Asklemmy

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

It's a good idea in theory, but there's a few problems:

• Wealth and power above a certain level tends to become generational no matter how meritorious the origin
• People who are less capable through disability, ilness, generational poverty or anything else not their fault would still be left behind
• A lot of jobs and other functions can benefit from several different skillsets, some of which aren't mutually inclusive
• Who decides who's best? Who decides who decides? Etc ad infinitum.

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?)

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 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.

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.

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?

_ /\ _

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.

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.

Down with meritocracy

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

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.

Depends what you mean by "believe in". Could it work? Sure, why not. Do we live in one? Hell fuck no.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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:

• representative democracy - politicians lie to get into office and do their thing after
• autocracy - the person in charge freaks out and becomes a lifetime ruler
• communism - people starve while the politicians become rich
• monarchy - the bloodline will produce some idiot who breaks stuff - also no reason to be this rich
• multiparty system - will get little done and devolves into populism as well
• two party system - devolves into hating the other party

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.

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?

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.

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.