I know some guys who came from money, and getting their inheritance was bound to some stipulations. They had to have reached a certain age, and they had to have already graduated college on their own and gotten some real life work experience. One guy could only benefit from the family money as long as he also had steady employment (he started his own business that was kind of simplistic, and just barely stayed in the black), so that’s something to consider. In both cases these guys were reasonably intelligent and hard working, and didn’t have everything handed to them, but they still had way more advantages than I ever did. If you DO believe the US is a meritocracy (more or less) then you also shouldn’t be opposed to inheritance taxes, since being born into money isn’t earning it in any sense.
That’s true when considering the tippy top of society – the 1%, government leaders, and so on – but do you believe it’s true in every scope? Do you believe that in general line supervisors at factories don’t have any merit applicable to their jobs that the assembly line workers don’t have? That lead investigators mostly get their research grants via gross miscarriages of justice? That all people are corrupt and no one who has a degree of power or security has properly earned it, you yourself included?
I think the idea of meritocracy works okay almost everywhere except when it comes to society’s biggest bogeymen: the ultra-rich, CEOs, and prominent politicians. Take them out of the picture and meritocracy works as well as anything else. The problem isn’t with the idea of meritocracy – it’s with the set of people so powerful they can defeat and corrupt any system, including communism if we went that way.
Well, by that logic if everyone were born with the exact same situation, with a basic income, housing, education and health care provided, then the most hard working, intelligent and talented would rise to the top. If having your basic needs met means you become lazy and complacent then you’re admitting the entire concept of a meritocracy is bunk because humans are naturally lazy, and nobody would even try getting ahead.
In other words, if you really want there to be a meritocracy, then have everyone start from the same point and see how they fare. Instead we have the race beginning with some people sitting in comfy chairs at the finish line (and some without running shoes stuck in the locker room.)
Anarcho-syndicalism? Workers self management? Parecon?
I believe that in terms of the big picture there is little if any correlation between “who works hard to contribute to society” and “who has lots of money and power.”
The family that essentially created the opiod crisis has billions of dollars. The people who grow the food we need to survive are making poverty wages. Yes, a person who picks cabbages faster than their peers might take home a few extra bucks a month or even get a promotion, but they could work a hundred lifetimes and not be worth as much as the laziest heir to the Walton fortune.
The “-ocracy” part doesn’t refer to who earned a few extra bucks by putting in overtime, it refers to the people who run the place.
Academia is also a meritocracy. In some ways it avoid this, for example hiding author names when papers are reviewed (sometimes). However, career progression and grant systems are very much a meritocracy with all the problems you’ve described.
I think there’s a fair bit of good will and interest here to try things out, if you have any ideas.
He/she probably came from a family with more means than the factory worker and had more access to a high quality education, rather than being somehow inherently smarter than the worker or somehow better at “management”, which is a job most of us can probably be trained for.
You really think that research grants are based on merit and what we need to be studying instead of who one knows?
Those people may or may NOT be corrupt, but having access to money and elite institutions from a young age means having better access to it down the line.
No, it doesn’t. People game the system from the top down and people manage to get advantages by who they know rather than what they know.
See the Ivy League college scandal that’s still in the news right now…
Meritocracy is a MYTH invented by the ‘Haves’ as an excuse to placate all the ‘Have Nots.’
Remember Boxer, and what ‘reward’ all his “merit” earned him in the end.
Just because the merit is unearned, doesn’t mean that it isn’t merit. Jobs should be done by the people best qualified to do them, even if they arrived at those qualifications unfairly. For many jobs, “who you know” is a facet of merit – a network of contacts and resources directly helps get the job done. That’s the “each according to his ability” part of the equation. How they’re compensated for doing those jobs is a different matter though.
This sincerely is a good answer. The workers can decide by committee who will do each job. Life as a series of popularity contests is about as transparent and egalitarian as it gets.
You’re technically correct (the best kind of correct), but “as above, so below.” Every level of society tries to order itself according to the same principals, and it’s all part of the same gestalt. That’s why people keep bringing up that college admissions scandal even though the headliners for it are a couple of B-list actresses rather than people who “run the place.”
None of the methods I suggested use committees, unless you consider the ballot box a committee.
Just out of interest, where did you get your newspeak dictionary from?
as opposed to when an owner assigns you a merit score, that’s not a popularity contest
I prefer systemic change to charity. A little thing Ben Franklin called prevention and all that. 
I’m imagining the scenario under Parecon where a group of six employees must decide who among them will serve as the manager for the rest. I suppose they would debate among themselves a bit and then take a vote. Seems like a committee to me. Sorry if I’m not accurately imaging how it might work in the workaday world.
I don’t get the knee-jerk aversion to committees. How else do people prefer for small groups to reach consensus on decisions? Maybe people just don’t like the word.
And yet that kind of thing is so ripe for abuse, even more so than gaming a welfare program where at least there is public oversight to try and weed that abuse out. Allowing a manager to hire his best buddy might mean the guy is the best qualified, but just as likely not.
That would be a deliberative assembly. Also a manager under any of the systems mentioned would not be managing people but whatever they are working on, and would run the risk of having a recall election if they were to act in such an authoritarian manner as to act like a manager in a capitalist workplace. Maybe facilitator would be a more appropriate term.
Committees represent centralised power.
Direct democracy.
Meritocracy is incoherent as a position. Not because it is stupid, but because it is obvious. Who should get desirable but scarce thing? Why, the person with the most merit.
Yeah, but what’s merit? If you root about and examine what people mean by it, you quickly realize that the above statement can be reformulated as 'The person who should get the scarce thing is the person who should get the scarce thing."
Oh, well done! That’s very illuminating.
In truth, everyone believes in meritocracy (because it is tautological). The issue is who gets to determine what constitutes as ‘merit,’ who gets to measure said merit, how efficient the system is, and what sort of things are subject to competition.
