The Merit of Merit
With all the talk of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, we have forgotten why Merit-based decisions are so essential to modern societies.
The following is an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
The Importance of Skills
As I argued in the first book in this series, From Poverty to Progress, technological innovation is just one of the factors that cause a society to experience long-term material progress. Skills and organizations are also critical factors.
While biological organisms can survive and reproduce without human intervention (except for some domesticated plants and animals), technologies cannot exist without human intervention. Technology requires humans to possess highly specialized skills for it to survive and reproduce (by getting widely used by humans).
Even the simplest technology requires some amount of skill to use. In addition, conceiving of the technology, designing it, building it, and repairing it are important related skills. Until people possess these skills, a specific piece of technology cannot come into being; or, if it does, it would not last very long. It will certainly never spread far enough to become an important part of a society’s technological suite.
The collective skill set of even the simplest Hunter-Gatherer band, while very simple compared with other types of human societies, dwarfs the skill set of any non-human animal. As a society acquires more complex technologies, its collective skill set increases even more rapidly. This is because each technology requires a host of related skills. The more complex the technology, the greater the number of required skills.
While the total skill set of a society has no upper limit, there is an upper limit on the number of skills that one person can acquire. Learning a skill requires large amounts of time to practice it, and time is finite.
Cesar Hidalgo has developed the concept of a “personbyte” to denote the total amount of knowledge and skills that one person can possess. This concept is important, because it shows that the only way for a society to increase the number of skills beyond a personbyte is for individuals to specialize in one skill or a small number of related skills. Fortunately, the more a person specializes in a skill, the greater the frequency of the repetitions and the more opportunity to get better at that skill. With an incentive to improve, and actionable feedback, humans can become extraordinarily good at one skill.
As the number and complexity of technologies accelerate, people need to specialize in a small number of skills. So technological innovation and progress fragment us into more specialized professions, each with clusters of related skills. But something more is required to knit these specialized workers into a team that can produce a technology or service.
The Importance of Social Organizations
That something more is a social organization. Social organizations have existed throughout human history. The family, bands, tribes, and nations are just some of the social organizations that humans have lived within. In modern times, social organizations have formalized into institutions, for example governments, corporations, labor unions, churches, militaries, non-profits, and many more.
For progress and technological innovation, corporations are the most important institution. Corporations knit together people with many different skills into one organization based on a business model designed to sell a small set of products or services to a specific customer base. Because each corporation has different technologies and different customer bases, each corporation evolves its own business model to succeed in that environment. Because customers have a limited amount of money, corporations are forced to compete with other corporations to survive.
In this way, a corporation, like all social organizations, is much like a biological organism. While biological organisms compete for energy and nutrients, corporations and other institutions compete for revenue.
To survive this competition for revenue, corporations must adopt technologies, employ people with skills appropriate to those technologies, and adopt processes that organize those people toward a common mission. Corporations that do this successfully will tend to acquire increased revenue. Those that fail to do so will tend to acquire less revenue. The worst will go bankrupt.
As technologies become increasingly complex, requiring a greater number of specialized skills, corporations and other institutions must also become more specialized and complex. Traditional societies have a relatively small suite of technology, so they require only a few small organizations. Modern societies, however, have an enormous suite of technologies. This requires a vast number of complex social organizations, each specialized in a narrow domain of technologies or services.
Importance of Merit-Based Decisions
For organizations to deliver the benefits of progress to the people, they must make hiring, firing, and promotion decisions based on merit. This ensures that the people with the skills most relevant to a job will be hired and gradually filter up the organization. Just as importantly, merit-based decisions give all employees and potential employees the incentive to keep learning new skills and improving the skills that they already have.
Skills relevant to success in a modern organization largely consist of the ability to understand and use technology, as well as “soft skills” that enable them to cooperate effectively with others in the organization. To fulfill its chosen method, it is vital for all organizations in society to make hiring, firing, and promotion based upon those two categories of skills.
Defining Merit
Before going further, I want to define what I mean by “merit.” Unfortunately, the word has been somewhat conflated with the term “virtue” to imply that a person with merit is a more virtuous person than one with less merit. This meaning of merit implies a moral judgment about an individual.
