I like the way you describe the two systems that oppose meritocracy: the system favoring those born with significant financial and social capital and the system that locks out many of those who are born with a deficit of the same.
Both systems are unfair and lead to sub-optimal results. Both systems also spark resentment and describe the angst fueling the American populist movement
Very useful to think about policies in the context you lay out.
I think the sports analogy is spot on. When I hear people on the left bashing the dearth of coaches of color being due to racism, I find it full of hysteria. I think you have to be smoking something really strong to think that an owner prefers hiring a white guy who wins less games to a black guy that will win more.
I call bullshit. The only arguably anti-meritocratic, "judged by this list of demands we just made up" hiring practices advocated by the left is Diversity Hiring, which had to be forced on corporations because up until lately they were LITERALLY hiring only white men of a certain class. Modern newsrooms are a perfect example of this-- so long as new hires are based on their economic ability to join up as unpaid interns, a helluva lot of good journalists will be ignored. A TRUE meritocratic system would be applauded by everyone, but saying "We only hire the best" and then populating the board with Nigel Carruthers III and his ilk is not meritocracy.
Very late to the party here, but while I largely agree with this, I'd just like to bring up a point that hasn't been raised.
Lots of jobs - possibly most jobs - don't really hire on a "you have a list of the most qualified people from #1-to-whatever and you go down the list and find the most qualified person you can get" basis. Most jobs hire on a "take a clump of people who are more-or-less equally qualified, interview them, and decide who gets the job on the basis of 'soft' factors like cultural fit or this person kinda knows my cousin or whatever political considerations might be relevant" basis.
This is particularly true for lots of super-high-profile jobs, like Supreme Court justices and Cabinet secretaries. There's not *one* person who is especially uniquely qualified to be Secretary of State, there's dozens of people whose qualifications might differ in the particulars but are kinda equal to each other overall. But it's true for lots of other jobs, too.
And in those circumstances, I think diversity is fine to include as one of those 'soft' factors. I don't think it should be the only one, I think how it important it is should depend on the job, and I definitely don't think unqualified people should be hired because "we need a woman on the team" or whatever. But I think it's fine to consider diversity when you are deciding between a group of more-or-less equally qualified candidates, and that's how most hiring processes work.
Sports players -- yeah, you can make an argument that the meritocracy is stronger there than in other parts of society. But looking at coaches and executives in sports? No way. Just look at all the failsons on NFL coaching staffs right now.
"Obviously, that team would get its brains beaten in. In sports, success and failure are relentlessly measured, which is why it’s probably the most meritocratic field there will ever be."
But what if all the teams in the league used the same insane recruiting strategy? And what if the referees had the same despotic and woke ethics? Finally, what if the league changed the rules to reward teams based on things other than actual play?
Dear Jeff - you're concentrating your fire on one pushback against meritocracy.
The one that says "well, we want more equal outcomes so let's just pretend that people are more equal in skills/trained talents than they are rather than fix the 'equality of opportunity thing', which turned out to be way more complicated and politically difficult than we thought...
But that leaves asides a second type of pushback. The one that says that your talent/your skills are determined essentially by chance - your genetic makeup and your lived environment. You had control over neither. Therefore, while it makes total sense to have LeBron James playing for the Lakers rather than I, it may not be entirely fair that he gets such a disproportionate pay package to me.
That's obviously applicable to all human beings in any endeavour. So Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates wouldn't end up with gazillions of dollars. The optimal level of inequality would then be down to "however little it takes to motivate people to exert their best efforts".
I really enjoy your writing. There's a lot that goes into hiring and different positions require different considerations but being able to do the job has to be the main one but I understand the argument from the Left that we narrowed it down to 5 good candidates and we consistently hired the white guy.
So overall, agreed, let's keep meritocracy rather arbitrary political hiring.
Yet this fall apart in two places worth noting
1) We are really shit at assessing who is good at something. Sports is a great example where we have objective data, but otherwise we only can make really coarse assessments. You maybe can sort resumes into two stacks of qualified and not-qualified, but choosing amongst the qualified is much more a crapshoot than most will admit. We probably code actually do better (in the sense of a achieve our outcomes of making more money in business or whatever) by randomly choosing people from the qualified pile.
2) There are pipeline problems. To choose an odd example, there aren't many black hockey players, and while the Maurer-Cowbows proposal could be applied to hockey too, it would have all the same problems. An alternative such as cross-training football players or whatever (our now ex-Cowboys), would also give us teams that underperform. Instead an answer might be to subsidize youth and high-school hockey for under-represensented groups and let the problem sort itself out over a few decades. I'm not sure this is worth the investment for hockey, but you could do something similar, say, for computer science.
I never realized "dessert" was so controversial. I thought everyone agrees pluots are the best after a good meal. "Desert", on the other hand - that's a good source of argument.
I think the Dallas Cowboys have a method of player acquisition that is even WORSE than the one you mentioned: they let Jerry Jones do it.
