Attention Economy


Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Pros and Cons of Meritocracy

Rejecting meritocracy clashes with America’s basic premises
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/06/rejecting-meritocracy-clashes-with-americas-basic-premises/
 
Attacking ‘merit’ in the name of ‘equity’ is a prescription for mediocrity
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/25/attacking-merit-prescription-mediocrity/
George F. Will observes:
“A meritocratic society has less discord than a society that abandons meritocratic principles. Equity, pursued through government-driven allocation of social rewards, drenches society with bitter distributional conflicts because wealth and opportunity are allocated by political power according to shifting standards contested by competing factions. Allowing the market to articulate preferences, without seeking to decide — who will decide who the deciders are? — the preferences’ moral worth, promotes domestic tranquility”.
 
America’s Collapsing Meritocracy Is a Recipe for Revolt
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/16/taiping-rebellion-addison-rae-meritocracy-exams-rebellion/
 
Equality and the elites
https://www.newstatesman.com/aristocracy-talent-meritocracy%20modern-world-adrian-wooldridge-review
 
Meritocracy, Not Democracy, Is the Golden Ticket to Growth
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-16/china-knows-that-meritocracy-is-the-key-to-boosting-economic-growth

David Brooks:
Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”
Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”