In my company, a significant portion of our performance is tied to how well we work as a team. Particularly for management. It would be difficult to be considered good at your job if half your team decided to form a union or (more likely) simply quit and go work for another company.
I’ve come to the conclusion that “merit” is ambiguous enough of a concept that it’s not useful to make an “-ocracy”. You might as well call it a “People who fit what we consider a ‘good employee’-ocracy”.
Yeah, it’s really descriptive of a society rather than a government.
We probably have different ideas of what constitutes merit. For most jobs I can think of, there are things that can be measured objectively. How often a fast food worker gives customers the wrong order. What percentage of students in a given classroom pass an exam. How many home runs a designated hitter can hit per season. How often the patients in a nursing home fall. I could go on, but that’s the general idea. A construction company, and their employees whose responsibility it is to meet those standards, meeting strictly enforced construction standards is exactly the sort of thing that would differentiate one with merit vs. one without.
Not quite, but I think it would be safe to say that most people who would object to such a system - like any other system - would be the people who have the most to lose from such a system, and the ones who’d support it the most would be the ones who have the most to gain.
However, “merit” is not static and immovable; it’s something that can be gained. So if someone studies hard, works hard, but has an IQ of only 95, he’d in theory have more merit in a system than someone with the same IQ who does not work hard or study hard.
This is stuff that gets you promoted, or fired, or kept in the same job for years on end, depending. It really has little to do with merit, I think. To me, “merit” means “How much more is the person getting paid who manages the fast food restaurant than the person handing out the french fries?” and “How much more does the person who owns sixteen franchises earn than the unemployed ex-hander-out of french fries who got fired because he couldn’t perform that task efficiently?”
How much one is paid isn’t a measure of merit. At least not in my book. To the extent that we currently take that into consideration, I think it reflects on the fact that we don’t have a meritocracy, but rather a system where people are sometimes paid more (because they’re the bosses son, have connections, whatever) for reasons that aren’t fair.
Really? Seems to me that we need entry-level workers, bosses, unemployed people, people who own several successful businesses, etc. and the most important distinction between them is how well they’re rewarded for their various jobs.
To me the most important distinction is how good they are at their job. Let’s take an extreme case. Doctor A is a surgeon who works in a small rural hospital, just graduated from medical school, and is on a contract that pays 150K per year. They took that job because that’s where they grew up and want to serve the community where they grew up. Their record while in residency shows that they did solid work, with below average rates of complications. Doctor B is a surgeon at a private hospital in a wealthy suburb, and was hired by the group where they work at a rate of 800K per year. Their record shows they have higher than average rates of complications. Despite that, they got the job because they come from a long line of doctors who have also worked for that group. I’d say Doctor A has more merit, and if I needed surgery I’d choose Doctor A.
Seems to me we’re living in that sort of meritocracy right now. You’ve got doctors earning five times as much as other doctors and the ability to choose between them.
Yes, but that doesn’t make it a meritocracy. The point I was trying to make is that the judgments about who is better at what can’t be made just based on how much money they make. In a true meritocracy the pay would follow the good worker, but we don’t live in that world. Someone who works in a poor community, regardless of whether they are a doctor or flipping burgers at McDonald’s, is likely to make less money than someone who works in a wealthy community. That doesn’t mean the people who work in the poor area do a worse job. It just means that we have a system where what people earn isn’t always based on how good they are at their job.
I feel like the Peter Principle has a lot to do with how meritocratous(?) a society or government is perceived.
A lot of what I’ve seen with incompetent managers is really the Peter Principle in action. They were probably great programmers, team leads, etc… but aren’t necessarily equipped temperamentally, educationally, or otherwise to be good managers. So they are poor managers, and people get all bent out of shape crying that they don’t deserve their positions because they suck.
Which is true, but only to a certain degree. What happened is that they got promoted to a point where they’re no longer good at their jobs, and stay there, continuing to be incompetent. Nobody’s willing to demote them, and nobody’s willing to promote them either.
A real meritocracy would have mechanisms for people to try out different jobs- not necessarily “higher” jobs, but different ones, without any attached opprobrium for it not being a good fit. It would essentially be a way to separate pay grade from your actual job function, so that you could get promoted for merit, without necessarily having to move into a different job.
