The unstable feedback of meritocratic societies

I was thinking vaguely about what talent really means in the talent-luck simulations and whether it's even possible to reward people based exclusively on their ability. I suppose that's almost possible in athletic competitions or in manual labour : you can directly and objectively measure their output. And that's certainly a bajillion times better than rewarding people based on class or race or whatever, no doubt about that. But is it truly fair ? Perhaps not. You'd still be rewarding them partly based on the results of a genetic lottery, i.e. luck. Their effort would be a very important component but you can't eliminate luck completely. You also can't really measure how difficult something is in relative terms : tasks which are easy for some require monumental efforts for others, even if they receive equal training.

Still, for jobs where sheer output is what counts - how much coal you've shovelled, how many PC's you've fixed, how many teeth you've repaired - at least something can be measured that ties roughly to ability. For others, measuring ability is much harder. Can you really judge skill by the popularity of a novel, or the number of citations a paper receives ? I doubt it. There's also a risk of rewarding people because they've been rewarded (I can vouch for that from personal experience but more on that in a future post).

My feeling is not that a meritocracy is a fair system but that it's the fairest system we've got. Plato's Republic is a testament to the perils of taking that to extremes, e.g. raising children with the state-determined "best" guardians rather than their natural parents. Even giving everyone the same opportunities to limit the potential for unfair advantages can be problematic (same example).

Even if a Universal Basic Income turns out to be economically or otherwise problematic, I'm ideologically inclined towards its social perspective. We should use rewards as incentives and punishments as deterrents, but not to the point of absurdity. Everyone should be able to live with a basic level of dignity without having to struggle for it. They should be rewarded for doing jobs that demand particularly high (or unusual) abilities, but not to a degree that it would require the worst off to live in squalor. Punishment should be metered out largely as a means of reform (I reserve judgement on whether it should ever be used for other purposes), and should never be so harsh that it actually prevents people from reforming (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46104333). Punishment does have a very important role, but in general, I favour encouraging success more than punishing failure for the sake of it. We also need to consider the consequences of rewards very carefully, as the article says.

Anyway, from the article :

We have rejected the old class society. In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As Young knew, that is not the real story. Working-class consciousness – legible in the very name of the Labour party, founded in 1900 – spoke of class mobilisation, of workers securing their interests. The emerging era of education, by contrast, spoke of class mobility – blue collars giving way to white. Would mobility undermine class consciousness? These questions preyed on Young.

What drove him was his sense that class hierarchies would resist the reforms he helped implement. He explained how it would happen in a 1958 satire, his second best-seller, entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited. The new ruling class was determined, the author wrote, by the formula “IQ + effort = merit”. Democracy would give way to rule by the cleverest – “not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.” This is the first published appearance of the word “meritocracy”, and the book aimed to show what a society governed on this principle would look like.

Young’s vision was decidedly dystopian. As wealth increasingly reflects the innate distribution of natural talent, and the wealthy increasingly marry one another, society sorts into two main classes, in which everyone accepts that they have more or less what they deserve. He imagined a country in which “the eminent know that success is a just reward for their own capacity, their own efforts”, and in which the lower orders know that they have failed every chance they were given. “They are tested again and again … If they have been labelled ‘dunce’ repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend; their image of themselves is more nearly a true, unflattering reflection.”

But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, “nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring”. And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. If the financial status of your parents helped determine your economic rewards, you would no longer be living by the formula that “IQ + effort = merit”.

Researchers tell us that higher education is now a great stratifier. Economists have found that many elite US universities – including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale – take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. To achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power and privilege, in short, it helps enormously to start there. “American meritocracy,” the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argues, has “become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.”

That would seem to be a good argument against prohibitively expensive tuition fees.

Young believed, the problem was not just with how the prizes of social life were distributed; it was with the prizes themselves. A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations. This is why the authors of his fictional Chelsea Manifesto – which, in The Rise of the Meritocracy, is supposed to serve as the last sign of resistance to the new order – ask for a society that “both possessed and acted upon plural values”, including kindliness, courage and sensitivity, so all had a chance to “develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life”. Even if you were somehow upholding “IQ + effort = merit”, then your equation was sponsoring a larger inequality.

“It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit,” Young wrote. “It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.” The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and to turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur. We cannot fully control the distribution of economic, social and human capital, or eradicate the intricate patterns that emerge from these overlaid grids. But class identities do not have to internalise those injuries of class. It remains an urgent collective endeavour to revise the ways we think about human worth in the service of moral equality.

Via Simon B https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SimonB?cfem=1 (G+ won't tag the right Simon).
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-meritocracy-who-really-gets-what-they-deserve