Meritocracy? You must be kidding.
Twitter has been ablaze recently with posts like this one:
“Trump’s daughter works at the WH
Her husband works at the WH
Rudy’s son works at the WH
Barr’s son in law works at the WH
Barr’s daughter works at Treasury
Trumps (sic) sons do foreign business
His daughter is getting Chinese patents and Saudi grants
But sure let’s talk about Biden”
Why not talk about all of them and include Chelsea Clinton and the lovely Obama children and Claire McConnell and Megan McCain and every child, in-law, or distant cousin who owes their job in some way to another relative’s position. And invoke as well the hordes appointed to prestigious posts whose only obvious qualification is being friends and supporters of someone with power. But let’s do so not to feed the endless appetite for partisan snark, but rather to set a backfire to put out another inferno in the land of the literati: myriad mentions and denunciations of a supposed meritocracy.
These latter conflagrations have burst out cyclically over the last 60 years when new books sporting the term appear and spawn multiple reviews and essays; e.g., James Fallows in 1985, Nicholas Lemann in 1999, Ross Douthat pretty much any old time. Currently, news stories still cover the fallout from the college admissions scandals as proof of the dark side of meritocracy. The idea that we are ruled by a meritocratic select few invades even our politics. While these criticisms often stem from a deep and noble commitment to greater equality of opportunity, they suffer a fundamental and ultimately self-defeating flaw: there is no meritocracy. There is a collection of oligarchies that to a large extent correlate with class, gender, and race. It might be fair to describe the system in which we all live as containing galaxies of decision-makers who exert their gravity inordinately upon all of the other elements. Call it a plutocracy, the Epsicopacy, a mafia, the cream of society (as Samuel Beckett noted, ‘rich and thick’), a sacred circle, the ruling class, or a vampyrarchy, but please stop confusing things by calling it a meritocracy.
Like all oligarchies since the term was coined by Aristotle, our current collection contains some smart people, some stupid people, and some very stupid people; the latter being a combined effect of the necessity of hiring in-laws and regression to the mean. Conversations with those who have interacted with ‘the people in charge’ at companies, agencies, schools, and all other sorts of organizations reveals that a pool of stupendous mind-blowing mediocrity right alongside a stream of brilliant insightful talent. Meritocracy does not describe the top of organizations if its meaning as defined in a standard library resource is “a system in which those who possess coveted talents, abilities, or superior intellectual capabilities attain high level, prestigious executive positions while those lacking these abilities are slated to the lower to middle ranks of society.” Yes, some of those makers of rules and deals that affect the rest of us are superb at what they do, but certainly not all of them.
No one disagrees that we are talking about the uppermost layer of decision-making pyramids, the uppermost stratum where as Dennis Wrong once put it power is exercised by “the mobilization of resources such as wealth, official position, fame, skill, knowledge, etc. to produce effects” or more specifically as Clifford Geertz had it in his book The Interpretation of Cultures, “the power above power — the right to specify the terms under which the direction of the state, or even mere official existence, is granted.” Likewise, there is unanimity that there is a distinct asymmetry of agency at work in our world; some people have a whole lot more power than others. But their possession of that power is not caused in every case by their merit. The notion of a meritocracy requires that only those with the exquisite smarts and skills assume those decision-making rights and roles. That’s just not true.
Inhabitants of the highest offices fail so often that even the media notices. If true merit — talents, abilities, or superior intellectual capabilities — got them there, then why didn’t he keep them there? In the cases of the celebrated fall of CEOs at eBay, Juul, and WeWork, and the less well known record-pace of U.S. executive departures (159 CEO changes in August and 1,009 departures for the first eight months of this year), either those folks didn’t really have the talent or the people who pick them — the capos di tutti capi — screwed up; they turned out not to be very good at what they were supposed to do. They lacked merit.
Testing is a smokescreen obscuring the real issues
Some critics of meritocracy would say that these failures prove their point: people that shined on various tests actually only possessed test taking ability. But many of them gained entry to the colleges that serve as the waiting rooms to the inner sancta of power not by SAT scores that are accurate predictors of whether a student would get a degree or good GRE General Test scores, which correlate more highly with students’ graduate GPA than smoking is likely to predict lung cancer, but through other means. As Kuncel and Sackett have found, “Standardized tests are not just proxy tests of wealth, and many students from less affluent backgrounds do brilliantly on them. But the class differences in skill development are real…”
Getting in is enhanced greatly by being born to the right family in the right place. “43 percent of the white applicants accepted to Harvard University between 2009 and 2014 (who) were athletes, the children of alumni, or the children of donors and faculty” show the lingering clout of ‘legacy admissions’, which Jim Jump described as “A form of property transfer from one generation to another”. The publication of the skewed geographic representation of Princeton students from wealthy enclaves is not only true for other lusted after universities but demonstrates the degree to which demographics are destiny. The collegiate practice of covertly collecting and analyzing data on prospective students such as their web activity proves that admission officers are more interested in clues of money than merit in those searches. Yet the misdescription of meritocracy continues and usually by pundits who must be counted as part of the supposed meritocracy.