I do not use merit in that sense. I would argue that merit is highly specialized to a specific domain, so that a person with a great deal of merit in one domain is very unlikely to have merit in other domains. These domains are typically very specialized occupations.
I use the term “merit” to mean having demonstrated an ability or accomplishment that is related to the decision at hand, typically hiring, firing, and promotion. In other words, merit is using a person’s past results in a specific field to attempt to predict the likelihood that they will show similar results in a related field. In practice, this means using job experience, educational credentials, and test results for hiring, firing and promotion decisions.
A person can have a great deal of merit in one field and very little in most other fields. In practice, this is usually the case. As I mentioned, we live in a highly specialized world, in which few people are good at doing many different things.
For example, if I am looking for an electrician to wire my house, I am only interested in the qualifications that are directly related to that task. I might ask how many years the applicants have been working as an electrician, what type of jobs they have done that are similar to my house, and whether they are licensed contractors. I might also ask other electricians or construction workers if they know anyone who would be good for the job.
By hiring a specific electrician, I am not saying that this person is a better person than all the others. I just perceive them as the best person for that specific job at that time and location. In practice, of course, I will also ask how much they want to be paid and disqualify any excessively high bids. I might even accept a very low bid from a lesser candidate to save a few bucks, depending on the work I need performed.
I have been on both sides of the hiring process in digital technology. I have directed or assisted in looking for candidates, typically software engineers or designers, and I have applied and interviewed for positions on many occasions. My overall sense is that most job search processes are relatively merit-oriented, but that corporations focus more on avoiding hiring a bad candidate than on identifying the best candidate.
So if a person looking for a job is above average in qualifications, they will eventually find a job, but it will probably not be on the first attempt. In times of great demand, that person will be hired quickly, while in times of slow demand, it might take significantly longer. Merit-based decisions are about playing the odds wisely, not about getting the perfect results for each individual case.
Meritocracy
One of the greatest benefits of material progress has been the creation of the most meritocratic societies that have ever existed. Today, an individual’s position in a society largely depends upon their skills and effort to deploy those skills over the long run.
A meritocratic society is one where the bulk of the decisions made by institutions for hiring, firing, and promotion is based on merit (as I defined “merit” above). In his book, The Aristocracy of Talent, Adrian Wooldridge states it well:
“A meritocratic society combines four qualities which are each in themselves admirable. First, it prides itself on the extent to which people can get ahead in life on the basis of their natural talents. Second, it tries to secure equality of opportunity by providing education for all. Third, it forbids discrimination on the basis of race and sex and other irrelevant characteristics. Fourth, it awards jobs through open competition rather than patronage and nepotism. Social mobility and meritocracy are the strawberries and cream of modern political thinking, and politicians can always earn applause by denouncing unearned privilege. Meritocracy’s success in crossing boundaries – ideological and cultural, geographical and political – is striking.”
Life Before Merit
Today we take our relatively meritocratic society for granted. For virtually all of history, humans were born into a certain position in life and most were trapped in those circumstances for their entire life. Agricultural societies were stratified by ranks, orders, or castes into which all people were born. No amount of effort would fundamentally change one’s circumstances. Occasionally, some extraordinarily talented person could break into the upper classes, and, presumably, some people with mental or physical disabilities would plummet, but these were rare exceptions.
In traditional agricultural societies, everyone understands that only the children of aristocratic families can fill the leadership positions in political, economic, religious and military institutions. While there was often intense competition between members of the upper class, no one believed that members of the lower classes could enter that competition. This kept the talent pool very small and undermined the effectiveness of all institutions in society.
In traditional agricultural societies, patronage (support from your superiors) was far more important than merit or achievement. The political, economic, military, and religious elites usually lived in national or regional capitals. Those living in rural areas would strive to find favor from those above them so they could move to regional capitals. Those living in regional capitals strove to find favor from those above them so they could move to the national capital. Those lucky enough to live in the national capital found that they still had to get by mainly upon political patronage from their superiors, rather than their skills and achievements.
