Meritocracy
the failure of success
Last newsletter I wrote about the vanishingly small odds that exist for people to achieve their dreams in contexts of radical competition. As I argued, our societies are characterised by scarcity in a time of abundance. Most metrics of life have gotten unimpeachably better for the average person worldwide1. However, inequality has also increased. The visibility created by social media and the internet compounds this. People are made ever more intimately aware of the disparities between them, while the fruits of the normative good life are dangled before their eyes. The crushing sense of competing for nothing creates a feeling of involution.
In the last newsletter I mentioned the US college admissions scandal (watch this film). To give a sense of what has changed in higher education in the US consider this: in 1972 Stanford accepted 1/3rd of those who applied. Today, it accepts less than 5%. Johns Hopkins, which accepted the majority of its applicants in 1988 (54%) now accepts only 9%. This is reflected in a societal shift; the share of adults aged 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education increased from 17% in 1980 to 33% in 2015. In the 1970s if you didn’t make it to college it wasn’t the end of the world. In 1970, only 26 percent of middle-class workers had any kind of education beyond high school. Today, nearly 60 percent of all jobs in the U.S. economy require higher education. So not only is the competition for spots in college exponentially fiercer, but the number of doors that will close to you if you don’t make it has also increased.
If you come from a rich family (top 1%) your chances of attending an Ivy League school are 77 times greater than if you come from a poor family (bottom 20%)2. Better schools, access to tutors, more opportunities for extra curricular activities, all of these and other forms of implicit bias mean the rich are favoured in admissions policies (let alone the impact of structural racism). That is why the college admissions scandal stung so many people. The odds were already stacked against the average person. Worse, here were the scions of the ultra-wealthy–the top 0.1%–not even competing within the bounds of a system already rigged in their favour. They chose the side door, photoshopping their kids to become world-class athletes of sports they’d never even played.
But why did they bother? These are the children of movie stars, hedge-fund managers and industrialists. They had all the contacts they’d need and near-limitless financial resources. Even if they failed abysmally in everything they ever did, they still had a solid chance of becoming president one day.
Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, argues that we are wrong to focus on the tangible things that these children already had (the cars, the houses, the money), but rather the one thing they lacked. What these parents were after “was less tangible but more valuable.” What they wanted, Sandel argues, is “the borrowed lustre of merit.3”
A meritocracy is a system in which merit determines outcomes. In a meritocratic society inequality is tolerated as long as it is the result of some people working harder and better than others. A ‘just’ meritocracy therefore is one where the barriers to entry are eliminated and equality is focused on opportunity, not on outcome. It is fine if some people are rich, as long as they earned that money in a fair competition.
Of course, as we know, even if our societies profess to be meritocratic, they are not fair. There are incredible amounts of privilege built in to our systems. I got into Oxford because I had a private school education, I could afford to pay for a masters degree, I’m white, and I was able to spend time in my early 20s studying Mandarin (which I did because I loved it, its own incredible privilege). I am not the brightest person I have ever met, nor the most deserving person of the elite education I have received4.
But even if we had a perfect meritocracy, and I was genuinely the brightest and most deserving person, would a system in which I got to Oxford and then earned an inflated wage be fair? Sandel says no.
He disagrees that meritocracies are fair because he argues that what is accorded ‘merit’ in society is arbitrary. Michael Phelps is the best swimmer in history. He is often quoted as saying that his favourite day to train is Christmas Day, because he knows that no-one else is in the pool that day. It’s undeniable he works hard. But he also has size 14 feet, is nearly 2m tall and is double jointed, giving him a greater range of motion in the water when he kicks. Is that fair? I’m a good swimmer, and I don’t care about Christmas, but I’ll never be Michael Phelps (my feet, alas, are only an 11). But it’s not just height. It’s also propensity. It’s arguably unfair that he has the willpower to work on Christmas day. Not everyone has that in-built ambition and drive.
