The Meritocracy Myth
A discussion starter: the U.S. prioritizes not merit, not diversity, but credentials.
In February 1996, when I was ten months old, my parents and I immigrated to the United States from South Africa after selling everything we had except for four suitcases – all in the chase of the American Dream. Meritocracy is the perfect manifestation of the American Dream: Anyone, no matter who you are or where you come from, can be successful so long as you work hard. It's the gold standard.
I believed in an American meritocracy my entire life. It created a tenacity in me that helped me rise up the ranks at AWS – becoming a senior software engineer in four years after college – and launch my own Y Combinator backed startup. Unfortunately, my beliefs in a true meritocracy have died along the way.
I was sold a dream that each of us would be judged on the content of our character, our work ethic, and our ingenuity. Recent proponents of restoring meritocracy claim to want that same dream. But I'm here to tell you that pinning the demise of our meritocracy on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is misguided at best and malicious at worst.
The true culprit is credentialism.
Restoring meritocracy and tackling such a systemic problem requires a systems thinking approach – one that analyzes the ecosystem as a whole, not finding an easy scapegoat. I believe that meritocracy is something everyone wants, and the best way to figure out how to get there is through discussion.
I hope this kicks that off.
Executive Order bans DEI, on the basis of merit
On January 21, 2025, the White House passed the following executive order called ENDING ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION AND RESTORING MERIT-BASED OPPORTUNITY, effectively banning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives:
Roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society... use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation...
These illegal DEI and DEIA policies also threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs...
Yet in case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.
Section 1
The chief complaint is that hiring standards are being lowered in order to fill diversity quotas. In light of recent court cases – such as Duvall vs. Novant Health, where a jury found that race and/or sex were motivating factors in the firing of David Duvall (white, hetero male), or Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, where a straight woman is suing on the basis that she was demoted because of her sexual orientation – I can understand where this sentiment comes from.
However, with DEI now "gone,” will everyone be measured by their "aptitude, hard work, and determination", as mentioned above? Was DEI really the only barrier to a meritocracy? If DEI threatens "the safety of American[s]", does that imply diverse people are not American? Is this Executive Order misguided or malicious?
My thesis is that the United States actually prioritizes credentials over both merit and diversity. This is supported by two observations: 1/ we rely on superficial proxies, such as school name recognition, as an indicator of one's abilities, and 2/ human beings innately struggle to evaluate talent objectively, due to implicit bias.
We live in a world of "credential-ism", not meritocracy
Have you ever interviewed someone, hired them, and had your expectations completely reversed? I know I have. It is incredibly difficult to predict someone's performance after a one hour interview. Instead, we tend to look for additional information to form our hiring decision.
1/ Credentials
Assuming equal opportunity, credentials (such as college or previous employer) could be a proxy for competency. By the transitive property, if Harvard is recognized as "hard to get into" and academically challenging, then – "all else equal" – when deciding between someone that went to Harvard and a lesser-known school, you might choose the Harvard grad.
At face value, this makes sense in a business setting. You're using the data you have to make the less risky decision. But it begs the question: are we really holding "all else equal"?
Equal opportunity is not real. The tragic irony is that credentialism favors the wealthy.
A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found that, when controlling for SAT/ACT scores, students from families in the top 1% [incomes > $611,000] are "more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families [incomes between $91,000-$114,000], and 58% more likely to be admitted to one."
The study states they likely underestimated the impact of their findings, which reinforces the fact that equal opportunity does not exist:
Standardized test scores may not be pure measures of academic "merit" as children from high-income families may have access to additional test preparation or other resources that allow them to obtain higher scores.
The post-college outcomes of attending an Ivy Plus college are also correlated with increased status and wealth. Despite fewer than 0.5% of Americans attending these elite institutions, their graduates account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 25% of U.S. Senators, and 75% of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last fifty years.
Another data point that highlights our credential-istic society? Ivy-Plus graduates are "60% more likely to reach the top 1% income bracket by age 33". By age 33!
These factors create a negative flywheel where the wealthy send their students to Ivy-Plus schools, these schools tend to prioritize legacy students and other wealthy students, and the cycle continues. We then see the same effect in hiring from these schools. Does this prioritization not undermine the very notion of a meritocracy?
2/ Implicit Bias
Humans’ ability to identify merit is also compromised by unconscious bias.
Multiple studies have found that, with identical credentials, resumes with White-sounding names received 50% more interviews than those with Black-sounding names. Even fMRI brain scans show that human beings make automatic judgments about the people we interact with. This psychological experience is known as implicit bias, and everyone has it.
This means that humans are fundamentally poor at recognizing talent on resumes. Left unchecked, our unconscious actively works against our ability to find the most qualified individuals.
I want to stress that implicit bias is not inherently "bad" – again, everyone has it. What’s important is acknowledging that it exists and that it mars our ability to assess and hire effectively.
Moving closer to real meritocracy: A systems thinking approach
In 2017, AWS had an outage that took down a large chunk of the internet after an engineer accidentally typed in the wrong command and shut down critical servers. An instinctual reaction would be to fire that engineer, given that they had likely cost customers hundreds of thousands of dollars; however, if we use a systems thinking approach, we should actually blame the system for allowing anyone to be able to shut down those servers in the first place. If the system is not held accountable, and that engineer is fired, it will be only a matter of time before that same outage happens again.
The core question I keep coming back to is: Could we hire the most qualified individual if they were sitting right in front of us?. With a basic understanding of human psychology, the absence of equal opportunity, and our current credential-favoring society, the answer seems to be definitely "No". To find out how to get to "Yes", we have to take a systems thinking approach, or in other words, analyze the system as a whole, as opposed to one facet of it.
Blaming Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs alone for the erosion of meritocracy is as misguided as firing the engineer who caused the outage. Neither gets to the root of the problem, and both leave room for the same issue to occur again. We should instead hold accountable hiring and education admittance systems for putting us in such a situation where highly qualified individuals struggle to find jobs and get into the best schools.
If we follow the methodology laid out in the Executive Order, and the United States sees diversity hiring initiatives as a "threat to safety of American men, women, and children," then we must also end legacy admissions, which are by definition not merit-based. The lack of questioning of practices such as legacy admissions continues to point to the fact that the wealthiest 1% create and nurture systems for their own benefit.
We should not be looking for "token" hires based on race and gender, and we should not be looking for "token" hires based on credentials, such as school and previous employer because we know those are not true proxies for talent.
So if we genuinely desire a meritocratic society (which we should!), the accountability rests on us to question the institutional systems that are currently in place, challenge our own assumptions, and work against the factors that inhibit our ability to hire the best.
Meritocracy will not trickle down. If we want to see change, it has to start with us.
Takeaways
1. Be open to discussion. We can only make progress with an open dialogue. I'd love to have a conversation about anything I may have missed or gotten wrong here.
2. Look for the systems thinking viewpoint: There is so much nuance in the world. We should strive to understand upstream and downstream influences – within the hiring/admittance system in this case.
3. Do your own research & use data. Statements are baseless without data. Sources matter. Push and probe to understand how conclusions are being drawn.
Many thanks to my friends for the feedback and discussions on the early drafts. Inspiration also taken from the Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of their employer. Any content provided by the author is of their own opinion and is not intended to malign any organization, company, or individual. The author is not responsible for any consequences resulting from the use or interpretation of the information presented in this article, and no endorsement, approval, or disapproval by their employer should be inferred.