I can't help feel like including any discussion of the ultra-rich such as Gates as an example when discussing meritocracy confuses the question. That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck, as there is no possible way one person's skill or merit can exceed that of his peers by 6 to 7 orders of magnitude. Basically, that kind of wealth is more like winning a lottery where their skills bought them a ticket. I suppose the question then becomes, could you still say there is a meritocracy if there are outliers who win the lotto? Do you discard those outliers and look at the general population, is the existence of such of outliers counter-evidence to meritocracy, or does the fact that the kind of "lottery" Gates won still required a high level of skill to even play mean it may to some degree support the idea of a meritocracy?
I stopped reading that article when he implied that Gates' wealth should be considered or measured in relation to programming skill. Debates about meritocracy are important, but starting from flawed frame like that made me not want to invest more time reading that particular author. If he wanted to compare Gates to other technology entrepreneurs, that might have been worthwhile, but implying that we don't live in a meritocracy because there are better programmers than Gates shows the author is not interested in a rigorous look at the issue. I wasn't surprised to see Bill Gates clickbait at the top of the Apple News app, but I was a little bummed to also see it on the top of HN. Then again, I still clicked it and commented on it, so mission accomplished for Fast Company I suppose.
That same sentence made me stop reading. It's perhaps not an obvious point, but there are several dimensions that require excellence to succeed in entrepreneurship, and failing at passing the bar on any one of those dimensions make the probability of success drop dramatically.
I disagree. Many people do not read the articles. You can easily tell by taking the number of unique users commenting on articles and comparing to standard marketing metrics for shared articles.
And they don’t need to read anyway, because comments are the real reason people come to a site like this. If the comments praise the article highly or make strong references, then perhaps it warrants a read, otherwise the comments make for much better content. You can often tell what the article’s main idea is from the headline anyway, otherwise it’s just a bad headline and probably a bad article.
I disagree. Comparing returns to labor productivity along a particular dimension (programming labor) is a useful framework for explaining that it’s clearly not a meritocracy.
Obviously, as nearly any reader would grant, there are other dimensions like business acumen, network connections, market timing, etc., that matter hugely in the specific story of Bill Gates, and clearly the article does not have as a goal a desire to discuss all those different dimensions as much as discussing labor productivity.
And that’s fine.
Some essays may focus on one of these aspects or another. This one happens to be among the subset that focus on labor productivity, which is a valid and worthwhile subset of factors to spend an essay focusing on.
An essay focusing on one side of things and conveniently omitting the other one is not an essay, it's propaganda.
I'm afraid if we run a proper statistical analysis of programming labor vs. the result, we'll see a pretty strong correlation between the two.
There will be outliers, but according to my personal (non-scientific) observation, "negative" outliers are extremely rare: I know very average software developers who raised to the top overtaking their smarter colleagues. I still have to see a great developer who due to the lack of opportunities cannot make ends meet.
Nobody is “omitting” anything. Not all discussions of X must focus on all aspects of X. Sometimes it’s useful to just study a subset of attributes of X, and that’s perfectly valid.
Separately to your second point, I think you’re just badly mistaken. Firstly, meritocracy would mean someone receives financial compensation directly proportional to their productivity. I don’t know any software developers for whom this is remotely true. Often developers are paid a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate, nothing remotely approaching a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view.
Secondly, there are many skilled software developers who cannot find work and cannot find competitive wages. Some end up unemployed from chronic burnout or the toll that dysfunctional open plan work environments take, some have family circumstances requiring them to live in places where the job markets are poor, some are unemployed after being fired for ageist cost cutting, and some work for successful companies but are deeply exploited, earning a fraction of what the person in the next cubicle is earning, despite being equally productive.
It’s really harmful to propagate this stereotype that just because a person had training or skill in software engineering, they have a simple path to a middle class life. Absolutely not true.
> Firstly, meritocracy would mean someone receives financial compensation directly proportional to their productivity. I don’t know any software developers for whom this is remotely true. Often developers are paid a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate, nothing remotely approaching a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view.
I would call this a bad strawman of meritocracy if you weren't obviously for meritocracy. The parts I object to are "directly proportional" and the assertion that "a tiny fraction of the revenue they generate" is not "a fair fraction from a meritocratic point of view".
Why do you object to those points? For example, I’d say a developer earning $200k per year in total comp (which is at the very high end of the spectrum) is drastically underpaid at almost any company, relative to the revenue they directly bring in, even after you account for risks that investors / owners are taking, costs of benefits / office space / equipment / sales / distribution / etc. The developer is still drastically underpaid.
And if they are really a skilled developer whose productivity is sincerely a large multiplier beyond their peers’ productivity, they’ll be lucky to earn even 30% more, despite literally accounting for 10x, 100x, 1000x more revenue.
I do not see how any rational argument could be made to suggest this is even the tiniest bit meritocratic. And we’re not even discussing the role of political favorites or nepotism might play in bonuses or promotions, etc. etc.
Meritocracy is a thing that distinguishes between people who had the same opportunities. There are many people who had all the same opportunities as Gates but only one of them is Gates, because the other people who had the same opportunities made different choices. There are others who might have made the same choices but didn't have the same opportunities.
Pretending that one or the other is sufficient on its own is folly. You need both. If you don't have the same opportunities then you can't be Gates no matter how hard you work, and if you don't work hard then you can't be Gates even if you had the same opportunities.
Moreover, having fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the "what should I do" decision tree. If you have the same opportunities as Gates and you make the right decisions then you're a billionaire instead of a millionaire. If you have fewer opportunities then instead it's the difference between having a $140K/year job or a $40K/year job, but that is still a highly relevant difference in your life.
I would disagree that Meritocracy only distinguishes between those with the same opportunities, and argue that a true Meritocracy can only exists when people are afforded generally the same opportunities. If everyone is playing with a different set of options or rules, success is inherently not based on skill, but at best on a combination of skill and the options/rules they were playing by.
