The End of Meritocracy

It comes to us from The Economist, in particular from senior editor and writer Adrian Wooldridge. His new book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, is undoubtedly a serious book. Reviewing it in the City Journal, Kay Hymowitz treats it thusly.

I have not read the book, but I have read the Hymowitz review. It has given me and perhaps even you a few ideas. Given the current rage against meritocracy, it is worthwhile to examine some of the lame arguments that have been marshaled against it. Primary among them is that meritocratic admissions standards to major universities do not produce a sufficiently multicolored undergraduate cohort. 

Precisely why it should, we have no idea. Judging reality against some will-o-the-wisp ideal that you conjured in your basement seems like a bad way to develop policy. An idealist, by definition, never finds fault with his ideas. He always finds fault with reality.

Besides, college admissions, the kinds that give preferences to children whose parents have donated the science lab or the athletic complex, are not really meritocratic. Once you decide to privilege the children of the very rich and to downgrade the superb academic achievements of Asian children you are not running a meritocracy.

A strict meritocracy, evidenced in Asia and in New York high schools like Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, offers entry solely on the basis of standardized tests. The results, as you know, have been heavily Asian, with a smattering of whites. The test-based admissions system has for now not included very large numbers of minority children. Rather than work to increase the achievement level of minority children, today’s social justice warriors want to tear down the system.

One suspects that those who want to do so did not earn their way on the basis of their own merit. They were promoted regardless of merit, in order to fulfill diversity quotas. Such quotas are the opposite of merit. They offer admissions, job opportunities and advancement on the basis of skin color and ethnicity. If anything, they seem to be a throwback to the times when aristocratic privilege and blood line determined social status and advancement. As the French say, the more things change, the more the stay the same.

Surely, as Heather Mac Donald has been at pains to point out, children who do better on standardized admissions tests tend to do better in school and better on the job than do children who are admitted on the basis of aristocratic or ethnic privilege.

Of course, the argument against meritocracy implies that academic skill has nothing to do with inherited talents or inherited intelligence. Fair enough, in some situations we find the children of handymen to have more natural talent than the children of computer scientists, but we should not imagine that talent is distributed equally among everyone, as though every human were born a blank slate.

And of course, different children in different neighborhoods have learned different work ethics. They are brought up in different cultural environments. Some cultures enhance and value academic achievement. Among the advantages that charter schools provide their students and parents is a new cultural environment, one where academic excellence is valued ahead of well-roundedness. Some do not. Malcolm Gladwell reported on this in his book Outliers.

One notes with some chagrin that these analyses, however intelligent and well-meant, often turn into a theoretical muddle. For example, beyond the question of who gets hired and for what reason, lies the ultimate arbiter-- the marketplace.

In principle the market does not know your race, gender or ethnicity. It does not even now how you like to have sex. Whatever reasons got you the job, for better or for worse, you still have to do the job. Promoting someone on the basis of bloodline or race will only work if the person can do the job. Apparently, promotion by aristocratic pedigree failed because the aristocracy started producing too many deadbeats and failed to hold them to account, failed to allow them to be judged by the market. Besides people who inherited their positions are less likely to command the same respect as someone who worked his way up the ladder. Thus, they will have more difficulty exercising executive authority.

Still, someone who has learned leadership skills from a parent who is a leader will be more adept at leading than will someone who did not. Culture matters, and it should be an integral part of education. Obviously, the current rage in favor of social justice will teach precisely the wrong leadership lessons and will produce a generational cohort that is both mentally inept and social incompetent. It will look and feel like an aristocracy, where promotion is based on blood line, not merit. That means, it will not feel earned and will not be respected.

Moreover, when you are thinking in terms of executive talent, for example, it takes more than surpassing intelligence. Such leadership requires a high level of social skills. Leadership is not innate, but it is not completely detached from innate talent. Obviously, it can be taught, as our service academies do, and as our ivy league schools most likely do not.

And then there is another nagging question. If we examine the mess that our meritocratic elites have made, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, surely this will shake our faith in merit. And yet, there is merit and there is merit. The fault with the best and the brightest who were running the war in Vietnam was simply that they knew very little to nothing about running wars. They were Ivy League deans, people who had advanced on the basis of a certain kind of abstract intelligence that has far less value on the battlefield. People who made careers in the academy, at a time when the academy was all-in for meritocracy, were more like members of an aristocratic elite, people who did not want to get their hands dirty, but who preferred to opine to the winds about whatever. They were true philosopher kings but they were congenitally unsuited to the world of competition, be it the battlefield or the marketplace.

One does better not to confuse the best and the brightest who tried to impose their capacious intelligence on the real world, and who saw their arrogance come a cropper when faced with real world challenges, with the semi-Asperger’s cohort that runs Silicon Valley. Or better, that does not run it as much as provide the brainpower that is necessary to make our techno gadgets effective and efficient. 

Say what you will about them, but they are not the same group as the best and the brightest who gave us our failing military efforts. It is useful to differentiate different kinds of intelligence.

According to Hymowitz, Wooldridge  declares that the advent of a merit based system in the modern West had something to do with the Protestant Reformation and the development of a new work ethic. Whereas traditional systems of merit, those that began with the standardized exams in China a millennium ago, aimed to enhance the quality of mind in the courtier class, the mandarins who ran the country, today’s meritocracy is designed to produce people who can compete in the free enterprise system

Importantly, Wooldridge suggests that a free enterprise economy required far more active and intelligent people than did the government bureaucracy.

Of course, the key to the meritocrat system is fair competition. If you refuse to compete or if you refuse to accept the results of fair competition you have exited the world of meritocracy and have returned to a world of privilege, determined by bloodline.

Hymowitz explained:

Understood in the context of this tenacious history, meritocracy was a genuinely radical idea. It took bloody revolutions, religious wars, and centuries of dispute to undo the old system of lineage and shift toward modern thinking about merit. The Protestant Reformation played a role in this process by releasing individual conscience from the all-powerful word of priests and kings. Calvinism moved individual hard work to the center of moral and religious life. Enlightenment philosophers harped on the corruption and mediocrity of titled aristocrats of their day. The philosophes began the nature–nurture debate that continues today: were the talented just born that way—“natural aristocrats”—or were their gifts the result of training and education? In either case, the individual was to be judged and rewarded according to his merit, not family ties.

In truth, if we want to have a more perfect meritocracy we should give more weight to test scores and less weight to blood line. We are obviously not doing so. Instead, we have instituted a new counter-meritocracy and have filled our academic institutions, as well as our media and business world with people who lack the requisite skills, whether mental or social, but who possess the correct blood line.