> in a meritocratic world, what happens to the dumb and/or lazy?
They don't get to run things?
Put another way: assuming you're going to have some sort of hierarchy, and you will, how would you want to organize that hierarchy? Merit seems like the least bad way to do so.
"Merit" is not a quantifiable characteristic. All your plan would do is give the power to the people who define "merit."
It's like you're advocating for correctpersonocracy. Put another way, literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy.
The actual word 'meritocracy' comes from a book that warned about the dangers of creating easily-gamed draconian systems that needlessly exclude people from the process of governing. I wish as many people would read the book as use the word.
It's not? What are SAT scores, school grades, entrance exams for the civil service, election results, income etc.?
I would say that these are all ways for society to quantify merit.
Did you mean perfectly accurately?
> literally every government that has ever existed would call itself a meritocracy.
Nope. Most governments used to call themselves monarchies and would have bristled at the idea that they'd have to somehow demonstrate merit to justify their power. Their power was justified by heredity, and in fact, I'd think that if you suggested that they needed to do demonstrate their merit, you might end up short a head.
> The book
Yep. Have to admit I didn't read it, but I did read what the author wrote:
"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit."
What he objects to is the following:
"It is the opposite [of good] when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others."
So merit-based selection: good. Ossified class system: bad. I think Trump, May and Johnson are ample evidence that we leave plenty of room for the incompetent to get a chance at the reins, even if we generally try to organize ourselves by merit.
And so exactly the fact that we can't quantify merit with perfect accuracy, and have multiple domains, helps us avoid the problems Young mentions, though here as elsewhere we aren't at all perfect.
I think I like a new phrase/idea I heard from Jordan Peterson recently. "Hierarchies of competency". This seems to me like a better idea of how society can arrange itself. Society needs to be able to have different people have different amounts of power in different domains, but those hierarchies don't have to be built on violence and raw power. Maybe "hierarchies of competency" could be a stable, positive way to organize at least some parts of society.
Competency in what? The best person to make decisions may not be the best person to talk about those decisions in front of a camera, or the best person to inspire confidence in those decisions in a nation of (by definition) less-competent people who (again by definition) would have made the decision differently.
Well, for example, take the medical profession. There are of course many problems with how doctors are trained and licensed. The AMA might do well with a shake up. But in America you are not getting a license to practice without demonstrating a huge amount of skill, dedication, and competence. Your cousin who is already a doctor doesn't just get to say, "You are in". Or you just have to pay some large amount of money to the right person.
I'll take town board/administrator form of government, you take "meritocracy."
In my form of government the board members run for office periodically. The ones who get the most votes win. Then they hire a professional bureaucrat to handle the day to day business of keeping a municipality up and running.
Here's what I've got:
* a discrete (and anonymous!) method to determine who will become the board members
* local community members who campaign and are subject to citizens by virtue of elections
* at least one professionally-trained bureaucrat who more likely than not is competent in the job and given the power by the board to make day-to-day decisions like hiring and firing people
So...
How does your meritocracy function?
What's the way you measure and get consensus on community leaders' merit?
How are those leaders held accountable?
How do you ensure at least one of those leaders is trained in a relevant field as opposed to being trained only in the art of rhetoric (shout out to Socrates for this question)?
> What's the way you measure and get consensus on community leaders' merit?
I find the model of liquid democracy enticing: Every decision is voted on by the people of the community and because that would be overwhelming you can delegate your vote (in general, for a certain topic or just for a single vote) to someone you trust, like an expert in that area. Maybe people might get a little money for voting so experts who vote with many votes can do this professionally in full time.
So now you have people competing for the expert status for certain topics (like health care or foreign affairs) and everyone in the community can have direct influence on the outcome of every decision. Every bit of power is earned and most decisions are effectively made by trusted experts.
No, would you? People want to decide and vote, at least in areas that they are interested in. See most referendums world-wide or the participiant rates in Switzerland.
> What's the way you measure and get consensus on community leaders' merit?
Dunno, elections, maybe? Seems like a common way to get community consensus on personell decisions. For things like public office. So people get to vote for who they think is best suited, who has the most merit. And for lower level positions, you could have entrance exams and a mechanism for promotion that takes into account job performance.
And for the economic sphere, we could let people vote with their wallets...
"Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (Churchill, quoting anonymous)
Sadly, merit is a terrible qualifier. Humans have proven time and again that they are appallingly bad judges of “merit”, and this holds whether they are doing so on an ad-hoc/heuristic basis or by some systematic quantification: both approaches are wide open to intrinsic bias and systematic discrimination, and this routinely happens on scales from the job interview to national elections.
As for democracy, however, what we don’t have (yet) is anything demonstrably better. A meritocracy will not be an improvement over a democracy. The critical function of a democracy is affording the governed a guaranteed means to evict bad adminstration.
They don't get to run things?
Put another way: assuming you're going to have some sort of hierarchy, and you will, how would you want to organize that hierarchy? Merit seems like the least bad way to do so.