A Mediocre Meritocracy

Essays Meritocracy and Brazilian Society down with Meritocracy

“Down with meritocracy” is a frequent sentence in posters displaying demands from different professional categories on strike and other union demands in Brazil. So, it is far from being new. What is interesting, in the present moment, is that this demand – “down with meritocracy” – is reproduced simultaneously with a Brazilian party-political, administrative and institutional discourse change, ...

Affirmative Action, Meritocracy, and Efficiency on Behalf Of: Affirmative Action, Meritocracy, and Efficiency

This article provides a framework for comparing meritocratic and affirmative action admissions policies. The context of the analysis is admissions to public universities; admission rules are evaluated as part of the public investment problem faced by a state government. Meritocratic and affirmative admissions policies are compared in terms of their effects on the level and distribution of human...

A Compensatory Control Account of Meritocracy

Why are people motivated to support social systems that claim to distribute resources based on hard work and effort, even when those systems seem unfair? Recent research on compensatory control shows that lowered perceptions of personal control motivate a greater endorsement of external systems (e.g., God, government) that compensate for a lack of personal control. The present studies demonstra...

A step backward for Italy's meritocracy.

On the Merits of Meritocracy∗

We study career choice when competition for promotion is a contest. A more meritocratic profession always succeeds in attracting the highest ability types, whereas a profession with superior promotion benefits attracts high types only if the hazard rate of the noise in performance evaluation is strictly increasing. Raising promotion opportunities produces no systematic effect on the talent dist...