The topic keeps coming up, so I’ll again point to my post from 2005, Meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the “ocracy” with some further discussion by commenters a few years later.
The topic keeps coming up, so I’ll again point to my post from 2005, Meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the “ocracy” with some further discussion by commenters a few years later.
Flynn’s argument confounds two distinct notions of “advancement”. An egalitarian meritocracy is possible because capable people can have influence and responsibilities without extra goodies. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
Don:
I disagree. The point of the “ocracy” part of “meritocracy” is not just that people with merit get good jobs, it’s that they run things (“ocracy”). It’s inevitable that people who run things will want to use that power to help out their friends and family. That’s why meritocracy is self-contradicting as an idea.
Hi Andrew: a good thought experiment would be this: imagine a species (defined by chromosomal number etc) doddering at extinction with hardly 5000 left (evidence shows it could have been lower for us humans 50k years back). E.O. Wilson said that we are a very young species (200K years old) and cannot “speciate” to racial supremacy. Regression to the mean means our IQ will hover at the mean (true 100) over until we become an old species (millions of years according to large sized-mammalian biology). The point is that the ocracy is, as you identified correctly, the flaw in the system. High IQ couples will produce mediocre children or die out and vice versa (and Michael Jackson’s children or parents will never achieve his musical talent; unless we clone him which goes against the protective nature of sexual reproduction; MJ’s talent is a subset contained in all of us but expressed only with him due to whatever epigenetic exposure he had at/around inception or later). The most successful product of the universe is not reproduction, but sexual reproduction — programmed to maintain mean centered mediocrity no matter how hard we try to overcome it. Once in a million years, it escapes and we have a new species … To me, meritocracy is luck, random as hell, odd event but ergodic, cyclical and at best left out of policy and seen as a gift to society. We cannot promote it or ‘design/pedigree’ future babies — it’s bound to fail! We should encourage all to reproduce (responsibly) and show no favors. Otherwise, royal families would’ve produced all the Nobel laureates of the world!
The “ocracy” part *could* happen if there were a robust system of wealth redistribution favoring the economically disadvantaged, and an institutionalized, diligent talent search and development project carried out broadly in the population.
I don’t see that happening in any existing society in the foreseeable future, but, this is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility in some more enlightened world in the future.
Clyde:
“X-ocracy” is “rule by X,” so “meritocracy” is “rule by the people with merit.” If these people rule, they will rule in favor of their friends and family.
You could also have a “people with merit get the good jobs” system within an egalitarian democracy. But then I wouldn’t call it a “meritocracy.” The “ocracy” part of “meritocracy” is that the people with merit are actually running things.
The bigger question about “meritocracy” (in the strong sense that Andrew defines as “people with merit running things”) as I see it is how we define “merit”. The discussion above seems to assume that there is a universally agreed upon definition of “merit”, which I see as dubious.
After all, people have a range of skills and abilities in a variety of areas, and the circumstances of whether these skills and abilities have merit are context-dependent (e.g. skill with hunting is of considerable merit to hunter-gatherer societies, analytic ability is of considerable merit to tech companies, etc.) But I can easily imagine circumstances where those in positions of power currently can get to define “merit” in such a way to favour those with existing privileges, to the detriment of other groups.
We already *have* a partial meritocracy, which has proven wildly more successfully than competing “equalocracies” – which is why there are none of them left.
It’s true that people use their merit to help their less meritorious friends and family up the ladder but, ultimately, lacking the skills they need to.compete, the meritless often slide back down, which is why all the great fortunes slowly decline.
A “robust system of wealth redistribution” has proven disastrous over and over and over again. When ppl aren’t allowed to keep the wealth they create, they create far less of it.
Meritocracy is enforced by free markets and undermined by government. Government is the key means by which less meritorious social groups acquire unearned wealth, thereby reducing the incentives to create it in the first place.
+ 1
“Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same…So people don’t want to work.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secret-document-that-transformed-china
There are two distinct concepts being conflated here
1. For each person, given that they perform, can they expect to be rewarded more than if they didn’t perform
2. For two people, given that person A performs better than person B, is person A expected to be rewarded more than person B
#2, given that you’re rewarded with “power” of some kind, is the impossible self consuming dream of meritocracy. “Fairness”. #1 is the engine of liberal democratic productivity.
I don’t care about #2. I think we’d all be better off if we cared less about it and if people stopped pretending #2 is or ever was the status quo.
-Karl Marx
Also relevant