Or so the people who get big raises and pay say. But we’ve seen plenty of examples of CEOs getting 8 figure paychecks and running the company into the ground.
@voyager has a great point. A true meritocracy has to put merit in a box so you can dole out rewards based on how much it weighs. How do you contain and measure worthiness?
Taking something so subjective, and turning it into a strictly objective measurement is fraught with problems. Either it remains subjective, or you turn it into a meaningless collection of KPIs that get gamed by those who already have resources.
Well, to my mind, you start a meritocracy by approximating income equality–which doesn’t mean everyone earns the same amount. You simply make it very difficult for someone to earn thousands for every dollar a poor person earns. By reducing the gross disparities in wealth, you de-incentivize (somewhat) the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, which is how the present system operates: money as a way of keeping score, and sometimes of accumulating power. If everyone’s income is capped, effectively, at say a million dollars per year (an absurdly low figure, of course) then what people can accumulate is credit and recognition for a job well done, which in turn wards off the day that their income dips below that million-mark. So people are motivated to do their jobs well, perhaps to broaden their skill sets, once they’ve broken through to that million-dollar level. If they choose, instead, to say “Why work so hard? I’ve already reached the top level,” then someone else gets a shot at breaking through to the top level. And if they choose to continue working so hard, it’s because they enjoy the work and take satisfaction from being recognized as very good at it, which (they claim now) is the real reward of hard work anyway.
Money has always been a way of keeping score. It was invented for that purpose when the barter system became to cumbersome as economies grew and became more complex. The problem isn’t money. It’s not even income inequality, because I’m pretty sure a system where everyone was paid the exact same amount would fail spectacularly. The problem is that the wealthy are disproportionately rewarded, and that they are rewarded for things that don’t actually benefit society at large.
Huh???
My bad 
. The point I was trying, although not very well as it turns out, is that part of why we aren’t currently a meritocracy is that we reward people based on things other than merit. IMHO the problem isn’t the unequal outcomes, it’s the methods we use in deciding those outcomes (which IMHO in our current system tends towards aristocracy rather than meritocracy for the C-suite types).
In other words, we don’t want income equality, we want income equity. Everyone being judged by the same standards would be a good start.
You know Ayn Rand was big into meritocracy. She believed in people being compensated based on how much actual value they added. But in the world of Atlas Shrugged a dollar was worth a dollars work.
A meritocracy has nothing to do with income equality. If someone is really creating 100x the value or more of the average employee, why should they not be compensated accordingly.
Because money isn’t everything. The esteem of your peers and your self-respect is far more meaningful.
And this gets into the problem of judging “merit.” If I’m a CEO who focuses on short-term profits instead of long-term growth have I created more or less value?
The higher up the corporate tree the less frequent the merit-demonstrating opportunities and the more result of those opportunities are driven by fortune not ability.
I agree it doesn’t have anything to do with income equality, but just paying those who are lots better than others more isn’t a meritocracy. Almost everyone does that. Can you sort all employees based on merit? Can you define it and measure it precisely enough to make the “100x the value” assertion anything more than hyperbole?
Exactly. The whole concept of “meritocracy” to my mind begins with the concept of relative value. Maybe a CEO is worth 8x the salary of his most poorly paid employee, maybe it’s 20x the worth. I doubt it’s 100x and I doubt it’s a 1000x. Why? Because, like the janitor, the CEO could be replaced, and very likely you’d see no difference in the company’s performance. If you did see one, it might be an improvement (happens all the time) and if you saw a decline, it would be in range of 10-20%, which would be a disaster. But it would never (or very rarely) be a more sizable decline, and literally never a 100% decline.
So the starting point is to get salaries, in general, into some sort of rational proportionality. Then we could start figuring out more precisely how the formulae should be tweaked.
In Brave New World, the meritocracy is objectively created through genetics. Alphas just are better than Betas, who are better than Gammas etc. And the rewards appear to be on the basis of class, not measured output. All Alphas live the same, pampered lives; all Deltas the same shit ones.
I’m not raising this to discuss if merit throught genetic engineering is plausible - let’s not go down that rabbit-hole. But it’s interesting that Huxley has this perfectly stratified society spend quite a bit of effort in reconciling the under-classes to their positions in life. "I’m glad I’m not an Alpha, I work so hard" is the mantra hypnotically drilled in from infancy. Because he recognised that a structurally and unchangeably unequal society will left to itself suffer from unrest.
We’re not going down the hypnosis/conditioning route. But lets say we do wave our hands in the air and create an actual meritocracy and there really are people who produce 100x or 1000x what others do and consequently they really do earn that. And everyone who doesn’t knows full well that this is in fact fair and deserved and so is their pauper’s wage and general relative depravation.
Are we really going to try and maintain highly unequal society on the basis of “I’m awesome and deserve all this: you suck and deserve your shitty life. No, it can never change.”?.
I mean, you might think than in a meritocracy there would be a relatively low level of inequality - some people are better than others but no-one’s that much better - in which case fine. But if you really do believe that the the top 1% are going to have >50% of the wealth/income/resources/power while the bottom 50% have <1% then - what’s the next bit of this plan?
It doesn’t have to be precise. Just objectively measurable. If someone has 100x (or whatever reasonable multiplier) the sales or wins 100x the cases or writes 100x the amount of quality code or can weld or carpentry 100x as fast as their average peer, then they are worth 100x the average employees and should be compensated accordingly.
Unless we are talking about something fundamentally different, a “job” is still an activity that society pays people to perform to produce the goods and services it needs. Putting better, more competent people in their jobs means greater output which means a better standard of living for all.
A lot of more liberal academic types seem to think a job is a reward for “being a good, well educated person” or some such thing. Then they seem surprised that no one will pay them for their esoteric major and progressive sensibilities. If it’s not creating value for someone else, you aren’t going to get compensated.
Even in a meritocracy, your still going to have the problem of some jobs don’t pay as well and won’t be as desirable as others. Janitor is most likely always going to be a low-level job performed by people without skills to do something more lucrative. Lawyers and doctors will always be compensated more.
I disagree with the premise that CEOs and other senior executives don’t have any impact on their company. Look at General Electric before and after Jack Welch or Twitter / X before and after Elon Musk. Then again, the corporate leadership at the tech consulting firm I worked for some years back were complete morons and the only reason it existed is that the CEO married a rich woman whose family financed the company so long as she effective ran it as CFO.
So I think the problem you are trying to solve is how do put effective leaders in charge of organizations as opposed to creating a overclass of superwealthy where the organizations effectively run themselves and any moron can sit in the CEO chair and collect big money for doing nothing.
The historical documents tell us the best way to get back into the job you are good at is to hijack and blow up a starship, then somehow get a Klingon vessel to travel back in time to retrieve some humpback whales. Seems like a lot of work. 
We need a better system.
A) There is no anthropological evidence, or so I am told, of a generally barter-based culture in history. Lots of “gift economies,” though, where high-status persons can grant gifts, feudal lands, favors, and the like.
B) If it makes it easier to accept, substitute “income disparity” for “income inequality” in these discussions. It’s not that we expect incomes to be identical; just not multiple orders of magnitude different.
Where are we finding these Kryptonians? Two orders of magnitude greater than the median skilled worker in that field is not a realistic number.
Ugh, this is Margaret Thatcher language. Contrary to what she thought, it’s actively dangerous to society when we discourage low-productivity careers that provide a useful but rarely profitable service. We need historians and nutritionists and anthropologists more than we need mergers & acquisitions lawyers, despite the enormous pay difference pointing the other way.
I suspect it’s less
I’m a good person with the “right” sensibilities - therefore, I deserve a job!
and more
I do have valuable skills! I can read, write, even “think critically”! Won’t someone at least pay me to do that?