Quotes About Meritocracy

There's an admirable belief about the virtues of meritocracy - that the best ideas prove the best results. It's a wrong and misguided belief by well-intentioned people.

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, but you don't have to be Catholic, you don't have to be a Christian to work for Blackwater.

President Obama believes in a level playing field.

We don't hand anyone anything in the Democratic Party.

You're not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you're shutting some people out of particular careers.

Don't believe the system is a meritocracy in which ability and hard work are necessarily rewarded. Today the most important predictor of someone's future income and wealth is the income and wealth of the family they're born into.

The meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are worth in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible. In truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who excel.

What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.

Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as apparently haphazardly distributed as money; that we sever the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue; and that before we begin measuring our peers, we at least attempt to ensure that the taller ones have taken off their stilts, and that the shorter ones are not standing in a ditch.

Michael Young, the English sociologist who coined the term "meritocracy," despised the fashion for it: first, because it is largely a smug fantasy perpetuated by those who sit at the top of the social pyramid; and second, because it bestows on those at the bottom the slur that they are there because they have no merit. Even feudalism spared the poor that insult: their lowly station was an accident of birth.

One of the reasons why people come to America is that there are fewer speed bumps to the top of the ladder in comparison with other countries.

Como Primer Cónsul, Napoleón decretó que todos los funcionarios públicos fuesen asalariados al servicio del estado, se preocupó de que estuviesen bien formados, y abolió la promoción basada en la corrupción y el nepotismo, reemplazándola con premios al talento y al mérito.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded.

Mr. Lincoln's elevation shows that in America every station in life may be honorable; that there is no barrier against the humblest; but that merit, wherever it exists, has the opportunity to be known.

For the private sector to flourish, special privilege must give way to equal opportunity and equal risk for all.

But the truth is the meritocracy is a lie. Those born into wealth and privilege will always be able to game the system for their own benefit and their children's own benefit.

Boxing should not let - we should not let - the people in business of boxing should not let a person to just walk right in and get the grand prize of boxing. You can't do it in basketball, football, hockey.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.

Film isn't a meritocracy; there's no system ensuring the best screenplays get produced. It's a hustle.

Nepotism exists - not just in Bollywood but in every profession in India.

Infosys is an absolute meritocracy. Even in a meritocracy, other things being equal, you have to give opportunity to the more experienced candidate.

Britain's great postwar meritocratic experiment was broad-based, but it was in politics that the change was most dramatic.