Should we really all get what we deserve?

Natural justice suggests that rewards go to those who deserve them. Sounds simple, but of course there is a lot in the word ‘deserves’, as an everyday example shows:

Mariane Rudan, a Danish parent working in Australia wrote that her children are at a primary school with a reputation for academic excellence, so the pressure to keep up is real…. in a class times table competition… one child was pitted against another in a race and maths sums were called out by the teacher. The child who answered first got to move up a step. The first to reach the whiteboard won. My daughter lost. Rudan goes on to say that her daughter describes the incident as a humiliating one.  Did she deserve what she got? 

A minor story, in a way, and one might say that these things happen, inevitably, as not everyone can be first, or win the prizes; and it’s the job of schools to prepare students for that reality. Of course, this is profoundly wrong; they are not inevitable in schools or indeed beyond. These things only happen if we choose to turn activities into competitions, where there are winners and losers. We could make other choices and not signal that fastest is best, or indeed that beating others is the goal.

In general, the injurious effects competition can have on learning are well-known, but Daniel Markovits, Professor of Law at Yale, has recently linked competition to an (apparently) far more benign idea – that of meritocracy. The idea of meritocracy is an appealing one, and though actually quite recent (since mid-last century) – seems firmly embedded in our culture. Who could object to the principle that recognition, privilege, awards, jobs, should go to those that deserve them? The historical alternative has been that these things go to family, or ‘the establishment’, or those from the same social/racial/political classes. Meritocracy is clearly superior, and early champions of meritocracy did so on grounds on increasing social mobility. Markovits notes that in the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite.

However, it is interesting to see that the term meritocracy itself was only coined in 1958, by British Sociologist Michael Dunlop, whose book, The Rise of the Meritocracy was actually a satire designed to warn against the dangers of such a system, which he imagined would eventually engender a revolution! He starts with the obvious attraction: It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit and there’s no arguing with this. The best advert here is probably Singapore, the most remarkable economic success story globally over the last 50 years, where meritocracy has been an explicit foundational principle, in going ‘from third world to first’ in 50 years. But even there (or ‘here’ – full disclosure, I live in Singapore) the meritocratic system is beginning to reflect Dunlop’s satire. He predicted that those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden … into a new social class without room … for others.

And this is the central issue; that meritocracy puts full responsibility on the individual and ignores systemic privilege and advantage. Paulin Straughan from Singapore Management University notes that not everyone starts from the same point in society, but we [are] still reward[ed] in the same manner… the message around you is we’re a meritocratic system, and therefore I deserve this reward that I get… but this hides growing and increasingly obscene inequalities of opportunity.  Markovits makes exactly the same point with regard to the USA: hardworking outsiders no longer enjoy genuine opportunity. According to one study, only one out of every 100 children born into the poorest fifth of households, and fewer than one out of every 50 children born into the middle fifth, will join the top 5 percent. Absolute economic mobility is also declining —the odds that a middle-class child will outearn his parents have fallen by more than half since mid-century—and the drop is greater among the middle class than among the poor.

His conclusion is particularly striking: Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury. To me, there are clear parallels with the Australian primary school I mentioned earlier.  Markovits goes on to make the powerful argument that meritocracy is not only tough on the needy, but that it has also created an appalling taskmaster for the privileged; and it’s worth quoting him at length here:

…those who manage to claw their way to the top must work with crushing intensity, ruthlessly exploiting their expensive education in order to extract a return. Elite universities that just a few decades ago accepted 30 percent of their applicants now accept less than 10 percent. The shift at certain institutions has been even more dramatic: The University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of its applicants as recently as 1995. In 2019 it admitted less than 6 percent. [NB Dunlop wrote: …. Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education].

…A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

This is surely recognisable – the monied classes used to be dilettantes; now they are ruthless perfectionist workaholics. Markovits has two throwaway examples that capture the situation at work:

• Amazon, stock market darling, tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”
• A respondent to a recent Harvard Business School survey of executives proudly insisted, “The 10 minutes that I give my kids at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work.” Ten minutes!

And this, I think, unites what we are seeing in schools and workplaces; that taken to an extreme, the idea of meritocracy – a great idea in principle – can create enormous pressures, and drive highly undesirable behaviours. We need to take a thoughtful view of its unintended consequences, and address them without undermining the basic intention of meritocracy. Even here in Singapore, capital of meritocracy, that sentiment is taking hold; Education minister Ong Ke Yung recently argued that though meritocracy has not failed, it is “under siege” and there is a pressing need to find ways to improve. Recognising the problem has to be the first step.