The trouble with merit

Few ideals command such broad agreement as meritocracy. The principle that jobs, university places and rewards should go to those who earn them, rather than to those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, appeals to the left and the right alike. It is worth remembering, then, that the word itself was coined as a warning. In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy, a satire set in a future where intelligence plus effort determined everyone's place in society, and where the result was not justice but a new and unusually arrogant elite.

Young's fear seems less fanciful today than it did then. In many societies, places at the most prestigious universities have become fiercely contested, and success in that contest is increasingly treated as proof of personal worth. To be sure, a system that rewards talent and hard work is a vast improvement on one that rewards inherited privilege. All the same, the more firmly a society believes that its winners deserve their position, the harder it becomes to feel sympathy for those who fall behind. If success is earned, failure, by implication, must be deserved as well.

There is also a practical problem. Merit, as it is usually measured, is anything but neutral. Children of wealthy, educated parents arrive at school with larger vocabularies and quieter homes to study in and, later, enjoy access to private tutors and costly extracurricular activities. By the time they sit entrance exams, the race has, in effect, been running for years. Small wonder, then, that study after study finds test scores tracking family income with uncomfortable consistency. Far from dissolving privilege, a narrowly measured meritocracy can end up laundering it, converting inherited advantage into what looks like earned achievement.

Defenders of meritocracy have a reasonable reply. The flaw, they argue, lies not in the principle but in its execution: if everyone started on a level playing field, the outcomes would be fair. This is a serious argument, and it has inspired worthwhile reforms, from scholarships for low-income students to the scrapping of admission tests that reward expensive coaching. Even on its own terms, however, the argument runs into difficulty. It is far from clear that perfect equality of opportunity is achievable, or even coherent, since talents themselves are partly a matter of luck, whether genetic or circumstantial, and no amount of reform can redistribute them.

This is why some philosophers, most prominently Michael Sandel, have argued that the deepest problem with meritocracy is not inequality as such but the attitudes it breeds. Winners are encouraged to believe that they owe their success entirely to their own efforts, thereby overlooking the role of luck, timing and the contributions of others. Conversely, those who fail to climb the ladder are invited to blame themselves, which may help to explain the resentment that has fuelled so much political anger in recent years.

None of this amounts to an argument for abandoning merit altogether. A surgeon should be chosen for her skill, not her surname, and few of us would wish it otherwise. The point, rather, is that merit is a sound basis for allocating particular roles, not a reliable measure of human worth. So long as we confuse the two, we turn a sensible rule for hiring into a moral hierarchy, with all the arrogance and humiliation that this implies.

A healthier meritocracy, if such a thing is possible, would therefore pair its rewards with a measure of humility. It would acknowledge that those at the top owe a debt to circumstances they did not choose, and it would extend genuine dignity to work that does not require a degree. That may sound like a modest ambition. Given how far we have drifted from it, however, it would represent nothing less than a quiet revolution.