My first post. I am new here and see a lot of ground work has already been laid. I have not yet read through all of this, so I apologise if I am covering matters addressed elsewhere. Following the Twitter/X group chat last night, I am delighted to see there is a lot of common ground. That said even if it seems obvious to some, I think it’s essential to take the focal length back to the abstract and agree on what are the core shared values and objectives we have that underpin what it is we want to achieve. The more aligned we are with the “big picture” the more joined up/ cooperative and effective we can be at the tactical level. Foundations: I am not sure we can take for granted that the things we take as read mean the same thing to each of us; especially those of us who have had the misfortune to have had a Marxist infused postmodernist education. We need to be careful with language. There was a lot of discussion last night over the obsolete political spectrum and how the media use this to conflate small ‘c’ conservatism with fascism. The irony is that these are polar opposites and we are now in the bizarre outcome of having centrist governments in the UK and Europe with highly authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies which share more in common with fascism than we ever will, as they are top down and collective, we are bottom up and individualist. Principles: I assume we share a love of individual liberty, freedom of expression, freedom to benefit from the fruits of our labour. We want a meritocracy with upward mobility for those with the vision and drive to succeed. We want an entrepreneur lead mixed economy. We want our culture to prevail and thrive. Our objectives are to curb the “progress” of the globalisation of our economy and culture. To restore Britain to the British, preserving our freedom, way of life and prosperity by reversing the encroaching Blairite technocracy.
In general, I worry about the use of the word “meritocracy”, especially as it can be used to justify high amounts of inheritance tax and the atomisation of society. If you owe no one anything but what their “objective” (I could go on a long rant about how what people call objectivity is not objective) merit demands that they are owed, then the bonds of family and community disappear.
That is not to say, of course, that we should disregard merit and only reward others based on their familial ties either. There is and always has been an egalitarianness to English familial structures, with sons not always inheriting/inheriting equally. Instead, there is a balance to be had.
Ironically, it seems we are already failing to communicate (foundations). “Meritocracy” as I understand it does not align with what you have described. Identity politics should never trump ability. Nepotism should not be tolerated. One of the single biggest injuries to the UK and western world over the last 10 years is the rise of a very mediocre managerial “elite” in every institution and corporation, as a result of DEI. The damage will start to show over time, just as the damage to the UK was not immediately obvious when we abandoned our unwritten constitution. This is a core principle. We should not be seeking to re-establish an old boy’s club. Look at what our last few Eton schooled PMs have done to the place (were Cameron and Johnson even in the same year?)
I am not sure how meritocratic it is to have inheritance tax in any case. Especially at the threshold where it falls, catching far too many “normal” people. I do not know what the original purpose of the tax was (other than another source of revenue), but if I were to guess, it was to chip away at the power base of old money. It seems highly unjust to me that income earned in a lifetime and taxed along they way should be taxed again on death. It is unlikely it is very effective at chipping away at old money or that the very rich pay much in the way of this tax as much of their assets will be protected via offshore family trusts and other tax efficient strategies. The hardest hit by inheritance taxes will be those who generated their wealth in their own lifetimes, so not a very meritorious tax.
I’ll break down what you have said here in order to better explain where I am coming from.
Ability acording to whom? Measured in what way? This is a very nice memetic message, but it has no substance. I also think that demanding that ability always wins means that it never does. Often, you will find that objective ability cannot be measured, so we replace it with a pseudo-objective hiring system which is emperical, not objective. For instance, I have talked to hiring managers who lament that they were unable to hire the candidate that they wanted because, despite being the best candidate, according to the scoring system that HR created, they were not good enough.
Demanding that “ability always wins” seems likely to me to lead to a point where it never does.
This leads me on to this point. Based on my understanding of the above, nepotism is a necessary evil. Because objectivity sometimes means going off of vibes, or understanding that sometimes, you just understand things that you cannot quantify or measure, the best system which recruits the best people is also one which is abusable for people who would be nepotistic.
It isn’t DEI, or is not just DEI. It is also the poor education that people receive, and that people tend to like others like themselves. Further, it is the very result of bureaucracy and managerialism, demanding that people prove their skills in a measurable way, that leads to worse hiring decisions. Part of this (in my view) is that companies have gotten too large and rely on big, corporate machinery to run. Smaller companies which need to make better hiring decisions, are better able to avoid some of these ill-effects.
The notion that ability cannot be objectively measured seems to be asinine. DEI and familial nepotism can easily lead to hiring bad managers. Hiring people based on superior past performance is much fairer and leads to employing far more able people. Is it absolute, of course not, are their outliers: yes. Overall, it is the best guide. Not least, think of the “ill effects” on productivity from nepotistic hiring practices. There is no reason to excel. To try hard… why bother if it will not result in progression? I find this argument really bizarre.
