“Meritocracy” was coined as a pejorative, has enjoyed a few decades as an aspiration, and is now returning to its original status, as progressives denounce the notion that attention to “merit” is anything more than camouflage for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and what new isms and phobias have been discovered since three o’clock yesterday. Part I of this series examined the “soft” anti-meritocratic argument, the one advanced by the term’s originator, Baron Michael Young, and carried on today by Charles Murray, ideologically a very different figure.
The “soft” objections to meritocracy specifically address the tendency to equate “merit” with natural intelligence. Baron Young would have forestalled a great deal of confusion if he had labeled the idea that he was satirizing “sapientocracy”. Progressives attack a broader concept of “merit”. The ultimate foundation of their argument is that no one “merits” anything, because our merits don’t originate within ourselves. Rather they are bestowed by others: ancestors, parents, people with whom we associate, society as a whole.
An example of this thinking can be found in an interview that Vox, a web site popular with TikTok influencers and other pre-adolescents, conducted with Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor who has written The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. I will here borrow from the Vox interview to explicate the logic of the “hard” case against meritocracy, which is much like a case against merit itself
Asked to define “meritocracy”, Professor Markovits replies, “Meritocracy is the idea that people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than, for example, on their parents’ social class. And the moral intuition behind meritocracy is that it creates an elite that is capable and effective and that it gives everybody a fair chance at success.”
He concedes that contemporary America is “something like a meritocracy”, because “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things” but objects that “the moral intuition behind meritocracy is not at all realized. This system does not give everybody a fair chance at success and it hasn’t been particularly good for society as a whole.”
Although Professor Markovits undoubtedly regards inequality as undesirable, he is not devoted to leveling all the hills and filling up all the valleys. If he advocated “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, he would hardly be interested in whether meritocracy gave “everybody a fair chance at success”. A fair game that produced unequal results would be just as objectionable as one that was rigged.
He summarizes meritocracy’s unfairness thus: “[B]ecause the rich can afford to educate their children in a way nobody else can, when it comes time to evaluate people on the merits, rich kids just do better.” The proof of that proposition is that students at top-tier colleges predominantly have parents who are well above average in income and education.
The premise is that the key to admission to a top-tier college is the preparation furnished by affluent, well educated parents and that the recipients of that preparation have an unfair advantage. Those advantages are of many kinds, including (i) native intelligence (assuming that intelligence is linked to either heredity or family environment), (ii) attendance at good schools, (iii) parental encouragement to do well academically and in extracurricular activities, (iv) lower incidence of family breakup, crime, drug abuse and other detriments to achievement, (v) association with other children of the same “cognitive elite” class, (vi) superior access to cultural and intellectual resources and (vii) in a pinch, the availability of special tutoring and similar support. There are doubtless more that haven’t crossed my mind.
Those advantages foster the qualities that selective colleges look for in students, but to Professor Markovits they are no better than the bribes paid by the celebrity parents involved in the “Varsity Blues” scandal.
In that scandal, some rich and famous people paid bribes to get their kids into college.
Now, I’m not saying the scandal wasn’t wrong – it absolutely was scandalous. But the bulk of the reason why our colleges, particularly our elite colleges, are filled with kids of rich parents isn’t that. Instead, it’s that rich parents spend enormous sums of money not on bribing anybody but on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers, and this means the children of rich people simply do better on the merits.
And so the big problem that we face isn’t merely that the rich cheat, it’s that the meritocracy favors the rich even when everybody plays by the rules.
In this discussion, Professor Markovits takes us only as far as the gates of the campus, which isn’t where many men and women other than star athletes accrue wealth and fame. I’ll assume arguendo that matriculation brings with it yet more advantages – acquisition of monetizable knowledge, friendship with fellow students who are on their way to success and will be helpful in later life, credentials that will impress future employers, etc. – that lead to “the children of rich people” doing yet “better on the merits”. If that isn’t the case, Professor Markovits’s argument peters out, for all that an elite college education then does is make rich people a little less rich as they pay monstrous sums for their children’s four-year vacations.
At this point one may ask why, even if it is in some sense “unfair” for those who are “better on the merits” to earn the greatest rewards, society doesn’t benefit from the arrangement. Leaving aside “rent seeking” activities (for which Yale or Harvard may or may not be a good preparation), getting rich generally is the result of providing goods or services that other people want. Professor Markovits himself says, as already noted, that “the bulk of the reason why certain people have gotten ahead is that they have genuinely accomplished things”. Jeff Bezos isn’t a multi-billionaire simply because he graduated from Princeton, nor Bill Gates because he attended (but dropped out of) Harvard.
“Genuinely accomplishing things” isn’t a prime, or even especially desirable, goal for Professor Markovits. Accomplishment has become enmeshed in the greater evil of competitiveness. He shares Baron Young’s nostalgia for pre-meritocratic privilege:
Look, one way to think about this is that if you take a longer historical view, meritocracy in its deeper origins came to the English-speaking world around 1833 [sic; sc. 1854], which is the date in which the administrative division of the British East India Company entrance and promotion based on social class was replaced with entrance and promotion based on competitive examinations.
The eventual upshot was –
It takes enormous effort to win and keep winning in this competition, so elite schooling has become enormously more intensive than it was 20 or 50 years ago. And elite jobs have become enormously more intensive. The toll that this takes is quite heavy and I think it’s destructive of human well-being.
Meritocrats are constantly struggling and being evaluated and tested, and they constantly have to shape and manipulate themselves in order to pass the test. And in a way, it’s like they’re portfolio managers whose assets include just themselves, and they have kind of an instrumental and alienated attitude toward their own lives because they have to treat their life that way.
The interviewer asks, “Is there any way to organize a competitive society that doesn’t inevitably tend toward these sorts of excesses?” Professor Markovits has something of a solution at hand:
I think it’s possible, yes. So one distinction I draw is between excellent education and superior education. Excellent education is education that makes a person good at something that’s worth doing, and superior education is education that makes somebody better than other people at something, regardless of whether it’s worth doing or not.
You can imagine a society which has widespread, excellent education and invests in training people to be good at all the tasks that the society needs and fills up its jobs with people who are excellent at them. And that would be a kind of a meritocratic society that structures its education and work so that once you’re excellent, being a little bit better doesn’t make that much of a difference.
Damping down education from “superior” to “excellent” sounds like an excellent way to stifle innovation, while suppressing “education that makes somebody better than other people at something” is an obvious formula for producing cookbook followers who unimaginatively do what their predecessors did. Stagnation almost sounds like the objective behind Professor Markovits’s denunciation of “superior education”:
It gives huge advantages to people who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing, like being great at high-tech finance, which most economists think has almost no social value.
But if you’re really good at it you can make millions and millions of dollars a year, and to get really good at it you have to master all sorts of difficult skills and you have to get degrees at the top of your class in the very best universities in the country. And that’s the kind of system that we have now.
This is such a strange view of the economy that I suspect the professor of amusing himself at the expense of his teenage-level interviewer. He was perhaps waiting to be asked how those “who are better than somebody else or than everybody else in all sorts of things that probably aren’t worth doing” get paid “millions and millions of dollars a year”. Alas, the question didn’t come, so we didn’t get to hear his answer. I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that it wouldn’t have been convincing.
Whether meritocracy is useful is, however, only part of the story. As should be clear by now, Professor Markovits has moral, as well as utilitarian, criticisms. To those I’ll turn when I get around to the next installment in this series.