suggesting is that each person gets to keep their wealth indefinitely. Do they also get to pass it on? Because that’s the reality today, that access to wealth, the best education, the best opportunities is the best predictor of future success. How are we taking that aspect out?

(I know many successful businessmen will balk at the idea that their success has anything to do with their parents, but look at it from an “all else being equal” POV: Starting a successful business is a very different prospect between a person who knows they may be homeless if there is a lack of liquidity for even a month, versus someone who knows they can fail a few times and live a middle-class life the whole time).

Finally I think it’s quite elitist to assume that earnings map neatly to aptitude. Capitalism isn’t about fairness, it’s just market forces. Whether Job A pays more than Job B does not depend on whether Job A needs more smarts.
And even within a particular job…let’s take an example like political commentary. Right now, many of the most popular channels are just disinformation and bile. Their viewers are less informed than before they started watching. Are those channels the elite? Do they “merit” more money?

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I think these questions set up the straw man aspects of meritocracy.

No one is coupling the concept of meritocracy with any absolute guarantee of unlimited rewards for merit, as these questions imply it does.

The implication is that in a meritocracy, a smart competent lawyer would be paid exactly the same as a stupid bumbling lawyer–but who is claiming that as a necessary condition of a meritocracy?

17

I don’t like competition when it isn’t all in fun. A certain amount of it is inevitable in human affairs, but we are not living in times of scarcity. We have enough resources to go around and enough trained/skilled/educated people to do the necessary chores to keep it coming. The old attitude of “Ya don’t work, ya don’t eat” is thoroughly out of place. The one scarcity we’re prone to having is scarcity of jobs.

An actual meritocracy would be a huge step in improvement over what we’ve got, but a meritocratic competitive economic system is not what we need. I’m with the 60’s flower children on this. Just share everything and don’t worry about who did what portion of the work. Ditch the entire notion of specific reciprocity, burn all the money, derecognize all the currencies of the world, abandon barter, and just pitch in where you fit in and take what you want.

So that’s my assessment of actual meritocracy and the ways in which it is bad.

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Where in the definition of meritocracy is disproportional pay required? A meritocracy could pay everyone the same, merit applies to the positions and status people attain through demonstrable skill, knowledge, and experience. Only a small percentage of people are paid based on their actual productivity and profitable contributions and there is no accepted means of determining that in any job that involves the participation of multiple people. And that’s just the first few grains of sand in the process of moving a mountain. Meritocracy is the dream of elitists.

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One of the strongest arguments against massive pay inequalities, in general, is that “good work is its own reward.” Which is to say, the answer to “Why should a CEO earn merely a hundred times his average employee’s salary, and not several multiples of a hundred times?” is “Because he also earns the satisfaction of knowing he’s doing a difficult task very well, because he gets all the attention and fame he gets, because relative equity–if we can really call ‘a hundred times your average employee’s salary’ equitable–makes for a more nearly equal society.”

Besides the principle of “A free market places no limits on earnings,” does anyone care to defend the position that society is served by gross, unlimited pay differentials?

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This is the big problem for me. Lots of places have the “Up or out” kind of philosophy, you either get promoted or get fired. Then there’s the idea common among managers that an employee should never earn more than the person managing them.

Both of these undercut the notion of “merit”, because they inherently promote some skills over others.

My own career is a perfect example. I’m at a level of my job where it’s a damn near perfect fit for my innate skills and my experience. I’m not at the top of the heap in terms of my organization, but I’ve maxed out on how much they’ll pay me to do this job. If I want to earn more, I’d have to hustle to move up to the next level of a managerial job - which job I know I would suck at. I’ve done it often enough on temporary acting terms to know that with near certainty.

So, is a half-assed manager really worth more to my organization than a kick-ass senior employee? Apparently so.