The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea.
The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system.
Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.
I didn't put this in the article, but a few hours later I think this is an interesting point, thank you.
If the post's proposition is correct and that "meritocracy" is all about minimal false positives, then we can also agree that there are people at the bottom who are qualified, but that's a cost of setting up a system optimized for minimizing false positives.
I know from many discussions about interviewing that this is one of the major families of strategy: It's better to miss out on a few good people than it is to mistakenly hire a bad one, so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people.
This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work. I'm trying to avoid controversy, so I'll return to the straw man scenario of the post: It's as if the Lisp people said, "If Python was any good than there'd be Python people on the schedule."
> so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s
Most companies want those perfect "A"s. However, not all projects require perfect "A"s. In the startup world we like to pretend like our projects are technically demanding and require the best people.
That's not necessarily so. Your project may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, but it may actually be boring from a technical perspective, in which case I would personally trade the qualities of a an A for good hard-working B+ programmers.
Hiring bad apples can happen of course. However this can happen at all levels, regardless of background. Many superstars of our field achieved that status because they know how to market themselves. I've seen people really good at marketing, you know, walking the walk and talking the talk, with stellar resumes, but otherwise lazy and of dubious skill.
> "so there's a real emphasis on only hiring perfect "A"s. Which means that you'll miss a few As and lots of B+ people."
It's actually worse than that. When you exclude huge swaths of a sample like that, you have no context for the true scale.
So while you can hire the best of the sample you see, while understanding you may miss other people nearly that good, you may also be missing people who are better (perhaps wildly so) than even the best of those you chose.
Consider the case of competitive sports during times of segregation.
> This isn't a problem until people start assuming that anyone who wasn't hired is terrible or doesn't deserve to work.
This, indeed, is where things get very dicey. Meritocracy tends to converge on winner-takes-all markets, which result in an extreme inequality of outcomes and all the socioeconomic harms that entails.
Why wouldn't it? In terms of pure merit, NOBODY deserves ANY prize except THE single best competitor.
Physical limits and other regulations even things out but, particularly in computer and digital products and services, physical limitations are less and less important.
He's saying in an absolute meritocracy, things are only awarded by merit. Given the choice between awarding a contract to company A or company B, once A has already shown to have more merit than B, all future work would logically go to A, and B would die out.
Presuming that A doesn't do something to demonstrate they don't deserve merit any longer, why would you ever go with a proven inferior (B) option, or an option that is unproven altogether (C)? Hence, a trend toward a single dominating entity.
In reality, I think things are more nuanced, of course. No one awards purely on merit, as you also have timing, capacity, and costs to balance. I'm not really aware of any market that you could consider a -true- meritocracy to the extent of the GP comment. And maybe I misread the comment altogether, but that is my understanding.
You read it correctly, thanks a lot of clarifying my terse comment. Naturally, no market is going to behave perfectly like this, but I think it's important to understand where the natural tendency points to, and what kind of elements will alleviate, smooth or otherwise disrupt the absolute winner-takes-all nature. If you are going to say deliver a new product, you need to understand that unless your product has something superior to the competition or you can subvert the meritocratic dynamics (say, through marketing & PR), it will likely die because there's no reason NOT to choose a competitor.
I disagree because this predicate doesn't take in account the backpressure of mediocracy. A mediocracy is when mostly incompetent people are dominating and pushing back people with merit to preserve their domination, culture, ... The academic example is Galileo Galilei. US citizen should also look at the history of their own country and the way they handled black people. "If they were at the bottom (slaves) it's because they deserve to be there" ? This is mediocracy !
While the Galileo example is interesting, the "black people" one is not. The application of actual force (IE whipping people, beating them, lynching them, etc) is not really something normally applied in business place itself (though there are businesses that seem to apply force to the external environment in order to make their business dominate).
For example, I can't think of any business that is having gladiator style fights to the death whose real purpose is to keep the mail room employees killing each other instead of killing the CEO. Nor can I think of a business where the mail room employees are literally being beaten or lynched in an attempt by the CEOs to keep them down.
A better example of your "mediocracy", would, IMHO, be a workplace where the CEO is grooming their child (or execs play favorites, etc) to take over despite the fact that the mail room guy may be a better choice.
However, it's not clear why in this model, after the child takes over, the business wouldn't fail relative to other, better businesses if the child is really that mediocre at it.
> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.
And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc. Now don't get me wrong--these are smart and hard working people. But they're also generally very privileged. Not in a "my daddy is a hedge fund manager" privileged (though often that privileged), but almost always in a "my daddy was upper middle class, so I had all the educational support I ever needed, could afford to do extensive community service instead of working in HS and get into an Ivy league school, never had money distracting me from my grades, etc."
> Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
And often an advanced degree from a particular set of schools followed by work experience from a particular set of institutions. With the rise of a "professional manager" class, many (most?) companies prefer to recruit their executives not from within, but from places like McKinsey, etc.
When I hear this, I can't help but wonder if the poster is taking an overly narrow view of the "world of companies out there that one could work for". I mean, yeah, if your view of the world is just the big, famous, hugely important companies that everyone has heard of, then maybe that's true. maybe. But... if you consider that outside of the Fortune 500 there are thousands, tens of thousands, hell, maybe millions, of other, smaller companies, I'm not convinced that the statement above holds water.
OK, I mean, I'll admit I could be wrong, and I haven't done a scientific study on this or anything. But I strongly suspect that if you went out and, say, studied all the textile manufacturers with 200-1000 employees, in NC, VA, GA and SC, you'd find a LOT of CEOs, VPs, managers, etc., that did not work for McKinsey, did not go to Harvard, and generally don't fit this picture that is being painted. You also largely won't read about these companies in the WSJ, see them advertise on TV, or really even know about them unless you go looking. But they're out there, doing business and making money, and they're just as real as the "big boys".
> All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree.
And yet, some of the most wealth has been created by college dropouts - not just for themselves but also for shareholders of companies they created: Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Batista, among others.
See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion...
In fact : "The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion, is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if you remove the world's second richest man, Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0 billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to a recent report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's millionaires never attended college."
But that latter is a bullshit statistic. The number of dropout billionaires is so low (32 out of 1400) that a factor of 2 difference in average wealth is not statistically significant.
That really is one of the great ironies of the English language. And this is not well known - I didn't know this until a few years ago (maybe on HN?).
I guess the reality is that "meritocracy" is a goal that in practice is hard to achieve. But does that make it the wrong goal? What are better alternatives? How can we fix it? I think it is very, very hard to actually improve on this but I would love to hear suggestions.
Meritocracy is the best -ocracy there is. Which unfortunately isn't enough for human liberation.
In its ideal form meritocracy guarantees that ruling institutions will choose people who maximize some kind of merit function: there are many ideals, however, that aren't incorporated into that. Equality of outcome (an ideal I don't desire, but many people do) inherently contradicts it. Equality of opportunity is a vague and slippery ideal, but whatever it is the absence of it is very compatible with meritocracy. In the end all that ideal meritocracy guarantees is some kind of global merit function that organizations will use to maximize their effectiveness: individuals per se aren't guaranteed anything. And even that weak guarantee ignores huge and intractable political economy issues about whether different interests have commensurable merit functions, the measurability of individual merit, and whether the people implementing the merit function actually implement it according to spec. But those issues aren't going to go away, whatever -ocracy you choose.
And since meritocracy's fundamentally focused on social and organizational needs instead of individual ones, it's plenty compatible with systems that are horrible violations of the principles of the world we want to live in. Imperial China was, supposedly, quite meritocratic: whoever you were, if you did well on imperial exams, you were selected (if you were male and not Miao). The Soviet Union was similar (though those practical issues I mentioned earlier made it de facto more a clientele system). None of us would want to live in either of those systems, though, despite their meritocratic underpinnings.
Assuming that we have to have an -ocracy, though, is a failure of the imagination. If we want something better, I'd say trying to build a decentralized, self-organized, fault-tolerant society without hierarchy is the way to go. Any given organization can fuck up, and most people will end up fine, living in the interstitial spaces between organizations. If someone is unfairly passed over (according to some imagined meritocratic standard), well, it might have wasted a couple hours of their life but isn't the end of the world, because the zero-sum game of having power over other people just isn't played.
The etymology of the term is not the same as the etymology of the idea. The idea goes back at least centuries, if not millennia. That popularized term was coined in a work satirizing the idea, doesn't intrinsically make the idea satirical or a bad idea always deserving of satire.
This is actually one of the biggest things I appreciate from studying Marx: the reminder that 'use-value'[1] and 'exchange-value'[2] are two, separate things, and while I generally want things based on how I can use them, the market doesn't care about that at all.
Startups would be wise to heed Marx's words here, and remember this difference. Your job as a startup is to make money, which means producing something that has a high exchange-value. Don't let your own notions of use-value blind you to what the market cares about: exchange value. How many times have I said "That idea is stupid, I'd never use that" and then it became a smashing, overnight success? Too many to count.
As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away.
This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo.
The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up with a theory that says some people are systematically skimming the value generated by others and that a series of cyclical crises will cause the total collapse of capitalism at some future date.
Every time there's a market crash or a recession, Marxists bestir themselves to tell us all "I told you so!". The problem is the same as the Rothbardian Austrians blaming it all on the Federal Reserve or Keynesians saying it's a slump in demand. Too simplistic. (I'm a Hayekian, an economist who put "I can't explain particular examples and neither can anybody else" at the centre of his theory of economics).
Complex, chaotic systems naturally move around their phase space, often with large oscillations. That's the bottom line. You can't eliminate the boom/bust cycle. It exists in every industry and always will. Sometimes bigger industries go through the cycle and everyone feels it.
Sure, I didn't say that Marx invented it, just that it's from studying Marx that I remember it.
> He read Smith and Ricardo.
Absolutely. The subtitle of Capital I is "a critique of political economy" for a reason. Marx's innovation being, among other things, the 'socially necessary' component of 'socially necessary labor time.'
Also, economics is only a small part of Marxism overall. (1/3 if you ask Lenin.)
> The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value.
We can get into a big argument about how the LTV is not predictive, it'd descriptive, or maybe about how some studies have shown the LTV is just as descriptive as the STV is. That's not really what's important here, though.
> That's the bottom line.
Your comment has a lot of these assertions without a lot to back it up. Ideology can always shore up weaknesses in theory. ;)
That said, I'm not an orthodox Marxist by any means.
Hand waving is pretty much the one currency every school of political economy deals in.