The royal court was the center of most agricultural societies. The court consisted of the monarch, his advisors, and an entire entourage of hangers-on. The court functioned not only as the political center, but it also functioned as the economic, cultural, artistic, and social center.
This forced almost everyone who wanted to excel in a domain to focus a great deal of time on currying favor from the royal court. This meant that no one was ever truly independent. The opinion of the royal court always trumped competence.
In traditional agricultural societies, the key question was not “What can you do?” It was “Who is your family or patron?” It was only when you gave a satisfactory answer to the latter question that anyone would bother to think about the first question. Few questioned the natural order, and those who did were not invited into the halls of power.
Rise of Meritocracy
Meritocracy evolved over centuries as a means to take advantage of people’s talents for the benefit of rulers. Kings, nobles, and the church were all bastions of the established order, but they also needed more talented workers than the upper classes could provide. Because they were in military competition with other kingdoms, they could not afford to completely ignore talent as a criterion. Each found ways of promoting especially talented members of the lower classes to leadership positions.
Meritocracy Is Revolutionary
Political revolutions also played an important role in creating meritocracies. The Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Empire, the American Revolution, the Puritan Revolution against the British Crown, and the French Revolution all destroyed an old regime based upon titled privilege.
The new revolutionary regimes needed men of talent to staff their government, military, and other institutions, so they opened up hiring to the lower classes even further. Each revolution undermined the moral legitimacy of the established order and expanded the role of merit in organizational decision-making.
Britain, France, Prussia, and the United States, at different times, overhauled their educational system to provide greater opportunities for the lower classes. This included reforming the admissions system, and lowering tuition costs, as well as overhauling the curriculum.
Those same nations also overhauled the way they staffed government institutions. Blatant political patronage and aristocratic privilege were gradually replaced by rigorous entrance exams and educational credentials. These reforms enabled each of these societies to compete better in both economics and the military domain.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the political Left championed the ideal of meritocracy and saw it as the key to building a more just society. The Left realized that giving an upward path to talented members of the working class would benefit society as well as building leaders for the future of the party. The opponents of meritocracy were primarily conservatives who tried to defend the established order by supporting the privileges of the upper class. In the long run, the conservatives lost the fight, as meritocracy kept expanding.
The Triumph of Merit
Gradually the concept of meritocracy spread throughout most institutions in society. Particularly in the United States, a four-year college degree is today regarded as the bare minimum for getting a high-paying job. Many positions now demand a master’s degree or even higher.
Today, merit-based decisions are far more widespread than they were 200 years ago. Whereas title and family connections used to dominate organizational decisions, now education, skills, and accomplishments do. All Western countries embrace the ideal of meritocracy, even when they do not totally fulfill it. Just as strikingly, so do Asian nations. Even Communist China, which promotes an ideology completely alien to meritocracy, embraces the concept within the party (although the current leader seems to value personal loyalty as a higher goal).
Opponents of Meritocracy
Recently, a number of books have been written that have been strongly against the concept of meritocracy. Daniel Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap and Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit are two of the most important examples. Markovits focuses largely on college admissions, a topic that I will cover later. Sandel criticizes the concept of merit because he believes that the concept assumes that those with less merit deserve their fate of having less. Sandel also claims that those with merit congratulate themselves on their efforts and on moral virtue that they do not really possess.
The problem with all of these criticisms and others is that none of them offer a viable alternative. Of course, meritocracy has its faults. People with greater merit than others in a specific domain are fallible, and sometimes catastrophically so. But what is the real alternative? Do we want to go back to a world of rigid orders, classes, or castes? Do we want institutional decision-making based on family title, patronage, or purchase of office? No, obviously not.
The only cure for the failings of our current meritocracy is to apply merit-based decisions in a fair and transparent way. Meritocracy is much like democracy. They are each flawed because humans are flawed, but they are still better than all other alternatives that humans have yet come up with.
Critical Theory and Meritocracy
The only critics of meritocracy that have a clear counter-proposal are Critical theorists (more commonly known as the “Woke.”). Because Critical theory sees all intellectual concepts as means by which powerful groups oppress marginalized groups, they see merit as just another tool of oppression. Critical theorists believe that they have a moral obligation to stand up for the oppressed by deconstructing the moral underpinning of merit so that the entire system comes crashing down.
