Thinking about "meritocracy" and its uses. I appreciate competition & its ability to make organizations more effective. I value rewarding people "based on the contents of their character" rather than their social station. But the idea of merit is still complex.

There's the obvious fact that what we value as "merit" is embedded in a system of culture and history and capital that isn't an objective or fair assessment of human worth.

Just as fundamental, tho, is the fact that even for the simplest version of meritocracy - one that rewards you for how good you are at a valued task, say - merit is not really a property of a person, and rewarding that person for their merit is not as fair as it seems.

Both opportunity and aptitude tend to accumulate. Resources like wealth and social capital create conditions for building skills, which in turn enrich your resources and provide more opportunities. This is presumably one reason why skilled careers pass across generations.

As a first-gen college student and now faculty member, I've felt both uplifted and frustrated by my "merits." My government-cheese, single-parent upbringing didn't stop me from getting a PhD.

But I also made, continue to make, so many mistakes along the way. At least some of those mistakes seem like a legacy of my class and experience. They stand in contrast to the merits of colleagues whose lives seem to have perfectly equipped them for success.

Anyway, I'm not saying we abandon the idea of meritocracy, just that we have a more nuanced view of it. We can value what it offers without imagining it to be fully fair. We can work to patch its gaps, and to align it with the kind of society we want to live in.