Fix Meritocracy with This One Weird Trick

Several weeks ago, Matthew Yglesias published an edition of his Slow Boring newsletter in which he argued that meritocracy is bad. He’s right. Meritocracy is bad. But while I agree with many of the issues Yglesias raises with meritocracy, his argument is muddled due the fact that he does not clearly delineate two different critiques he is leveling against meritocracy. And ultimately this lack of clarity about what is wrong with meritocracy leads Yglesias to undersell the role that public policy can play in creating a just, post-meritocratic society.

Before getting into what Yglesias gets wrong, let’s start out by looking at two critiques of meritocracy that Yglesias directly acknowledges, the first of which he rejects and the second of which constitutes his core claim about what is wrong with meritocracy.

Meritocracy is a system in which individuals are rewarded based on some notion of talent or merit. It’s a system in which “the best and the brightest” rise to the top of the social and economic hierarchy due to their own skills and effort, irrespective of factors such as social class, race, gender, etc. The first critique of meritocracy, which I refer to as the “practical critique,” does not take a position on whether this type of system is desirable in theory. Rather, it argues that meritocracy cannot work in practice when evaluated on its own terms, at least in the long-run. Chris Hayes presents one form of this critique in The Twilight of the Elites, arguing that something like the meritocratic ideal operated for a time in 20th century American society, but that elites who were rewarded by this system eventually used their status to entrench the power of themselves, their relatives, and their peers.¹ As a result, the meritocratic system has ceased to function as intended, with power and privilege being awarded not on the basis of merit but rather on the basis of one’s connections to the existing elite class.

A similar argument is put forward by Daniel Markovits in this recent video from Vox’s Glad You Asked series hosted by Fabiola Cineas. Markovits’s remarks start around 6:50:

The practical critique can come in other forms as well. For example, one could argue that nothing resembling the meritocratic ideal is achievable, even for a limited period of time.

Regardless of how we choose to formulate the practical critique, Yglesias clearly rejects it and states that meritocracy works more or less as intended in contemporary America:

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.

In particular, Yglesias believes that contemporary American society does a good job at rewarding intelligence, although the evidence he offers for this claim is a bit flimsy:

Whether or not Yglesias is correct to reject the practical critique, he advances a separate argument against meritocracy, which I call the “virtue critique.” His view is that meritocracy’s problems stem from what the system values and how these values shape the virtues embraced by the meritocratic elite. He introduces this critique by first pointing to work showing that private equity takeovers of nursing homes may have been responsible for more than 20,000 deaths over a 12-year period. He then argues that this outcome reflects meritocracy working as intended:

Why do private equity takeovers kill so many people? It’s not because the Wall Street boys are dimwitted. The people who work in private equity are very smart. Their job is to look for companies that, for whatever reason, are not being managed in a way that maximizes shareholder value. Then they take them over with borrowed money and rejigger operations so as to increase profits. In the case of nursing homes, it turns out that basically, if you give patients more drugs, you can get away with lower staffing levels, and then you can drain the resources that are freed up by that in various ways…. [T]he point here is that things can go awry not despite, but because smart people are in charge.

This contrasts with the virtues that we would want to see embraced in the healthcare sector:

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.

Yglesias offers several similar examples from other sectors of society in order to demonstrate that the meritocratic system of social reward is at best indifferent to, and often hostile towards, virtues and behavior that we generally consider praiseworthy.

Another version of the virtue critique comes from Helen Andrews. Although Yglesias frames his own piece as a rebuttal to hers, their objections to meritocracy are structurally quite similar and their disagreements largely focus on whether meritocratic elites are “smart” or not. Like Yglesias, Andrews objects to the virtues (or lack thereof) embraced by these elites, contrasting contemporary elites with aristocrats:

It was the meritocratic ideology that paved this road to ignorance. Being open to all comers, with intelligence the only criterion, meant that no particular body of knowledge could be made mandatory at an institution like St. Paul’s, lest it arbitrarily exclude students conversant only with their own traditions.

…

Unlike meritocracies, aristocracies can put actual content into their curricula — not just academically, but morally. Every aristocracy has an ethos, and a good ethos will balance out the moral faults to which that aristocracy is prone.

