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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."
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."
That's not an example of meritocracy, it's one of nepotism. Affirmative action is another.
Societies that can't handle reality are doomed to fail. Some people are better, faster than others. Deal with it. People are tribal and place undue value in charismatic leaders. Deal with it. If you can't, there's always Sally Struthers' offer of TV/VCR repair and auto mechanic training. In the meantime, focusing on merit helps mitigate these tendencies.
Those of us who have "underclass" relatives, no matter our race, have also see how black, white, etc. they almost always dismiss the role that hard work plays in others' success. Most of the time "life just happens to them." Drugs, booze, kids out of wedlock? Shit happens. Little concept of "damn, I did this to myself."
It's conveniently fatalistic and ignores the fact that yes, you can make your own luck in many cases even if it's not the level you would like to have.
What a load of horseshit. In all my years, I have never come across a situation where I couldn't prove my worth to an employer or client through hard work.
I'm not particularly intelligent. I'm not good looking, nor am I all that charismatic. What I am is persistent, and I have an understanding of what it takes to succeed ( it may sound cliche, but "never give up" ).
Oh, I've had set backs because of nepotism. Idiot managers and bosses surely have gotten in my way. I don't let that slow me down, however; I keep pushing through it.
Meritocracy isn't perfect, but it works when you do that one thing; don't give up. What more could you ask for?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Gates didn't get rich because of his programming skills, he got rich because of his business skills
Its a mix: he happened to need both to capitalise on that opportunity. Once the money started coming in its clear which skillset took the front seat. Its the business skill that took him from selling a successful product to mega rich.
and he got lucky, but his business skills were good enough he would have gotten rich even without the IBM mistakes. Just not as rich
And he got lucky in being born into a rich family. Its astonishingly hard to get rich without a hefty dose of working capital: its glibly said that its easier to make two million dollars from one million than two dollars from one.
Generally you need to be smart, hard working and lucky to strike it rich.
On the other hand there are a lot of people here who fetishise a narrow view on technical skills to the point where they believe a "true" metriocracy is concerned only with that, which is why my post is getting downmods.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A central tenet of post-modernism is that "there is no such thing as merit". Anyone who succeeds can only do so because privilege, as there is no such thing as merit. Every successful person is an oppressor, as there is no such thing as merit.
Meritocracy, the idea of meritocracy, is the very antithesis of post-modernism. And post-modernism is the most evil philosophy that has ever been conceived.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Genetics = luck?
Great teacher in school = luck?
Choosing to follow intuition = luck?
Seems to me that, with a sufficiently large value of 'luck', you could encompass almost all circumstances. And I mean ALL.
How about;
Genetics at birth = luck, but study and intellectual exploration = merit
Great teacher = luck, but putting forth the effort to learn and developing your intellect with challenges (from the teacher) = merit
And I can't even touch the third one: if you develop the ability to use intuition to solve problems and choose the 'best' option, that's merit.
In other words, luck is a circumstance, but merit is the result of a series of choices.
And with that, my PhD thesis is complete.....
That sentence demonstrates without requiring much thought what the article demonstrates if you think about it -
the author is an idiot.
Bill Gates isn't a successful programmer, he didn't write DOS. He's an incredibly successful business person, he bought and sold DOS and managed a company to turn it into billions.
Here's a little story about luck. I recently got lucky and got a new high-paying job. Maybe my dream job. Lucky for me, the hiring managers were looking for someone to do the types of things I have been doing at work lately, such as teaching a CISSP course. My class consisted of about 50 employees ranging from our head of internal security to recently hired engineers. The reason I volunteered to do such a class was precisely to raise my profile as a security expert - to put self in front of these managers while I filled the role of security expert. If you want to eventually have options of good security jobs, it doesn't hurt to have the head of security see that you are an expert, I figured. Twice per month I attended a meetings of security groups like OWASP and ISC2. At those meetings I talked to dozens of people about the companies they worked for and which skill sets they were hitting for. I kept on eye on the open positions at three local companies I was interested in. I tried to learn more about the skills they were looking for. I kept my LinkedIn updated with accomplishments and fielded calls from recruiters several times per week - mostly pointless calls. I kept a copy my resume in my car and gave it to someone who might be able to hire me. I did a good job at my current role, asking my co-workers and my boss how I could improve. I struggled to actually be *nice* to co-workers, although my natural state is asshole.
Overall I did hundreds of things to increase my odds of landing a great job. Hundreds of things "didn't work" immediately, yet I kept doing them. Eventually I "got lucky" and two of the things I was doing aligned with what a company was looking for and I landed the great job. How lucky.
It's like wearing a seatbelt. 99.9% of the time, if you don't wear a seatbelt nothing bad will happen. But eventually there will be an accident, so if you don't wear a seatbelt 99.9% of the time, you're probably going to end up hurt.
A large percentage of people who found very successful businesses first started several businesses that were not successful. They learned from their failures and kept trying. Eventually they learned enough and try enough things to find one that worked well - they "got lucky" and did tell right things, by trying a lot of things that seemed likely to be right.
We all make a hundred decisions every day. Starting with whether to hit the anooze button and ending with going to bed in time. Do we stop to help the person on the aide of the road while we're on the way to work?
We have a hundred "luck" situations every day - the stranded motorist could be the president of our company, could be our future spouse, who knows. That's luck. When we cut someone off in traffic, or get cut off, the person we flipped the bird to might be in a rush to get to an interview on time - them interviewing us. In the elevator when we smile at someone oe don't, who that person is depends on luck. In any given year we have thousands of "luck" possibilities. Some will be great opportunities, some won't be.
Success and failure happens when our thousands of choices each year meet our thousands of lucky opportunities. Someone who is habitually rude will, by chance, end up being rude to the written person, eventually. Someone who is always helpful will, by chance, eventually be helpful to the right person.
Luck determines whether our fate happens on Wednesday or on Thursday. Our habits determine whether we'll be doing to right thing or the wrong thing when those opportunities come by.
While much of what you wrote is true, you clearly didn't RTFA.
A few quotes that demonstrate what they are referring to:
The most common metaphor is the “even playing field” upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. ... wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events. Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either “essential” or “very important” when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe. ... Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth.
Thus their conclusions and the title. If you believe the world IS driven by merit, if your own actions and efforts alone can transform you into a C-suite executive or billionaire, the result ranges from being an unrealistic optimism about work, to a self-destructive attitude, to confusion and delusion about why their hard work is not being rewarded.
The belief is also why so many people tend to be self-praising, they write about that belief, "It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses.", and when used by the poor, destroys morale and self worth.
While it is valuable to put people in charge of projects because they have a demonstrated ability to get things done, hence meritocracy, the article is declaring that the world does not work that way and many other factors like family wealth, race, luck, nepotism, and good old fashioned boot-licking are the way a large part of how the world actually works.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement