Asymmetrical Information

According to Dictionary.com, there are two common definitions for "meritocracy". One of them is where the rich and privileged linger at the top; the other is where persons rise to the top on the basis of individual ability or achievement.

Yours seems somewhat compatible with the former, while arguing in favor of the latter. I'm not convinced that both can be true at the same time and still be true meritrocracy, although I am not opposed to the rich and connected lingering at the top on the basis of two reasons:

1. If this is a disease, the cure is assuredly worse.

2. The system eventually levels itself when the offspring of the rich either reinvest wisely and therefore demonstrate true merit (Rockefellers?) or else dissipate the wealth through wild living.

Our current system is not meritocratic in Jane's sense, as demonstrated by the educational career of President Bush. Regarding the previous post, keeping a large fortune intact in The United States requires nothing more than turning it over to a good investment advisor. Making our system more meritocratic would require a real effort to improve the educational experience and personal health of people in the middle and bottom income ranges. Scandinavia accomplished this in the years following World War II, but it's impossible here in the current political climate.

"In a system based on some political sorting, a person born on the outside would have no mechanism to get on the inside."

Is this literally true? Isn't political history rife with outsiders who used personal charisma to work their way into power? I think this describes Huey Long, for instance. And Bill Clinton.

"a truly non-meritocratic criteria": a singular criteria - a wee bit embarrassing on a post about merit, education and whatnot?

Ad hominem arguments (BUSH! SKULL AND BONES! KERRY!) is that, of course, we can also see Bill Clinton's amazing career. Single instances don't matter much. That list of CEO alma maters is considerably more interesting.

--The Cranky Professor

It all depends how deep you want your meritocracy to run. The current system's pretty clearly NOT meritocratic in determining who gets access to "all of the things Jane lists -- connections, social knowledge, useful work for low pay, a good peer group", even if it is meritocratic after that.

"While going to a good school certainly helps make big bucks"

But it really doesn't. On average, people who graduate from Ivy League make more than people who graduate from state universities. But that is not because of the education offered at elite schools or even (and I found this surprising) because of the value of the 'Harvard' brand on the diploma or even because of connections made.

People who graduate from Ivy League schools don't actually make any more money than people who were accepted to Ivy League schools but, for whatever reason, chose to attend a State U instead.

Meritocracy is about fairness, strip fairness out of it and there is no meritocracy.

Stretch out the concept of meritocracy to prisoners to see the actual results. Most prisoners ,apart from hard wired criminals, come from poor and uneducated background. A profiling will show that these people didn't have chance to study or to work and deviated to petty crimes for livelihood. Are we to say now as their connection and background exposed them only to petty criminals, its justified that they are locked up for their lives? I would say provided they had an access to other opportunities, they could have been successful lawyers, businessmen or etc. Saying that they merited to be closed in cells is unfair and unmeritocratic.

"Our current system is not meritocratic in Jane's sense, as demonstrated by the educational career of President Bush." And Gore, another political heir who got worse grades than W. So all you've shown is that politics isn't particularly meritocratic. Business is another matter - e.g., all the Bush money and influence didn't get W a CEO job, although he did get hired straight into a fairly high-ranking job at a ball team that needed political influence to get a stadium built.

Yes, the business world isn't entirely meritocratic. Family influence can get you a better first job, and of course inheriting millions makes it much easier to start your own business - but after that, success depends on your own ability. (Also, the timing or luck to pick a business with room to grow.) However, most successful businessmen came from the middle class rather than the really rich, and for the middle class it really is a meritocracy. Where meritocracy really fails is in the education of the children of the poor. It's not that they don't have a good shot at Harvard - because smart, hardworking people from state colleges beat out Harvard grads all the time - but that they don't even have a good shot at graduating from high school with enough literacy to handle a normal course load at a state college. And that's a political failure, too.

So I really don't get liberals that think the world isn't meritocratic enough but want to increase the role of government.

Well, the question of whether it exists or not apart, I have one: do we want it? Is wholesale meritocracy a good thing? I'm increasingly skeptical. When I was in grad school in Boston I was struck by the sense of entitlement a lot of people in high-end academic programs displayed. I wouldn't want an aristocracy, either, but people who are born to wealth and position at least sometimes realize that their selection is random. People with high LSATS and MCATs will often tell you they're the lords of creation - particularly if your customer service skills are wanting.

From the post above:

Check out this list of which colleges CEOs went to in Time Magazine. All worthy institutions, but not a solid block of Ivy by any means. Perfectly accessible to smart, hardworking individuals who never had the benefit of learning how to "move around in the elite milieu"

And from the comments on another post on this same topic (comment made by AT, I think):

CEOs may have been at the apex of the pyramid then, but they're not now. $18 million is a lot of money, but while only a few CEOs get paid that much, it's only what a somewhat above-average partner MD at Goldman Sachs or a runt hedgehog got paid last year. Three people at Goldman took home home over $100 million, and there are hundreds of hedge fund and other money managers who took home that much. Has the Left just not gotten around to complaining about them with the same passion?

