The question of Merit

Who should receive the top rank in your class? The best performing student. Right.

What is the best way to fill a job opening? With the candidate who has the perfect qualifications and experience. Right.

What is the right way to organise our society, our businesses, our government? On the basis of merit. Right?
Not really, as the person who coined the word ‘meritocracy’ would have us believe. Not least because he, Michael Young, created the word in a satirical novel about a merit-rewarding dystopia.

According to him:

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.

I encountered Mr. Young in Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. At this point, one may attempt to guess that Sandel’s book is about the failure of meritocracy to live up to the ideal. That it is prone to be captured by the well-to-do who scheme to perpetuate their privilege.

But what Sandel does is to take the fight well beyond the surface, right down to the fundamental questions. Such as the very definition of merit. Why should it be linked to academic credentials? Why is talent more prized than moral worth? Why is a college education even necessary for gaining practical wisdom or an instinct for the common good? Are we losing our shared humanity in our rush to reward merit?

He has dealt with these questions in great detail, with plenty of philosophical and historical backdrop. 

The premise is this: Developed countries like the US that embraced globalization have promoted ‘equality of opportunity’ as a remedy for rising inequality in society. But this has not succeeded in curbing the resentment of the working class. He believes that the meritocracy project, at its very essence, is a flawed one. While I found some views rather extreme, I did derive some useful lessons from the American experience, and insights for devising welfare systems.

Here are my top 3 takeaways (includes quotes from the book)

1. The ‘winners’ in a meritocratic society cannot claim full credit for their success.

“That I live in a society that prizes the talents I happen to have is also not something for which I can claim credit. This too is a matter of good fortune.”

 

2. The ‘losers’ in a meritocratic society need more than distributive justice

This is particularly relevant in the US, where he believes the working class displaced by globalization has been short-charged by the technocratic elite.

“Proposals to compensate for inequality focus on increasing the purchasing power of working- class families, or to shore up the safety net. But what these families really want is to reclaim their status as producers.”

Welfare schemes do them a disservice by not helping them keep their status as worthwhile contributors to society (Contributive justice)

 

3. We need general diffusion of intelligence and learning across all classes and vocations

The system of merit as it stands now rewards one’s learning in a tertiary (college) education setup. What we need, instead, is to cultivate the ability to reason and deliberate about fundamental moral and civic questions across all kinds of educational settings.

 

“Civic education can flourish in community colleges, job training sites, and union halls as well as on ivy-strewn campuses. There is no reason to suppose that aspiring nurses and plumbers are less suited to the art of democratic argument than aspiring management consultants.”

I don’t agree entirely with his radical rethinking of the concept of merit. For instance, he believes that college admissions should be based on a lottery system, with merit being only a gating criterion.

My scepticism about such ideas notwithstanding, I came away with much fodder for thought. And I’ll certainly be wary of taking anyone’s standing in a meritocracy for granted.