The merits of meritocracy

Inequality seems both an inevitable and an intolerable threat to a free and democratic society.  We cannot reasonably expect to be rid of it, yet we dare not allow it to flourish without constraints.  So how much inequality can a democratic society tolerate?  What kinds or degrees of inequality are compatible with a prosperous, efficient and just society?  What kinds are not?  What can we do to mitigate the inevitable inequalities?

Nature itself has not made us perfectly equal or we would be indistinguishable from one another.  We are not equal even in the diversity of our skills and inclinations—else one person’s musical talents would be fairly matched to another’s managerial abilities and to another’s bowling prowess.  Some basic forms of inequality, then, seem to have little remedy.  Nature’s gifts and opportunities have been very unequally distributed.  (And in the coming generations, some will attempt to game the system through genetic modification.)  Even our capacities for hard work, concentration and endurance are frustratingly beyond our control.  So we cannot expect a fair and well-functioning civil society to emerge spontaneously from nature’s bequests.  Whatever civil equality we hope to achieve will require artificial supports.  We will have to create a system of equality for ourselves, in spite of nature.  Our civil equality will have to be engineered by deliberate social negotiations and guaranteed by an institutionalized rule of law.  In a democracy, this act of creation requires the participation of as many voices as possible.

Despite the shortcomings of natural equality, we tend to agree that we will no longer stand for some of the once-common artificial forms of inequality.  Slavery is out.  (At least few are willing to defend it publicly.)  Legally distinct estates, orders or castes are no longer acceptable.  We don’t care for a privileged nobility either.  We won’t put up with inequalities based purely on distinctions of sex, race or religion (whatever our private opinions).  If you are a citizen-member of your country, born or naturalized, you will stand equal to the rest before the common law.  And the collective will grant you minimal public supports, including legal counsel, if you are in criminal jeopardy.  Beyond these basics, we begin to lose unanimity.

Those who express little concern for inequality are usually those on the better side of it, well-positioned in relation to society at large.  In the past, such privileged folk have justified their advantageous social or political positions with appeals to purer blood (literally), superior piety or sacrifice, or the manifest will of the divine.  These days the socially and politically advantaged members of a democratic society are likely to offer meritocratic justifications.  Such defenders of unequal outcomes (who have at least acknowledged inequality) habitually conflate their own good fortune with personal merit.  And indeed, some individuals have prospered by combining remarkable talent with unusual dedication, though these are necessarily a minority of cases.  (We wouldn’t draw attention to such exemplars if they were common.)  Those who enjoy a wide array of social advantages, however, are more likely to have acquired them by means of birth, inheritance and upbringing.  Many will argue that they went to the best universities and worked hard to earn the best grades and the best jobs.  There will be truth in these claims, though perhaps less than they think.  They were groomed from childhood for such enviable places and took advantage of every support and connection to rise to their success.  Undoubtedly, some manifestation of hard work was necessary for achieving these advantaged positions, though hardly sufficient alone.  Most people who combine skill with hard work never rise much above the average—and in a fair society this would be a perfectly just and happy outcome.  But even hard work and skill could hardly justify highly-unequal allocations of resources (that is, wealth) or disproportionate levels of social prestige and influence.  Yet the meritocratic argument has often been used to justify much more extreme and unequal outcomes.

Against the modern claims of meritocracy, John Rawls has argued that even remarkable displays of talent and hard work are not enough to justify highly-unequal social outcomes.  Those with talent, including a talent for hard work, have no more earned those talents than aristocrats have earned their birth-fortune.  Rawls maintains that inequalities of reward can only be justified if they are necessary to produce better outcomes for society as a whole, specifically for those who are least well-positioned.  Yet few modern citizens either know about or seem inclined to approve of Rawls’ argument.  (He is certainly not easy to read.)  Most people—judging by the popularity of celebrity culture and the business cults surrounding star performers—seem to expect effort and hard work, but especially talent, to be extravagantly rewarded.  They want unusual talent to be disproportionately rewarded with resources and influence regardless of how it was gained.  Yet these same people seem not to want the remaining members of society—themselves included, the fans and followers—to go entirely without rewards.  Most will never enjoy fame and success, whatever their talent and determination.  But they still have lives.  They want some resources and influence too.

