A comment launched into the ether. I wonder if the smart people running the wicked hedge fund “know” they are screwing the virtuous nursing home? Or, more likely, are the bad impacts simply the direction toward which our system runs when you change a few variables?
Roy Cohen, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Page 6 may be strong reasoning for how Trump achieved such power and fame and maybe an argument for there not being enough meritocracy. Though more interesting to me, Matt's piece touches upon how Intelligence and ethics have never be so pointedly intertwined in modern America. I would argue that supporters of Trump, to not believe what a failure as president, evidenced by his covid response alone, or to not get how self serving and wicked, well that is a lack of either or both ethics and intellect. Reasoning for one's Trump support has to be 100% simplemindedness or unethical or some mixture of both. The Machiavellian idea for his picking Supreme court justices only proves the point further in any reasonable scientific, utilitarian sense. Looking at the glass half full, as seen through the historical lens, for there still to be so many Trump supporters should prove a strong lesson and have a positive effect on the future of American democracy.
This essay gave me a first impression of "Don't hate the game, hate the player", especially with regards to the nursing home example. My first instinct is to say "show me the incentives and I'll show you the result" and, given the incentives of running a nursing home (provide good enough care to not get sued while spending as little money as possible), I can imagine a group of stupid people (er, less meritorious people) who fumble their way through managing a nursing home & provide inadequate care while not saving all that much money which is an all around worse situation than having very smart people acting under the exact same incentives.
But upon further reflection, I think is a shallow reading of the problem. The steely core of the anti-meritocracy stance seems to be that "this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle" (and I, personally, think this sentence would have made a better TLDR tagline for this article ;)
The problem is that we *want* soft-rules like honor and virture to be a part of the game but psychopaths who nakedly optimize for money and nothing else (ie only the hard-rules) tend to win-out, Moloch-style. We can try to regulate an approximation of the soft rules into the hard rules but this tends to play out as a whack-a-mole of finding/patching loopholes which may or may not converge onto a stable set of hard rules that everyone's happy with. Meritocracy is, I believe, a necessary *but not sufficient* aspect of a solution and I predict that discarding meritocracy entirely would make things thoroughly worse for everyone.
Ultimately, I think the declaration that "meritocracy is bad" is like declaring "hammers are bad" because they're sometimes used to hurt people. Meritocracy is a tool within our economic toolbox and, like any tool, it's morally neutral: it can be put to good use and help people or it can be misused and hurt people. That said, I respect such a bold declaration as this article's title and appreciate you having the editorial independence to make good-faith arguments for potentially unpopular positions.
I think you are really underestimating how important competency is to a lot of jobs. I think part of this might be that you are so used to America, where, as you observe, people are mostly very competent. But there are a lot of European countries and many, many poorer countries where the biggest problem is often "incompetent people are in charge of things". These are often not small effects; the incompetence often hits in big ways. And critically, those incompetent people are often regulators. A lot of your post is "competency is nice, but it doesn't stop evil". But a bunch of morally righteous but not very competent regulators are not going to be very good at stopping evil.
Friedman in a more ethical age? I guess so. He used to speak of reputational effects of double dealing. People now settles with NDAs - reputations often survive the worst of dishonesties.
Honestly, this is the first SB post I've substantially disagreed with (I've read them all). This post is kind of dumb. No problem with meritocracy is established. Instead, the point seems to be that *merit* should be defined slightly differently than it is believed to be defined. Rather than only IQ, it should be some combination of IQ & moral character. An additional unstated assumption appears to be that morality is uncorrelated (at best) or negatively correlated (at worst) with IQ. No support is provided for this assumption.
First, the existing meritocratic system does not only select for / optimize IQ. It gets a combination of cognitive & characterological traits including perseverence (Coolige quote), industry, self-organization, conscientiousness, ambition, etc. Likewise, there are other beneficial cognitive / attentional traits that are unrelated to IQ that are, in efect, selected for.
Second, while our ability to measure a person's moral character is obviously poor, there is no reason to believe the correlation with IQ is <=0. E.g., rates of criminality increase with decreasing IQ, as do behavioral problems in school, etc. It is reasonable to imagine there is a small positive correlation.
Furthermore, it's not obvious to me that it's "unfair" the tournament winner gets $16 mil while 9th place gets $3 mil. I think their taxes should be higher, but other than that, good for them.
But haven't there been 'elites' who've made mistakes? Yes, obviously. But non-elites also make mistakes, and typically more of them. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the view that a dumb democratic politician is better than a smart republican politician. However, it's worth recognizing that line of reasoning leads to the Grover Norquist quote, "We don't a great thinker to tell us what to do; we know what to do. We need a president with enough working digits to sign the bills we send him." And that quote in turn leads to Trump. After all, Trump does share most of their policy goals. And yet we tend to believe republicans should have voted against Trump because of his lack of individual merit (however defined).