I used to be a fully dressed libertard. But the world is too complex for any one humanly comprehensible theory to completely explain. Writing software for a living brought that home. When I got around to reading Hayek, I felt like I was revisiting familiar territory.
I realised that I was doing the same thing as the various lefties I'd mocked during student politics were doing: replacing reality with purity. The cornercase arguments for any strict ideology are always hilarious.
I fully expect that if Rothbardian libertarians were given dictatorial powers tomorrow, they'd buggerise it as much as the communists did.
Interesting Rothbard is actually a fascist, like a real fascist of the old school. He just usually dresses his fascism up in the pretty colors of capitalism but he choose not to do so in the following essay in which he:
* "dog whistles" racism and sexism,
* advocates a police state beyond the rule of law "Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.",
I have plenty of issues with Rothbard... but, a fascist? His capitalism is a very different capitalism than what most of us would associate with the word capitalism. Even your quote of requiring police to be liable for their faults isn't something that any police force in the United States is subject to.
The key to improving liberty is trying to find allies, not trying to find enemies.
>Even your quote of requiring police to be liable for their faults isn't something that any police force in the United States is subject to.
Police are still subject to the law at least in theory in the US and in actual practice police are charged with crimes on a regular basis. Police in the US are not allowed to be "administer instant punishment". Notice that he is saying "unleash" as in decrease the checks against police abuses. He is writing this directly after the Rodney King beatings in support of the presidential bid of a White Supremacists.
Read his essay, it is a laundry list of fascist polices.
You say that the modern economic system as it runs has large oscillations and busts, and you are perturbed that Marxists say "I told you so" when a bust happens. But US mainstream economists through the twentieth century did not say that the economy came with large oscillations and busts. How many US economists even in the late 1990s said that the economy would run into big busts in the future? The people who predict correctly are marginalized by a media controlled by capital, and the Jim Cramers of the world are free to continue their panglossian bromides and predictions, no matter how often they turn up false.
Five hundred years ago, the HN class equivalents would be clergy and lower (and some upper) nobles. The majority of people would be praising feudalism, saying that feudalism was common sense etc. Now we are five centuries later, in a different economic system, and the majority of people here praise the economic system they are in as the best one, saying it makes sense etc. In 1935, the intelligentsia in the USSR praised their economic system, said it was common sense etc. - why shouldn't they have? The western world was in a depression while their economy went full steam ahead. Despite the world having seen four economic systems (hunting-gathering, slavery, feudalism, capitalism), and the sparks of a possible fifth one (socialism), it's not surprising that the majority of people under the current economic system see it as being, unlike its three predecessors, as permanent, lasting forever, as being common sense etc. The majority of people felt the same way about serfdom centuries ago. Many felt this way even one century ago, when most of Europe was run by kings.
I'm aware of the existence of a business school which was until recently was majorly staffed by Marxists. That was basically their response as well. "We know capitalism better than anyone, all we do is study it."
I've found that it's a bit better to recommend "Value, Price, and Profit"[1] rather than Capital I because it gives you the gist of the most important part (the first three chapters) while being much smaller and a little less dry.
Reading Capital is still totally worthwhile. I've read volume I four or five times at this point, and I always find new things that are relevant to today... that said, it is difficult for a new reader.
I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like the huge dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, and then the crash. Or the (sub-prime) real estate bubble. Or how the finance sector is growing, in GDP percentage wise and in power, relative to the economy which produces real commodities.
Then again, according to polls (and my experience), the majority of Americans believe "every word of the Bible is literally accurate", and that "the Virgin birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem, and the Wise Men from the East" are "historically accurate". Over 70% believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, expecting people to understand how wealthy people discretely work the economic system is way, way beyond most people.
I have no clue how people who don't understand Marxian political economy can understand things like...
Your statement implies that economic events must be analyzed from the standpoint of base & superstructure, but there is no rule or law that requires it.
> Then again, (...) [o]ver 70% [of Americans] believe in "God, Heaven, the resurrection of Christ, survival of the soul after death, miracles, the virgin birth, the devil and hell". If blindness to the way the world really works is so overwhelming with these fantasies, (...)
There is a way to phrase this sentiment without alienating quite as many decent people. Try to find it next time.
(I, too, am an atheist; but I don't see a need to enforce atheism on HN.)
I personally do not really mind "alienating" the "earth is 5,000 years old" crowd by not respecting their complete and total disrespect for science and logic.
If your wife told you that she was pregnant, but it wasn't your kid--would you believe her if she said the sperm just sort of came out of nowhere? Or would you say that it's not how conception (or marital faithfulness) actually works?
(note: that's a general non-specific "your" up there, which does not refer to an actual wife, who if you have one I do not mean to in any way impugn)
Something relevant to note, is that YC's two biggest successes got into YC at least in part because of personal relationships.
IIRC, Dropbox was recommended by former roommates and friends from MIT (Xobni guys?). Airbnb was recommended by Michael Seibel from Justin.tv, perhaps others.
In both cases it's possible that YC wouldn't have interviewed or perhaps accepted one or both of these companies if not for those recommendations.
Or perhaps wouldn't have accepted Dropbox without the MIT credentials.
Based on the stories the founders tell, YC was very skeptical of both ideas (but it's probably hard for them to judge).
The next question I think of is whether Airbnb would have succeeded without YC. I suspect not. As good as those guys were at staying alive even they had limits, which they seemed in danger of reaching at that point.
