Yes, but it doesn't last for long. It just takes a few bad apples on top for the system to quickly go corrupt, which is why the powers on top need to constantly fear being changed by the people
What do you mean by doesn't last long? Also if the society was a complete meritocracy what accountability would the people have?
Well, human judgement is not perfect, and eventually a snake would be able to climb the ranks and corrupt the whole system.
This is why democracy is the only system that can allow for “constant revolution” and if the current system is broken or corrupt, it’s the only way that allows for a consistent peaceful transfer of power. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but as Churchill once said “ Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
It's a good idea in theory, but there's a few problems:
Regarding wealth, it doesn’t have to with a heavy enough estate tax, AKA anti-aristocracy tax.
I don't.
The core issue: Who determines merit, ability, and position? The people who write the rules are the actual government, and governments secure their own power. Like every flawless paper-government system, it crumples as soon as the human element wets the paper.
However, assuming the rule book could be written flawlessly, with "perfect" selfless humans writing the initial rules and then removing themselves from power, there are unsolved issues:
All of these arguments try to argue that implementing meritocracy perfectly is impossible.
But ask yourself, what is the alternative? A system in which the most capable person isn't in charge? Should we go back to bloodlines, or popularity contests, or maybe use a lottery?
I agree it's very difficult to determine merit, and even more difficult to stop power struggles from messing with the evaluation, or with the implementation. But I would still prefer a system that at least tries to be meritocratic and comes up short, to a system that has given up entirely on the concept.
I'll try to answer some of your questions, as best as I understand it:
Who determines merit, ability, and position?
Ideally, a group of peers would vote for someone within the group, who is the most capable, with outside supervision to prevent abuses.
Popularity contests in determining merit
Popularity shouldn't factor into it. Only ability. (and there's no doubt Depp is the better actor :P )
Are Athletes or Artists more worthy
Each one is worthy within the scope of their domain of expertise, in which they have demonstrated merit.
Power corrupts
Always true in every system. That's why we need checks and balances.
Save the entire planet, then start kicking cats. Still a hero?
If kicking cats is wrong, it should be against the law, and no one should be above the law. All other things being equal, whoever has the most capacity to save the planet should be the one to do it.
How long does a merit last?
For as long as you can demonstrate it. If someone better comes along, they should take your place.
Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what?
More mathematical problems. And ideally, also lots of money and babes.
At the end of the day, it's a cultural problem. Meritocracy can only work if there's a critical mass of people who believe in it, understand it, and enforce it socially. The same can be said of democracy, capitalism, and basically any other social order.
No.
Who gets to determine what counts as merit? If it's the people with merit already, it's trivial to corrupt such a system. Think billionares.
And then, is everyone even given the opportunity to display their merit and if they are, is their merit recognised? I'm concerned esp. about people perceived by society to have inherently less merit. Think disabled people, old people, young people, women, people of colour, queer folks, etc.
And then, how does the system ensure that merit wasn't faked or even just exaggerated, how does it investigate and how does it respond? Does a sufficient amount of merit allow someone to cover up such things? If implemented, can and would this investigation power be used to punish people with low merit, those that are the most vulnereable?
And then, why do people that are not constantly being useful to the system deserve less and esp. if meritocracy is the only system in place, do some people not deserve to live at all? Here I'm talking about people that want to have a hobby or two or want to spend time with their friends and family, basically anything that doesn't give merit. I'm also talking about people that can't or don't want to be useful to society.
Beyond all this, meritocracy aims to replace the people's purpose in life with "being useful". And that's just a really miserable mindset to live with, where you feel guilt if you're not being useful all the time, where you constantly have thoughts like "am I good enough" or "am I trying hard enough".
I totally agree.
IMO the notion of merit is an illusion. It hides the assumption that people can be ranked and compared, but do we truly want to live in such a society?
Also, is that even feasible?
It's impossible to objectively compare humans of similar "skill level". For example, think of Plato and Aristotle, they have been dead for thousands of years and their work has been studied but millions of not billions of people, yet people still argue who was the best philosopher of the two. How can we have a meritocracy if we cannot evaluate merit? You may be able to distinguish experts from beginners for a certain skill, but, when considering roles of influence/power, there are multiple skills and attributes to be considered, and the same principle applies.
It's easier to cheat a merit metric than to evaluate it. Any algorithm that makes a decision based on merit will need to either evaluate or compare it. Both are going to depend on the presence of absence of features that once known to a cheater they will be able to fake them. That makes evaluation and cheating a competing game, where the evaluator and the cheater contiously adapt to one another, with the cheater being much able to adapt much faster.
Any meritocracy will have to be open about it's evaluation process. If it's not participants with merit cannot know how to demonstrate it and the process is prune to corruption.
Personally, I believe making decisions based on trust is much better. It's hard to build trust and it cannot be cheated. Of course, cheater may try to influence decision makers with bribes or blackmail. But, once this is found trust is destroyed and they get rejected.
For anyone interested, Wikipedia provides some arguments against meritocracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
Meritocracy is argued to be a myth because, despite being promoted as an open and accessible method of achieving upward class mobility under neoliberal or free market capitalism, wealth disparity and limited class mobility remain widespread, regardless of individual work ethic.
I believe in the theory of a meritocracy, I even think it could work.
I don't believe it exists anywhere in the world in practice where power and money are at play.
SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,
and not just privilege's gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),
then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.
However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered "level" playing-field.
The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.
Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.
Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.
Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.
Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.
Not mitigating it == accommodating it.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?
_ /\ _
But what is merit exactly? Who decides the criteria we use to measure it?
As a general rule, yes. People who are able to better perform a task should be preferentially allocated towards those tasks. That being said, I think this should be a guiding rule, not a law upon which a society is built.
For one, there should be some accounting for personal preference. No one should be forced to do something by society just because they're adept at something. I think there is also space within the acceptable performance level of a society for initiatives to relax a meritocracy to some degree to help account for/make up for socioeconomic influences and historical/ongoing systemic discrimination. Meritocracy's also have to make sure they avoid the application of standardized evaluations at a young age completely determining an individual's future career prospects. Lastly, and I think this is one of common meritocracy retorhic's biggest flaws, a person's intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance, which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.
which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.
Why do you think this is?
If I was guessing, in general, I think people who advocate for a pure meritocracy in the USA feel the world should be evaluated in more black and white, objective terms. The financial impact and analytic nature of STEM and finance make it much easier to stratify practitioners "objectively" in comparison to finding, for instance, the "best" photographer. I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only "real" academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy. But I'm no expert.
I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy.
Yeah I agree with this quite a bit.
Every 'ocracy' is some kind of meritocracy. It's just a matter of what the merit is and how it's measured. They all suck because manipulators break them all.
Like eugenics, it's just another way for racists to push their racism under the guise of "science". It's not "corruptible", it comes pre-corrupted.
The word was coined as satire. Brain-dead ~~liberals~~ centrists took it seriously and, here we are.
I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair.
The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033.
Edited because too many people don't know what liberal means.
No one single "-ocracy" applied exclusively can result in a well functioning society.
IMHO, you need bits from multiple different approaches blended together to get closer to a society that works well for the majority of people.
That's too vague a definition. Like, if person A is an accomplished athlete, the best basketball player ever, I do not think his position of power or success should be, say, president. I think this is actually a very dangerous mindset derived from the capitalistic notion that success determines your--I'll call it value. If you're successful, you must be smart; If you're smart, you can be anything, even the president. Success is equal to wealth in these talking circles, and it sort of ends up as a backwards meritocracy. You gain merit measured by your success (wealth) instead of the other way around
But if you define it as a place in which positions of authority are given to people who have proven themselves knowledgeable and capable in the field in which the position of authority is being granted, I do believe in it in principle. I say that because principle and practice are rarely the same in politics and sociology. There are countless other factors that will impact your "success" that are not actually based on your expertise in the field. Better people have designed public transport, electric cars, social media, and spaceships than Elon Musk, yet the man sits in a position of tremendous influence. In a just meritocracy, we would never have heard his name
Which brings about the point that we have certain ideas as a culture (or maybe system) that awards some merits disproportionately more than others. Some will say his merit is in being a ruthless business man. He's good at that, I guess, so he should be the leader of the company. His "merit" of being a bad human being is being disproportionately rewarded compared to the merit of the scientists that actually design his spaceships, and the engineers that make them work. Meritocracy only really works in a closed system. The most capable archaeologist will be the head of the expedition. If you let the ideas go beyond that, and start comparing apples to oranges, you start seeing instead a system's idea of what's important, and by extension that of the society built in that system
There's a lot of good points here. I think even "better candidates" like a veterinarian or a variety of scientists may not even be a full "solution" to the systems issues due to people having the capability to still be bad despite being good at something. I mean just how many anti-vax scientists came out after 2020.
On the other hand, with stronger meritocracy maybe being genuinely incorrect would disqualify you and we wouldn't be in a position where you can spew complete lies and still be seen as a worthwhile candidate. But that of course would mean that the meritocracy has positive values, which isn't necessarily a guarantee because as you said, man that guy sure is good at being bad... Let's elect him!
I believe in a theoretical meritocracy but I think there are some pitfalls. We have a market that's very efficient at rewarding incredibly unproductive people. The correlation between money and skill in the modern world just... isn't. So we'd really need a better evaluation system... if we had that I think it'd be achievable.
Love the idea, though.
I agree, there would have to be measures in place to prevent the "promote to the level of incompetence" style of meritocracy that is prevalent already. There needs to be a system of recognizing that the person in any given position has the skills and abilities that make them awesome at that specific job, and rewarding them appropriately without requiring them to justify it by taking on tasks that they're not suited for.
The idea that workers should always be gunning for a promotion is one of the worst parts of what people think a meritocracy is. But how else do you determine how much they should be paid?
In theory it's how things should work (put the most competent person willing to do the job in the position), in practice it would again lead to even more white men (disclaimer: I'm one) in better positions because of the advantages they tend to have growing up just from their skin colour and sex.
The only way a meritocracy works is if everyone starts with the same possibilities in life and even then, as time pass you still end up with a system where a person that was at the top when they were young will tend to always be at the top since they always get the best opportunities.
Depends what you mean by "believe in". Could it work? Sure, why not. Do we live in one? Hell fuck no.
I think that when we do things we should generally listen to the person who best understands how to do it.
I don’t think that your position in life should be determined by it
Why not? The people most qualified should have the positions. The amount of qualified people and said positions probably don't always match and people may not want the jobs they qualify for though, But I think it's an ideal to strive for.
Generally yes with two huge caveats.
First, It has been widely demonstrated that diverse teams are more productive and produce higher quality products than homogeneous teams.
Second, selection criteria is heavily biased towards homogeneous teams and has also been demonstrated to stifle innovation.
Desire/inspiration is nearly as important as capability and non-optimal teams (according to most, if not all selection criteria) will consistently outperform "optimal" teams in any tasks that require innovation.
I feel like a true meritocracy would be a system kind of like Plato's republic where children are separated from their parents as early as possible and are all raised from the exact same level, so the only thing that sets them apart will be individual talent (their merit). If not this, then the wealth, status and connections of your family will influence your opportunities, which runs counter to meritocracy.
Safe to say it's not a system I'd want to live in.
I'm confused about the definition. They are moved? Forcefully if needed, or they are offered the position? Also what kind of position are they moved to you mean? Like the person best in the world in welding, they will atrificially be placed in a position of influece? Influece over what, policy? Culture? Or they will be the boss of other welders? How is the demostrated ability measured? Do people take exams in like welding to compete on who is better than someone else? If so, is the test the only thing that matters? If the best welder in the world is also a complete asshole, they still get the position of power? If not, where is the trade-off on how good a welder do you have to be to be a certain amount of asshole?
It's easily manipulated. We already have barrier to entry in several professions via required degrees and certifications. Those degrees and certifications require significant time and resources to attain. They can also be skewed to certain demographic a la old school SAT exams.
My own personal experience is the CPA exam. Passing it shows me nothing of one's accounting abilities. I've seen people who pass it and I wonder how they tie their shoelaces in the morning without injuring themselves. I've seen others who haven't passed it but are brilliant accountants.
All that exam tells me is that a person had resources to not work for six to nine months so they could study and pass the exam. That's it.
But without it, you're just not gonna go very far in the industry at all.
Then the AICPA keeps making the exam more difficult and whines that there's a shortage of young talent.
So what "merit" are we going to measure in this hypothetical system?
I'm very wary of the term because it could only be measured correctly if everyone started from the same conditions. People with more resources have it easier to go up.
The issue will always be reality. In theory, meritocracy and even geniocracy sounds promosing but so does our current system.
The reality is that incompetent or malicious people will always find ways to corrupt the idea.
At this point, I‘m pretty sure the only way to go forward is to think in new ways. Maybe general AI will work, or anarchy (more like anarcho communist probably).
We tried and broke everything:
The real problem imo is that a few people just cant make decisions for the masses over an extended time. Its too much power and responsibility.
I‘m pretty sure a more direct democracy represents this day and age more since the majority sees how our world goes to shit.
communism - people starve while the politicians become rich
making it, by definition, not communism.
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51f
The problem is the powerful make the rules, but don't abide by them. What starts off as a meritocracy quickly turns into this growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Like we have now.
There is a meritocratic aspect to reality. There are also meritocratic aspects to capitalism. So it's partly real, for sure.
A real meritocracy would nurture merit. In terms of policy that would manifest as socialist policies that create a level playing field.
Hiring based on identity is fiercely anti-meritocratic. Expensive degrees and high interest student loans are also anti-meritocratic.
Peeps proposing lots of good reasons against, but I'll just say: is a system where a reality show host can threaten our democracy really better?
In theory? Yes. But it not realistic. In reality being good at your job is less important than being good at networking and pleasant to be around when you're at work.
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