Quotes About Meritocracy

Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.

I have never experienced any nepotism or groupism in my career.

I don't believe in nepotism. I don't much like the idea of parents who interfere.

Nepotism exists everywhere.

affirmative action's weakness and vulnerability cooperate with, and perhaps unintentionally legitimate, a meritocracy that privileges test scores over other indicators of student potential in the first place.

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

the good society would have a low rate of inheritance of social status and correspondingly low variations in income and wealth.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

Let's remember what truly unites us. It's a common belief in a better economic future. A belief in a meritocracy.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.

The status quo is never happy when things become a meritocracy.

As one of the grammar-school generation, I grew up as part of a postwar meritocracy that steadily infiltrated the citadels of power.

There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

This was a far cry from the meritocratic Ottoman period, when only by dint of an education could a man of humble background hope to rise through the ranks, get rich, and become a pasha.

there aren't any 'jobs' left. Just financial engineering and politics. I'm not qualified for either. For one thing, I can't say 'meritocracy' with a straight face.

you're convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it's the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.

There's no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you're a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who'd do your job every bit as well.

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. "What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works," Torvalds said. "People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens.

Franklin's own idea was more expansive: he believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed based on their diligence

Page 46: Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.