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.
