On merit – Stefan Collini in LRB:
“Once upon a time, the distribution of power and privilege was determined by birth. Now, it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.”
(…)
“This agreement is underwritten by a yet more encompassing principle, typically expressed in statements of the form ‘Everyone has the right to realise their full potential.’ Quite apart from the now common inflation of the quasi-legal language of ‘rights’, there is a curious emptiness to this claim. It seeks to be at once egalitarian, relativist and positive. ‘Everyone’ has this right; no one can say what another’s ‘full potential’ might be; ‘realising’ it, whatever it is, on this universal scale will be a good thing. Yet has anyone ever realised their full potential? Could it be that in realising my potential, I might get in the way of you realising yours? And what if my potential is to become the most successful mass murderer in history?”
(…)
“As usual, there is little mention in all this of the people who don’t ‘succeed’, but the clear implication is that, however grim their fate, they ‘deserve’ it: after all, everyone gets a ‘fair chance’, so it’s nobody’s fault but your own if you don’t take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ presented to you. We are asked to believe in a world in which individual agents are in full possession of undivided selves, unshaped by social determinants, and able to realise outcomes simply by willing them strongly enough. It is assumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems – that some people will make more ‘effort’ and work ‘harder’ than others. Meritocracy proposes to rearrange the world (shouldn’t take long) so that, for those who combine ability and effort, every day is Christmas Day.”
(…)
“But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested that people with ability didn’t just realise their potential: they ran the place. And ability was understood, here, largely as a matter of measurable IQ, regarded as an innate and fixed quality – a notion that was held in greater esteem in the 1950s than it is now. In Young’s dystopian satire (it’s striking how often both its satirical and dystopian aspects are now overlooked), life has become an enlarged version of the eleven-plus. Those who are ‘clever’ go on to take the top jobs; the rest are confined to their subordinate positions on merit.”
(…)
“The term ‘meritocracy’ soon slipped its original moorings and became used more loosely to indicate any set of social arrangements in which outcomes were, notionally, determined by ability (effort is a more recent emphasis), not by the traditional mechanisms of rank, nepotism, inherited wealth and so on. Contrary to the spirit of Young’s minatory sketch, it has become an overwhelmingly positive term, bound up with what it is to be ‘modern’. The implicit narrative of progress that the term now encodes has proved to be astonishingly impervious to counter-evidence. As Jo Littler puts it in Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (2017), the idea functions as ‘a neoliberal justice narrative’. Such narratives ‘recognise the egalitarian deficit as a meritocratic deficit and prescribe competitive neoliberal meritocracy as the solution, which in turn produces more inequality’. In other words, the mass of counter-evidence is interpreted as showing that we need to install more effective mechanisms of competition if we are to achieve a ‘genuine meritocracy’, though this only compounds the problem.”
(…)
“Ladder-speak tends to ignore the fact that ladders are used for descending as much as ascending, and has nothing to say about what happens when someone on the way down meets someone on the way up. And of course there will always be some people who prefer to take the lift. Where, in any case, are all these competitors in the Great Ladder-Climbing Championships trying to get to? The metaphor suggests a once-and-for-all ascent: you climb a ladder to get somewhere; ladder-climbing is not a way of life.”
(…)
“The frequently repeated claim that ‘social mobility has ground to a halt’ in the last couple of decades is an example of historical ignorance compounding confused thinking. In the mid 20th century, especially in the years between 1945 and 1980, there was a transformation in the occupational structure of most of the advanced economies whereby a large number of blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. Several processes were at work here: deindustrialisation, the growth of the service economy, the increase in the public sector, and so on. At the same time, the school-leaving age was progressively raised and the expansion of higher education began. This complex of changes has deposited in popular memory the idea that those who came to maturity in these years were ‘socially mobile’: that they rose to a higher position in society than their (working-class) parents. And it was of course true that these changes, along with rising prosperity and better public services, did improve the lives of large sections of the population, though the class position of the majority remained little altered in relative terms. But the experience of these historically specific conditions has been transmuted into an assumption that ‘social mobility’ (understood exclusively as moving ‘upwards’) is a natural and continuing feature of a properly functioning society.”
(…)
“In a so-called meritocracy, the dominant determinant of outcomes appears, in principle, to be education, the mechanism whereby ability is recognised and validated. But the hard truth is that education overwhelmingly reproduces advantage rather than restructuring it; the most effective way to address inequalities in education, is to address inequalities in society. However, the myth of mobility through education survives partly because in some cases it is not a myth. There have long been individuals from less advantaged social backgrounds for whom education has been the route to advancement (‘the scholarship boy’ was one of the most celebrated, and most obviously gendered, of the tropes used to represent this possibility). This, too, is an important truth, not simply to be disparaged as ‘elite recruitment’. But the fact that such individual stories stand out is an indication that education does not work in this way for the majority.”
(…)
“In Mandler’s usage, meritocracy is, essentially, the view that the education system should select by ability, as tested by some form of open competition, resulting in deliberately differentiated trajectories and destinations. Although this notion was originally contrasted with more traditional arrangements in which birth and inherited advantage had been allowed to determine outcomes, in the period since 1945 the contrast has been, so far as education is concerned, with what Mandler calls ‘democracy’, meaning, roughly, a commitment to high-quality provision for all. These two principles aren’t necessarily in conflict. One could support high-quality provision for all while accepting that some will distinguish themselves by their ability and go on to reap additional rewards from it. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an education system, however egalitarian, that wouldn’t have some meritocratic evaluation built into it, just as it would be hard to imagine any complex society that didn’t attempt to match more intellectually demanding roles with demonstrated abilities. But, broadly speaking, Mandler sees ‘democracy’ as having triumphed in educational provision in the second half of the 20th century: more and more people wanted more and more education of a higher and higher standard – and that was what they got.”
(…)
“Mandler’s focus is exclusively on state education. A striking fact, which he mentions but does not pursue, is that over the past 75 years the proportion of children educated in private fee-paying schools has remained remarkably stable, at around 6 or 7 per cent. There have been some minor short-term fluctuations caused by ups and downs in prosperity, changes in the character of state education, shifts in social attitudes and other such forces, but overall the line on the graph has been unwavering. The existence of these schools has always complicated the claim that we live in a meritocracy, since it has meant that the children of the old social elite and, increasingly, the new financial elite have run the race on a different track from everyone else. But it should also complicate the story about democracy in education, for much the same reason. A significant number of the most influential and vocal parents aren’t greatly exercised about state education because they know their children will never need it. One reason university entry has become such a social flashpoint in recent times is that these parents struggle with the fact that they can’t directly exercise the power of the purse at this crucial stage in their children’s education.”
(…)
“More generally, the simultaneous increase of egalitarian sentiments and actual inequality has been a striking feature of recent decades, but evidently not every form of inequality is perceived as unfair, and some forms, including some that may be highly consequential, are hardly noticed at all.”
(…)
“You are the author of your fate, so you must begin by asking yourself what you want. ‘Social mobility’ is what results when enough individuals clearly identify their goals and then successfully pursue them. In sport it’s a commonplace of pre-match punditry to say that the result will come down to which team ‘wants it most’, and something similar now applies, it seems, to social competition. There should be no limit to your dreams: you can get whatever you want if you try hard enough. You just have to be ‘passionate’ about it. This bizarrely voluntarist language is the ruling trope of the age, but it raises so many questions. How are wants formed? How do we know what we want, and will getting what we want always turn out well? Where does ‘effort’ come from and why do some people try ‘harder’ than others? As Littler observes, this is ‘a psychologising discourse which vest[s] not only power but also moral virtue in the very act of hope, in the mental and emotional capacity to believe and aspire’.”
(…)
“Judging from the media alone, the conclusion would be that we live in an ‘effortocracy’ rather than a meritocracy.”
(…)
“But should we regard the following as facts of nature? In 2017 Walmart paid a median wage of around $18,500; some of its full-time workers had to rely on public assistance and food banks to get through the week. That same year, Walmart’s CEO was paid 1118 times that median wage. It is, shall we mildly say, not easy to understand how such a grotesque differential could ever be justified.”
(…)
“It is a further complication that the common American usage of ‘middle class’ refers to more or less everyone between those in real poverty at the bottom and the super-wealthy at the top. The great majority of those who would be categorised as ‘working class’ in the UK (even if some of them might now favour some other self-description) are termed ‘middle class’ in the US, which tends to obscure patterns of inequality and vulnerability.”
(…)
“It is hardly surprising, given the elite’s heavy investment in the hurdle race, that, once its members are in a position to do so, they sweat their assets – i.e. work very hard to extract as high a return as possible from the cultural and intellectual capital they have accumulated. Goldman Sachs has renamed its personnel department Human Capital Management. That says it all. Corporate capitalism does not employ ‘people’ – those messy, contradictory, needy, whole human beings for whom work is just one among many activities. It manages ‘human capital’: invests it, moves it to where it is most profitable, disposes of it at the most advantageous moment. Lives are things that people have; capital has rates of return.”
(…)
“The Meritocracy Trap is full of riveting and sobering detail, but there does seem to be an unacknowledged tension between two strands of its argument. On the one hand, Markovits repeatedly claims that meritocracy works and that’s the problem. The winners are selected for ability and effort, but this locks them (and their children) into a remorseless cycle of overachieving, while damaging the prospects and self-esteem of everyone else. But, on the other hand, what the bulk of the book’s evidence shows is that, in fact, those who succeed do so because of parental advantage.”
(…)
“Even when the illusions of meritocracy have been stripped away, some hard questions remain, not least for people on the left. One of them concerns the unit we call ‘the family’. Even the most committed progressives, who will vote or campaign or organise or write against any number of expressions of injustice, may be unable or unwilling to address the fundamental unfairness of the advantages they pass on to their children. Yet political activism is not like carbon-offsetting: you can’t make up for the injustice you are implicated in at home by supporting causes elsewhere. There is no easy resolution of these tensions. Accepting that it is natural to do everything you can to give your own children a competitive edge, even while denouncing other forms of inequality, is part of what legitimates meritocracy and allows it to transmit dynastic advantage.”
(…)
“One might have thought that our current form of casino capitalism would provide propitious conditions for the growth of socialism, but, other difficulties aside, this may be to underestimate the lure of the casino. The outcomes for individuals in a casino are largely a matter of luck (though, of course, the overall outcome is rigged in favour of the house), but many people may intuitively prefer to see luck, rather than, say, ability, govern the outcomes in life. If everything depends on ability, most of us will know by a certain age that we cannot significantly improve our situation and may come to resent the more talented (Young’s insight, essentially). However, if everything depends on luck, then we can all feel we’re in with a chance – even if, as the evidence insists, it doesn’t and we’re not.”
Read the essay here.
This is an important essay.
As we all should have known for a while that meritocracy is largely a myth and upward social mobility is more complicated than most us want to believe.
But we cannot do completely without the notion of ability. I believe that would be a fatal mistake.
Although Collini rightly argues that effort appears to be valued higher than intellectual ability in our current system.
The educational system is not the big equalizer, it reproduces advantage.
And the casino is there, the slightly hidden and true notion that we all live in a casino, the casino is our great pacifier.
In other words, our “modern world” resembles the antic Greek world more than we might want to acknowledge, there is more fate and less freedom than we are being told.
The whole idea that the future is open, not determined, part of our “modern idea” of freedom is still there, but it doesn’t depend on ourselves, because we are all in the casino. It depends on luck.
And although the old aristocracy has been swept away, birth is the still the place where the luck or the lack of it starts.