Track meets and basketball provide different lessons about meritocracy?
Who's the best depends on who we are connected to and the pattern of those connections
Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.
My senior year in high school I wanted to put my name in the record book. I was only an ok runner. In a bit of a surprise breakout, I made the 1600 meter state finals the year before. Yet, I wasn’t fast enough to set a record on my own. In a relay, however, I could get there. We had a strong senior class of 800 meter runners but one of them was ready to be done with sports and didn’t want to go through another track season. I tried to convince him that he was the key to a school record. It was easy to show him his value to the team. We just added up the times of the top returning runners from the previous year. If he ran with us and we all dropped just a half second from our times, we had the record. Without him, it would be tough.*
In a situation like a track or swimming relay team it is easy to think about merit and individual value. For the most part, all of our performances were independent of each other. The performance of the team was simply the sum of the individual parts. In this type of a scenario, thinking about a meritocracy is easy. The best individuals make the best team. However, that isn’t something that’s true for all types of teams.**
Track wasn’t the sport I loved most. I was a basketball nut. I loved playing and competing but I also loved watching the sport. Growing up in Michigan in the 1980s I was a Detroit Pistons fan. They were the best NBA team when I was in high school and won two NBA championships. Then there was a lull in winning for the Pistons as Michael Jordan took over the sport. Eventually the Pistons would rise again and make the NBA finals in 2004.
Their opponent was the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers had assembled a dream team that year. They had two superstars who were household names, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Then they brought in two additional Hall of Famers that were perennial All-Stars, Gary Payton and Karl Malone. Every NBA analyst had already given the championship to the Lakers before the 2003-2004 season started. In the 2004 finals, they had the four best players on the court. The Pistons had no chance.
However, the Pistons won the opening game in what most analysts at the time considered a fluke performance. The Lakers came back to tie the series in game two before the Pistons dominated the next three games and won the championship in a rout. The Lakers had the best players but the Pistons had the best team.
Basketball is not like a relay. The best player to add to a basketball team might not be the best player individually but instead the player who best complements the skills and talents of the other players on the team and makes up for the deficiencies of those players too. Track relays are simply additive. Add up the individual times and you know how fast the team will run. With basketball you need to know how the pieces fit together to judge a player’s worth and merit. Basketball performance depends on how all of the players fit together and perform as a unit.
Most things in our society resemble a basketball team more closely than a relay team. In our jobs and our schools the output is a complex and coordinated combination of the interactions of the people with whom we interact. A student learns from other students in the classroom as much as from a teacher. If everyone in the room contributes the same thing, less learning occurs than if each student brings something different to the conversation. A team of engineers and product developers succeeds and fails at creating new innovations based on how they work together and how they combine their individual expertise into a collective expertise. What you get isn’t a linear sum of ability.
In this sense, merit on a work team or a college campus is a different concept than merit on a relay team. We easily know what merit looks like in the second case. But that case is really unique. Thinking about meritocracy in other teams is far more challenging. You can’t simply add the best individual and expect that they are the person who will improve the team the most. Even further, in this second case, if you put a different set of complementary people in the room, the person who will improve the team the most might (and likely will) change.
Teams also turn over. People leave to take new jobs and some retire. You may want to hire someone who complements your current team but also provides robustness so that they will still be a valuable team member with a wide variety of potential future teammates. In this sense, meritocracy is complex. You can’t simply find the person who scores the highest on an IQ test or some other aptitude test and decide that they will be the best hire. You also can’t simply choose only the students with the best grades and SAT scores and automatically create the best university. The best person to add in each of these situations depends on the other people with whom they will combine both today and tomorrow and far into the future. When we enter this world of complementarities meritocracy becomes complex and there aren’t simple answers. This fact is under appreciated by most who hail forth with assaults on DEI programs.
Luckily, there are serious and smart people who study exactly this type of problem. When you have a chance pick up Scott Page’s book The Difference, or check out his conversation with Steven Durlauf on the Inequality podcast where they discuss the difference between relay teams and other types of teams more broadly toward the end of the broadcast. That podcast was the inspiration for this post.
*In the end I couldn’t convince him but an underclassmen stepped up and we got the record anyway.
**I borrow this example of the linearity of relay teams from Scott Page.