What is Meritocracy For?

It's not about justice or fairness; it's about results

The first IQ test was developed by Alfred Binet to track students in France’s newly-universal school system. It was adopted as part of a larger secularization push to replace religious schools, and its purpose was to decide who would likely need more assistance, and would therefore be segregated from the main body of student so as not to slow general class instruction down. I believe the first mass use of IQ tests in the United States was by the Army in World War I, for whom Robert Yerkes developed a test to sort recruits and identify those with officer potential. The American armed forces still use tests derived from these early IQ tests to qualify and sort recruits. From the beginning, then, the purpose of intelligence testing was to sort the population so as to maximize the use of its talents, particularly to win wars.

I bring this up because, over the course of time, the popular understanding of this purpose has evolved in an especially pernicious direction, to the belief that our relative worth (rather than our pragmatic utility) is a function of our aptitude and, particularly, our intelligence as measured in standardized tests. Therefore, this warped logic goes, those who do well on such tests deserve higher status, greater deference, and the material benefits of the good life. Most importantly, they deserve to rule. This misbegotten idea is well-expressed by the odious and inelegant term meritocracy.

As “autocracy” means “rule by the (singular) self,” “aristocracy” means “rule by the best,” and “democracy” means “rule by the people,” “meritocracy” means “rule by the deserving.” In a strict sense this is a tautology; of course those who “deserve” to rule should rule—but who deserves to rule? As used by both its advocates and its critics, though, “meritocracy” means a system of selection of applicants for positions based on an objective assessment of their skill, talent and aptitude for said positions, rather than based on seniority, political or familial connections, or any number of other possible criteria that, relatively speaking, can be construed as corrupt, compromised, and otherwise undeserving.

Phrased that way, it’s an idea that has cropped up over and over in history, usually with impressive results. When generals are chosen for their proven ability to win battles rather than for being loyal sycophants of the ruler, or fanatical devotees of the party’s ideology, the country is more likely to win its wars. The results are what have mattered, to their contemporaries and to the verdict of history, and not the justice with which they operated. Yet, I suspect that to both the generals in question and, even more so, the soldiers they command, a sense of justice is nonetheless in play. It feels better to be given command because you are genuinely considered the best commander than because you are the emperor’s nephew; it feels much better to know that you are being commanded by the best general than to anticipate putting your life on the line to feed the emperor’s nephew’s vanity.

So far, I’ve been talking about a sense of “merit” that measures proven ability through experience. But modern bureaucracies, whether educational, military, corporate or what-have-you, clearly see value in starting this process earlier, prior to any important experience. Hence the resort to testing for aptitude. The practice was a signature feature of imperial China, which was governed by a massive bureaucracy selected on the basis of examinations of applicants’ facility with classical Chinese texts, but over the past century testing has become a central aspect of how America selects its leadership class. Again, the purpose had nothing to do with justice or desert, but with practical results. Yet, while there’s a manifest artificiality to these tests—they’re assessing a much narrower skill set than is assessed by the experience of actual life—the very fact that they are tests, that they pit people against each other in a contest for the highest score, naturally suggests that people who get the highest scores deserve something as a reward.

That’s why, I think, there’s still a great deal of cachet to the idea of meritocracy even among people, whether on the right or on the left, who rail against the culture that our meritocracy has produced. Most of our critiques of meritocracy focus on the imperfections of its implementation—whether, on the one hand, the tests are biased and need to be supplemented or replaced by other forms of assessment or, on the other hand, the test is the best, most-objective means of measuring merit which ought not be watered down—rather than against the idea itself.

But in fact the whole idea is anathema to self-government. We should not be ruled by those who deserve to rule; we should be ruled by ourselves, because we are a democracy. Even at a subsidiary level of particular institutions, though, the idea of “merit” in the sense of desert is not and should not be the matter at issue. When institutions engage in this kind of selection process, they are—or ought to be—doing it not as a matter of justice, of handing out rewards to those who deserve them, but to improve the performance of the organization towards its understood ends. That’s the only assessment that truly matters. Desert has nothing to do with it.

Is it possible to banish that sense of desert from the process of meritocratic selection? I don’t know. But it seems rather important to me that we do so. David Brooks had a column in The New York Times recently lamenting, in so many words, that the winners of the meritocratic process have become a class, insular and separate from the rest of the country, possessed of a normal instinct for self-preservation and with interests that can conflict with the general interest—conflicts that, as is normal for elites, they are blind to. So much so normal, and there are, broadly speaking, two ways to respond to the decay of an elite: either you open it up to new blood that had been excluded (the children of titled aristocrats marry the children of wealthy industrialists; Harvard lifts its quota on Jewish applicants), or you overthrow it in favor of a new elite entirely.

How would these remedies apply to meritocracy, though? Yes, Harvard could let in more students of Asian descent with high SAT scores, as the Supreme Court plainly wants them to, but would that really address the problems of insularity and self-regard that Brooks describes? I don’t see how. And yes, you could overthrow the meritocracy entirely in favor of an elite chosen on some other basis—but what basis? Unless the tests used by the meritocrats really are worthless, your counter-elite is going to be negatively selected in a pretty severe way, with predictably negative consequences for basic performance in office, an endemic problem for populist movements around the world.

Which brings me back around to the cultural question. Can we sever meritocracy from the idea of merit, of desert, and inculcate a humbler ethos in the winners of the selection process, and if so, how?

I have some preliminary thoughts—but I’ll save them for a future post.