And yet is it true. I do say this as a doctor of mathematics too, so trust me, I love measuring things and putting things into numbers. Something that you learn very quickly, however, is that very often, you cannot measure things or concepts directly despite knowing that they exist, so instead, you create proxies, many of which fail to capture the essence of what you were looking for in the first place.
A very good example of this is the concept of “Britishness”, which is a debate in this forum. That is, what it is and how we define/measure it. The common consensus was, and I very much believe this to be true, that asking that question was in and of itself, wrong. That whilst “Britishness” or “Englishness” is a real thing, one can observe a person and measure how English they are, however, it is not formulaic. You can not take a Kongolese man, bring him to England and teach him to be English, for you will only ever end up with a parody of what you sought.
Unfortunately, so many people are post-enlightenment-brained and think that everything can be measured and put into numbers when that just is not true. It leads to so many of our modern problems, such as Goodhart’s Law, which infects almost every aspect of daily life, making people care more about being seen to work or being seen to be moral rather than actually working and actually being moral.
This is not to have a dig at you, these honestly are hard concepts to grasp and go against almost all of what is taught in schools and against the common dialectic. But to me, this is the very core of the issue, that the common dialectic, how we are taught to think about and examine the world, is wrong, and is actually illogical.
To solve the problems that we are facing today, we have to solve problems in the real world, and that requires understanding how humans really behave to stimuli, and understanding how bad we often are at logic and fallibility. We should not seek to become more like machines, but instead, embrace our humanity, understanding that it is that which gives us our edge and sets us apart.
If you have time, this is a good video on the matter. It’s mostly two hours of Rory Sutherland talking at Alex O’Connor about why what seems rational often isn’t.
Not sure how we got to people progressing on the basis of merit and ability, being unjust dehumanising, cold blooded automation. This is not the case. This is not a math problem to be solved with algebra, but logic still has a role. It does not take a lot of intuition or information to work out. Imagine a football team seeking a new striker. Should they hire their new player based on a lottery or based on the results of a trial? Which method will be fairer? Which will have a better result for the team and its other players?
The problem is that the trial itself might be malformed, and the team might not understand what makes a good striker. For instance, naively, one might make the candidates do a penalty shootout and measure how many shots on target and how many potential goals each candidate could have scored. However, when the new player gets onto the field they may be entirely shit at handling opposition and basically freeze.
Alternatively, the best striker for that team very well might not be the best atomised striker. It could be the case that the individual best striker is a prick, doesn’t play well in a team and brings everyone else down despite being objectively “good”. But the best striker for that team is someone who is less skilled at shooting but has a great tactical mind and someone who helps to develop and grow his teammates and creates a better locker room atmosphere.
And this is how we got to this. Because the very concept of merit being an objective, rational, provable thing is the problem. The bureaucratic state and corporations which demand meritocracy don’t actually get the best people because merit is hard to measure and a person’s merit has so many intangible qualities about it.
When you insist on objectivity, you actually just get empiricism. A repeatable measurement which you can take again and again, but does not necessarily reflect the true skill or merit of a person. This is especially true because sometimes, as with your football example, you don’t fully understand what you are looking for when you start looking for candidates.
All of this is why a truly meritocratic system is a system which is open to abuse by nepotism.
Perhaps the problem here is HR created scoring systems. Surely managers should be the best judge of what is needed and if they select the best candidate that can be employed for the remuneration offered, then the manager should have the final word. It seems that companies are now run by HR, which might be worse than companies run by accountants.
Yes, and this is exactly my point. The “best candidate” as measured by the hiring manager and by the HR department can often be very different. And this is because of the demands for “objectivity” which is not truely objective as to the real-world needs of a role, but is simply repetable and scorable.
However, if the manager had the ability to say “no, I know better what this team needs”, that is a system which is open to nepotism.
What I am trying to point out is that, because we do not have access to alternative universes and can never prove the counterfactual, any meritocratic system cannot prove its own metitocracy, and any system that tries to prove that it is meritocratic, cannot be almost by definition.
Unfortunately, that is also the case and one I have witnessed many times. But merit is, as you say, apart perhaps from some qualifications, or specific experience, largely subjective.
Perhaps the muddling along ‘system’ that was the norm in the past and contained a mix of nepotism, meritocracy and gut-feeling without the need for quotas and government applied regulations worked for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Honestly, even qualifacations do not denote merit. Unfortunately, qualifacations measure how well you are able to pass the test that you are subjected to, not how well you can do the thing that your qualifacations says you can. There are far too many BS degrees with titles that do not reflect what you are tested on and do not reflect what you actually do and think, just how you performed when being observed.
