1/There are two purposes of meritocracy:
A) allocation (send people to what they do best)
B) incentives (make people try hard).
I think meritocracy helps with both of these, but a lot less than we tend to think.
A) allocation (send people to what they do best)
B) incentives (make people try hard).
I think meritocracy helps with both of these, but a lot less than we tend to think.
2/In terms of allocation, I think that meritocracy is a bit overrated because what people will do well at is generally what they'll work hard at over a long period of time. And that's mostly determined by what they like to do, rather than what they're naturally talented at.
3/I think of the example of South Korean child prodigy Kim Ung-Yong, who held the world record for high IQ at the time. He was pushed into a physics career he didn't really want, and felt lonely and unhappy, and ended up not being a great physicist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-y…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-y…
4/There are exceptions, of course. LeBron James is obviously uniquely talented at basketball, and meritocracy helped make him a basketball player. It helps that "superstar athlete" is something most people would enjoy being, unlike "physics professor".
5/Test-based meritocracy selects people based on brief sprints, when career success is a long-distance trek. It's relatively easy to motivate yourself to do well on tests to please your parents, but also easy to burn out by age 30 if you don't really like the field you went into.
6/This gets to the second reason I think meritocracy is a bit overrated, which is incentivizing effort. Short-term and long-term incentives are very different.
In the short term, negative motivation -- "work hard or you'll suck and fail" -- can be very effective...
In the short term, negative motivation -- "work hard or you'll suck and fail" -- can be very effective...
7/...but in the long-term, it's positive intrinsic motivation that keeps people going over the decades. To be honest, I think that motivation is best provided by A) needing to provide for a family, B) having coworkers you like, and C) loving what you do. Not fear of failure.
8/To sum up, meritocracy treats success as a sprint when in fact it's a distance run.
Sprinting isn't totally unlike distance running, but the two are different enough that we shouldn't assume that doing well at the former means one will do well at the latter.
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Sprinting isn't totally unlike distance running, but the two are different enough that we shouldn't assume that doing well at the former means one will do well at the latter.
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