Episode 151 - Meritocracy Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] Ellie: The Podcast, where two philosophers merit your full undivided attention.

[00:00:24] David: I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:25] Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: To support the show and get access to extended ad free episode. Live Q and As and more. Please subscribe to overthink on Substack.

[00:00:36] Ellie: Merit has been a key concept in Trump's recent attacks on DEI in this absolutely depraved second term. One of his first executive orders in 2025 is called Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.

In which he says that hiring practices that involve principles of diversity, equity, inclusion are illegal and will be replaced with practices based on individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination. End quote. So he thinks that DEI unfairly privileges certain people based on where they were born rather than based on what they do, that is, based on merit. Even though reversing the history of rewarding people based on where they were born rather than based on what they do, is exactly what DEI policies were created to do.

[00:01:31] David: Well, and do we need to point out the irony that is staring us right in the face there.

[00:01:36] Ellie: Which one? There's so many we can choose from.

[00:01:38] David: Yeah. The plurality of ironies that constitute the Trump presidency, you know, but the irony is that as he is proclaiming and boasting to try to change the law to reflect merit, he is appointing too positions of power the most undeserving, unmeritorious individuals, right? Like, so think about his diplomatic team that is filled with people that just do not deserve being in any government office. So the role of ambassador to France went to the father of his son-in-law. So it's like a clear nepo baby relationship.

The same thing of the post of ambassador to Greece, not to mention the most, Egregious of all of these cases is Pete Hegseth, who has never commanded a large military unit who has never led a federal agency with anything near the scope of the Department of Defense and whose only experience has been really working with nonprofits, all of whom he's known to have mismanaged terribly.

[00:02:39] Ellie: He's like known as a podcaster.

[00:02:41] David: Yeah. And he's now the defense secretary, one of the most important jobs in the American government.

[00:02:47] Ellie: Yeah. Some of these are positions that were brought about by nepotism. Definitely not merit exactly the opposite. I mean, Trump himself obviously completely in no way merits the office of the presidency.

But I think one of the things that really disturbs me too, and I think this is part of the rationale for Hegseth, who was really mainly known as media personality, like the podcast bros taking over the government as a whole thing that we have referred to in the past and could talk a lot about, but that's part of a very troubling hiring practice that I've noticed.

I think especially, I'm attuned to it because I grew up in LA, which is the concept of hiring somebody because they look straight out of central casting.

[00:03:31] David: What does that mean?

[00:03:33] Ellie: Yeah, so you might not be aware of this term if you didn't grow up in LA or live there, but central casting is basically the casting database from which people would select certain actors to play roles, especially if they're small roles.

So for instance, I went to a Catholic all girls high school. First time my mom came to see my school. She looks at the nun principal and says to me, she's straight outta central casting, which means she looks like what you would expect a nun to look like.

[00:04:00] David: I see. I see. So Pete is like military dude. Because he has those tattoos, especially the Nazi ones.

[00:04:07] Ellie: Yeah, despite having no experience, he is like a handsome, masculine looking guy who seems like the kind of person that you would cast in Top Gun, right? And so Trump has referred to people looking straight out of central casting. And I mean, you just can't get farther from merit than that. There's like the nepotism, that's as far from merit as you can get. And there's also equally far from merit as you can get, the idea of central casting as being a principle of your hiring.

[00:04:39] David: And aside, maybe from this like casting reference, what I find very fascinating about these cases of individuals being appointed on the right to positions for which they have neither knowledge nor expertise nor any kind of background, is that when they get pressed about it, many of them point to the fact of having been appointed, as if that is itself proof of merit. So there's a kind of inversion where they say other people, people of color who have positions of power or positions of prestige, they never merit it in the first place.

But I clearly merit it because if I didn't merit it, I wouldn't be in it in the first place, even though in their case. They truly don't know what it is that they're doing.

[00:05:19] Ellie: And they also often perform a weird inversion whereby experience becomes contrasted with merit.

So we often equate experience with merit. You know, if you have experience in this certain areas you mentioned with Pete, he lacks experience, and we might consider experience to have produced merit or been a sign of merit. That might be something we already wanna trouble because experience and merit aren't always the same thing.

But all the same, they're at least closer than the idea that merit is the absence of experience, right? It's like, oh, I'm this fresh new face who has literally no experience in this area, and no, yeah, no reason to deserve this. Other than that, I look the part and or have the right connections.

[00:06:03] David: No, that's exactly right. And I think there's also a weird expansion by force of what counts as experience.

I'm thinking about the Sarah Palin fiasco of, you know, what gives you any expertise to lead. And her answer was, well, my experience is that I can see Russia from my house. Right? So like any kind of connection, any kind of point of contact with the subject matter of the post for which you're being considered on the right then gets transformed by this ideological procedure into proof of experience, even as at the same time they often reject traditional experience because those are the elites in power that have prevented, you know, new voices from leading government.

[00:06:47] Ellie: Yeah. And so obviously something like this executive order is just a total farce when we're talking about merit. But I think part of its appeal lies in the fact that merit is a nebulous concept that is very attractive to people, and therefore saying we're gonna bring back merit. It's hard to argue against that. Unless you scratch the surface and look at what is actually being done.

