What everyone gets wrong about meritocracy

Define meritocracy as:

1. A situation

2. In which any two people with the same natural talents and work ethic.

3. And a common ambition

4. Have as close as possible the same chance of achieving that ambition, regardless of their background, events beyond their control, etc.

Granted we’re never going to achieve that this side of paradise, but a lot of people want to approximate it as closely as possible. This is not just because giving everyone an equal opportunity to use their talents increases the social surplus but also for reasons of fairness.

As a philosopher, I’m skeptical of the enormous weight some people place on meritocracy, but I think it has some value, if only because living in a society that lets people languish due to ill fortune is bad for people’s welfare for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons.

A lot of egalitarians have made the point that genuine equality of opportunity- understood as giving everyone as-close-to-feasiable-equal chance-relative to talents and not just a formally-equal-chance-relative-to-talents requires a general program of redistribution. I agree with that, and it overlaps with some of the points I’m going to make, but it is not my focus in this essay.

What I think most people get terribly wrong about meritocracy is thinking the most important way to achieve it is by monitoring and enforcing the fair division of opportunities. This matters a great deal, but the sheer number of opportunities is as important as their division, maybe even more so at the margin.

The ladder of opportunity necessarily tapers thinner the higher you go, but slowing that tapering matters to how much meritocracy we get. If the path to becoming, say, a film director, is incredibly narrow, only the privileged will achieve it. But if people are given a longer time horizon to prove their talents, and don’t need to “get it right” at every step, the poor and unlucky will have a better run of it.

If you have a tiny number of opportunities, those positions are going to go to people who are talented and lucky and frankly also probably well-connected. If you have more opportunities at every level from the top to the bottom, people who didn’t get all the luck will have a chance to climb the ladder, including:

1. Talented but quite unlucky people whose talent is “hidden” behind misfortunes.

2. People who are very talented in a way that is not immediately legible or transparent, but which, over time will reveal themselves.

This last category is interesting. There are quite many famous scientists who, while they did reasonably well in University, would not have made it in the current ultra-competitive system, which selects for immediate, legible outputs. Even if they had all the luck in the world, their talent would not, at first be observable to a sufficient degree to keep them afloat in a cut-throat publish-or-perish environment. This is, in itself, a failure of meritocracy because it is a failure to recognize merit.

I’m sure there’s a lot you can do to try to make choosing between applicants and picking the most talented, regardless of prior luck, easier. You could implement affirmative action. I support affirmative action but it is never perfect, there are always forms of disadvantage that remain hidden from it, and there can be a tendency to pick the most well-off people from the least well-off groups.

You could try to alter the processes by which winners are picked to make them fairer. Perhaps you could consider a broader range of factors, or, going in the opposite direction, you might rely on a narrow range of quantitative metrics thought to be hard to game (e.g., GRE scores).

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not denying that trying to get it right is important. However, if there’s only a tiny number of opportunities available, circumstances will contort so that typically only the lucky, and moreover well connected- get them, and even if you somehow overcame these biases- and no one ever has- there would still be the problem I mentioned above of talents that are not immediately legible.

Another aspect of the problem is that there will always be a certain number of “nepo babies” and other socially well-connected people who are almost assured of getting a spot. This is true not just in the arts and entertainment, but even in academia, medicine, etc. Despite the good intentions and numerous efforts, no one has ever overcome the power of nepotism completely. If there is a small number of spots relative to those who want them, the portion that is effectively “reserved” for nepotistic access will be higher relative to the total.

You can overcome these problems partially by reducing the level of competition, and you do that by offering more opportunities.

Now you might think that while it sounds nice in theory to offer more opportunities all around, that takes resources we don’t have. For some sorts of achievements- like being a celebrity- this might be true- there’s probably a fixed number of celebrities because society has a fixed amount of attention (although, not, necessarily, a fixed number of acting roles). For other types of achievements though, it is plausible to increase the number of spots available- and there are good reasons to do so.

Consider the roles people truly covet, despite poor pay and job security and/or inordinate difficulties of access:

1. Intellectual work (writer, academic, scientist, engineer, etc.)

2. Artistic work (Artist, actor, musician, etc.)

3. Some kinds of caring work (Doctor, psychologist, allied health, etc.)

4. Transformative work (Community organizer, advocate NGO worker, policy worker, etc.)

The majority of these roles are compensated very poorly compared to similarly skilled roles in the rest of the economy- at least until one gets to the highest levels- and have very poor job security- so much so that it is extremely difficult to have a career in these areas. Nevertheless working in these areas remains in high demand. Other roles that are well compensated (e.g. Doctor, psychologist, allied health) are largely well enumerated because they are underproduced due to underinvestment and regulatory capture and thus hard to access.

For three reasons the number of opportunities available in these fields is scarcer than the social optimum.

1. Many of them have benefits that accrue widely, which no individual is liable to pay, and are under-compensated i.e. they have positive externalities.

2. They have benefits that accrue to the poor and vulnerable who have a difficult time paying for them.

3. Especially in the case of medicine and a few others, there is endemic underproduction due to high upfront training costs and regulatory capture e.g. by doctors’ associations.

Meanwhile, there are a bunch of industries to which access is often not as coveted despite paying way more money-. Jobs in these industries are overproduced by the market relative to marginal social benefit- jobs in sectors like finance, insurance, real estate, and marketing, for example.

You can likely see where I’m going with this. Given that more people want meaningful work than there is available, and given that meaningful work is underproduced from the point of view of social utility, we can, and should, give people more opportunities to do what they want. This will increase meritocracy in these areas. Even putting aside issues of meritocracy, this is efficient because it corrects an underproduction inherent in the market. Increasing the number of jobs in these sectors will increase both the absolute number and the proportion of talented people who rise into these roles despite challenges.