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One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.
See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.
Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.
Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.
As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.
Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.
I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"
The Malays would have won that riot because they dominated the military.
Which in turn suggests the existence of considerations with far greater effect sizes than simple genetics, supporting my point.
Well yeah, the state of modern Russia points to something beyond national average IQ scores being highly relevant for what happens in a country.
Agreed
Yet Russia's PISA scores are consistently middle-of-the-pack, in mathematics above the US.
Obviously things other than IQ matter. But what, precisely, are you arguing against?
Do you believe genetics is responsible for, say, 10% of variation in educational outcomes? 20%? 50%? 80%? And I specifically mean current variation, not hypothetical variation with different forms of education (which would push up black and white equally, and leave them ranked the same).
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