I think your nursing home example shows the problem with the very idea of meritocracy. In a nursing home that would be one metric. Others might be how fast messes are cleaned up and whether the clients like the worker. Even if all can be objectively measured, what weights should be assigned to them to measure merit? A people boss might care more about the clients smiling when the worker comes in. A boss with an aversion to soiled bed clothes might weigh the clean up more. There is no objective way of assigning weights, so the computation of merit is always going to be subjective.
True, but you might consider how much people are paid relative to others in the same position. That’s closer, but not perfect either. When we did salary administration, we had target salaries for people, but we couldn’t necessarily get them there, because the pot of raise money to assign was too small. (The high inflation period was great for this.) So if you sorted people by salary you would not match what you’d get if you sorted them by an inexact definition of merit.
My intended target for an Income Guarantee was about half the $50K Velocity mentioned–when I thought about it, before our recent bout of inflation. Should be enough to live on & keep your house if you have to strike, but also with a (probably flat-rate) quarter of your other income going in taxes to cover it. I imagine that sounds like way too much to people who live on several times that.
In general, though, I think when you’re providing a service or product to the people, whether as a government contractor or in the marketplace, it’s more important that you follow the rules & regulations to do it properly than that you are “competitive.” If “merit” is awarded on the curve, based for example on productivity, it’s not only going to be derived from questionable measurements, it could mean no one in competition is actually bidding to do the job properly, taking as long as it takes with the necessary materials & work practices to protect both one’s workers and the end users from calamity. This goes for building a viaduct as well as for selling meat or baked goods as well as things like contract law and investment management. Rules are better than competition.
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.
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.
That’s just old-school Social Liberalism, which is an older idea than meritocracy, and has the advantage of having been adopted and found to work well in living memory.
Yes. If you focus on income inequality as being a major component in what some form of meritocracy would accomplish, we already have the means to begin bringing some of that around.
What we lack is the will.
This idea is massively unpopular in the U.S., but it is also absolutely necessary in any sort of merit-based system of governance.
And oddly, the people who denounce it the most fiercely are the ones who constantly parrot “Good work is its own reward.” They just don’t act on that maxim.
Agree. But rather tautologically what they’re really saying is
The work that has highly rewarded me is the good work. Other work, that rewards others less well is evidently bad work. We live in a Good World that rewards Good Work. After all, look at me and my rewards!!! QED.
I don’t know that meritocracy would bring around income equality- it’s kind of the exact opposite.
People who are competent get higher raises, prestige, pay, etc… than those who are not so competent.
If the weightings were all based on performance, it is a 100 percent meritocracy. It might be a bad meritocracy where the objective merit criteria were poorly set, but it would still be a meritocracy.
And if the weightings are all based on who your relatives are, it is zero percent meritocracy.
So if a Chinese university bases domestic student admissions on test scores only, that’s completely meritocratic, much as it might be a bad system that distorts secondary education. A Canadian university that bases admissions only on grades would also be meritocratic.
It is hard to conceive of a pure meritocracy for business start-ups. Who you know, and what money your parents might be able to plow into the business, are super-important. It also is super-important, I think, that lots of new businesses are started. So even though I lean towards meritocracy, I would never outlaw parents from giving substantial amounts of money to children — while paying bigger gift taxes than today.
Performance is how you assign scores based on the various components of what you call merit. I’m assuming that these scores are accurate in some sense, and I was implicitly assuming that all the relevant metrics of performance are included, far from obvious as your examples show. But weighting is about how you add these up to a final score, and has nothing to do with performance, but are someone’s estimate (maybe a manager, maybe an AI) of how important each is. Most of us would agree that meeting deadlines is more important than having a clean desk, but how much more important?
Your college example is interesting. At some point, after I went to college, admissions offices looked for school activities, not just grades, so you had a set of students who joined every club around but never actually did anything in them. Leadership then became more important, so they’d start clubs they could be the president of. It shows another problem with meritocracy - peoples behaviors will migrate to doing things deemed meritorious, even if they are not advancing the goals of the company.
Yeah, your examples might be called meritocratic, but they have little relationship to true merit in that they will lead to less competent people being better rewarded than more competent people.
The people who run these systems will define merit according to their measures, until they get kicked out and the next set define it a totally different way.