There has been a change in how achievement is rewarded in the last few decades--moving from distributing rewards on a linear slope to amassing the large bolus of reward at the very top of the distribution of talent. Nassim Nicholas Talib pointed this out in his Black Swan book and I have been observing it since.
In many distributions of performance, the distribution is pretty linear in the middle but becomes parabolic at the very top (perhaps because that is where the numbers are small and schooling and practice are exaggerated).
Many here are pointing out differences along the middle of the distribution. Some of what Matt is highlighting is what happens at the parabolic top, especially when rewards go with a particular measurement. Here, nearly everyone preforms well, and their differences are mostly measurement error around trying to sort where the differences are tiny. The societal problem is how the group at the top attracts disproportionate rewards and the person at the top of the top attracts even more disproportionate reward.
Malcomb Gladwell has a relevant observation about distributing rewards. He points out that endeavors differ in how important a strong middle is, versus how important the biggest star is. The example from sports is soccer versus basketball. In soccer, the team's performance is most helped by making the weaker players less weak. In basketball, the team's performance is most dependent on the more and more terrific performance of the star player. He suggests that our societal emphasis on stars causes us to underattend to what kind of endeavor is being managed.
Mixed into this is the experience that the huge bolus of rewards at the very top leads many achievers to find ways to manipulate the measurement variable, often by taking greater risk. This is the nursing home private equity example. There are disproportionate rewards to buying a troubled nursing home chain, loading it up with enough debt that survival is in doubt, drugging the patients and cutting staffing, and planning that all this can be accomplished before either the too high debt or the damaging of patients catches up with the manipulator. The manipulator then gets the markets to believe that he has some special power. These incentives are worse in private equity since the manipulator gets paid high management fees while this is going on. Hence, he is protected if the business fails or if the regulators come after his drugging regimen.
Many of our organizations are structured to socialize the downside of risk.
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.
This feels less like an argument against meritocracy to me and more an argument for changing what counts as merit. Giving jobs to the most ethical person is still a form of meritocracy, it’s just defining “merit” as having good ethics rather than making a lot of money.
This is a full-bore "Christian" post: Serve the Lord, not the World.
This is a full-bore "Christian" post: Serve the Lord, not the World.
A comment launched into the ether. I wonder if the smart people running the wicked hedge fund “know” they are screwing the virtuous nursing home? Or, more likely, are the bad impacts simply the direction toward which our system runs when you change a few variables?
Roy Cohen, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Page 6 may be strong reasoning for how Trump achieved such power and fame and maybe an argument for there not being enough meritocracy. Though more interesting to me, Matt's piece touches upon how Intelligence and ethics have never be so pointedly intertwined in modern America. I would argue that supporters of Trump, to not believe what a failure as president, evidenced by his covid response alone, or to not get how self serving and wicked, well that is a lack of either or both ethics and intellect. Reasoning for one's Trump support has to be 100% simplemindedness or unethical or some mixture of both. The Machiavellian idea for his picking Supreme court justices only proves the point further in any reasonable scientific, utilitarian sense. Looking at the glass half full, as seen through the historical lens, for there still to be so many Trump supporters should prove a strong lesson and have a positive effect on the future of American democracy.
This essay gave me a first impression of "Don't hate the game, hate the player", especially with regards to the nursing home example. My first instinct is to say "show me the incentives and I'll show you the result" and, given the incentives of running a nursing home (provide good enough care to not get sued while spending as little money as possible), I can imagine a group of stupid people (er, less meritorious people) who fumble their way through managing a nursing home & provide inadequate care while not saving all that much money which is an all around worse situation than having very smart people acting under the exact same incentives.
But upon further reflection, I think is a shallow reading of the problem. The steely core of the anti-meritocracy stance seems to be that "this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle" (and I, personally, think this sentence would have made a better TLDR tagline for this article ;)
The problem is that we *want* soft-rules like honor and virture to be a part of the game but psychopaths who nakedly optimize for money and nothing else (ie only the hard-rules) tend to win-out, Moloch-style. We can try to regulate an approximation of the soft rules into the hard rules but this tends to play out as a whack-a-mole of finding/patching loopholes which may or may not converge onto a stable set of hard rules that everyone's happy with. Meritocracy is, I believe, a necessary *but not sufficient* aspect of a solution and I predict that discarding meritocracy entirely would make things thoroughly worse for everyone.
Ultimately, I think the declaration that "meritocracy is bad" is like declaring "hammers are bad" because they're sometimes used to hurt people. Meritocracy is a tool within our economic toolbox and, like any tool, it's morally neutral: it can be put to good use and help people or it can be misused and hurt people. That said, I respect such a bold declaration as this article's title and appreciate you having the editorial independence to make good-faith arguments for potentially unpopular positions.
