A rare Slow Boring post I mostly don't agree with!
I think your argument works for some jobs. There are easily hundreds of people who could be competent Supreme Court justices. Within that universe it probably makes sense to pick justices based on ideology, demographic representation, and other criteria other than raw intelligence. The same might be true of New York Times columnists.
But I think it's clearly good for the world that a bunch of the world's smartest programmers work at Google rather than doing IT support at a local bank. I think a team of programmers drawn from the 99th percentile of the intelligence distribution are going to produce dramatically better software than programmers drawn from the 90th or 60th percentile.
I'm not an expert on other fields, but I suspect that (for example) the same is true of vaccine science. I'll bet America's meritocratic institutions helped pull together a dream team of vaccine scientists that enabled us to produce several covid vaccines in a matter of weeks. It's hard to say exactly which part of America's talent pipeline are important for getting talented people the opportunities and resources to succeed, but it seems to work pretty well and it seems foolish to dismiss it too readily.
At the same time it's obviously true that some extremely smart people behave in sociopathic ways and that's bad. But it's not obvious to me that that has anything in particular to do with those people being smart. It seems like average-intelligence people are just as capable of being greedy and indifferent to the suffering of others.
At one point you say you want a smart doctor but you don't want a shrewd doctor, which I think is true. But these just seem like different things to me. I don't think there's any particular reason to think the most talented surgeons are more likely to have either the ability or the inclination to steer their patients toward unnecessary services. The main thing you need to do that is low ethical standards—I'm not sure you even have to be particularly intelligent to figure out how to do it.
— I'm not against companies hiring smart people for jobs where that's important.
— Nor am I denying that smart people (scientists especially) do important things for society.
What I am saying is that it is wrong to look at the problems in American society as primarily reflecting *failures* of meritocracy that could be improved by making things more meritocratic.
For example, I think we should fight less about who gets to go to Yale and fight more about why Yale gets so much more material resources than Gateway Community College.
And I think we should have applauded harder in favor of Google's old-timey effort to make "Don't Be Evil" a foundational principle of culture, and been sad when they abandoned it. The effort to inculcate a corporate culture of virtue was really important and praiseworthy and it's a sad thing for America that it was dropped rather than becoming a thing where people asked why other companies couldn't also aspire to reach that standard.
Agreed on the "Don't Be Evil" bit - we should 100% do more of that!
On the Yale vs Gateway Community College comment, though, if you're going to make this argument you need to have some sense that the resources put to GCC do more *for society*.
If we're agreed that you could tax a Yale grad to support a welfare state and also agreed that we should have a culture (corporate and otherwise) that supports virtue and punishes bad actors that find holes in the legal system, it's no longer enough to say that the GCC grad's life will be helped more by additional investment in their college. It might well be the case that we want to add resources to get that Yale biochem lab over the hump and create a new mRNA vaccine production process, or even just support them as part of support into basic research.
This is part of what people mean when they say "meritocracy" - we should try to put society's resources (not just people) where the resources will be most productive, and then we can cut each other into small pieces about allocating the outputs afterwards.
Completely agree about company values. Firms have overlapping responsibilities to shareholders, employees, customers, community, society-at-large. 'Operate to max shareholder value' is crazy as end-all be-allIMO--just don't think that's actually accurate in the same way that 'people act only in their self-interest' is not accurate or desirable. More complex than that and you need values.
Problem I have with the 'don't focus on Yale admissions' vibe is that a) it is rational to place emphasis on getting into these institutions because they offer real, observable rewards to those that get in, ie your odds of landing that entry job at Google/the NYTimes are much higher for same intelligence at Yale vs. QPac, b) the argument to give more resources to Gateway College doesn't do anything to solve the differences in rewards--is it really that Yale has more resources or that it is a very powerful brand? So the argument seems to end up as a deflection of legitimate concerns that these real pathways to success are in fact largely 'captured' by the exising elite class (the income distribution of students at these schools is striking).
I think a lot of the point is that there shouldn't be such a jackpot effect related to getting into Yale.
Right now, successful elite school applicants get the substantial benefit of a great education and being on the shortlist for high-prestige jobs that some of them may crave, and ALSO a guarantee to those that don't land the highly-visible jobs that they will be rewarded with staggeringly high earnings potential relative to their peers that decided to attend state schools because they are now able to participate in the cartel of workers who hold Yale degrees.
Ya I completely agree, and agree with where Matt goes with expanding admissions. I was sort of arguing with people who go to the 'don't focus on Yale focus on resources etc. for people' as a way to resist changes to Yale, etc. system. People from elite colleges I know who are quite progressive turn out to be surprisingly resistant to points about unfairness baked into Ivy League. 'We shouldn't reduce brand value of Harvard...it's really a slipperly slope when you start meddling with private institutions' are actual quotes from progressive millenials I know on this topic. So breaking this cartel effect (reducing brand value) should explicitly be our goal I think, so that the whole thing is less of a big deal. I just don't see how you do that by only sending money to Ohio State and leaving Ivy League unchanged.
Just to add to this, I know a guy* who went the no-name-iest schools I can imagine for undergrad (it might not even exist anymore). But he took advantage of what opportunity he had, and he eventually parlayed it into a good Physics PhD. Now he's on Wall Street making a half mil a year as a quant. Wait - did I just prove Matt's thesis?! :D
It's not that it's impossible, it's about overall distribution of opportunity and clear 'spoils' to the elite schools. I know a black guy who worked hard and became president...but, uh, that doesn't dispel the idea that black people are disadvantaged in this country.
"However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. "
It's annoying, but I guess I'd say that the perception of the jackpot effect is the main thing- it's the mechanism that maintains Yale's exclusivity, and that exclusivity plays into the hyper-lucrative positions that tend to go to people from fancy universities.
As Matt suggests, it's reasonable to think that Yale is good at identifying smart students that will have a lot of earning potential regardless, and because of the jackpot perception they select from a pool of already very promising people. Presumably substantially beefing up the quality of Gateway university grads will reduce the power that Yale has just by making the Ivy imprimatur less valuable.
I definitely agree that perception of elite universities is itself a problem, although I wonder if this is field specific. In the sciences, while I certainly know good people at the Ivies, I don't think of the schools as *significantly* better than others.
I haven't looked through this paper, but does it operationalize "college selectivity" by taking 12 top places and comparing them to everywhere else, or by taking 100 top places and comparing them to everywhere else, or by looking at a ranking and seeing if there's any sort of linear relationship? If the jackpot effect is present only at 10 or 20 small places, then it will be hidden in anything that looks at a much bigger pool (and will also be less important than effects that hit a much bigger population).
Good question! They say "Each college’s average SAT score and Barron’s index of college selectivity (as reported in the 1978 and 1992 Barron’s guides) was linked to student’s responses to the questions concerning the schools they applied to. Because there were only one or two colleges in some categories of the Barron’s index (particularly for the 1989 cohort), we represent the index with a continuous variable. The schools in our sample ranged from “Competitive” (coded a 2 on our continuous measure) to “Most Competitive” (coded a 5 on our continuous measure). "
This does highlight a potential criticism in that it's a retrospective study, so one could certainly claim that things have changed a lot since then. It's also worth pointing out that
"There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents’ education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics."
In fact, that (big) exception may jibe better with this interesting paper about Texas's top 10% rule, which find, if not a jackpot, at least a benefit for students from underrepresented high schools to getting into a better university: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26821/w26821.pdf
I guess if I were to *actually* formulate a coherent thought, I would say that getting into a highly ranked school could be the break that some students need to move up, but for many others it's not especially beneficial (and I speculate that legacies are a big part of the latter group). Speaking from my own experience, grad school was that "break" for me, as opposed to my non-selective undergrad institution.
Matt did not argue smart people behave worse than non smart people. The argument is that meritocracies only optimize for “smarts”, while ignoring ethical behavior. If you ignore something, you obviously don’t get as much of it as you would when you optimize for it.
I am unsure there's a good solution for fighting nefarious actors. One thing I will agree with, and potentially add on, is that intellectual capacity is easily measured, moral capacity is not. One thing I absolutely agree with, and wish society would take to heart is your comment on business purely existing for profits. I do not agree with this, and will never agree with it. If government could legislate this away, I'd do it today.
This is indeed a tricky issue, and I suspect that extracurriculars and volunteer work started to get more attention because they were a measure of personal ethics or a community spirit of some sort. Of course, once that became known, every ambitious student started to load up on extracurriculars and so broke the measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
I would even go so far as to say that barely any system optimizes for smarts alone or even primarily. One reason is that it's really hard to measure "smarts". Even Matt in his argument uses a proxy for it (quality of questions). It is a good proxy, but it's not perfect by any means.
Most systems optimize for some convoluted mess of parameters. Interesting examples would be the tennis players mentioned by Matt (talent, hard work, strategic thinking, etc), clergy (no idea what it optimizes for, not exclusively smarts), military (a lot of parameters also).
Another question is, what society as a whole optimizes for. Here I would argue that measurability matters a lot, so financial parameters (easy to measure, very objective) end up important vs. ethical behavior (hard to measure and subjective).
"But I think it's clearly good for the world that a bunch of the world's smartest programmers work at Google rather than doing IT support at a local bank".
That is not the tradeoff though. The problem is that the smartest programmers in the US are working at Google rather than teaching other people to program. Whats worse is that at Google they aren't even working on particularly important problems - Google's won a couple of winner take all markets, and the ad business in particular throws off a lot of money. So Google can pay people stupid amounts of money to do not particularly valuable things. Because our society is designed around the smartest people making the most money, the smartest programmers in general take the money (One told me that they thought it would be immoral given their family, etc not to!) and then are miserable. Google (and Facebook, and... finance in general) are sucking a significant portion of intellectual capital of the US into mediocre bullshit because they can.
I think Matt's argument is that a sense of honor or rightness should counter this merit-money linkage resulting in bad social outcomes. I think a more straightforward (and complementary) approach would be to tax the loot. Right now you could make twice the amount or more at Google/Facebook vs. a college professorship. It's hard for someone to do the right thing for society given that payoff. But if it were closer to 50% more because taxes would eat up the extra - perhaps more people would choose to keep their souls.
FWIW, I'm a programmer and I deliberately took a lower salary, higher QoL job. I think it's a real perk of making enough money that you can afford to be choosy. But it definitely wasn't an easy choice at the time.
Using the Supreme Court as your example here is frankly weird. Do people think that we choose justices now based on raw intelligence, because that has pretty clearly not been the case for quite some time.
It's also strange because law (and indeed the Court) is one of relatively few areas that was meritocratic long before the rest of upper class society was (the same is true of "the professions" more broadly, but being the business owner's lawyer or accountant has never been half as lucrative as being the business owner). There's a reason we had two Jewish justices long before non-WASPs started showing up in large numbers in congress and corporate board rooms. The second of those, Cardozo, is a universally heralded figure and really was picked for the Court not because of any particular ideological or political reason but because he was regarded as a generational legal talent and there was a sense that it would be absurd if he never became a justice. That would obviously not happen today, not least because it would be seen as wildly irresponsible to appoint someone to the Court who was already in his 60s.
I'm just saying that the Supreme Court is an example of an elite job where raw intelligence isn't the most important factor. I'm not making a claim about whether we do or don't choose justices based on intelligence today.
Yeah, if you talk to fancy appellate lawyers in private, a good number of them are pretty dismissive of Justice Sotomayor's legal talent. I'm not saying that's true.* But even if it was true, it doesn't stop Sotomayor from being a better justice than e.g. Kavanaugh and Roberts, who many fancy appellate lawyers deeply respect.
Descriptively this is also obviously true--Richard Posner was never a plausible SCOTUS candidate because he had too many wild opinions for both parties, but many would consider him smartest judge of the last few decades.
*I'm sure most of it is that elite appellate lawyers generally grew up very wealthy and are notoriously snobby about credentials, especially clerkships, and Sotomayor grew up underprivileged and worked instead of clerking.
I have to interject here. There is no way that law or the judiciary could be considered meritocratic until quite recently. There’s a reason for the saying “a judge is a lawyer who knows a politician” When did the ABA start rating judges?
For most of our history, law was an undemanding profession that the scions of the wealthy played at, when they were in fact living on family money. Newland Archer in Age of Innocence is *exactly* a representation of this class. The highest-status firms provided landing places for people waiting their next turn at the political wheel (come to think of it, they do this today).
Judges like Cardozo who were selected for their legal talent are outliers in past history. For every John Marshall or Oliver Wendell Holmes there were many, many other Federal judges who were just straight-out political appointees, with very little to recommend them other than breeding, connections and loyalty. They were not chosen for talent, and they were not expected to be talented.
It is easy to recognize judges who are too smart by half, but have no humanity.
I think we should expand the scope in which we discuss meritocracy. Sure, you may find that the spread of doctors with good vs. bad intentions are roughly the same between the most academically talented and the moderately talented, so why not go for the best ones? But to become a doctor in the first place requires passing decades of merit-based exams, admissions to prestigious schools, etc etc. If we "chilled" with the absurdly high requirements (both intelligence and cost-wise) at all level of prestigious schooling, could we then get more doctors in general who are compassionate / have higher moral standards, who otherwise would not have made it because they weren't the BEST at school?
Similarly, I work in IT as well, and I can tell you that the B- student who can communicate effectively and care about their co-workers is infinitely better than a A+ programmer who can't communicate what they are doing or is socially incompetent. Matt's point is not that the smartest people should be more evenly distributed into other industries / fields that don't value their work, but that there are people (yes, even in the 60th percentile) who could be invaluable to a team or company because of other intangible qualities, and that we just currently ignore them because we insist on the A+ programmer.
The episode "Puzzle Rush" from Malcom Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast is a prime example of this, were the absurdly tight time limit arbitrarily rewards students who are fast at taking tests (the LSAT), and disregard the otherwise equally competent students who simply are slow at taking standardized tests.
That's why I wish Matt had defined what he means by "meritocracy". By the definition I normally apply, it simply means the people who are best suited to the job advance- it's not simply an IQ test where the smartest people win with nothing else taken into account. To use your example, under a meritocracy the B- student who can communicate effectively and is therefore "infinitely better" at their job should be the one who is more successful than the one who is a better programmer but fails miserably at all the other aspects of the job. Those other aspects of the job also matter! Under a meritocracy, it's the people who are best at the job who advance, not the ones who are best at a very small subset of relevant characteristics. Matt seemed to be defining meritocracy as simply "if you're the smartest then you get the farthest", but that's a VERY narrow definition of the term that ignores a huge swath of other incredibly relevant and important abilities. Without a working definition included, it was a very bizarre article to read IMHO.
I think Matt avoided a semantic discussion about "meritocracy" on purpose because we all kind of know what it implies. As Berne Brown says, "you don't always need to know where the line is, to know that something is over the line". We don't need to know exactly what a perfect meritocratic measure would look like if it takes into consideration ethics and what not, but we all know that companies consistently take the shortcut by imposing high GPA requirements just for a chance to be interviewed. The point is that we are all very aware of these shortcuts that we justify as "meritocratic", and we should work on fixing them bit by bit, even just as experimentations, rather than go in circles about what the *ideal* model of meritocracy would be.
Google absorbs a large quantity of talent in this sector. This talent usually ends up cycling into some form of internal infrastructure production. Rather than providing new products or innovations, it largely makes Google slightly more efficient. One of the most brilliant people I've ever known spent a decade doing cache and scheduling optimization before I lost contact with them. This was undoubtedly useful because adding a few extra operations per millisecond really adds up at Google. But the world was out whatever else that person could have achieved, which was, by nature, probably not incremental improvement to the Linux kernel.
I think you’re underrating the value of making Google/computers slightly more efficient. Saving tens of millions of dollars of computer time is pretty great.
This just motivates the question of what you’re doing to delete a petabyte of server logs (actual job that produces millions with a button push) versus whatever your plans for the weekend are.
Saving millions of dollars of computer time is not as easy as pushing a button. Deleting logs more often wouldn’t do it, and anyway that could easily be automated.
All those Linux kernel improvements are public and used by other people, companies, researchers, etc. That's very much a contributing to the commons best case.
The vast, vast majority of code written at Google, Facebook, etc is never released to the open-source community. In part because it only applies to their internal infrastructure.
I wouldn’t trade the rest of my existence for incremental improvements to the Linux kernel even though I could make a hard-nosed case that literally every person should be doing that. None of us would and the world in which we pursue this optimization is not recognizable to us as good.
That's fine though, no one is forcing you to? There is a need for people to do good work on boring infrastructure. There really aren't that many people doing that kind of core, bottom of the stack work, even at Google-most people work on stuff much closer to the products that people use.
While there is a gap between the underlying capabilities of modern computer hardware and what is delivered to the application, it's not huge. Put another way, if we focused all our time on improving Linux, we might get 25% improvement in efficiency, not 2x or 10x or anything like that.
It's not a bad thing to do, but it won't solve any real problems facing us today
Exactly! I'd just add that making Google (or Facebook or Amazon) infrastructure slightly more efficient is the best case scenario. There's just a ton of super smart people working on rebranding Google Meet to Hangouts to Chat to Duo and creating Google Plus or working on AI ethics (in a place that makes it impossible to raise interesting questions about it).
Google actually intentionally produces lots of makework (like releasing five chat apps at once and rewriting all internal libraries every few years) and combined with their habit of hiring everyone who sounds cool to hire - what is Vint Cerf doing there? - it looks like the strategy is just to waste everyone’s time so they won’t leave and start competitors to the ad business.
Right! To economists though the combination of adwords making lots of money and Vint Cerf working at Google looks like Vint is being extremely productive.
Google employs tens of thousands of programmers. You can't employ tens of thousands of above average people. By definition, when you employ that many programmers they are, despite the hype about tough interview questions, average programmers on average. At Google's scale, it makes sense to employ someone who knows how to, e.g., perform some optimization that will cut 0.1% off the budget for servers, since that translates to millions of dollars per year, but employing a handful of long tail super-programmers doesn't really change the fact that most Googlers are just sort of okay programmers who are good at some stuff, bad at other stuff, and mostly just average. We can see this reflected in their products. A lot of their products are just okay! Is Chrome OS changing the world? Well, it has a successful niche in education and low cost computing, but I don't think we'll see the equivalent of Folklore.org to recount the glories of the wonder years of Chrome OS someday… That's fine!
Obviously it's impossible for every Google programmer is in the 99th percentile. But I bet that the median Google programmer is well above the median talent level for the profession as a whole.
I can believe that Google aggressively weeds out programmers in the bottom quartile of programmers overall, which pushes the mean up, but there's just no mathematical way to shift the talent mode away from the middle. You just can't hire tens of thousands of people and not have your mode in the same place as everyone else.
Probably we should just leave it there unless someone with relevant evidence can add some empirical rigor to our speculation.
I don't know about that. It's not like they employ 30 or 50% of all programmers in the USA. All of silicon valley might not employ 50% of all programmers. It's pretty reasonable to imagine that they take a vastly disproportionate amount of the top talent, and they IT team at, say, a local health network of hospitals does not.
Disappointed that someone as smart as Timothy B Lee (who wrote good stories at Vox, like 'Don't read intelligence documents by cellphone light') is writing this comment that seems like he put minimal brain cycles into it.
When intelligence is aimed at a bad goal (like reducing transparency in programmatic systems, say, as Google has made a huge profit in doing) it is more effective than when stupidity is aimed at a bad goal.
"I think a team of programmers drawn from the 99th percentile of the intelligence distribution are going to produce dramatically better software than programmers drawn from the 90th or 60th percentile."
Possibly, but it matters what other characteristics and especially values those people have. I would much rather have a programmer at the 95th percentile of the intelligence distribution who has a system of morality that says "there are limits on how clever a solution can be if that solution will hurt people" than one at the 99th percentile who is an absolute garbage sack of a demon person when it comes to morality, and has no problem hurting people to optimize something if they can get away with it.
The complaint is that the system as it stands generally underweights ethics relative to intelligence and academic achievement, and that society in general would be better off if more focus were put on whether people will do the right thing when there is a cost to doing so, than whether they can absolutely bleed things dry in search of the business-optimal outcome.
Sure, morality is important. I just don't see any reason to think there's a sharp tradeoff between morality and talent. Most people (talented and otherwise) want to behave ethically, and most people (especially talented ones) are capable of behaving ethically given the right institutional environment. I don't know exactly why many American institutions have developed amoral cultures, but I don't see any evidence that's driven by excessive meritocracy.
Maybe it's just me, but this argument feels muddy. It seems like your suggestion for answering a structural question (should smart people rise to the top) is with a cultural statement (we should value honesty and character), and I'm not even sure how one can actually even bring about such a change. I definitely agree that our cultural desperately needs to get its values in order, I'm just having trouble seeing why that would be mutually exclusive with meritocracy.
For one thing, smarter people are better at getting things done than less intelligent people. Even if Joe Biden may not be as book smart, he's still smart enough to surround himself with smart experts, all of whom got to where they were by being smarter than their competitors. I realize the fundamental paradox that a smart evil person can do more damage than a dumb evil person, but it's also true that a smart good person can do more good than a dumb good person. Our goal should be optimizing for good and smart, but it seems this piece is saying we should be trying for good instead of smart, and I'm just not seeing how the two ideas are connected.
I agree. It's a good article, but a little muddy. I count at least four different questions that are getting blended together:
1) Who gets to make decisions.
2) Who gets paid.
3) Who do we value in society.
4) How do we decide who gets limited opportunities.
Everyone agrees that we shouldn't automatically equate having a lot of money, or fame, or a title with being a good person, and that we should have some sense of value which is independent from social status.
I think most people agree that it's better for social status to go to people who "deserve" it rather than people who don't, and then argue about what it means to "deserve" it (this is the version of arguing against meritocracy without being able to see outside it -- just trying to shuffle the meaning of "deserve."
Finally there's a third dimension of how much power/money/social status should the top performs get. How do we feel about tournament style outcomes vs a more egalitarian and less competitive structure.
Trying to balance these different concerns which produce very different moral intuitions is tricky. The post is an interesting prompt, but I don't think it helps sort through those questions.
I feel like you've set up a sort of tautology here - you're defining "smart" as being whatever intellectual attribute leads to success.
I think the point Matt is trying to make is that intelligence is a real trait, a trait that matters, and one we are good at measuring. But intelligence, while helpful, is not the primary driver of outcomes in many scenarios.
Instead of thinking in terms of a smart/dumb/good/bad matrix, it might be more productive to think of intelligence, honesty, kindness, determination, and bravery as ALL mattering in various situations. In this model, intelligence is a positive trait, but just one among several. The important thing is to match people to their particular competencies rather than focusing on sorting people into a strict hierarchy based on just one trait.
First of all, I'm not really talking about "intelligence" per se, but merit/competence. No one thinks professional athletes get paid more because they are smart, but we all call it meritocracy because we know they are still paid more for being better. And it's not a tautology, because there are alternatives. For example, you could select randomly, or based on pedigree or personal connections. The last two were the only way people got important jobs before people started calling for meritocracy.
But I take your point. Would it be fair to say that the argument simplifies to something like "we should select for competence *and* character?" If so, then it sounds like the title should be "meritocracy is not enough" as opposed to "meritocracy is bad." And I would agree with that completely. But, even then, I would add that selecting for character is far easier said than done, and I still haven't seen any explanation of how that would look in practice.
The more I think about it, the more I think the real issue is in the obsession with ranking people and the fierce competition to rise into a small elite. The problem is that, by making the competition so fierce, we justify oversized rewards to the handful of people who manage to win the competition. If you have to work your tail off through your entire childhood and young adult life, and orient your whole existence towards a specific model of success, you are naturally going to feel entitled to reap the rewards of all that hard work, even if those rewards come at the expense of others.
The current highly competitive system is very good at finding aggressive competitors and elevating them to positions of power. In sports, this is exactly what we want. But in society as a whole, it may be better to find ways in which less competitive people can still find their way into positions of genuine importance.
If meritocracy is nothing but "people who are good at something should be the ones doing that thing" then yeah, meritocracy is obviously good. But our current ideology of meritocracy is focused more on cranking up the dial on competition and letting the survivors reap the rewards. This leads to a ruling class optimized for winning competitive games rather than a ruling class optimized for solving important problems.
That's an interesting take. So what do we do to make the stakes lower? There are still going to need to be doctors, and politicians, and engineers, and doctors still need to be highly competent, and politicians are still going to wield incredible power.
For doctors, I think the answer is obvious - increase the number of residencies and med school slots so a larger number of the people who want to be doctors can do it. We should also look at making everything cheaper and more subsidized so people don't have to take out crazy loans. We could also do what a lot of other countries do and let people go to med school straight out of high school instead of making them get a four-year degree before going into medicine.
Engineering and tech are actually in an okay spot, IMO - there is a ton of demand for those skills, so it isn't a case where tons of people are chasing a limited number of spots (except for like, facebook and google, but they aren't representative). For the most part, STEM right now is such that anyone who achieves a reasonable level of competence can be successful. That's not to say they are easy skills to learn or anybody can do it - but if you can learn the core skills, you will be able to succeed.
For politicians, the answer is probably putting more resources into pipelines that recruit competent people to run for local office, and then are able to move people into higher level roles over time if they have what it takes.
To abstract, I think what we have right now is sort of a "push" model. We expect individuals to push hard and demonstrate their worthiness, and only then are they recognized and rewarded for their efforts. What I think we want is to build more institutions that are good at "pulling." By that I mean, identifying people who have useful talents and recruiting them into positions where their talents are utilized well. In a push model, only people with a competitive edge will rise. In a pull model, people who have potential but lack that raw ambition and drive can still succeed and do very well.
I appreciate the distinction you made for STEM. The meritocracy seems to work pretty well here (probably with a few caveats), and that fact has strongly biased my interpretation of Matt's piece (negatively).
I'm not totally convinced by your arguments with respect to politicians, but I feel I generally have a good idea of the arguments your making. Thank you for taking the time to write that. You've given me a lot to think about.
I think this gets at part of the problem - part of the premise is that intelligence is a measurable trait but intelligence can come in many forms. We tend to select for particular kinds of intelligence, like logical thinking on tests or social intelligence in networking but we don't really think through what we are looking for. People can be intelligent in different ways and we should try harder to define what kind of intelligence we value and how we measure it.
I do want to push back a little bit on defining all positive mental traits as different types of intelligence. I think that if we think of stuff like "determination" as a form of intelligence, that actually serves to elevate the thing we classically think of as "intelligence" as being a sort of ultimate form of virtue, to which other virtues are subsidiary.
It may be conceptually cleaner to say that intelligence is what we normally think of as intelligence - logical, abstract reasoning ability. Other positive mental traits like intuiting the emotional states of others or persisting in the face of adversity are worthy traits in and of themselves, and we should be careful not to treat them as "knock-off" versions of intelligence.
I think these are good points. Keeping intelligence rigidly defined helps keep the conversations straight. But I think we still might run into issues using other relevant words, like "competence."
There are a lot of different skills a person can have, like forming relationships, managing databases, explaining broad trends, or solving puzzles. We can bundle these by saying someone has good logical intelligence or emotional intelligence or academic intelligence. But if we take a few of those skills and say that is intelligence, we end up missing other things a person can bring.
This has real consequences. In the job market, we end up conflating large networks or ability to write a cover letter as conveying unrelated skills. It might be that we want to select for a particular type of intelligence like logical reasoning but it is more helpful to be more specific about what we are looking for
That's true, but when I made this comment I didn't really see what problem was being described.
Since then, the comments have helped me understand that Matt was using the term "meritocracy" in a less literal way, referring less to the specific strategy of selecting based on merit but more to a culture that disproportionally rewards the most competent at the expense of everyone else.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean. I don't know how to solve the moral problem, but I don't think the solution has any obvious connection to the question of meritocracy. At least, I don't see how Matt made that connection.
And I'm still very unclear on what an alternative to Meritocracy looks like, anyway. Before meritocracy was the guiding paradigm, people only got anywhere because of their connections. I think we can all agree that that is terrible, and we don't want to go back to that, so what does "post-meritocracy" even look like?
I see what you mean now. Those are interesting questions. Sorry if I was being defensive, your statement was short and this helped me understand the context in which you meant it.
I don't really know what the answer is. The responses to my original statement have helped me see the connection that I had missed, but I don't feel any closer to understanding what a better system would look like.
Having, like you, spent a lot of time with 'the smartest guys in the room' I think this is all really correct. Those guys really are smart, but there are plenty of smart people, and you want leadership from the moral smart people, not necessarily the extremely smart people. Also the difference between Harvard/Oxbridge smart and 'decent university smart' is there but it's not all that big really.
That said, there are a couple of virtues that are usually folded under 'smart' which should be prized by themselves, namely inquisitiveness and reflectiveness (basically inquisitiveness about what's in your own head). A lot of what made Trump and Bush jr come across as plain stupid both in the press and people's memoirs is that they didn't seem to try and understand complicated questions and they didn't seem to be able to reflect on who they were and why they did things. This had little to do with raw IQ points and everything to do with an entitled sense that they knew everything worth knowing already. Obama was much better in this regard.
Absolutely, and honesty etc etc. However of the useful virtues, inquisitiveness and self-reflection are ones that are more often linked to intelligence, and are often just mislabeled as being 'smart'
"there are plenty of smart people...the difference between Harvard/Oxbridge smart and 'decent university smart' is there but it's not all that big really."
I don't think this is right. There's a lot of important variance at the top. Intelligence is overrated, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that there isn't meaningful distinction above some threshold. It's just that there are a lot of other qualities that also have a lot of meaningful variation and are also very important.
As the resident dumb guy, I have a lot to say about this. (Plus I’m waiting for these units to get LOTO before I inspect them, so chilling in the trailer)
First, unrelated, I got my 1st shot of vaccine this weekend, so looking forward to not randomly dying of Covid... especially since I’m going to Brazil next month for work.
Ok, on to meritocracy.
Relative to college selection. I don’t think it’s the same to equivocate large public colleges were smart people go with the Ivy leagues. What Ivy leagues provide is Access and social networking to people with power. The issue isn’t weather Harvard should accept smart people, it’s that they only accept connected smart people. Well along with a few token regular smart people that they make sure get loads of local press.
I also think that Matt underestimates the relative damage that dumb people can do. Sure smart people make mistakes, but having spent a large part of life in countries where family connections had more to do with key jobs, I can tell you that it could be a lot worse.
But as a blue collar guy I couldn’t agree more with the “honest days work” attitude.
I’m sitting in a trailer at a random power plant. Next to me is a 27-year old engineer who has worked 2-weeks straight. Next room is 6 Millwright’s who work 12-hour shifts building and fixing shit.
This job is a hard life, but it needs to be done, and honestly we all make a decent living (100 - 220k a year).
If there is one thing that I try and teach my kids, it’s that there is a sense of satisfaction that one gets from working hard, especially if u contribute to society. It’s not happiness, it’s more like pride. Honest wages for honest work.
Anyway, back to the issue. The problem isn’t meritocracy, it’s a problem with incentives and accountability. No one went to jail for all the sleezy housing bubble shenanigans. Trump won’t go to jail. The finance dudes with the care homes won’t go to jail.
There is a general lack of integrity (I like the USAF definition... doing the right thing, even if it’s hard, even when no one is looking). Integrity is what is missing from the system.
Some good points mixed with some bad, and since I'm a crotchety old man I'll focus on the bad. While you point out, somewhat randomly, the downside of meritocracy, you don't give an alternative. Monarchy, theocracy, communism, all have been tried and for various reasons discarded. We do need something, though. It seems like in a couple of places you were advocating for communism, or its nicer sounding synonym egalitarianism. And that's fine, but I think readers should have that in mind when considering the downside of meritocracy.
As for this downside, I'm in total agreement that meritocracy may not be the solution for every career path, and the good news is we clearly don't follow it. You mention politics as an example. Clearly we've ditched any pretext of meritocracy (in your stricter sense of merit equals smarts) in politics a long time ago. When was the last time a really smart person got elected to high office? As for business, I don't know what you're trying to do with the Trump example. You seem to be holding him out as an example of failed meritocracy, but that's clearly not correct and he is very definitely an idiot. The man can barely read. You're conflating his complete lack of ethics with intelligence, and that's not the case. But in a much broader sense, you don't need to be the very brightest person to be the CEO of a huge company. You'll have to be above average smart but there are all sorts of other people skills involved in being a successful businessperson. Likewise in today's media climate an obsession with woke causes and a generally snarky attitude are more important than brilliance.
So I don't think there's anything like a true meritocracy in politics, media or business. But I do think our system overall does a decent job of sorting people by intelligence, as per your college examples, and slotting them into the appropriate career paths. The smartest people should end up tackling the biggest problems. At one point that may have been in politics but that stopped decades ago. But overall the smartest people are going into tech careers, where if they cure a pandemic or reduce global warming, they will be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. People good at managing people and social networks end up running big organizations, creative people end up in the arts, athletic people in sports, etc. And I don't think there's any other system out there that can do that job.
BTW, for what it's worth, Communism, at least the Soviet type, was pretty meritocratic. I spent the 1990s in Moscow teaching finance and economics to kids who were graduates of the best Soviet STEM institutions. Talk about raw talent! Better even than the students I taught in the Ivy League or University of Chicago (and they were good, too). What counts is the institutions the meritocratic education system dumps its students into.
Agreed, I'm really talking about a theoretical communism. In the real world Communist countries created great astronauts, gymnasts and lots of other superstars that could only happen under a very meritocratic system.
How is it different (as an economic system, obviously very different from a political sense)? From my perspective they both mean everyone gets the same amount of stuff, and I genuinely think it's one of the two proper ways to think about an economy. Either you reward the most productive, or you reward everyone the same.
Again, speaking only of Soviet communism, it was emphatically NOT true that everyone got the same amount of stuff. It was meritocratic but not egalitarian. The difference is that the Soviet system operated on inequality of privilege, not of wealth. If you were a professor, you got to buy canned salmon and East German beer in a "special shop". If you were a mid-level official, you got to send your kids to a better summer camp. If you were a high-up, you got a fancy dacha. If you were a ballerina, you got foreign travel, and so on. As Orwell put it, all animals were equal but some were more equal than others.
Yes- human society will usually find a way to create a hierarchy. An advantage of a market system is that the hierarchy is very visible, easy to understand, and *less* dependent on "who you know".
Then what you're talking about are competing ideas of distributive justice. At no point is Matt calling for all private property to be owned by the state or for the means of production to be in the hands of the mass of labor. The fundamental building blocks of a capitalist economy are not being challenged here: private property ownership enforced through legal contracts and goods and services freely traded in marketplaces.
i believe this is a distinction without a difference. If the fruits of private property ownership are re-distributed equally to the population, then nobody will take on the additional risk and work associated with providing those fruits. See the USSR's attempts with farm collectives.
I guess I'm not seeing where Matt advocates for that. What I see is him saying we should have a stronger social safety net, encourage more charitable giving to non-selective colleges, and wrangle the culture in a way that doesn't give so much status to people who do ethically bad things. Now, that the third one there is a bit hand-wavy and there's no theory of action there. But none of this is communist. The reliance on charity and societal pressure seems distinctly non-state to me and wouldn't fit a system where the state was expected to redistribute all the proceeds of all economic activity totally equally across the entire population.
He's not calling for anything, really, he's just attacking the idea of meritocracy without proposing an alternative. I don't see how you can read the post as only pertaining to politics though; the large majority of it is about business.
Yes, and it's about how smart people succeed in business by sometimes doing bad things. He's pointing out that the way we reward people is at odds with our ethics and that we need to reconsider caring so much about a society where everyone is assumed to get their just deserts. His alternative is a bigger social safety net and some sort of societal pressure to push elites to be more ethical in both their charitable giving and their career choices. Though I totally agree that this last part has no plan of action. It's more of a sentiment or longing for a society where elites are more virtue-driven.
There are lots and lots and lots and lots of very smart people elected to higher office. Obama comes to mind immediately. Elizabeth Warren. Ted Cruz is a bad person but he's very intelligent.
Excellent point, and I mangled what I was trying to say. I meant that politics doesn't require or reward smartness in isolation, that the smartest kids don't rise to the top on their smartness. But it also doesn't hold them back as your examples illustrate. Surely you can be smart and be a successful politician, you just need lots of other skills as well. Pete Buttigeig and Andrew Yang might be good examples of politicians who succeed with smartness being their main attribute, although it's early days in their political careers.
Why is intelligence overrated relative to virtue? Because intelligence is easier to measure. How do you test if someone is ethical? Everybody knows "the right answers"; the tough thing is actually doing them. Whereas being smart is the *same thing* as knowing the right answers. I'm not sure how to test for virtue in a job interview.
The last company I worked in had a "culture interview" as part of their interview process. It shocked me with how well it worked at filtering out mild-sociopaths and jerks. I would have thought that it would be too easy to fake the right answers to simple questions about teamwork, disagreeing without being an a-hole, etc.. But apparently not! Some people can't even give a single example of a time they helped a coworker, did something for the greater good, etc...
Of course some unethical people still got through, so it wasn't perfect. And they often brought in more who were like them later. But still, just attempting to measure amount ethics seemed to help a bit.
Maybe they only filtered out the dumb sociopaths. Maybe the really good sociopaths are getting away with all kinds of shit that no one else has caught on to.
The decline of public virtue is a real problem, but I am not sure how convincingly you connect it to “meritocracy”. What is the alternative system that mitigates the problem? One could more easily imagine tweaking a meritocratic system (putting higher premium on character) in its sorting to address the issue than some other system — natural aristocracy? Marxism? Not clear what the proposal is — naturally doing so. It is obviously the case that choosing leaders exclusively on the basis of who is smartest is 1) not a great idea and 2) not really what we are doing anyway.
I don’t think Matt is arguing for a totalizing alternative, just a much greater emphasis on the social values around the common good as was the case in post-war America (admittedly only for white people at that time) or as is still (though to a lessening extent) the case with Scandinavia and East Asia.
I do think the Western world attempts to choose leaders on the basis of who is smartest. Examples: the respect for Fauci, the arguments that get made when someone is nominated for the Supreme Court, the deference to technocrats at the Fed and the military, etc. Not saying all of these are bad but the phenomenon is real.
The alternative is very hard to imagine because meritocracy is not just our system but also our paradigm. I think we can start by placing less emphasis on something/someone being the best and more on it/them being good.
I do have to challenge what you even mean by the word "meritocracy" though. You never explicitly define it, but you strongly suggest it's a system by which we effectively rank people by raw intelligence and give power and esteem to the smartest people. That's never really how I've thought of it, to the extent that anyone strives to be one. "Merit = A praiseworthy value; a virtue." So in today's system, we give undue merit to raw intelligence and not enough merit to ethics and humanistic kindness. I agree! But you can still have a meritocracy in a world where people who do the most good for others are rewarded with more power to do more good. Maybe I am weird but at the company where I work, a big, old school industrial company, "meritocracy" is thrown around a lot, and it's used to mean that "you'll get promoted based on what you accomplish, not who you know." Debatable how much we live up to that, but as much as we value raw intelligence, no one assumed that just being smart would get you promoted.
The value of the definition of the word "merit" is that it is truly democratic- it is the value that the rest of society puts on your contributions. I tend to think this is the best measure we could possibly use to structure a power hierarchy around. But I absolutely agree that the hierarchy *is too steep*- the highs are too high, the lows are too low, and it's too damn hard to move good people up and bad people down. We need to flatten the hierarchy with the egalitarian perspectives and methods you describe at the end. We also need to think objectively about what deserves merit.
The heart of the culture wars is that the two halves of our nation think different traits are "praiseworthy." Liberals praise raw intelligence, racial inclusion, and secular values. Conservatives praise minimal government, Christian ethics, and capitalist success. The tension comes because conservatives *used* to dominate the social process of deciding who deserved merit--the moral majority, values voters. Over time their cultural power has atrophied. They resent living in a "meritocracy" where they feel the wrong values are being merited with power. Your suggestion of flattening the hierarchy and making things more egalitarian would lower the stakes, which would lower the heat. I think it's also worth doing some national soul searching on what our common values are. We can't even agree on whether it's a good idea to treat people equally regardless of their race. We have a lot of work to do.
First, I agree with about 90% of your comment. I will take issue with "we can't even agree on whether it's a good idea to treat people equally regardless of their race." I believe this is a statement that 99% of people on both sides agree with, and there is little debate on this topic. When this concept is stretched from the individual to the systemic or structural is when disagreement arises. For those on the right, where I reside most of the time, the move to structural racism often seen as an attempt to force equal outcomes in all areas, rather than merely treating everyone equally. I yearn for "equality", but I do not strive for "equity".
That was a probably unnecessary dig at the subset of my fellow lefties who don’t see the disconnect from that seemingly obvious goal and their insistence on using race as a factor in deciding who to promote or empathetically listen to.
The important question isn’t whether people should be treated equally, without regard to their race, but rather whether a person’s race should influence how they experience access universal aspects of society. That’s not how we talk about things, but I sure don’t care about how anyone is “treated” but about what their experiences are as a result of their race. I’m a white guy and have literally never had anything stand in my way or negatively affect me my entire life that I didn’t deserve directly because of my actions and decisions that I had complete control over. Everyone should have that “privilege” (I use quotes since “getting what you deserve” it is very much a double-edged sword.) Maybe we don’t disagree about anything, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply there’s no disagreement on “treating people equally” when very few really understand what that actually means in practice, in the actual world we live in.
I would propose that unless you are not only white but also tall, attractive, didn't come from a poor background, athletic, extroverted, intelligent and don't speak with any accent, then you have had to overcome something that wasn't entirely due to your actions and decisions. Society (hell, humans in general) consciously or unconsciously rewards lots of things in the actual world that aren't in your control and it is up to each of us to try our darndest to look past those inalienable qualities and treat people equally.
Yep to (basically) all -- my parents were highly educated and well-off, I've been extroverted/hyper-confident since basically birth according to all who know me, ditto regarding having excelled at school, and have no discernible accent. It's true I'm a bit short and was raised Jewish, so I do take your point about having overcome some *very very very mild* obstacles, but really that's cutting it very fine. If everyone had to only overcome the very, very, very mild obstacles I have faced, I'd be totally good with that. No arguments. Until then, though, we've got a societal problem. And again -- how I/you/we treat people is almost totally irrelevant. It is how people are treated in general based on their "inalienable qualities". If people like me are treated in general in a way that is very different than some other group of people who are not like me based on each of our respective "inalienable qualities" then that is a REALLY BIG societal problem, regardless of whether individual people think it is important or correct or whatever to treat other individual people equally or fairly or whatever. The two things really have almost no relationship to each other.
Respectfully, I disagree with your last statement. The two things are inextricably linked. How society treats people in the aggregate is an amalgamation of how individuals treat individual people. I believe we can only improve the former by improving the latter.
I appreciate your respectful disagreement! I suppose I'd say that I believe the causality arrow goes the other direction -- from societal norms and aggregates to individual behavior (with the caveat that we are all sentient beings with free will and can individually choose to buck trends if we so choose, damn the consequences, but that it doesn't happen super often, IMO). Anyway, one of us if probably more right than the other, and there is probably no good way to prove it. I certainly hope we end up in the place we both are interested in getting to faster rather than slower. :)
This is what always unnerves me about the "some must suffer for the greater good" kind of arguments, made in very mild forms in liberal democracies ("this will make some people unemployed but lower consumer prices a little and the gains outweigh the losses in the aggregate"), and terrifyingly extreme versions in communist/fascist systems ("this will kill millions of peasants, but the State needs greater steel production to safeguard the revolution for the masses").
So yes -- I misspoke when I said they have no relationship. The relationship (as I believe it functions -- opposite of how you believe it functions) makes focusing on individual behavior meaningless in changing norms, to my way of thinking.
This is a flawed defense of meritocracy, in my view. I suspect from reading Matt’s post that there’s an underlying notion that one of the major flaws with meritocracy is that it promotes only those people who have been best at not making too many mistakes. You might think “hey, that’s a good thing!” The reality, however, is that a lot of people have the decks stacked against them in that regard. Things like poverty or growing up in households with parents who have addictions creative lasting cognitive issues that make people prone to fucking up the rest of their lives, for example. Rigid adherence to a system that promotes mostly those who are good at not fucking up will overwhelmingly favor those who have been fortunate to face fewer things in life that have created cognitive roadblocks, and that’s true even if you got the advantages of position caused by wealth out of the promotion mix.
The argument I see Matt making here seems pretty obvious in his “we should all be more chill” remark. We really should.
The dirtbag left will sometimes raise the basic question of "what do we do with people who are just kinda bad at stuff?" and it seems to sort of align with what you're saying. Conservative meritocracy goes "those best at making money should succeed and we don't need to change anything for people to be able to make it", liberal meritocracy goes "those with the best test scores, extracurricular activities, and academic awards should succeed and we need to make sure everyone can play the game", and neither one says what to do if you're just kind of not good at making money or passing tests. At worst it's "well, should've tried harder, now work for a pittance or starve", at best it's "here's some social insurance with a side of utter scorn and disrespect."
Yes very much that! Look, most people are average. Normal distribution and all. And most people screw up, quite a lot. A lot of people who screw up would also make perfectly fine leaders of companies, teams, nations. Because contrary to popular wisdom, there is no one right type or one consistent quality that makes someone a good worker or a good leader. The ones who fuck up might even have a little more empathy and forgiveness.
Now I’m not saying to make advancement and leadership opportunities a free-for-all in every industry, academy, or public office. But it’s often surprising who makes a good leader in different organizations or teams. I have a friend who’s a great leader of engineers, because he gained experience doing project management as an army captain. He doesn’t know shit about telecom engineering. But despite what you might think, that’s not all that important to his position. Chilling out about the concept of deservingness and merit would do us all some good.
I didn't pick up on the sentiment about forgiving mistakes; I totally agree with you. Matt's point about dumb luck almost always being a factor was spot-on. I would argue that for society to function efficiently, we need some sort of -ocracy ("theory of social organization) to streamline the decision-making process. I agree with you that "we should all be more chill" and less rigid in that, though. This is what I meant by "the highs are too high, the lows are too low, and it's too damn hard to move good people up and bad people down"- but by "good" I meant "people with the potential to help society if they were given more influence," and this includes people who've made mistakes or had bad breaks.
Egalitarianism has blended with "fairness" in a way that is pretty corrosive to virtue IMO. I make a lot of money, because I am smart, and I pay half my income in taxes. This should make me feel like a virtuous person who has contributed a lot to society (by making a lot of money) and contributed a lot to egalitarianism (by paying a lot of taxes). But the message I get from society is that I'm a sucker or a scumbag.
