The Problem with Meritocracy

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/the-decline-of-middle-america-and-the-problem-of-meritocracy/

by asciilifeform • 16 years ago

48 65 16 years ago

marciovm1232• 16 years ago

I see these situations as people being forced to confront the trade-offs between Equality and Freedom. The prevailing sense in America is that Freedom is the most important value, and that Equality is pretty important too. However, attaining Equality often involves infringing on Freedom and vice-versa. Maximizing economic freedom is one of the core principles of America, which has resulted in amazing wealth and technology, but also means that Equality is inevitably de-emphasized - we have to accept that.

The OP thinks that this is a problem, and that Americans should become more local. However, he fails to realize that America is made up of people who were fed up with staying local. That is why they packed up their bags, left their jobs, friends and family and traveled far to come live here. Why would their offspring be any different?

arethuza3• 16 years ago

I think you'll find that pretty much all of us are decended from people who were fed up staying local. Otherwise we'd all still be in Kenya.

marciovm1232• 16 years ago

touche

defen• 16 years ago

For a self-professed arch-conservative Catholic monarchist's take on the equality vs. freedom debate I recommend "Liberty or Equality" by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: http://blog.mises.org/archives/006326.asp

etherael2• 16 years ago

The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence.

All this supposedly so those that are incapable of succeeding in a meritocracy are not sentenced to the terrible fate of believing themselves worthy of their low station. I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing.

Feudalism died for a reason, let's not bring it back.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Imagine the state the world would be in if someone had put into practice his proposed "solution" back in, say, 1500.

People who succeed do not just benefit themselves, they often benefit many others, including future generations. And people are motivated to succeed by desiring the rewards that come with success such as wealth, fame, etc. Without such incentives, success and progress suffer. Art, architecture, literature, music, and poetry suffers. The study and practice of medicine, physics, and chemistry suffers. Innovation in industry suffers. Free enterprise suffers. Everyone's quality of life is reduced because the automobile was never invented, penicillin was never discovered, radio was never discovered, the electric light bulb was never invented, the refrigerator was never invented, etc, etc, etc.

Should we discourage the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the John Carmacks, the Sergey Brins, the JK Rowlings, and the Steve Jacksons of the world because there are so many other folks who are perfectly content to spend their lives working at the Try N Save and watching 5 hours of TV a night and some of those folks find their lives dissatisfying in comparison? Quiet down! You're being unruly! You're making everyone else look bad with your success! Here, come slum with us, it'll make everyone happier in the end, honest.

Time and time again history has shown that unfettered individual liberty maximizes progress, both for individuals and for society as a whole. There will always be inequality and tragedy, that's the nature of life. Trying to pretend that we can make everyone identically equal and erase everything that makes people different from one another is a distopian vision, very Borg-like and anti-humane.

drunkpotato4• 16 years ago

I'm surprised to see such a high number of points for this canned mad-libs response unworthy of the thoughtfulness of the original article. You fail to acknowledge issues raised in the article and narrowly argue the solution in the most trivial and trite way.

I would like to find a way to combine the best of the technological brilliance and economic powerhouse that meritocracy and social mobility have provided, while also looking for a less disconnected, community-focused and psychologically healthier nation. Any discussions that help pinpoint problems in our current system, and propose solutions, are welcome to me. I do not agree with the author's proposed solution, but I do agree that there are problems inherent in the extreme selfishness and greed in our society that we have not adequately addressed.

moron4hire• 16 years ago

Agreed. This article expressed especially strange sentiments for an entrepreneurship board.

plorkyeran• 16 years ago

Which is exactly why it is an article people here should read. It's a decently reasoned argument against a view most people here (myself included) support, and it's important to understand why we disagree with it.

proemeth2• 16 years ago

Well I think this article has its place on HN because it questions values that are so consensual they are never discussed. Ethics sure is a tough ground to venture on, the author goes there but not only, and makes a few points.

decode3• 16 years ago

"The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence."

The important question that the author raises is this: why is that offensive? Right now we allocate power according to the chance of genetics and environment, and tell people that we're actually allocating it through personal effort. Which raises two questions:

1) Is it okay to lie to ourselves about what determines the meritocratic hierarchy?

2) Is it more tragic that a bright, smart, knowledgeable person not be able to fully exercise those properties, or for a slow, unintelligent, uninformed person to not be able to have a dignified place in society?

