This article is baffling. "The rich are unfairly rich-" it says "Because their parents were rich and bought them good schooling no one else can afford! But schooling hasn't been able to lift those who aren't already rich out of poverty very well! But if we just fix education the right way, surely THIS time it will work, and everyone can be rich(er)!"<p>People love to believe comfortable myths. For a certain group of people, their comfortable myth is that wealth inequality can be solved by education. It cannot. People become wealthy because of luck. Who your parents are is luck. Where you were born is luck. Your intelligence and physical and mental health are luck. It's all luck. The best schooling in the world can't move this needle much, and its power grows ever weaker as technology and automation eat more and more of the economy.<p>"Growth" can't save us either. We cannot escape by giving the economy more gas, because the faster the economy goes, the more things get automated, the more jobs vanish, and more wealth gets concentrated. We are rapidly approaching a point where a tiny fraction of the population controls almost all economic activity, and in that future, the only way to fix wealth inequality is to tax that group and spread the money around. Most of that group do not want this to happen of course, and they get to make the decisions. But sooner or later, this will become an untenable position.
I don't think meritocracy is a myth. The myth is the belief that the current world is perfectly meritocratic.<p>It's not meaningful to say an abstract ideal is a myth when it's not fully realised, because meritocracy still exists as a relative measurement between different times and places. It still means something to say "our workplace should be more meritocratic." It would also be meaningful to say "our country should be freer," even if absolute freedom doesn't exist.
Luck (and nepotism) play far too great a role in success for meritocracy to exist.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I</a><p>Then of course there's the whole "the guy who first coined term considered it a joke." Too many people missed the satire and took it way too seriously.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy</a>
The article fails to prove its central point because it fails to demonstrate that merit is non-heritable through for instance, genetics.<p>I'm not exactly sure what the argument against meritocracy actually was. Are these highly educated students NOT better workers? Are they better workers but they only got to be that way through the unfair favoritism of parents towards their own children and an insufficient social support network? Usually when I see complaints about meritocracy the solution is to put your fingers on the scale of adult employment because of the non-meritocratic nature of it but if the argument is the latter than one can raise many objections to this idea. If the idea is the former the argument has not been sufficiently made.<p>Is it being argued that nuture can't raise intelligence? That's questionable as well. Is meritocracy and egalitarianism supposed to be the same thing for reasons? I really don't know the arguments are clear as mud. I don't feel like me reading this article happened through any meritocratic process.
Idk how many others share this opinion, but I consider even intelligence to be luck. So if you're giving the more intelligent people better jobs / living conditions it's still unfair.<p>But moreover, intelligence is too broad to rank. There's STEAM intelligence, which is what most people consider "intelligence". But there's also emotional intelligence, "quick-thinking" intelligence, "street smarts", etc. and even STEAM is kind of broad. So when you say meritocracy, do you mean that someone who's very analytical, but has no empathy or emotional understanding whatsoever, should rule the world?<p>I think an ideal society would be more in line with John Rawls' philosophy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice</a>).
Meritocracy isn't egalitarianism. The whole point is to promote the best and the brightest, thus it will always promote inequality. Then the best educated will receive the best resources money can buy. That race always starts before you're even born.
> Yet as a top-notch education becomes the essential requirement for the best job, the rich can buy educational privileges for their children<p>This is not meritocracy. Every argument made is just how much meritocracy has died in the U.S. not how meritocracy does not work. If it worked properly, the rich wouldn't have a leg up just because they have money, because in theory there wouldn't be elite schools to begin with. Schools themselves would be rewarded based on merit, instead of having these generational gatekeeping mechanisms that literally produce the ruling class in America. This is "the swamp" in politics, it's a bunch of elite people coming from elite schools, which might have some education, but are not necessarily the best for those jobs, just the ones with the best access... so not meritocracy.
Even if it were real, the bigger problem is assuming anyone knows how to accurately evaluate merit. I’ll point you to any number of books on human biases, but I particularly like The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis.<p>The tech version of this is extremely frustrating, because intelligent people are very good at letting their brains blind their biases and insulate their egos.