So we will have to find some compromise between extravagant rewards for the remarkable few and the wants of the rest.  Perhaps a socially-useful compromise would find middle ground between the extremes of meritocratic and Rawlsian forms of liberalism.  The most acceptable form of inequality—at least to modern audiences—is a meritocratically-justified sort of inequality.  Such justification assumes that unequal outcomes must be earned—by some combination of hard work, innovation and raw talent.  Yet for such unequal rewards of talent to be equitably realized—that is, for every hard-working and talented individual to rise to the fullness of their potential—they would have to be equally accessible to every competitor.  Elites could not be allowed their many starting advantages without hobbling the opportunities and potential outcomes of the rest.  So the meritocratic argument would necessarily give attention to equalities of opportunity (as opposed to equalities of outcome).  And opportunity, to be entirely equitable, would begin at the beginning.  The most meaningful equality of opportunity would ensure that every child from every sort of background and socio-economic stratum had equal access to quality health-care and education, not to mention networking, so that they entered their meritocratic adulthood as well-positioned as possible.  What these individual children ultimately accomplished with such advantages would lead to significantly disparate outcomes, but at least such unequal consequences would be as much within their individual control as could be managed.  So here is the part of the meritocratic argument that usually goes unsaid: meritocracy is a conditional social argument.  Its viability is contingent upon the quality of opportunity that the supposedly meritocratic society is willing to arrange and enforce.  Meritocracy can only really work if the greatest possible equality of opportunity is institutionally established.

Those who argue in favor of meritocracy are usually impatient with public concern for outcomes.  They assume that existing outcomes are already an accurate reflection of opportunities.  Surely only the most talented and hardest-working individuals would achieve the best outcomes.  But this is a dubious assumption—those who enjoy the best outcomes undoubtedly have some talent (found among rich kids as well as poor) but not necessarily the greater share of it.  Observed outcomes may reflect existing (that is, unequal) opportunities, but not the opportunities that might have been.  In a proper meritocracy, outcomes would not be overlooked.  They would be used to gauge the quality of the inputs.  If it were discovered, say, that the overwhelming majority of those accepted into Harvard (a kind of outcome) were from privileged backgrounds, we would not necessarily conclude that the majority of academically-gifted students happened to come from wealthy families, but rather that non-elite high-schools (most of them) were doing a less-adequate job of preparing or encouraging academically-promising students.  Since this is actually the case with Harvard matriculants (despite noisy efforts to recruit more widely), we might suspect that even their renowned undergrads are not as accomplished as they would otherwise have been.  The problem is less with Harvard than with the quality of public schools in America at large.

Meritocracy only works if those with as-yet-unrealized talents have the chance to discover, develop and apply them.  It’s not enough to assume that the naturally talented will rise to their potential on their own.  This is particularly ill-assumed if their path is consistently blocked by existing elites.  And blocked it is.  Elites want their children to rise, not other people’s children.  Elites don’t really mind if their children are a little less talented than the children of others.  Perhaps they fear they really are so.  Yet they want them to rise regardless.  And they will rig the system as much as they can to ensure that their own flesh and blood remain in the ranks of the existing elite for generations to come.  They are not much concerned that it will lower the talent capacity of society as a whole, which will certainly be the case if potentially-more-talented but non-elite kids are pushed aside.  They are only concerned with how their own children rank—even if it is a higher rank in a more talent-impoverished society.  You’re not sure this really happens?  Consider.  Elites don’t send other people’s children to prestigious schools.  They don’t send other people’s children to educational camps.  They don’t hire tutors for other people’s children when they struggle with math.  They don’t give other people’s children generous allowances so that they can spend a summer in a well-placed internship.  They don’t introduce other people’s children to connected insiders in business and government.  They don’t give other people’s children timely loans to start business-ventures.  (You may find elite-funded charities that do some of these things, though they touch only the smallest fraction of those in need of such help.  This allows the wealthy to feel as if they have done something about the problem, as well as earn extravagant praise from politicians, other privileged folks, and of course grateful recipients.  And in the meantime, they gain generous tax deductions.  If there were programs that gave every child the same opportunities as the fortunate few, they would be public—that is, government—programs.)  Would elite schools really be considered elite if any child from any sort of background had an equal chance of getting in?  Helping underprivileged kids is all well and good.  Private charities often make a big difference to a fortunate few.  But a society is not really meritorious and fair until all of the kids from all of the places are given all of the helps they need to discover and realize their individual potentials.  Only the public can do this.  Only enforceable laws and policies can make it so.  That such an effort would be overpaid in public benefits—since that society had done its very best to find all the latent talent within—is merely one more advantage accruing to real fairness.