I’m not at all sure of that. I’m a member of that class, being retired and not having to work. But I do in volunteer type jobs, and my retired friends do the same. Now some do because they are short of money, but most do out of desire to be active - it is a cliche that you are busier after you retire than before.
No doubt there would be lazy people, and society would not be able to direct what work is done through paying for it, but I don’t think the numbers of people sitting on their butts would be all that high.
Unless the government gave a disincentive to work. Then all bets are off.
Getting back to some of the original discussion, I’ve worked for a Silicon Valley company which called itself a meritocracy. It wasn’t, not even close. It rewarded behaviors like those of the managers who set performance review criteria.
I wonder how many of you have been involved in performance reviews for complex jobs. A lot of what I’ve seen here, and which thorny_locust noted, is a one-dimensional view of merit. Works fine if what counts are widgets per hour but not so good for a collection of highly educated people who are working at various stages of diverse projects. You can identify top people, who were famous in the field, and real losers, but not so much in between. We at least didn’t use the Jack Welch method of giving lots of money to the top 10%, firing the bottom 10% and treating the other 80% as cogs.
So I don’t believe an actual meritocracy is good because merit can’t be measured in any way to prevent the introduction of all sorts of bias.
There’s a tendency for successful people to attribute their success to their own effort and tenacity; the myth of the self-made man; look at how I got to where I am - by my own graft and determination.
The reality is that you need effort and tenacity for sure; success without them is not very likely, but in order for hard work and determination to result in success, other overlooked factors are often at play - privilege, prejudice and often just dumb luck.
You’re one of ten equally-qualified candidates at final interview for one job opening. The employer has to pick one of the ten, even though any of the ten could do it. They may pick at random, or on the basis of some completely arbitrary variable you couldn’t have predicted or controlled, like they appreciated the colour of your shirt, or their decision might be prejudiced by something like the colour of your skin, which again, you can’t really control by just trying real hard.
What happens to the nine people who don’t get picked? It’s not guaranteed that there will be other similar opportunities open for them; trying real hard doesn’t magically make dream job vacancies appear.
You’re a self-made man who built this company up from nothing. Why, when you came to this country you had nothing but the shirt on your back, and ten million dollars daddy gave you. Why can’t other people work as tirelessly as you, to build up their own businesses? Maybe they’re not good enough. Not quite meritorious enough. It’s probably their own fault they ended up shovelling manure.
You’re an ordinary average person from an ordinary average family, who works a fairly ordinary job that you enjoy, and that pays the bills with enough left over for a few luxuries; it’s easy to see how you got to this position by a series of deliberate steps and choices and actions and efforts. It’s not quite so easy to see how the colour of your skin subtly opened a few doors for you; how you had two parents, who stayed together, and who were able to invest in your education, buy you books and have the time to take you to the library and museum and pay for that school foreign exchange trip that happened to spark an interest in a foreign language, that subsequently happened to be useful at a job interview, etc.
So yeah, you generally need hard work and determination to be successful, but the ultimate success of your hard work and determination is very significantly filtered by privilege and luck. Exceptions exist where people heroically overcome the odds, but they are exceptions.
If you want an actual meritocracy, you have to solve for this, or it ain’t a meritocracy.
The roles of luck and of resentment for lazy people are two HUGE barriers to establishing any sort of meritocracy.
The combination means that successful people will ALWAYS 1) attribute 100% of their success to their own hard work, and 2) will always resent the pittance that unsuccessful people get merely through virtue of having been born.
Any meritocracy must build in safeguards to prevent either of these roles from gaining currency. Otherwise, it’s doomed to fail.
Agreed, and I’d go further: goodness aside, a meritocracy isn’t even really practically achievable because not only can merit not be objectively measured, the very premise lacks clarity on how precisely this concept of merit will be defined such that it can be subject to measurement. As you say, one-dimensionality is a huge problem.
Taking the discussion of the baker above: In the abstract, it seems reasonable that the social framework should function to allow the better baker to be more successful than the not-as-good baker. But what does it actually mean to be the better baker? The ability to produce baked goods that are more delicious than those made by others? Or a greater variety of baked goods? Or perhaps healthier goods? Or some metric that combines and weights these factors? Okay, but what if high performance on all these qualities requires more time and effort and the baker works slowly and cannot meet demand? Is not the ability to deliver products to buyers who want them an element of merit? What if the baker works inefficiently and the products are expensive to make and cannot be sold for much above cost? Is it also not an element of merit that the baker should be able to work very efficiently and increase the profit margin of the business such that it can be grown? And on and on for any number of other factors which contribute to the overall consolidated impression of what makes one baker better than another.
And ultimately this comes down to collective consumer choice, anyway. People will independently decide on what’s more or less delicious; they will independently weight for themselves the balance between deliciousness and healthiness; they will decide what they are willing to pay for the goods, considering (or not considering) the effort and expense that went into their production; and so on. And then we’re not really in a meritocracy, we’re just in a market economy.
Similar observations can be made elsewhere. What makes one software engineer better than another? The ability to analyze requirements and write and/or revise code quickly? What about another engineer who produces at a slower speed, but with fewer bugs requiring correction? What about another engineer who produces at an average speed with average quality but who has a gift for quickly recognizing in the analysis stage that there are meaningful functional or logical gaps in the requirements? What about an engineer who produces rock-solid high-quality code but who hates adding comments and writing documentation? What about an engineer whose own code production is unremarkable but who is brilliant helping other engineers during the code-review phase? All of these, and many more, are factors which contribute to the single reified opinion of “merit.” Who decides which matter more than others? What if that opinion changes over time?
From my perspective the fatal flaw in the meritocratic model is that it sounds good in principle but that reality is so messy and complex that there’s really no way to implement it such that doesn’t fall prey to the vagaries of human imperfection. As I said in my earlier post above, it would seem like a good idea to find the people who are best at leadership and put them in charge — who would argue with that? — but lots of different cultures and political systems are already trying to achieve basically this and it turns out we’re really bad at it, for lots of reasons.
My view is that we can recognize the value of encouraging and rewarding merit, and we can aspire to a meritocratic ideal, but we must accept that we are imperfect, individually and collectively, and that a pure and simple meritocracy is not a desirable end state because it will collapse under our tendencies toward inequality, manipulation, bias, and all the other bad shit people do to each other when given the opportunity. Whatever we put in place must guard against those tendencies, which means it must be carefully calibrated and compromised and, therefore, not truly a meritocracy as generally understood.
It’s simply not possible. I can’t imagine an intelligent person who would design “a pure and simple meritocracy”–it can’t be done, and it doesn’t take much smarts to realize that it’s a concept, not a practical reality.
The policing alone involved in seeing that the entire society behaves fairly at all points means a bureaucracy that would make current GOP complaints about an out-of-control federal government seem quaint.
Much of what an ideal meritocracy could achieve could be accomplished practically by a system of increased tax rates on the wealthy (plus better enforcement) and a more generous system of bringing housing, healthcare, education, etc. to the poor.
I think we’ve seen examples of it in this thread. It’s like “I don’t care how costly my healthcare gets, as long as poor people still die in the gutter in pain”
Yes, I know, and I said so. My point is that we should dispense with it as a goal because even if achievable it would be so fraught, and therefore begin with an entirely different objective in mind.
And of course that’s not even to mention the success that comes at the direct expense of exploiting less fortunate people. Yes, you built this company from nothing, starting with only the shirt on your back (plus ten million dollars daddy gave you), and the sweat and toil of a thousand underpaid, overworked, undervalued, employees who work in unnecessarily-unsafe conditions to make your company successful.
If they don’t like the conditions, well, they could just go and work somewhere else, right?
No, it’s a great goal. It’s just impossible in practice. Sort of like “a perfect union”–we just want a MORE perfect union, because a perfect one ain’t happening.
There are all sorts of ways of leveling the playing field, most of which seem very unfair to the uber-wealthy (like a death tax, as they love to call it, that would limit the money that children can inherit to a measly few million) that would fund opportunities to the poor and some to the middle-class. That is achievable, though in the current mindset not any time soon.
It’s not always impossible in practice. As mentioned earlier in the thread, professional sports (at least for the players, coaching is a different story) comes really close.
IMHO the real problem is that some of the people who are are financially successful (I’ll avoid naming names so as not to get into politics) achieved that success despite a lack of merit. Such people will naturally not want to work towards an actual meritocracy, even if they might claim that’s what they want.
Malcolm Gladwell got part of a book out of discussing why that isn’t the case (at least for hockey, but similar stories no doubt apply to other sports). Is what month you’re born in “merit”?
I wasn’t saying it had anything to do with how hard you try. What I was saying is that how much someone is paid is generally based on how replaceable they are.
That doesn’t have squat to do with merit, effort,determination, good thoughts, or anything else like that. If you’re working as a janitor, you’re going to be paid as a janitor, no matter how hard you try, etc… because the pool of people who can be janitors and who are willing to be janitors for janitor pay is large. They won’t pay you more, because they don’t have to- if you balk, they can just replace you with someone else willing to mop the floors for the money they offer. This isn’t the case as you go up the ladder.
Now how you get into a position where you’re not at the bottom… that’s where the merit, nepotism, luck, privilege, etc… comes in.
But the actual mechanism by which pay is set? That’s pretty much a market system.