<i>It's who you know, not what you know.</i><p>Being rich and well-connected creates a self-amplifying, "virtuous" circle much like a population differential equation where the rate of increase is proportional to the amount present.<p>I do believe that someone who out-competes and out-achieves the "lazy rich students who buy their homework" have the grit to overtake anyone who isn't focused, experienced, and used to working hard. It's easier if you're well-connected except it's not worth giving-up because unfairness, connectedness, and advantages exist.<p>Victimology isn't productive for achievement, it's an excuse.
This author seems to have an angle they either can’t prove with facts or don’t know how to discuss with data. How much better are the super-rich test scores? Is that enough to fully explain their over-representation in the Ivies? How much does private school improve those scores? Does that fully explain their admissions advantage? What is the statistical benefit of wealth in the GaoKao? What portion of the wealth advantage in Chinese admissions is due to better scores, and how much is due to provincial quotas, or even political favors? In the US there have been several Supreme Court cases about this, and the conclusions have been that meritocracy is not a goal of federal education funding and tax relief programs.<p>A simple search comes up with a far more comprehensive article on exactly this topic:<p>“The Myth of American Meritocracy” by Ron Unz
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of...</a><p>I admit that I haven’t read to the end; it’s nearly a book. But what is interesting to me is the source and focus of the complaint, today versus a decade ago.<p>Is it liberal or conservative to decry the lack of meritocracy? Is it okay to skew admissions to redress privilege, while not okay to skew admissions in favor of privilege, or does the simultaneous practice of both make it okay?
The problem with “merit” is that it’s entirely subjective. Some would argue that Boris Johnson is prime minister based on merit: he went to university, worked as a journalist, got elected Mayor of London and the became PM. Others (myself included) would say that he has achieved nothing on merit but has used his privileged background, influential friends and lied his way to the top.
The solution is not for elite schools to take in more students from deprived backgrounds. The solution is to make state schools good enough to compete with the elite schools.<p>Teaching at state schools (I’m from the UK) is utterly crap and 30 years of continuous reform has merely ensured that it keeps getting worse even as grade inflation is encouraged to make it seem like it’s getting better.
Baaaaaaarrrrrffff. What a horrible take. Rich people use their wealth to improve the opportunities of their offspring? How tragic. I suppose we’re all the victims of Jeff Bezos because his unfair, luck-derived, incredible intellect invented Amazon before we got around to it. If only we had more people from the bottom 60% going to Harvard (even though we know Ivy League schools predict little about performance) then some other person would have invented Amazon, and then we would be reading a similarly shit article where they use that person as evidence of whatever the point actually is here.<p>Tl;dr being poor isn’t as good as rich and luck matters more than zero.
This whole debate is the conflation of proximate causes and antecedent causes.
If the most skilled person gets hired, is that an example of meritocracy?<p>According to some people's definition - those who emphasize the proximate cause of the decision - yes, this is absolutely a meritocracy.<p>According to others, no, it isn't, because of the genetic lottery and other antecedent causes outside of the control of the hiree.<p>Who is right here? The answer is that both parties are right. They don't disagree on the underlying reality. They just disagree on what aspects of that reality the word "meritocracy" should refer to.
I remember reading about David Shaw (of D.E Shaw), and how he annually donated $1MM to each HYPS school, over a period of six years - and then some to a couple of other schools. That's like at least $24MM just to get your kids to the best schools - these are the kids you're competing against, though probably outliers in above example.<p>The elite school -> elite (or important) jobs pipeline is something you see in every country, and that's how it's been forever, but I think things are getting a bit better. My only concern would be that we're not getting enough "class" diversity.
I wonder what empirical evidence we have which would show graduates of elite schools are better in their chosen field of study than those that graduated from non-elite schools (or even carefully studied the material on their own).<p>If outcomes are better at elite schools and it is not due to the students themselves then what is the elite school's secret sauce that cannot be replicated?
To me the most interesting part of this debate is that the majority of commenters here have pretty quickly jumped to “merit is luck because intelligence is luck”, which it’s pretty much impossible to make compatible with the concept of free will.<p>But I somehow doubt that <i>all</i> the people commenting would accept that free will is not a thing.
Everyone claims they like meritocracy. Then they realise Merit is smarts, hardwork and luck. And they don't have all those. So why would they actually want a meritocracy anymore than a non-king wants a monarchy?
Any notion that we live in anything remotely resembling a meritocracy should already be thoroughly debunked if for no other reason than the results of the 2016 elections.