Why True Meritocracy has never been tried

[Epistemic status: Written in a day because Procrastination; not a particularly insightful piece, I will probably rewrite this at some point]

One of the most prevalent memes in modern Western society is meritocracy: the idea that anyone, regardless of background, can achieve success based on their own merit.

Prima facie, this seems like an honourable ideal; it is obvious that if everyone has the same moral worth (another prominent meme), then everyone should have the same opportunity to achieve something in life. Alongside that, there seems to be positive utility in having competent people in positions of power.

Despite this, many commentators¹ criticize modern society for merely patting itself on the back while ignoring the fact that actually, we are not a meritocracy at all. As Scott Alexander points out, these criticisms often rest on a different definition of meritocracy, namely that “[it] is founded on the belief that smart people deserve good jobs as a reward for being smart”, and he goes on to assert that we can return to a ‘proper’ meritocracy by emulating the example of programming and making every field hire people who can demonstrate an understanding of the principles of said field:

Instead of Goldman Sachs hiring whoever does best at Harvard, they should hire people who can demonstrate their knowledge of investing principles or (even better) who can demonstrate an ability to predict the market better than chance. Some of these people will be the academic stars who learned how to do it at Harvard Business School. But a lot of others will be ordinary working-class people who self-studied or who happen to have a gift, the investing equivalents of General Grant and Garry Kasparov.

I think this is valid but misses the point. Scott is correct that aiming towards True Meritocracy would be a start but I don’t think programming is a case of True Meritocracy nor do I think that applying this case more widely would have a huge net benefit over the current system. There are more fundamental obstacles against a True Meritocracy; namely, objectively measuring merit and how people develop competences.

As a society, we have conjured up numerous ways of measuring merit, mostly in specific settings and concerning specific domains. As an example, most countries has some sort of university entrance qualification, aimed at allowing universities to choose which caliber of student to admit, and for students to choose the most appropriate university for their ability. A core assumption of these qualifications is that these qualifications use objective assessment methods, such as exams (in the case of A-levels, used primarily in England but also internationally). However, these qualifications are not totally objective in reality, as, especially in the humanities, marking can differ widely based on a particular marker’s impression of the essay written, which is often exploited by private schools who can afford to pay for mass remarks.² Other qualifications such as the SAT counteract this subjectivity in marking by using a multiple-choice format but as this Washington Post article explains, multiple-choice tests don’t really measure higher-level cognition skills. This is a problem as in many fields and professions, success often relies on well-developed higher-order cognition, and free-response exams (like A-levels) that are better suited to measure higher-order cognition suffer from the inherent subjectivity of free-response exams, particularly if the method of assessment is essays.

Another pertinent issue is how people develop competences. There is a popular theory that a person can acquire an elite proficiency in something by practicing (in an effective way) for ten thousand hours. While there is some truth to this, it’s not a watertight concept, and I am skeptical that it is good advice for the modal person.

This is for a few reasons, but it primarily comes down to the relationship between competance and luck. Society tends to think that success is down to one’s competance, which can be developed through learning and experience (ie. by developing a certain skill). The reality is that luck plays a bigger role, and I don’t think this is as counterintuitive as it may be at first glance. For example, Oxford still takes around 40% of its students from private schools, despite privately educated students only making up 6.4% of all UK secondary students³. If we take a private education as a proxy for wealth (which seems to be a reasonable assumption), then we could make the argument that being born into the right family has a much bigger impact than simply being born with a high IQ.

There are also issues around supply and demand. There are professions where supply dramatically outpaces demand; for example, there are millions of boys who want to become Premier League footballers, but there are only 220 places available on Premier League starting XI’s every week⁴. Equally, there are places where demand dramatically outpaces supply (cf: competent software engineers). Someone may well have a natural aptitude for something, but depending on the field in which that aptitude resides, success may be hard to come by, because of supply and demand reasons (success here means ‘financial success’ which I would assume most people are thinking of when choosing fields and whatnot).

The totality of this is that I don’t think hard work necessarily guarantees success, and if we use the definition of meritocracy at the beginning (the True Meritocracy I alluded to earlier), it seems that there are numerous obstacles towards meritocracy. Moreover, these obstacles emerge out of fundamental biological and socioeconomic phenomena (some people are brawnier than others, and some people are born into families with more resources than others), which means that small tweaks will not massively improve the situation.

Note that I am not saying that meritocracy is Bad, nor that nothing has ever been done to improve the situation. Meritocracy is an honourable ideal, even if it is not achievable in its Platonically Ideal form; and, among other things, universal education (although by no means perfect) has produced a tremendous increase in the ability of ordinary people to climb the ladder and achieve success in their life and within society.

My overall point is really that we have accomplished perhaps 80% of the possible gain in this context, and that the scourge of Pareto means that to achieve the final 20%, we need to expend a huge amount of effort that might be better used to help the hoi polloi in other ways, or even to help the Global South towards a more secure future.