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Notes -
If you remove merit, yes.
If you remove 'merit', not necessarily.
We all know Goodhart's Law, right?
There may be some abstract sense in which, for the next marginal position you want to hire for, you could in principle rank every person in the world on how much they would increase your long-term profitability, control that for how much pay they would demand, and get a ranked-order listing of candidates by merit.
But why in the world would you think that whatever combination of resumes/test scores/etc you get from your limited candidate pool, combined with whatever HR person has to make the decision, would return anything close to the same result?
Like, the first problem is that we don't even really know what we actually need for any marginal position, the second problem is that we only have very indirect proxy measures of the things we think we need, and the third problem is that everyone knows what those measures are, and we are mostly selecting on ability to produce those measures, not the things they are proxies for.
(and the zeroth problem is that the HR person is probably underpaid and overworked and lazy and doesn't care that much and isn't that competent and doesn't know that much about the position, to begin with)
If the options were 1. Have a true, perfect meritocracy vs 2. Have affirmative action, obviously you pick 1.
But the option is 'Everything is a shitshow, our metrics are fucked, most of what happens is arbitrary and depends on starting conditions.'
Given which, we may as well throw in additional arbitrary bullshit that 1. We expect to work counter to some of the other anti-meritocratic arbitrary bullshit already in the system, maybe readjusting us slightly more on target, and 2. Accomplishes other important social projects we care about.
Are you referring to Trump or to Biden here? I guess both, since they were both leader of the free world for a while.
Or maybe Sam Bankman-Fried? He really rose to the top and gained incredible wealth and influence incredibly quickly, he must be one of the truly excellent elites that we should reward and let guide our future.
And etc. This is a nice sentiment, but it's not how the world works by default, and it's not how the world works today. Things are way more contingent and contextual and stochastic than that, and the traits that lead to someone seizing power and influence aren't identical with the traits that make them excellent at wielding it for the public good.
You don't get this outcome by default, just by taking a hands-off approach. You have to monitor and regulate the system to make it give you an outcome like that.
I guess every job in society should just be handed out by lottery then, since figuring out if someone would be good at something or not is apparently impossible. That sure does make hiring easier. Every time say... a civil engineer... quits or retires we can just replace them with someone who was working at McDonald's the day before. Have fun next time you're driving across a bridge.
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