Interesting example in this context, considering the well-known fact that replacements are pretty much always paid more than incumbents for the same job. It’s why people don’t stay in the same job anymore.
These are all really just articles of faith. First principles about how we imagine the world must work.
This is a very low bar you’re setting.
“Sports” are extremely artificial organizations, voluntarily entered into and with very clearly laid out goals. Still, I would certainly argue that the central conflict in sports, winning vs. making money, is wide open to artificial manipulation.
There is simply too much fierce resentment of poor people and too little recognition of the importance of luck for the rich for a meritocracy to be of practical use, other than as a concept or a goal.
Even ignoring that, the definition of merit changes a lot in sports over time, sometimes even very quickly. Twenty years ago a guy could be in the NHL by being a boxer who could skate; those guys are gone now, and smaller faster players are prized. Twenty years ago the three was severely undervalued in basketball, and big men were prized; now the opposite is true. Which definition of merit is correct? Or does the definition of merit change? If it changes, who decides on the change? And if you say “the market does”, remember that the whole premise of Moneyball was that there were undervalued and underappreciated players who could be acquired for below what their market value should have been to field a competitive team on a limited budget. In other words - there were guys who weren’t being recognized for their merit and weren’t being paid appropriately because of baseball teams bias and lack of knowledge of the game.
The goal has always been to win. The particular strategies, and thus the types of players better suited to implementing those strategies, might change over time, but the goal is still to win. As for the Oakland A’s of Moneyball fame, IMHO what that reveals is that the owner of the team lacks merit as a serious owner, which shows in the standings. It’s not a perfect meritocracy, and as I previously noted it applies less to management and especially to ownership. But that just goes to prove the point. The owners / managers who insist on sticking to the “good old boys” style of doing things will suffer in the standings, while those who run their organizations by judging people on their merit will do better.
In addition, some seem to assume that the baker is running their own bakery; and may even want to expand into a chain. Which requires a whole different set of abilities, unrelated to the ability to produce excellent (by whatever definition) baked goods; and which abilities often don’t go with the abilities needed for baking.
One of which is that the ability to get people working together towards a common goal is an essential part of leadership – but some of the people who are very good at that are no good at all at identifying which are good goals to work towards; and worse, some of the people who are very good at that consider the goal to be their own individual betterment, and/or the detriment of others. But people who are very good at the first are likely to be able to get themselves considered by many to be people of high merit – because the people who so consider them are themselves susceptible to being gotten to work together for the malevolent and/or foolish person’s goals.
I think, however, that we may be somewhat sideways of the common meanings of “meritocracy”, which I think often has to do with government, not primarily with bakers or IT people. The idea that the people who govern should be chosen by their ability to do the job, rather than by inheritance (monarchy or aristocracy) or by wealth (plutocracy), has a great deal to be said for it. The problem is partly that there’s a very great and continuing tendency for the wealthy to define “merit” by definitions that require wealth; and for people in power to define “merit” in fashions that favor their family and friends. And the rest of the problem is that the complex requirements for “merit” in governing (which may be different in different circumstances) don’t necessarily go with “merit” in other fields; so because somebody’s good at X (which is not governing) doesn’t mean they’ll be good at governing, and because they’re terrible at X doesn’t mean they’ll be bad at it.
And no, running a business isn’t like running a country. Businesses run with a selected batch of managers and employees, and can fire people. One of the essential skills needed to successfully run any business large enough to hire people is the ability to judge who to hire and when and if to fire somebody. Countries have to include everybody. Or, at least, ought to (and may run into serious trouble if they don’t.)
In addition: we don’t know how many people who would be even better at any given sport are out there, or who they are. My guess is that such people do exist, in numbers at least as great as those actually playing at the professional level; but for one reason or another either they never entered the process of selection, or they were selected out for reasons that were either unrelated to their actual ability, or were temporary and/or potentially curable.
I’m actually not sure I agree. While winning, of course, matters greatly in professional sports, being entertaining is extremely important. Possibly more important than winning, in that sometimes rules are changed specifically to thwart winning strategies, if they make the game less entertaining/profitable. Though I suppose that gets in the messy area of how environments can be manipulated in a way that specifically lowers or raises one’s merit, and how that itself could be weaponized.
That does demonstrate another aspect of the debate, that of opportunity. There’s no innate reason the best cricket players are from India, Pakistan, and the UK, the best baseball players from the US, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, and so on. It’s just that people in those countries have more opportunity to develop their skill in those sports since that’s what’s popular in their country.
As much as I’ve been arguing in favor of meritocracy, I mean that in terms of outcomes. In terms of opportunity presented to people, I am very much in favor of everyone being given equal opportunity to develop their potential. Meritocracy shouldn’t be used to limit the opportunity of children to develop their potential.