While many Critical theorists have been entirely vague about what comes after merit, Critical race theorists mostly see systematic discrimination against powerful groups as the only other option. They essentially argue for radically expanding affirmative action for marginalized groups into all organizational decisions. They want to substitute “What can you do?” with “What group do you belong to?”
Affirmative action started in the early 1970s and, until recently it has largely been restricted to universities, governments, and government contractors. Early in my career in the digital technology industry, I worked in Apple Computers’ Department of Multicultural Affairs. While the department had many tasks, monitoring the racial and gender characteristics of employees and pushing managers to “do better” was a key task.
When I first started working there, I accepted the goal of affirmative action, but as I began to see how it worked in practice, my support waned. At the time, managers had a huge financial incentive to hire the most qualified person, and begging and pleading for them to do otherwise was pointless. In the 1990s, the Department of Multicultural Affairs was swimming against institutional incentives. Unfortunately, since that time institutional incentives have changed radically.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Particularly since 2020, institutions of all types have accepted (or at least pretended to accept) the rationale of making hiring, firing, and promotion decisions based on race, gender and other characteristics. While I do not believe that corporate executives and managers actually believe that this is good for society or the corporation, they promote the practice in order to maintain public relations.
The DEI industry has convinced corporations to pretend that they believe that only discrimination against the oppressors can compensate for past discrimination by oppressors. They cover up the intent using words such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), but deliberate discrimination is clearly their goal.
Particularly toxic is the way that executives tie the performance reviews of managers to the racial and gender representation of their hiring, firing and promotions. This enables executives and HR departments to pretend to support merit-based criteria while forcing hiring managers to deliberately discriminate.
Any manager who believes that these practices are unethical or even bad for the company risks termination. Managers in many corporations now have a career incentive to discriminate, stay quiet, and pretend that nothing unusual is happening.
Also toxic to progress has been the radical expansion of racial sensitivity training that is effectively promoting Critical theory. These training sessions actively (but privately) promote racial discrimination, racial stereotyping, and racial segregation. Employees are forced to sit and listen to left-wing agitators lecture them on race, while pretending to agree.
The evidence from these racial-sensitivity training sessions is clear. They do not work to lower racial tensions or elevate racial minorities. They only inject racial tension, anxiety, and left-wing ideology into the workplace (Harvard Business Review).
A lack of transparency and the fear of being fired play a key role in the continuation of these policies. Employees know that they will be at best stigmatized, and at worst endanger of being fired. And since all the training and policy are done in secret, it will be difficult to acquire the evidence necessary to prove discrimination and harassment.
Supporters of DEI also conveniently ignore the fact that affirmative action has been widely used in many sectors of society for over 50 years. By their own claim that the United States is a racist society with unfair outcomes, they prove that previous affirmative action was a failure. Rather than accept the failure of past policies, they chose to double down on them. This, unfortunately, has been a consistent pattern on the Left.
Patronage 2.0
What is shocking is the way that liberals who used to believe in integration, merit, non-discrimination, and getting beyond race now support imposing policies that are the complete opposite. However, when seen from another perspective, it may not be so surprising.
When you get past all the ideological rhetoric, the new DEI regime looks remarkably similar to political patronage. Patronage was the fuel that supported American political parties in 19th and early 20th century politics. While the practice was widespread, it was particularly prevalent in the Democratic party in the large cities of the Northeast and Midwest. This style of politics is often called “urban political machines.”
These urban political machines traded votes for jobs and money. Political candidates and local party leaders promised various ethnic groups in the city that they would hire them as government bureaucrats or party activists and focus government funding in their neighborhood if the group supported the Democratic party. These urban political machines also frequently stuffed or dumped ballots to win elections. Systematic corruption was the lifeblood of these urban political machines.
While the proponents of DEI use rhetoric to create the impression that their goals are based upon moral principles, they apply their concepts selectively. Institutions that embrace the concepts of DEI do not seem too concerned about professions where Blacks are heavily over-represented: athletics, music, and entertainment. Nor are they particularly worried that women are increasingly over-represented as students in universities. Nor do they care too much about the under-representation of religious or ethnic minorities who happen to have white skin.
The new DEI regime is a means by which the Left rewards groups who support the Democratic party. Those rewards come in the form of government benefits and jobs. Just like the machine politics that the same party practiced in big cities in the past, they have a clear message: vote for the Democrats, and you will be rewarded with money and jobs.
The goal becomes particularly clear when it is combined with attempts by stifle conservative Blacks, Hispanics and women who speak up. If you do not toe the party line, you are still at risk of being fired. Your demographic group will not save you. Only your partisan alignment will.
The Merits of Merit
I believe that supporters of meritocracy have not done a very good job of selling the principle. Despite the principle being widely viewed as positive, few people can clearly articulate why an individual decision in the workplace should be based upon merit instead of equity.
Every institution in society exists because it helps to solve a problem for the rest of society. Organizations that do a good job of solving a specific problem acquire more resources from customers and investors, and they can attract the best talent with higher pay.
It is a fundamental truth that no organization can be good at everything. For this reason, it is critical that all organizations specialize in the specific domains that are necessary for solving a specific problem. This leaves space for other organizations to specialize in different areas.
By focusing on one clear organizational goal, an organization is far more likely to achieve its goals. When one adds additional goals into a business model, this undermines the ability of that organization to achieve socially desirable results. This is particularly true when the additional goals fundamentally conflict with the ability of an organization to hire, fire and promote people who possess the necessary skills to pursue organizational goals.
Everyone Wins
Critical theorists and many others on the Left see hiring, firing and promotion as a zero-sum game of distribution. For them, this game is something like divvying an economic pie that is of a fixed size. One person’s gain is another person’s loss. As they see it, the person who gets the job is a winner in the game, and everyone else is a loser. The job itself and what that person does in it after winning is incidental. This is completely wrong both factually and morally.
When the best person for that job gets the job, everyone wins. When the best person for the job gets the job, their co-workers win. They have a greater ability to accomplish their own tasks because all work is at least somewhat interdependent. It is demoralizing for co-workers when the efforts of the entire group are undermined by one incompetent or disruptive co-worker. This is even more true if that co-worker is given a free pass because they happen to share demographic characteristics with under-represented groups.
It is particularly bad when that person is a manager. There are few things worse in employment than having a bad manager. I have been pretty lucky in my career. Most of my managers were competent enough, but I have had a few that were… not. Employees have little recourse against a bad manager other than quitting or suffering in silence while waiting out the manager.
Hiring the person most qualified for the job also benefits the customers and shareholders of the company. When everyone in a company is qualified and believes that they are honestly being graded on their performance, customers will receive a better product, and stocks are more likely to rise in value. Of course, all companies have bad employees, but when the dominant hiring ideology is the theory that diversity, equity and inclusion are more important than merit, this guarantees a much higher proportion of bad employees.
While it is true that the person who does not get a job is a short-term loser in the transaction, there are still very real benefits for that person. I see merit-based decision-making as a way of guiding people toward the position where they can make the greatest contributions to the organization and society in general. So someone may fail to get an individual job, but this may benefit them in the long run.
The feedback from the job search process helps people, particularly young people, to get real feedback on where their talents would best be applied. Assuming the job market is not too bad for job-seekers, numerous job rejections over a long period of time sends a clear signal that another career path may be a better choice.
Far too many people struggle for decades to launch careers in extremely competitive fields, such as athletics, music, acting, art, politics and academia, without being willing to confront the possibility that they are not good enough. In many of these desirable professions, a lucky few make the cut and earn huge amounts of money, but so many cling to unrealistic hopes for too long.
A person who is a very bad lawyer or doctor might be a very good mechanic. While there are some people who truly cannot support themselves with employment, the vast majority of people can. The hard part is finding a match between what one is good at, and what society wants sufficiently enough to pay money for.
And if an unqualified person gets a job, they are most likely moving their careers in a direction that will create dead-ends. Supporters of DEI seem to believe that no one will notice the results of employees who are not hired based on merit. While there might be some jewels that rise to the occasion, everyone will notice if employees of certain demographic groups perform worse as a whole compared to other demographic groups. They may be too scared to say anything, but everyone will know.
DEI sets favored demographic groups up for long-term failure. Sadly the entire regime of diversity, equity, and inclusion has hugely stigmatized all employees in the very groups that its supporters claim to want to help. People will immediately assume that a person was a diversity hire based upon their physical appearance — even when it is not true. This forces them all into a position where they have to prove their worth even after they are hired. No amount of protestation that they were not a diversity hire will persuade some of their fellow employees.
When DEI hires reach a certain critical mass, it is likely to seriously undermine employee morale. No one will believe that decision-making is ever based upon merit. Why put in the extra effort for the company, when you know that it will not change who gets hired, fired, or promoted, or who gets a pay raise?
The concept of intersectionality is particularly toxic in an organization. While most ideologies focus on one division within society, for example, class, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender, intersectionality uses all of them at once to create a hierarchy of oppression. Worse, supporters of intersectionality keep inventing new supposedly oppressed groups.
Everyone can game the system to identify a characteristic that they have that is under-represented in the company overall. Everyone can also game the system by identifying characteristics of other employees that make other people less deserving of favors.
This transforms organizational decisions into pure politics, where all resources are divided into different groups and everyone thinks that their group is deserving of more. Because Critical theory rewards those who side with the oppressed, regardless of logic, and so many individuals can find a criterion that explains why they are being oppressed, organizations are doomed to everyone fighting everyone in a never-ending zero-sum conflict.
Contribution, Not Distribution
A fundamental problem with ideologies on the Left is that they focus exclusively on the distribution of the gains from progress. The Left wants to achieve a fair society, which they define in terms of equal outcomes, and they bridle at any deviations from that outcome. They see political activism to create demand for redistributionist social programs and regulations as being the way we need strive for a better society.
Instead of focusing on the distribution of the gains of progress, we should primarily focus on the contributions that individuals make to progress. Progress is not an inevitable outcome of forces; it is the outcome of human activity. And some people can contribute to progress far more than others.
We need to ensure that people who have won the genetic lottery and have lucked out on other non-genetic factors are put into a position where they feel an obligation to contribute as much to society as possible. Part of that incentive comes from economic incentives to learn skills and perform in the workplace. Part of that incentive comes from meritocratic decisions within organizations. When the most talented succeed, everyone wins.
Living in a society experiencing material progress benefits everyone, not just the most fortunate. Long-term economic growth pays for all the social programs that the Left supports. It pays for our food, energy, housing, transportation, health care, entertainment, and virtually every other thing that can be purchased on the market.
This is why meritocracy works. It is not because of social mobility, although that plays a role. Meritocracy works because it places the people who have the ability to contribute the most to society in a position where they are best able to do so.
Focus on the Individual
A fundamental concept of a Progress-based reform agenda should be to focus on the individual, not on the group. Institutions make hiring, firing, and promotion decisions about an individual, not a group. Each person is hired, fired, or promoted based upon their own unique characteristics, which cannot be defined by which demographic groups they happen to fall into.
A person is not defined by their race. A person is not defined by their gender. A person is not defined by their nationality, religion, ethnicity, age, marital status, sexuality, or any other characteristic. Nor is a person even defined by all of those characteristics in combination (as in the theory of intersectionality).
Each person is unique. Only the people who interact with them regularly within the context of their workplace can make judgments about their merit. Of course, those persons will have biases, self-interest, and personal goals. That is why we need to focus on merit so that we have a principle that limits the impact each of those biases plays in the decision-making of organizations.
And of course, even if the process is perfectly merit-based, some will make judgments in error. Others will make decisions because they have inaccurate stereotypes about a person because of their demographic characteristics. Others will make decisions based on accurate stereotypes that do not happen to apply to that individual. Some will make blatantly discriminatory decisions.
The antidote to all these poor decisions is organizations competing against each other in the marketplace, and the ability of the talented to create new organizations based upon new models of operation. It is this competitive process that forces organizations to overcome their prejudices and hire the individual with the most merit for that specific position.