Sucker: Trying to (legally) pay less taxes is not socially stigmatized; if anything, it's considered "smart". I sometimes ask my more leftwing friends why they don't voluntarily pay more taxes (the US treasury accepts checks!) and IMO I don't get very good answers. Egalitarianism doesn't have a limiting principle; maybe my tax rates should be 90% instead of 50%. So there's no virtue in the high tax rates I currently pay. The best way to "win" seems talking about how the system should be more egalitarian but avoiding any personal sacrifice, and that doesn't seem like it encourages people to be virtuous.
Scumbag: egalitarianism asks a lot of the rich in a way that IMO is clearly "unfair". But people don't like that, so you end up with a lot of BS about how it's actually fair. Rich people didn't earn what they have, the only way to get rich is to be extremely unethical, "pay your fair share", "you didn't build that", success is just pure luck, etc. A healthier egalitarianism, IMO, would say "it's great that you were so successful; now we need you to help us help everyone else out". The message today is closer to "you stole your money from us; now we're gonna take it back".
I'm inclined to say that we should split the difference between egalitarianism and fairness; half of what you make you can keep, and half should go towards helping others (although I'm not convinced "helping others" should be the same as "paying taxes"; I'm a lot happier with the money I send to charity than the money I send to taxes)
Interesting perspective — and one I’m basically inclined to agree with. Two (real) questions, though: regarding “fairness,” should everyone get to keep half, or would you admit that there is some lower bound below which one can’t really afford to help others at all (or as much)? The thing about the hierarchy of needs seems to apply here, no? Second — lots of charitable giving isn’t very productive (even though it might make the giver and recipient feel pretty great). How would it work in practice to “help others” through charity in a way that actually “helped others.”
1) Yes, everyone. If you were really distributing half the resources in an egalitarian way, everyone would have enough to afford to help others. The US is a pretty rich country!
2) Lots of government spending isn't very productive either! I'm extremely confident that my donations to https://www.givewell.org/ do more good than most government spending. But I do agree with you that a lot of time and money is spent trying to "help others" in a way that doesn't really do that; not sure governments are better at it than charities to be honest, and I'm not sure what to do about it.
Fundamental to the legitimacy of meritocracy is the implicit belief that our intelligence/parents/etc are a gift from God, and so we deserve what comes from them. Once you replace “God” with “luck”, as Matt had shown here it quickly becomes obvious that this is a total BS system.
Wow, I think that's completely wrong. The legitimacy of meritocracy is wholly based on rewarding those who contribute the most. Beneficiaries of meritocracy may believe their talents were a gift from God, although I think that's a very small percent at this point. They probably believe it's luck mixed with a lot of hard work, which is why they deserve more than similarly talented people who didn't do anything with their talents. A well functioning meritocracy doesn't reward people for inherent advantages, it rewards people for using those advantages productively.
It's an anecdote, meaning it's one isolated story. As an alternative anecdote I could say that the scientist who invented the covid vaccine was really smart, so meritocracy is great! Neither is convincing.
true. there are a lot of such anecdotes. a well-functioning meritocracy is like the true socialist society. it exists only in theory and in practice can be used to justify lots of perverse outcomes.
I'm not sure the argument is that they deserve more. At least not for me.
I would say the argument FOR meritocracy is that:
1) Growth/Technological Advance/Progress is good.
2) As a gross approximation, You get better progress with more skilled people in charge (this can include people skills, intelligence, whatever - but things we'd call 'merit')
3) Rewarding higher skilled people _in_ growth industries with better rewards encourages them to do those things, which is good for society.
That means that if you genetically/environmentally luck into a solid education and high IQ (or whatever merit you want to define) then you'll get rewarded more, because that, up to a point, is good for society.
And I think those broad strokes are true, although there's lots of room for nuance in there.
1) There _are_ jobs where being 10% smarter than someone else may make a HUGE difference, but this doesn't apply to every job.
2) Not every job that rewards very smart people is super socially productive. The financial industry as a whole is useful - I'm not so sure that finding tiny improvements at the top to maximize your firm's usage of financial markets is.
3) We could vastly be overrewarding the top end - maybe we're paying 20x for something we could be paying 1.5x for.
So it's not that smart people "deserve" more, but systems that reward them more have some alignment of incentives to outcomes. That doesn't mean the current system has everything set up right.
First and foremost, they don't unless they put their talents to use. And the meritocratic system is the best one we've come up with to incentivize people to cure pandemics, reduce global warming etc etc. Our system is far from perfect, and if I could start all over I'd have a welfare system that focuses overwhelmingly on children, ensuring they have access to the best education, nutrition, healthcare etc. It's genuinely scary to think of all the talent that just gets tossed away because we leave large sections of our society to rot from neglect.
No, meritocracy is legitimized by the idea that you want competent people doing things, so that things go right instead of wrong. If I have to get a surgery, I want to get it from the guy who got straight A's at Harvard, not the guy who got straight C's in community college. So does everyone else, which is why the Harvard doctor is the one getting all the money. Beyond that, we want to incentivize other smart people to be doctors, because they'll be better doctors and society will be better off for it.
That is not to say Meritocracy doesn't have failure modes (like the nursing home example) or loop holes, but it is to say that your "gift from god" argument is a straw man, or at least the weakest possible argument you could make for meritocracy.
Not to go all Resistancey, but I really do think Trump is a dumbass, at least according to our meritocratic standards. E.g., if you stuck him in a room with a bunch of freshmen at Yale to debate the Fourth Amendment, they'd run circles around him, because he almost certainly has no idea what the Fourth Amendment is. The success in his career you cited was more so due to his willing to be shameless, and his similarly shameless business associates and lawyers willing to tackle the details. I see Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley as more representative of your point--guys who are technically very smart, probably got much higher LSAT scores than I did, but who suck because they are bad
Trump is so dumb that he saw a new path to winning the White House and won one of the biggest election surprises ever. I don't agree with most of Trump's policies but he was a lot smarter politically than Clinton or Obama (who wasted two years' of one-party rule on small potatoes).
Obama and Clinton were both very smart at getting elected, just as Trump was, and they also managed to romp to re-election. Where they foundered was in getting stuff done in office...yet Obama’s record in that regard was clearly better than Trump’s (see Obamacare, which is not at all small potatoes). And of course Trump had every opportunity to turn COVID into a strong re-election campaign, but was constitutionally incapable of doing so.
It's an interesting definitional question. Would the Yale freshmen actually run circles around him? They would certainly know far more than he did, and would be orders of magnitude more articulate, but in all likelihood Trump would just talk over them, or throw them off with emotionally charged non-sequiturs and insults. Maybe that would be losing according to the formal rules of debate, but would he really be losing if it furthered some other goals beyond the debate stage? Does being really good at playing politics make you "smart," or is that the wrong word to use?
The United States is not as meritocratic as you think it is. The United States is not exactly Singapore. For example, if the Ivy Leagues were to accept students based only on what their grades and SAT scores are,a ton of the students who are currently enrolled in them would not have been able to get in. Imagine if Harvard were to get rid of legacy admissions and affirmative action.
Very few people who get into the country's top schools aren't very bright. They may not be wise. They may not be virtuous. But the vast majority are bright and hardworking.
I think Harvard would claim they are more meritocratic (with exception of small number of legacies and royalty) and that they do a better job of it by considering non-test-score forms of merit along with the life circumstances of the student.
There’s some truth in this, also some BS, but I think all the critiques of meritocracy apply to either case.
I'd like to know more about the mechanics of how Ivy Leagues churn out successful people. Do they pick people with better networks and supports? Do they provide better networks for people who are admitted? Is it actually the case that they provide a superior intellectual education?
Almost all the students at Harvard are qualified to be there. It just happens that there are probably 10x as many students also qualified who are not there. BUT, importantly, it doesn't seem to matter much in the end: https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
"However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. "
I love this study because I feel like I lived it. I could have gone to an Ivy but didn't for...reasons. And yet, I still turned out pretty well, perhaps even better (well, who can know).
more meritocratic compared to just sorting students by test score and going down the list.
Harvard’s admissions office would definitely claim that the way they do affirmative action is more meritocratic than not doing it, for instance. I tend to agree.
Nope. If the Ivies were to use only school grades and SAT scores, what would happen is that there would be a significant increase of white students from non-affluent backgrounds and an even greater increase of Asian students.
there’s a circularity where you’re assuming that test scores are the only way to evaluate merit and measure it reliably for every student.
i hate to find myself arguing on behalf of the Ivy League admissions system, which is bad and quite corrupt. I just think it’s not worse than pure standardized testing.
Girls do better than boys when it comes to school grades, but boys do better than girls in the SAT tests. An example that I like to use is that I was barely a B student in high school, while my sister was an A student, but I ended up doing better than her in the SAT.
right but due to the advantages of their upbringing some of those legacies would have gotten in on merit (and probably did get in to other elite schools where they aren’t legacies).
It's been a while since I thought about this work, so I don't want to claim it's perfect. But they concluded that "Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."
The “as you think it is” is doing way too much work in this comment. One of the disconnects here is that people seem not to realize how big a shift there was some time around the mid-80s in How Things Work when it comes to college admissions and entrance to other elite circles. I’m about Matt’s age and graduated from a fancy prep school in New Jersey, which to me was an interesting vantage point to see this phenomena play out in real time. At the time that my peers’ parents were graduating from high school (the mid-to-late 70s), roughly half of the graduates of our school went to Princeton, while the other half went to a bunch of other elite schools (Penn, Amherst, whatever). I’m not exaggerating to say that Princeton’s reunions were a major social event for my middle school because so many people went with their parents every year.
Fast forward to the early aughts and our very fancy and well regarded prep school sent maybe 20% of its class every year to ivy-plus institutions. That’s a huge number, and the very top boarding schools (a la the recent Atlantic piece) do a little bit better than we did, but it still meant that we had literally dozens of students every year who would have been the third or fourth generations of their respective families to go to some particular Ivy League school and did not get in (there’s a joke here about the existence of these students being Tuft’s and Elon’s business models). But that’s what happens when Harvard & Co. go from reserving 80% of their class for legacies to only 20%. That is not to say that we did not have some marginally qualified grads that went off to Harvard or Princeton, I can think of at least two off the top of my head, but the reason I can recall them is that their acceptance into schools that they didn’t quite seem smart enough to get into was notable and widely discussed around the school. And of course in both cases it turned out that the student in question came from a family that was Fuck You Rich instead of Normal Rich like the rest of us (i.e. their family could donate a building, not just afford tuition and kick in a few thousand dollars to the annual campaign).
I wonder if the lesson that a lot of people my generation and just before took from this whole state of affairs was not “well that’s good, we’ve made things open and fair” bur rather “I guess being normal rich isn’t enough, I’ve got to figure out how to get some fuck you money” so that they could either donate a building to Columbia or else set their kid up with a large enough trust fund that it wouldn’t matter whether they got into a good school. And thus we get to a place where it’s no longer good enough for your average banker or lawyer or CEO to make half a million dollars per year, secure in the knowledge that their children will go to the same school and get that same job, they need to make much, much more money than that, the consequences for everyone else be damned.
I have a theory I developed in high school academic competitions where public schools competed against private schools on a regular basis. The kids from private schools weren't all that much better than the teams from public schools. I call it the Top 100 rule. The top 100 students at a private school with an enrollment of 400 aren't going to be any better than the top 100 students from a public school with a 2000 student enrollment. This "Rule" is adaptable to a wide variety of endeavors.
The limits of meritocracy are also evident in the old joke:
Q. What do you call the person who graduated last from their medical school?
A. Doctor.
Beyond a certain threshold of minimum competency there is little marginal value in creating more and more exclusive categories.
Yeah from my experience those small private schools don't have any advantage in having smarter kids, but they have very few students who would fall into the bottom third of a school of 2000
"But the benefits of an egalitarian economic order are clear, real, and don’t fundamentally hinge on the idea that Nadal or anyone else did anything “unfair” to get where they are."
That really hits the nail on the head. I honestly can't name a single person I've met who favored a significant redistributionist state but also acknowledged that people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos got rich because they actually provide a lot of value to society; literally all of them have some contrived story to tell themselves and others that those fellows somehow stole their fortunes.
The utilitarian insight "The marginal dollar taken out of Nadal’s hands and given to someone in need will greatly increase human flourishing" is a very, very, very good reason to support redistribution, but leftism really is a politics of envy and resentment while compassion and care are incidental at best.
Would you accept the following formulation: people like Bezos have provided value, but not nearly as much as they have reaped in rewards? I've omitted Zuckerberg because I think it a charitable view to say that the jury's still out on whether Facebook does more harm than good.
I accept this! I would submit that if we had a system were Bezos could build Amazon and be worth $90 billion instead of his actual $180 billion, his behavior would have been no different.
I'm still digesting this piece, but I feel like there is a bit of a baby/bathwater thing going on. Ethics is undoubtably important, and you are right to draw more attention to it. But meritocratic sorting (as defined here) is *also* useful.
>>What I’d like to see even more is for Michael Sandel to teach at a community college.
This would likely be incredibly inefficient. The students at a community college will (presumably) get much less benefit from Sandel compared to an average professor there as well as compared to students at Harvard. In fact, it might even be much worse, as the skills required of a community college professor are much different than those required of a Harvard professor (I don't know Sandel, maybe he would rise to the occasion).
>>The really “in” thing to do could be to found new research centers in struggling communities.
Who is going to staff these centers if not people drafted from around the country for their merit?
I'd like to know more re: "The students at a community college will (presumably) get much less benefit from Sandel compared to an average professor there as well as compared to students at Harvard."
Based on the next sentence, I think you're speaking more to a professor's competencies and the need to tailor instruction to the needs of your students, but I don't want to discount the possibility that you're saying community college students are too stupid to understand Sandel's ideas.
I think there could be some depth to his lessons that will be under-appreciated in a community college? I don't want to overstate this point as it applies to him specifically.
I'm just drawing from experience in math and science, where the students at community colleges need more help on basic concepts that prevent the class from reaching more advanced topics. It may not map so cleanly onto political science.
A rare Slow Boring post I mostly don't agree with!
I think your argument works for some jobs. There are easily hundreds of people who could be competent Supreme Court justices. Within that universe it probably makes sense to pick justices based on ideology, demographic representation, and other criteria other than raw intelligence. The same might be true of New York Times columnists.
But I think it's clearly good for the world that a bunch of the world's smartest programmers work at Google rather than doing IT support at a local bank. I think a team of programmers drawn from the 99th percentile of the intelligence distribution are going to produce dramatically better software than programmers drawn from the 90th or 60th percentile.
I'm not an expert on other fields, but I suspect that (for example) the same is true of vaccine science. I'll bet America's meritocratic institutions helped pull together a dream team of vaccine scientists that enabled us to produce several covid vaccines in a matter of weeks. It's hard to say exactly which part of America's talent pipeline are important for getting talented people the opportunities and resources to succeed, but it seems to work pretty well and it seems foolish to dismiss it too readily.
At the same time it's obviously true that some extremely smart people behave in sociopathic ways and that's bad. But it's not obvious to me that that has anything in particular to do with those people being smart. It seems like average-intelligence people are just as capable of being greedy and indifferent to the suffering of others.
At one point you say you want a smart doctor but you don't want a shrewd doctor, which I think is true. But these just seem like different things to me. I don't think there's any particular reason to think the most talented surgeons are more likely to have either the ability or the inclination to steer their patients toward unnecessary services. The main thing you need to do that is low ethical standards—I'm not sure you even have to be particularly intelligent to figure out how to do it.
Let me try to be clear about this:
— I'm not against companies hiring smart people for jobs where that's important.
— Nor am I denying that smart people (scientists especially) do important things for society.
What I am saying is that it is wrong to look at the problems in American society as primarily reflecting *failures* of meritocracy that could be improved by making things more meritocratic.
