I saw this today and REALLY wanted to respond to it.
I guess the main question is, what is meritocracy?
Well, from the Latin it means “rule by those who have earned it.”
Yeah, I’ll give you that one, that’s a myth. Just like democracy, “rule by all the people.” It doesn’t exist.
But what are we talking about ruling? Our society is ludicrously complex. There are 350 million people, 32 million companies, 20,000 towns and cities, 3,000 counties, 50 states. Each one of those entities has a person or a group of people who rule it.
What if, instead of a hard and fast rule, meritocracy is more of a soft correlation? Take those 32 million companies. In any given industry, it’s probably fair to say that you can’t line them up by how well they do the job and have it overlap perfectly with how much money they make.
Instead, let’s ask if the 50 companies that do their job best make more money between them than the next best 50. Do you think that exists?
Absent gigabytes of data from different industries all across America, I think there’s a decent rule of thumb for measuring economic meritocracy: when you spend your money, do you get what you want?
If you buy a new car and the engine starts every time you turn the key and the tires are grippy enough to keep you on the road and the headlights are bright enough for you to see at night and the airbags deploy if you have an accident, then all the people who made that car had merit and got paid for it.
If you pay your electric bill and can illuminate any room in the house at night, you can microwave leftovers whenever you want, you can charge your phone at will, you can log onto your computer to read some dude’s blog, then the people who get paid to keep the power plants operating had merit and got paid for it.
If you check into the hospital and you can get an accurate x-ray and a CAT scan and the doctor can figure out what is wrong with you and give you a medicine or treatment that actually makes you healthy again, then all the doctors and nurses and the people who make the machines and the medicines all had merit and got paid for it.
At the end of the day, not everyone who deserves something gets it, not everyone who gets something deserves it.
But what meritocracy really means is that, in spite of all that imperfection, things work (more or less) the way they are supposed to.
