The obsession with meritocracy needs to be toned down a bit. In my opinion, the very idea of merit is fuzzy and lives right beside corruption and bias.
Merit is measured in imperfect ways, by other people, and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.
Human dignity isn't contingent on outperforming others, and everyone would likely rather live somewhere that doesn't feel like constant competition is needed to enjoy leisure, food, shelter, pastimes, etc.
When it comes to who we should trust for critical work, taking decisions on our behalf, etc., we do want someone qualified. I find the idea of "qualification/qualified" much nicer than "merit". The latter seems to imply a deserved outsized reward, like it justifies not why you are given the responsibility of something important, but why you are allowed to be richer, higher ranking, etc., than others.
Meritocracy is simply a means of preventing elites from kicking the ladders down, nothing more, nothing less. Once the ladders are kicked down, which all elites will inevitablely try to do, society will start to stagnate, your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot.
The key here is that while meritocracy is championed as a means of finding the best, it in reality functions as a system to keep out the worst. You want harness the ambitions in people, even if not everyone's ambitions can actually be met, and you want to mitigate the harms of nepotism, even when eliminating it entirely is impossible.
So the difference between qualifications and merit evaluation are moot from my perspective, the question you need to ask is if whatever selection criteria you prefer is vulnerable to ladder kicking. If you preferred way is more vulnerable than the current system then you are putting the cart in front of the horse.
Also to make my position clear, I can't tell either way in regards to what you have suggested. As far as I was aware, we already select based on qualifications, so it's unclear to me what the exact change you are proposing is.
Yes, but the value system behind these matters to prevent the very thing you are talking about. What I am seeing is that the value system behind meritocracy is too close to my liking to self-appointed superiority. I am rich and powerful because I am the smartest, fastest, strongest, and worked the hardest. No one else deserves my position of power unless they too are rich, and if they are not rich, they are not smart and don't merit such position. The idea of merit I think can be subterfuged, old Egyptian leaders were thought to be Gods, so it was deemed they were the only ones that could merit to rule.
You get in a situation where no one questions the system that evaluated someone's merit, and that system becomes easy to control, so the criteria become that those that are already in power are the only ones that meets it.
> your country will start to fall behind the others, and your quality of life will start to rot
I think this idea also needs to be toned down, many countries have as good or better quality of life than the US and China, yet they are way down whatever competitive latter you want to look at, GDP, military power, land mass, etc. I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those.
> I think corruption as a metric correlates a lot more to QOL than any of those
I see Meritocracy as a deterring force against corruption so I'm sensing some semantic discord here. A nation that starts to rot will be taken advantage of by external entities which will result in a drop on QoL. While GDP and such can somewhat approximate national power, they seem a bit tangential to the discussion imo, the point is rot invites parasites.
> What I am seeing is that the value system behind meritocracy is too close to my liking to self-appointed superiority. I am rich and powerful because I am the smartest, fastest, strongest, and worked the hardest. No one else deserves my position of power unless they too are rich, and if they are not rich, they are not smart and don't merit such position. The idea of merit I think can be subterfuged, old Egyptian leaders were thought to be Gods, so it was deemed they were the only ones that could merit to rule.
But that's the opposite of Meritocracy? Or rather, it's like you are confusing the cause and effort perhaps? It's an oppositional force to the default nepotistic hereditary nobility type systems, which will naturally emerge in every system that does not account for it, these are absolutes. Caveat being that the means of avoiding it are nuanced ofc.
The point is you design systems where positions of power are selected on (best effort) neutral criteria that at minimum narrows the candidate pool down in a way that the preserves a degree of instability, and through which helps prevent calcification of power structures. With a Meritocracy the criteria is via a demonstration of merit/qualifications/evidence you are the most capable for the position.
It does not give someone license to act as if their wealth justifies their position, that's just a simple narcissist. Meritocracy is just a good general principle to follow when designing the process of selection, it's not some complex ideology. Having power never implies you earned it, your merits do, and society is the judge of what exactly those merits are.
You also focus on wealth a lot so I'm wondering if you are primarily pushing back on the thought that having wealth qualifies as intellectual merit? Because if so I very much agree, but I also rarely see this from anyone but narcissists who don't even need a reason to think that in the first place, their conclusion came first. But maybe this is just a blind spot for me.
Money is power, and our modern economic system has made the liquidation of wealth into money easier than ever. It has helped shift power struggles from violent to competitive and allowed some innovative types of tax policy to become possible. But that doesn't make our economy a Meritocracy, what we have is closer to natural selection, where any snake can kill a lion and so on. The perks of capitalism are entirely from it's ability to parry these inevitable power struggles into something society can gain a net benefit from through the innovation that arises from healthy competition. It's impossible to eliminate the power struggles themselves though, those are human nature.
I can see how the concepts can be confused but fundamentally it's a brain (skills) vs brawn (power) thing. A meritocracy advocates for selecting for the most skilled not the most powerful. It's only practical to enforce on a institutional level though.
I'm talking about semantics yes, but also interpretation and the philosophy behind the term.
Merit is defined as:
> the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward
It doesn't accidentally emphasize the fact that it chooses those "worthy of praise and reward"
This is literally part of the term, and I see this ingrained as well often in the ideas and those behind it.
It can be used to justify why you're eating a thousand dollar steak you can't even finish, while someone else goes hungry. You are deserving of it, they are not.
This is what I think we collectively need to tone down: the part about being deserving of praise and reward. We should emphasize only the part about being particularly good.
Off course, the more you benefit others and society, the more it should benefit you. We need this reward mechanism to incentivize people to take risks, and put the work/effort, or be dedicated to certain endeavors that society needs. I'm not questioning that. But it's not because you are deserving that you can enjoy that steak, but because you've helped countless others in ways far beyond that of what you are taking by eating that steak. You've earned it.
I'll give another example... Consider term limits, we don't want to keep in place the same person for too long, even if they still rank number 1. Term limits are amazing at curbing what you talked about and preventing people from kicking the ladder down. It's an auto-eject for people at the top.
The reason is, it's simply unbelievable to think that 8 years later, there is no one else as qualified or even better than you at doing the job. We know assessing "merit" or even qualifications is fuzzy and imperfect. That the rules and criteria used to assess are put in place by those currently with high rankings, etc. It needs mechanisms against abuse like anything else.
And then, in the day to day, people want stability as well. Imagine each day at your job was a make it or get fired challenge. Each day they had someone new come in and perform your duties, than your boss would evaluate who did best and let go the other. This is not a desirable state. So you need a balance.
> and fundamentally, we don't want a hierarchy of classes, even if we claim the higher rankings/elites have merited it.
What do you mean by this? What creates a hierarchy of classes? Different social groups? Differing amounts of wealth? Different amounts of power to get stuff done? I think, in the end, it's got to come down to power, but I feel like it's good for society to distribute more power to people able to get better things done.
I agree with you that the term 'merit' now has a connotation of 'you deserve everything you can get'. It feels like a misappropriation of stewardship to take $100m to buy a yacht. If a government official did that, they would go straight to jail, but we somehow justify it under capitalism because maybe the CEO really wanted a yacht, and that's the only reason they started the business (in which case, I'm actually kind of fine with that $100m going to a yacht, as long as they were in the business of creating, not extracting, wealth). I don't think this is really a solvable problem, because to measure who's good at creating wealth, you kind of have to use wealth. Maybe we could have government-assigned stewards over pots of money, but that might have even bigger problems.
Very plainly put, you want a large middle class, and a rotating lower and upper class, with the various aggregate metrics from min to max, and everything in between to rise over time.
In that state, you want to enlarge the pool of people whose lifestyle affordances are more and more similar to one another, and since no one is poor for too long, or rich for too long, they don't enshrine themselves as some systemic class of people forming clicks, bad habits, group identity of them and the others, falling into self-selection and preservation, or some vicious cycle that entraps them there, etc.