For example, I think we should fight less about who gets to go to Yale and fight more about why Yale gets so much more material resources than Gateway Community College.
And I think we should have applauded harder in favor of Google's old-timey effort to make "Don't Be Evil" a foundational principle of culture, and been sad when they abandoned it. The effort to inculcate a corporate culture of virtue was really important and praiseworthy and it's a sad thing for America that it was dropped rather than becoming a thing where people asked why other companies couldn't also aspire to reach that standard.
Maybe you shouldn't have titled it "Meritocracy is bad" then.
Agreed on the "Don't Be Evil" bit - we should 100% do more of that!
On the Yale vs Gateway Community College comment, though, if you're going to make this argument you need to have some sense that the resources put to GCC do more *for society*.
If we're agreed that you could tax a Yale grad to support a welfare state and also agreed that we should have a culture (corporate and otherwise) that supports virtue and punishes bad actors that find holes in the legal system, it's no longer enough to say that the GCC grad's life will be helped more by additional investment in their college. It might well be the case that we want to add resources to get that Yale biochem lab over the hump and create a new mRNA vaccine production process, or even just support them as part of support into basic research.
This is part of what people mean when they say "meritocracy" - we should try to put society's resources (not just people) where the resources will be most productive, and then we can cut each other into small pieces about allocating the outputs afterwards.
Do you believe that "elites" in the past were more virtuous? That was the impression I got from your post.
Completely agree about company values. Firms have overlapping responsibilities to shareholders, employees, customers, community, society-at-large. 'Operate to max shareholder value' is crazy as end-all be-allIMO--just don't think that's actually accurate in the same way that 'people act only in their self-interest' is not accurate or desirable. More complex than that and you need values.
Problem I have with the 'don't focus on Yale admissions' vibe is that a) it is rational to place emphasis on getting into these institutions because they offer real, observable rewards to those that get in, ie your odds of landing that entry job at Google/the NYTimes are much higher for same intelligence at Yale vs. QPac, b) the argument to give more resources to Gateway College doesn't do anything to solve the differences in rewards--is it really that Yale has more resources or that it is a very powerful brand? So the argument seems to end up as a deflection of legitimate concerns that these real pathways to success are in fact largely 'captured' by the exising elite class (the income distribution of students at these schools is striking).
I think a lot of the point is that there shouldn't be such a jackpot effect related to getting into Yale.
Right now, successful elite school applicants get the substantial benefit of a great education and being on the shortlist for high-prestige jobs that some of them may crave, and ALSO a guarantee to those that don't land the highly-visible jobs that they will be rewarded with staggeringly high earnings potential relative to their peers that decided to attend state schools because they are now able to participate in the cartel of workers who hold Yale degrees.
Ya I completely agree, and agree with where Matt goes with expanding admissions. I was sort of arguing with people who go to the 'don't focus on Yale focus on resources etc. for people' as a way to resist changes to Yale, etc. system. People from elite colleges I know who are quite progressive turn out to be surprisingly resistant to points about unfairness baked into Ivy League. 'We shouldn't reduce brand value of Harvard...it's really a slipperly slope when you start meddling with private institutions' are actual quotes from progressive millenials I know on this topic. So breaking this cartel effect (reducing brand value) should explicitly be our goal I think, so that the whole thing is less of a big deal. I just don't see how you do that by only sending money to Ohio State and leaving Ivy League unchanged.
Just to add to this, I know a guy* who went the no-name-iest schools I can imagine for undergrad (it might not even exist anymore). But he took advantage of what opportunity he had, and he eventually parlayed it into a good Physics PhD. Now he's on Wall Street making a half mil a year as a quant. Wait - did I just prove Matt's thesis?! :D
*I'm not that guy. I only sometimes wish I was.
It's not that it's impossible, it's about overall distribution of opportunity and clear 'spoils' to the elite schools. I know a black guy who worked hard and became president...but, uh, that doesn't dispel the idea that black people are disadvantaged in this country.
Is there really a jackpot effect? I love citing this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
"However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. "
Sorting for ability doesn't stop at 18.
It's annoying, but I guess I'd say that the perception of the jackpot effect is the main thing- it's the mechanism that maintains Yale's exclusivity, and that exclusivity plays into the hyper-lucrative positions that tend to go to people from fancy universities.
As Matt suggests, it's reasonable to think that Yale is good at identifying smart students that will have a lot of earning potential regardless, and because of the jackpot perception they select from a pool of already very promising people. Presumably substantially beefing up the quality of Gateway university grads will reduce the power that Yale has just by making the Ivy imprimatur less valuable.
I definitely agree that perception of elite universities is itself a problem, although I wonder if this is field specific. In the sciences, while I certainly know good people at the Ivies, I don't think of the schools as *significantly* better than others.
I haven't looked through this paper, but does it operationalize "college selectivity" by taking 12 top places and comparing them to everywhere else, or by taking 100 top places and comparing them to everywhere else, or by looking at a ranking and seeing if there's any sort of linear relationship? If the jackpot effect is present only at 10 or 20 small places, then it will be hidden in anything that looks at a much bigger pool (and will also be less important than effects that hit a much bigger population).
Good question! They say "Each college’s average SAT score and Barron’s index of college selectivity (as reported in the 1978 and 1992 Barron’s guides) was linked to student’s responses to the questions concerning the schools they applied to. Because there were only one or two colleges in some categories of the Barron’s index (particularly for the 1989 cohort), we represent the index with a continuous variable. The schools in our sample ranged from “Competitive” (coded a 2 on our continuous measure) to “Most Competitive” (coded a 5 on our continuous measure). "
This does highlight a potential criticism in that it's a retrospective study, so one could certainly claim that things have changed a lot since then. It's also worth pointing out that
"There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents’ education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics."
In fact, that (big) exception may jibe better with this interesting paper about Texas's top 10% rule, which find, if not a jackpot, at least a benefit for students from underrepresented high schools to getting into a better university: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26821/w26821.pdf
I guess if I were to *actually* formulate a coherent thought, I would say that getting into a highly ranked school could be the break that some students need to move up, but for many others it's not especially beneficial (and I speculate that legacies are a big part of the latter group). Speaking from my own experience, grad school was that "break" for me, as opposed to my non-selective undergrad institution.
I agree with all of that.
Matt did not argue smart people behave worse than non smart people. The argument is that meritocracies only optimize for “smarts”, while ignoring ethical behavior. If you ignore something, you obviously don’t get as much of it as you would when you optimize for it.
Exactly this. A system that optimizes exclusively for smarts will reward bad actors.
That's not the same as saying that smart people are bad actors per se.
I am unsure there's a good solution for fighting nefarious actors. One thing I will agree with, and potentially add on, is that intellectual capacity is easily measured, moral capacity is not. One thing I absolutely agree with, and wish society would take to heart is your comment on business purely existing for profits. I do not agree with this, and will never agree with it. If government could legislate this away, I'd do it today.
This is indeed a tricky issue, and I suspect that extracurriculars and volunteer work started to get more attention because they were a measure of personal ethics or a community spirit of some sort. Of course, once that became known, every ambitious student started to load up on extracurriculars and so broke the measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
Yes, but many of our systems (like college admissions) don't optimize exclusively for smarts.
I would even go so far as to say that barely any system optimizes for smarts alone or even primarily. One reason is that it's really hard to measure "smarts". Even Matt in his argument uses a proxy for it (quality of questions). It is a good proxy, but it's not perfect by any means.
Most systems optimize for some convoluted mess of parameters. Interesting examples would be the tennis players mentioned by Matt (talent, hard work, strategic thinking, etc), clergy (no idea what it optimizes for, not exclusively smarts), military (a lot of parameters also).
Another question is, what society as a whole optimizes for. Here I would argue that measurability matters a lot, so financial parameters (easy to measure, very objective) end up important vs. ethical behavior (hard to measure and subjective).
"But I think it's clearly good for the world that a bunch of the world's smartest programmers work at Google rather than doing IT support at a local bank".
That is not the tradeoff though. The problem is that the smartest programmers in the US are working at Google rather than teaching other people to program. Whats worse is that at Google they aren't even working on particularly important problems - Google's won a couple of winner take all markets, and the ad business in particular throws off a lot of money. So Google can pay people stupid amounts of money to do not particularly valuable things. Because our society is designed around the smartest people making the most money, the smartest programmers in general take the money (One told me that they thought it would be immoral given their family, etc not to!) and then are miserable. Google (and Facebook, and... finance in general) are sucking a significant portion of intellectual capital of the US into mediocre bullshit because they can.
I think Matt's argument is that a sense of honor or rightness should counter this merit-money linkage resulting in bad social outcomes. I think a more straightforward (and complementary) approach would be to tax the loot. Right now you could make twice the amount or more at Google/Facebook vs. a college professorship. It's hard for someone to do the right thing for society given that payoff. But if it were closer to 50% more because taxes would eat up the extra - perhaps more people would choose to keep their souls.
FWIW, I'm a programmer and I deliberately took a lower salary, higher QoL job. I think it's a real perk of making enough money that you can afford to be choosy. But it definitely wasn't an easy choice at the time.
Using the Supreme Court as your example here is frankly weird. Do people think that we choose justices now based on raw intelligence, because that has pretty clearly not been the case for quite some time.
It's also strange because law (and indeed the Court) is one of relatively few areas that was meritocratic long before the rest of upper class society was (the same is true of "the professions" more broadly, but being the business owner's lawyer or accountant has never been half as lucrative as being the business owner). There's a reason we had two Jewish justices long before non-WASPs started showing up in large numbers in congress and corporate board rooms. The second of those, Cardozo, is a universally heralded figure and really was picked for the Court not because of any particular ideological or political reason but because he was regarded as a generational legal talent and there was a sense that it would be absurd if he never became a justice. That would obviously not happen today, not least because it would be seen as wildly irresponsible to appoint someone to the Court who was already in his 60s.
I'm just saying that the Supreme Court is an example of an elite job where raw intelligence isn't the most important factor. I'm not making a claim about whether we do or don't choose justices based on intelligence today.
Yeah, if you talk to fancy appellate lawyers in private, a good number of them are pretty dismissive of Justice Sotomayor's legal talent. I'm not saying that's true.* But even if it was true, it doesn't stop Sotomayor from being a better justice than e.g. Kavanaugh and Roberts, who many fancy appellate lawyers deeply respect.
Descriptively this is also obviously true--Richard Posner was never a plausible SCOTUS candidate because he had too many wild opinions for both parties, but many would consider him smartest judge of the last few decades.
*I'm sure most of it is that elite appellate lawyers generally grew up very wealthy and are notoriously snobby about credentials, especially clerkships, and Sotomayor grew up underprivileged and worked instead of clerking.
I have to interject here. There is no way that law or the judiciary could be considered meritocratic until quite recently. There’s a reason for the saying “a judge is a lawyer who knows a politician” When did the ABA start rating judges?
For most of our history, law was an undemanding profession that the scions of the wealthy played at, when they were in fact living on family money. Newland Archer in Age of Innocence is *exactly* a representation of this class. The highest-status firms provided landing places for people waiting their next turn at the political wheel (come to think of it, they do this today).
Judges like Cardozo who were selected for their legal talent are outliers in past history. For every John Marshall or Oliver Wendell Holmes there were many, many other Federal judges who were just straight-out political appointees, with very little to recommend them other than breeding, connections and loyalty. They were not chosen for talent, and they were not expected to be talented.
It is easy to recognize judges who are too smart by half, but have no humanity.
I think we should expand the scope in which we discuss meritocracy. Sure, you may find that the spread of doctors with good vs. bad intentions are roughly the same between the most academically talented and the moderately talented, so why not go for the best ones? But to become a doctor in the first place requires passing decades of merit-based exams, admissions to prestigious schools, etc etc. If we "chilled" with the absurdly high requirements (both intelligence and cost-wise) at all level of prestigious schooling, could we then get more doctors in general who are compassionate / have higher moral standards, who otherwise would not have made it because they weren't the BEST at school?
Similarly, I work in IT as well, and I can tell you that the B- student who can communicate effectively and care about their co-workers is infinitely better than a A+ programmer who can't communicate what they are doing or is socially incompetent. Matt's point is not that the smartest people should be more evenly distributed into other industries / fields that don't value their work, but that there are people (yes, even in the 60th percentile) who could be invaluable to a team or company because of other intangible qualities, and that we just currently ignore them because we insist on the A+ programmer.
The episode "Puzzle Rush" from Malcom Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast is a prime example of this, were the absurdly tight time limit arbitrarily rewards students who are fast at taking tests (the LSAT), and disregard the otherwise equally competent students who simply are slow at taking standardized tests.
That's why I wish Matt had defined what he means by "meritocracy". By the definition I normally apply, it simply means the people who are best suited to the job advance- it's not simply an IQ test where the smartest people win with nothing else taken into account. To use your example, under a meritocracy the B- student who can communicate effectively and is therefore "infinitely better" at their job should be the one who is more successful than the one who is a better programmer but fails miserably at all the other aspects of the job. Those other aspects of the job also matter! Under a meritocracy, it's the people who are best at the job who advance, not the ones who are best at a very small subset of relevant characteristics. Matt seemed to be defining meritocracy as simply "if you're the smartest then you get the farthest", but that's a VERY narrow definition of the term that ignores a huge swath of other incredibly relevant and important abilities. Without a working definition included, it was a very bizarre article to read IMHO.
I think Matt avoided a semantic discussion about "meritocracy" on purpose because we all kind of know what it implies. As Berne Brown says, "you don't always need to know where the line is, to know that something is over the line". We don't need to know exactly what a perfect meritocratic measure would look like if it takes into consideration ethics and what not, but we all know that companies consistently take the shortcut by imposing high GPA requirements just for a chance to be interviewed. The point is that we are all very aware of these shortcuts that we justify as "meritocratic", and we should work on fixing them bit by bit, even just as experimentations, rather than go in circles about what the *ideal* model of meritocracy would be.
Pretty sure we’d be better off if there wasn’t such an easy way for the best people in tech to get lifetime sinecures.
I don't know what you mean by this.
Google absorbs a large quantity of talent in this sector. This talent usually ends up cycling into some form of internal infrastructure production. Rather than providing new products or innovations, it largely makes Google slightly more efficient. One of the most brilliant people I've ever known spent a decade doing cache and scheduling optimization before I lost contact with them. This was undoubtedly useful because adding a few extra operations per millisecond really adds up at Google. But the world was out whatever else that person could have achieved, which was, by nature, probably not incremental improvement to the Linux kernel.
I think you’re underrating the value of making Google/computers slightly more efficient. Saving tens of millions of dollars of computer time is pretty great.
This just motivates the question of what you’re doing to delete a petabyte of server logs (actual job that produces millions with a button push) versus whatever your plans for the weekend are.
Saving millions of dollars of computer time is not as easy as pushing a button. Deleting logs more often wouldn’t do it, and anyway that could easily be automated.
Work/life/leisure balance is a tough question.
All those Linux kernel improvements are public and used by other people, companies, researchers, etc. That's very much a contributing to the commons best case.
The vast, vast majority of code written at Google, Facebook, etc is never released to the open-source community. In part because it only applies to their internal infrastructure.
I wouldn’t trade the rest of my existence for incremental improvements to the Linux kernel even though I could make a hard-nosed case that literally every person should be doing that. None of us would and the world in which we pursue this optimization is not recognizable to us as good.
That's fine though, no one is forcing you to? There is a need for people to do good work on boring infrastructure. There really aren't that many people doing that kind of core, bottom of the stack work, even at Google-most people work on stuff much closer to the products that people use.
While there is a gap between the underlying capabilities of modern computer hardware and what is delivered to the application, it's not huge. Put another way, if we focused all our time on improving Linux, we might get 25% improvement in efficiency, not 2x or 10x or anything like that.