It seems to me that if "fewer opportunities doesn't actually change much in the 'what should I do' decision tree" then we are not living in a Meritocracy, as your saying the outcomes depend primary on the set of opportunities you either started with or achieved by chance, and no mater what skill is applied you have a limited "optimal" path and can not achieve more then that.
I actually think I agree with that, while there are Meritocratic elements to the world we live in in that we get to apply skills to our choices, the significant limits to our individual "choice trees" caused by various social and economic factors rule out the possibility that we are living in what could be called a mostly Meritocratic system.
> I would disagree that Meritocracy only distinguishes between those with the same opportunities, and argue that a true Meritocracy can only exists when people are afforded generally the same opportunities. If everyone is playing with a different set of options or rules, success is inherently not based on skill, but at best on a combination of skill and the options/rules they were playing by.
That is just defining meritocracy in a way that causes it to be impossible. Some people are 5'0" and others are 6'6" and that is not a personal choice but it is also a relevant characteristic in the game of basketball.
There are two ways out of that. One is to define merit as including things like genetics and upbringing, so Gates is meritorious because he went to good schools and his parents had the money to expose him to computer hardware at a time when it was very expensive etc. causing him to know about business and code. But that's reaching the point of tautology -- if you're successful you're meritorious because merit is defined as things that produce success.
The other is to recognize opportunity as something separate from merit but still relevant to position. Some people never had the opportunity to go to medical school and so they can't be your doctor. Some people did have that opportunity, but didn't choose it, and they too can't be your doctor.
This allows us to recognize that not everyone has the same opportunities -- and that it is not even possible for everyone have the same opportunities, even if there are ways to improve the opportunities for some people, because there is still no way to make 5'0" people 6'6" -- while at the same time recognizing that the person who did become a doctor/engineer/CEO/etc. did so at significant personal effort when other, similarly situated people did not.
It seems like you're just trying to redefine Meritocracy to fit the state of the world. Saying that "Some people never had the opportunity to go to medical school and so they can't be your doctor" means that no, we don't live in a true Meritocracy, unless you can also show that all such people would not have been able to get through medical school had they been given that opportunity.
With your definition, a Monarchy would be a Meritocracy. The son of the King has the opportunity to rule because of "genetics and upbringing", he has enough skill that it doesn't lead to deposition or revolution, so he becomes King.
Of course there are limits to this in terms of genetics, and I would agree that to determine if we were in a Meritocracy you would have to look at what differentiates the success/failure of those born with similar physical/genetic characteristics as that is not something we can realistically make equal as a society.
I am also in full agreement in that I think an Absolute Meritocracy is impossible, and I think the question is are we a Mostly Meritocratic society or not, but you can't just redefine something because the definition makes it impossible.
The point is that the question of "mostly meritocratic" is nonsense because it depends entirely on the definition of merit. If you call genetics a component of merit then society becomes much more meritocratic. If you call it not then it becomes much less. But it isn't society that is different in either case. You can make any society arbitrarily meritocratic or unmeritocratic by classifying various things as merit or not.
And this gets into the whole question of free will. If you had the "opportunity" to be taught about expected value and opportunity costs and economic theory, do your choices that take into account that knowledge count as merit or opportunity? Did you make the choice, or do your circumstances cause you to?
But those kinds of games aren't revealing anything deep, they're just shuffling paper around. It's a shell game used for political advantage to try to create a conflict between things that shouldn't.
Rewarding is merit is good. If there is a law that says people can't keep enough of what they earn, that is a dumb law, because we will lose good entrepreneurs.
Increasing opportunity is good. If there is a law that says black people can't be entrepreneurs, that is a dumb law, because we will lose good entrepreneurs.
Where politics comes in is that you have people that want to trade one good against the other. So they vilify success to justify reducing its incentives in order to raise money for programs that increase opportunities, even though that is one of the dumbest trade offs available when it is possible to have both. And the rhetoric used convinces people that their circumstances mean that they can't succeed, even though the circumstances only make it more difficult, and then they don't even try.
The straw man is that Gates is a representative example of anything when he is the far extreme outlier. Taxing him at even 99% would generate an inconsequential percentage of government revenue because there are so few people like him, whereas the median family in the "top one percent" is a surgeon who is married to an anesthesiologist. So if you want meaningfully more money, it's really going to come from the large number of doctors and software developers and college professors, not from one Bill Gates.
But the government already raises more than enough money. The problem is that most of it goes to corruption and waste and appeasing the AARP. Use the same money to actually increase opportunities for people and you don't have to take it from doctors and entrepreneurs. (Have a look at what percentage of the federal budget is spent on retirees. Say what you will about the need for those programs at some level, but that percentage is just too high, and it keeps going up. All while the programs are sending big checks to millionaires and inflating healthcare costs. But it's much easier to vilify Bill Gates than anger a large voting block in the major swing state of Florida.)
IBM could have had (something like) Windows. They famously misunderstood that they commoditized themselves out of the whole-PC market, and the truly big players to remain would be those to achieve mastery in creation of the components of the market. Like Intel and CPUs, or Microsoft and software.
What kind of historical revisionism is this? Microsoft has always faced competent and well resourced competitors at every step of the way.
Apple, IBM for consumer operating systems. Later on NeXTStep and BeOS. UNIX vendors for Windows Server.
Lotus, WordPerfect for office suites.
Borland, Sun for developer tools.
PalmOS, then Nokia, Apple and Google for Windows Phone.
Gates is being modest. Microsoft beat these companies again and again, and only partly through over-aggressive tactics. Mostly his competitors just didn't invest in the right things at the right times, or got distracted, or couldn't hire the right talent, or made other strategic mistakes. Gates wasn't perfect either but he was smart enough to make plenty of good decisions, and turn on a dime when he realised he'd made mistakes (e.g. the internet pivot).