Meritocracy has a meaning, but not the one that most people assign
The connotation of many words change over time; ‘capitalism’, ‘conservativism’, ‘socialism’, come to mind. But current mismeaning of meritocracy seems to be both less acknowledged and perhaps more harmful.
Michael Dunlop Young, the late Baron Young of Dartington, and the person who conceived the label ‘meritocracy’ in his 1958 satire entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy offered somewhat belated guidance that is rarely referenced. He admitted in an introduction to the 1994 edition that there was “nothing new in the proposition that I.Q. + effort = merit”, but he did establish that “nepotism, bribery, or inheritance” were not part of the concept of meritocracy. Young’s prescience throughout The Rise of the Meritocracy (only one of more than 30 works authored by him) astonishes the rare actual reader of his book; my library copy was last checked out in 1998. Young acknowledged that expected infrequency in his 1993 preface, “the most influential books are always those that are not read.” But whether The Rise of the Meritocracy was read or not, the ‘rich and powerful’’ have shaped society as if they used Young’s book as their blueprint.
Young made his book so devilishly entertaining that even its irregular readers tend to either miss the point that it was a dark satire — its tone is undeniably Swiftian and its form presages the marvelous final chapter of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale — or fail to grasp that, “The book was… intended to present two sides of the case — the case against as well as the case for a meritocracy. It is not a simple matter and was not intended to be.” His scenario for this dystopia was set in the future, all the way up to 2034 and blithely notes that well before that time meritocracy is no longer about merit: “The elite is on the way to becoming hereditary; the principles of heredity and merit are coming together. The vital transformation which has taken more than two centuries to accomplish is almost complete.” In those two sentences, Young manages to conjure the shadows of eugenics, convey the inevitable corruption insisted upon by those in power, and communicate that in this fairytale there will not be a happy ending for most of the populace. He also lets on that meritocracy has already ceased to possess any sensible meaning. Again, his prediction has come true.
A Mess of Mismeanings
Tyler Cowen once remarked, “The best critiques of the meritocracy have come from those with extreme merit”, but so do the messiest mismeanings. The author of the encyclopedia definition cited above maintains ignorantly that Michael Young is “commonly referred to as the father of meritocracy in the realm of education, exposed the value of meritocracy and helped to create a public education system based on merit rather than birth order”, a characterization wrong on so many counts that it doubtless would have amused the man who was one of the writers of the Labour Party’s radical 1945 manifesto. The disavowers of meritocracy both old and new are often making important points about flaws in our society, but by tying them to that word they confuse the situation. An important example of the characteristically fuzzy use of the word — actually, 10 examples — appeared recently when The Chronicle of Higher Education asked ten scholars to weigh in on the questions of whether meritocracy “stalls social mobility, entrenches an undeserving elite, and undermines trust in higher education.” Almost none of them were talking about what Young original defined as a meritocracy. But two of them — Agnes Callard and Lauren Schandevel — hit important marks. Callard unsurprisingly as one of America’s leading philosophers asks us to make an important distinction between two different kinds of meritocracy: “timocracy”, which “focuses on bestowing honors for what was done” and “technocracy”, which seeks to “discern the talent that predicts future contributions.” Even with those distinctions, Callard notes that “What makes meritocracy such an easy target is that we will always be able to complain either that someone didn’t earn what they received, or that they were not the best person for the job.” And that’s the point: there is no meritocracy because there are many people in the top tier who did not earn what they received or were not the best person for the job.
Schandevel charges that meritocracy is a myth and that the better term for the upper tier of our country’s hierarchy is oligarchy. The ticket for admission to that group is social capital that Schandevel perceptively notes any aspirant will “need to maneuver their way through elite spaces and to signal to others that they belonged there.” If we were in a meritocracy, then those in the most desired positions, the wielders of power, the makers of decisions, would be those with the most worth, those entitled to reward, not those with the strongest and most influential networks. I don’t know if a meritocracy in the United States of America ever existed, but even the most cursory examination of those at the top shows its absence today.
