There is No Meritocracy Without Lottocracy
14th July 2025
Metrics such as KPIs may be adequate in narrow circumstances such as approximately evaluating an employee’s ability to do a specific type of job, but they have a ceiling of complexity they are able to measure. Highly complex tasks with many dimensions of competency (often including an unknown number of unknown dimensions) cannot be adequately legibilized by quantitative metrics. There is also the matter of who gets to decide what performance indicators are used, how they are measured, and how they are used to inform decisions which are ultimately made by humans. You could design a purely mechanistic system which attempts to cut out human decision-making, but such systems lack flexibility and nuance and are typically abandoned quickly for good reason. In the end, simply having good quantitative metrics isn’t enough on its own. It is the ultimate decision-making process itself that must be improved.
Randomness helps address these problems because it eliminates most marginal advantage from subversive scheming. With random selection, no action or investment can meaningfully improve one’s chances, rendering efforts to manipulate the system worthless. This nullifies political capital and ensures that authority is not seized by those adept merely at influencing outcomes through charm, money, or connections. Instead, it creates a system where competency and merit have a genuine chance to rise naturally, unhindered by strategic manipulation. Moreover, randomness systematically dismantles entrenched crony networks by constantly disrupting established relationships.
How might meritocratic institutions actually harness randomness in practice though? The possibilities are virtually limitless, but here are some ideas.
Ancient Athens used it. Of course, they were more committed to democracy that we are.