I like the way you describe the two systems that oppose meritocracy: the system favoring those born with significant financial and social capital and the system that locks out many of those who are born with a deficit of the same.
Both systems are unfair and lead to sub-optimal results. Both systems also spark resentment and describe the angst fueling the American populist movement
Very useful to think about policies in the context you lay out.
I think the sports analogy is spot on. When I hear people on the left bashing the dearth of coaches of color being due to racism, I find it full of hysteria. I think you have to be smoking something really strong to think that an owner prefers hiring a white guy who wins less games to a black guy that will win more.
I call bullshit. The only arguably anti-meritocratic, "judged by this list of demands we just made up" hiring practices advocated by the left is Diversity Hiring, which had to be forced on corporations because up until lately they were LITERALLY hiring only white men of a certain class. Modern newsrooms are a perfect example of this-- so long as new hires are based on their economic ability to join up as unpaid interns, a helluva lot of good journalists will be ignored. A TRUE meritocratic system would be applauded by everyone, but saying "We only hire the best" and then populating the board with Nigel Carruthers III and his ilk is not meritocracy.
I couldn’t disagree more!! If wiping your ass was declared racist, bidet sales would skyrocket.
I didn't know you spoke French! "Merdedecheval" is a beautiful little town.
Very late to the party here, but while I largely agree with this, I'd just like to bring up a point that hasn't been raised.
Lots of jobs - possibly most jobs - don't really hire on a "you have a list of the most qualified people from #1-to-whatever and you go down the list and find the most qualified person you can get" basis. Most jobs hire on a "take a clump of people who are more-or-less equally qualified, interview them, and decide who gets the job on the basis of 'soft' factors like cultural fit or this person kinda knows my cousin or whatever political considerations might be relevant" basis.
This is particularly true for lots of super-high-profile jobs, like Supreme Court justices and Cabinet secretaries. There's not *one* person who is especially uniquely qualified to be Secretary of State, there's dozens of people whose qualifications might differ in the particulars but are kinda equal to each other overall. But it's true for lots of other jobs, too.
And in those circumstances, I think diversity is fine to include as one of those 'soft' factors. I don't think it should be the only one, I think how it important it is should depend on the job, and I definitely don't think unqualified people should be hired because "we need a woman on the team" or whatever. But I think it's fine to consider diversity when you are deciding between a group of more-or-less equally qualified candidates, and that's how most hiring processes work.
Sports players -- yeah, you can make an argument that the meritocracy is stronger there than in other parts of society. But looking at coaches and executives in sports? No way. Just look at all the failsons on NFL coaching staffs right now.
"Obviously, that team would get its brains beaten in. In sports, success and failure are relentlessly measured, which is why it’s probably the most meritocratic field there will ever be."
But what if all the teams in the league used the same insane recruiting strategy? And what if the referees had the same despotic and woke ethics? Finally, what if the league changed the rules to reward teams based on things other than actual play?
Dear Jeff - you're concentrating your fire on one pushback against meritocracy.
The one that says "well, we want more equal outcomes so let's just pretend that people are more equal in skills/trained talents than they are rather than fix the 'equality of opportunity thing', which turned out to be way more complicated and politically difficult than we thought...
But that leaves asides a second type of pushback. The one that says that your talent/your skills are determined essentially by chance - your genetic makeup and your lived environment. You had control over neither. Therefore, while it makes total sense to have LeBron James playing for the Lakers rather than I, it may not be entirely fair that he gets such a disproportionate pay package to me.
That's obviously applicable to all human beings in any endeavour. So Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates wouldn't end up with gazillions of dollars. The optimal level of inequality would then be down to "however little it takes to motivate people to exert their best efforts".
I really enjoy your writing. There's a lot that goes into hiring and different positions require different considerations but being able to do the job has to be the main one but I understand the argument from the Left that we narrowed it down to 5 good candidates and we consistently hired the white guy.
So overall, agreed, let's keep meritocracy rather arbitrary political hiring.
Yet this fall apart in two places worth noting
1) We are really shit at assessing who is good at something. Sports is a great example where we have objective data, but otherwise we only can make really coarse assessments. You maybe can sort resumes into two stacks of qualified and not-qualified, but choosing amongst the qualified is much more a crapshoot than most will admit. We probably code actually do better (in the sense of a achieve our outcomes of making more money in business or whatever) by randomly choosing people from the qualified pile.
2) There are pipeline problems. To choose an odd example, there aren't many black hockey players, and while the Maurer-Cowbows proposal could be applied to hockey too, it would have all the same problems. An alternative such as cross-training football players or whatever (our now ex-Cowboys), would also give us teams that underperform. Instead an answer might be to subsidize youth and high-school hockey for under-represensented groups and let the problem sort itself out over a few decades. I'm not sure this is worth the investment for hockey, but you could do something similar, say, for computer science.
I never realized "dessert" was so controversial. I thought everyone agrees pluots are the best after a good meal. "Desert", on the other hand - that's a good source of argument.