The Meritocracy Trap—A Review
25th February 2020
Meritocracy is in trouble. Recent years have seen a flood of articles deploring inequality and blaming meritocracy for it. In the vanguard is Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits who attacked meritocracy in its home, in an address to Yale University graduates in 2015. His new book, The Meritocracy Trap,1 has just been published.
My objection to the notion of ‘meritocracy’ is that there is no universally valid understanding of what constitutes ‘merit’. One man’s merit may be another xer’s ‘privilege’.
On a conceptual level, one might say ‘Okay, merit has a lot of disadvantages, but how would we be better off distributing rewards on some other basis? We just spend two hundred years fighting free of such systems.’
The basic objection appears to be that meritocracy leads to inequality, and Inequality Is Just Bad. Justifying the animus against inequality is the Step Not Taken. I’m still waiting.
February 25th, 2020 at 08:32
Tim, I’m sure you’ve read it before, although it may have been a while: Harrison Bergeron
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
http://vaviper.blogspot.com/2014/12/harrison-bergeron.html
February 25th, 2020 at 11:17
A classic. Ought to be required reading in the schools.
February 25th, 2020 at 23:51
Merit is whatever the person paying for it says it is.