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by padolsey·5y ago·view on hn ↗
These conclusions seem to spit in the face of "meritocracy". It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive, bleeding into our corporate performance reviews and our pro-diversity efforts ("we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>). But it is so internally irrational. I'm reminded of this argument:

> The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.

> The case against meritocracy can also be put sociologically: (a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.

Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2007/12/04/meritocrac...

The idea that "innate" merit should be rewarded (this underlies what we consider meritocracy) is fundamentally a noncontinuable state. Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.

23 comments
You are so focused on economic inequality that you ignore the greater picture: there will still be a hierarchy. There will still be humans dominating other humans and asserting themselves above them. Maybe in the far future humans will create a social technology to live in true equality but in the immediate future this is clearly not happening.

As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.

Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities. That looks like meritocracy to me.

It is not the existence of hierarchy that is the problem. It is the type of hierarchy and the effects of that hierarchy. The parent and the study argue that we should give greater resources to those with the least resources in such a way as to broaden access to opportunities.

You can argue that is not worth the expense (it costs X to produce Y outcome and redistributing X would lead to negative impact Z. Y + Z results in a net loss to society). But it seems hard to argue that inequality or hierarchy is inevitable so we should not even try to ameliorate the negative effects of that structure or imagine different ones.

To me, the “inequality inevitable” mindset seems like a frequent way those who benefited from the existing system rationalize not sacrificing anything to help less fortunate people. I am very sympathetic to arguments that redistribution is not effective, but the debate should be about what is or is not effective. “Inequality inevitable” sidesteps that and asks that we just give up before even trying or imagining different possibilities because we’ve failed in the past. It is hard to not see such arguments as a misguided effort to rationalize one’s self interest.

Economic inequality within a developed nation is one of the least important kinds of inequality. I'd trade one standard deviation of income for one standard deviation of pretty much anything else, such as intelligence or attractiveness. The average person in a developed nation lives better than the kings and emperors of the past in material terms. They had a bigger dwelling, but I'd much rather live in a modern apartment than in a medieval castle. A rich person today can buy a $1200 phone, and a poor person has to make do with a $200 phone. That extra $1000 only marginally improves the quality of the phone. The $200 phone today is still better than the $1200 phone of 10 years ago. The medieval king had no phone, heck, he probably didn't even have running water. The food he ate was worse. We can eat bananas every day, the king perhaps only saw a banana on one of his paintings. The healthcare he had access to was way worse. The transportation he had access to was way worse. The entertainment he had access to was worse.
> As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.

This sounds like a bit of a stretch. Let's try and make people a bit more equal first.

One thing I think about is the quality of domination, if I may say it this way.

Someone with a better understanding is a normal authority, it might 'dominate' others in the sense that they have to follow his lead and maybe not feel it's right but in the end it's the best path.

On the other hand there are so much bad authorities that percolate through luck, appearances, bullying, networking.. and it will be 1) very clear their ways are detrimental .. sometimes almost absurdly, 2) very difficult for people below to change this.

That's really irrelevant. Inequality is the bad thing. Less of it please.

Hierarchy? In so far as it currently exists, who cares?

When people say that inequality is a problem in society, they are not saying everyone in society should be equal. They're saying maybe it's not a good state of affairs if 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth.
Hierarchy is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. We can reduce levels of inequality without producing the negative outcomes you fear.

I’m not sure whether this applies to you (I’m not implying that it does), but I continually find it interesting to hear Americans expressing the fear that acting to reduce inequality will somehow limit social mobility, as if they don’t realize that much of the developed world has greater social mobility than their country (or that many countries also rate higher in measures of social welfare, despite having greater social mobility and lower inequality).

Your so focused on your own take on human nature that you ignore obvious evidence disproving it, namely that Scandinavia isn't a hell hole.
Unequal distribution of rewards (i.e. according to merit) is fine and desirable (as a motivating force). The problem's roots are when the distribution of rewards becomes hereditary, that the children of the wealthy have near-guaranteed access to the best educational and social institutions, have near-guaranteed access to startup capital (i.e. from their parents), are usually provided with necessities (food, housing, clothing, incidentals) at no out-of-pocket cost by their parents for a considerable portion of their early adult lives, etc. It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.
> It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality.

Hereditary wealth is a specific form of rent-seeking which is something liberal economics has no explanation for. It's like one of those things that never left the feudal era whilst everything else did. But I wonder why some who follow this type of economics think this is the sole and most important issue? There are many examples of rent-seeking and this is far from the biggest contributor towards inequality.

> Unequal distribution of rewards (i.e. according to merit) is fine and desirable (as a motivating force).

This assumption sounds nice but isn't backed by psychology research. Extrinsic rewards can motivate and demotivate - and in general contribute to anxiety.

Then add in a tax system which aggressively taxes labor while leaving capital and inheritance untaxed, if we stopped taxing labor that might be enough to pull a whole chunk of labor out of poverty, just having work is no escape from poverty in a world of high rent and high income tax.
Agreed -- it is certainly inheritance that mostly takes the blame here, since it allows massive advantages to accrue, unchecked. However, I do think that there's something to be said against even inner-lifetime accruement of obscene wealth, as that can warp merit as well. Where's the sweet spot? - the level at which there are sufficient rewards required to motivate the gathering of wealth without the risk of accruing such an advantage that would unbalance the playing board.
Which is culturally solvable, but would require require people to give up their children to be raised by the state and never be allowed to know who they are. That sounds horrible, but I submit that said horror is largely driven largely by a culture of possession and selfishness, i.e. people want to raise their own children because they want to shape who they are and ensure their genes have good survival odds. Assuredly there is a biological component that drives us to take an interest in our lineage, but we know that this can be directed towards similar goals via adoption and pets, so it is conceivable that a society could direct it not towards one's individual children but children in general. Of course, the whole 'raised by the state' thing is also a pretty uncomfortable thought to any society that has enshrined "freedom" and most people who lived through the soviet union, however I think it is possible that without the concept of genetically-bound inheritance of property and status that the corruption of such structures might be less likely.

Not that I suggest any of this in serious mind you, it's just the kind of thought experiment day-dream that gets me through my workday. What this one has taught me is this: nobody actually wants a meritocracy.

It is natural to pass resources onto your children. You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. A stranger might just regard your children as mere “people”, but a parent see’s their children as extensions of themselves, and have a vested interest in ensuring their happiness and well-being.
Distributing rewards according to merit may be beneficial, but the problems with unequal distribution go far beyond hereditary rewards. Consider the income distribution according to jobs. Some jobs are assigned greater monetary rewards than others even if they are essential to the functioning of society. Much of that comes from our notions of status. I would argue that distributing wealth according to merit only works as a motivating factor when one is being compared to their occupational peers, which is something rarely seen in lower income occupations.
Do you have any sources on what percentage of wealthy that inherit their wealth? From what I've gathered it's quite small and doesn't necessarily last more than a few generations.
"It is the hereditary nature of wealth which is the largest contributor to long-term inequality."

This is not true, because when you don't have hereditary nature of wealth, there is no wealth. Why would you be motivated to accumulate wealth?

Economically you want people to save money and invest, when there is no target to have wealth, people will over spend.

Spending means economically staying at same level as population, not improving.

> It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA), is so pervasive,

This study looks at some of the poorest villages in Bangladesh with some additional data from other very poor countries.

Anyone who even has a shot at applying to a USA tech company is already wildly more wealthy than the type of poverty discussed in this study. In fact, they’d be firmly past the threshold the study identified as the minimum wealth necessary to engage with wealth-building jobs.

The conclusions don’t really apply at all to situations like a US tech company, unless you’re trying to understand why homeless people living on the streets aren’t able to get jobs at an Amazon warehouse or other entry-level jobs. Trying to project this on to hiring practices of educated candidates into high paying tech jobs is ignoring the core focus of the study.

Anecdata that agrees with you follows.