I do apreciate that what I am saying, and what I have been saying throughout this thread “feels bad”. We are all raised to believe in meritocracy and that the most deserving will always do well, so to be told that it isn’t true hurts and goes against our natural instinstics. But yes, I believe that the current system produces and rewards ineptitude and mediocracy. It encourages people to look like they can perform well but not actually to do it. And perhaps worst of all, it itself pretends to be fair and ballanced when it isn’t and is just as capricous as the old system.
I do tend to think that the old ‘muddling along system’, as you put it, was indeed likely better, if for no other reason than it did not pretend to be something that it was not. If you combine it with smaller companies, so that stupid decisions in hiring can hurt you quickly, you will get a more meritocratic system which comes out in the wash.
It was the smaller companies that I was considering. After ten years in BT, starting when it was GPO Telephones and we were civil servants and I learned to hate large organisations. After that I swore never to work for a company where I couldn’t see the MD/CEO or whatever on a regular basis ever again.
On reflection, I suppose many qualifications are only of use in getting you to the interview. My wife has a degree in English and French from Trinity Dublin and that got her the interview for her first job as a journalist, since it suggested that she could probably read and write.
And even experience can be altered in the telling as reading so many CVs over the yeras has shown. Not that mine was necessarily pristine…
I don’t believe I was making a case for a flawed system. “Might be malformed” It also might NOT be. If you select a “prick” as your striker, then there was a failure of implementation, not of policy. As per the argument I made, I asked what will create the higher number of recurrent successes. A random selection or a curated selection? No was I claiming it always hit the mark, it will still be better than a partly nepotistic muddle. I was also a hiring manager and agree I was better at picking new employees than HR, but that is a training and skill issue. That is a different topic entirely.
It strikes me that you may have had negative encounters with recruitment in the past, and HR has possibly used the term “meritocracy” as a shield and prevented you from hiring the people you wanted. One of my concerns in my opening post, is the impact on our culture from post modernism. Words now have different meanings and are used to obfuscate. We cannot take for granted that which once could leave taken as read and we all have the same understanding.
Firstly, it seems to me that you are upset. I do not believe that I have done anything to impune your character in any way. I have only given my well-thought-out, considered criticisms of your position on meritocracy and why it may not be truly achievable. High-minded ideals are lovely, but they should not drive us if they crumple upon impact with reality.
I think that the problem is that you are presenting a false dichotomy here. There are actually at least three options:
- Appointment at random;
- A ‘curated’ selection according to “tasks” or “metrics” which may or may not align with the role requirements; or,
- A ‘curated’ selection according to the hiring manager who can attempt to envision how well a person will perform in their role, but may not be able to quantify this analysis, and may act based on nepotism instead.
To my mind, and in my experience, the second option produces consistent mediocrity. It hires candidates not based on how well they can do the job but on how well they can look like they can do the job (and there is a stark difference between those ideas).
The third one produces better results on average, but can seem more arbitrary and capricious. It also sometimes misses the mark because the manager decides to be nepotistic, but as long as they are held responsible for their hiring decisions, that is acceptable.
The first option is more variable. Depending on the job, it could be better than 2 on average. It has the chance to swing from very good to very bad, however.
I also wish to be clear, my problem is not with the concept of meritocracy (not entirely at least), it is with the process and implementation of trying to get to meritocracy, which I object to. You are correct, many words have had their definitions changed in recent years, and one of them is the word ‘objective’. This now seems to mean ‘empirical’ instead. And if you created a law requiring meritocracy, you would end up in a position of companies and HR departments creating a lot of poorly designed tests to hire even more mediocre applicants who are good at performing (putting on an act) but not at actually doing.
The problem is the very notion of the idea itself, that there is a unique, objectively correct or best candidate. Without access to time travel and the ability to visit alternative universes, who the best candidate is is entirely subjective. All you do is replace the subjective intuition of a person with the empirical observation of a subjective, non-adaptive test.
“Firstly, it seems to me that you are upset. I do not believe that I have done anything to impune your character in any way.”
I can assure you I do not feel the least “impuned”. I am not sure where you are getting that impression.
“I have only given my well-thought-out, considered criticisms of your position on meritocracy and why it may not be truly achievable.”
I have to say I am very impressed with your ‘self-effacing’ tone. Your lack of hubris is very refreshing.
“High-minded ideals are lovely, but they should not drive us if they crumple upon impact with reality.”
