Meritocracy is an appalling idea that no one believes in even though everyone cla

ims to
By Andrew Lilico
June 8th, 2013
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100024795/meritocracy-is-an-ap
palling-idea-that-no-one-believes-in-even-though-everyone-claims-to/
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has caused some ripples with his address a
couple of days ago at Princeton. In his speech he offered 10 "suggestions", mir
roring the Ten Commandments. One of these concerned "meritocracy", about which h
e said the following:
We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. P
utting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely m
eritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternativ
es. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in
which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luc
kiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest
in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other wa
ys difficult to enumerate these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The
only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be c
onsidered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also h
ave the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of
the world, and to share their luck with others.
This led to a rather peculiar exchange on the Today programme yesterday between
Toby Young, whose father originally coined the term "meritocracy" (to disagree w
ith it), and Helen Lewis. What I found particularly odd about the Radio 4 interv
iew was that it centred around the idea of how those that flourished most in a m
eritocracy, on account of their biological advantages, might have duties to assi
st the less genetically endowed. The reason that it's a peculiar debate is that
if the less genetically endowed are permitted to be assisted to do better than t
heir pure genetic inheritance implies, by definition we do not have a "meritocra
cy".
I shan't beat around the bush. In my view, a meritocracy (or, if you prefer the
terminology, a system of "equal opportunity") is one of the worst, most wicked c
onceptions of society ever devised. In a meritocracy, all that counts for your s
uccess or failure is your biological merits. If you are beautiful. clever, healt
hy, good-tempered and naturally hard-working, you will (and you ought to) succee
d, and if you are ugly, stupid, unhealthy, bad-tempered and naturally lazy you w
ill fail, and no one is allowed to help you. In a world of equal opportunity, al
l the usual systems and social bonds that help the less biologically advantaged
to get ahead family connections, church, charitable patronage, pity, brute good
fortune are stripped away and called wicked. In the morally inverted world of eq
ual opportunity, helping your children to get their first job is what bad parent
s do. In such a land, policymakers regard an educational system as having weakne
sses if it facilitates loving parents getting their children a head start on tho
se children whose parents neglect them. In such a world, inheriting good looks i
s perfect; but inheriting bad looks and money means your wealth must be confisca
ted by death duties and you left to fend and fail for yourself.
No one actually believes in the Nietzschean dystopia that a world of truly equal
opportunity would represent. All of us, in practice, believe we should be able
to teach our children what we know, or give that blinded solider a part in the v
illage play whether or not he's the best actor, or fund that eager-but-poor Tanz
anian youth's investment scheme even though other investments nearer to home mig
ht yield higher returns. But even though none of us actually believes in equal o

pportunity, and would be appalled if we witnessed it in practice, we still mouth

an attachment to it and because of that it infects policymaking. Just this week
we have seen the government's social mobility tsar tell us we should not try to
organise jobs for our children. Nick Clegg said something similar about interns
hips a couple of years ago. In a notorious speech in 2007 David Willetts argued
that a weakness of the current system which he considered particularly amplified
in the case of grammar schools was the scope it gives for middle-class parents
to enable their children to do better by focusing more effort and resources on t
hem. (He did not, as some commentators at the time implied, criticise the parent
s themselves for doing this. But he did, squarely and unambiguously, consider th
e education system weaker to the extent that it granted more opportunity for thi
s.)
It is just as foolish and wrong to reduce aggregate opportunity in the name of m
aking opportunity more equal as it is to reduce aggregate income in the name of
making income more equal. We want a society in which there is an abundance of op
portunity. But what must be understood is that the creation of opportunity typic
ally makes opportunity less equal. If a wealthy person picks out a poor person f
or patronage, the beneficiary of that patronage has a huge boost in her opportun
ity relative to others. If I love my children and help them to flourish, part of
their flourishing comes from my love, not from their merit, and that means my c
hildren's opportunity is boosted relative to other children that might have grea
ter biological gifts.
That opportunity is not equal is not a weakness of our world it is not a problem
to be solved, or even an area for us to "make progress in". Meritocracy is not
a sadly unattainable ideal. It is a monstrous idea that has attained the status
of shibboleth.