Meritocracy is still a factor but the bar is currently very low. My own father came out of the impoverishment of war torn Bangladesh to be a successful real estate developer in the west. Why did his elder brother not have the same results? Very simple: the elder brother was responsible for the family. The family has rewarded the elder brother by taking care of him for years now and he is the happiest old man I know. He will die satisfied.

The truth that no one wants to admit is that we have to put (very minimal) resources behind the youth to become independent of their families so they can grow.

For all his faults, my father understood this for everyone except me (long story) and funded the education of a few people back home. For two boys I'm aware of, that was about $5-7K/year. The two boys lived in a one room shack that routinely got flooded. One is now an accountant, the other is a working chef. Trust me, neither of them are particularly smart.

What's needed is so minimal but the problem we have is too much grifting occurs. Levels and levels of middleman bullshit.

I would start experimenting with Kiva-style microloans if you want to make a difference, tbh.

My wife did her bachelor thesis on Grameen bank, Muhammad Yunus and microfinancing. That was like 2009.

Is microfinancing still a thing in Bangladesh? What are the effects since then?

This is all well and good to argue around a very literal meritocracy, but I don't think anyone actually argues for this. It's not just "lol, 1 - 1 = 0, meritocracy is impossible".

The underlying principal, as I understand it, is that it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company, or a farmer. Yet zuck is compensated as such. We can recognize the "unique" value facebook creates by giving unique compensation, but should that compensation really be x1m times more than the farmer?

Reworking wealth distribution is the goal - not rewarding everyone equally for everything in some meme level paradox.

> it's unreasonable to think for example, that mark zuck literally does millions of time more work than say, a senior software dev at a middle size company

Careful not to confuse work and value. Sheer labor is worth minimum wage, the value of someone is far more than their hourly labor.

A well connected person can bring many many times the value to a company of someone without connections.

The right strong personality can be a performance amplifier for the rest of the company, Steve Jobs can be argued to be an example of that.

The long and short of it though is a person who makes the people beneath themselves work more valuable is worth that added value, and arguably deserves a proportional portion of said added value.

Public services in my country (like teacher, police, nurses etc) have salary coefficients (job complexity ratio) depending on qualifications and duties. Not sure what the proper terminology is in english and if it's the same in other countries. There are socialists in Europe supporting the max 1:12 ratio between minimum & maximum income. Although, there is an old saying in my country: "They couldn't pay me so little that I couldn't work even less" (not sure about the rough translation), so that's definitely a danger of such schemes.

Aside from that, I don't really believe in the musks and zucks of the world. Our society shouldn't rely on charismatic leaders, who for all we know could be fronts for the NSA/CIA operations. Shock workers or strike workers could be used to motivate and promote labor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udarnik).

That is not what meritocracy is - it is rule by the cognitive gifted.

The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.

It's not just about "rewarding", or giving out high paying position to who we want to.

There are real and difficult things to do in the world that some other people need. They (employers, clients, customers) decide that this work is so important to them that they exchange money for it.

Then the person can use that earned money to improve their life.

For example if a top surgeon flies to a different country to do a difficult operation, I'd want them to be able to enjoy a relaxing VIP lounge, bigger legroom and direct taxi. Rather than flying low cost and standing in the bus for 3 times longer than the taxi ride.

We want to allocate resources to people who accomplish important things for us. Not just as reward or motivation, but in our own interest, we invest in the most capable and competent to have more of our stuff taken care of.

Jobs aren't just about sitting in a chair and taking cash and we just pick who gets to sit in which chair to enjoy that cash. It's doing things. And we want those things to be done well.

This is the idea behind meritocracy. Not that we praise people for their genetics.

I'm not saying this is how it works currently, just that this is what we mean by meritocracy that we should move toward.

Agree with everything you said on the surface. Sounds reasonable. Of course we want the surgeon to be prepared for his job. It's important.

But then there are those in this thread arguing that Elon Musk's reward should be unlimited because he's "arguably ensuring the long-term survivability of our species." Wow, that sounds very important. I guess he should have the most money then.

Nevermind the fact that the majority of his wealth is literally gained by "sitting in a chair and taking cash". That's the job of a capitalist after all - they don't work for their money, they sit in a chair and let the ownership of assets make them money. I mean, sure he's "doing things" but are the things he's doing worth $140 billion? What has he "done" in the last 9 months that made him $88 billion richer? Is the planet saved yet?

> "we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>

There doesn't have to be anything contradictory here. Diversity efforts can work to offset biases and enable getting closer to meritocracy. For example hiring the best in your network coming from a high-class university doesn't mean you're hiring the best overall. The diversity effort may be for example to make sure that the job offer is visible to the brilliant person who wouldn't even find it otherwise. Or it may be an effort to ensure a less biased review (masking names?) Or it's making sure that people do behave well internally, so the company isn't avoided by the best people for hiring racist assholes for example.

> These conclusions seem to spit in the face of "meritocracy". It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA)

Just to be clear this paper’s about peasants in Bangladesh.

"It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy,"

Nothing puzzling about it. It's a "just so" story designed to make successful people feel good and justified about their success.

(a) Allocating rewards irrespective of merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise environments cannot be equalized; (b) allocating rewards according to merit is a prerequisite for meritocracy, otherwise people cannot be stratified by wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.

This is a disingenuous argument. (a) and (b) are not talking about the same kind of rewards:

(a) : when talking about the equalization of environments, the "rewards" are allocated to areas and groups of people, not to individuals.

(b) : the stratification of wealth is talking about "rewards" to individual people.

These two concepts are not the same, the mechanisms are not the same, and the justification for them is not the same. They're only grouped together as "rewards" so they lead to the false conclusion (c).

Why is absolute equality a more desirable state than the merit-based system now in place?
I'm not suggesting we should have absolute equality but is system we have in place really merit-based?

Last I checked, about a fourth of millionaires inherited their wealth and the vast majority had the opportunity to become wealthy due to factors completely out of their control (where they were born, to whom they were born and natural cognitive abilities).

So, how do you decide who gets the rewards? Assuming not everyone can have every job/house/life.

Do you tell the people who get the rewards that they were given a chance at random (compared to their neighbor who was not) or do you let them believe they earned it?

For the record, I agree that merit is a bad system. Im curious to explore the ramifications of doing away with the system and how it would be different, if at all, from the current system.

For example, in a post-scarcity society, everyone has what they need, but some houses still have nicer views than others.

> "we hire only according to merit" <signed, Diversity Manager>

What you would consider a better policy? Hiring according to a fair dice roll?

I don't think that "innate" merit should be rewarded. I think that applied merit should be. You could be the smartest, most capable person in the world, but if you won't work to apply that, you're useless to me and the world. If you do apply it effectively, you are likely to be rewarded for that, which seems eminently reasonable.
When "meritocracy" was defined it was not used as an example of a good thing :-)
The end of your comment seems to imply that meritocracy is intended to generate equality, but actually it's intended to do the opposite.
I don't see why you need a) and b) here. A class-stratified meritocracy being impossible is pretty much a tautology in itself.
Wasnt the study performed in Bangladesh? Since when is Bangladesh considered a meritocracy?
"These conclusions seem to spit in the face of "meritocracy". It's always puzzled me that this idea of meritocracy, especially in tech (notably USA)"

"Evidence on Poverty Traps from Rural Bangladesh" - are you suggesting the situation in rural Bangladesh is applicable to Silicon Valley?

If there's someone with "Diversity Manager" anywhere near hiring at a company it means it has deep issues.
I suspect many who believe in meritocracy are already successful people who like to tell themselves they got there by merely being so much smarter than everyone else around them, dismissing the access, luck, (i.e. quality of schools they were born near), family wealth etc. almost entirely as a factor.
“ Above all we need to focus on delivering opportunity via improved circumstances and empowerment, irrespective of merit or success: that is the only path to actual equality.”

Please consider that you are advocating for communism. I hope you will consider reviewing the histories of China and the USSR, et al. after World War 2. The critique and solution you offer do not lead to “actual equality.”