Dropbox had a better chance probably, since it was already very well received, but maybe they would have fumbled it without the YC help. Certainly they wouldn't have done quite as well.
If personal connections was the thing that pushed some of YC's big successes over the application/interview acceptance hurdle it's fair to conclude that they've probably missed out on some others that didn't have those connections.
Even in a meritocracy, those making the decisions need some way to both gather and screen candidates. Properly utilized personal relationships (as opposed to nepotism style situations) can be a good way to do both.
Maybe Dropbox and Airbnb wouldn't have succeeded without those recommendations, but those recommendations could certainly have led to a MORE merit based process. When it comes to judging quality, it can sometime be hard to beat a personal opinion from someone you trust. That may narrow the field a little bit (nobody has personally experienced all the alternatives) but it may also improve your decision.
There are so many interesting ways to think about this. Some of us may have Venn diagrams in our minds' eyes, thinking about the set of {all highly competent programmers} and {speakers invited to programming conferences} and just how those sets overlap.
Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities. I think there are probably a lot of diamonds in the rough in communities all over the world that never get picked up, much less polished. Programming communities can thrive by being welcoming to people who are other than the usual suspects just like current programmers. Props to the author for reminding us not to neglect anyone.
"Of course the important policy point here is that we have no idea how much more flourishing of human developed talent there could be if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities."
This is a very positive way of looking at this. I would argue that we have a fairly good sense of how much more (a lot) and that this informs the tendency for entrenched meritocracies to restrict access rather than open the floodgates, so to speak. People are generally overprotective of their position or status, the past and what they have built for themselves.
I wholly agree that "communities can thrive", and I believe gain a lot more, by being open and welcoming to people not (just) on the basis of merit, but on the basis of curiosity / interest / engagement.
if only all young learners had full opportunity to develop their abilities
The irony here being that our public education system operates in a way that strictly opposes any sort of "meritocracy". As a result, we completely fail to help young learners develop their abilities... wash, rinse, repeat.
The main problem, as Hayek pointed out, is that folk confuse value and virtue.
Value is an economic thing. Virtue is a social or emotional thing.
Hayek argued quite comprehensively that value does not flow to the virtuous or vice versa. They are entirely unrelated. Moreover, attempts to align the two fatally break the mechanism which allows value to be created in the first place.
People want value and virtue to go together. But they needn't. And they can't be made to.
Meritocracies are great sometimes but they have the nasty side affect of promoting people into jobs they suck at. Just because you're the best at being an individual contributor, it doesn't mean you're going to be a good manager, and being a good manager doesn't mean you're going to be a good executive or entrepreneur. In organizations that value meritocracies absolutely, you end up losing your best people if they don't scale.
This is known as the Peter Principle. But, I would think a meritocracy would strive to test for, or respond to, promotions into levels of incompetence by pushing the person back down into a role where merit is higher than other available candidates.
First of all, I absolutely agree with the general sentiment of this article. And I don't mean to nitpick, but I just want to point out something about this bit:
But we don’t ask why they know their stuff. How did they get into a good university?
Depending on exactly how you define "good university", I contend that the importance of this may be overstated. For the sake of argument, let's go with the idea that to many people "a good university" means "Ivy League". IF you take that premise, it makes sense to look at where a number of high-level leaders, like, say, the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies, went to college. Luckily, that's been analyzed:
Now, as you might expect, a number of Ivy League schools are very well represented. But, equally important is this:
The University of Wisconsin is tied with Harvard for the largest percentage of S&P 500 CEOs, at 3%. This is above Princeton, Stanford and Yale. And the University of Texas is right in there at 2% as well. Now this is not to say that UW or UT are "bad" schools, but are they what most people are talking about when they talk about the whole elite / non-elite dichotomy?
Another tidbit: If you look at only the CEOs of the top 100 out of the S&P 500, four schools are tied for "most well represented". Those four are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and, wait for it... The University of North Carolina, all with 3% each.
For what it's worth, it appears that it can at least be said that going to a reasonably well regarded State school is borderline just as helpful as going to an Ivy League school, if you plan to be the CEO of an S&P 500 firm.
Of course, this all totally overlooking the fact that "CEOs of S&P 500 firms" is a ridiculously small and overly restrictive set to represent "being successful and a respected business leader" in any sense. If you're the guy who owns 6 McDonalds locations in your local small town area, or runs the most successful car dealership in a given area, you're pretty damn successful and - at least in a local sense - well regarded. And I expect you'll find plenty of those folks who went to schools most of us have never heard of, or didn't go to school at all.
Anyway, just something to throw out there. I certainly wouldn't mean to discourage anyone from going to Stanford, Yale, Harvard or Princeton if they want to and have the opportunity. But the poor sap left to attend UNC, UT, UVA, UW, UM, etc., certainly should not feel like they've been consigned to the dustbin just because they did not go to an Ivy.
This is bad statistics. You're cherry-picking the state schools to consider (plus what Evbn said). The S&P 500 has ~500 CEOs, so some random deviation is to be expected.
(This is purely a methodological comment; I haven't looked at any data either way. I agree, at least, that going to a state school should not mean that your life is over.)
I'm not cherry-picking anything, I'm just relating what's in the study. And while all state schools may not be equivalent that isn't the point... the point, at least the point I was getting at is this: There is an existence proof (multiple ones, actually) that you don't need to have attended an Ivy League school to become the CEO of an S&P 500 firm.
