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the myth of meritocracy

vuk

vuk

\o/ choose anarchy
interesting article in vox:

https://www.vox.com/conversations/2...-meritocracy-robert-frank-success-luck-ethics

Why the myth of a perfect meritocracy is so pernicious

excerpt:
“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get that on your own,” President Obama declared four years ago at a campaign rally in Virginia. “If you’re successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”


Obama was pilloried for this statement. For conservatives, it was sacrilege, an offense against the individualist ethic. It’s a treasured mythology in America, this belief that hard work and a touch of grit is all one needs to succeed.


Reality is more complicated than that, however. Talent and drive can take you a long way, but it’s often not enough. Luck, as it happens, is every bit as important. Being born to the right parents helps too.
 
3 years into being self-employed and still skint I'm beginning to think being a bit of a crim helps too. So you need TALC; talent, ambition, luck, crookedness. Or maybe you can do it with any 3 of those, but all 4 gives you a guarantee? Not sure 2 is enough.
 
chris hayes does a pretty thorough examination of the myth of meritocracy in the US in his book, 'twilight of the elites.' but he's MSNBC, so it might not suit your tastes.
 
er - who cares? wrote that in my first philosophy exam. failed philosophy thankfully, but it took some doing. and i did it on my own.
 
We all want to be good at doing one or more things, so we set goals and try our best to achieve them. We all wish for good luck, and many, but not all of us get at least some small share in our lives.

This seems a variation of the old nature versus nurture argument. Can people be born to greatness, or is it thrust upon them? What good is great DNA (good looks, high IQ, perfect health) if one’s environment and circumstances are crap (poverty, abuse, living in a war zone)? Is it more important to be really good at something, or to perceived as really good at something?

I’d rather be both good and lucky, but if I had to pick one, I would pick lucky.
 
I’d be amazed if anyone successful would disagree this side of obvious sociopaths like Trump etc. Luck plays a huge part IMO. Taking inherited wealth out of the equation the vast majority of success is down to having the right idea at exactly the right time, i.e. getting it right once can provide a good living for life. This especially the case in music, the arts etc.
 
1% in New York earns $2.2m or more per year? That seems a lot of people earning a lot of money.
 
There are many aspects to life, many ways to be successful (or not).

People make sacrifices according to how important they feel it is to be successful in this or that area. This depends on context and priorities shift when situations change.

Many rich people have made sacrifices and reaped financial rewards. That isn't a bad thing per se - it's the extreme imbalance of wealth that's bad for the world.

Obviously luck comes into everything but you can change the odds (again not just talking about money) as an individual. That's not the same as saying society is fine and our institutions are fine, they're not.
 
It's a fascinating topic.

In "A Theory of Justice", John Rawls uses the idea that *none* of us can take credit for our natural abilities or our parents/parenting (both are literally "accidents of birth") to propose a "veil of ignorance" thought experiment. Imagine that none of us know what position we will occupy in society: in such a state of radical ignorance, what kind of society would we choose to live in? The answer, he suggests, is a society in which the well-being of the least well-off members is as great as possible (the so called "maximin" principle). There is a ton of political philosophy about this - Sanddel's book "Justice" is a good short guide, aimed at an interested lay audience.

A more radical critique still was offered by Michael Young, way back in the 1950s. Young coined the word "meritocracy" but for him it was not something desirable for society to aim for but something with inherent problems. He satirised these problems in his novel "The Rise of the Meritocracy" , which is written from the standpoint of a future historian and charts the history of the meritocracy from its birth to its eventual overthrow in 2033. I haven't read the book but Young wrote a piece in The Guardian years ago that sets out the gist of his argument:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

I didn't realise until I read the above that Young was the author of the Labour Party's manifesto for the 1945 election. I really must get hold of a copy of his book!
 
drood.

if you haven't read "the idea of justice" by amartya sen, you may want to check it out. presents an alternate view to rawls.
 
vuk said:
drood.

if you haven't read "the idea of justice" by amartya sen, you may want to check it out. presents an alternate view to rawls.
Click to expand...

I haven't - I will check it out. I don't have any allegiance to Rawls but I admire the ingenuity of his argument and its roots in Kantian philosophy.

I was lucky enough to see Sen lecture back in the days when I was a PPE undergraduate at Oxford. I'm embarassed to say I didn't really know who we was but even in my state of ignorance I recognised I was in the presence of a brilliant mind.
 
Tony L said:
I’d be amazed if anyone successful would disagree this side of obvious sociopaths like Trump etc. Luck plays a huge part IMO. Taking inherited wealth out of the equation the vast majority of success is down to having the right idea at exactly the right time, i.e. getting it right once can provide a good living for life. This especially the case in music, the arts etc.
Click to expand...
I think you will find that the more successful people are, the more they believe that they earned it, they deserve it, they are special. They generally don't think luck plays any part. That's my experience anyway.
 
I'm living proof that Meritocracy is a myth.

If it did, I'd be rich and famous by now...

...and I ain't.
 
vuk said:
interesting article in vox:

https://www.vox.com/conversations/2...-meritocracy-robert-frank-success-luck-ethics

Why the myth of a perfect meritocracy is so pernicious

excerpt:
“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get that on your own,” President Obama declared four years ago at a campaign rally in Virginia. “If you’re successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”


Obama was pilloried for this statement. For conservatives, it was sacrilege, an offense against the individualist ethic. It’s a treasured mythology in America, this belief that hard work and a touch of grit is all one needs to succeed.


Reality is more complicated than that, however. Talent and drive can take you a long way, but it’s often not enough. Luck, as it happens, is every bit as important. Being born to the right parents helps too.
Click to expand...
I've always thought that the US idea that, if only you rolled up your sleeves and worked hard, you too could be as rich as Bill Gates, was rubbish. Of course, such an approach justifies the other US pernicious idea, that, if you're poor, you are because you haven't tried hard enough, and are completely undeserving and we simply take away any benefits. A sort of "punishment will continue until morale improves" mentality.

It always seemed to me that success was built on three things:
(i) Education, be it formal or otherwise
(ii) Individual talents/abilities
(iii) Getting the right break - having, as you say, the right parents, or the right opportunity.

Taking the aforementioned Mr. Gates, he was a computer geek when such a talent was starting to become valuable, with some entrepreneurial flair. And then he got the colossal break when IBM, in one of the most fundamental business blunders of the century, decided that the future was in hardware and not software, so this little, insignificant MS-DOS thing could be given to this little company - what was the name again?

Obama was correct - people tend to ignore all the national infrastructure that has contributed to individual business success. It is now widely acknowledged that The Eisenhower Administration's building of the interstate highway network transformed the US business world and led to an enormous increase in business efficiency and profitability.
 
tones said:
It always seemed to me that success was built on three things:
(i) Education, be it formal or otherwise
(ii) Individual talents/abilities
(iii) Getting the right break - having, as you say, the right parents, or the right opportunity.
Click to expand...
How hard you try too.
 
Other variables, besides luck, talent, and rich parents:
- Values (partly influenced, of course, by education, parents - see above)
- Drive
- Opportunism (recognizing the lucky break when you come across it)
- Good looks
- Sociability
- Etc.

Our societies are far from being perfect meritocracies, and many people rise to the top (or just stay there) based on many factors besides pure ability. Only a fool would ignore the importance of inherited wealth, connections and plain luck. If all the article was trying to do is explain that we don't have a perfect meritocracy, fine, but is this really a scoop? I do have a small problem, though, with lines like the "myth of meritocracy". There is a small risk that they could be used in a way that further reinforces inherited advantage. If you downplay or remove "merit" from the equation, what replaces it? Lottery ticket? Who your parents are/were? How big a sociopath you really want to be?
 
richgilb said:
Failed philosophy where?
Click to expand...
university. only took it because of the 98% pass rate, but, like all these get something for nothing sales pitches, you couldn't get out of it once you'd signed on the dotted line. sat 2 extra exams, with answers which went from polite "sorry, i don't know' to terse negatives. in the end they called me in to see the dean so i could explain myself, so i fled the country and spent a couple of months learning about life in various exotic locations. even then they rang me when i got back, so i went to see them and told them i wanted to take art history, at which point they finally gave up, and i spent the rest of my university career in darkened lecture halls watching some of the greatest achievements of the human race roll by.
 
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