Meritocracy doesn't exist and believing it does is bad for you (2019)

&gt;Bill Gates<p>His Mom knew the chairman of IBM.<p>That&#x27;s a connection no normal person will ever have. Steve Jobs and Steve Woz actually had to start from a middle class.<p>Comparison is the theft of joy, I haven&#x27;t been evicted since I got my first apartment at 19 and with any luck I&#x27;ll retire early. That&#x27;s enough for me. I&#x27;m widely more success than I could of imagined.<p>Yes someone else is making a million a month, has a beautiful partner and a family.<p>Someone else just got out of prison and is struggling to stay in housing.<p>I will never know why the rich ( north of 10 million in the US) feel a need to keep working though. Start a band, travel, etc.<p>Why deal with VCs breathing down your neck.<p>Then again, if I woke up rich I&#x27;d probably start a game studio as a passion project.<p>I&#x27;d want to release all the code open source. I want the popular games of the future to at a minimum be open core.

It is a statement on where we are today that this was flagged today but not 2019

I didn&#x27;t capture why author decided that it doesn&#x27;t exist, but I think it as most of the time is just not white&#x2F;black situation, but more many shades of grey.

Big ole thread at the time <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19415309">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19415309</a>

Arguments against merit make two errors. First is treating it as a formula, not a correlation. Second is conflating merit for free will.<p>Merit is not about freedom from circumstance. As the article points out, luck can be stow someone with more merit. Someone can have better parenting, education or genes through no action of their own. This does not mean they lack merit. Merit is a performance metric.<p>Working hard or having talent won&#x27;t always result in equal rewards in the real world. Nobody is making this straw man. However, talent and effort improve outcomes relative to lack of talent and lack of effort, all else being equal.

This is why debates over the extent to which particular individuals are “self-made” and over the effects of various forms of “privilege” can get so hot-tempered. These arguments are not just about who gets to have what; it’s about how much “credit” people can take for what they have, about what their successes allow them to believe about their inner qualities. That is why, under the assumption of meritocracy, the very notion that personal success is the result of “luck” can be insulting.

Whether or not meritocracy exists, believing that it does is essential for upwards mobility. Studies suggest that having an external locus of control-believing that your fate is determined by factors outside your control—is associated with lower academic achievement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ijlter.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;ijlter&#x2F;article&#x2F;viewFile&#x2F;7094&#x2F;pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ijlter.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;ijlter&#x2F;article&#x2F;viewFile&#x2F;7094&#x2F;pd...</a> (pp. 399-400).<p>A remarkable statistic is that Asian Americans raised in poverty have more than double the upward mobility of white Americans raised in poverty. Asian kids raised in the bottom 20% of income have a 25% chance of growing up to be in the top 20% versus just 10% for similarly situated white kids.<p>Folks are resistant to studying why, but I strongly suspect part of the reason is that Asian kids are generally taught that hard work produces results, and are discouraged from thinking about whether things are “fair” or not.

&quot;The harder you work, the luckier you get.&quot;