meritocracy

Like democracy, meritocracy is the worst form of social organization, except for all the others that have been tried.

Of course it is good that organizations and governments should be run by people of talent and intelligence. You want your brain surgeon to be someone who is actually good at brain surgery. Merit is valuable, by definition, and it's natural that we should try to direct the people with the most merit towards the positions where they can provide the most value. I won't belabor this here.

Instead I want to examine the arguments against meritocracy, which I think are more interesting, since they point at ways in which this simple model is imperfect and can perhaps be improved.

Loss of dignity: meritocracy creates a giant game that we all play, and that most of us must necessarily lose: any hierarchical organization has only a few top positions. In medieval times there was no shame in being a servant; it was just the lot in life that you were born into. But servants in a meritocratic society know that they are not good enough to have ended up in a higher-ranking position. This creates suffering where no suffering was present before.

Noblesse oblige: just like their servants, classic aristocrats also knew that their position was unearned. There must be someone at the top making the big decisions, thinking about the big questions, and they were fortunate to be that person: having been born into and trained for these responsibilities it was right and natural that they should exercise them. At its best, this led to a sense of duty towards society at large.

You didn't build that: by contrast, people at the top of a meritocratic system tend to think they deserve to be there. They've earned their place and society owes them for the work they did to get there. Sometimes they are wrong about the facts of the matter --- all actually-existing systems are extremely noisy at measuring merit, so they may not in fact have 'more' of it than others --- but more deeply, whatever merit they do have is ultimately due to factors outside of their control: luck, genetics, and the cumulative work of parents, teachers, and the rest of society to train and invest in them.

Illusions of fairness: we often give credence to the myth of a fair system that gives everyone an equal chance to rise to the top. But such a system is impossible even in principle: there are many fewer spaces at the top than at the bottom, so there will always be some selection criteria that determines who gets there. Whether the privilege that determines the winners is legible or not, it necessarily exists. Meritocracy trades the visible arbitrariness of a class system for an invisible arbitrariness, which is more pernicious since we can pretend it doesn't exist.

Potential is not merit: the true measure of merit is what someone does with the resources invested in them (education, money, power, status), but this is knowable only after the fact. Any meritocracy must operate on measures of potential: grades, test scores, etc., and its participants are naturally incentivized to target these proxy measures, thus falling afoul of Goodhart's Law. You end up with ambitious kids who think that getting good grades or getting promoted was the whole point, rather than actually creating value for the world. At its worst we bend the whole society towards instrumental goals and forget entirely to pursue any final goals.

Merit is not static: the idea of sorting people according to merit implies a view in which each person has a fixed quantity of merit. This may be roughly true along some axes (measures of IQ seem to be stable over most people's lifetimes), but the majority of traits that matter --- motivation, curiosity, mental models, collaboration and leadership skills, etc. --- can be trained and developed if one possesses a growth mindset. The aristocratic system works for the same reason that arranged marriages do (not that either works great, but they can be a lot better than we'd naively expect): people recognize that every branch has high-value leaves and focus on making the best of the circumstances they find themselves in.

Rich get richer: the tendency to direct resources towards the most 'meritorious' people allows them to invest in developing even more merit for themselves.

Solutions

The thing meritocracy gets right is that you want the highest-leverage work to be performed by the people who are positioned to be best at it.

At the same time, you want dignity and status to be widely distributed. There is an inherent tension here, because we do need to recognize that some work is more valuable than others and incentivize people to do the valuable work. But it is possible to navigate this tension with degrees of skillfulness.

Where applicable, it's good to orient towards a view that 'merit' is a high-dimensional space in which global comparisons are difficult or impossible. Sure, you want to be led by the best leaders, be operated on by the best surgeons, run code written by the best coders, and so on, but most big achievements are collaborations that depend essentially on the contributions of people with a wide range of skills.

We also want to orient people in positions of power towards serving the greater good. Well-designed incentives are important, but these don't substitute for a culture that imposes an inherent sense of duty. Organizations that think of leadership as service, as one valuable skill among many, tend to train more effective leaders and teams.

Ultimately the most profound and least contingent sense of universal dignity comes from spiritual views (found in most of the world's religions) that emphasize the sacredness inside each person, that we are all at our core the same essence of the divine. I think these views are likely true in some deep and meaningful sense, and that this will become more clear as we continue to develop our understanding of consciousness using the tools of meditation, psychedelics, and modern science. But regardless of whether this view can be said to be objectively true, it is certainly useful.