This is the definition I am using:
a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.
Why not? The people most qualified should have the positions. The amount of qualified people and said positions probably don’t always match and people may not want the jobs they qualify for though, But I think it’s an ideal to strive for.
This is a copy of a reply to @godzillabacter@lemmy.world :
Just to make it clear the definition that I used does not talk about choosing people for tasks they are suited for, but rather putting them in positions of power, success, and influence.
What’s the difference? The people most deserving of power, success, and influence would be the most qualified to handle it.
Ok, I just wanted to make sure if that is what you were saying.
Yes, but being good at something does not necessarily correlate to being good at managing others doing that thing.
This is especially pronounced in sales, where good salespeople get promoted to management, before immediately discovering that it requires a totally different skillset and they’ve basically changed fields entirely.
Managing people is “something.”. It’s a skill. In an ideal meritocracy, managers would be good at managing.
Halo effect
Do I believe it could work? Maybe.
Do I believe it’s been seriously tried to a significant degree? Nah.“Wherever you go, there you are” also applies to the human condition and any kind of whatever-cracy. At the end of the day, people are people and a lot of people suck, there’s no fix for that.
Yes, but it doesn’t last for long. It just takes a few bad apples on top for the system to quickly go corrupt, which is why the powers on top need to constantly fear being changed by the people
Meritocracy just means you’re rewarded proportionally to your contribution. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re rewarded with authority over anyone.
Actually the “cracy” suffix does refer specifically to the distribution of authority. Democracy is a system in which people decide; not just one in which people do well. Aristocracy is where those people are the deciders, not just where they’re the most wealthy.
A fair point. I guess I’m used to it being used incorrectly then.
“No! You can’t change me!”
“Yes we can”
::: changes him :::
“Well, I guess that does feel better”
“Told you”
What do you mean by doesn’t last long? Also if the society was a complete meritocracy what accountability would the people have?
Well, human judgement is not perfect, and eventually a snake would be able to climb the ranks and corrupt the whole system.
This is why democracy is the only system that can allow for “constant revolution” and if the current system is broken or corrupt, it’s the only way that allows for a consistent peaceful transfer of power. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but as Churchill once said “ Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
And for when the people in charge decide they’re not going to hand over their power despite being elected out, we have rules about it not being allowed to clear out people’s weapons.
Basically we do our best to ensure there are no circumstances where those in charge get to ignore those they’re ruling over. It’s a way of solving the agency problem given humans’ tendency to ignore the rules when they want to.
Another way to put it is that a politician might decide “oh this system of democracy isn’t going to keep me in power, so I’ll just step outside of it to the world of anything goes” and then an armed populace can say “nope, we’ve got moves there too, and they’re way worse for you than getting voted out”.
It makes the attractiveness of that step outside the system go way down.
No.
“American Dream,” was built on belief where workplaces are meritocratic environments where workers, regardless of their background, can, on merit and abilities overcome any deprived situation they may find themselves in and rise above.Just like communism when the Wall fell, I think it’s safe to say this ideology, when tried and tested, has been proven a total and complete failure.
The “American dream” was based on a much earlier (and just as false and terrible) idea of manifest destiny.
Also, communism has never been achieved for it to have failed:
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51fFor practical purposes it failed. If every attempt to achieve it failed then it’s just a failure.
If you follow the subjective “it was never really achieved for it to fail” logic then anyone can claim nothing ever fails.
Meritocracy and the American dream didn’t fail, we just never achieved it for it to fail then?
Meritocracy is a dogwhistle white supremacists created to justify their position of power over people of color.
As a general rule, yes. People who are able to better perform a task should be preferentially allocated towards those tasks. That being said, I think this should be a guiding rule, not a law upon which a society is built.
For one, there should be some accounting for personal preference. No one should be forced to do something by society just because they’re adept at something. I think there is also space within the acceptable performance level of a society for initiatives to relax a meritocracy to some degree to help account for/make up for socioeconomic influences and historical/ongoing systemic discrimination. Meritocracy’s also have to make sure they avoid the application of standardized evaluations at a young age completely determining an individual’s future career prospects. Lastly, and I think this is one of common meritocracy retorhic’s biggest flaws, a person’s intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance, which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.
which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.
Why do you think this is?