The answers to these questions could be either yes or no, but we need to be honest about our answers to them, and why we answer them the way we do.

anamax2• 16 years ago

> Is it more tragic that a bright, smart, knowledgeable person not be able to fully exercise those properties, or for a slow, unintelligent, uninformed person to not be able to have a dignified place in society?

Those aren't mutually exclusive and neither is their inverse.

Also, the first one is wrong in a subtle way. We want people to exercise their capabilities to the fullest - bright and smart are merely two kinds of capabilities, two that are far less important than bright and smart people think.

In summary, we want all people going at full tilt and we want dignity regardless of what their "full tilt" is.

The author's mistake is in thinking that you can give someone dignity by treating them as more capable than they actually are.

jimbokun6• 16 years ago

By your response, I suspect that you do not think a "solution" to this problem is needed at all.

I find it refreshing that the author readily acknowledges that the people left behind are there because they are not talented enough to go anywhere else. It was very politically incorrect of him to say so.

With that as the premise, what do we do with those people left behind? Our meritocracy allows fewer and fewer people to control ever more of society's wealth and resources. What of the rest of society? Basically, we are witnessing the ghetto-fication of Middle America. Is that not a problem?

etherael2• 16 years ago

I'm not an American so I have not witnessed the exact situation being outlined in the article, but as I was born in the Australian countryside and grew up in the closest thing that Sydney has to a ghetto, I do think I have a grasp on seeing this from the inside, and I think I've seen the kind of people who largely result; the best summary to me is "Ignorant, and proud of it".

I find the notion of organising a social structure around making these people feel better about their uselessness abhorrent, I find the notion that those distributed amongst them capable of greater things being sentenced to living their lives in the immediate presence of these people, as a close-knit good old fashioned "community" as a pretty good argument for euthanasia.

And in case I come across too much someone swimming deep in the dunning-kruger effect, if I am or were afflicted with the same unfortunate situation with regards to my abilities as the group in question, I would still not wish that anyone who had the capacity to make the world better ought to be held back on account of not wounding my pride. I live in the world after all. Feudal serfs had it a lot worst than the modern ignorant and proud of it, and I believe this is largely because the world is a much better place on account of the very meritocratic values the original article decries.

exit• 16 years ago

I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing.

You setup a straw man by simplifying their grievance to an abstract understanding of ones position. People who are below average live genuinely miserable lives in a meritocracy. WHY shouldn't they ruin the world? It was cruel of the world to create them (never mind fooling them into becoming attached to being alive). HOW is randomly allocating power and privilege any different than the random allocation of cognitive abilities?

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

Currently, the lowest rates of unemployment are in flyover country. The Dakotas, Wyoming, Oklahoma...

sethg• 16 years ago

It occurs to me that one of the effects of meritocratic mobility is that school systems in less-desirable places get caught in a downward spiral. Public schools in Kansas, for example, get the bulk of their revenue from Kansas taxpayers. But if someone rises through the Kansas school system, does extremely well, and ends up with a high-paying job in New York, that person’s taxes will be going to support public schools in New York, not Kansas.

sgoranson• 16 years ago

That Vonnegut short story is the first thing that comes to mind for the author's solution:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

Sukotto• 16 years ago

Wow, I never thought about things from this perspective before. Quite a lot of things I find weird about American culture -- in particular the politics here -- make a lot more sense viewed through this lens.

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.

billybob2• 16 years ago

I thought it was interesting too. I would sum it up as "local culture and equality are important, and are being destroyed by an ideal of individual aspiration. Current policies push us toward the latter; they should be made neutral or to favor the former."

An interesting point. It's true that our scholarship system tends to pull talent from small towns to large ones, and maybe that has negative implications. But to actively discourage people from their ambition seems wrong. Let THEM decide whether local culture, traditional community, etc, are valuable to them.

Another point: is a government-enforced local culture as good as a naturally developed one? Can you ever regain the attitude "that's the way life is around here, just like in great-grandpa's day" by making policies? Or will you just have festering resentment by those with stunted talent? To me, this is part of the inherent flaw of communism.

grellas• 16 years ago

Semi-bizarre ruminations about why kids from the midwestern U.S. leave home when they grow up and don't come back. As someone who did just that many years ago, I can sum it up in a much shorter way: because there is nothing going on there.

Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities.

A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.

jerf3• 16 years ago

You raise in passing a very good point to consider when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you think you want to study biology, but you really want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.)

Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you can't tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you can tell them that, but you will be lying.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better.

You can't have it all. Ever.

Kisil2• 16 years ago

>If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result.

Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.)

> when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures to choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.

decode3• 16 years ago

"If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result."

There are no people in the world who can do anything in the world. Even if your child had all of the intelligence, physical ability, drive, and opportunity possible, he or she would never have a choice between being a jockey and a basketball player. So, no matter how much of a meritocracy we have, you will be lying when you tell your child, "You can be whatever you want."

nihilocrat• 16 years ago

That's basically what I was thinking, and it's so fundamentally obvious it's painful to think anyone would be surprised or wonder why people don't want to spend their lives in their no-name hellhole hick town. I grew up in the suburbs of various unremarkable mid-sized cities in the southeast, but I still had a strong "I need to get the hell out of here" feeling constantly in my mind growing up. Moving back home after college personally would feel like a sign of failure, a major life setback, and I felt pity for those who did so.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

When the premise is that flyover country is rotting because all the really smart people leave and never come back? I'm bailing out of the article.

If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.

ovi256• 16 years ago

I wish it were so, but I do not think it will be for some time. First, even if the technical means for remote work exist (and the means have existed for some time), inertia delays their adoption. Second, even if business switches to remote work, people will still move to business centers for a while, again by inertia. These two delays are considerable enough that I think it is more likely for us to see another paradigm switch than current trends coming to completion.

Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.

proemeth2• 16 years ago

Long but worth the read, because insightful, well researched and written. It questions a value that can be so deeply rooted in our paradigms that i got a bit of a "shock" myself. I love to read something so refreshing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution

pragmatic2• 16 years ago

Bogus. Lowest unemployment is in "flyover" country: http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm

These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years.

Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.

pragmatic2• 16 years ago

Rapid City, which is in the Black Hills Region of South Dakota is #10 lowest unemployment in the Nation. It's also the nastiest part of the state with gangs, crime, etc. I'm making no judgments, etc, just giving you some info.

However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city.

Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.

turkishrevenge• 16 years ago

I can vouch for Philadelphia. I live right across the river from it. The city itself is really is a hole. There is rampant crime and the infrastructure is literally crumbling. North Philadelphia, is essentially a war-zone, and across the river in New Jersey, you have the urban decay of Camden and Trenton. And to think, all of this is in the most heavily populated region in the country, the Northeast megalopolis (Northeast megalopolis). Of course, there used to a great deal more manufacturing in those places as well--for instance the shipyard in Philadelphia.

chadgeidel• 16 years ago

As a Rapid City native, I am surprised to hear this. I have not lived there in about 5 years, but I grew up there and my parents and brother still live there.

Sure, there are people on "tough times" but I can't believe that it's the "nastiest part of the state."

Of course, these are just my personal observations. I lived on the "good side" of town and my father (who owns a construction company) did fairly well.

jimbokun6• 16 years ago

Oops. There go some of the points I was trying to argue else where in this thread. Should have read to the end before replying.

eplanit2• 16 years ago

Not sure at all why this article is this particular forum (neither Hacking nor News is contained). It's socialist proselytism, laced with logical fallacies, pseudo-intellectualism, and bizarre non-sequiturs regarding societies vs. organizations.

It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.

eplanit2• 16 years ago

Oh - sorry, comrades, to offend the 'collective'.

junklight2• 16 years ago

The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve".

What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - which in fairness seems to be the purpose of the civil service), the cost of doing anything tends to be immense and people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

The civil service is a meritocracy - they just don't use sane metrics for what merit is.

junklight2• 16 years ago

Well yes - one metric might be characterised as "how well you are able to work in the civil service".

Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at

plinkplonk• 16 years ago

"The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve".

What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen."

You just described the Indian Civil Service - which of course we inherited from the British and fucked up in our own unique ways.

Kisil2• 16 years ago

Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility).

I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.

DenisM2• 16 years ago

It's easy to prove as well - meritocratic societies seem to have survived and won over communal societies.

igorhvr• 16 years ago

Who is John Galt?

DenisM2• 16 years ago

tl;dr: When judged on their merit stupid people get upset. However if wealth and status are allocated randomly every loser has an excuses in randomness of luck. Author believes the latter is a better world.

azgolfer• 16 years ago

The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.

The Problem with Meritocracy

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