Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.

"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

Comments

Re:Believing in meritocracy is bad for you

[CronoCloud]

You might think so at first, because hey, you got a job you might not have otherwise received, but in reality you haven't benefited.

Money isn't a benefit?

That means you're going to be working with less skillful co-workers and that the competition is going to have a leg up on the company you work for because they hire more skilled employees.

But that doesn't always end with the less skilled company ending up on the bottom, does it. Microsoft?

Now it's your bigotry that's showing. I'd look very carefully at the attitudes that lead to people living in ghettos and keeping them there.

yes yes here we go again "It's all their own fault, they're just lazy and anti-intellectual"

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Pay attention in particular to the parts about school segregation, school funding, and how home ownership turns into access to wealth.

I'm sure that you're familiar with people who are referred to as trailer park trash. A pejorative typically used for white people, but essentially it's just a way of saying white ghetto. Why did they fail to receive all of these benefits, boosts, etc. that you think everyone else received?

Here's the thing...they did get those boosts, if they hadn't they'd be even worse off. You've h eard about the opioid crisis in certain white-rural/semi-rural areas right? Well the reason that's happening, is because the same socio-econimic forces that created say the heroin and crack crisis in urban ghettos are now affecting Appalachia. It just took a bit longer because they had somewhat more resources to start with.

It's causing some frustration with those who know how to deal with certain issues, telling the people of these rural areas that they need to do what works and have needle exchanges and other programs and the rural folks are dismissing what the urban folks learned out of hand.

Or would you base your selection on whether or not that person comes from some group that you consider more deserving?

The thing is, some white people do that with white doctors. They also do that in other ways. Racism is still a thing you know.

The problem isn't that meritocracy is bad, it's that we don't have enough of it. Do you think fighting inequality with inequality will help anything?

Don't you realize that is the whole "the remedies for discrimination are reverse discrimination" argument used by many a privileged white libertarian/alt-right/conservative tech-guy we see on slashdot? It is usually used as an excuse to not do anything.

Personally I think REALLY desegregation society is a start. Making ALL the schools like some of those well-off surburban schools like New Trier here in Illinois.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Lots of lawyers, 1 Bill Gates. I was homeless

[_Sharp'r_]

Clearly, the other 1.99999 million of them just suffered from bad luck, like Venezuela is currently experiencing. As Heinlein wrote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”