If I was guessing, in general, I think people who advocate for a pure meritocracy in the USA feel the world should be evaluated in more black and white, objective terms. The financial impact and analytic nature of STEM and finance make it much easier to stratify practitioners “objectively” in comparison to finding, for instance, the “best” photographer. I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy. But I’m no expert.
I don’t think the idea of meritocracy only lives in the U.S.
I didn’t say it did, but I am a citizen of the USA and the vast majority of my cultural experience and knowledge, and therefore what I can intelligently comment on, are centered on the US.
That’s fair.
I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy.
Yeah I agree with this quite a bit.
a person’s intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance
I don’t think anyone who views contributions in STEM fields as the most valuable to society has any respect for finance.
All of my encounters with individuals who feel liberal arts are useless and STEM is the way seem to, at their core, feel that way because of earning potential, and I’ve never heard one of them bash Econ/finance/investment as a career path. But 🤷♂️
All of my encounters with individuals who feel liberal arts are useless and STEM is the way seem to, at their core, feel that way because of earning potential
You were saying a group of people believe that value as a person is determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance.
Now you’re saying that this group of people believe that value as a person is determined by earnings potential. Those are not the same things.
Just to make it clear the definition that I used does not talk about choosing people for tasks they are suited for, but rather putting them in positions of power, success, and influence.
Well you need to clarify further then. Are you saying we should make the best scientist the president, or the person with the most aptitude for politics and rule to be president? I don’t see how this is functionally different than what I said.
Well the way I interpret it is that people who demonstrate their ability are put into a position where they are rewarded more relative to their peers and/or have control over what their peers do.
So for example if I was a engineer and based on some metric was considered highly valuable then I would be paid more than other engineers and I would be put into a position where I can give other engineers directions on what needs to be done.
Then no, I don’t agree with this specific implementation of the system, at least the second half. I do think more productive/effective workers should be compensated more. But being a good engineer does not make you a good manager, and the issues associated with promoting an excelling worker into management (a job requiring a substantially different skill set) are so common there’s a name for their inevitable failure, The Peter Principle
It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a few problems:
- Wealth and power above a certain level tends to become generational no matter how meritorious the origin
- People who are less capable through disability, ilness, generational poverty or anything else not their fault would still be left behind
- A lot of jobs and other functions can benefit from several different skillsets, some of which aren’t mutually inclusive
- Who decides who’s best? Who decides who decides? Etc ad infinitum.
The problem is the powerful make the rules, but don’t abide by them. What starts off as a meritocracy quickly turns into this growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Like we have now.
I’m confused about the definition. They are moved? Forcefully if needed, or they are offered the position? Also what kind of position are they moved to you mean? Like the person best in the world in welding, they will atrificially be placed in a position of influece? Influece over what, policy? Culture? Or they will be the boss of other welders? How is the demostrated ability measured? Do people take exams in like welding to compete on who is better than someone else? If so, is the test the only thing that matters? If the best welder in the world is also a complete asshole, they still get the position of power? If not, where is the trade-off on how good a welder do you have to be to be a certain amount of asshole?
Generally yes with two huge caveats.
First, It has been widely demonstrated that diverse teams are more productive and produce higher quality products than homogeneous teams.
Second, selection criteria is heavily biased towards homogeneous teams and has also been demonstrated to stifle innovation.
Desire/inspiration is nearly as important as capability and non-optimal teams (according to most, if not all selection criteria) will consistently outperform “optimal” teams in any tasks that require innovation.
Wildly untenable concept in modern society…
I’m sure it would work great in a video game or something, but In the real world, this shit goes crony AF guaranteed.
We don’t measure aptitude or ability in our society, we absolutely suck at it. A person’s ability is measured by what pedigree they purchased at degrees R us, or worse, by how articulate and verbose they were when typing a resume. Occasionally, ability is measured by how well someone likes a person even…
Competence is valued in a very select few enterprises. Trades, IT, and at higher echelons, math nerds… That’s about it…
The issue will always be reality. In theory, meritocracy and even geniocracy sounds promosing but so does our current system.
The reality is that incompetent or malicious people will always find ways to corrupt the idea.
At this point, I‘m pretty sure the only way to go forward is to think in new ways. Maybe general AI will work, or anarchy (more like anarcho communist probably).
