DiscoBiscuit
Meat Tornado
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2009
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I'm not saying competence doesn't matter, only that "merit" is always colored by who is in power.
In situations that connect with the objectively verifyable world, it'll be less likely for it to color things that much.
But when we talk about "merit" in governance, we have seen time and again it's power that gets to define "merit".
Yea the boss gets to decide who gets hired, it's always been thus.
The best you can ever hope for is that that decision gets made by those interested in hiring the best person for the job, and not because Blackrock threatened to pull the companies funding on DEI/ESG grounds unless you hire people with the right skin color. 1 in 6 Hiring Managers Have Been Told to Stop Hiring White Men
I sincerely worry about the impact of DEI/ESG on our competency crisis.
Edit: I realized that I kind of talked past your last point. In politics merit will always be defined differently by the parties, and even differently person to person.
For instance I see our administrative state as a bloated unelected beast that has taken over de facto legislative powers where the congress has increasingly become the place where lawmaking goes to die. As congress has played less of a lawmaking role, we've turned to the admin state, SCOTUS, the President (through executive orders), and NGO's and think tanks through white papers written to "suggest" policy to gov't agencies.
I would, I think reasonably, like to see the admin state gutted.
Im sure that those who enjoy the direction our unelected policy making machine is taking would view gutting the admin state with horror. Even more horrible in their eyes would be the people I would recommend to replace those fired in our Fed Bureaucracy.
I don't see any overarching definition of merit that would apply to both parties excepting of course a tendency towards people from good uni's that have relevant degrees etc etc. And of course a level of nepotism that is never entirely eradicable, but that I think we in the west have done a relatively good job of minimizing.
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