The idea that Gates isn't a good example of meritocracy is a strange one indeed. I can't help but think this sort of attack on "meritocracy" comes from SJWs who hate the idea that maybe the people at the top look the way they do because that's who deserves to be there!
I don't think it's historical revisionism. The initial stroke of luck was IBM not realising what a gold mine they had gifted Microsoft. Beyond that point, MS leveraged their platform advantage to neutralise competitors. They made Lotus 1-2-3 run slower on their platform, then copied it. Stacker's code, they straight out stole. Once they were in a powerful position, that gifted them more power, but it was luck that got them there in the first place. None of that has to do with any meritorious coding by Gates.
Lotus employees themselves said they don't recall DOS ever breaking or slowing down their app, and Microsoft gave them betas to test. Any compatibility issues were bugs in DOS that Microsoft fixed. So you're repeating long since debunked myths here. Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is one of the strategic issues Gates got right.
Secondly, IBM not realising the OS was a "gold mine" is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That's not luck. Luck is a dice roll, it's something that could happen to anyone. Noticing important opportunities other firms have missed due to lack of strategic insight isn't "luck", that's indeed the heart of merit!
Thirdly, Stacker wasn't stolen. The Stacker lawsuit was about patents, it happened because Microsoft evaluated Stac's technology and decided to go with a different compression engine, which pissed off Stac so they sued. The judge concluded any infringement wasn't "wilful" i.e. the Microsoft people who did DoubleSpace didn't know about Stac's patents. This is the kind of dispute that happens to every software company.
Finally, being in a powerful position didn't automatically "gift them more power". It doesn't work like that. Look at Azure - it doesn't benefit from Windows at all, yet is growing like a weed and beating GCP. That's not something that was gifted to them merely by being there.
What I'm seeing here is a very strange view of business and leadership - good decisions are described as luck, hard work to build new products is zeroed out and described as merely 'gifts', and a bunch of garbled or false urban legends are used to minimise their achievements.
Look, I've never worked for Microsoft and have no particular reason to love them. In the 1990s I was a full on Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy in fact. But with the benefit of age and time, and watching competitors, I can see now just how many good decisions Gates made repeatedly to get him and his firm where he is now. It wasn't luck.
I'd guess it applies the initial deal Microsoft had with IBM to write DOS, along with keeping the rights to the IP. A whole lot of luck was involved: being in the right time at the right place, IBM focusing more on hardware, etc.
I ran a business for a while, and I distinctly remember several key moments where I got super lucky. Eventually the business got big enough that less luck was required to make it on a daily basis.
The term belongs in the same bin as toxic masculinity, mainsplaining, manspreading and Patriarchy. Words people one on side of a political spectrum use since they think its descriptive, and the other side find that they only end discussions.
SJW is not a pejorative, it's a descriptive term for people whose overriding concern is social justice, which they define as equitable outcomes, and whose concern is sufficiently great that they spent lots of time engaging in aggressive rhetoric and tactics ("warrioring").
Remember what happened to GitHub's rug that said "meritocracy" on it? Pictures of the rug reached a bunch of feminist forums and they then started demanding it be got rid of because if GitHub is a meritocracy then why isn't it full of women? They then kicked up such a stink that one of the first acts of the new CEO was to get rid of it - sending a rather powerful message to everyone else about who really runs the place.
It's therefore an extremely relevant term for extremely serious discussions, which is why it crops up so much. There are many people who describe themselves is nearly identical words, such as "social justice activist". If everyone who used the term SJW started using SJA instead, rapidly you'd come to the view that SJA is also a pejorative, simply because so much discussion of these types of people is disapproving in nature.
I feel like that statement is just saying that things are always partly meritocratic. Yes, you have to be skilled and prepared to take the best advantage of opportunities, but how does one get opportunities? Does one meet more/better opportunities because of skill and merit, or because of station and class of birth, or random chance? If the latter two outweigh the first, then I don't think we can say we really live in a Meritocracy.
> That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck
I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got to see how many decisions he had to make to achieve what we did, I'd doubt you'd it attribute it solely to luck. All successful businesses likely experience some form of luck, but you need to be in a position to take advantage of it and that comes from skill and hard work.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is to create an industry like PCs or business software. After they're ubiquitous it's easy to look back and say "well of course, anyone could have done that", but the fact is other's were trying and failed or gave up or never started.
I'm in no way attributing his achievements solely to luck. You say there were those who "were trying and failed" and those "gave up or never started." He had to have the skills and perseverance to not be in the last group, and the skills to make the choices that didn't lead to early failures. But there is a point at which the compounding effects of luck separates the successful from the ridiculously successful.
If you re-rolled all the dice that defined the random chances and situational conditions in his life, I'd expect someone like Gates to come out reasonably successful in many cases. But he had to get one very specific set of roles to be where he is now, you'd have to re-roll forever for that set to come up again. And It's not unreasonable to think that there are a fair number of people out there who could achieve the same ridiculous level of success if you re-rolled their dice enough times.
I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer.
Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical.
Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
We celebrate the winners because it's hard to know how much of winning was chance and how much was skill. There were 57 possible ways of doing something, but the successful person picked the best one. Was their choice fully random, or did they see some specific potential in that option and purposely chose that one to try? What about the choice to try one of the 57 to begin with rather than any of the other infinitely many things they could have done with their time when there was no guarantee any of them would work?
There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases.
One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it.
And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government.
So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.
I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.
An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house.
(Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
>An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house.
Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
Playing the game well enough means A- not B+. I used to think about this in University a lot with the grading system. On the face of it nobody really seems to notice the +/- distinction. There is a more primitive grouping of A/B/C. The difference between being an A grade player and a B grade player is 1 point. If you're 79 points you're B+. If you're 80 points you're A-. But it's a world of difference between being perceived as an A player vs. a B player. By that same token, the effort/reward ratio for striving for A+ is crappy.
Luck doesn't exist. People take advantage of opportunities, and working hard is one way to be exposed to a greater number of opportunities.
What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
Or maybe you're just lucky enough that you've never been in a frame of mind to notice its absence?
I know nothing of you as an individual, but if we define "luck" as events unfolding in your life beyond your control in a positive manner it's absurd to say it doesn't exist. We are all brought into existence either lucky or unlucky, relatively speaking. Were you born healthy, attractive, tall, rich, smart, with loving parents with a stable income, in a first world country? Or were you born poor, diseased, addicted to crack, and into sex slavery?
Yes, there are things you can do to improve your lot in life, but saying luck doesn't exist is a harmful truism. You believe it because it makes you feel in control of your destiny, not because it has any basis in reality.
Tell me how you feel about luck after being diagnosed with a terminal illness that will make the rest of your life miserable and deplete the savings you pass onto your grieving loved ones.
I think it was pretty clear the context I was talking about. I wasn't referring to randomness, like with your terminal illness diagnosis.
This is the idea of "luck" when discussing "meritocracy" and people being promoted, which I think was kind of clear if you read past the first three words.
Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
The poster may see something worse than luck there; they may see cause. One cannot reroll in life and be reborn as the heir of the Hilton family.
Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
Yeah, I'm probably splitting hairs somewhat, but that would be fortune and not luck.
Also, while that extreme example is somewhat illustrative, I think for most of us it's that we're one of 20+ engineers, illustrators, business-types, etc in a department, and the "luck" we see around us is explained by what I wrote.
Luck implies unexplainable randomness. Example: The person who got the promotion was "lucky", because they just happened to have knowledge in a field that was needed. There's no luck there, they spent years learning that information.
I like the phrasing "increasing your luck surface". But random chance just happens. You won't ever sell a software startup for a billion dollars if you don't start one... but you still probably won't sell one for a big exit, even if you do.
There wasn't much effort on my part to be born to highly-educated parents who valued educating their children well. I didn't work especially hard for my mother, a maths PhD, stay at home so that my father's career, which required frequent moves, could advance. Wasn't my work ethic that ensured his career advanced to the extent that he could afford to send me abroad for post-graduate studies (I turned out not to need the financial help in the end, but still).
It's not just about parents or upbringing either. Mark Zuckerberg's roommates - Hughes, Moskovitz, and Saverin - were his roommates by luck. What if they'd gone to Yale or Brown or Stanford? Or not been assigned to those rooms? You might say "But they worked hard to get into Harvard and be exposed to those opportunities!" - but so did (almost) everyone else who got into Harvard. Most of the other people from that class aren't billionaires now - they're merely highly successful professionals.
So the poor person in the inner city who works hard is going to have the same statistical chance of getting ahead as the “hard working” person in the suburbs where the household income is ten times more?
I bet you also believe the justice system is fair and that a poor Black teenager caught with weed will be treated the same as a White kid in the burbs...
The post has been heavily downvoted, but I think there is some truth in it: there's no such thing as 100% luck.
People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before.
There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.
> Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy.
Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words.
I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
Yes, because everyone who gets into one of our elite institutions gets there on merit and there is absolutely not a predatory aspect to the way the elite networks have arranged society that steals advantage from everyone else. It's just a victim mentality the cost to call out the structural inequities of society that cause so much pain and stress to the unlucky classes. Now hold still while we raise the costs of everything necessary to life while automating your job away. And don't you dare call out your betters for their bad behavior; that's toxic!
One possible positive aspect is that it allows you to think:
My current lousy situation is not the result of something internal and unchangeable, so it is worth figuring out how to change it and get into a better situation.
It's easy to take that attitude too far, but maybe keeping a little bit of it around could be helpful for some.
That guy skipped right over the comment about collective action. For people that don't have the system pre-gamed for them the only why to fight back to prevent being exploited is collective action. Or taking lots of risks and being lucky.
I'm not a take big risks and hope to be lucky kinda guy.
The iron law of collective action is that it doesn't really work for large, dispersed groups. Collective action is how the old-boy-network perpetuates itself in the first place; you can try to raise the scale of feasible coordination so as to increase its social benefits, but it's a very hard problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially ideological flamebait, to Hacker News? It leads to acrid and predictable discussions that are off topic here.
That's because meritocracy is not a synonym for the idea that hard work has any value at all. The article isn't saying what you think it's saying if you read it as "hard work doesn't matter at all and luck is all that gets you anywhere in capitalism".
> Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).
As already stated, Bill Gates and other billionaires are pretty irrelevant to this question. Nobody really cares what it takes to become a billionaire, almost nobody will become one anyway.
What matters is if talent and hard work pay off, and they most definitely do. Yes it helps if your parents are rich, but that’s ususally because of _their_ hard work so that’s not really a counterpoint, and most successful people come from average backgrounds.
If you forget about the question of why is it that someone's parents are rich, parental socioeconomic status has comparable power in explaining children success as the child's IQ has. Reference paper: "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research", Tarmo Strenze.
log(success) = S * skill + P * privilege + L * luck
Were the coefficients S, P & L depend on the measure of success.
American dream-like meritocracy says it is almost all S.
For honest "equality of opportunities" (sadly, often it's a euphemism for the above), S, P and L (and want to change it to S and L).
People for "the equality of outcome" believe it is mostly P (and L).
You won't become a top scientist by will low skill. Yet, if raised in an environment with no value on education, and not spotted by anyone - they may not become a scientist at all. Or someone with high S and P, but focusing on a problem that turned out to spend their lives on problems that turned out to be dead ends?
Do you think that say Zuckerberg (given the same skill and drive) would have achieved the same success if he spent their forming years among less privileged environment, e.g. Poland (less mentoring, no-one wanting to invest millions, not that tempting to join a students' network of a not-Ivy league university?)
