this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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I don't.
The core issue: Who determines merit, ability, and position? The people who write the rules are the actual government, and governments secure their own power. Like every flawless paper-government system, it crumples as soon as the human element wets the paper.
However, assuming the rule book could be written flawlessly, with "perfect" selfless humans writing the initial rules and then removing themselves from power, there are unsolved issues:
All of these arguments try to argue that implementing meritocracy perfectly is impossible.
But ask yourself, what is the alternative? A system in which the most capable person isn't in charge? Should we go back to bloodlines, or popularity contests, or maybe use a lottery?
I agree it's very difficult to determine merit, and even more difficult to stop power struggles from messing with the evaluation, or with the implementation. But I would still prefer a system that at least tries to be meritocratic and comes up short, to a system that has given up entirely on the concept.
I'll try to answer some of your questions, as best as I understand it:
Ideally, a group of peers would vote for someone within the group, who is the most capable, with outside supervision to prevent abuses.
Popularity shouldn't factor into it. Only ability. (and there's no doubt Depp is the better actor :P )
Each one is worthy within the scope of their domain of expertise, in which they have demonstrated merit.
Always true in every system. That's why we need checks and balances.
If kicking cats is wrong, it should be against the law, and no one should be above the law. All other things being equal, whoever has the most capacity to save the planet should be the one to do it.
For as long as you can demonstrate it. If someone better comes along, they should take your place.
More mathematical problems. And ideally, also lots of money and babes.
At the end of the day, it's a cultural problem. Meritocracy can only work if there's a critical mass of people who believe in it, understand it, and enforce it socially. The same can be said of democracy, capitalism, and basically any other social order.
You touched on a really important point here: when humans are judging skill, it’s subjective and not really meritocratic.
One of my favorite psychology professors says that people really like the idea of meritocracy, when it’s actually present. He gives the example of sports, and how people aren’t bitter about a particular team winning, or that there’s big inequality between the players, and that the reason people are okay with that inequality is the presence of the playing field and the high speed cameras and whatnot means meritocracy is the actual basis for reward, not personality politics.
In business, government, etc it’s all people judging other people, and on an individual basis. A group of people evaluating is better, like star ratings for an uber driver are probably more trustable than performance evaluations from someone’s boss. The latter can be so heavily distorted by that one person’s judgment.
The ideal is using measurable performance as the measure of “merit”. Like when people run a marathon. As long as the course is visible to confirm nobody’s cheating, that marathon time is yours in a way your degree or your job or your salary isn’t.
It’s also why people are so in favor of free markets deciding resource allocation rather than people: the free market is at least a large crowdsourced combination of everyone’s needs, instead of just some mental image of those needs in the mind of a few committee memebers.