[00:07:14] David: So let's scratch a little bit. Today we are talking about meritocracy.

[00:07:21] Ellie: What does it mean to organize a society around merit?

[00:07:25] David: Does meritocracy set up reasonable objectives or impossible ideals?

[00:07:30] Ellie: And how does the education system reveal issues with meritocracy in the US today?

Everyone likes meritocracy. I think we can even consider it as core and American ideal as freedom or democracy, although that latter one's been tested lately. But meritocracy appeals to people on all sides of the political spectrum. It appeals to people on the right because it justifies inequality. That is the idea that some people are more naturally skilled than others, justifies an unequal distribution of wealth and resources.

On the left. Meritocracy is appealing because of its rejection of established order, right? Especially order that's rooted in hierarchies such as bloodline or race. And so for both the right and left meritocracy promises that if you work hard, you have the right talents, you will make it no matter how little you started with.

[00:08:31] David: Yeah. And I think that's what makes meritocracy so difficult to criticize and so impervious to change, right? Because it seems like who could possibly oppose to this idea that the meritorious should get what they deserve, right? Like, I want to get what I deserve. I wanna reap the benefits of my labor.

Conversely, I would never want to argue that other people shouldn't get what they deserve. You know, that's not a position that anybody's going to rush to defend anytime soon. And more importantly, there is also this sense that we have, that we shouldn't suffer unfair consequences. Right? Like just like I should get what I deserve.

I should not pay a price for something that I didn't do. 'cause that's like the definition of injustice. And so in many ways, the problem with the concept of merit and meritocracy is that merit is almost the essence of how we think about fairness itself.

[00:09:28] Ellie: And that's a problem, why?

[00:09:30] David: Well, I mean, we'll get to that because the concept of merit is not as straightforwardly clear as I think we tend to think about it. But my point here is simply that. Because we associated with fairness, we see no room for criticizing a meritocracy.

[00:09:46] Ellie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that's fair. And so a meritocracy is technically speaking rule by those with merit. It's a way of organizing governments and societies by using merit to distribute offices and social goods.

[00:10:01] David: And so meritocracy is ruled by the meritorious, which of course raises the corollary question of, well then. Who are the meritorious, those with merit. Then what exactly is merit? And so in the way we usually think about that concept, merit refers to things like cognitive abilities, skills, talents that individuals possess, especially in relation to self-training and self-discipline.

And so you can think about merit as that, which enables you to work your way up through effort. So your merit is your intelligence, you're savvy, your drive, your willingness to do what it takes to succeed, so on and so forth. So it refers to those traits and skills I think that we cultivate.

[00:10:46] Ellie: And you can see how that idea of merit is deeply tied to the ideals of democracy because it's an anti-establishment idea, it rejects the passing down of power over generations in favor of suggesting that any individual, regardless of the opportunities they're handed at birth, has the chance to make something of themselves.

[00:11:07] David: And the idea that any individual can do it, I think is central. And it highlights the extent to which the seeds for our understanding of meritocracy, at least as that concept is used today, really were planted by enlightenment thinking. Because the idea, one of the central ideas of the enlightenment is that all individuals, at least in principle, we know that in practice there, there were some problems slightly with enlightenment discourse.

The idea was that all individuals have those same capacities, right? We share them by virtue of being human. And so if you think about the capacity for reason, the capacity for language, the capacity for moral thinking, all of that is something that we share, and all we need to do is give individuals opportunities to hone in and exercise those capacities, say through education, right?

 If you give people opportunities, then they can rise up to the challenge And so these are views that, for example, you see in enlightenment, thinkers like Rousseau and Kant very clearly. So as we move forward into the 19th century, that enlightenment thinking gets mobilized, especially against the logic of hereditary titles and nepotism, w here meritocracy becomes a mechanism for criticizing established institutions. And what meritocracy does is it promises us. Liberation from unjust hierarchies. Where we are ruled by individuals who do not merit to be politically above us and are only there by virtue of luck because they were born into the right family, or because they stumbled upon a position of power by completely random means, which in this case means anything other than merit.

[00:12:52] Ellie: Yeah. And so meritocracy in critiquing these established institutions and the unjust hierarchies, though promises, not an absence of hierarchy, but the replacement of an unjust hierarchy with a just hierarchy. Political commentator, Christopher Hayes, whose book on meritocracy we will be discussing in detail explains that a meritocracy must comply with two principles.

The first that he identifies is the principle of difference. So this suggests that there is a vast differentiation between people in their abilities, and we should embrace this natural hierarchy by putting the hardest working and most talented people in positions of power. But then there's also the second principle, the principle of mobility.

Which suggests that there must be a competitive selection process that ensures that those with merit are rewarded. People must be able to move up or down in positions of power, depending on their merit, and much of this competitive selection process we'll see later in the episode happens through our educational system.

[00:13:59] David: Now, that process of selection is very familiar, obviously to all of us. But when we think about it from a deeper historical perspective, it turns out that it's actually quite new as a phenomenon. The idea of a meritocracy, at least as we think about that term today, takes form again with the enlightenment, and then it becomes this organizing principle in American society, right? It's like part of, like the very essence of the American dream is that you make it, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that is the American version of merit. It's like as American as apple pie.

And it does begin, I think, with enlightenment principles of equality in the sense that everybody has capacities, even if they're not exactly the same capacities, but everybody can have a shot.

[00:14:47] Ellie: Yeah. And I mean, America as we know, was founded with essentially enlightenment principles. And so it makes sense that that would be part of it. But I think you're right that it is really core to that American dream, which I also just want us to keep in mind as we move a little bit later in the episode into some of the worries that Hayes in particular has about the viability of meritocracy. If meritocracy is core to the American dream, or if merit is, and merit and meritocracy might not work particularly well. Does the American dream work particularly well? It might not be particularly surprising to our listeners to know that we don't think it does, but you know, so be it. Okay. The term meritocracy itself, however, is quite new. Even if we think about the rise of meritocracy as starting in the Enlightenment, the term was coined in 1958 by Michael Young, who's British.

He wrote a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. But funnily enough. Young was no fan of meritocracy. He wrote the book as a dystopian satire of Britain in the 20th century, and then in the 1990s and two thousands, he wrote some articles about how people totally missed the point of his 1958 book, and they needed to be more critical of meritocracy.

I get ahead of myself because we'll worry about meritocracy later, but I just think this is such a fascinating point. Like the person who coined the term meritocracy coined it in a satirical book that was about how bad meritocracy would be if it were instituted, and he was coming from the place of worrying about how it was being instituted in British society, and he wasn't worried about it because he wanted to go back to some nostalgic idea of hereditary rule.

But because it maybe leads to some problems. Anyway. Okay. I once again get ahead of myself.

[00:16:35] David: No, I, but I love that he wrote this dystopia and people read it and they're like, this is fire. Kinda love it. I love this for us, I love this for political governance. I love this for the present, past, and future.

[00:16:48] Ellie: Everyone just ignored him.

[00:16:49] David: Yeah. Although, you know, I wanna say I read about this origin of the term with Young, but I also read that there is or was controversy. Around the coinage of the term. Okay. So young coins, the term in 19, you said 58. But the term had been used by a couple other political theorists also in Britain a few years before.

Like in the early 1950s, there was also for a while at theory that Hana Arendt. Was the one who coined the term in an essay that she wrote, but then it turned out to be not the case because she only used it after 1958 and the earlier version of the essay that people thought contained the term that would've made her, the originator didn't actually contain, like the earliest draft, didn't have that word in it.

[00:17:37] Ellie: So she didn't merit being known as the person who coined the term.

[00:17:41] David: Yeah, no, sorry, Hannah Arendt, undeserving of the title. But again, there were other people who used it before Young as early as 1954. But the reason that we nowadays still give young the owners for coining the term is because he was the first one to really offer a concrete explanation of what he thought meritocracy entailed by depicting it in this dystopia that everybody loved.

Although meritocracy is a recent word from the fifties, the concept of merit and merit-based social organization is very far from new because it goes back to very ancient times. In fact, what we call merit appears to be valued by practically every culture throughout reported history. So, for example, Roman law does have certain principles that suggest that justice is each individual getting his or her due. Greek theories of justice, some of which are referenced. For example, in Plato's, the Republic also equate justice with giving each person what they are owed theories of karma, for example, in Buddhism and Hinduism can be interpreted as a religious version of merit where you return in a different manifestation based on the way you behaved in the way you behave in your present life.

[00:19:06] Ellie: Well, and it's actually not about lives necessarily, but about action. So like karma technically means action.

So yeah, we could get into that, but I think the, what you're talking about is like a version of it. I would just specify, it's not that your present life sets you up for what you will have in your next life. That's part of it. But it's mainly like in this life, the actions, the seeds that you plant will result in consequences.

[00:19:30] David: Okay. Fair.

[00:19:31] Ellie: Yeah, and there's more to say about karma.

[00:19:32] David: Yeah. So it depends on like whether we incorporate like a reincarnation principle here or just think about it within the lifespan of the individual.

[00:19:40] Ellie: And certainly we can put it in reincarnation terms. I just want to qualify that it's all, it also can be put in terms of this.

[00:19:45] David: Point very well taken, thank you for that clarification. Aside from Buddhism and Hinduism, of course Christianity, if you look at the Bible, you reap what you sow.

Not to mention the very idea that you go to hell if you're bad and you go to heaven if you are good. Presumably nobody goes to the wrong place unless they deserve it. Also, there is this quote in the Quran that I just wanna read out loud, because it's not even just about merit, it's actually about meritocracy.

It's about how a ruler ought to organize, , the form of government. So in the Quran, there is a passage that reads as follows, A ruler who appoints any man to an office where there is in his dominion another man better qualified for it. Sins against God and against the state. So Trump sinning against God and sinning against the state.

[00:20:40] Ellie: Okay. So the idea here is that people should get what they deserve. And that's roughly the basic notion of merit that yeah, that is the essence of merit.

[00:20:53] David: And you even find it in Confucian Philosophy. So there is this Confucian defense of merit-based distribution of things like government offices.

And the argument is that by looking at merit, that's how you get good government. That's how you get talented administrators. And bureaucrats, and I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy entry on merit, and they point out that this was actually the rationale for the imperial examinations that began in China in the sixth century, which were these exams open to the public, that you needed to do really well in order to get a civil service job. And so the idea behind them is that through an exam we assess. People's merits and based on who succeeds in the exam, we then go through that selection process that you mentioned to decide who is going to be in what particular government position.