Individuals Do Not Represent a Group
An implicit assumption of many on the Left who criticize the unequal outcomes among different demographic groups in a meritocracy is that an individual “represents” a group. In politics, the concept of representation makes sense. We elect leaders to represent us: i.e. to make decisions on our behalf so we do not have to. In that sense, political leaders can be judged by how much they represent voters.
In most institutions in society, however, representation is not a useful concept. A corporate CEO or manager who happens to have identical demographic characteristics to me does not represent me in any way. Nor does a corporate CEO or manager with differing demographics fail to represent me.
It is not and should not be the goal of individuals in an organization to represent anyone. They should be applying their skills, time, and energy to solving a specific problem for the organization. Doing this has nothing to do with representation.
I want to work for a great CEO, a great manager, and co-workers who have the right technical skills, people skills, integrity, and work ethic to perform their job. I win, and all the other employees win when the staff possess those characteristics. My guess is that the vast majority of people want the same for their employment.
Inequality is Inevitable
Virtually all ideologies on the Left have a goal of equality. I would argue that they are trying to achieve an impossible goal and their unwillingness to acknowledge that 200 years of effort have been wasted on this goal undermines the entire movement. At some point, the Left must look at the actual results of their policies and acknowledge that they have not been able to achieve their goal of equality.
Inequality is an inevitable outcome of living in a human society that has evolved past a Hunter Gatherer lifestyle. Even among Hunter Gatherers, there were important biological inequalities based on strength, speed, charisma, beauty, intelligence, and charisma. Inequality is part of the human condition.
Diversity inevitably leads to inequality. Different types of people have different preferences. Those preferences lead to different choices. Those choices lead to different outcomes. Different outcomes piled on top of each other lead to inequality. Over generations, those inequalities will tend to be reinforced until people’s fundamental preferences change.
In every society that has ever existed, there have been different outcomes between different ethnicities, religions, races, and genders. There is no reason to assume that discrimination always is the cause. In some cases, it has been, but differing outcomes are not evidence of discrimination per se. And when those inequalities reproduce themselves even when individuals migrate to different societies, it is safe to assume that discrimination is often not the cause.
Inequality is inevitable, but it really matters what type of inequality exists in society. An inequality where a handful of titled families rule through expropriation and pass those titles onto their children is not a just society. Nor is a society where rank in the ruling party determines outcomes a just one.
A meritocratic society with a high material standard of living leads to the most just form of inequality that we can probably ever achieve. We want a society where the most talented work hard to better themselves and in the process improve society. Such a society creates the incentive for individuals to innovate new technologies, learn new skills, cooperate in groups to solve common problems, and outcompete other organizations trying to do the same.
Yes, such a society is inevitably unequal in income and wealth distribution. It seems only fair that such individuals have more income, wealth, and status than the rest of us. And once society reaches a certain material standard of living, those inequalities will be about luxury items, not the necessities of survival.
The inequalities of a meritocratic society are fair because those inequalities are largely due to the contributions that individuals make to society. As long as a society maintains the Five Keys to Progress, meritocratic decision-making will lead toward good ends.
Merit Is Not Social Mobility
Some people mistakenly conflate merit and social mobility. These people start with the “blank slate” assumption that all persons are born with the same inherent characteristics, so the outcome of a meritocratic society will be high levels of social mobility.
When a society transitions to being relatively merit-based, rates of social mobility typically increase, but after a few generations, the overall levels of social mobility decline. In social mobility research, this is often operationalized by comparing the income and social status of adult children compared to their parents.
In fact, a meritocratic society is a sorting process. Meritocratic societies sort people based on socially beneficial factors, the most important of which are intelligence and conscientiousness. Because intelligence is closely related to genetic factors, meritocracies indirectly sort by genes. Because members of the same class tend to intermarry and have children, that genetic sorting moves on to the next generation. This is why meritocratic societies tend to have lower rates of social mobility than the ideal of social mobility would imply.
See part 2 of The Merit of Merit.
The above was an excerpt from my second book Promoting Progress: A Radical New Agenda to Create Abundance for All. You can order e-books at a discounted price at my website, or you can purchase full-price ebooks, paperback, or hardcovers on Amazon.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: