This is the definition I am using:
a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.
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
Meritocracy just means you’re rewarded proportionally to your contribution. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re rewarded with authority over anyone.
Actually the “cracy” suffix does refer specifically to the distribution of authority. Democracy is a system in which people decide; not just one in which people do well. Aristocracy is where those people are the deciders, not just where they’re the most wealthy.
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.…”
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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:
- Popularity contests in determining merit. (I like Johnny Depp better than Amber. Who loses more status?)
- Comparing apples to oranges. (Are Athletes or Artists more worthy, what about the Plumbers and Mailmen?)
- Power corrupts.
- Do morals and ethics have a say in merit? (Save the entire planet, then start kicking cats. Still a hero?)
- How long does a merit last? (When a champion, or athlete, is no longer fit, are they de-positioned? Look at Rome.)
- Brilliant mathematicians get rewarded with what? (Better supercomputers, or political power? What qualifies them to make policy?)
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.
You touched on a really important point here: when humans are judging skill, it’s subjective and not really meritocratic.
One of my favorite psychology professors says that people really like the idea of meritocracy, when it’s actually present. He gives the example of sports, and how people aren’t bitter about a particular team winning, or that there’s big inequality between the players, and that the reason people are okay with that inequality is the presence of the playing field and the high speed cameras and whatnot means meritocracy is the actual basis for reward, not personality politics.
In business, government, etc it’s all people judging other people, and on an individual basis. A group of people evaluating is better, like star ratings for an uber driver are probably more trustable than performance evaluations from someone’s boss. The latter can be so heavily distorted by that one person’s judgment.
The ideal is using measurable performance as the measure of “merit”. Like when people run a marathon. As long as the course is visible to confirm nobody’s cheating, that marathon time is yours in a way your degree or your job or your salary isn’t.
It’s also why people are so in favor of free markets deciding resource allocation rather than people: the free market is at least a large crowdsourced combination of everyone’s needs, instead of just some mental image of those needs in the mind of a few committee memebers.
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.
The word was coined as satire. Brain-dead
liberalscentrists 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.
