The unfairness of fairness

I would define meritocracy to be concerned with how rewards are bestowed. A meritocratic system rewards labour in accordance with how difficult it was to perform, and grants employment opportunities based on an assessment of who's most likely to be successful in a given role. The great virtue of this is that it ignores all social classes. Race, class, wealth, age, gender - none of these matter, only how well you perform the task required.

This is incomparably fairer than a class system which rewards unrelated and often imaginary factors. But it is not, in itself, a complete definition of fairness. There are several ways a meritocracy can be implemented unfairly, or so as to have unfair consequences (some of these may be related or just variants of each other) :

1. When it is concerned solely with how to respond to ability which has already been achieved, not with how to achieve ability in the first place. That is, when it rewards only actual, expressed ability, and makes no attempt to bring forth latent ability.
2. Likewise, when rewards and success are taken to equate directly with merit, thus bestowing more rewards for having rewards, not for accomplishment. E.g. when paying people differently for doing the same job on the grounds that one is more experienced, even if they don't actually do a better job; or people who are famous for being famous, or respected for being authority figures - an escalating series of rewards decoupled from continuous achievement.
3. When differences in rewards are set poorly, either in one or across multiple sectors. That is, someone climbing one career ladder may have to work extraordinarily hard to reach the next rung, which may itself be far below other rungs in other careers that are far easier to reach.
4. When it neglects any and all other factors. The extreme form of this is Plato's Republic, in which children would become the property of the state because parental ability mattered more than parental rights.
5. When wealth is deemed to be the whole measure of success, especially when a meritocratic system is perceived to exist but not actually employed. This leads to a belief that those at the top only got there through sheer innate genius, and that those at the bottom do not deserve further advancement.
6. When there is no safety net. Some people are literally unable to work through no fault of their own, but as per point 5, lack of ability doesn't mean they are worthless. Without a safety net of some kind, this punishes people for things over which they have no choice or control.
7. Conversely, rewarding people for things they are naturally very good at with little or no effort on their part is similarly unfair (though it would seem to be difficult to account for how much effort each individual applies).

The author of this article points out several of these, but confounds the meritocratic ideal with its all too flawed real-world implementation. No alternative reward system is proposed, because there isn't one - rewarding the combination of quality and quantity of work done is the only sensible system we've come up with. So when he rightly points out...

On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

... I think here he has a very legitimate point (see 1 and 2 above). While my instinct is to say that meritocracy is about employment (productive labour), not education (training), there are certainly grey areas - especially when an education a) costs money to the student and b) has limited resources. How do you decide who to admit in such a case, knowing that the experience will bestow greater abilities and opportunities on those enrolled ? Taking those who are already best qualified to succeed would seem sensible and fair, but that risks denying the less able any further chance to advance. And one cannot ignore the simple fact that experiences unavoidably cost money. The risk is of creating an elite who are genuinely more able and talented than the rest, but only because of their greater financial resources, not because of their innate characteristics. Such a situation would be a perverse meritocracy indeed.

I will not attempt to answer that hugely difficult question - the dynamics of social mobility are horrendously complicated. However, I will say that when the author goes on at length about the effects of the working conditions of the elite, I think he's (to large extent) confusing meritocracy with good old-fashioned greed.

Parents... sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills needed to be admitted to an elite college. Where aristocratic children once revealed in their privilege, meritocratic children now calculate their future—they plan and they scheme, through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry.

The contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

Elite managers were once “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”... The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success.

Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

Look, if you don't want to work any harder, don't climb the ladder. Don't play the game. Plenty of people get buy without reaching the top; we can't all be chiefs or there'd be no Indians. If you have enough to satisfy you, why crave more ? Why not enjoy what you have, rather than joining the rat race and sacrificing meaning and happiness for mere wealth ? "Meritocracy" has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with exactly how hard one has to work to earn top dollar - it only says, implicitly, that those earning the most should work the hardest. It says nothing at all about the absolute standard of this, or even the scaling between different jobs.

Of course, there may well be other, much more important factors at work than simple personal greed. A far worse trap is that any kind of financial reward that gives more than mere survival may require outlandish levels of performance, thus compelling even those who would willingly opt to remain lower down the financial ladder to climb its greasy rungs out of sheer necessity. Again, that particular meritocracy is unfair, but completely unrelated to the basis of meritocracy itself.

Another factor is cultural : believing that those who earn more are somehow better. This is closer to being a problem with the meritocratic ideal - closer, but still no cigar. Intrinsically, those who earn the most must be the best at what they do in a meritocratic system. But does that automatically make them happier people ? Of course not - and it certainly doesn't mean that they're superior in anything other than one narrow field. So this drive to achieve more and more of what one doesn't need may be a problem of a meritocratic system, but only partially so - I think it's better described as a cultural misunderstanding.

Meritocracy does reward achievement above all else, but only in a narrow and specific sense. It takes a much broader cultural aspect to transform, "pay those who work the hardest the most money of all" into, "only those who work hard are valuable people and everyone else deserves to suffer". So while I agree that there indeed enormous problems with making wealth into an endless terrible competition, I don't agree that this is the fault of adopting a meritocracy. On the contrary, I tend towards a belief that there are plenty of areas in which society would be much better if it were more meritocratic - giving more opportunities to children from poorer background (accounting for latent ability), punishing the most powerful rather than allowing the "famous for being famous" syndrome to run rampant. 

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone-even the rich-miserable. Maybe there's a way out. Updated at 4:38 p.m. ET on September 4, 2019. In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale.