I think equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome is, if not at the heart of the argument, at least very nearby.
I don’t know. I think the concept of awarding jobs or promotions based on ability and experience instead of class, favoritism, nepotism, race, or other factors is a nice ideal. But I can see those concepts taken to an extreme where people quickly become pigeonholed into specific tracks based on early assessments of their innate talents and abilities, with little opportunity to alter that trajectory.
Do we want every position of substance to be subject to the same level of competitive rigor and scrutiny as a professional sports team? Where everyone has an equal opportunity regardless of race, class, or background to be identified at age 6 as a potential architect, CEO, engineer, VP of Marketing or whatever their profile suggests and then relentlessly steered down that path, only to find that they can only keep their career so long as they constantly perform?
And ultimately, it does not address the question of people who for whatever reason are at the lower end of the bell curve.
Equality of opportunity can be massively improved, and should be; but it’s also a perpetual goal, not something that can ever be accomplished.
It’s not possible to get every child the best possible teachers for that child – not only because we need way more teachers than just the “best possible” ones, but also because a great teacher for one child may be a terrible one for another child.
It’s not possible to get every child the best possible parents – for both of those reasons, and also because enforcing licensing allowing people to be parents according to parenting tests carries a whole huge pack of additional problems that licensing teachers doesn’t.
It’s not possible to get every child the best possible living situation – not only because everybody can’t live in the same place, but because that also varies by child. My oldest sister needed badly to have been able to stay in New York City. I badly needed (and need) to be out in the country. My parents’ move, when she was eight and two years before I was born, probably saved me; but it did her significant damage.
And children are going to be born who need to learn in different fashions; in some cases due to obvious factors, in some cases due to much less obvious ones. A lot of work can be done (and some has been) to accomodate this; but it’s still not going to give equal opportunity to both the child who just sails through the standard system with little trouble, and the one who has to struggle continuously to do so and/or needs significant accomodations.
And people are going to be born with different physical capabilities. Nothing whatsoever could have been done to give me an “equal opportunity” to play professional football.
Again – none of this is a reason not to try to get as close as possible; any more than all the complications of baking (let alone of running a bakery while being a baker) is a reason not to try to get people making baked goods who are good at it. But what it does mean is a) that we’re never going to get perfectly there, or even so close that it doesn’t matter and b) that it’s still wrong to sneer at people for not matching a particular definition of success because, hey, they had “equal opportunity”.
A lot of comments in this thread are fighting the hypothetical. Rather than addressing what would be bad about a true meritocracy, they’re trying to nitpick and point out that a true meritocracy could never exist - but the OP is just asking, “well, what if we had one?”
Anyhow, back to the hypothetical - the only thing bad about an actual meritocracy is just the ruthless nature of it. It’s great to be a human with lots of merit. It sucks to be one who hasn’t got it. So if you have lots of merit, you probably like such a system, and if you have little, you probably hate it. That’s really all it boils down to.
Kind of a logical problem here, isn’t there?
What if we had no gravity? We probably wouldn’t be us, in that case, so it’s impossible to answer, It’s not nitpicking–if you can’t begin to define how a “true” meritocracy would run, how can we answer your hypothetical?
The place my mind was going when I started the thread was along the lines of what do we do with those who are at the low end of the bell curve, whether it’s due to some kind of lack of innate gifts, or whether it’s due to self-imposed reasons? And where do we draw those lines? How do we do all this without punishing the people on the other side of the bell curve?
I’m in favor of a strong social safety net. Enough to provide the people in that situation with safe housing, clean water, and healthy food, but not so much that their lifestyle is essentially undistinguishable from those who do work at the lowest paying jobs. Otherwise we end up with the situation that we currently have, where the people who “shovel manure” complain about those on welfare having it better than they do. We need to make sure that those who do the low paying, non-glamorous, but essential jobs are better off, and not just by a little bit, than those on welfare. The way to do that is not by cutting welfare, but to improve the pay for the lowest paid workers.
