Thank you for summarizing (I actually read the whole article before seeing your reply and might have posted similar thoughts). I get the appeal of romanticizing our past as a country, looking back at the post-war era, especially the space race with a nostalgia that makes us imagine it was a world where the most competent were at the helm. But it just wasn't so, and still isn't.
Many don't understand that the Civil Rights Act describes the systematic LACK of a meritocracy. It defines the ways in which merit has been ignored (gender, race, class, etc) and demands that merit be the criteria for success -- and absent the ability for an institution to decide on the merits it provides a (surely imperfect) framework to force them to do so. The necessity of the CRA then and now, is the evidence of absence of a system driven on merit.
I want my country to keep striving for a system of merit but we've got nearly as much distance to close on it now as we did then.
>Many don't understand that the Civil Rights Act describes the systematic LACK of a meritocracy. It defines the ways in which merit has been ignored (gender, race, class, etc) and demands that merit be the criteria for success
The word "meritocracy" was invented for a book about how it's a bad idea that can't work, so I'd recommend not trying to have one. "Merit" doesn't work because of Goodhart's law.
I also feel like you'd never hire junior engineers or interns if you were optimizing for it, and then you're either Netflix or you don't have any senior engineers.
FWiW Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington, the author of the 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy popularised the term which rapidly lost the negative connotations he put upon it.
He didn't invent the term though, he lifted it from an earlier essay by another British sociologist Alan Fox who apparently coined it two years earlier in a 1956 essay.
Many don't understand that the Civil Rights Act describes the systematic LACK of a meritocracy. It defines the ways in which merit has been ignored (gender, race, class, etc) and demands that merit be the criteria for success -- and absent the ability for an institution to decide on the merits it provides a (surely imperfect) framework to force them to do so. The necessity of the CRA then and now, is the evidence of absence of a system driven on merit.
I want my country to keep striving for a system of merit but we've got nearly as much distance to close on it now as we did then.