Meritocracy is Bad

Something I’ve often found is that arguments that start off promising to offer a critique of meritocracy end up, in fact, simply arguing that today’s existing society fails to live up to meritocratic ideas. So, I was excited when I recently read a Helen Andrews article arguing “our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it.”

That, I thought, is exactly what critics of meritocracy get wrong!

But then midway through the essay, I come to this part, where she does exactly the thing that I thought she was criticizing:

Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb.

So I want to actually make the argument that I merely thought Andrews was making.

The current system of social hierarchy in the United States is of course not a perfect meritocracy (nothing is ever perfect), but it’s genuinely pretty successful on its own meritocratic terms. The problem is that those terms are bad. American society will not get better if we try to make it more genuinely meritocratic along any dimension of possible understanding of what the term means. What we need to do is relax our level of ideological investment in the idea of meritocracy and be more chill.

Our smart elites

I think the idea that America’s existing elites are somehow “pretty dumb” is itself one of the dumbest lies that people tell themselves. I recently did a virtual event with some Yale students, and the questions were all really good and perceptive. Every time I’ve done an event with Yale students over the past 18 years of my career, the questions have all been really good. Harvard events also get great questions. I’ve also been to Penn twice — great questions. When I’ve been to flagship public university campuses in Ann Arbor and Austin it’s the same — really good. (...)

And if you talk to people with a curious and open mind, you’ll pretty quickly find out that New York Times reporters are really smart. So are McKinsey consultants. So are the people working at successful hedge funds. So are Ivy League professors. Probably the smartest person I know was in a great grad program in the humanities, couldn’t quite get a tenure track job because of timing and the generally lousing job market in academia, and wound up with a job in finance at a firm that is famous for hiring really smart people with unorthodox backgrounds. Our society is great at identifying smart people and giving them important or lucrative jobs.

This just turns out to be an outcome that still has some problems.

Smart people do bad things

If you want a story about the problem with meritocracy, I would read Dylan Scott’s recent article about what researchers have found about the consequences of private equity takeovers of nursing homes: (...)

There’s a lot more you could say about this story looking specifically at the lens of nursing home operations. But I’m interested in meritocracy. And the point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.

The healthcare sector poses these kinds of questions in droves. To become a medical doctor, you generally need to get into a good college, have decent grades there, get a good score on a pretty hard standardized test, and then put in a bunch of time into a challenging graduate education program. So doctors are quite a bit smarter than the average American, which seems reasonable. Nobody wants a dumb doctor. But you also don’t really want a shrewd doctor who is putting his smarts to use figuring out how to take advantage of his asymmetrical information vis-a-vis his patients to buy unnecessary services. You want healers who, yes, earn a comfortable living, but also comport themselves according to a code of honor and offer legitimate medical advice.

But this concept of honor and virtue is consistently at odds with the merit principle. (...)

Round pegs and square holes

My read on a lot of what’s happening in elite cultural institutions in the United States is that we are currently living through a desperate scramble to make certain kinds of social justice goals and egalitarian commitments fit into a fundamentally unsound meritocratic framework.

What you need to do is actually change the framework — have a society that’s less based on sorting and ranking, and more based on equality.

In his meritocracy book, the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel suggests that the most exclusive colleges should move away from tournament-style admissions. Instead, he’d like to see them set a minimum competency bar and then accept everyone who clears the threshold. That seems like a fine idea to me. What I’d like to see even more is for Michael Sandel to teach at a community college. Or for it to become stigmatized for rich people to donate money to already-rich universities. The really “in” thing to do could be to found new research centers in struggling communities, or to financially support educational institutions that serve low-income people.

In the political realm, I’d like to see less emphasis on taking the tech bros down a notch and more on just making the welfare state better, more generous, and more user-friendly.

But then, I would really like us to rethink Milton Friedman’s idea that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” and that everything to do with human welfare can be addressed through regulation. Friedman was a libertarian. He should know better than anyone how utopian it is to think that bureaucratic processes are going to successfully align everyone’s incentives.

I think he, the product of a more ethical period in American life, just underestimated the extent to which scams and shady dealings can be made to pay off. After all, it wouldn’t be hard to tell you a story about how changing up your nursing home management practices in a way that gets tons of your clients killed is going to be bad for business. And I could very easily tell you a story in which developing a reputation for not paying your contractors leads to your demise as a businessman.

The facts are pretty clear that poor ethics can frequently be rewarded. To have a healthier society, we need more emphasis on fair play, “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” and creating an atmosphere in which people would be ashamed to tell their parents that their well-paid finance job involves identifying ways to make patient care worse. That’s not a simple switch we can flip. And while it obviously includes a regulatory component, it’s fundamentally not a regulatory issue. It’s a question of social values and getting away from celebrating tournament winners and being “the best,” and a shift to celebrating other kinds of virtues including humility, restraint, fairness, and a belief that some things just aren’t worth it.

by Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring | Read more:
Image: William Thomas Kane/Getty

[ed. See also: The Banality of Merit: Unlearning Obama (Current Affairs)]