For executive positions (unlike technical ones), I guess it is much more P & L than most meritocrats would like, vide
"Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19406432
Also, as a side note and subjective): everything is luck. Your innate skills are a lottery, your environment (for nurturing and networking). This "luck" in the equation is more like "residual luck" (from "I worked on problem X and it turned out to be a game changer/time waste" or "They looked at that moment for a person of my profile").
I'm not really sure how else to see it. It's pretty straightforward to show that the simplest possible model is some kind of probability density function with inputs of skill and privilege and a wide distribution and a very long tail due to cumulative effects. Not having various skills will obviously preclude certain outcomes (probably can't buy 86-DOS and produce PC-DOS if you couldn't understand the technology), not having certain privileges will preclude others (can't sell PC-DOS if you aren't in a position to meet with anyone to try) and some outcomes beget further possibilities (unlikely to have grown Microsoft and produced Windows if you hadn't have sold PC-DOS). Luck being the realization of such a probabilistic model into finite outcomes.
Anyone attempting to reduce it further than that is selling (or got sold) some very dangerous and irresponsible ideas.
The authors demonstrate meritocracy doesn't exist by defining it out of existence: even if your success could be entirely due to intelligence and hard work, you don't deserve the genes and life experiences that made you intelligent and hard working.
so you're suggesting that the authors definition is to narrow or unrepresentative?
Consider this though, what is the say, American public's image of meritocracy in culture? It's the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire, or the underdog who makes it big, or the entrepreneur from humble beginnings, shunned by everyone else. In fact if there is an underlying theme to the story of meritocracy, it is that the greater the adversity to overcome, the better the story.
If Inherited wealth and genetic fortune should fall into the definition of meritocracy, why aren't American movies about extremely handsome and intelligent aristocrats born into wealth, carrying forth the family name?
I strongly disagree with the claim that the author redefines the term. He uses the exact definition that is the mind of societies that uphold meritocracy, and it is a blatant myth.
How many people think Gattaca is a meritocratic utopia?
> The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value...
They suggest that this “paradox of meritocracy” occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behavior for signs of prejudice.
Which "market mechanics" are going to change that? This is a factory issue monkey cognitive defect, as far as I can tell.
This study needs to be replicated before its conclusions are taken seriously, because much of sociology is known to be deciding on a conclusion in line with intersectionality ideology dogma before writing the paper and producing papers with extreme methodology flaws. See the sokal hoax for a recent very clear expose of this academic bankruptcy
The Sokal Hoax happened in a journal of "postmodern cultural studies", not sociology. Furthermore, it was an academic essay, not an empiric and quantitative study.
Can you point to anything akin to the Sokal Hoax that happened in the context of sociological empirical studies?
Also, if you don't trust sociologists in general, replicating the study will not convince you anyway. It is a good idea to replicate, but it is not a good idea to care about the opinion of those who dismiss entire scientific fields based on ideological prejudice, be the field sociology, immunology, climate science of evolutionary biology.
The point I am making is that the premise seems to be politically motivated and not scientifically. They even redefined meritocracy to fit an intersectional paradigm in the same way as the sokal hoax papers showed.
I fail to see how it’s interesting that people with different capability as well as possibly willingness to work doesn’t succeed at equal rate in intellectually demanding jobs.
Meritocracy is when such people of different class backgrounds succeed at about the same rate on average. Intersectionality muddles that water in an unhelpful way.
I understand your point. I work with sociologists and I also follow the ongoing "Internet cultural wars". People like Jordan Peterson (who I don't either dislike nor agree 100%) really brought these matters to the forefront. His criticisms of postmerdernism are somewhat relevant, but they are also exaggerated. Some corners of "postmodernist academia" are as bad as he paints them, but not all of them, by any means.
Even the Sokal scandal is somewhat simplified. It was not so easy for them to get the paper accepted, in fact they were rejected many times by other journals. This is rarely mentioned.
The cited work in TFA compares performance evaluations with raises. It found that for the same performance evaluations, an explicit focus on meritocracy leads to worse monetary outcomes for women. That seems fairly objective and methodically sound to me, and not at all related to Sokal-style bullshit.
The income gap is a complex topic, and it is clearly not as simple as either extremes of the cultural wars paint it. It is not true that the pay gap is 100% due to discrimination against women, but it is also not 100% true that such discrimination plays no role. As usual in real life, there are nuances and complexities that cannot easily be reduced to simple slogans.
Silicon Valley has a religion-ideology that we have no name for yet. It is a very American kind of Protestantism with zero gods. I know the environment and I know what I'm talking about, even though I accept you might disagree. My view is that the self-proclaimed ultra-rationalists are not as rational as they would like to think.
It is true that Sociology has a left-wing bias. In my view, this is true of all academia. There was a time, not so long ago, when academia had a right-wing bias. This too is a subject of sociological research :)
Those are good points. However, I do think we will look back at the large amount of postmodern literature inspired by Foucault and deidre as obfuscatory to knowledge seeking.
They essentially wrap simple concepts within a format that require immense effort to parse, maybe to present an intellectual challenge or to obfuscate what is actually said. Great for staying fashionable as a tool for showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops due to the amount of studying needed to pierce the veil, but not so great for knowledge seeking.
To me it seems like what they are saying are:
- culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
- culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
- either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
These are interesting to some degree, but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have.
I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
> Those are good points. However, I do think we will look back at the large amount of postmodern literature inspired by Foucault and deidre as obfuscatory to knowledge seeking.
Postmodernism, at its core, is precisely a criticism of conventional epistemology. I am not a postmoderinst, but I do find that some of their views are interesting, or at least worth considering. I would not be surprised if you are right, and that postmodernism goes down in history as a fool's errand. In any case, I think that it is good that people kick the foundations of knowledge to see what happens. If nobody does that, it becomes very easy to fall into religion/ideology without noticing.
To borrow a term from another thinker who also hates postmodernism (I think), knowledge should be anti-fragile.
> showing academic belonging in Parisian coffee shops
You are absolutely right about this part. Just don't think that Sillicon Valley's Matcha Tea Boutique Shops are so different. The environment is also full of terms and clichés that mostly serve to signal tribal alignment, that really say nothing new and only create a barrier of entry for outsiders: "let us create a curated list of use-cases for under-the-radar angel round startups that are attempting to leverage blockchain technologies for adtech verticals."
> culture is adapted to get the marginal to conform to the majority (Foucault marginal sexual identity that caused him to attempt suicide)
Right, but he also has some interesting things to say about our relationship with the "mentally ill", how that relationship is different in other societies and why our approach may be pathological for all of us. For example.
> culture corrupts the pristine child’s mind (Rousseau inspired)
Some might say this, but overall culture is just taken as a powerful force that shapes the reality we inhabit. The thing is that, if one doesn't cherry-pick, some postmodernist ideas actually became mainstream. "We inhabit narratives."
> either you apply cultural power or you are a victim to cultural power
I think this is mostly true. No problem if you disagree, but it doesn't seem like such a crazy hypothesis to me.
> but not when used to argue for a deconstruction of all experiences into identity groups like postmodernists have
This is a confusion between postmodernism in general and "grievance studies".
> I think they’ve abandoned their academic duty to try to construct world views contiguous both within themselves and to the larger culture.
For me, the academic duty is to think seriously and independently. Any other red line only guarantees that we get stuck in local maxima. I think that the unusual views should have a place, and knowledge seekers should make an effort to understand them if they are going to criticize them.
That abstract seems very intersectional. The scientific bankruptcy of research that tow the intersectional line, such as papers that are similar to the sokal hoax papers, have demostrated that papers and programs towing that line is with all likelihood politically motivated.
It is therefore reasonable to treat this kind of academic papers exactly as what it looks like, basically as politically motivated reasoning useful only to people that believe in those ideological tenets. Basically, as a secular theology for the intersectional faith.
They seem politically rather than scientifically motivated. They even redefined meritocracy into something where people with different capabilities as well as willingness to work hard in intellectual pursuits should have equal outcome. Essentially, the equity agenda.
Choosing someone less qualified for a job because equity is not meritocracy. Rather, there are many less capable and willing to work from that upper class that would wish to take advantage of a less meritocratic system when they can’t competent with someone better from less privileged circumstances
There is a lot of nuance to unpack in these discussions. You'll pardon me if I express skepticism at it being worth the effort to have that conversation with someone whose own contributions to that conversation so far include calling an analysis of existing studies and patterns of behavior a "study" that can (and should) be "replicated", and the gems: "intersectionality ideology dogma" — emphasis added, and "secular theology for the intersectional faith".
You display a dismissive, even disdainful attitude about the matter, and I really don't feel like fighting uphill like that today. But if you really want to have a good-faith discussion about this then you can start by explaining how you read their position as "redefin[ing] meritocracy into... equal outcome", when the only occurrence of the string "equal outcome" in The Fine Article was:
> Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes.
The context was a "fake game of skill", where players were told they had won. This is about self-belief, not outcome.
EDIT: Phrasing
EDIT 2: And my new favorite: "People that share the intersectional beliefs does not believe in scientific reasoning."
People who make statements like that don't appear to believe in logical reasoning.
I disagree that it is not logical to point out the religious aspects of some of people that subscribe to intersectional ideology. I hope you can hear me out since you had such a vocal objection, and that you can point out flaws in my reasoning.
You might agree that creationists when expressing something resting on their faith might have some scientific methodology issues. I think we might agree that it is not illogical to point out that some research done by creationists have a religious overtone. Research outside their creationist dogma might not warrant such scrutiny.
Can you after watching the following two videos, which contains core thoughtleaders in intersectionality like DiAngelo, that intersectionality does not have a religious overtone? [1,2] If not, why not?
If so, why is it then illogical to point out that the authors are expressing something that to at least some degree seem to rely on intersectional dogma and that this has a religious overtone?
> I disagree that it is not logical to point out the religious aspects of some of people that subscribe to intersectional ideology. I hope you can hear me out since you had such a vocal objection, and that you can point out flaws in my reasoning.
Primarily that you seem to be making a category error in saying that because people within the movement have acted in bad faith, intersectionality itself — or, possibly worse, the legitimate concerns it's trying to explore — is bullshit.
I'm not here to debate the movement with you, but if your notion of it is something other than "people marginalized along multiple axes have an especially hard time of things", and particularly if it's something more nefarious than that, then you're quite possibly operating from someone's "they're coming to take your $whatever!" narrative, instead.
That is not what I claim. Like the creationists adherents of intersectionality are capable of holding conflicting ideas in their head with good intent. If we that don’t agree to these beliefs should accept it as science is an entirely different question.
However, can you at least see how arguing from belief regardless of how true you think it is does not make a convincing argument for someone that doesn’t share those beliefs?
It is ok that intersectionality is a political movemennt, go ahead. Just don’t pretend that arguing from belief is science, and use that to argue that a belief is a fact.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The flaws in social
science studies have been demonstrated repeatedly. The existence of one study should barely move the probability (in either direction) of meritorcracy being legitimate.
People that share the intersectional beliefs does not believe in scientific reasoning. See this aero expose for a more expansive reasoning on how the scientific and intersectional paradigms are inherently incompatible https://areomagazine.com/2019/03/15/teaching-to-transgress-r...
Well put. When "meritocracy" is defined and enforced by those who gained that power by something other than merit, the result is likely to be anything but true meritocracy.
Obviously, I don't have the answer, but in this example my first thought is that the managers could be subjected to a sampling-based external evaluation, that adjusts their reward, possibly with a penalty-component.
You can also imagine that the rewards in this system become a solid part of the legal system, and so workers could sue their managers for assigning unjust rewards. This basically means that there is always an external "eye" that keeps things in check.
What does it even mean for "meritocracy not to exist"? That it is impossible to have an organizational structure where decisions are made by those with the greatest abilities?
If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.
The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
What would happen if we'd apply PageRank to the problem? I.e., everybody gives N votes to other people. Then we'd put everything in a big matrix, compute the first eigenvector, and obtain a ranking. And then we'd distribute wealth according to that ranking.
Since N is limited, I'm guessing that "SEO" would not be a problem.
Even without SEO, I wouldn't say that the best websites are the top results - they tend to be those most broadly applicable. Which works okay perhaps for a search engine
I think aspiring to the meritorious (ethical, wise, knowledgeable, dedicated, etc.) being successful seems like it'd be good, rather the problem isn't so much "meritocracy" as it is believing that meritocracy is an existing norm, rather than being more of an aspirational Avalon.
Pure communism doesn't exist, pure capitalism doesn't exist, pure fascism doesn't exist. Pure ideals of any kind don't exist. Meritocracy exists to varying degrees all over the place, and it's something we should be striving for wherever possible. There are good arguments for temporary exceptions to meritocracy to, say, correct historical inequities, but it's extremely important that those be viewed as temporary roadblocks on the ultimate path towards a society that is as meritocratic as we can make it. Which, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean that those low on 'merit' need to be left to die, we can still provide a good life for even the least economically valuable individuals, but yes, those who are providing the most economic utility to society should get to consume more of that utility.
> According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
This is also completely false. What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk. Gates took on tremendous risk to do what he did. He could have failed spectacularly, but he chose to enter the startup lottery and he won. That's the deal you make, you go into that game knowing that it's a lottery, and of course luck is involved. But we have that lottery in place for a very good reason: New companies provide tremendous value to society, and so it's important that we incentivize people to create them. Nobody would take on the kinds of risks that he did if the rewards weren't enormous.
Gates was as obsessed about business almost asmuch as about programming. His father was a recognized lawyer. And he was immensly strong willed.
He didn't really take huge risks. If his business had not succeeded the worst that would have happened to him (likely) would have been an upper-middleclass career and life.
He was immensly shrewd, bold, hard working and smart. But ... I'm not sure what he exactly can be held for as an example since he had the right genes and the right topics of interest and the right place in history.
You can't approach just the business as a form of lottety since, although it's a game of chance, it's not a single roll of the die. The stars must be aligned, lot of small things need to come together just right.
Sure, i'm not saying luck wasn't involved. He was extremely lucky. However, he was also extremely talented at both business and engineering, and he worked very hard and absolutely took personal risks. He didn't risk becoming homeless, but if Microsoft had failed he'd have wasted many important years of his career, and would have been set back a great deal relative to his peers.
> What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk.
Isn't there also a major component that involves the opportunity to take risk including things like a sufficient social safety net? Certainly, different people have different downsides in the case of failure. Many of those factors are not based on merit.
So did my son have more “skill” in getting into the college of his choice after we paid $1100 for ten sessions with a personal ACT tutor who was a college professor?
Did the children of the parents who paid $250K to get their children into school by bribing administrators have more skill?
Did you actually read my comment or are you just responding to some odd emotional interpretation of what you imagine someone would have said? Because I very clearly stated that I didn't think society was completely meritocratic. I even put a numerical range on how meritocratic it was: 30-50%. So, your examples are really pretty meaningless.
Since getting to college has a large affect on lifetime earnings and people of means can legally increase the odds of getting to college. Your family’s wealth has an overwhelming impact on your own success.
Forty-two percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain in the bottom, while 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top.
Children of middle-income parents have a near-equal likelihood of ending up in any other quintile, presenting equal promise and peril for those born to middle-class parents.
The “rags to riches” story is much more common in Hollywood than on Main Street. Only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income at the very bottom move to the very top.
6 percent from the very bottom move to the very top. That is fucking incredible. They moved all the way up! 6% of them! That's a great statistic, and conveys the exact opposite of your intent. The mobility between the more intermediate strata will be substantially higher than that. Nothing you've said here contradicts my point in the slightest.
It's all substantially more complicated than that, though. 46k is abject poverty in San Francisco, but in Des Moines, you can probably live pretty well. You can't just take the average income bracket of the US and ignore cost of living.
> What separates Gates from most other programmers of his skill level is willingness to take on risk.
Balderdash. His parents were wealthy, his father was a successful lawyer and his mother was on the board of IBM and was very well connected socially. From Wikipedia: "Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard, saying '... if things [Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence].'" According to Gates, the decision was fairly riskless.
His decision to start working on Microsoft may have been risk-limited, but his decision to stick around for many years was not. He wasn't wildly successful overnight.
Gates didn’t take much of a risk, he was never going to be homeless if his plans didn’t work out. He is pretty much the perfect example if you want to prove we don’t exist in a meritocracy.
Gates absolutely took a risk. He devoted many years of his life to something that may not have panned out. He could have spent those same years working his way up at say, IBM. Opportunity cost is a real risk. It's not the same as being homeless, but that doesn't make it not a risk.
Why are we even comparing programmers to Bill Gates ? He was an a business owner, an entrepreneur.
The world doesn't lack highly skilled entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk.
Gates, besides being very talented, was extremely lucky - being at the right school at the right time, having a mom at the board of directors of the largest computer company in the world(IBM), and having IBM make the worst business decision probably ever - feeling that there won't be much money in the operating-system - so licensing it out.
> Why are we even comparing programmers to Bill Gates ? He was an a business owner, an entrepreneur.
He was a highly skilled programmer and entrepreneur.
> The world doesn't lack highly skilled entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk.
Erm, what? It absolutely does.
> Gates, besides being very talented, was extremely lucky - being at the right school at the right time, having a mom at the board of directors of the largest computer company in the world(IBM), and having IBM make the worst business decision probably ever - feeling that there won't be much money in the operating-system - so licensing it out.
Yes, my point exactly. He was both lucky and talented and hard-working. There were tens of thousands of kids as well off as him and more, who didn't amount to a hundredth of his success.
You are predicating your entire premise on merit already existing. The surge in articles recently dig a little deeper.
What is merit? Is it merit if, because someone is of faith, they donate food to those without? That person who is receiving the food has more than they did prior, the person who had the food has less.
Merit is a metric, and in contemporary culture, it is one used to reinforce ownership and capital. Yet in the above overly-simplistic example, we can see that not all human interactions are, nor should, be overfit into the idea of “merit” nor “ownership of capital or goods.” In the above scenario, “merit” conveniently tries to avoid disclosing its ethical structure.
It’s a fallacy. More folks are waking up to this fact[1].
[1] Avoiding the whataboutisms discussing “talent” or “skills” and other bogus terms.
> What is merit? Is it merit if, because someone is of faith, they donate food to those without? That person who is receiving the food has more than they did prior, the person who had the food has less.
Merit is extremely easy to define. Merit is providing economic value to society. We have an imperfect, but quite impressive system for measuring this, called pricing. If I can create something you want, you pay me for it. I capture part of the excess value of that transaction, commensurate with the uniqueness of what I created.
I didn't say luck didn't exist, or wasn't involved. But absent the incentive to capture some of the value of that gold, the person who finds it would simply leave it there on their farm, despite the fact that other people in the world want it.
Sure, it is just not merit. People are incentivized and are rewarded for a variety of reasons -- some merit-based and many non-merit-based. I am not arguing against capitalism.
Laws of nature are in every person identical so it can't be both luck and hard work in different people in different amount.You cross street on green light and 160 mile per hour car kill you.Everyone would say bad luck determine that man life.If person get money on lotterry everyone would say good luck determine that man life.But if person get richer every day by medium amount people and end up being rich people say hard work determine that man life.If you accept that hard work determine man life than you must accept that lottery winner get his money through hard work.Otherwise you must accept that person that worked hard just got lucky most of days by medium ammount.Sorry for my english.
> As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order.
I'd say that more than anything, what it offers is hope for those lower in the social order to improve their position, even if that's not very true to life. That's why the right's struggling middle class holds onto this worldview even as elites use it to take advantage of them.
I also think the author misses an opportunity by lumping all non-merit factors together as "luck". By far the biggest factor in success isn't sheer random luck, but your current standing (whether because of your family or because of wealth you've already accumulated). Capitalism as we know it is inherently exponential, which I think is its biggest problem. Success breeds success. You (or your family) only have to get lucky once and then the rest takes care of itself, forever. A person who contributes nothing to society can continue to rake in millions every year, give their children the finest education and connections, etc.
Agreed... but we also shouldn’t make them suffer and starve.
The bad part of the ‘meritocratic’ world view is not that having people who are good at certain tasks do those tasks is a bad idea, it is that thinking those people are more ‘deserving’ of a good life is bad.
People that are good at math should be math professors, but we shouldn’t think they are morally superior to the person born dumb as a rock, nor do they deserve a better life.
So they are effectively not using the normal definition of meritocracy that people of same capability and will to work hard born in different classes can succeed at somewhat the same degree in intellectual professions, and instead talk about how people that are either unable or unwilling to do the work can’t compete with someone that does.
How is this useful or meaningful? Why are we funding research like this using tax dollars, when an exact paper like this has already been written many times and already shown to be meaninlesss?
The original quote strikes me as a strawman. To anyone familiar with the science instead of the dogma, it's obvious that genetics have a huge impact on conscientiousness and IQ. But meritocracy, even in its most hyperbolic idealized form, doesn't strive for everyone getting equal outcomes, but rather outcomes in proportion to their ability. There are certain things that we almost axiomatically consider the property of the individual, and their body is generally one of them (the fairly-universal revulsion at the theoretical idea of "redistribution of sex" rests on this assumption that your body is yours in a way that the product of your labor is not).
I'm not aware of anyone arguing for meritocracy encompassing all of society: this would suggest that eg the intellectually disabled shouldn't be taken care of if they can't be economically productive. The application is generally much more limited than resource allocation, to things like production: those who are the best at a job should be the ones doing it (and compensated for doing so), for the benefit of society overall, while a separate belief demands allocation of a baseline of resources to anyone who needs them based solely on their inherent worth as a human.
This comment isn't interpreted as a full-throated defense of meritocracy as much as a lament that this gross misunderstanding of the concept has so rapidly become dogma among the stupider (and unfortunately, louder) parts of society.
That's part of what the piece is attacking, though, the notions that society currently does work as a meritocracy. Very few people argue that it should work that way, but the author picks up on the (shockingly common) belief that the world (in particular, the capitalist global market) is a meritocracy. This belief is, in my view, omnipresent even among HNers. A common argument against non-market ways of organizing society is that because the market distributes rewards according to merit (in the sense of "equality of opportunity") then a non-market way of distribution would be unjust. This is simply a re-hash of the "equality of opportunity" versus "equality of outcome" argument, and the concept of equality of opportunity (and its dim-witted cousin meritocracy) has been attacked[0] on many fronts by all kinds of people - let alone its (perceived) implementation in modern life in the market.
1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing to prove otherwise.
2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in isolation.
So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.
Obligatory note that the word "meritocracy" was coined by a sociologist in mid-century England as a distopian ideal, distopian because it was used as a bad excuse for privilege and the withholding of social services. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy
