Is Meritocracy Just?
http://theprincetontory.com/main/is-meritocracy-just/
Professor James R. Stoner, Jr. / May 16, 2014
In 1958, English sociologist Michael Young published a clever little book called The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033, in which he imagined the long-term effect on society of according social goods on the basis of the principle of equality of opportunity as it was then understood.
[..]he imagines two things by 2033: (1) that society will be restratified, not on the basis of inheritance but of IQ, which his fictitious scientists show to be biologically hereditary; and (2) that there will be a rebellion of the lower classes, who, however, lack the intelligent leadership they once had, since all the best brains will have been co-opted by the system. He also supposes that clever rulers in the 2010s would be able to stave off rebellion by a statute equalizing everyone’s income but still rewarding the meritorious my means of all the amenities they need in order to optimize their productivity: ample vacation time, spacious living quarters and good meals, personal servants (what else could dull people do once effective machines had been invented?), travel, and so forth.
[..]
Murray, in Coming Apart, tells of a vast class differential that has opened up in American society—for the sake of simplicity or to avoid charges that plagued his earlier work, he confines his evidence to white society—between (a) a new upper or upper-middle class elite, the top 20 percent of the population, whose wealth is based on “the increasing market value of brains,” whose ticket in is acceptance by the best colleges, who typically marry, when they (eventually) marry, another of their kind, and who live or want to live in the “superzips” around a few major cities; and (b) a new lower class, the bottom 30 percent, who live in what he calls “Fishtown,” who are no longer really a working class, only half of whom will ever form stable marriages, many of whom divorce, many of whom have kids outside marriage, many of whom are not in the labor force but on disability, more than half of whom do not attend church, and few of whom describe themselves as happy. Putting Young and Murray together, one sees a similar story of bifurcation, one under imagined socialism, one under a reawakened capitalism. And neither author sees this place as desirable.
[..]
Young does not, as I mentioned, anticipate the sexual revolution, which characterizes the chaos in the lower classes that Murray notes. The breakdown of the family, once an upper-class phenomenon for those who could afford divorce and alimony and psychiatrists, is now chronic among people who can afford none of these, eviscerating the stability that allowed the working class of an earlier era in America to attain a modest measure of wealth (home and car ownership, perhaps also a retirement pension) and a large measure of dignity. Cause and effect are hard to sort out here—has the absence of well-paying jobs killed the family, or has the absence of stable family life sent jobs to a more reliable workforce overseas?—but it stands in contrast to the general stability of family formation today among the high bourgeoisie. Is moral order, however belittled or condemned by elites, actually a benefit they used to share with working classes? Like the family, religion has suffered among the less well-off, and again cause and effect are unclear: Do people abandon traditional morals because they lose belief, or do they fall away from organized religion because their lives have become a mess? [see Mary Eberstadt]
The scorn for inheritance in modern meritocracy reveals small-mindedness about the good, for in fact many of the institutions of greatest wealth devote substantial effort to sharing their treasure with the less fortunate who might benefit from the good they harbor. What evidence is there that state bureaucracies, however meritocratic, are better stewards of our cultural legacy than self-governing institutions that assume responsibility for the things they love?
Professor James R. Stoner, Jr. / May 16, 2014
In 1958, English sociologist Michael Young published a clever little book called The Rise of the Meritocracy: 1870-2033, in which he imagined the long-term effect on society of according social goods on the basis of the principle of equality of opportunity as it was then understood.
[..]he imagines two things by 2033: (1) that society will be restratified, not on the basis of inheritance but of IQ, which his fictitious scientists show to be biologically hereditary; and (2) that there will be a rebellion of the lower classes, who, however, lack the intelligent leadership they once had, since all the best brains will have been co-opted by the system. He also supposes that clever rulers in the 2010s would be able to stave off rebellion by a statute equalizing everyone’s income but still rewarding the meritorious my means of all the amenities they need in order to optimize their productivity: ample vacation time, spacious living quarters and good meals, personal servants (what else could dull people do once effective machines had been invented?), travel, and so forth.
[..]
Murray, in Coming Apart, tells of a vast class differential that has opened up in American society—for the sake of simplicity or to avoid charges that plagued his earlier work, he confines his evidence to white society—between (a) a new upper or upper-middle class elite, the top 20 percent of the population, whose wealth is based on “the increasing market value of brains,” whose ticket in is acceptance by the best colleges, who typically marry, when they (eventually) marry, another of their kind, and who live or want to live in the “superzips” around a few major cities; and (b) a new lower class, the bottom 30 percent, who live in what he calls “Fishtown,” who are no longer really a working class, only half of whom will ever form stable marriages, many of whom divorce, many of whom have kids outside marriage, many of whom are not in the labor force but on disability, more than half of whom do not attend church, and few of whom describe themselves as happy. Putting Young and Murray together, one sees a similar story of bifurcation, one under imagined socialism, one under a reawakened capitalism. And neither author sees this place as desirable.
[..]
Young does not, as I mentioned, anticipate the sexual revolution, which characterizes the chaos in the lower classes that Murray notes. The breakdown of the family, once an upper-class phenomenon for those who could afford divorce and alimony and psychiatrists, is now chronic among people who can afford none of these, eviscerating the stability that allowed the working class of an earlier era in America to attain a modest measure of wealth (home and car ownership, perhaps also a retirement pension) and a large measure of dignity. Cause and effect are hard to sort out here—has the absence of well-paying jobs killed the family, or has the absence of stable family life sent jobs to a more reliable workforce overseas?—but it stands in contrast to the general stability of family formation today among the high bourgeoisie. Is moral order, however belittled or condemned by elites, actually a benefit they used to share with working classes? Like the family, religion has suffered among the less well-off, and again cause and effect are unclear: Do people abandon traditional morals because they lose belief, or do they fall away from organized religion because their lives have become a mess? [see Mary Eberstadt]
The scorn for inheritance in modern meritocracy reveals small-mindedness about the good, for in fact many of the institutions of greatest wealth devote substantial effort to sharing their treasure with the less fortunate who might benefit from the good they harbor. What evidence is there that state bureaucracies, however meritocratic, are better stewards of our cultural legacy than self-governing institutions that assume responsibility for the things they love?
posted by martin at August 21, 2015
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