As the above quote suggests, Andrews’s proposed solution to this problem is a return to an aristocracy.² Ross Douthat likewise endorses a conservative response to the virtue critique of meritocracy:

Thankfully, Yglesias offers a different solution:

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.

While this response is more appealing than those offered by Andrews and Douthat, Yglesias gives us little in the way of actionable suggestions. Yes, he acknowledges there is some role for regulation to play in the cultivation of better virtues, but we are mostly left with a nebulous hope society’s values will be transformed in a way that deprioritizes competition and embraces fairness. That said, perhaps it is not unreasonable to think that if the virtue critique of meritocracy is correct, then this is the best solution we can expect. If the problem with meritocratic system arises from what this system values, then what solution could there be other than a change in these values?

I don’t think this is entirely off base, but it greatly undersells the role that public policy can play in bringing about this shift. Crucially, Yglesias ignores how what we choose to reward economically shapes the values that are embraced more more broadly throughout society. But before we see how public policy can help develop a more virtuous (and more practical) post-meritocratic society, I first want to address a third critique of meritocracy that is present Yglesias’s piece. Not only does this critique offer a unique analysis of what is wrong with meritocracy, but it also points to a path forward more clearly than either of the other critiques.

This third critique of meritocracy, the “egalitarian critique,” is quite straightforward. Meritocracy is a system that rewards individuals on the basis of conceptions of talent or merit, which necessarily gives rise to social and economic inequalities based on these conceptions. To the extent that we believe such inequalities are undesirable, then any meritocratic system that produces them will be also be undesirable.

I mentioned that this critique exists within Yglesias’s piece, but a clearer articulation of the egalitarian critique comes from Fredrik deBoer’s recent book The Cult of Smart. deBoer, focusing on the American education system, argues that individuals are endowed with different levels of academic talent at birth and that for this reason we cannot expect all individuals to enjoy the same levels of academic success. Any society that rewards individuals on the basis of academic performance is unjust since, to a large extent, it punishes those who “lost the genetic lottery” through no fault of their own.

And while deBoer focuses on the differing academic talents between individuals, this is just one form that the egalitarian argument may take. More generally, because individuals differ in their talents and abilities due to factors outside their control, we may think it is unjust to build a system of that rewards those abilities. An even more general form of the egalitarian argument says that certain forms of inequality are unwanted even if we can find some way to attribute unequal outcomes to individuals’ own choices. On this view, meritocracy is bad because it generates inequality, full stop.³

Getting back to Yglesias, he advances the egalitarian argument in the context of sports:

Back in 2019, Rafael Nadal earned $16 million in prize money playing tennis. Gael Monfils, in ninth place, earned $3 million.

…

[T]he basic reality is that it is not great for material resources to be distributed so unequally. The marginal dollar taken out of Nadal’s hands and given to someone in need will greatly increase human flourishing.

…

It takes hard work to be the champion, of course, but it’s equally obvious that the vast majority of people would never be as good as Nadal no matter how hard they tried. Almost everyone who’s successful works hard to get where they are. But they have also lucked into abilities that most people don’t have. And beyond that, they have meta-lucked into being alive at a time and place where the abilities they lucked into are valuable.

Here, we see versions of both a more measured egalitarian critique (Nadal has been rewarded due to inherent athletic talent that few others possess) and a more general one (an unequal distribution of resources diminishes human flourishing, regardless of the source of this inequality). Yet although Yglesias makes these egalitarian arguments, this example appears alongside the virtue critique without acknowledgment that it constitutes a separate cases against meritocracy.

Moreover, Yglesias’s focus on transforming social values as the way to move beyond meritocracy reveals that he does not take the egalitarian critique to diagnose the main problem with meritocracy. This is because the egalitarian critique sets itself apart from the other critiques by presenting a very clear solution: enact policies to reduce social and economic inequality. There isn’t a single silver bullet here, and different measures will be needed to address inequities in different parts of society. But policies that would make contemporary American society more egalitarian are not exactly mysteries. More progressivity in the tax code and the introduction of a wealth tax would compress income and wealth distributions. Legislation to help revitalize union membership, such as the PRO Act, would shift the gains of economic growth away from capital and towards labor. Universal healthcare and free college would equalize access to medical care and education. Ending exclusionary zoning and funding social housing would reduce residential segregation and, in turn, educational segregation. It’s not obvious that enacting these policies would constitute the end of meritocracy, if we are willing to grant that contemporary American society is meritocratic, but they would sand the edges off existing inequalities and assuage the concerns raised by the egalitarian critique.

The conflation between the virtue and egalitarian critiques of meritocracy in Yglesias’s piece may in part be due to the fact that there is a close connection between the these critiques. Yglesias sees the correct response to meritocracy to be the elevation of values such as fairness and equality, values that undergird the appeal of the egalitarian critique and that justify pursuing the policies listed above. We might think that Yglesias has actually identified a prerequisite for adopting these policies, i.e. egalitarianism must be widely embraced as a virtue by a society before egalitarian policies can be enacted. While I doubt that a wider embrace of egalitarian values would hurt efforts to adopt these policies, this assessment ignores the possibility that causality flows in the opposite direction. That is, we should consider how making society more economically egalitarian would help cultivate egalitarian virtues.

To see how this might play out, recall that the different versions of the virtue critique all posit that meritocracy imposes a socially undesirable value system. It’s important to recognize that while this may be true, no society has a single, totalizing notion of value embraced by every member of that society. Rather, individuals and institutions are often pressured by multiple, possibly contradictory, value systems. In fact, the force of Ygelsias’s arguments against meritocracy rely on this being the case. Suppose for the sake of argument that Yglesias is correct that we currently live in a reasonably meritocratic society. In the examples he presents, we are meant to to view various actions as laudable despite the fact that they are not rewarded by the meritocratic system. This shows that we can evaluate actions in terms of value systems other than the meritocratic one.

This line of reasoning allows us to consider the virtue critique in slightly different terms. The virtue critique of meritocracy does not say that meritocracy obliterates all other value systems. Rather, it introduces very strong incentives to act in accordance with the meritocratic system of values. Promoting social and economic equality in the ways suggested by the egalitarian critique provides a counterweight to these incentives. These policies would diminish the potential gains from coming out on top of the social and economic hierarchy, thereby reducing the incentives to act in accordance with the meritocratic value system. In turn, we would see more individuals and institutions acting in accordance with other value systems. There is no guarantee that individuals actions’ would be guided by the virtues mentioned by Yglesias — humility, restraint, fairness, etc. — but I take the optimistic perspective that these virtues would exert greater influence if we reduced the economic incentives to act counter to them.⁴

Egalitarian policy changes would also address Hayes’s version of the pragmatic critique, in which the elites that emerge in a meritocracy eventually work to undermine the meritocratic nature of that system in order to preserve their own power and the power of those close to them. Again, in a more egalitarian society, there is simply less to be gained by joining the ranks of or maintaining membership in the elite, thereby weakening the incentives to undermine the system.

All three critiques of meritocracy can be addressed via policies promoting social and economic equality. In the case of the egalitarian critique, such policies address the critique head on. In the cases of the practical and virtue critiques, a different mechanism comes into play. By reducing the incentives for joining the ranks of the meritocratic elite, we mitigate the pernicious effects of meritocracy. I note that this is not a fully novel observation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all authors attacking meritocracy from a left or liberal perspective come to a similar conclusion. But it speaks to the strength of the egalitarian response that it addresses the concerns made by multiple, independent critiques of meritocracy. Regardless of why you are inclined to think that meritocracy is bad, egalitarianism shows us how we can build a better society.

¹ Of course, many people, including women, people of color, and non-heterosexual and gender non-binary individuals, have been precluded from fully participating in American society on an equal footing. Hayes acknowledges this fact, but also argues that during the mid-20th century, members of these groups were allowed to join the ranks of the elites for the first time. This brought American society closer to being a true meritocracy than it had ever been previously, at least until the elite class acted to entrench its position and subvert the meritocratic ideal.

² To be precise, Andrews argues that the meritocratic elite already constitutes an aristocracy, but that they do not view themselves as such. What’s needed is for the aristocrats to recognize this reality and for this self-perception to fuel the cultivation of better virtues.

³ deBoer, a self-described Marxist, also endorses this more general egalitarian critique of meritocracy.

⁴ I imagine there is also a type of left-communitarian argument to the effect that a more egalitarian society promotes these virtues independent of any economic incentives, but I am not familiar enough with any such argument to describe it faithfully.