Hello guys. It’s been a while since I’ve written a piece. It’s been even longer since I’ve written one overtly political. I wanted to put an end to that streak. I definitely missed being a “hot takes” sort of person. Here is my attempt at reintegrating that with my love for all things tech and futurism.
Recently, I read a post by Matthew Yglesias that I found interesting for various reasons. The piece titled “Meritocracy is bad” sought to give a valid left-leaning critique of Meritocracy by attacking the concept itself. I thought a lot of the points he made were valid. But I ultimately disagreed with him due to reasons I’ll elaborate on soon.
Yglesias’s argument
In the piece in question, Yglesias uses various examples and anecdotes to make the case that whatever meritocratic system may exist will primarily select for people that are shrewd because that’s precisely what it means to be “the best” at any one thing.
He uses the example of Trump— a product of America’s meritocracy— in this way:
Trump exploited loopholes in the Selective Service system to get a deferral due to supposed bone spurs. And throughout his business career, Trump succeeded with sharp practices. Liberals who’ve had their brains poisoned by meritocracy often make out Trump to be some kind of dunce who only got anywhere because his dad was rich. But if you examine the record, it’s clearly not true.
His recognition that he could get away with repeatedly stiffing contractors without becoming unable to do business going forward was genuinely insightful. The way he emerged from bankruptcy in Atlantic City by launching a publicly-traded company and then sticking his shareholders with his own personal debts was nothing short of brilliant. The problem with Trump is that he’s a bad person. He ran the federal government with the ethics of a private equity team taking over a nursing home.
This he contrasts with Biden a president who had probably proven far more competent in the first few months of his presidency than Trump did in the entirety of his. Biden also happens to be from a background very distant from the definition of “elite”:
Joe Biden didn’t have a rich dad, benefit from legacy admissions, or benefit from affirmative action. He went to the University of Delaware, then Syracuse for law school, and he was in the bottom of his class at this not-super-prestigious law school. And while it’s obviously too soon to pronounce his presidency a huge success, it certainly seems to be off to a promising start. He has a good nose for public opinion, has hired a good team, seems to get along well with the relevant people, and excels at tapping into personal tragedy he’s experienced to connect with normal people despite having been in politics since the beginning of time.
The point Yglesias makes can be summarized as “Meritocracy selects for people who understand systems they are tasked with handling so well, they can easily reverse engineer said systems to suit their needs. Such people are bound to misuse the systems they were supposed to guard.”
This is quite the point. But here’s the thing, the sort of meritocracy he describes—not its outcome— is in many ways a uniquely American iteration of the concept.
American Meritocracy measures the wrong things.
American Meritocracy is the sort that assumes that one having a degree in Government from Harvard and maybe a subsequent law degree in a similarly prestigious university makes one fit enough to carry out the grand task of leadership. It assumes that the requirements one must fulfill to obtain high-status credentials make one suited for a given task. In short, American meritocracy falsely assumes that proof of status equals proof of competence. In this way, American Meritocracy manages to be meritocratic(requires some proof of proficiency), while straying far from the ideal.
That’s where it all falls apart. Because it reveals that this sort of meritocracy selects for a group of values that may not necessarily make people suited for leadership in the world we live in today. In its eyes status means competence, and I’m not sure whether there is a correlation between the two, but regardless of the case, it sure happens to be a terrible metric for deciding what or who qualifies as “best” or “most suited”.
This flawed conception of a meritocracy is what Matthew then generalizes in his critique. I saw a few try to make the counterpoint that the US merely suffers from “misaligned incentives”. Misaligned incentives would imply that one is being praised or rewarded for wrong actions. But that misses the crux of the problem entirely! American meritocracy rewards these actions because it thinks they are right. American meritocracy prides itself on creating the shrewd businessman, the charismatic/charming politician and in many cases, these people have significant sway over public discourse.
Meritocracy can exist in other forms too.
Compare this to Chinese and Singaporean meritocracy and we get an obvious view of how meritocracy is supposed to work. Or how it works when we measure for the right things.
Meritocracy, as it exists in China today, is a concept based on a long history of experimentation and philosophy; a concept it may have actually invented. It is believed that the Chinese philosopher Confuscious invented the notion of leadership based on merit rather than status. Today Political Meritocracy is tightly ingrained in how it selects leaders in everything from local provinces to the Prime Ministership itself. Xi Jinping himself had to prove the competence of his governorship by actually managing several provinces.
A great talk on the subject was this one by Eric Li in which he describes the differences between Western governance and the Chinese meritocracy. I recommend anyone interested in this topic watch it.
For its adherence to “Political Meritocracy”, it has been rewarded with 25 years of insane economic growth and so has Singapore.
Now, this system of strict Political Meritocracy isn’t perfect, and in many cases, runs antithetical to democratic values. But it does work and if alleviating millions of people from poverty is good, if an increase in wealth and a rapid decrease in material scarcity is good, then there exist fundamentally good forms of meritocracy. The question of whether a form of meritocracy can work depends on one thing and one thing only. The metrics with which we measure “best”. For it is in this way that we make obvious what values we seek to see in “the best”.
When one looks at it this way, it becomes apparent that it is American Meritocracy that is bad, but not the concept itself. You do want people who are best suited to tackle a job, handle a given job. But how do you do so when you don’t even know what you’re looking for?
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Thanks for reading and till next time.