The bigger point I'd also make, going along with my reply to somebody else about how "the world is a lot bigger than the S&P 500" is that there no reason at all to think that not attending an Ivy League school means you won't be able to have a great career, even being a CEO or whatever. You might just be CEO of a sock manufacturing firm that nobody other than the employees and owners has ever heard of. But that's still a pretty damn good career compared to a lot of the alternatives. :-)
I think the point was; one can cherry-pick with deviation, as they are not _that_ far apart. The parent contends the overstated-ness, not that they are equal.
POI: UWisc has 4x the population of Harvard, so it isn't really on par on an odds ratio. I expect similar class size differences for the other state vs Ivy schools.
Right, but if you believe the narrative that some people seem to be promoting (not raganwald, mind you, I'm generalizing a bit here), they'd have you believe that going to a State school is like a career death sentence or something... the narrative seems to be "Ivy League or you might as well commit suicide, unless you're the rare lucky chump like Zuckerberg or Gates".
I'm just pointing out that things aren't quite so skewed. You can go to school at a reasonably reputable State school and still have a pretty good career... Ivy League not required.
> the narrative seems to be "Ivy League or you might as well commit suicide, unless you're the rare lucky chump like Zuckerberg or Gates".
Both of which actually did go to Ivy League schools, so they are actually counterexamples to what you are trying to say. They may not have graduated, but to focus on that is to miss the point.
The point is that these Ivy League schools come with networks, which are more important than the education itself. When you are part of such a network, you are more likely to be considered for high-ranking positions. Going with the article's example, being in the network is the difference between being a Lisper vs. a Pythonista.
The point is that these Ivy League schools come with networks, which are more important than the education itself. When you are part of such a network, you are more likely to be considered for high-ranking positions.
I don't disagree with that, but I think the value of that may be overstated. That's all I'm saying. Again, I would not try to tell somebody to not attend an Ivy League school... what I'm saying is that there is plenty of evidence that one can attend a non-Ivy League school, even the oft-derided "State university" and still have a good chance at an amazing career. Not just a good career mind you, but amazing, as I would consider making it to the level of "S&P 500 CEO" to be pretty dang amazing.
So, if you're just starting out, just out of high-school, and you know that you absolutely want to be CEO of a S&P 500, or Fortune 500 company one day, then by all means, do everything in your power to get into Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Princeton or Brown or Columbia or something. It can't hurt. BUT... if you're willing to accept, say, only being CEO of a multi-million dollar company that nobody has ever heard of, you certainly aren't out of the running if you go to a State university. And, as seen above, you aren't even out of the running for the S&P 500 gig either. Maybe you'd have to work a little harder, or have a little more luck to get there, but it obviously can be done.
Fair enough, I was thinking in terms of "graduated from an Ivy League school", but point taken.
Anyway, that I could have chosen a better example doesn't negate the point, that you can certainly be very successful without having attended an Ivy League school.
A meritocratic society is a lot of meritocracies chained together, themselves needing to merit success. Each one can only work with their own inputs, and so rely on the outputs of the other organizations. If these organizations do not extend deeply and broadly enough back, then at some point the inputs of an organization won't be the ones that should be there. This needs to go back to families at some point. In a meritocracy, mothers and fathers have an obligation to ensure that the potential of their children is developed and expressed through participation in society. I believe the failure of so many parents to do this is responsible for the ineffectiveness of our supposedly meritous systems, organizations and industries.
While parents do, of course, have a huge impact on their children, I think it's overly simplistic to lay the ultimate responsibility at their feet. As raganwald points out (in the other direction), when there are feedback loops at play, the system can re-enforce other traits than you might hope for. Parents with no education in nutrition or no real supermarkets in their neighborhood can't be expected to feed their children well. A father in prison will have highly limited influence on his children. A teenage girl with limited access to contraceptives or abortion (or sex education) may end up a mother well before she's financially, emotionally, or intellectually prepared to perform that job well. Low-income, blue-collar communities may have perverse incentives to tie their children to their existing social and economic status, and resent and resist "modern society" in it's various guises.
Which is to say, I don't think you can approach this from a purely reductionist viewpoint. Yes, a given institution is limited to a degree by its inputs, but it's also the case that each component has the potential to make improvements, even if marginal.
I didn't mean to say only one is responsible; this is in the context of raganwald's essay about how quality meritocracies (presumably not needing much improvement) don't choose the best because they only maximize their inputs and don't necessarily work with all of those with the most potential. So I wrote about improving the inputs by examining the prior systems.
What I completely missed, and what you alluded to by mentioning people in prison, with bad parents, and so on, is that the present generation of families also have inputs -- the systems that they went through (education, military, commerce, etc.) and their own parents. The issues we have today are partly the results of mistakes made by parents living a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago.
It's a depressing thought when expressed that way, but on the bright side, if we do as well as we can given our limited inputs today, we at least give the next generation of parents, teachers and employers a chance to do better than we could possibly have done.
The thing described in the article is what I would call "pull meritocracy". You have a pool of candidates and you pull well-educated, predictable, safe ones from there. Leaving behind both privileged but not able and able but not predictable people.
The ideal would be "push meritocracy", where able people push themself into the system and are able to reach their potential by exercising their ability. There are also multiple ways to do it (starting up, corporate/government ladder, non-commercial projects) so they don't get derailed over some personality quirk.
