What is meritocracy?
Andrew Gelman points to our confusions regarding merit in our social perceptions of winners and losers. I might make a list of naughty and nice sayings for another post.
Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint.
But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales:
America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy.
That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary:
1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement
2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteriaNothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous” seems to me to an attempt (unconscious, I expect) to retroactively assign moral standing to the winners in an economic race.
Later, Zingales writes:The fundamental role of an economic system, even an extremely primitive one, is to assign responsibility and reward.
Huh? Again he seems to be conflating economics with morality, in a similar way as when economists Mankiw and Weinzierl implied that the state only has a right to tax things that are “unjustly wrestled from someone else.” Zingales in the above quote is taking the economic functions of prices, wages, supply, and demand and transmuting them into to the morally-loaded terms “responsibility” and “reward.”
Finally, in his praise of meritocracy, Zingales doesn’t seem to be aware of the concept’s self-contradicting nature. As James “Effect” Flynn has pointed out,
The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
To put it another way, Zingales talks a lot about the threat to meritocracy from business capturing government regulation or from pitchfork-wielding hordes raising the marginal tax rate, but he doesn’t consider some much more direct effects of meritocracy such as this.
More can be read at Andrew’s place. (link is at beginning)
Well, it sure comforts me to know that I am poorer than some people because they are more virtuous than I am.
“Meritocracy” is just more garbage-thought to help the “successful” deal with their guilt, and to keep the “might be successful” working hard and being good. That is why it is ever so important to get A’s on your spelling tests and to wear the right deodorant when you go to a job interview. That’s so the highly meritorious interviewer can tell in advance that you will be a meritorious worker.
BTW the purpose of an “economic system” is to feed people. If “assigning responsibility and reward” is a way that works, fine. But it is hardly the only way. And judging just from what I can see, “playing the game, even cheating at it, are far more likely to bring you “success” than any actual productivity.
I had to blink at the word virtuous. I always thought hardworkandvirtuous was one word! But not for cynical spin either.
I tend to think it is natural and human to figure these things out after the process was done.
well, if i was a more meritorious writer i would have been clearer that the “successful” do not feel guilt even when they should, but it helps them escape “assigned guilt” if they can claim that success is a function of virtue.
there is plenty of “honest success” in our society, but the garbage brain analysis by Zingales demonstrates that not all success is due to merit.
might be worth noting that the “definition” of meritocracy offered in the post depends on someone doing the “selecting” and “choosing.” Who are these someones and how did they get the right to choose and select?
It turns out that people work just fine “for the family.” It’s when the idea of “reward” is introduced that you get slackers and gamesters and cheaters. and ultimately a great nation run to hell by harvard graduates.
Well, America used to be the Land of Opportunity, but social mobility is greater in Europe now.
Zingales: “According to one recent study, just 40 percent of Americans attribute higher incomes primarily to luck rather than hard work—compared with 54 percent of Germans, 66 percent of Danes, and 75 percent of Brazilians. But perception cannot survive for long when it is distant from reality, and recent trends seem to indicate that America is drifting away from its meritocratic ideals. “
It seems to me America has drifted away from valid self-assessment that Germans, Danes, and Brazilians are better at. Another example of market failure is people’s inability to perceive where their rewards are actually coming from.
Min
not sure i understand this “social mobility.
if people were happy where they are, why would they want to mobile?
and is mobility zero sum? to have people go up you need people to go down?
and what if “merit” is genetic, as we surely know some of it is?
i suspect… don’t claim to know… that America is still a more mobile society than most. you may not like what people have to do anymore to succeed in business without really trying, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
friend of mine teaches school in … poorish community. these kids are not going anywhere. and it’s not because she isn’t trying.
Certainly is strange that the discussions, where ever it takes place, regarding the antecedents of success are rarely buttressed by a reference to fact based data. That would not include studies of popular opinion on the subject. That might include studies of financial success, the accumulation and/or maintenance of wealth, and its relationship to schooling, employment history, prior family wealth, inherited wealth, etc. In effect, what were the concrete experiences of an individual’s life that may have generated that wealth. All too many wealthy people are thought to have scored on a home run while ignoring that they had been walked over to third base and scored on some else’s bunt single.
coberly: “if people were happy where they are, why would they want to mobile?”
Los Esclavos Felices! 😉
With perfect socio-economic mobility, which is what I meant to say, your socio-economic class at the end of life would be uncorrelated with your socio-economic class at birth. Not gonna happen any time soon. 😉 In a caste society, your caste at death is almost always the same as your caste at birth.
At its birth, the U. S. rejected European aristocracy and class. But now we are more of a caste society than the Europeans.
A MERITOCRACY IS A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT THAT IS BASED ON MERIT WHICH CONSISTS OF THREE BASIC QUALITIES AND THEY ARE:
HONESTY
CIVILITY
COMPETENCE
HONEST PEOPLE ARE NOT CORRUPT OR CURRUPTIBLE.
CIVIL PEOPLE ARE POLITE
COMPETENT PEOPLE HAVE THE NECESSARY QUALIFICATIONS TO ENABLE THEM TO FULFIL THEIR DUTIES IN THE JOB OF THEIR CHOICE. THEIR COMPETENCE IS JOB SPECIFIC WHICH MEANS THAT THEIR COMPETENCE IS LIMITED TO ONE OR TWO TYPES OF WORK OR PROFESSION. FOR INSTANCE A CABINET MAKER OR MOTOR MECHANIC MAY NOT BE A COMPETENT ACCOUNT OR LAWYER BECEAUSE HE OR SHE DOES NOT HAVE THE REQUISITE EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE. COMPETENCE IS JOB SPECIFIC.
MERIT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WEALTH OR FAMILY STATUS. IN REAL LIFE THERE ARE MONARCHS AND RICH PEOPLE WHO MAY OR MAY NOT PASS THE TEST OF MERIT.
Oh, MIn,
the logic is somewhat dubious. If i am happy not being a slave, why should i enslave myself to “success”?
I have serious doubt that you have been held back by a caste system. There are barriers to mid-level success in this country, and they may be somewhat caste-related: we only hire people who talk like us, and if we are sleazy bastards that’s who we hire.
There may also be some race based barriers, but they are by no means impossible to get around. Look at Herman (?) Cain and Clarence Thomas.
Not being a statistician, I am unsure what kind of correlation between beginning of life class and end of life class you would expect from genetic considerations alone, or taste, or just the fact that most of us are “average”, or the fact that it’s a hell of a lot easier to follow in daddy’s footsteps than it is to blaze a trail of your own.
But that’s the point… you want to blaze a trail? you got the chops? go for it.
And please, please understand that I am no fan of the status quo at all, with equal contempt for all.
Ah Sidney
you make me want to stand aside and let Min have at you.
Honesty Competence and Non-corruptible will not get you very far in American business or politics. Civility helps… one reason I have carefully shucked myself of it.
And personally I think more of cabinet makers and motor mechanics than I do of accountants and lawyers. We just live in a corrupt society that rewards the “skills” of lawyers more than those of a good mechanic. Nothing to do with merit on a universal scale at all.
“America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy.”
Even some one as ignorant as I knows that America was known as a land of opportunity because there were a world of almost free for the taking resouces. Does one have to have a PHD to be more ignorant than I?
dilbert
i have been thinking about experts (with ph.d’s) as people with ground-in ignorance.
but i think you may somewhat misremember the “land of opportunity.”
you ARE right that resources free for the taking, after killing the indians, was THE opportunity.
But the idea was that in America there was no established aristocracy to prevent you from taking advantage of the resources.
To this extent America has been a land of “social mobility”, and I am not sure the statistics cited (so far) really put the lie to that claim.
There would be natural limits to mobility even if there were no artificial restrictions. I think we are coming up against the natural limits. The artificial limits will be established shortly.