Why *would* an actual meritocracy be bad?

Great Debates
181

As long as “merit” is seen as competitive, no amount of hard work and study will put 100% (or anywhere near it) of people in the top 20%, or even 50%. By definition. The person who works and studies their ass off but doesn’t have much talent for the job will always, always be beaten out by the person who works and studies and does have such talent.

(In practice, they may both be beaten out by somebody who, due to pure luck, has and/or comes from more money.)

Telling people that they just have to work harder and then they’ll be fine is all too often just a way to defend sneering at people who aren’t considered by the society to have high merit.

Yup. And a real meritocracy would recognize merit in all the work which that society needed to have done, instead of rating some work as “higher” than other work – or, at least, instead of rating much of the less important work as “higher” than the more important work.

It would be nice, if we actually had one. But I don’t think it would look anything at all like what some here are proposing as meritocracies.

A large part of that issue is defining what counts as “merit”. Which, as I think we’ve seen in this thread, ain’t easy.

Or at any rate, coming up with a clear definition, for any particular society, that actually recognizes all types of merit, isn’t easy. Coming up with a definition that fits the definer – that, unfortunately, seems to be a lot easier.

Even aside from what others have posted about this: Chances are really good that they can’t possibly do that without the help of those average employees. Attributing the increase in value solely to one person is rarely if ever accurate.

182

The 100x Engineer is a term I see being tossed around a lot. They don’t literally code 100x faster than their peers. But the have a combination of technical skills, leadership, and subject matter expertise such that they can provide some order of magnitude of value greater than your run of the mill developer through a combination of elevating the people around them and focusing work on those activities that produce the most value. Or they create new ways of doing things that elevate the entire industry. Think of them like the Taylor Swift or Michael Jordan of their profession.

Maybe not literally 100x but I’ve worked with a few people who fit that description. I’ve also been surprised by how thoroughly mediocre a lot of corporate employees are, particularly at big, established companies.

IOW, it’s not so much that they work 100x faster than the average employee. They make a group of average employees collectively better.

Because that’s not a “job”. That’s the bare minimum I would expect from a functioning adult.

183

This is an interesting model because sports/entertainment operate on superstar economics where a small handful of workers utterly dominate and earn the lion’s share of income in that industry. We know that most actors wait tables, most musicians gig as music teachers etc. But one day they might make it.

If every industry is operating in this kind of income distribution as opposed to the flatter distributions of say actual teaching or engineering or even lawyers then that implies a massive shift in social relationships. The winners have taken it all, no one can say it’s unfair and the non-winners can’t make it one day. So…how long till the revolution?

184

But so many cannot meet your bare minimum. And those who do can barely meet it. I’d say that’s most of society right there.

So what to do about these poor souls in a meritocracy? Assign them to the dustbin and be done with them?

185

I’d rather have more money than the esteem of my peers, honestly. I can’t buy a new car with esteem.

186

That’s using a single dimension again. What if the person writing all that code is disruptive? Quality is not so easy to measure - how well did that person understand requirements? Is someone who is a bit slower but whose code is a bit better at meeting maybe unstated requirements worse? A guy makes 110 x the sales - maybe he did that by paying off the buyer.
I’ve managed enough software development in my day that I know assigning numbers to this can’t be done in the real world.
Plus, a meritocracy doesn’t only consider the very best versus the very worst performer. How about those in the middle? Those who get rated better might really be better, but they may just do better under whichever rating system is used by the management. Not to mention the problem of merit calculations by incompetent managers. I’ve seen them also.
Yes, people in different fields get paid differently. No matter what you think about that, I think it would be hard to argue that the finance guy getting 7 figures for doing a deal is a lot more meritorious than the person working for an NGO saving the lives of children in an African village. Let’s just go with saying market forces are responsible for this gap, let’s not pretend it has anything to do with merit.

187

I think that’s the direction a lot of industries are heading in, driven by social media business models and technology that allow a small group of employees to have a disproportionately large global effect. Isn’t that why we have “superstar” CEOs these days making 1000x the average employee leading companies where employees can often command $300k salaries?

I’ll have to look for the link, but there was a piece written by Malcolm Gladwell some years ago critiquing the corporate trend of looking for “superstars” and how it led to the Enron crisis. The prevailing theory is that superstars create great systems while Gladwell’s argument was that you need good systems to create superstar employees. According to Gladwell, Enron had hired all these “superstars” and placed them in roles they really didn’t have the experience or qualifications for. They would be running various business units and would often be promoted upwards really before their shortcomings could come to light.

I see this a lot in Corporate America. Companies create these groups and teams to do big things and they hire impressive people with impressive credentials from Ivy League colleges and MBA programs and 1-2 year stints at impressive places like Mckinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, and so on. You look at these people’s background and they don’t stay in a role for more than a year, often less. Typically they are either promoted or they take a different role at another company.

The thing is, I have no idea how these people prove themselves they are ready for a promotion in a year or less. I suspect most likely they have already been fast tracked for some future position and these short stints are just to check a box that they did this thing before moving on.

The point is, one downfall I can see with a “meritocracy” is an inordinate amount of time spent on personal branding and promotion instead of developing the skills and experience really required to do certain jobs. Particularly in industries where the skill / compensation curve gets highly skewed with a small number of extremely highly compensated individuals at the top and everyone else just sort of getting by.

188

Have you tried? Really, really TRIED?

That’s not me talking so much as it’s standard capitalist explanation of why wages are as low as they are–because the workers are all too focused on money, when it’s self-esteem and pride in doing a job well and the admiration of one’s peers that are truly important.

189

Maybe @Voyager’s NGO can help them out?

Or feed and clothes my children.

If we are talking about meritocracy in the context of compensation and providing a standard of living, unfortunately the dominating “merit” will be creating economic value for the people who are compensating you.

I don’t think anyone would begrudge an investment banker earning seven figures on a deal that finances a billion dollar expansion at a company providing thousands of jobs making and selling products that benefit millions.

Arguing the merits of bankers earning the same seven figures on market speculation is a harder sell.

190

I still think we’re confusing meritocracy with the market nature of the labor market. In general, the fungibility of workers for a job is what determines the pay/benefits of a job, not the actual utility of the job for society or a company.

So landscaping staff is very useful for society and a company, but the skills and experience required are low. That means that landscapers are essentially interchangeable, which also means that they can replace them with ANY other landscaper without issue.

Assuming that the government/company has an obligation to reduce costs, there’s no reason to pay those guys any more than what is needed to attract and keep them. Which in the case of landscapers, isn’t too high. It’s higher for garbagemen and sewer workers though, not because it’s more useful, but because that’s what’s required to attract and keep them. You could look at the willingness to work in stinky conditions as a skill if you want. It goes up the chain- a good system administrator is a lot harder to find and replace than a landscaper, which is due to the experience and educational requirements. So they’re paid more. Same for lawyers, engineers, and so on.

Meritocracy has nothing whatsoever to do with this- it’s at best adjacent. Meritocracy is about that landscaper getting promoted and/or getting better opportunities because he’s better at his job. Or for that matter, WHY that guy’s a landscaper in the first place. In a more meritocratic society, if that guy has drive and smarts, he’d hopefully have done better in school and been eligible for a better job. In other words, everyone would more or less sort out according to their abilities, whatever they may be. Hard work and smarts would get someone far, regardless of background. Dumb and lazy would sort out low, regardless of background. We aspire to this already - our standardized testing for colleges, etc… are a step in that direction, even if they’re imperfect in many ways.

191

I would question it, on principle.

That principle being: would that man starve if income were capped, say, in the very high six figures? Would he cease to show up for work? Would he do a shoddy job?

I don’t think any of those answers are a clear cut “Yes.”

Yes, he would be outraged. Yes, he would vigorously denounce any system that came between him and his money. Yes. he would resent the hell out of the poor people that “his” money was being diverted to, making their miserable lives marginally better.

But I think he’d get over it. I’d certainly like to try a system that discouraged incomes over six figures per annum (via taxation).

192

The Platonic ideal of a meritocracy would have hiring people seeing through the marketing BS and being able to discern who is and isn’t better for a job. But it’s necessarily imperfect in the real world, and looking like you can do the job is as important as being able to do it.

I’ve been overlooked more than once for promotions I have no doubt, because I didn’t fit the mold of what they thought of as promotable, which was basically a grown-up frat-boy who wore golf-course branded stuff, talked about hunting and golf all the time, and was thin and in shape. In my 9 years at that company, the only people who got promoted, were people who met that frat-boy image.

And when I quit that job and moved somewhere with much more equitable (and meritocratic) hiring practices (a city government), I ended up gaining a job title in the move (not uncommon), and ended up getting promoted two job grades above where I started inside of 2.5 years. I’m pretty convinced it’s because they can’t justify promoting the “right” people based on looks/clothing/etc, so they end up promoting more on qualifications and performance when they can.

Even that’s not perfect- we still have a lot of situations where people get moved up to fill gaps in the org chart, and they get moved up because they’ve been there forever, not because they’re necessarily superior in their job. As a result, we end up with two sorts of management-the competent ones promoted because they’re good at their jobs, and the ones who sort of fell into it and have basically not failed bad enough yet.

193

Seems like a really good way to get a crappy landscaping job done.

Doing a good job of landscaping work does take skills; and experience; and physical fitness for the job. It doesn’t require the sort of skills and experience, or the length of training, needed for doing heart surgery – but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require any, or that the people doing the work can each be replaced by anybody at all without issue.

I’d say it’s both a skill and a merit.

You’re assuming that landscaping is essentially a bad job. For a lot of people, it’s a much better job than anything done sitting in a chair inside a building all day – from any aspect other than how much they can get paid for it, and how much respect they’ll get for it from those who assume that anybody with drive and smarts wouldn’t be doing it.

“Hard work” and “smarts” don’t necessarily go together. “Dumb” and “lazy” don’t necessarily go together. And there are a whole lot of people who are smart at one kind of work but “dumb” at another. Not to mention “dumb” at school but smart at the right kind of work.

194

Yep. Money comes first, then barter. Graeber covers this quite well in Debt: The First 5,000 Years .

195

I think this is getting to point I’ve been fumbling around which I think is influencing quite a lot of people’s takes on teh qeustion. It’s teh difference between micro-merit and macro-merit.

Micro-merit- the best landscaper/baker/hedge fund manager should earn more than the average, in direct proportion to how much better they are than the average.

I think most people basically agree with this in principle, with provisos around just how much more than average is actually fair. But the basic idea, sure.

Macro-merit - hedge fund managers should be paid more than cancer nurses.

This is more difficult, because now we are combining the idea of excellence at some endeavour with the value of that endeavour. It is mathematically provable that many hedge fund managers have negative merits - compared to the option of a simple stock tracker, they lose their clients money. And yet these hedge fund managers earn more than he genuinely excellent bakers or nurses or landscapers, because we (collectively) think that managing a hedge fund is a more meritorious job than crafting an aesthetically pleasing lawn, or managing the pain if a terminally ill patient. Or maybe we don’t think that. But in a meritocracy it’s still true that different classes of jobs would be worth more than others so that even the most highly skilled baker would earn less than the worst, I don’t know, commercial lawyer.

But how do you decide what types of job have greater merit?

196

Let me offer a different POV:

Typically the reason companies are run like a “frat-ocracy” is because they are more “relationship” driven. Consulting firms are like that. We hire the sort of young ambitious superficially charming people who are eager to join teams and find creative solutions to problems.

Other organizations like government or large established companies might be more equitable in terms of hiring and promoting based on a consistent set of criteria. But that can also make them very rigid and “rules-driven”.

197

Do you keep track of how well your solutions work, in the long term?

198

In my experience (used to work for Alvarez & Marsal years ago), it was almost an Abercrombie & Fitch sort of thing, in that as best as I could tell, they didn’t hire ugly women, ethnic women, short or fat men, etc… I’m sure everyone was actually qualified for their jobs, but there was a definite emphasis on looks, and a certain image, and that image was white, good looking, clean-cut and frat/sorority-ish.

That’s what I’m talking about- some companies, especially the last one I worked for, had the same sort of thing going with respect to promotions and getting out of the lower-management ranks. Which didn’t make a lot of sense- our public-facing people were all over the map- fat, thin, black, white, hispanic, gay, straight, male, female, etc… We were actually really good about that sort of thing. But the managerial and executive ranks outside of the medical side of things? If you were a white man, you pretty much had to fit that frat-style mold and live that lifestyle, or they weren’t going to give you any consideration whatsoever.

I see how for a consulting company, it does make sense in that your consultants are your public face, and their appearance and attitude are as much marketing/PR tools as they are elements of doing their jobs, but it doesn’t make sense for the home office of a medical company with hundreds of clinics and thousands of employees, especially when the vast majority of the managers never interact with the public whatsoever.

199

I was thinking mainly that I’ve certainly known “young ambitious superficially charming people who are eager to join teams and find creative solutions to problems” whose “creative solutions” . . . were often really bad ideas, and they didn’t want to hear that.

200

I know A&M. I actually used to work for a competing firm years ago.

My cynical POV is that corporate leadership cares about diversity in their employees about as much as they care about diversity in the people who mow their lawns or clean their homes. They are fine with it if it’s something that pleases their customers or they need particular skills sets to actually “do” stuff. But when it comes to joining the ranks of senior leadership, they tend to treat it the same as they would run a fraternity. Basically they want a bunch of people who are just like them who share their values (to the extent that they actually have any).