And there, there was also a concern that if you don't do that, the only alternative is to select people based on noble blood. But that has absolutely no correlation to whether they're actually going to be successful at carrying out their responsibilities and the functions of government.

[00:22:09] Ellie: Okay. But of course, those imperial examinations led to massive bureaucratic bloat, which we talk about in the discretion episode with Barry Lam.

[00:22:17] David: Yes, we do.

[00:22:18] Ellie: And I feel like that is foreshadowing some of what we're gonna talk about later in terms of the ill effects of things like standardized testing on the American education system.

It's like something that starts as well-meaning, which is the desire to replace a system that's based on something contingent or arbitrary like nobility with something that seems more contentful like merit can have some undesired consequences.

[00:22:44] David: Yeah, and I think those undesired consequences come from the fussiness of the concept itself of merit. You know, we mentioned that. It seems super intuitive. We like it. Most cultures seem to have some kind of defense for it. But one of the things that I walked away from or with, from my research is that once you really start analyzing the concept of merit, it becomes very, very slippery.

So, for example, some scholars who write about merit and meritocracy. We'll differentiate between merit and Deservingness, where merit is about whether or not you meet certain objective conditions for a prize, an award, or a benefit like an office. So do you meet the conditions or not? Whereas Deservingness is a little bit different because it makes reference to the amount of effort and striving that you put into meeting the conditions.

Yeah. So, let me give you an example. Let's imagine that you and I, Ellie, are running a race and you and I arrive at the exact same time at the finish line. We both technically merit first place. We should get the gold medal because we arrived first. However, one could argue well, Ellie is shorter than David.

Her strides are shorter, so she actually had to bolt it and run way faster than David. Sort of like overcome that difference. And so even though we both merit it equally, you deserve it more because it costs you more to get to the same place. Okay. And so the question there would be, when we're making decisions, you know now in government, which of those two concepts should we use?

Should we use merit or should we use deservingness? Should we take into account effort and struggle? Beyond that, I think, I mean, merit is just a really complex term.

There is this one article that I read called The Merits of Merit by Judith Lichtenberg and David Luban, and they point this out. They note that we talk about merit in the singular, do you merit this or not? Do you deserve it? But in reality, when we're assessing merit, we're always looking at many things.

It's always a constellation of skills and talents in a pool of candidates, and it's never the case that one candidate clearly beats everybody else in all of the relevant categories. You know, nobody's the best across the board. And so when you're making decisions about how to distribute goods and services.

You're always in a position of having to like decide and prioritize what you value. And so we actually make really tough decisions by prioritizing things, but we fool ourselves into thinking that it's a really easy decision because clearly there is a linear organization of people into a hierarchy, and you just choose number one.

But who is number one? We don't know.

[00:25:43] Ellie: That I think also speaks to some of the challenges around meritocracy, which have to do with quantification. And the idea that you have to place people on this sort of linear scale, you have to standardize in some fashion. And on the one hand, that seems to be crucial to the idea of a meritocracy, but on the other hand, it also seems to be a bit at odds with the idea of merit, which I think is meant to celebrate individuality and the idea that we each have our own unique gifts.And talents to bring to the table. And I think that ultimately those two seemingly opposed features come to together. Reveal themselves to be not opposed, but actually quite compatible in the notion that meritocracy is a justification of hierarchy.

It's just a justification of a kind of hierarchy that we're not used to recognizing as a hierarchy. And that is a hierarchy of talent, skill, and or ability.

[00:26:46] David: We've established that merit is really hard to define. But independently of how we define it, I think we can agree that most people accept it as a good basis for determining who rules. It is definitely better, I think we can say than rule by money, rule by heritage, and certainly rule by brute force or violence.

But if we agree that meritocracy can be good, how exactly does meritocracy work and does meritocracy actually work?

[00:27:17] Ellie: Christopher Hayes, the political commentator I mentioned in our previous discussion thinks it does not, and in fact, I read his book last summer and I was so inspired by it that I decided we had to do an episode on this topic, which is how we find ourselves here some months later.

Essentially, Hayes thinks that meritocracy is a lie we tell ourselves, and that it involves contradictory aims. Our particular version of American Meritocracy has not panned out at all. Our country suffers from extreme wealth inequality and other disparities with oligarchy, it was actually in preparation for our oligarchy episode that I came across this book.

[00:27:56] David: Oh, really?

[00:27:56] Ellie: But I, yeah, didn't really have a chance to read it. Yeah, I didn't read it prior to that, but then I like took it on summer vacation with me and read it. So we've got, you know, rampant oligarchy and plutocracy pulling the levers of politics and meritocracy, he says, is precisely this.

It's facilitated, accelerating an extreme economic inequality of a scope and scale unseen since the Gilded Age. Fundamentally, we still think that a select few should rule. We've just changed our criteria for what counts.

[00:28:26] David: I think what you're saying. I really like this and I agree, is that meritocracy does perform an ideological function in the kind of classic Marxist sense of concealing the machinations of like the material world from us. We get sold this lie. We believe it, and because of that, we don't actually strive to change the material conditions of our political life. And I think it in particular heights, how the game is rigged from the very beginning. And it sells us this fantasy that through effort, right through the exercise of those cognitive skills, talents, those capacities that we are all thought to share in common, we can get, a post that is going to change our lives. But my real worry, aside from that about this.

Meritocracy as ideology is that it has a really deleterious effect on those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Because if you are a loser in the meritocratic race, then in a meritocracy, the only explanation is that you're just not good enough. Yeah. And so I think a lot of us internalize that and we say, if I have a bad post in life, it's not the world, it's not the economy it's me.

[00:29:38] Ellie: Exactly. And so meritocracy aligns very well with a capitalist economic system where there are some winners who consolidate more and more power and capital, and then there are some losers, increasingly large numbers of losers who are then meant to blame themselves. Or who then I don't think capitalism is some entity that wants us to blame ourselves, but it works very effectively to consolidate power and capital in the form of capital, and then to make people feel like there is a kind of natural status quo to their powerlessness. Not because they don't come from the right class, caste, race, et cetera, but because they haven't worked hard enough.

 And so what you're speaking to David, this ideological function that meritocracy has indicates or sets us up nicely for one of Hayes's key points, which is that it's not just that the American form of meritocracy doesn't work.

The problem is with the very concept of meritocracy. America's just an example here. Meritocracy is a hopeless ideal and he quotes an earlier Christopher, Christopher Lash on this point, whose work I will say, I think is generally overrated. His book on narcissism has like been making the rounds on social media in recent years, and I think it's a horrendous book, but that is a story for another time.

Christopher Lash has this quote where he says, meritocracy is a parody of democracy, and Hayes roughly agrees with this.

[00:31:06] David: So tell me more specifically about why it's not just the way in which meritocracy has played out in American history that's the problem, but like the very idea? Like it's already corrupted and polluted in some way.

[00:31:18] Ellie: Yeah. Recall the two principles Hayes identifies as needed for a meritocracy, which I mentioned earlier, the principle of difference and the principle of mobility. So we've got some people who are superior to others in virtue of things like their intelligence, self-discipline, et cetera, principle of difference.

Those people, principle of mobility can come from any social class or walk of life, and so they should be able to move to the top of the food chain by proving their merit. In such a case, a pure functioning meritocracy would produce growing inequality, but with a correlated increase in social mobility.

So the smarter and more hardworking you are, the more power and wealth you'll accrue. Ending up in the Oval Office or the corner office of Goldman Sachs, the less smart and hardworking you are, the less power and wealth you'll have. You'll be stuck restocking the Amazon warehouse until the robot takes over your job.

[00:32:17] David: The solution to meritocracy, AI and automation. No, but I mean, when you put it this way, even a perfectly working meritocracy sounds really bad,pretty horrific in fact. And so one question we might ask is why would anybody. Like meritocracy to begin with, when even the best version of it leads to this hierarchy.

[00:32:41] Ellie: I know, right? Like the PR campaign for meritocracy has been great. And one thing that we don't like to talk about here is how meritocracy is rooted in inequality. It's just a more palatable form than more aristocratic or other forms of inequality because it seems to be based on features that are more important than the contingent ones of name or race.

But Hayes suggests that. Inequality is indeed part of the ideal of meritocracy. Only the best of the best can get into Harvard or Yale and get the coroner office meritocracy, advocates, equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. It's actually antithetical to equality of outcome. And you know, I think the folks who advocate meritocracy on the right maybe are more aware of that than those who advocate meritocracy on the left.

[00:33:31] David: Yeah. Because the ultimate goal is that not everybody finishes equally. Right? Like you want the best to get the right job in a meritocracy. So it's, it doesn't have a democratic endpoint. However, maybe the fact that meritocracy isn't attractive to us isn't that big of a deal because didn't you say that Hayes thinks that we can't really get to meritocracy anyway, like it's impossible?

[00:33:56] Ellie: Yeah. So this is exactly right. But the problem is that for him, the reality is even worse. The ideal of meritocracy is an increase of inequality, but at the same time an increase in social mobility. But he suggests that meritocracy in practice only ends up increasing inequality.

It doesn't lead to a correlative increase in social mobility. He calls this the iron law of meritocracy. Eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will get big enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. That is, over time, society will grow less equal and less mobile rather than less equal and more mobile.

[00:34:40] David: Okay. And so the two principles sort of like work against each other in practice.

[00:34:44] Ellie: Exactly. And this is because those who get to the top create means of preserving and defending their privilege and then passing it on to future generations.

[00:34:52] David: Okay. That's the key in the argument.

[00:34:54] Ellie: Yeah. And so think about the robber barons of the gilded Age.

Many of them rose to positions of unimaginable wealth and power from very humble beginnings. But then they hoarded a bunch of wealth and created a pseudo aristocratic American elite of recognizable families. Many of whom remain wealthy to this day. And the situation has only gotten far worse this century.

And you know, broadly speaking in recent decades. Hayes points out that increasing tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy starting in the 1970s have given rise to extreme wealth inequality because the people in power don't wanna lose what they have. I think we see that all over the place today.

[00:35:36] David: Yeah. Well, and they don't wanna lose what they have and they want to reproduce themselves in their children. Right. And like pass down the family business. Accumulate wealth transgenerationally. And so the problem with the meritorious is that once they reach a position of power, they kind of like pause, merit out, and change the terms of the game.

So like now they're playing a new game. And I really love this argument. I have to say

[00:35:59] Ellie: it's so good.

[00:35:59] David: Yeah. Because it shows that what begins as a meritocracy very quickly becomes something other than a meritocracy. Maybe it becomes a plutocracy, most likely it becomes an oligarchy.

And that means in practice that those who win by meritocratic standards then violate the meritocratic game. And I think when we're thinking then about those at the bottom of the hierarchy, that transition away from meritocracy spells disaster. And there are two reasons why I'm thinking this.

So first and foremost. Let's imagine that we're in a meritocratic society where the meritorious rise to the top and then they start doing that thing of trying to consolidate power. It leads to asymmetrical distribution of wealth and resources. It means that resources are not available to go to those in the lower echelons of society.

And it means that the very things that are necessary for people to prove their merit, like education, basic rights, basic access to social goods are denied to a whole segment of the population. And so even if we wanted them to show their merit, we're not actually giving them the opportunities to develop it and cultivate it.

And so there's a violation of the very ideal of meritocracy. But more importantly, I think the second reason why it's problematic is because the powerless will be under an illusion. Here, like those at the bottom will think if I just prove my merit, if I develop my talents, if I work my way up, I will succeed.

But that's because they are thinking that they are in a meritocracy when they no longer are a meritocracy. So they're actually playing the wrong game. You know, it's like showing up to what, what's the expression? Showing up to a gunfight with a knife. Or something like that?

[00:37:50] Ellie: Yeah. And in fact, one of the even worse elements of this is something that Young, the person who coined the term meritocracy points out young, was particularly concerned. Not only that, meritocracy has this ideological function as you're pointing out, but also that the very workings of it, I guess this actually is part of the ideological function, prevent people from coming to an awareness of their condition because it weakens the left and particularly the ideology of meritocracy prevents leftist political leaders from coming to the fore and therefore ends up skewing society conservative.

So think about leftist political movements. They depend on class consciousness, but that's a kind of solidarity that is at odds with meritocracy. Meritocracy relies on seeing certain talented individuals as having potential but not the rest.

And then those individuals get selected for training and education leaving the others behind. And that ultimately means no solidarity among the working class and therefore no genuine grassroots leftist movements because there's no one to lead such a movement. Like all of the people who might do that have then been, you know, brought into Goldman Sachs.

[00:39:07] David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they've evidence that meritocracy works, right? Like they become the token, like lower class individuals who manage to succeed because they did all the right things. And so the very people who come from the working class or from whichever strata of society we're talking about rise to the top in leadership positions then get presented to the rest as these role models of what you should have done if you didn't wanna get stuck in your underprivileged social station.

[00:39:37] Ellie: Yeah. So there has to be just enough room for those few individuals to rise to the top. Yeah. Even as actually the workings of it make it less and less likely that many of those individuals will rise to the top.

[00:39:48] David: Right. Well, it reminds me of Gramsci's analysis of intellectuals which we talked about in our intellectual episode, which is that when you have intellectuals from the working class, as soon as they rise and become intellectuals, they already become members of the dominant class.

Because they become members of institutions like the church, the university, Goldman Sachs, whatever. And at that point, they betrayed their class origins.

[00:40:13] Ellie: Exactly. And ultimately this increasing inequality leads to what Hayes calls vertical social distance. And so you mentioned like maybe this leads to something like oligarchy.

And I said, yeah, in fact, I had come across this book in researching our oligarchy episode a while back. Because what happens is that those in power are increasingly out of touch with the needs of the people. People feel alienated from what he calls a shadowy and unresponsive set of incumbent elites, and those elites are increasingly out of touch, right?

So there's this vertical social distance. And this is a gripe that people on all sides of the political spectrum share. And Hayes really thinks that it is a function of meritocracy. Meritocracy leads to the rise of this shadowy elite that is out of touch with the needs of the people. And we can say it's especially dangerous because the people in power really think they know better than the rest because they've bought in to the idea of meritocracy.

[00:41:08] David: Yeah, and there is a term that I think captures this really well, which is the experience of that elite that gets distanced from the people. It's the term class melancholy, and it refers to the fact that when you come from the working class and then you rise to the top, you lose yourself. And you lose your connection to the very soil from which you come, and there is sort of no way to avoid that. And so you become co-opted because your co-option is what makes possible the ideological efficacy of the meritocratic myth.

[00:41:45] Ellie: Hayes argues that one of the places where we see meritocracy at work most clearly is education. In particular, education gives individuals access to refining their talents. We mentioned this earlier and to developing their merit, but the way this works in practice is. Well, maybe it doesn't work.

[00:42:06] David: Yeah, and why doesn't it work? One place to begin is how do we even figure out, again, who has this thing, this mysterious quality that we call merit? So, let me give a concrete example to give this a little bit of flesh. Let's take the case of somebody who is applying to get into like a prestigious PhD program. You know, like they want the best, and so people apply and the question is, who's gonna get in, who's not gonna get in?

Now, how do we assess the pool of candidates? We've already talked about the problem that merit is hard to define. It's not one thing, but it's like a constellation of skills and values, and then you have to choose between them and prioritize. But another problem with identifying who the meritorious are is that even if we had a clear definition of merit.

We don't have a clear mechanism for detecting it. So even if objectively, some people do have it, we as this selectors don't know who that is because we can only assess merit indirectly. So think about, again, a graduate school program choosing PhD candidates. How do they make those decisions?

Well, it's not property that you just see directly on a candidate. You have to look at things like where they went to school, they went to an ivy, to a state school, so on and so forth. And also maybe how they performed on certain standardized tests like the GRE. And the problem is that those metrics, what college went to, how you did on these exams.

It might reveal merit, or it might just not reveal merit at all, right? It might reveal something completely unrelated such as affluence. And I think the case for standardized testing as a proxy for affluence has been so well established that there's no point rehashing those arguments. But it means that even if we wanted, if we were committed to meritocracy, we might not have the tools to actually identify the people who should be selected.

[00:44:07] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and you said we, you don't wanna rehash the arguments around standardized testing, but I wanna at least rehash one element of it, which is the fact that judging people based on standardized testing seems great in principle, but in practice it is very easy for the elite to co-opt the processes of standardized testing for their own ends through an ancillary test prep industry. that leads to very differential outcomes for people of different social classes.

And one of the key examples that Hayes offers here is Hunter High School, where he himself went, this is a public high school in New York City that is meant to be accessible to people from any walk of life. It is a classic example of a meritocratic institution. The way that you get into Hunter High School, however, is by taking a placement exam when you're 11 years old and that placement exam is standardized, but, of course, like all of the rich people who also skew quite white relative to the population of New York City, end up getting test prep for their children.

And I think we can also add to this of course, things like what kinds of educational adjacent opportunities are available in the home, who has access to reading tutors who has books around the home who's getting homework help from their parents, right? So there are a lot of elements of this and he actually says that Hunter is a perfect parable for how democracies tend to devolve.

So I wanna read a passage here. But if you have any quick thoughts on that, that'll give me a chance to just decide what part of this passage I wanna read, because it's pretty long.

[00:45:54] David: Do you actually want time? No, I think there are so many immaterial ways in which that affluence manifests itself, even like which parents think about prepping you for an entrance exam, which parents and families tell you that you are a candidate for possible inclusion into Hunter High School. And so those are not necessarily like clear things having to do with wealth, but they do have to do with the kind of image that a family has of itself and of its future that is very much tied to class.

[00:46:27] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. And, okay, so on this.

[00:46:31] David: You found the passage.

[00:46:32] Ellie: I found the passage. I'm like, great point, David. Now let me see what I,

[00:46:35] David: Yeah you're like, let me say something.

[00:46:37] Ellie: Yeah. So he notes that Hunter is actually less diverse today than it was in previous decades. I mean, he focuses specifically on the 1980s where there was not a race blind admissions process.

There were actually slots set aside for students of color who had scored near but below the threshold for entrance on this standardized exam. Those students then were enrolled in a special intensive summer training course to get them up to speed. But now Hunter doesn't have those slots set aside anymore.

It truly has like a blinded admissions process.

[00:47:11] David: Oh, wow.

[00:47:11] Ellie: Where it's just based on the standardized test scores. And he says that this is especially weird because there was actually less inequality in the 1980s than there was today. Right. As we noted, wealth inequality in particular has soared since the 1970s, so he says.

Now at a time when the playing field is as uneven as it's ever been, hunter clings to a far more austere vision of meritocracy than it did in the past. In this way, hunter is a near perfect parable for how democracies, sorry, meritoocracies tend to devolve. While it rejects with a kind of bracing, austerity, any subjective aspects of admission, its hard line dependence on a single test is not strong enough to defend against the larger social mechanisms of inequality that churn outside its walls.

And here's the kicker. The result is that just 10% of Hunter High School students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced priced lunch in a city where more than 75% of all public school students do. So we can just see there, based on those numbers, that the population of hunter is skewing way wealthier than average and wealthier in New York City, as in many other places, also means whiter.

And so, one thing to note here, in relation to what we started the episode with, is that this is what many, including myself, and I'm sure you too, worry about with the rollback of DEI policies.

[00:48:36] David: Yeah. Well, and it touches on something that. We know about standardized tests in general, right? That they do not correlate with your likelihood of succeeding in life or even at school.

For example, thinking about the GRE, we know that it doesn't mean anything whether or not you do well in the GRE for getting into grad school.

[00:48:55] Ellie: Do you know I had like a really weird anxiety. I don't know if I would consider it a panic attack, but I got like major anxiety on the day of the GRE and I'm actually really good at standardized tests, generally speaking, but I got this like major wave of anxiety pre GRE and I bombed the math.

[00:49:11] David: Oh really?

[00:49:12] Ellie: I straight up bombed math.

[00:49:14] David: Okay. Yeah. But you know, like, okay, so there is also the issue of like, so much of your life hinges on this one moment, which is a testing day.

And if anything goes wrong that day, it can derail your career.

[00:49:27] Ellie: Totally. And I was like a lot more privileged than a lot of other students taking the gre, but I wasn't wealthy enough to afford taking it a second time. So it was like, oh, I bombed the GRE math. Okay, I guess

[00:49:35] David: thank God I'm applying to philosophy,

[00:49:38] Ellie: continental philosophy no less. But I was just like, you know, I, I guess those are my scores. Whereas, you know, if, if it were somebody even more economically privileged, they would've A had GRE test prep, which I didn't have, and B, like been able to take the test multiple times.

[00:49:52] David: Yeah, of course. And like, so there is the pressure of the day, but aside from that, the lack of correlation to anything significant with the sole exception that if you do well in one of these standardized tests, the one thing that we can conclude about you is that you come from an affluent family. So the only predictive power is actually about class proving the bias of the testing exams, which is why a lot of standardized test requirements for admissions into graduate schools are being slowly, or by now actually kind of quickly in some cases being they're being phased out.

Now, in thinking about this politics of merit in education, I want to raise also a meta point. You know, we've been talking about the problems of merit, but we also have to consider why we give merit itself such a central role in our decision making. So aren't there other values other than merit that should guide how we make decisions about the distribution of posts and the distribution of goods, whether they're private or public?

So, think about other values that might compete with merit, such as utility, right? Like social utility, the greater good.

[00:51:06] Ellie: I didn't know you were about to go more quantified utilitarian than merit.

[00:51:09] David: Well not necessarily quantified. You make utility, you can think about the greater good in terms of like social equality, less imbalance in representation, although I guess you can quantify some of those things in some ways, but we could make an argument that social utility ought to trump merit. And I think this is one of the arguments for affirmative action policies, that it is for the greater good to give a right of entry to people from underrepresented communities, even though on a kind of technical, quantitative assessment of merit, they don't perform nearly as well as members of a more privileged class.

Another competing value here is need. So let's think here with Marx and Engels, you know, the, the communist slogan of from each, according to their abilities, to each, according to their needs.

Maybe the distribution of goods is not about what you merit, but actually about what you need. You know, like, yeah, maybe I merit a lot of things, but I don't even need them. Some of those goods should go to other people who need them, even if arguably they don't merit them. Because also there's the question of like, what are things that you merit versus things that you're entitled to.

You know, a question of rights. And I think many of the values that we can. Use as alternatives to merit also can be context specific. So think about inclusion to college, right? Like who gets into college. Surely we want the meritorious students to get into college, but colleges often use other criteria for making those decisions that I think are really valuable.

You know, like geographic diversity. You don't want everybody at like the University of whatever, like Southern Indiana to all come from the same region because part of the value of college experience is meeting people who are different, encountering people from other areas, from other walks of life.

And so then that should be something that guides decisions in college admissions offices. Think about the value of having non-traditional students, older students, veterans, you know, that's the rationale for having different entry requirements for different populations. And so I do think we need to.

Even if we are defenders of merit, we need to remember that it's not the end all be all of decision making. That there are other ways of making decisions about distribution.

[00:53:45] Ellie: And in thinking about distribution, I'm thinking specifically about the distribution of rewards in terms of money and security. I think we should be thinking about rewards far more broadly than that, of course, but because that is what our society most values, I think. One really noxious aspect of this ideology has to do with a certain kind of circular reasoning that suggests that if you have money, it's because you deserved it and therefore you deserve even more money.

And if you don't have money, it's because you didn't deserve it and therefore you don't deserve any money. And that also translates to things like healthcare and housing security and so on. And I don't exactly know what to make of that. But I think that's. Coming to mind here in terms of the decision making that our society and our government makes around access to goods.

[00:54:42] David: So one way to think about the problem with the way our society distributes goods is to think about the concept of proportionality, because let's assume for just a hot second that everybody did come with like a numerical value of like. My merit value is 95. Yours is 96. Yeah. And we all exist in this like

[00:55:01] Ellie: Chinese social credit system.

[00:55:02] David: Yeah, maybe. There's a clear hierarchy. The problem is that the hierarchy of merit, even if it's real, doesn't actually translate into a comparable hierarchy of rewards. Right? So let's say that you are slightly more meritorious than me at an academic job, if that's true. Let's say that you outm merit me by 5%.

It doesn't mean that you're gonna get a job that's gonna pay you 5% more than me. In our society, it might mean that you get a job and I get nothing. And so there's a lack of proportionality there, and especially at the top end and the bottom end of the reward spectrum. Think about somebody like an athlete.

You know, imagine your favorite basketball player, and again, we agree that he's the best. Does he merit $30 million a year? You know, like even if he merits making more than every other basketball player, the actual compensation and reward distribution in our society is so exorbitant

[00:56:06] Ellie: because the other players aren't making 29 or $28 million. They're making one or something of that sort?

[00:56:11] David: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:56:11] Ellie: I feel like we need a comparative term here.

[00:56:12] David: Yeah. And because $30 million is absurd for anybody, no matter what, right? So like we live in a disproportionate economic system, but because we think that the rewards are established by merit, and merit justifies the rewards, we then draw this bizarre conclusion that, oh yeah, it's totally fair for some people to have nothing, not even healthcare.

And for some people to own multiple mansions. And there is just something really absurd about that logic.

[00:56:44] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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[00:57:16] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.