I am a pragmatist at heart, as a soundbyte this resonates with me, but you have again slipped into the trap of assuming bad faith or inept implementation renders advancing people on the basis of merit impossible. You are possibly allowing an experienced tactical failure to determine strategy. Your approach is too binary. Principles are guidelines not laws. We strive for them. We once had a “comply or explain” corporate governance system which had space for the fuzzy logic I believe you feel is lacking. I am not advocating for box ticking metrics with narrow bands of interpretation. I think the adoption of Sarbannes Oxely style governance was a major mistake and the England’s system prior to this was far superior.
I entirely agree with you here. I read what you were saying in your initial post as a belief that we should try to enforce meritocracy via laws, which I found troubling.
I guess this is perhaps a case of me being slightly hyperbolic, for which I apologise if so. I do not believe that it is technically impossible to achieve meritocracy, what I instead believe and am trying to get across is that it is impossible to prove that you have achieved it (mostly because you cannot prove the counterfactual of “what if I hired the other guy?”).
Further, I believe that what merit is, is itself subjective, as is how you weigh the various merits that differing individuals have. Further, I am acutely aware of Goodhart’s law that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. This is because people will naturally perform and put on a show to hit a target in a way that is not reflective of their natural performance and their actions change as soon as they cease being observed.
As such, the best measures of skill or performance are necessarily subjective and somewhat arbitrary. If you do not know and cannot understand how you are being judged, you cannot change your behaviour to affect the judging (This is how the YouTube algorithm works, and some theologians argue this is how God thinks and explains the problem of evil).
However, such a system is open to abuse by would-be wrongdoers who would favour their friends or family over better candidates. This is fine for a family-run cafe, but maybe less fine in different fields.
To me, I view the modern system as encouraging mediocracy, as I have said, and I abhor the performative nature of it all. Most especially, I abhor the fact that we end up testing people not against how well they would do at the job but at some other BS test that most of the people doing the job couldn’t pass again if they tried. I would rather a system which was honest about its unfairness and didn’t encourage people to put on an act to get a job. Yes, such a system would be abusable by hiring managers, but in those cases you should call it out and hold them accountable.
P.S. This is all before we try and tackle the argument of meritocracy = infinity immigrants, which you have not advanced, but is a trap to be wary of.
Meritocracy, as I understand it does not lead to infinity immigrants. They would not be entitled to jobs, or benefits they and their kin have not paid for over those that have contributed in one shape or form, but this is crossing over into another topic.
This has become a slightly long thread (not off topic though!), as such, I thought I should add a synopsis of my thoughts and arguments here as it may be somewhat hard to follow them throughout this thread.
Let us imagine that we are seeking to hire someone to join our company and are selecting from the applicants.
Firstly, let us define the objective function. This is the function that we wish to maximise. It seems reasonable that we define the objective function as the delta in profits that the company makes in, say, 5 years of the employee being in the position, with all other things being equal. That is to say, the best employee is the one who will make us the most money. (Note: this is still a subjective test; maybe performance is better, as is the case for a striker in football. The point is that the objective test is future performance of some flavour.)
Unfortunately, we do not have access to a time machine, and do not know all of the market changes between now and 5 years from now! This means that the form of the objective function is unknowable due to the laws of the universe, and we must instead guess at what it might be.
Further, it is worth noting that the objective function must necessarily depend not just upon traits and qualities that the employee has, but also the traits and qualities that our current employees have, the other new employees we hire within that time will have, etc.
From here, we can conclude that we cannot identify the true best candidate 100% accurately each time we go through a hiring process. We might accidentally do it, but we would never know and could never prove that we were being truly meritocratic, just that we were possibly trying to approximate it.
The question now is, “What is the best method of approximating the objective function?” To me, the answer seems obvious: the hiring manager’s reason and intuition. The reason being that any attempt to codify or denote a formula for hiring is bound to:
- miss things that might come up in an interview but cannot be patched into the recruitment process; and,
- create performative responses to questioning, which makes the test useless, formulaic, and obsolete (Especially as best practice for these interviews/reviews of job applications, which gets shared and becomes increasingly well-known).
Relying instead on one person, or perhaps a small panel, to use their understanding of the company, market, and role to use fuzzy logic to extrapolate how well each candidate will perform will allow them to avoid the pitfalls of the modern recruitment system, however, they could never prove that they truly did that and were not swayed by nepotism.
My answer is that that does not matter. It is for companies to hire and discern the people who have high levels of honour, who would not abuse any power they were given. And that, again, is best done by people talking to people, not by arbitrary tests.
tl:dr What makes a person meritorious is subjective; the true merit of a person is unknowable within the confines of the universe; the best we can do is make subjective guesses at the form of the merit function; the best way to do that is through a system which is by necessity open for abuse; it is my opinion that the potential for abuse is less of an issue than the current system of hiring.
