Here’s What a Real Meritocracy Looks Like
A blind selection process for time with the Hubble telescope didn’t just eliminate gender bias. It erased prestige from the equation.
The Hubble telescope helped to prove a theory right here on Earth.
Source: NASA, via Getty Images
Meritocracy is a popular idea for structuring society, but whether committees are picking students to go to Yale or doling out coveted time on the Hubble Space Telescope to astronomers, it’s often nearly impossible in practice. Merit can be hard to measure — doable enough in tennis or swimming, but harder to define in art, science or college admissions.
When merit can’t be measured, nominally meritocratic institutions tend to assess it by past success, even if that success was based on subjective judgments and a dose of good luck. That may explain why parents have become desperate enough to resort to bribery to buy their kids one marker of merit — admission to an elite university. But now scientists running the Hubble Space Telescope have found a way to improve the assessment of merit. And they’ve tested it scientifically. The results could apply to many other areas of life.