It’s not just inherent abilities which render meritocracy unjust. Phelps is American. I.e. he was born into a culture that values athletes. He was also born at a time when US higher education had Div1 swimming programmes and scholarships. He was born at a time when the Olympics were no longer just for amateur athletes but was a global sensation. He was swimming at a time Speedo had millions of dollars to sponsor athletes. All of these contributed to him being the Michael Phelps, rather than just damp Mikey with the big feet who swims a lot.
But Sandel is not only worried that meritocracy doesn’t exist in practice. He’s also worried about the kind of people that meritocracy creates. When we believe that Michael Phelps is the best swimmer because he swims on Christmas day, and not because he’s an anatomical anomaly born with the fortune of living in a time that celebrates the greatest swimmer of all time, then we believe in success and failure. Phelps deserves to be a millionaire because he works hard. Whoever came third in the nationals behind him (who I can’t name) failed. They do not deserve anything. They don’t even deserved to be named in a sparsely read newsletter.
On a social level, this means the rich do not feel an obligation to the poor. The US and UK are two meritocratic societies where inequality has spiked in recent decades. In those societies, how much of the political unwillingness to attend to the lives of those left behind is related to the (false) belief within the political and elite classes that it is simply that those people don’t work hard enough?
Worse, it is more existentially fraught to suffer in a society that tells you your suffering belongs to you because you aren’t good enough, rather than to suffer in one that allows for the arbitrary nature of success and failure. As Sandel notes, ‘deaths of despair’ in America have increased massively in recent decades. “For White men and women aged 45-54, deaths of despair increased threefold from 1990 to 2017. By 2014, for the first time, more people in this group were dying of drugs, alcohol and suicide than from heart disease5.”
How do we get past meritocracy? Sandel’s book is good at diagnosing the disease, but it isn’t great at offering a cure. One of his suggestions is to build an actual lottery system at elite institutions. Everyone who qualifies for admission to Harvard, for example, is put in a hat, and then a select few are drawn. This means that those who get in are forever aware that they are there only partly as a fruit of their labour, and partly down to luck, and should feel all of the responsibility that entails.
In Plato’s Republic Socrates puts forth the parable of metals (which is often referred to as the Nobel Lie). Everyone is born with an amulet of metal in their core which determines their place in society. Gold for rulers, silver for helpers, and brass or iron for artisans. Whatever a person was born with, that would determine their place in society. “This myth...[it] would have a good effect, making [the people] more inclined to care for the state and one another."
We don’t want a society as rigid as one of Plato’s lie, but we also don’t want a society that creates such stark feelings of failure as the one we currently have. Meritocracy, to the extent that it works, does so because it forces us to strive to be better. In forcing competition, it spurs innovation and excellence. If we believe that everything is down to fate, we limit agency.
The philosopher Agnes Callard argues that we need to construct as society in which people own their success but are freed from being victims of their failure. She says it would look like the way we treat our friends–celebrating wholeheartedly when they succeed (you got that promotion? damn bro!) and commiserating when they fail (they fired you? well you know your boss is a monster anyway). No-one treats their friends the in the opposite way (you got that promotion? of course you did because you have contacts in your industry and are utterly undeserving and I think your boss wants to sleep with you. You got fired? should have been sooner, tbh). This is a nice idea, but as she acknowledges this requires a level of empathy that societies don’t have a good track record of showing.
The other alternative is a society that radically changes what it defines as merit. This week I enjoyed this interview with the professor Tithi Bhattacharya, who writes about social reproduction theory. Our societies are good at valuing ‘thing-making’ rather than ‘life-making.’ Imagine a society that did not value profit, but rather valued life. How could we recenter our understanding of merit to look more like that?
rates of literacy, life expectancy and the fall in people living in extreme poverty have all been at their highest levels in recent years, though the pandemic will have obvious impacts going forward
Michael Sandel, Tyranny of Merit p. 167
ibid, p. 13
I do acknowledge this however, which is why I try my best to be intentional in the ways I share the fruits of this education, my social responsibilities and the kind of jobs I want to do in the future
Sandel, p. 200