I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.
This sort of thing is endemic to most parts of the world, and I doubt the rest of the world will come around in that period. The political forces that drive this will likely be as strong in fifty years, just as they were as strong fifty years ago.
People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.
I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?
People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.
I think we want to focus on outcomes...
Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.
I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?
I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)
So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.
(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)
People want “merit” to be the determining factor… but they don’t want to express or discuss what merit actually is.
As someone has plenty of the characteristics commonly associated with merit, but who also has a strong sense of fairness, I’m awfully skeptical of the faith (and I used that word deliberately) people put in the concept. Why the hell do the talents I was born with or advantages I was given make me any more deserving of material wealth than anyone else?
That’s all I see anyone doing with “merit”… it’s used as a “drop the mic” concept that to justify self-serving criteria for conferring material advantages.
Personally, I think ability should confer obligations more than advantages. (A wildly radical concept, I know, in the morally retarded era we live in.)
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