It's not a bad thing to do, but it won't solve any real problems facing us today
Exactly! I'd just add that making Google (or Facebook or Amazon) infrastructure slightly more efficient is the best case scenario. There's just a ton of super smart people working on rebranding Google Meet to Hangouts to Chat to Duo and creating Google Plus or working on AI ethics (in a place that makes it impossible to raise interesting questions about it).
Google actually intentionally produces lots of makework (like releasing five chat apps at once and rewriting all internal libraries every few years) and combined with their habit of hiring everyone who sounds cool to hire - what is Vint Cerf doing there? - it looks like the strategy is just to waste everyone’s time so they won’t leave and start competitors to the ad business.
Right! To economists though the combination of adwords making lots of money and Vint Cerf working at Google looks like Vint is being extremely productive.
Google employs tens of thousands of programmers. You can't employ tens of thousands of above average people. By definition, when you employ that many programmers they are, despite the hype about tough interview questions, average programmers on average. At Google's scale, it makes sense to employ someone who knows how to, e.g., perform some optimization that will cut 0.1% off the budget for servers, since that translates to millions of dollars per year, but employing a handful of long tail super-programmers doesn't really change the fact that most Googlers are just sort of okay programmers who are good at some stuff, bad at other stuff, and mostly just average. We can see this reflected in their products. A lot of their products are just okay! Is Chrome OS changing the world? Well, it has a successful niche in education and low cost computing, but I don't think we'll see the equivalent of Folklore.org to recount the glories of the wonder years of Chrome OS someday… That's fine!
Obviously it's impossible for every Google programmer is in the 99th percentile. But I bet that the median Google programmer is well above the median talent level for the profession as a whole.
I can believe that Google aggressively weeds out programmers in the bottom quartile of programmers overall, which pushes the mean up, but there's just no mathematical way to shift the talent mode away from the middle. You just can't hire tens of thousands of people and not have your mode in the same place as everyone else.
Probably we should just leave it there unless someone with relevant evidence can add some empirical rigor to our speculation.
I don't know about that. It's not like they employ 30 or 50% of all programmers in the USA. All of silicon valley might not employ 50% of all programmers. It's pretty reasonable to imagine that they take a vastly disproportionate amount of the top talent, and they IT team at, say, a local health network of hospitals does not.
Disappointed that someone as smart as Timothy B Lee (who wrote good stories at Vox, like 'Don't read intelligence documents by cellphone light') is writing this comment that seems like he put minimal brain cycles into it.
When intelligence is aimed at a bad goal (like reducing transparency in programmatic systems, say, as Google has made a huge profit in doing) it is more effective than when stupidity is aimed at a bad goal.
Thanks for the kind words about my work!
"I think a team of programmers drawn from the 99th percentile of the intelligence distribution are going to produce dramatically better software than programmers drawn from the 90th or 60th percentile."
Possibly, but it matters what other characteristics and especially values those people have. I would much rather have a programmer at the 95th percentile of the intelligence distribution who has a system of morality that says "there are limits on how clever a solution can be if that solution will hurt people" than one at the 99th percentile who is an absolute garbage sack of a demon person when it comes to morality, and has no problem hurting people to optimize something if they can get away with it.
The complaint is that the system as it stands generally underweights ethics relative to intelligence and academic achievement, and that society in general would be better off if more focus were put on whether people will do the right thing when there is a cost to doing so, than whether they can absolutely bleed things dry in search of the business-optimal outcome.
Sure, morality is important. I just don't see any reason to think there's a sharp tradeoff between morality and talent. Most people (talented and otherwise) want to behave ethically, and most people (especially talented ones) are capable of behaving ethically given the right institutional environment. I don't know exactly why many American institutions have developed amoral cultures, but I don't see any evidence that's driven by excessive meritocracy.
Maybe it's just me, but this argument feels muddy. It seems like your suggestion for answering a structural question (should smart people rise to the top) is with a cultural statement (we should value honesty and character), and I'm not even sure how one can actually even bring about such a change. I definitely agree that our cultural desperately needs to get its values in order, I'm just having trouble seeing why that would be mutually exclusive with meritocracy.
For one thing, smarter people are better at getting things done than less intelligent people. Even if Joe Biden may not be as book smart, he's still smart enough to surround himself with smart experts, all of whom got to where they were by being smarter than their competitors. I realize the fundamental paradox that a smart evil person can do more damage than a dumb evil person, but it's also true that a smart good person can do more good than a dumb good person. Our goal should be optimizing for good and smart, but it seems this piece is saying we should be trying for good instead of smart, and I'm just not seeing how the two ideas are connected.
I agree. It's a good article, but a little muddy. I count at least four different questions that are getting blended together:
1) Who gets to make decisions.
2) Who gets paid.
3) Who do we value in society.
4) How do we decide who gets limited opportunities.
Everyone agrees that we shouldn't automatically equate having a lot of money, or fame, or a title with being a good person, and that we should have some sense of value which is independent from social status.
I think most people agree that it's better for social status to go to people who "deserve" it rather than people who don't, and then argue about what it means to "deserve" it (this is the version of arguing against meritocracy without being able to see outside it -- just trying to shuffle the meaning of "deserve."
Finally there's a third dimension of how much power/money/social status should the top performs get. How do we feel about tournament style outcomes vs a more egalitarian and less competitive structure.
Trying to balance these different concerns which produce very different moral intuitions is tricky. The post is an interesting prompt, but I don't think it helps sort through those questions.
I really like this comment. It clearly organizes the questions we should be asking and in doing so explains why the article felt unclear.
I feel like you've set up a sort of tautology here - you're defining "smart" as being whatever intellectual attribute leads to success.
I think the point Matt is trying to make is that intelligence is a real trait, a trait that matters, and one we are good at measuring. But intelligence, while helpful, is not the primary driver of outcomes in many scenarios.
Instead of thinking in terms of a smart/dumb/good/bad matrix, it might be more productive to think of intelligence, honesty, kindness, determination, and bravery as ALL mattering in various situations. In this model, intelligence is a positive trait, but just one among several. The important thing is to match people to their particular competencies rather than focusing on sorting people into a strict hierarchy based on just one trait.
First of all, I'm not really talking about "intelligence" per se, but merit/competence. No one thinks professional athletes get paid more because they are smart, but we all call it meritocracy because we know they are still paid more for being better. And it's not a tautology, because there are alternatives. For example, you could select randomly, or based on pedigree or personal connections. The last two were the only way people got important jobs before people started calling for meritocracy.
But I take your point. Would it be fair to say that the argument simplifies to something like "we should select for competence *and* character?" If so, then it sounds like the title should be "meritocracy is not enough" as opposed to "meritocracy is bad." And I would agree with that completely. But, even then, I would add that selecting for character is far easier said than done, and I still haven't seen any explanation of how that would look in practice.
The more I think about it, the more I think the real issue is in the obsession with ranking people and the fierce competition to rise into a small elite. The problem is that, by making the competition so fierce, we justify oversized rewards to the handful of people who manage to win the competition. If you have to work your tail off through your entire childhood and young adult life, and orient your whole existence towards a specific model of success, you are naturally going to feel entitled to reap the rewards of all that hard work, even if those rewards come at the expense of others.
The current highly competitive system is very good at finding aggressive competitors and elevating them to positions of power. In sports, this is exactly what we want. But in society as a whole, it may be better to find ways in which less competitive people can still find their way into positions of genuine importance.
If meritocracy is nothing but "people who are good at something should be the ones doing that thing" then yeah, meritocracy is obviously good. But our current ideology of meritocracy is focused more on cranking up the dial on competition and letting the survivors reap the rewards. This leads to a ruling class optimized for winning competitive games rather than a ruling class optimized for solving important problems.
That's an interesting take. So what do we do to make the stakes lower? There are still going to need to be doctors, and politicians, and engineers, and doctors still need to be highly competent, and politicians are still going to wield incredible power.
For doctors, I think the answer is obvious - increase the number of residencies and med school slots so a larger number of the people who want to be doctors can do it. We should also look at making everything cheaper and more subsidized so people don't have to take out crazy loans. We could also do what a lot of other countries do and let people go to med school straight out of high school instead of making them get a four-year degree before going into medicine.
Engineering and tech are actually in an okay spot, IMO - there is a ton of demand for those skills, so it isn't a case where tons of people are chasing a limited number of spots (except for like, facebook and google, but they aren't representative). For the most part, STEM right now is such that anyone who achieves a reasonable level of competence can be successful. That's not to say they are easy skills to learn or anybody can do it - but if you can learn the core skills, you will be able to succeed.
For politicians, the answer is probably putting more resources into pipelines that recruit competent people to run for local office, and then are able to move people into higher level roles over time if they have what it takes.
To abstract, I think what we have right now is sort of a "push" model. We expect individuals to push hard and demonstrate their worthiness, and only then are they recognized and rewarded for their efforts. What I think we want is to build more institutions that are good at "pulling." By that I mean, identifying people who have useful talents and recruiting them into positions where their talents are utilized well. In a push model, only people with a competitive edge will rise. In a pull model, people who have potential but lack that raw ambition and drive can still succeed and do very well.
I appreciate the distinction you made for STEM. The meritocracy seems to work pretty well here (probably with a few caveats), and that fact has strongly biased my interpretation of Matt's piece (negatively).
I'm not totally convinced by your arguments with respect to politicians, but I feel I generally have a good idea of the arguments your making. Thank you for taking the time to write that. You've given me a lot to think about.
I think this gets at part of the problem - part of the premise is that intelligence is a measurable trait but intelligence can come in many forms. We tend to select for particular kinds of intelligence, like logical thinking on tests or social intelligence in networking but we don't really think through what we are looking for. People can be intelligent in different ways and we should try harder to define what kind of intelligence we value and how we measure it.
I do want to push back a little bit on defining all positive mental traits as different types of intelligence. I think that if we think of stuff like "determination" as a form of intelligence, that actually serves to elevate the thing we classically think of as "intelligence" as being a sort of ultimate form of virtue, to which other virtues are subsidiary.
It may be conceptually cleaner to say that intelligence is what we normally think of as intelligence - logical, abstract reasoning ability. Other positive mental traits like intuiting the emotional states of others or persisting in the face of adversity are worthy traits in and of themselves, and we should be careful not to treat them as "knock-off" versions of intelligence.
I think these are good points. Keeping intelligence rigidly defined helps keep the conversations straight. But I think we still might run into issues using other relevant words, like "competence."
There are a lot of different skills a person can have, like forming relationships, managing databases, explaining broad trends, or solving puzzles. We can bundle these by saying someone has good logical intelligence or emotional intelligence or academic intelligence. But if we take a few of those skills and say that is intelligence, we end up missing other things a person can bring.
This has real consequences. In the job market, we end up conflating large networks or ability to write a cover letter as conveying unrelated skills. It might be that we want to select for a particular type of intelligence like logical reasoning but it is more helpful to be more specific about what we are looking for
The article doesn’t need to have a solution to the problem it’s describing IMO. Describing the problem in a compelling way has inherent value.
That's true, but when I made this comment I didn't really see what problem was being described.
Since then, the comments have helped me understand that Matt was using the term "meritocracy" in a less literal way, referring less to the specific strategy of selecting based on merit but more to a culture that disproportionally rewards the most competent at the expense of everyone else.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean. I don't know how to solve the moral problem, but I don't think the solution has any obvious connection to the question of meritocracy. At least, I don't see how Matt made that connection.
And I'm still very unclear on what an alternative to Meritocracy looks like, anyway. Before meritocracy was the guiding paradigm, people only got anywhere because of their connections. I think we can all agree that that is terrible, and we don't want to go back to that, so what does "post-meritocracy" even look like?
I see what you mean now. Those are interesting questions. Sorry if I was being defensive, your statement was short and this helped me understand the context in which you meant it.
I don't really know what the answer is. The responses to my original statement have helped me see the connection that I had missed, but I don't feel any closer to understanding what a better system would look like.
Having, like you, spent a lot of time with 'the smartest guys in the room' I think this is all really correct. Those guys really are smart, but there are plenty of smart people, and you want leadership from the moral smart people, not necessarily the extremely smart people. Also the difference between Harvard/Oxbridge smart and 'decent university smart' is there but it's not all that big really.
That said, there are a couple of virtues that are usually folded under 'smart' which should be prized by themselves, namely inquisitiveness and reflectiveness (basically inquisitiveness about what's in your own head). A lot of what made Trump and Bush jr come across as plain stupid both in the press and people's memoirs is that they didn't seem to try and understand complicated questions and they didn't seem to be able to reflect on who they were and why they did things. This had little to do with raw IQ points and everything to do with an entitled sense that they knew everything worth knowing already. Obama was much better in this regard.
Also, generosity of spirit and kindness should be thrown in there as virtues to prize in and of themselves.
Absolutely, and honesty etc etc. However of the useful virtues, inquisitiveness and self-reflection are ones that are more often linked to intelligence, and are often just mislabeled as being 'smart'
"there are plenty of smart people...the difference between Harvard/Oxbridge smart and 'decent university smart' is there but it's not all that big really."
I don't think this is right. There's a lot of important variance at the top. Intelligence is overrated, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that there isn't meaningful distinction above some threshold. It's just that there are a lot of other qualities that also have a lot of meaningful variation and are also very important.
As the resident dumb guy, I have a lot to say about this. (Plus I’m waiting for these units to get LOTO before I inspect them, so chilling in the trailer)
First, unrelated, I got my 1st shot of vaccine this weekend, so looking forward to not randomly dying of Covid... especially since I’m going to Brazil next month for work.
Ok, on to meritocracy.
Relative to college selection. I don’t think it’s the same to equivocate large public colleges were smart people go with the Ivy leagues. What Ivy leagues provide is Access and social networking to people with power. The issue isn’t weather Harvard should accept smart people, it’s that they only accept connected smart people. Well along with a few token regular smart people that they make sure get loads of local press.
I also think that Matt underestimates the relative damage that dumb people can do. Sure smart people make mistakes, but having spent a large part of life in countries where family connections had more to do with key jobs, I can tell you that it could be a lot worse.
But as a blue collar guy I couldn’t agree more with the “honest days work” attitude.
I’m sitting in a trailer at a random power plant. Next to me is a 27-year old engineer who has worked 2-weeks straight. Next room is 6 Millwright’s who work 12-hour shifts building and fixing shit.
This job is a hard life, but it needs to be done, and honestly we all make a decent living (100 - 220k a year).
If there is one thing that I try and teach my kids, it’s that there is a sense of satisfaction that one gets from working hard, especially if u contribute to society. It’s not happiness, it’s more like pride. Honest wages for honest work.
Anyway, back to the issue. The problem isn’t meritocracy, it’s a problem with incentives and accountability. No one went to jail for all the sleezy housing bubble shenanigans. Trump won’t go to jail. The finance dudes with the care homes won’t go to jail.
There is a general lack of integrity (I like the USAF definition... doing the right thing, even if it’s hard, even when no one is looking). Integrity is what is missing from the system.
Crap... this preachy post sucked.
Hope everyone had a great weekend.
Once again. In a trailer. Typing on my phone. Forgive the grammatical errors.
Some good points mixed with some bad, and since I'm a crotchety old man I'll focus on the bad. While you point out, somewhat randomly, the downside of meritocracy, you don't give an alternative. Monarchy, theocracy, communism, all have been tried and for various reasons discarded. We do need something, though. It seems like in a couple of places you were advocating for communism, or its nicer sounding synonym egalitarianism. And that's fine, but I think readers should have that in mind when considering the downside of meritocracy.
As for this downside, I'm in total agreement that meritocracy may not be the solution for every career path, and the good news is we clearly don't follow it. You mention politics as an example. Clearly we've ditched any pretext of meritocracy (in your stricter sense of merit equals smarts) in politics a long time ago. When was the last time a really smart person got elected to high office? As for business, I don't know what you're trying to do with the Trump example. You seem to be holding him out as an example of failed meritocracy, but that's clearly not correct and he is very definitely an idiot. The man can barely read. You're conflating his complete lack of ethics with intelligence, and that's not the case. But in a much broader sense, you don't need to be the very brightest person to be the CEO of a huge company. You'll have to be above average smart but there are all sorts of other people skills involved in being a successful businessperson. Likewise in today's media climate an obsession with woke causes and a generally snarky attitude are more important than brilliance.
So I don't think there's anything like a true meritocracy in politics, media or business. But I do think our system overall does a decent job of sorting people by intelligence, as per your college examples, and slotting them into the appropriate career paths. The smartest people should end up tackling the biggest problems. At one point that may have been in politics but that stopped decades ago. But overall the smartest people are going into tech careers, where if they cure a pandemic or reduce global warming, they will be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. People good at managing people and social networks end up running big organizations, creative people end up in the arts, athletic people in sports, etc. And I don't think there's any other system out there that can do that job.
BTW, for what it's worth, Communism, at least the Soviet type, was pretty meritocratic. I spent the 1990s in Moscow teaching finance and economics to kids who were graduates of the best Soviet STEM institutions. Talk about raw talent! Better even than the students I taught in the Ivy League or University of Chicago (and they were good, too). What counts is the institutions the meritocratic education system dumps its students into.
Agreed, I'm really talking about a theoretical communism. In the real world Communist countries created great astronauts, gymnasts and lots of other superstars that could only happen under a very meritocratic system.
Egalitarianism is not synonymous with communism.
How is it different (as an economic system, obviously very different from a political sense)? From my perspective they both mean everyone gets the same amount of stuff, and I genuinely think it's one of the two proper ways to think about an economy. Either you reward the most productive, or you reward everyone the same.
Again, speaking only of Soviet communism, it was emphatically NOT true that everyone got the same amount of stuff. It was meritocratic but not egalitarian. The difference is that the Soviet system operated on inequality of privilege, not of wealth. If you were a professor, you got to buy canned salmon and East German beer in a "special shop". If you were a mid-level official, you got to send your kids to a better summer camp. If you were a high-up, you got a fancy dacha. If you were a ballerina, you got foreign travel, and so on. As Orwell put it, all animals were equal but some were more equal than others.
Yes- human society will usually find a way to create a hierarchy. An advantage of a market system is that the hierarchy is very visible, easy to understand, and *less* dependent on "who you know".
Then what you're talking about are competing ideas of distributive justice. At no point is Matt calling for all private property to be owned by the state or for the means of production to be in the hands of the mass of labor. The fundamental building blocks of a capitalist economy are not being challenged here: private property ownership enforced through legal contracts and goods and services freely traded in marketplaces.
i believe this is a distinction without a difference. If the fruits of private property ownership are re-distributed equally to the population, then nobody will take on the additional risk and work associated with providing those fruits. See the USSR's attempts with farm collectives.
I guess I'm not seeing where Matt advocates for that. What I see is him saying we should have a stronger social safety net, encourage more charitable giving to non-selective colleges, and wrangle the culture in a way that doesn't give so much status to people who do ethically bad things. Now, that the third one there is a bit hand-wavy and there's no theory of action there. But none of this is communist. The reliance on charity and societal pressure seems distinctly non-state to me and wouldn't fit a system where the state was expected to redistribute all the proceeds of all economic activity totally equally across the entire population.
He's not calling for anything, really, he's just attacking the idea of meritocracy without proposing an alternative. I don't see how you can read the post as only pertaining to politics though; the large majority of it is about business.
Yes, and it's about how smart people succeed in business by sometimes doing bad things. He's pointing out that the way we reward people is at odds with our ethics and that we need to reconsider caring so much about a society where everyone is assumed to get their just deserts. His alternative is a bigger social safety net and some sort of societal pressure to push elites to be more ethical in both their charitable giving and their career choices. Though I totally agree that this last part has no plan of action. It's more of a sentiment or longing for a society where elites are more virtue-driven.
There are lots and lots and lots and lots of very smart people elected to higher office. Obama comes to mind immediately. Elizabeth Warren. Ted Cruz is a bad person but he's very intelligent.
Excellent point, and I mangled what I was trying to say. I meant that politics doesn't require or reward smartness in isolation, that the smartest kids don't rise to the top on their smartness. But it also doesn't hold them back as your examples illustrate. Surely you can be smart and be a successful politician, you just need lots of other skills as well. Pete Buttigeig and Andrew Yang might be good examples of politicians who succeed with smartness being their main attribute, although it's early days in their political careers.
Why is intelligence overrated relative to virtue? Because intelligence is easier to measure. How do you test if someone is ethical? Everybody knows "the right answers"; the tough thing is actually doing them. Whereas being smart is the *same thing* as knowing the right answers. I'm not sure how to test for virtue in a job interview.
The last company I worked in had a "culture interview" as part of their interview process. It shocked me with how well it worked at filtering out mild-sociopaths and jerks. I would have thought that it would be too easy to fake the right answers to simple questions about teamwork, disagreeing without being an a-hole, etc.. But apparently not! Some people can't even give a single example of a time they helped a coworker, did something for the greater good, etc...
Of course some unethical people still got through, so it wasn't perfect. And they often brought in more who were like them later. But still, just attempting to measure amount ethics seemed to help a bit.
Maybe they only filtered out the dumb sociopaths. Maybe the really good sociopaths are getting away with all kinds of shit that no one else has caught on to.
Yeah that could be. Filtering out the dumb ones is at least a step in the right direction though
The decline of public virtue is a real problem, but I am not sure how convincingly you connect it to “meritocracy”. What is the alternative system that mitigates the problem? One could more easily imagine tweaking a meritocratic system (putting higher premium on character) in its sorting to address the issue than some other system — natural aristocracy? Marxism? Not clear what the proposal is — naturally doing so. It is obviously the case that choosing leaders exclusively on the basis of who is smartest is 1) not a great idea and 2) not really what we are doing anyway.
I don’t think Matt is arguing for a totalizing alternative, just a much greater emphasis on the social values around the common good as was the case in post-war America (admittedly only for white people at that time) or as is still (though to a lessening extent) the case with Scandinavia and East Asia.
I do think the Western world attempts to choose leaders on the basis of who is smartest. Examples: the respect for Fauci, the arguments that get made when someone is nominated for the Supreme Court, the deference to technocrats at the Fed and the military, etc. Not saying all of these are bad but the phenomenon is real.
The alternative is very hard to imagine because meritocracy is not just our system but also our paradigm. I think we can start by placing less emphasis on something/someone being the best and more on it/them being good.
the connection is that valuing meritocracy undermines valuing public virtue
Preach, Matt!! The wrap here is spot-on.
I do have to challenge what you even mean by the word "meritocracy" though. You never explicitly define it, but you strongly suggest it's a system by which we effectively rank people by raw intelligence and give power and esteem to the smartest people. That's never really how I've thought of it, to the extent that anyone strives to be one. "Merit = A praiseworthy value; a virtue." So in today's system, we give undue merit to raw intelligence and not enough merit to ethics and humanistic kindness. I agree! But you can still have a meritocracy in a world where people who do the most good for others are rewarded with more power to do more good. Maybe I am weird but at the company where I work, a big, old school industrial company, "meritocracy" is thrown around a lot, and it's used to mean that "you'll get promoted based on what you accomplish, not who you know." Debatable how much we live up to that, but as much as we value raw intelligence, no one assumed that just being smart would get you promoted.
The value of the definition of the word "merit" is that it is truly democratic- it is the value that the rest of society puts on your contributions. I tend to think this is the best measure we could possibly use to structure a power hierarchy around. But I absolutely agree that the hierarchy *is too steep*- the highs are too high, the lows are too low, and it's too damn hard to move good people up and bad people down. We need to flatten the hierarchy with the egalitarian perspectives and methods you describe at the end. We also need to think objectively about what deserves merit.
The heart of the culture wars is that the two halves of our nation think different traits are "praiseworthy." Liberals praise raw intelligence, racial inclusion, and secular values. Conservatives praise minimal government, Christian ethics, and capitalist success. The tension comes because conservatives *used* to dominate the social process of deciding who deserved merit--the moral majority, values voters. Over time their cultural power has atrophied. They resent living in a "meritocracy" where they feel the wrong values are being merited with power. Your suggestion of flattening the hierarchy and making things more egalitarian would lower the stakes, which would lower the heat. I think it's also worth doing some national soul searching on what our common values are. We can't even agree on whether it's a good idea to treat people equally regardless of their race. We have a lot of work to do.
First, I agree with about 90% of your comment. I will take issue with "we can't even agree on whether it's a good idea to treat people equally regardless of their race." I believe this is a statement that 99% of people on both sides agree with, and there is little debate on this topic. When this concept is stretched from the individual to the systemic or structural is when disagreement arises. For those on the right, where I reside most of the time, the move to structural racism often seen as an attempt to force equal outcomes in all areas, rather than merely treating everyone equally. I yearn for "equality", but I do not strive for "equity".
That was a probably unnecessary dig at the subset of my fellow lefties who don’t see the disconnect from that seemingly obvious goal and their insistence on using race as a factor in deciding who to promote or empathetically listen to.
The important question isn’t whether people should be treated equally, without regard to their race, but rather whether a person’s race should influence how they experience access universal aspects of society. That’s not how we talk about things, but I sure don’t care about how anyone is “treated” but about what their experiences are as a result of their race. I’m a white guy and have literally never had anything stand in my way or negatively affect me my entire life that I didn’t deserve directly because of my actions and decisions that I had complete control over. Everyone should have that “privilege” (I use quotes since “getting what you deserve” it is very much a double-edged sword.) Maybe we don’t disagree about anything, but I think it’s disingenuous to imply there’s no disagreement on “treating people equally” when very few really understand what that actually means in practice, in the actual world we live in.
I would propose that unless you are not only white but also tall, attractive, didn't come from a poor background, athletic, extroverted, intelligent and don't speak with any accent, then you have had to overcome something that wasn't entirely due to your actions and decisions. Society (hell, humans in general) consciously or unconsciously rewards lots of things in the actual world that aren't in your control and it is up to each of us to try our darndest to look past those inalienable qualities and treat people equally.
Yep to (basically) all -- my parents were highly educated and well-off, I've been extroverted/hyper-confident since basically birth according to all who know me, ditto regarding having excelled at school, and have no discernible accent. It's true I'm a bit short and was raised Jewish, so I do take your point about having overcome some *very very very mild* obstacles, but really that's cutting it very fine. If everyone had to only overcome the very, very, very mild obstacles I have faced, I'd be totally good with that. No arguments. Until then, though, we've got a societal problem. And again -- how I/you/we treat people is almost totally irrelevant. It is how people are treated in general based on their "inalienable qualities". If people like me are treated in general in a way that is very different than some other group of people who are not like me based on each of our respective "inalienable qualities" then that is a REALLY BIG societal problem, regardless of whether individual people think it is important or correct or whatever to treat other individual people equally or fairly or whatever. The two things really have almost no relationship to each other.
Respectfully, I disagree with your last statement. The two things are inextricably linked. How society treats people in the aggregate is an amalgamation of how individuals treat individual people. I believe we can only improve the former by improving the latter.
I appreciate your respectful disagreement! I suppose I'd say that I believe the causality arrow goes the other direction -- from societal norms and aggregates to individual behavior (with the caveat that we are all sentient beings with free will and can individually choose to buck trends if we so choose, damn the consequences, but that it doesn't happen super often, IMO). Anyway, one of us if probably more right than the other, and there is probably no good way to prove it. I certainly hope we end up in the place we both are interested in getting to faster rather than slower. :)
This is what always unnerves me about the "some must suffer for the greater good" kind of arguments, made in very mild forms in liberal democracies ("this will make some people unemployed but lower consumer prices a little and the gains outweigh the losses in the aggregate"), and terrifyingly extreme versions in communist/fascist systems ("this will kill millions of peasants, but the State needs greater steel production to safeguard the revolution for the masses").
So yes -- I misspoke when I said they have no relationship. The relationship (as I believe it functions -- opposite of how you believe it functions) makes focusing on individual behavior meaningless in changing norms, to my way of thinking.
This is a flawed defense of meritocracy, in my view. I suspect from reading Matt’s post that there’s an underlying notion that one of the major flaws with meritocracy is that it promotes only those people who have been best at not making too many mistakes. You might think “hey, that’s a good thing!” The reality, however, is that a lot of people have the decks stacked against them in that regard. Things like poverty or growing up in households with parents who have addictions creative lasting cognitive issues that make people prone to fucking up the rest of their lives, for example. Rigid adherence to a system that promotes mostly those who are good at not fucking up will overwhelmingly favor those who have been fortunate to face fewer things in life that have created cognitive roadblocks, and that’s true even if you got the advantages of position caused by wealth out of the promotion mix.
The argument I see Matt making here seems pretty obvious in his “we should all be more chill” remark. We really should.
The dirtbag left will sometimes raise the basic question of "what do we do with people who are just kinda bad at stuff?" and it seems to sort of align with what you're saying. Conservative meritocracy goes "those best at making money should succeed and we don't need to change anything for people to be able to make it", liberal meritocracy goes "those with the best test scores, extracurricular activities, and academic awards should succeed and we need to make sure everyone can play the game", and neither one says what to do if you're just kind of not good at making money or passing tests. At worst it's "well, should've tried harder, now work for a pittance or starve", at best it's "here's some social insurance with a side of utter scorn and disrespect."
Yes very much that! Look, most people are average. Normal distribution and all. And most people screw up, quite a lot. A lot of people who screw up would also make perfectly fine leaders of companies, teams, nations. Because contrary to popular wisdom, there is no one right type or one consistent quality that makes someone a good worker or a good leader. The ones who fuck up might even have a little more empathy and forgiveness.
Now I’m not saying to make advancement and leadership opportunities a free-for-all in every industry, academy, or public office. But it’s often surprising who makes a good leader in different organizations or teams. I have a friend who’s a great leader of engineers, because he gained experience doing project management as an army captain. He doesn’t know shit about telecom engineering. But despite what you might think, that’s not all that important to his position. Chilling out about the concept of deservingness and merit would do us all some good.
I didn't pick up on the sentiment about forgiving mistakes; I totally agree with you. Matt's point about dumb luck almost always being a factor was spot-on. I would argue that for society to function efficiently, we need some sort of -ocracy ("theory of social organization) to streamline the decision-making process. I agree with you that "we should all be more chill" and less rigid in that, though. This is what I meant by "the highs are too high, the lows are too low, and it's too damn hard to move good people up and bad people down"- but by "good" I meant "people with the potential to help society if they were given more influence," and this includes people who've made mistakes or had bad breaks.
meritocracy works. That’s how me ,Coulier and Stamos got hired
Egalitarianism has blended with "fairness" in a way that is pretty corrosive to virtue IMO. I make a lot of money, because I am smart, and I pay half my income in taxes. This should make me feel like a virtuous person who has contributed a lot to society (by making a lot of money) and contributed a lot to egalitarianism (by paying a lot of taxes). But the message I get from society is that I'm a sucker or a scumbag.
Sucker: Trying to (legally) pay less taxes is not socially stigmatized; if anything, it's considered "smart". I sometimes ask my more leftwing friends why they don't voluntarily pay more taxes (the US treasury accepts checks!) and IMO I don't get very good answers. Egalitarianism doesn't have a limiting principle; maybe my tax rates should be 90% instead of 50%. So there's no virtue in the high tax rates I currently pay. The best way to "win" seems talking about how the system should be more egalitarian but avoiding any personal sacrifice, and that doesn't seem like it encourages people to be virtuous.
Scumbag: egalitarianism asks a lot of the rich in a way that IMO is clearly "unfair". But people don't like that, so you end up with a lot of BS about how it's actually fair. Rich people didn't earn what they have, the only way to get rich is to be extremely unethical, "pay your fair share", "you didn't build that", success is just pure luck, etc. A healthier egalitarianism, IMO, would say "it's great that you were so successful; now we need you to help us help everyone else out". The message today is closer to "you stole your money from us; now we're gonna take it back".
“ Egalitarianism doesn't have a limiting principle”
What’s the limiting principle for your anti-egalitarianism?
I'm inclined to say that we should split the difference between egalitarianism and fairness; half of what you make you can keep, and half should go towards helping others (although I'm not convinced "helping others" should be the same as "paying taxes"; I'm a lot happier with the money I send to charity than the money I send to taxes)
Interesting perspective — and one I’m basically inclined to agree with. Two (real) questions, though: regarding “fairness,” should everyone get to keep half, or would you admit that there is some lower bound below which one can’t really afford to help others at all (or as much)? The thing about the hierarchy of needs seems to apply here, no? Second — lots of charitable giving isn’t very productive (even though it might make the giver and recipient feel pretty great). How would it work in practice to “help others” through charity in a way that actually “helped others.”
1) Yes, everyone. If you were really distributing half the resources in an egalitarian way, everyone would have enough to afford to help others. The US is a pretty rich country!
2) Lots of government spending isn't very productive either! I'm extremely confident that my donations to https://www.givewell.org/ do more good than most government spending. But I do agree with you that a lot of time and money is spent trying to "help others" in a way that doesn't really do that; not sure governments are better at it than charities to be honest, and I'm not sure what to do about it.
I am certain givewell.org does an excellent job (that’s where our charity goes, too!)
Fundamental to the legitimacy of meritocracy is the implicit belief that our intelligence/parents/etc are a gift from God, and so we deserve what comes from them. Once you replace “God” with “luck”, as Matt had shown here it quickly becomes obvious that this is a total BS system.
Wow, I think that's completely wrong. The legitimacy of meritocracy is wholly based on rewarding those who contribute the most. Beneficiaries of meritocracy may believe their talents were a gift from God, although I think that's a very small percent at this point. They probably believe it's luck mixed with a lot of hard work, which is why they deserve more than similarly talented people who didn't do anything with their talents. A well functioning meritocracy doesn't reward people for inherent advantages, it rewards people for using those advantages productively.
the point is, making nursing homes more profitable by making them more lethal is a perverse view of contribution.
That's an anecdote, not an argument. And I said a well functioning meritocracy. Your example is evidence that it needs fixing.
It’s not an anecdote. It’s from the study quoted in the article. A 12 year study.
It's an anecdote, meaning it's one isolated story. As an alternative anecdote I could say that the scientist who invented the covid vaccine was really smart, so meritocracy is great! Neither is convincing.
It’s an example. It’s not an isolated incident. Look at what private equity is doing to local newspapers.
Or here’s an article about how PE controlled firms reduced employment by 13% while similar privately held firms increased employment by 13%.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/10/07/new-study-shows-adverse-economic-effects-of-private-equity-buyouts/?sh=2fbcd65969e1
PE guys are smart, but what they’re doing is almost solely aimed at making money and not caring about the consequences.
true. there are a lot of such anecdotes. a well-functioning meritocracy is like the true socialist society. it exists only in theory and in practice can be used to justify lots of perverse outcomes.
Agree, but what’s the argument for why do they deserve more than less talented people?
I'm not sure the argument is that they deserve more. At least not for me.
I would say the argument FOR meritocracy is that:
1) Growth/Technological Advance/Progress is good.
2) As a gross approximation, You get better progress with more skilled people in charge (this can include people skills, intelligence, whatever - but things we'd call 'merit')
3) Rewarding higher skilled people _in_ growth industries with better rewards encourages them to do those things, which is good for society.
That means that if you genetically/environmentally luck into a solid education and high IQ (or whatever merit you want to define) then you'll get rewarded more, because that, up to a point, is good for society.
And I think those broad strokes are true, although there's lots of room for nuance in there.
1) There _are_ jobs where being 10% smarter than someone else may make a HUGE difference, but this doesn't apply to every job.
2) Not every job that rewards very smart people is super socially productive. The financial industry as a whole is useful - I'm not so sure that finding tiny improvements at the top to maximize your firm's usage of financial markets is.
3) We could vastly be overrewarding the top end - maybe we're paying 20x for something we could be paying 1.5x for.
So it's not that smart people "deserve" more, but systems that reward them more have some alignment of incentives to outcomes. That doesn't mean the current system has everything set up right.
First and foremost, they don't unless they put their talents to use. And the meritocratic system is the best one we've come up with to incentivize people to cure pandemics, reduce global warming etc etc. Our system is far from perfect, and if I could start all over I'd have a welfare system that focuses overwhelmingly on children, ensuring they have access to the best education, nutrition, healthcare etc. It's genuinely scary to think of all the talent that just gets tossed away because we leave large sections of our society to rot from neglect.
No, meritocracy is legitimized by the idea that you want competent people doing things, so that things go right instead of wrong. If I have to get a surgery, I want to get it from the guy who got straight A's at Harvard, not the guy who got straight C's in community college. So does everyone else, which is why the Harvard doctor is the one getting all the money. Beyond that, we want to incentivize other smart people to be doctors, because they'll be better doctors and society will be better off for it.
That is not to say Meritocracy doesn't have failure modes (like the nursing home example) or loop holes, but it is to say that your "gift from god" argument is a straw man, or at least the weakest possible argument you could make for meritocracy.
Not to go all Resistancey, but I really do think Trump is a dumbass, at least according to our meritocratic standards. E.g., if you stuck him in a room with a bunch of freshmen at Yale to debate the Fourth Amendment, they'd run circles around him, because he almost certainly has no idea what the Fourth Amendment is. The success in his career you cited was more so due to his willing to be shameless, and his similarly shameless business associates and lawyers willing to tackle the details. I see Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley as more representative of your point--guys who are technically very smart, probably got much higher LSAT scores than I did, but who suck because they are bad
Trump is so dumb that he saw a new path to winning the White House and won one of the biggest election surprises ever. I don't agree with most of Trump's policies but he was a lot smarter politically than Clinton or Obama (who wasted two years' of one-party rule on small potatoes).
And what exactly did Trump accomplish with two years of one party rule?
Obama and Clinton were both very smart at getting elected, just as Trump was, and they also managed to romp to re-election. Where they foundered was in getting stuff done in office...yet Obama’s record in that regard was clearly better than Trump’s (see Obamacare, which is not at all small potatoes). And of course Trump had every opportunity to turn COVID into a strong re-election campaign, but was constitutionally incapable of doing so.
I suspect the earlier comment was about Hillary, not Bill.
Though it was Bill who wasted two years of one-party rule.
The Affordable Care Act was not small potatoes.
It's an interesting definitional question. Would the Yale freshmen actually run circles around him? They would certainly know far more than he did, and would be orders of magnitude more articulate, but in all likelihood Trump would just talk over them, or throw them off with emotionally charged non-sequiturs and insults. Maybe that would be losing according to the formal rules of debate, but would he really be losing if it furthered some other goals beyond the debate stage? Does being really good at playing politics make you "smart," or is that the wrong word to use?
The United States is not as meritocratic as you think it is. The United States is not exactly Singapore. For example, if the Ivy Leagues were to accept students based only on what their grades and SAT scores are,a ton of the students who are currently enrolled in them would not have been able to get in. Imagine if Harvard were to get rid of legacy admissions and affirmative action.
Very few people who get into the country's top schools aren't very bright. They may not be wise. They may not be virtuous. But the vast majority are bright and hardworking.
I think Harvard would claim they are more meritocratic (with exception of small number of legacies and royalty) and that they do a better job of it by considering non-test-score forms of merit along with the life circumstances of the student.
There’s some truth in this, also some BS, but I think all the critiques of meritocracy apply to either case.
I'd like to know more about the mechanics of how Ivy Leagues churn out successful people. Do they pick people with better networks and supports? Do they provide better networks for people who are admitted? Is it actually the case that they provide a superior intellectual education?
Almost all the students at Harvard are qualified to be there. It just happens that there are probably 10x as many students also qualified who are not there. BUT, importantly, it doesn't seem to matter much in the end: https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
"However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. "
I love this study because I feel like I lived it. I could have gone to an Ivy but didn't for...reasons. And yet, I still turned out pretty well, perhaps even better (well, who can know).
Yes.
Technically. Yes. Yes. No.
I feel like that's the case and it indicates that networking is more important than being smart, which bothers me.
More meritocratic compared to what? It's a fact that a ton of the students at Harvard are there because legacy admissions and affirmative action.
More meritocratic because there are fewer asians, who are 'boring' and therefore have less merit.
more meritocratic compared to just sorting students by test score and going down the list.
Harvard’s admissions office would definitely claim that the way they do affirmative action is more meritocratic than not doing it, for instance. I tend to agree.
Nope. If the Ivies were to use only school grades and SAT scores, what would happen is that there would be a significant increase of white students from non-affluent backgrounds and an even greater increase of Asian students.
there’s a circularity where you’re assuming that test scores are the only way to evaluate merit and measure it reliably for every student.
i hate to find myself arguing on behalf of the Ivy League admissions system, which is bad and quite corrupt. I just think it’s not worse than pure standardized testing.
Maybe. Though you seem to possess inordinate faith in grades and SAT scores to accurately assess "merit."
And men would be at a substantial disadvantage to women. At least in terms of college admissions being male gets you special treatment.
Girls do better than boys when it comes to school grades, but boys do better than girls in the SAT tests. An example that I like to use is that I was barely a B student in high school, while my sister was an A student, but I ended up doing better than her in the SAT.
It's not a small number: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-more-than-one-third-legacy.html
right but due to the advantages of their upbringing some of those legacies would have gotten in on merit (and probably did get in to other elite schools where they aren’t legacies).
Sure, some, but probably not as many as you might think. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26316
It's been a while since I thought about this work, so I don't want to claim it's perfect. But they concluded that "Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs."
I wonder if the operative adjective is white or ALDC.
The “as you think it is” is doing way too much work in this comment. One of the disconnects here is that people seem not to realize how big a shift there was some time around the mid-80s in How Things Work when it comes to college admissions and entrance to other elite circles. I’m about Matt’s age and graduated from a fancy prep school in New Jersey, which to me was an interesting vantage point to see this phenomena play out in real time. At the time that my peers’ parents were graduating from high school (the mid-to-late 70s), roughly half of the graduates of our school went to Princeton, while the other half went to a bunch of other elite schools (Penn, Amherst, whatever). I’m not exaggerating to say that Princeton’s reunions were a major social event for my middle school because so many people went with their parents every year.
Fast forward to the early aughts and our very fancy and well regarded prep school sent maybe 20% of its class every year to ivy-plus institutions. That’s a huge number, and the very top boarding schools (a la the recent Atlantic piece) do a little bit better than we did, but it still meant that we had literally dozens of students every year who would have been the third or fourth generations of their respective families to go to some particular Ivy League school and did not get in (there’s a joke here about the existence of these students being Tuft’s and Elon’s business models). But that’s what happens when Harvard & Co. go from reserving 80% of their class for legacies to only 20%. That is not to say that we did not have some marginally qualified grads that went off to Harvard or Princeton, I can think of at least two off the top of my head, but the reason I can recall them is that their acceptance into schools that they didn’t quite seem smart enough to get into was notable and widely discussed around the school. And of course in both cases it turned out that the student in question came from a family that was Fuck You Rich instead of Normal Rich like the rest of us (i.e. their family could donate a building, not just afford tuition and kick in a few thousand dollars to the annual campaign).
I wonder if the lesson that a lot of people my generation and just before took from this whole state of affairs was not “well that’s good, we’ve made things open and fair” bur rather “I guess being normal rich isn’t enough, I’ve got to figure out how to get some fuck you money” so that they could either donate a building to Columbia or else set their kid up with a large enough trust fund that it wouldn’t matter whether they got into a good school. And thus we get to a place where it’s no longer good enough for your average banker or lawyer or CEO to make half a million dollars per year, secure in the knowledge that their children will go to the same school and get that same job, they need to make much, much more money than that, the consequences for everyone else be damned.
I have a theory I developed in high school academic competitions where public schools competed against private schools on a regular basis. The kids from private schools weren't all that much better than the teams from public schools. I call it the Top 100 rule. The top 100 students at a private school with an enrollment of 400 aren't going to be any better than the top 100 students from a public school with a 2000 student enrollment. This "Rule" is adaptable to a wide variety of endeavors.
The limits of meritocracy are also evident in the old joke:
Q. What do you call the person who graduated last from their medical school?
A. Doctor.
Beyond a certain threshold of minimum competency there is little marginal value in creating more and more exclusive categories.
Yeah from my experience those small private schools don't have any advantage in having smarter kids, but they have very few students who would fall into the bottom third of a school of 2000
My spouse is a physician and as she went through med school and residency she developed this sarcastic saying: "Anyone can be a doctor."
Also demonstrated by the "medical" marijuana periods in western states.
"But the benefits of an egalitarian economic order are clear, real, and don’t fundamentally hinge on the idea that Nadal or anyone else did anything “unfair” to get where they are."
That really hits the nail on the head. I honestly can't name a single person I've met who favored a significant redistributionist state but also acknowledged that people like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos got rich because they actually provide a lot of value to society; literally all of them have some contrived story to tell themselves and others that those fellows somehow stole their fortunes.
The utilitarian insight "The marginal dollar taken out of Nadal’s hands and given to someone in need will greatly increase human flourishing" is a very, very, very good reason to support redistribution, but leftism really is a politics of envy and resentment while compassion and care are incidental at best.
You haven't met me.
Would you accept the following formulation: people like Bezos have provided value, but not nearly as much as they have reaped in rewards? I've omitted Zuckerberg because I think it a charitable view to say that the jury's still out on whether Facebook does more harm than good.
"people like Bezos have provided value, but not nearly as much as they have reaped in rewards?"
No, I wouldn't.
I accept this! I would submit that if we had a system were Bezos could build Amazon and be worth $90 billion instead of his actual $180 billion, his behavior would have been no different.
I'm still digesting this piece, but I feel like there is a bit of a baby/bathwater thing going on. Ethics is undoubtably important, and you are right to draw more attention to it. But meritocratic sorting (as defined here) is *also* useful.
>>What I’d like to see even more is for Michael Sandel to teach at a community college.
This would likely be incredibly inefficient. The students at a community college will (presumably) get much less benefit from Sandel compared to an average professor there as well as compared to students at Harvard. In fact, it might even be much worse, as the skills required of a community college professor are much different than those required of a Harvard professor (I don't know Sandel, maybe he would rise to the occasion).
>>The really “in” thing to do could be to found new research centers in struggling communities.
Who is going to staff these centers if not people drafted from around the country for their merit?
I'd like to know more re: "The students at a community college will (presumably) get much less benefit from Sandel compared to an average professor there as well as compared to students at Harvard."
Based on the next sentence, I think you're speaking more to a professor's competencies and the need to tailor instruction to the needs of your students, but I don't want to discount the possibility that you're saying community college students are too stupid to understand Sandel's ideas.
I think there could be some depth to his lessons that will be under-appreciated in a community college? I don't want to overstate this point as it applies to him specifically.
I'm just drawing from experience in math and science, where the students at community colleges need more help on basic concepts that prevent the class from reaching more advanced topics. It may not map so cleanly onto political science.