They’ve often got a drastically incorrect idea of how those on welfare have it.
I knew somebody who complained like that. He was bound and determined that people on welfare could afford to buy a new Cadillac every year or two, and could not be convinced otherwise. He’d heard of such a case from a friend, and said friend couldn’t possibly be mistaken, let alone lying.
– having to drive a used car is one sort of thing. Being expected to live on ration bars designed to taste not quite too bad to get down is another sort of thing entirely.
I suppose there’d be two types of ‘actual’ meritocracies then: the compassionate kind, that provides a strong safety net, and the social-Darwinistic kind, that says “too bad, you lack merit, suffer.”
Right- I was thinking that a lot of this would be mitigated largely by a living minimum wage that’s updated regularly.
I feel like the balancing act for government is how to provide a robust safety net without being perceived as penalizing the successful, or as some kind of institutional Robin Hood. It’s one thing to help the people who for whatever reason are unable to work, or who have fallen on hard times. It’s another entirely to basically publicly subsidize people’s bad choices.
I’m reminded of an article I read from a British tabloid about a woman who was so tattooed that nobody would hire her, and how she had to go on public assistance as a result. And is STILL getting new tattoos!
I’m not sure how to feel about it- on one hand, employers ought not be able to just discriminate based on appearance unless appearance is part of the job. But on the other, she did this to HERSELF, in a repeated campaign of tattoos, and is now on the public nickel because of her choices. That’s offensive in its own right- it’s not the British taxpayers’ problem to basically foot her bill because she chose to be freakishly tattooed.
I mean, part of me says that she’s tattooed her bed, let her lie in it, as uncompassionate as that sounds.
Are you sure that wasn’t a limerick?
Consider all the teams that win a championship one year and suck the next year, without major changes in rosters. Has their merit somehow dramatically changed?
There is a big difference in ranking people on results, which I think hardly anyone would object to, and merit. They are only loosely correlated. In “The Black Swan” Taleb discusses best sellers, and how the success of book one does not mean much about book two. (His book turned out to be an example.) Publishers consider a best seller a sign of merit, but it might not be.
You can identify superstars in all sorts of fields, but that isn’t anything to build a system on.
And if you are so divided, imagine how the general population feels. Half of them hating the poor as parasites on the body politic, the other half extending compassion and alms to them.
And yet the society wildly praises people for taking risks – when the risks pay off in cash. When they don’t, well, many say those were bad choices that shouldn’t be subsidized.
It’s not a risk if failure isn’t possible. And if nobody dares take risks, there’s a whole lot of stuff the society’s going to lose out on.
A guy with a wife and four kids works a minimum wage job for years, finally quits to start a business of his own with his tiny savings and works a 20 hour a day, seven day a week schedule for years to make his startup work.
If he goes belly up, wrecks his health, and his wife and kids have to go on welfare because he’s hospitalized for months on end, he’s a parasite. If he turns his company into a wild success, and becomes a billionaire, he’s a hero.
For the same exact fucking thing.
It has never surprised me that the majority of Ayn Rand supporters I have met in life are nearly always18-25 year old white men.
“Free-market economics” was popularized by Milton Friedman, the brain of the Pinochet régime. I don’t think appealing to it as normative is wise.
Well, aside from the whole question of how “merit” is to be determined, and who gets to do the determining.
What you’ve written reads to me rather like saying ‘if you object to meritocracy, that must be because you’re a worthless person.’ That may not be at all what you meant by it, of course.
The Flatiron Dragados fiasco isn’t a matter that would be solved by some relative (and subjective) judgment of “merit” in a “meritocracy,” but a situation with a need for strictly enforced construction standards.
Ah! Here we’re getting somewhere! The call for meritocracy is call for individual ass-kissing, hostile to labor solidarity. The would-be “high-value worker” isn’t joining a work-to-rule action. He despises labor unions. He’s probably willing to work lots of overtime, and thinks scabbing is good. I’ve known people like this; they don’t have a good sense of the big picture, seems to me.