So, is there a list of where the partners at Goldman Sachs went to school? Any Ivy tilt there?

Excellent point. Nice to see you posting again.

Meritocracy isn't about fairness in the grand cosmic sense, just in the sense that merit matters in how well you do in life. Intelligence (as imperfectly measured by IQ) is apparently mostly determined by the time you're in your teens, by some combination of genes and upbringing/environment over which you had almost no control, and that amounts to a lot of what we mean by "merit." Talent at music or sports or sales are other meanings of "merit," and again, they're not distributed equally to everyone.

Now, you can thrown away your talent or gifts, and success in any demanding field is goign to be about what you do with your talents. But I think all you can demand of a meritocracy is that more effective scientists or lawyers or programmers or teachers or salesmen or basketball players or musicians or carpenters or ditch diggers tend to do better than less effective ones.

Sigh.

Okay, so Bush and Gore did "poorly" in school - they were B students, before grade inflation - therefore their success in politics proves that we do not have a meritocracy. Wrong. Grades in school have little to do with the particular qualities of merit that lead to success in politics. Ability to speak in public, ability to gather coalitions, ability to understand people and communicate with them. The merit of these abilities are not measured by college GPA.

Twill00: Are you claiming that Bush and Gore are exceptionally good at speaking in public?

What they are good at is gathering coalitions - by using their fathers' address books.

BP Beckley:
In response to your question about Goldman Sachs, as a person who was recently looking for a job there: the person I spoke to in HR there said that there were many possibilities for people who did not attend a school where they recruit. (Read: UPenn, Columbia, Yale, and a couple other highly selective schools) This is because, as she told me, only 70% of their hires come from these few schools. Of course, she continued, it is harder, because the alumni connections are very strong, and it is much easier when you have pressure for higher ups to hire from their alma mater.

But I think all you can demand of a meritocracy is that more effective scientists or lawyers or programmers or teachers or salesmen or basketball players or musicians or carpenters or ditch diggers tend to do better than less effective ones.

Ah, no. I think I can demand that people who could be excellent scientists or lawyers or programmers or teachers or salesmen or basketball players or musicians or carpenters aren't stuck being excellent ditch diggers. If all jobs aren't equal in worth (and I don't think anybody deep down really believes that they are), then people shouldn't be stuck doing something because of the position they were born into. Without that, you don't really have a meritocracy. Maybe what you have is better than alternatives, but don't call it a meritocracy.

I know this is an old post, but I just found this blog so I'm going to write anyway :)

Two things - you know that the term meritocracy was originally coined as a pejorative thing?

Second thing - are we looking at the same list? Because I look at the Times list and it appears to me that where one goes to school does matter.

If you look at straight undergrad that means 7 out of the 50 people on this list attended an ivy league school. There are approximately 2,500 four year degree granting institutions in the US, that you would have 7 from the same grouping is statistically significant.

It becomes more significant when you factor in grad school (I had some time on my hands and I did the research) - 14 have graduated from Ivy league institutions, and Warren Buffet left UPENN after three years, meaning 15 out of the 50 attended Ivy League Institutions. When you factor in that 4 are foreign born (I'm ignoring the Canadian and treating him as American), that means 15 out of 46 attended Ivy League Institutions, with Harvard being overrepresented (8 out of the 15). When looking at repeats (and for this we'll look strictly at undergrad) only two schools have more than one representative in the top fifty - Harvard and Duke; Harvard is ivy and Duke is elite. In fact, when your broaden your search to see those who attended either an elite undergrad or an elite grad program (i.e. Stanford, Duke, Berkeley which are not Ivy League but are considered equal in stature), you wind up with 22 almost half the list.

It's true - where you go to school does matter, if not in your final income, but in what sorts of positions you get. That's not to say that if you work hard you can't get to the same place, just that you're going to have to work harder.

Slocum your comment has not been verified(people who go to an Ivy league school don't actually make more money then those who got in but refused to go). I've read that study and I've read conflicting ones. The jury's still out on that one.

David to take your comment a step further - investment banks and the like don't even recruit for the same jobs at "lesser" universities. A friend of mine went to an elite university (not in jersey) and lived in jersey. When she went home to jersey for winter break she attended a career fair at a local college (Rutgers, a not shabby school). She was shocked to see that the kinds of jobs that were being offered by the same companies were very different. At Rutgers the jobs were mostly sales, at her University they were analyst and associate positions. Another friend who went to a solid (but not flashy) state school and graduated with a stellar GPA is at the point, five years into his career, where friends of mine who went to flashier schools were three years ago.

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