We tried and broke everything:
- representative democracy - politicians lie to get into office and do their thing after
- autocracy - the person in charge freaks out and becomes a lifetime ruler
- communism - people starve while the politicians become rich
- monarchy - the bloodline will produce some idiot who breaks stuff - also no reason to be this rich
- multiparty system - will get little done and devolves into populism as well
- two party system - devolves into hating the other party
The real problem imo is that a few people just cant make decisions for the masses over an extended time. Its too much power and responsibility.
I‘m pretty sure a more direct democracy represents this day and age more since the majority sees how our world goes to shit.
communism - people starve while the politicians become rich
making it, by definition, not communism.
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51fWell, again theory vs reality.
Every iteration of communism so far was an absolute nightmare, made by the people for the people.
I agree that most theories are great if taken seriously but I dont see how we keep incompetence and malice from corrupting it.
My logic says weed out malice and educate the incompetent but no idea how to do this.
The SU was pretty great until it came apart due to outside interference and ultimately illegally dissolved. People like to shit-talk the censorship (and to be fair under most circumstances I would be against it as well) but things didn’t get bad until they started loosening up on it; once the citizens had no protection from the lies specifically created to destabilize their society it all came crumbling down.
Also China for all of its flaws is fucking killing it right now. They’re genuinely on the path to full blown communism, with their strategy being to build up as much power as they can while they wait for the US empire to collapse. Once they’re out of the picture, expect huge moves.
I‘m not saying direct democracy cant be broken but britain isnt a direct democracy. Its like giving someone a bike who drove a car all their lives. They crash and hurt themselves and someone says „look! Bikes are dangerous!“
There are no direct (or mostly direct) democracies in the world afaik. Feel free to prove otherwise.
Brexit happened because the bri’ish are all a bunch of subhuman fascists. They all deep down wanted brexit because they hated foreigners more than they cared for themselves. All trolls had to do was bring that to the surface and give them the chance to actually act upon it.
And they eat beans on toast
[didn’t you have beans on toast like a week ago] (shut up, mom that doesn’t count)
or anarchy (more like anarcho communist probably).
I’ve come to a similar conclusion, however I still have some hold ups on how anarchism currently being implemented across the world.
It still relies on organizers and extra attention being diverted to certain individuals who give an agenda for what needs to be done next. This allows co-opting these movements to be a lot easier than if we could work past that.
Exactly. If anarchy (or a real, local, direct democracy to be precise) was to be born, it would take a long time to prepare. People need to be educated enough to lead their own lives and make decisions for themselves and their peers. Thats something that hasnt happened for centuries. People are born into worshipping hierarchy.
The most crucial thing is education in my book. Even the last person living under a rock should be able to get quality education without any cost or strings attached.
I still have some hold ups on how anarchism currently being implemented across the world.
If you think there is someone implementing anarchism around the world, you have completely misunderstood anarchism.
It’s like when the alt right tried framing antifa as an organisation.
The whole point of anarchism is that you do what your community needs you to do, and let other communities do the same.
Yeah I agree that should be the ideal however, like you have said, it hasn’t ever really been implemented yet.
There are a bunch of groups around the world that follow similar anarchist principles, like Rojava, Zapatistas, or even Temporary autonomous zones, but all of them have some unofficial/hidden/weak form of organizer that can be targeted by people with the right resources.
My point being that since systems tend to sustain themselves if we don’t start building systems that can function without the need of an organizer or something of a similar sort then there will still be that place where the power can be misused.
I believe in a theoretical meritocracy but I think there are some pitfalls. We have a market that’s very efficient at rewarding incredibly unproductive people. The correlation between money and skill in the modern world just… isn’t. So we’d really need a better evaluation system… if we had that I think it’d be achievable.
Love the idea, though.
I agree, there would have to be measures in place to prevent the “promote to the level of incompetence” style of meritocracy that is prevalent already. There needs to be a system of recognizing that the person in any given position has the skills and abilities that make them awesome at that specific job, and rewarding them appropriately without requiring them to justify it by taking on tasks that they’re not suited for.
The idea that workers should always be gunning for a promotion is one of the worst parts of what people think a meritocracy is. But how else do you determine how much they should be paid?
Hell, I only consented to management because the company stopped listening to frontline developers. We’ve got a serious problem in the west with title fixation.
I don’t think this would ever be achievable. It also sounds like a broader form of technocracy (to my very much unqualified brain)
