There's definitely proof that the world does respect hard work. Consider the fact that Asians, Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks spend time working on homework in that order: <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/08/10/analyzing-the-homework-gap-among-high-school-students/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...</a><p>Asians spend twice as much time on homework as compared to Whites, and about three times as compared to Blacks. Kids of high income families spend more time working on homework than low income kids. So the fact that Asians comprise the student body proportionally larger than Whites, and whites more than Blacks is evidence that hard work pays off.<p>I think these claims that meritocracy is false lack nuance. It's not that meritocracy isn't fair, it's that a pure meritocracy free of bias is <i>too</i> fair: it doesn't attempt to rectify the fact not everyone starts with the same resources and that certain groups have different attitudes towards thinks like education than others.<p>Granted many of you are probably thinking that the fact that meritocracy doesn't correct for these things makes it inherently unfair, and many are probably thinking that the notion that our processes to allocate opportunitiea <i>should</i> correct for things like disparate time spent on study is itself an act of unfairness. And there's no one right answer to this. This is a kind of question where there is no answer, but rather society continuously develops and evolves a concensus about the right approach.
As far as I can tell, that article should properly be titled "A belief that life is a meritocracy is not only false, it's morally wrong".<p>Most of the author's problems seem to revolve around the fact that real life is not actually a pure meritocracy, not in the idea that meritocracy itself is a bad ideal. Even his examples where people show bias in assessment of others when they believe they are operating in a merit-based system are just examples that the system is not actually merit-based.<p>What I find disappointing is that the author does not even bother to offer even a hint at an alternative.
Belief in meritocracy is yet another version of the just-world fallacy. If you belief in a just world, you need to fight off any counter evidence. This leads automatically to discrimination. Same thing with merits and success. To not acknowledge happenstance and luck is a huge red flag for me.
Talk is cheap. Meritocracy is the new bad word for some political segments, but the day you need complex surgery and they bring in the janitor, you grow up real fast.
This article (like so many others) inappropriately conflates believing that meritocracy is ideal with believing that meritocracy exists today. Given that, it’s hard to interpret its conclusions.
"Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour"<p>Of course it does, meritocracy is the process of discriminating good candidates from bad candidates.<p>I'm so fed up with people attaching emotions to the word discrimination. It is not an inherent evil.<p>"Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate."<p>Then they haven't implemented meritocracy properly then, have they?
I would argue that as a way to describe a selection process, "Meritocracy", warts and all, works great.<p>By warts, I mean that merit, as shorthand for "assessment of skill, talent, or capability", has other factors mixed in because <i>flawed people</i> decide who gets life's prizes.<p>The Gates example shows the missing ingredient - not luck, but recognition of luck's role in success, what some might call humility. The article referred to gratitude research, which probably means the same thing.<p>It's a missing ingredient because it doesn't seem too valuable anymore, especially when compared to other qualities, such as the ability to "talk smack."<p>And it's associated with sackcloth and ashes, or being a "loser." Moreover, it's often called false.<p>Coming back to meritocracy, what do we have as alternatives? Random selection? Suppression of individual differences (aka C.S. Lewis' "Parity of Esteem")? I don't know.<p>Parity of Esteem ref = <a href="http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf</a>
I am annoyed by the article's use of Bill Gates to exemplify the "fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story". Bill Gates and Microsoft is not "every success story". I would be surprised to find even a hardcore believer in an ideologized meritocracy who thought that tail events like Bill Gates and Microsoft didn't have a huge luck component.<p>Meritocracy-as-strong-just-world-hypothesis is a weak-man argument.<p>I am a believer in meritocracy. But, I note, I'm not a believer in any ideological big-M Meritocracy. Rather, I think meritocracy is the best practical way we know to organize things. In a liberal society, rather than get everybody to agree on the latent virtues they love the most, I think it makes sense to have demonstrated capability as a common ground evaluation metric. As another poster in the thread suggests, what do you want from your surgeon if not demonstrated capability?
It seems most people don't realise that "meritocracy" was coined half a century ago as a sarcastic term for a possible dystopia. One in which many people now find themselves.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy</a>
The article talks about morals, which by themselves are based on values and beliefs, therefore not defensible ethically and logically.<p>Meritocracy is not ethically defensible under argumentative logic -- Hans Herman Hoppe has provided the framework for that.
Is luck evenly distributed? If so, then at least on one level of abstraction, is not the world fair? If it is not evenly distributed, then by what mechanism is luck parceled out to individuals?<p>Bill Gates may be lucky in that he had little choice over the circumstances in which he was born into, but did not his parents make decisions that led to a better outcome? His luck could be said to be the merit of his ancestors.
I would point out that the equal opportunity espoused in the quote that start that article is not at all the same thing as meritocracy.<p>A balanced playing field doesn't mean that luck plays no role. It also doesn't mean that you can't provide a safety net and do some balancing of outcomes. It just means you have eliminated systematic biases.
I kind of agree with the article. I think of meritocracy as just another way to promote exploitation of people, hard work, submissive attitudes, acceptance of inequality. Basically every capitalist's dream society.<p>But it's pretty bizarre that people actually believe that being exploited is just hard work they have to do to get ahead and not being able to meet basic needs to live a normal life is just not working hard enough or not being talented enough to deserve a normal life.<p>It's morally acceptable to believe in meritocracy only as long as everyone's basic needs are met and they can't be exploited.