If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to
> max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.
Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.
If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.
We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.
We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.
Funnily enough, we agree:
> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)
That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?
Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities.
Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.