It’s All about the Social Capital
Social capital is about “the value of social networks, bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity.” It usually favors people who are similar to the existing members of the network. Those tightly knit networks are often fed by family or friend affiliation. Avi-Asher Shapiro depicts the reality of a particular peak of the governance of the world in which we live plainly: “From its earliest days, venture capital mirrored, and amplified, the core structural dynamics in the American economy: What often counts most is who you know, and who your parents are.” And if your parents have money, so much the better than merit in getting to and staying at the top of the structure.
Social capital and networks bring us back to the nasty tweet at the beginning of this piece. The importance of wealth and family connections is what critics of meritocracy like Thomas Franks neglect while admitting that there is a hierarchy, but insisting that it is one of “merit, learning, and status”… a ‘progressive’ view of social hierarchy in which talent and ability are the natural arbiters of who should rule in a society.” Michael Sandel in marking an eloquent populist complaint about the tyranny of merit, obscures that the issue really is about the tyranny of power, of decision-making rights. The game is rigged but the education signals and other glittering prizes the elite flourish are just the outer trappings of a rotten system. If we wish to rebuild the civic infrastructure of shared public life as Sandel suggests, then we must start with an accurate picture of the current infrastructure, hierarchies based not on merit but on other forms of power. Yes, those who excelled on tests and came out with the cum laudes rose up on the ladders of responsibilities and rewards, but they are nowhere near the top rungs in most cases unless they also possess some form of this capital. Hunter Biden deserves credit for his frank admission that “I don’t think there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Call It What It Is: Oligarchy
The problem might be easily remedied, if the decriers of meritocracy simply used ‘find and replace’ functions before hitting ‘share’ on their offerings. For example, with that replacement the conclusions of Richard Reeves (whom I much admire) steer us to a clearer depiction of the complex problem that society faces. Just substitute the word oligarchy for the word meritocracy in the following paragraph: “(Oligarchy) thus justifies and amplifies material inequality, by weakening the foundation of mutual respect needed for the funding of public goods, or support for greater resource-redistribution. The ideology of (oligarchy) is the connective tissue between material inequality and relational inequality.” Bernie Sanders was correct five years ago when he wrote that we had slid toward an oligarchy, which as Matt Simonton reminds us using Ancient Greece as a model “should not be seen as a stepping stone on the way to democracy, but rather as a reaction by elite regimes against the threat of democratic revolution.”
Perhaps more accurately, we have a ganglion of oligarchies that support and reinforce each other. In 2001, not long before he died, Michael Young wrote in the Guardian: “It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.“ Calling that new social class a meritocracy instead of an oligarchy evades the reality that race, wealth, and geography were agents of that hardening.
Calling it so allows us to address what Irwin Kirsch and Henry Braun termed the growing opportunity crisis resulting from “the accumulation of advantage or disadvantage experienced by one generation (to be) increasingly passed along to the next. As a result, life outcomes are increasingly dependent on circumstances of birth.”
Calling it an oligarchy highlights the locations of its members and prevents the evasion of the fact that as Douglas Massey and Jonathan Tannen found “residential segregation is the structural linchpin of America’s system of racial stratification.” Demographics is destiny. If you don’t change the demographics, then the test or whatever mechanism you use as a gate to some experience or opportunity will not make a difference.
Calling it an oligarchy gets at the way in which almost all of its members look alike. Even if people of color — especially Blacks and Latinos — get high scores and ivy degrees, they still operate within less powerful networks as documented by Rochelle Parks-Yancy. And societal pressure that they prove themselves in one particular domain makes it more likely that they will be specialists rather than generalists, which again causes a lower likelihood that any of them ever get the CEO job. That loss is a difference that makes a difference because CEOs hire future CEOs and generate their own social capital through powerful networks.
The sociologist Daniel Bell whom Young quoted approvingly in that 1993 introduction, once wrote that, “Conceptual schemes are neither true nor false but are useful or not.” Meritocracy as a concept is not useful now; it only confuses. Whether we are talking about Hunter or Eric, Yvonne, or Chelsea, referencing meritocracy camouflages intransigent issues of race, class, and wealth. If we put it aside, we stand a better chance of defining the problems in such a way so as to discern possible solutions. All systems resist change and complex systems resist change in complex ways. What I know is that continuing to mistake the nature of the system enables the system to stay just the way it is.
