Pointing out that a meritocracy is not a good society for most people.

"Meritocracy" encourages people to compete to climb the ladder, but ascending one rung pushes another down one. If you have to be above average to win a decent life, half the people won't get one. What we really should aim to do is to bring the runs closer together and pull the whole ladder up. We need to reverse the concentration of wealth.

There is a role in a well-organized society for judging people by comparing how well they would do a certain job. We want to put the best people in charge of important decisions. But what does it mean to be "best"? It's not just a matter of ability — making good decisions requires good values, too.

We have seen the bad results of choosing managers solely for ability to succeed. When Boeing ceased to be run by people with a career commitment to making safe planes, and was instead run by people with a career commitment to success, it started covering up possible problems rather than fixing them. When medical insurance companies and hospital companies started to be run by people who didn't have decades of commitment to doing medicine, they made it their goal to get more profit for less medicine.

The word "merit" is not the way to express what we should seek. We should call this something else. "Menschness"?