meritocracy

Thoughts on https://www.slowboring.com/p/meritocracy-is-bad:

Thought worth commenting here and worth reading, albeit with a critical eye. Was struck that it has a provocative headline and byline, but really when you get down to it seems to be a much more typical centrist-liberal court-intellectual piece. His main beef with meritocracy seems to be that it selects for and provides fewer jobs to orthodox and conforming Democratic Party supporting mediocrities from good families, not actually so much overemphasis on principles of selection and centralisation of decision making.

First part to open piece is putting forth irritation at another (rather better) piece where another writer claims to be writing against meritocracy, because he claims that she is saying they lack merit, rather than meritocratic principle itself is bad. The piece then goes on to try and correct this, by saying after an oblique fashion that the problem with meritocracy is that... the US's leaders lack selection on merit, which he redefines from intellectual ability to more or less fealty to Democratic Party ideology (<I>"obviously what made Obama a much better president than Bush is that he subscribed to Democratic Party ideology, not that he could beat Bush at a multiple-choice reading comprehension test"</I>).

This involves a lengthy excursion boosting Joe Biden's merit as a leader, for much the same reason, in the teeth of common observations that he's not outstandingly smart or intellectually original. It seems entirely possible this was a major motivation here.

There's also some flirtation with the merits of hereditary leadership by gentry high families, provided they succeed on their examinations to an acceptable standard and show fealty to the right ideology. Again not really too surprising, if we consider the audience being written towards, who are probably looking for reasons why it's good that their kids should inherit their jobs (the 'liberal Establishment').

The second hand of the article is more-or-less the time-worn argument that "More income equality is superior from a utilitarian perspective, therefore a state should interrupt "meritocratic" market action and redistribute and constrain income inequality directly". This presumes a buy-in of fundamental agreement with utilitarianism, and the functionality of utilitarianism as a governing philosophy. That I would say, leads you to ultimately "To each the ability (as decided by the Bureau of Ability), to each the need (as decided by the Bureau of Need)" and the incentive problems that plague that model (that it's working against how ppl generally work best and are most productive and happiest when they can try to help themselves and family, and are allowed to succeed or fail). It's also entirely unnecessary to justify a welfare state (which are perfectly justifiable on other basis of minimal care imperatives towards kin with society, or if you really want humanity, as a large extended kin group).

So piece is not as I see it, contra title, really a criticism of meritocracy. That would require it to wholly aim at challenging the principle of centralisation of decision making towards a group of people selected as individuals from the general population on their "merits" (whether virtue, smarts, their ability to choose a good tie to match their shirt, &c.) and then inducted into a governing and managing class. Instead an obliquely framed attempt to just influence how this meritocratic class is selected (more emphasis on adherence to Democratic Party orthodoxy, less on ability) and to embed a form of utilitarianism as the governing philosophy of the meritocratic bureaucratic class, justifying its interventions and powers. "The problem is meritocracy; the solution is more of *my type* of meritocracy!".

This is I guess me coming from the perspective that the problem with meritocracy is in the first principles of centralising decisions with a class of people who are not the individuals experiencing the problems, and who are isolated from any mechanisms of consequence for them - whether losing elections, their company going bust, people actually getting sick and dying, the collapse of law and order, etc.