The essay hits on the right notion but I think needs to be expanded further. Bottom line is that the most important quality of a leader is that people will follow them. While the individual is a significant factor in this, context/circumstance are also important. Often the ideal combination of leadership "merit" might not reside in a person who is of particularly great "merit" outside of a particular leadership role (though it is pretty rare in someone who is absolutely useless outside of the role).
Also note that it is people _will_ follow them; it's about the future and therefore speculative. No amount of examination can confidently predict who will speculatively be best able to lead.
A "meritocracy" therefore is founded on the notion that the intellectual talent and past accomplishments can confidently predict leadership ability for a context that we can't entirely predict... Yeah, when you got that nailed down, let me know. ;-)
At best a "meritocracy" functions by making an educated guess, based on past evidence, who is best able to fulfill a role, regardless of whether that person's currently role is being fulfilled with any degree of merit. In short: it is undeniably imperfect, though one case make a case it does at least as good a job of selecting candidates as any other mechanism... with the possible exception of a democracy (it's kind of hard to beat working off who the electronic says they'll follow). But more than that, it has a problem: people like meritocracies because they feel like whomever is in charge has "earned" the right to be there by virtue of having the best record of _past_ accomplishment... despite the fact that a well functioning meritocracy would select based on the expected record of _future_ accomplishment, not on the record of _past_ accomplishment.
This subtle difference eventually leads to disappointment, disillusionment, and cynicism, which is undermines the integrity of the leadership of an organization, if not the organization as a whole. In short: even assuming you overcame the issues of observability raised by the article, a utopian meritocracy might not be the utopia imagined by its subjects, which can lead to an unstable society...
Donald Trump is NOT successful investing in real estate. His projects go bankrupt left and right and his net return overall has been abysmal when compared to others who really are great investors.
Trump is good at two things: image and self-promotion.
The article has some good points. However, it loses a lot of credit by waving off Donald Trump's successes as being the result of a monetary investment not accessible to the many. Trump's real success comes from the education available to him via his father and his father's company, also not accessible to the many - but how many children have successful businessmen birthed who never surpassed or even matched their forebears the way Donald Trump did Fred Trump? While he did have an advantage starting out, Trump succeeded on his merits far more than most children of the wealthy and successful do.
I think you've totally missed the point of the article. It's not saying Trump is bad at real estate, but rather that there might be a million people who are even more talented at it, but will never discover that fact.
The "Outliers" argument. The only way for a meritocratic system to work is by creating an absolutely level starting plane for all competitors. Which is in itself somewhat ironic because meritocracy reminds of capitalism (indirectly, I admit) while the level playing field requirement suggests a socialistic-ish system.
This situation is very acute in "top tier" firms such as the management consulting big 4. The hiring process is designed to avoid false positives at all costs, even the cost of rejecting extremely good candidates.
Isn't the universe by default a meritocracy? Millions of years of evolution proves this... And society can either have policies that work against this default meritocracy or with it to speed it up.
One humbling thing I try to remember, is that before an asteroid struck the Earth 65 million years ago, mammals were no bigger than a field mouse and our warm-bloodedness was specialized for hunting insects at night. Then this lucky strike caused a huge climate change, and those dinosaurs that hand't evolved warm feathers died off, and we were in the right place at the right time.
The day before the asteroid strike, we had zero merit.
Now, this is a narrative with many factual errors, but I like to remind myself that we happen to have been doing well for the last 100,000 years or so, but it's the blink of an eye and who knows what will happen next?
I didn't necessarily mean millions of years of evolution for humans (have we even been around for that long?). I meant evolution (the concept) as evidence that only those who deserve to live, live. Merit is a fundamental rule of the universe and that you have to be meritocratic. Anything but meritocracy is foolish and will ensure your demise and irrelevance. It's not one of many strategies you can use, it's the only strategy. It is a practice fundamental to survival just like breathing or procreating or being fit.
Because it's fundamental, meritocracy should call for both minimizing false positives and negatives, as both work towards increasing survivability.
1. As by the peacock, "fitness" is not the same as our everyday use of fitness (certainly a bird that spends most of it's energy on giant butt feathers is not fit in the traditional sense, but does have a sexually selective advantage) and is certainly not meritocratic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peafowl#Evolution_and_sexual_se...
2. Consider the tragedies of the commons that often occur in nature. It is the structural arrangement of the system or colony which is disastrous but any individual organism within that system. http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1713/version/1
1) If sexual preferences can be genetically predisposed or even predetermined, then sexual preferences can be selected for through evolution as well. This means that if giant butt feathers are destructive towards actual survival, then all the female peacocks sexually selecting for this otherwise useless trait are disadvantaging their offspring and every peacock in on this giant butt feather thing will be disadvantaged.
For example, let's introduce a new predator that's also attracted to giant butt feathers. It doesn't matter how sexually attractive those giant butt feathers are, the offspring of giant butt feather peacocks will be at a survival disadvantage and will be selected out of the gene pool. The ones remaining are the female peacocks who don't like giant butt feathers, and their offspring (since they're more likely to not produce giant butt feathers).
But until that butt-feather-loving predator comes along, the definition of merit continues to be how big a feather you have sticking out of your butt. It is just that the definitions change once in a while.
> Why did the meritorious survive? Because it's a meritocracy.
No, the meritorious survive because you can't cheat the universe.
I'm saying you can't make the world meritocratic because it already is and it's not changeable. You can only align yourself with how the world works so you don't get screwed.
For example, let's say I'm an employer and I decide to hire the least competent candidate for a new job. I, as the employer, cannot escape the consequences of this action and most likely I will pay for it in some form like the company failing or me losing my job. The world is still meritocratic despite my inane decision making. This forces me out of the equation and eventually my successor will have to do a better job hiring or else face the same fate of irrelevance as I. Eventually, all that's left is an employer who does pick candidates based on merit. But if this is true, the employer didn't really create a meritocracy, but merely aligned itself with the equilibrium state of the universe.
This is just a way of looking at what meritocracy means, and it frames it as a purely practical construct necessary for survival.
My point is that you're taking what is and then applying the label "meritocracy" to it. But the world itself has no moral content, it's humans who create and apply it.
Meritocracy is essentially a statement that people are rewarded according to their merits, whatever those might be. It carries baggage in the form of an unstated moral component riding shotgun. If you ask people whether "meritocracy" is the same as "natural selection", they will tend not to agree, because merit implies a degree of human agency that is more than merely current emergent phenomena.
The confusion of value and virtue, or natural selection and meritocracy, causes all sorts of trouble. The philosophers have had long beard-stroking discussions about all this under the heading of "teleology".
I'm confused about what we're talking about now. My definition of meritocracy has no moral content either.
I'm not saying meritocracy is the same as natural selection. Meritocracy is the system which aligns itself with natural selection. Merit is assigned by humans, and if assigned perfectly well it should align with natural selection. However, humans are error prone and therefore can never create a completely meritocratic society so meritocracy will never be on the same plane as natural selection.
I guess you can say meritocracy is natural selection emulated by humans. However the universe ultimately forces the selection by merit (perfectly, as whatever the universe chooses is fair) and the humanly chosen merit is gauged by how accurately it aligns with it.
I'm not using meritocracy to define meritocracy. I'm reframing the definition of meritocracy so that saying "creating" meritocracy is a moot concept because meritocracy is not created.
I define merit as deserving to live. Because you can't cheat the universe, if you live then by definition you have merit. You can't create merit, it already is. You can only align yourself with merit.
> Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.
I never said it was meritorious. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. It's probably going to die off because it doesn't deserve to live, assuming giant butt feathers have no real purpose.
> And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.
Exactly. The stupid, useless, inane, will die off and be selected out of existence eventually.
> Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.
If this were true, society would be going backwards. This is not true though. Evolution was my example because of this. The more deserving to live will always have more probability of living, otherwise evolution wouldn't work. Sure stupidity exists, but only because a perfectly meritocratic society is quixotic. The universe is non-determistic, which means even if humans could be perfectly meritocratic, it wouldn't be perfectly meritocratic. And if the stupid around you seem to have more probability of perpetuating... then perhaps you should redefine who and what is stupid?
That's just a movie. Actual evidence has shown that IQs have increased over time.
And if in fact people are getting dumber, then there must be something about that which makes it... preferable, which means you either have to re-evaluate what dumb means or open your mind to the fact that maybe what you or I think is "smart" might not be good or desirable.
In the old days that's what we used to call a summary. If you like that sort of thing and think you might like to do it yourself, reading up on how to write essays and the like will be very informative.
After reading the article , uncomfortable thoughts began to float into my consciousness . A sense of unease at having to confront the hypocrite within .
We as a species have progressed so far and have built up such complex societies that life seems far removed the Darwinian struggles of the jungle . Perhaps stemming from an innate sense of fairness or hoping to maximise societal potential we try and impose our own mechanisms on top of this existential struggle . Any measure that is at odds with this underlying abstraction is doomed to fail . So we must try and allocate resources and authority to those who can best use it .
The ideal system would be where no person has any right to complain about his situation as he has been given what he rightly deserved . How deserving he is depends on his merit which actually depends on the resources the very system gave him in the first place . So meritocracy has to go back all the way back to the beginnings of society and maybe even deeper. But people would still be unequal .
In this light Platos solution of the noble lie dosent seem so unfair . From Wikipedia :
Plato presented the Noble Lie (gennaion pseudos, γενναῖον ψεῦδος) in a fictional tale, wherein Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato; Socrates speaks of a socially stratified society, wherein the populace are told "a sort of Phoenician tale":
"The earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian."
The fictional Socrates, created by Plato, proposes and claims that if the people believed "this myth . . . it would have a good effect, making them more inclined to care for the state and one another.This is his noble lie: "a contrivance for one of those falsehoods that come into being in case of need, of which we were just now talking, some noble one. . . ."
A meritocracy is just a more sophisticated and more fair version of the noble lie where we substitute "merit" instead of a metal without being aware that merit might also be related to being born in a certain class.
Then there is the ascertaining "responsibility" or "credit" . The author seems to be differentiating between the two definitions on the basis of how much credit(right to be smug?) the victors in a meritocracy can take for their sucess. Then we disappear down a philosophical wormhole into the land of determinism , nature vs nurture etc . I try resolve this by consoling myself that maybe this meritocratic victory isnt really a victory . Maybe the theory that some people are higher and up and some people are lower down isnt applicable to ranking human beings . Its like asking whether the lion is the meritocratic victor in the jungle foodchain and the rest of the animals are the losers . Its one giant interdependent chain in which everything has its place .