I think you are really underestimating how important competency is to a lot of jobs. I think part of this might be that you are so used to America, where, as you observe, people are mostly very competent. But there are a lot of European countries and many, many poorer countries where the biggest problem is often "incompetent people are in charge of things". These are often not small effects; the incompetence often hits in big ways. And critically, those incompetent people are often regulators. A lot of your post is "competency is nice, but it doesn't stop evil". But a bunch of morally righteous but not very competent regulators are not going to be very good at stopping evil.
Friedman in a more ethical age? I guess so. He used to speak of reputational effects of double dealing. People now settles with NDAs - reputations often survive the worst of dishonesties.
Honestly, this is the first SB post I've substantially disagreed with (I've read them all). This post is kind of dumb. No problem with meritocracy is established. Instead, the point seems to be that *merit* should be defined slightly differently than it is believed to be defined. Rather than only IQ, it should be some combination of IQ & moral character. An additional unstated assumption appears to be that morality is uncorrelated (at best) or negatively correlated (at worst) with IQ. No support is provided for this assumption.
First, the existing meritocratic system does not only select for / optimize IQ. It gets a combination of cognitive & characterological traits including perseverence (Coolige quote), industry, self-organization, conscientiousness, ambition, etc. Likewise, there are other beneficial cognitive / attentional traits that are unrelated to IQ that are, in efect, selected for.
Second, while our ability to measure a person's moral character is obviously poor, there is no reason to believe the correlation with IQ is <=0. E.g., rates of criminality increase with decreasing IQ, as do behavioral problems in school, etc. It is reasonable to imagine there is a small positive correlation.
Furthermore, it's not obvious to me that it's "unfair" the tournament winner gets $16 mil while 9th place gets $3 mil. I think their taxes should be higher, but other than that, good for them.
But haven't there been 'elites' who've made mistakes? Yes, obviously. But non-elites also make mistakes, and typically more of them. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the view that a dumb democratic politician is better than a smart republican politician. However, it's worth recognizing that line of reasoning leads to the Grover Norquist quote, "We don't a great thinker to tell us what to do; we know what to do. We need a president with enough working digits to sign the bills we send him." And that quote in turn leads to Trump. After all, Trump does share most of their policy goals. And yet we tend to believe republicans should have voted against Trump because of his lack of individual merit (however defined).
I have been a subscriber from the beginning and this is my favorite post to date.
Great article to read while I patiently await my Harvard rejection email
There has been a change in how achievement is rewarded in the last few decades--moving from distributing rewards on a linear slope to amassing the large bolus of reward at the very top of the distribution of talent. Nassim Nicholas Talib pointed this out in his Black Swan book and I have been observing it since.
In many distributions of performance, the distribution is pretty linear in the middle but becomes parabolic at the very top (perhaps because that is where the numbers are small and schooling and practice are exaggerated).
Many here are pointing out differences along the middle of the distribution. Some of what Matt is highlighting is what happens at the parabolic top, especially when rewards go with a particular measurement. Here, nearly everyone preforms well, and their differences are mostly measurement error around trying to sort where the differences are tiny. The societal problem is how the group at the top attracts disproportionate rewards and the person at the top of the top attracts even more disproportionate reward.
Malcomb Gladwell has a relevant observation about distributing rewards. He points out that endeavors differ in how important a strong middle is, versus how important the biggest star is. The example from sports is soccer versus basketball. In soccer, the team's performance is most helped by making the weaker players less weak. In basketball, the team's performance is most dependent on the more and more terrific performance of the star player. He suggests that our societal emphasis on stars causes us to underattend to what kind of endeavor is being managed.
Mixed into this is the experience that the huge bolus of rewards at the very top leads many achievers to find ways to manipulate the measurement variable, often by taking greater risk. This is the nursing home private equity example. There are disproportionate rewards to buying a troubled nursing home chain, loading it up with enough debt that survival is in doubt, drugging the patients and cutting staffing, and planning that all this can be accomplished before either the too high debt or the damaging of patients catches up with the manipulator. The manipulator then gets the markets to believe that he has some special power. These incentives are worse in private equity since the manipulator gets paid high management fees while this is going on. Hence, he is protected if the business fails or if the regulators come after his drugging regimen.
Many of our organizations are structured to socialize the downside of risk.
I'm curious about how you feel about Paul Graham's 15 year old essay that touches on this same issue. http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html.
Here is a quote:
American Universities Are Better.
You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said "Cambridge" followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don't seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.
This feels less like an argument against meritocracy to me and more an argument for changing what counts as merit. Giving jobs to the most ethical person is still a form of meritocracy, it’s just defining “merit” as having good ethics rather than making a lot of money.
Matt wins if only for creating something that spawns such a fantastic conversation. I'm supposed to be working right now!
Okay, so we need to focus on meritocracy + moral character. Got it.
"... a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it."
In a country where about 95% of people use factory-farmed/factory-fished products every day, that just isn't going to happen -- unfortunately.