The term meritocracy was coined by an English socialist, Michael Young, who also wrote the Labour manifesto for the 1945 election. He first popularised it in the 1958 satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, set in the future at the time of the overthrow of the meritocracy.
The argument put forward is that the old hereditary elite of the past has been replaced by a class of self-proclaimed beneficiaries of meritocracy whose only real merit is in the straitened climes of academic education.
This meritocracy would be, he predicted, characterised by the following:
A new elite based on educational attainment;
Decreasing social mobility as the new elite hardens;
Increasing social inequality as the new elite line their pockets at the expense of the rest;
Demoralisation of the working class and the siphoning away of their leaders;
The new elite claiming to have their greater wealth on the basis of merit.
And this is the situation we now have. More inequality of wealth, less mobility.
We live in a Meritocracy. Young saw it coming. No-one listened. Now we find outselves like this.
But I guess if you are so far socialist as to think “Harrison Bergeron” is a tutorial, having those who are actually talented and intelligent run things would seem oppressive.
The problem is that “merit” in business, politics and academia very often means “most like me”. So you end up with good old boy networks and nepotism/cronyism rather than a true meritocracy.
Since I don’t think we have anything like a meritocracy, no matter how you define it, we have to decide whether we’re talking about theory and ideals, or the same faults that affect pretty much every form of cracyness.
Look at the list of top 10 or even 20 wealthiest Americans, and you’ll see the majority inherited their wealth (the Waltons, the Kochs, the Mars, etc).
Even among the self-made billionaires, they didn’t exactly start from nothing. Warren Buffett’s dad was a stock investor and multi-term congressman, and Bill Gates came from an upper class family. That doesn’t mean they didn’t work hard to earn what they have, but they exactly didn’t start from scratch with only their wits/education to guide them.
Short of something very interesting happening (in the Chinese sense) in the next few decades, inherited wealth representing a majority of the elite will remain true through at least the next generation and probably for the next 2 or 3.
Which isn’t necessarily a problem, or at least isn’t easily solvable.
The example that comes to mind is from Richard Dawkins trying to explain how some genes flourish or fail in the presence of other genes. Imagine a rowing team that was created by throwing people at random into a boat and keeping the teams that win races. You’ll find that eventually the team will all speak English, or they’ll all speak German, even if the original pool of rowers contained speakers of both languages. The reason is that the team won’t work well together unless they can all speak to each other coherently. As soon as there is a majority of rowers that speak a language, all the other rowers will eventually speak that language or be replaced. Even though there’s nothing wrong with German speaking rowers.
Analogously, you have to “fit in” to an extent to be a good employee/businessman/politician/etc. Some quirks are okay, even nice to have. But real diversity is counterproductive, in the same way having a mutually unintelligible rowing team is counterproductive.
EDIT: I’m referring here to my previous post re: cronyism.
We don’t live in a meritocracy. Not unless Wall Street can justify why zero productivity should be worth billions or the Mitt Romney types can justify why taking over and liquidating companies should also be worth billions, or executives can justify why they are worth 600 times the compensation of an average worker, even when they are making asinine decisions that drive the company to bankruptcy and themselves to golden parachutes. We don’t live in a meritocracy, we live in a corporate oligarchy where the highest earners effectively set their own compensation, the biggest investors set their own returns, and moneyed interests in general control the financial and economic systems.
To be sure, some of this will always exist. It is, in effect, a major perk of being wealthy or being in the top echelon of a large business organization. The top echelon of the Soviet Communist Party were pretty damned privileged, too. The scandal is in the obscene extent to which a plutocracy has been allowed to proliferate in a supposed democracy and a putative egalitarian society that prides itself on having supposedly abolished class systems and aristocracies.
Right, and this is the Social Darwinist argument that justifies the success of the privileged. I assume the point of the OP was that the “meritocracy” described in the work discussed is the kind we have now. That is to say, it isn’t one, really (as you pointed out).
Certainly, the right-wing of the Western political class considers us to be living in a true meritocracy, or at least its rhetoric would indicate that it believes that. That clearly ignores systemic disadvantages against the poor and cultural/ethnic minorities.
Harrison Bergeron came up in another post. I’ve never been sure what Vonnegut was getting at with that story. I’m left-leaning, and I never considered that actual talent and hard work should not be rewarded. Conservatives/libertarians who characterize the Left as wanting to hobble the successful so that outcomes are identical are knocking down a straw man. Every Leftie/Progressive/Democrat I know just wants equal treatment and equal opportunity for everyone. If we had that, we would live in something much closer to a true meritocracy. But we don’t.
Unfortunately, his coinage has taken on a life of its own, and “meritocracy” is not used in the way he envisioned it (and, apparently, still does). Nevertheless, he made, and continues to make, some very important points.
But I have no clue what the OP is actually arguing.
And it wasn’t any particular success in “the straitened climes of academic education”, as the OP puts it, that led to their pre-eminence. For instance, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others all dropped out of college.
Warren Buffett earned an unremarkable degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska and then was turned down for entry to the Harvard Business School (though he did go on to get an MBA and MA elsewhere). Academic success was not what made him rich.
And “Harrison Bergeron” is an insulting straw man of a story, designed specifically to undermine social democracy. It’s made more anti-government libertarians than Ayn Rand could dream of doing.
ETA: Granted, I’ve read nothing else of note by Vonnegut, so maybe he’s less bizarrely right-wing elsewhere.
He wrote the manifesto for the Labour party in 1945. Which explicitly said the party was a “Democratic Socialist party”.
That merit as normally defined today is a measure of things of no real importance, yet the elite claim it imbues them with a position of moral authority rather than mere wealth or power.
So far the opposite that I believe you when you say you’ve read nothing else by Vonnegut. The man was considered a left wing nutcase by most conservatives and thought Nixon was one of the worst things to happen to the country. Actually, he was a borderline socialist (not the modern perjorative “Socialist” but actual turn of the 20th century socialism).
“Harrison Bergeron” was a bit of an odd duck. It was really more about Vonnegut’s anti-authoritarian streak. He was definitely a humanist and thought everybody should be treated equally. It’s just he was against overbearing government authority, even in an ostensibly good cause (also why he was against the “War on Terror”).
Then, maybe you should clarify your manifesto? Because if the above sentence is more the point you wish to make, there’s a ton of cruft and borderline untrue/irrelevant stuff in your first post. A more clear thesis would help.
There’s quite a difference between treating people equally and believing all people are equal. Neither stomping on the unfortunate nor giving undue privileges to the accomplished is one thing. Insisting that any kind of “elite” is a bad thing is another… and a bad thing.
Or, to put it in internetspeak: evvabody’s jest as smart as evvabody else.
If you look at the list of twenty richest americans only 7 of them inherited most of their wealth. The Mars family ties for twentieth with 3 members on the list and the 4 Walton heirs the other people who inherited their wealth. The Koch brothers inherited a succesful company from their father but it was nowhere near as valuable as it became under their management.
Here is a study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that shows inheritances are not a growing source of wealth but a declining source and that inhertances are declining as a source of wealth for those in the highest tax brackets. (pdf)
The majority of them inherited great wealth, even if it became even greater later. Unless you are trying to claim they’d have done just as well starting from scratch?
Misleading. The value of portfolios has grown exponentially (literally in many cases) over the last 30 years. So, the share that direct inheritance represents may be low, but the growth wouldn’t have been possible without that seed.