This is a strawman argument. Forget about Donald Trump as some model of success. Despite his head start he almost went bankrupt - twice. He is much less respected as a real estate developer in the world of real estate than you think. His success has been in PR and celebrity. There are thousands real estate investors who actually are good at it and started with nothing (e.g. Sam Zell).
Don't like "meritocracy" then how how should we choose our leaders?
If this was just a post on language I think I totally agree - it is a tricky word to define. And I hope you saw the comment above on the ironic origin of the word.
However I got the impression from several things in your post that you don't like the commonly held ideal of choosing leaders based on merit (i.e. meritocracy):
(1) Donald Trump is somehow an example of it at work (see my comments about him above).
(2) It discriminates against those from disadvantaged backgrounds who likely will accumulate less "merit". BTW - I agree this is a problem with both "meritocracy" and the world generally and should be adressed in various ways.
(3) It somehow implies to "some people" that "none of the people in positions of authority are bozos".
(4) Meritocracy does not "minimizing false negatives".
You seem to be against the ideal not just that particular definition. The only positive thing you say is that it is better than "picking leaders at random or having some dictator appoint his drinking buddies".
Do you like the idea of making choices based on merit? You seem to be both criticizing it as a goal and saying that it is not practical.
I get the sense you would prefer making decisions based on some sense of "justice" rather than "merit".
BTW - Love your many great posts on development. Thanks you very much. I feel awkward debating a hero.
I think it is a post about the word "meritocracy" meaning many things to many people, and not being very useful for certain types of discussion.
If two people understand each other and agree to disagree, fine. But recently, I've seen a lot of online arguments about these kinds of things, where I get the impression that there are two reasonable people talking past each other without really understanding each other.
I think that meritocracy is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of equality of opportunity. Given a pool of candidates, we should pick the best ones (eliminate false positives). AND, we should invest as much as we can reasonably afford to ensure that we get people with good potential into the pool (eliminate false negatives).
My overall view is that we're going to go into a serious economic struggle in the next twenty years, and like any sports team, scouting is as important as coaching :-)
Then I think I misunderstood the point your post - I hope you can see how it could happen. And I am probably yet another example of exactly what you were trying to warn against - people on the Internet talking past one another.
I think we actually agree overall. Leaders should be chosen as best we can by merit and we should seek to expand the pool as best we can.
This brings up another idea I wonder about: If choosing leaders is so hard can we somehow reduce our dependence on them? Put another way can we move to a more emergent approach to organizing ourselves rather than depending some "leader" to decide how we should be organized?
As somebody who has pondered this problem over a while. You can give different names to this problem. You could also look at this from a Karma perspective.
You could also question this in very different ways.
I've tried to study this problem in many ways. To an extent I can tell you karma works in very mysterious ways, its slow and there are simply too many factors which are often unknown to us to make a judgement on why a person does or doesn't deserve X in life.
Let me explain with an example. Somebody you know didn't study well in college, he is also not known to be very brilliant either. You are a super genius and you get into Google, he attempts every job interview and fails. But finally makes it to a start up as a very low level employee doing some menial job. You both go on to live life as usual. You assume his career his over. Now something strange happens, in the start up the guy is pushed, is put under tough demanding deadlines. Now the guy who wasn't good with books and exams suddenly discovers despite all that. He has something in himself to 'get things done'. The start up becomes a hit, he climbs the ladder pretty quickly ends up making a lot of money.
You might ponder how this idiot got so successful, though he wasn't good with books and exams. How come he made it that big without knowing even 10% of what you know?
Karma/meritocracy works in its own ways. You don't know how hard the other guy is working, you don't what is valuable to the world or why it is valuable, you don't know how much taking a risk pays off when done properly, you don't know many million things about the other guy to come to any logical conclusion. There are simply too many unknowns to ask 'If it is fair'?
The world is actually fair, in its own way. You simply don't have enough data to decide if the world was fair to somebody or not. Or many times you are jealous or biased or whatever.
What is that, your opinion? What is that based on? Does it apply to the kid who got caught selling pot for the third time, because he didn't know what else to do with his life, because he grew up in a place and a family where no one gave him any other choices, and is now spending the rest of it in prison?
Here's my opinion: Karma works sometimes. And other times people are crushed by the ugliness in this world.
Karma works because people judge what is fair based on their opinion and not on facts, simply because too many facts are unknown to take a decision.
>>And other times people are crushed by the ugliness in this world.
Yes this is true, but if you are going to keep talking why you will fail regardless how hard you work. You will always find enough reasons why you shouldn't try because you will fail anyway. Thereby you will never try, somebody else sure will. And by the virtue of merely being there will win. And then thereby simply going into this deeper cycle of victim hood.
The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and the most successful people give their children the best education. There is no longer the opportunity to work your way up from the mail room to the CEO chair. All the positions above a certain grade need a college degree, and often an advanced degree. Unlike the old aristocracies, there's no noblesse oblige; those at the bottom deserve to be there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
One of the great things about computer programming (and the open culture of programming as it is now) is that we can achieve merit outside of an institutionalized system.
Edit - I didn't expect this to be the topvoted comment... so just to restate, even programming isn't perfect here. There are still many filters and barriers. I think raganwald's point is that our filters are often sufficient to exclude vast swathes of deserving people, if we robotically look only for certain kinds of objective merit.