Merit, demand and humility
I'm returning to a topic I discussed four years ago (10/23/21). I'll start with an example. In a, let's say, imaginary country, a school teacher's career consists of two stages. The first is university education, which is generally undemanding but sufficient for entry into the education system without an additional selection process. The second, once the teacher has entered the system, is a career progression that, in practice, is simply based on seniority. It shouldn't surprise us that under these conditions, this country's system doesn't attract enough good teaching vocations. They aren't encouraged. The social cost is high.
The traditional recommendation to rectify the situation is to design a career informed by more rigorous meritocratic requirements. At the beginning, the person's entire educational package would count (grades, double degrees, doctorates, perhaps entrance exams, etc.), and for progression reasons, it would be beneficial for the best to progress quickly.
For me, this recommendation is the right one, in these and many other cases. I believe that the continued existence of a demanding meritocratic career path is a desirable characteristic of a country's economic and social organization, beneficial for the former's productivity and the latter's equity. However, stating this makes me outdated, since the consideration of merit has been questioned from important intellectual heights—I think of Michael Sandel. It has even been offered as an explanation for Trump's victory.
I comment on three questioned aspects:
1. Meritocracy promotes economic inequality.Income distribution is determined by the market and corrected by taxation. The passion of millions of fans leads—via the market—to the best soccer player earning a lot of money. In this sense, the market values merit, and this is a good thing. Unfortunately, the fiscal correction of excessive inequality has a limitation: that which arises from the multiplicity of political jurisdictions in the world and the tax competition it can induce. I note that this would also be a key difficulty for any professional career structure—market-derived or not, merit-respecting or not—implemented in a country, seeking to correct the highest incomes far beyond the norms prevailing in its economic competitors. Talent and money cross borders.
2. Meritocracy is manipulable. It is manipulated when a Harvard or Stanford student is a student because he or she is the son of a wealthy alumnus, and it is distorted when promotion based on seniority is disguised as promotion based on merit through lax credentialing procedures. That this occurs does not undermine the principle of meritocracy. But it weakens it in practice and should prompt us to intensify political and social vigilance over the integrity of nominally meritocratic processes. The first interested parties in doing so should be those for whom manipulation or distortion devalues a truly possessed merit.
3. Meritocracy fosters arrogance. Sandel has insisted on this point. It is the tendency to consider professional success as an exclusive consequence of one's own effort and, with greater or lesser intensity, to consider that those who haven't gotten so far do so because they haven't tried hard enough and, as a consequence, are owed nothing. A socially dissolving contempt that can only foster resentment. It is profoundly flawed because merit is not an absolute concept but a relative one; it depends on social circumstances, and therefore good fortune counts for a lot. The footballer whose merit has led him to great professional success has benefited from two types of random events. What defines who he is—including his ability to play well—is genetics, family, or the environment in which he was raised. And what makes football highly valued socially, something that does not depend on the efforts of any individual footballer. The role of luck is the funding justification for redistributive policies. But there's no doubt that society will function better and be happier if, in addition, the prevailing culture is not one of elitist arrogance, but one of humility and modesty. One that internalizes the virtue of solidarity, practiced in public or private ways.
In short: I think the appreciation of merit is essential, but it's better if it's demanding, complemented by redistributive taxation, and accompanied by a culture of solidarity.