(image: Aimee Ray CC BY)

Unjust deserts

Many people see meritocracy as a worthy ideal: everyone gets what they deserve. Luck can mess this up: it is, by definition, something we don’t deserve. But is it really that simple?

Koen Smets
7 min readJan 10, 2020

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Imagine you arrive home late one evening, only to realize you’ve forgotten your key. You whip out your phone, look for a locksmith nearby and you’re in luck: 10 minutes later a young guy with a toolbox turns up. He fiddles about for the best part of an hour, and eventually you hear the satisfying soft click of the lock surrendering to his efforts. Relieved, you enter your home, offer the locksmith a coffee while he completes his invoice, and in the end, you happily pay him £90 ($115, €105). That was well worth it!

Now imagine that instead of the novice locksmith, his boss had responded to your distress call. With his more than thirty years’ experience he would have picked the lock in less than five minutes. He would also have charged you £90 for this intervention, but £90 for five minutes work — come on!

This vignette is based on a story told by behavioural economist Dan Ariely (sadly no longer available it seems), and illustrates how we equate reward with effort (or time). Someone tinkering with a lock for an hour merits a payment of £90, someone fixing it in a mere…

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Koen Smets

Accidental behavioural economist in search of wisdom. Uses insights from (behavioural) economics in organization development. On Twitter as @koenfucius