The Meritocracy Party (The Political Series Book 2)
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The Meritocracy Party (The Political Series Book 2) - Kindle edition by Michael Faust, Mike Hockney. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC. Mad as Hell: Why Everything is Getting Crazier (The Political Series Book 1) by The Meritocracy Party (The Political Series Book 2) by Michael Faust, Mike.
Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the term itself was first created in by the sociologist Michael Young [2]. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first use in and gives this citation. Fox in Socialist Comm. Young Rise of Meritocracy iv. The "most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in terms of tested competency and ability, and most likely, as measured by IQ or standardized achievement tests. These are often determined through evaluations or examinations.
In a more general sense, meritocracy can refer to any form of evaluation based on achievement. Like " utilitarian " and " pragmatic ", the word "meritocratic" has also developed a broader connotation, and is sometimes used to refer to any government run by "a ruling or influential class of educated or able people. This is in contrast to the original, condemnatory use of the term in by Michael Young in his work " The Rise of the Meritocracy ", who was satirizing the ostensibly merit-based Tripartite System of education practiced in the United Kingdom at the time; he claimed that, in the Tripartite System, "merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications.
Meritocracy in its wider sense, may be any general act of judgment upon the basis of various demonstrated merits; such acts frequently are described in sociology and psychology. Supporters of meritocracy do not necessarily agree on the nature of "merit"; however, they do tend to agree that "merit" itself should be a primary consideration during evaluation. Thus, the merits may extend beyond intelligence and education to any mental or physical talent or to work ethic.
As such meritocracy may be based on character or innate abilities. Meritocrats therefore reject evaluation on the basis of race, wealth, family circumstances, and similar criteria. In rhetoric , the demonstration of one's merit regarding mastery of a particular subject is an essential task most directly related to the Aristotelian term Ethos. The equivalent Aristotelian conception of meritocracy is based upon aristocratic or oligarchical structures, rather than in the context of the modern state.
Garfield in prompted the replacement of the American Spoils System with a meritocracy. In , The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed, stipulating government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. The most common form of meritocratic screening found today is the college degree. Higher education is an imperfect meritocratic screening system for various reasons, such as lack of uniform standards worldwide, [9] [10] lack of scope not all occupations and processes are included , and lack of access some talented people never have an opportunity to participate because of the expense, most especially in developing countries.
Education alone, however, does not constitute a complete system, as meritocracy must automatically confer power and authority, which a degree does not accomplish independently. Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new.
In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group. The essay, written in the first person by a fictional historical narrator in , interweaves history from the politics of pre- and post-war Britain with those of fictional future events in the short onward and long term onward. The essay was based upon the tendency of the then-current governments, in their striving toward intelligence, to ignore shortcomings and upon the failure of education systems to utilize correctly the gifted and talented members within their societies.
Young's fictional narrator explains that, on the one hand, the greatest contributor to society is not the "stolid mass" or majority, but the "creative minority" or members of the "restless elite". It was also used by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Crisis in Education", [20] which was written in and refers to the use of meritocracy in the English educational system. She too uses the term pejoratively. It was not until that Daniel Bell used the term positively. According to scholarly consensus, the earliest example of an administrative meritocracy, based on civil service examinations, dates back to Ancient China.
This sets in motion the creation of the imperial examinations and bureaucracies open only to those who passed tests. As the Qin and Han dynasties developed a meritocratic system in order to maintain power over a large, sprawling empire, it became necessary for the government to maintain a complex network of officials. Rank was determined by merit, through the civil service examinations , and education became the key for social mobility. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia on American History: One of the oldest examples of a merit-based civil service system existed in the imperial bureaucracy of China.
Tracing back to B. This system allowed anyone who passed an examination to become a government officer, a position that would bring wealth and honor to the whole family. In part due to Chinese influence, the first European civil service did not originate in Europe, but rather in India by the British-run East India Company Both Plato and Aristotle advocated meritocracy, Plato in his The Republic , arguing that the most wise should rule, and hence the rulers should be philosopher kings.
The concept of meritocracy spread from China to British India during the seventeenth century, and then into continental Europe and the United States. The first European power to implement a successful meritocratic civil service was the British Empire , in their administration of India: Meadows successfully argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China , published in , that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic.
His model was to give more votes to the more educated voter. His views are explained in Estlund Mill's proposal of plural voting has two motives. One is to prevent one group or class of people from being able to control the political process even without having to give reasons in order to gain sufficient support. He calls this the problem of class legislation. Since the most numerous class is also at a lower level of education and social rank, this could be partly remedied by giving those at the higher ranks plural votes.
A second, and equally prominent motive for plural voting is to avoid giving equal influence to each person without regard to their merit, intelligence, etc. He thinks that it is fundamentally important that political institutions embody, in their spirit, the recognition that some opinions are worth more than others. He does not say that this is a route to producing better political decisions, but it is hard to understand his argument, based on this second motive, in any other way.
So, if Aristotle is right that the deliberation is best if participants are numerous and assuming for simplicity that the voters are the deliberators then this is a reason for giving all or many citizens a vote, but this does not yet show that the wiser subset should not have, say, two or three; in that way something would be given both to the value of the diverse perspectives, and to the value of the greater wisdom of the few.
This combination of the Platonic and Aristotelian points is part of what I think is so formidable about Mill's proposal of plural voting.
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It is also an advantage of his view that he proposes to privilege not the wise, but the educated. Even if we agreed that the wise should rule, there is a serious problem about how to identify them. This becomes especially important if a successful political justification must be generally acceptable to the ruled. In that case, privileging the wise would require not only their being so wise as to be better rulers, but also, and more demandingly, that their wisdom be something that can be agreed to by all reasonable citizens.
I turn to this conception of justification below. Mill's position has great plausibility: So, how can we deny that the educated subset would rule more wisely than others.
But then why shouldn't they have more votes? Garfield by a disappointed office seeker in proved its dangers. Two years later in , the system of appointments to the United States Federal Bureaucracy was revamped by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act , partially based on the British meritocratic civil service that had been established years earlier.
The act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit, through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote government employees for political reasons. To enforce the merit system and the judicial system, the law also created the United States Civil Service Commission. Australia began establishing public universities in the s with the goal of promoting meritocracy by providing advanced training and credentials.
The educational system was set up to service urban males of middle-class background, but of diverse social and religious origins. It was increasingly extended to all graduates of the public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women and finally to ethnic minorities. Singapore describes meritocracy as one of its official guiding principles for domestic public policy formulation, placing emphasis on academic credentials as objective measures of merit.
Meritocracy
There is criticism that, under this system, Singaporean society is being increasingly stratified and that an elite class is being created from a narrow segment of the population. Singaporean academics are continuously re-examining the application of meritocracy as an ideological tool and how it's stretched to encompass the ruling party's objectives.
Professor Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy asserts that "Meritocracy, in trying to 'isolate' merit by treating people with fundamentally unequal backgrounds as superficially the same, can be a practice that ignores and even conceals the real advantages and disadvantages that are unevenly distributed to different segments of an inherently unequal society, a practice that in fact perpetuates this fundamental inequality. In this way, those who are picked by meritocracy as having merit may already have enjoyed unfair advantages from the very beginning, ignored according to the principle of nondiscrimination.
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Meritocracy in the Singapore context relates to the application of pragmatism as an ideological device which combines strict adherence to market principles without any aversion to social engineering and little propensity for classical social welfarism, [41] is further illustrated by Kenneth Paul Tan in subsequent articles:. There is a strong ideological quality in Singapore's pragmatism, and a strongly pragmatic quality in ideological negotiations within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic maneuvering over the decades has resulted in the historical dominance of government by the PAP in partnership with global capital whose interests have been advanced without much reservation.
Within the Ecuadorian Ministry of Labor, the Ecuadorian Meritocracy Institute [43] was created under the technical advice of the Singapore government. Most contemporary political theorists, including John Rawls , reject the ideal of meritocracy. In an anonymous British group called The Meritocracy Party published its first manifesto, to which they have now added more than two million words on the subject discussing Hegel , Rousseau , Charles Fourier , Henri de Saint-Simon , and various other philosophers, scientists, reformers, and revolutionaries.
In summary, The Meritocracy Party wants to achieve the following:. On their website The Meritocracy Party lists five meritocratic principles [48] and thirteen primary aims. The Meritocracy International is the host of all meritocratic political parties in the world and the place where these may be found by country of origin.
Meritocracy could avoid the pitfalls of American-style politics -- at least in theory.
The term "meritocracy" was originally intended as a negative concept. As the supposed effectiveness of a meritocracy is based on the supposed competence of its officials, this standard of merit cannot be arbitrary and has to also reflect the competencies required for their roles. The reliability of the authority and system that assesses each individual's merit is another point of concern. As a meritocratic system relies on a standard of merit to measure and compare people against, the system by which this is done has to be reliable to ensure that their assessed merit accurately reflects their potential capabilities.
Standardized testing , which reflects the meritocratic sorting process, has come under criticism for being rigid and unable to accurately assess many valuable qualities and potentials of students. Education theorist Bill Ayers , commenting on the limitations of standardized testing, writes that "Standardized tests can't measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes.
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The Case for Meritocracy.
The educational system was set up to service urban males of middle-class background, but of diverse social and religious origins. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. The Emotional Sphere of Politics. In , The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed, stipulating government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. This reduces the effectiveness of a meritocratic system, the supposed main practical benefit of which is the competence of those who run the society. Humanity is about to enter its divine phase. Academic disciplines Political science political scientists International relations theory Comparative politics.
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Continue shopping Checkout Continue shopping. Chi ama i libri sceglie Kobo e inMondadori. The Meritocracy Party by Michael Faust. Buy the eBook Price: Available in Russia Shop from Russia to buy this item. Or, get it for Kobo Super Points! Democracy has become the single biggest obstacle to the rise of the most meritorious. In the USA, no matter your talents, you cannot become President unless you have access to vast wealth to fund your campaign. In Great Britain, social mobility — the opportunity to improve your social standing — has gone into steep reverse.
If you are born into a poor family you are statistically almost certain to remain poor, regardless of your merits. If your parents are rich, you can start looking forward to a prosperous future, again regardless of your merits. The world can be changed: