Max Lawson — Is Meritocracy the new Aristocracy? And the 11 Tricks that Elites use to capture Politics.

In reading this, it is good to realize that feudalism was justified by the religious paradigm then prevalent in Europe. It was based on the great chain of being, with God (the Lord) at the top and the king as God's earthly simulacrum. This implied the divine right of kings, kings being temporal lords.

Today, the great chain of being has been replaced by naturalism as the overarching paradigm owing to science replacing religion as authoritative. The concept of person has been submerged in the concept of the individual. While individuals are unique, persons are identical in sharing the same human nature.

Human beings have two aspects, particular and universal. Individuals are particular, being unique in their accidental properties and relations. Persons are universal, sharing human nature and consequently human essential properties and relations.

When naturalism and individualism become foundation in the overarching paradigm, meritocracy as rule by the evolutionary winners seems as natural as nobility by birth, which at least contained the notion of noblesse oblige, even if it was not always honored.

What is the basis for equality of persons as the foundation for human rights when individualism eclipses personalism? Then, the matter becomes one of positive law that is arbitrary.

The complement of individualism, which only partially true, is personalism. Personalism was assumed by most of the Enlightenment thinkers upon whose works modern democracy and law and based. Personalism is also a key fundamental of social justice and Catholic social teaching in that is emphasizes the inherent dignity of persons that is inviolable morally. According to Kant, “Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.”

This brilliant essay by Peter Adamson, who for many years’ wrote Unicef’s State of the World’s Children report, starts with a very similar story. His argument is a powerful and interesting one. What if meritocracy is simply another form of class oppression, and in some ways an even more dangerous one? It is an excellent, subtle yet powerfully argued paper, and I would really recommend reading the whole thing. He points out that the word meritocracy was originally conceived as negative. It was intended as a warning that the ‘re-stratification of society based on ‘intelligence + application = merit’ would produce a society of arrogant, insensitive winners, and angry desperate losers.

The philosopher john Rawls was very clear on this too: ‘meritocracy still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. It is therefore arbitrary from a moral perspective’....

Firstly we know that a huge amount of what we call merit is based on our upbringing, our parents and our home background…
But secondly, we also know, although it remains contentious, that some intelligence is genetic. It remains contentious as it is used by defenders of inequality- people are rich because they are cleverer- that genetic differences in intelligence explain why certain people are in charge. But Adamson’s point is that even if this is true in some instances, it does not make it morally right.…

At least with class or feudalism, the injustice of the system was very clear and based on obviously flimsy foundations like inherited wealth that did not stand up to scrutiny. With meritocracy, the poor are devalued because they are less clever and less able....

This week our team in Latin America and the Caribbean published a great paper, which looks at 13 instances of pro-rich tax and spending policy and political action in the region and dissects the way in which the state has been ‘captured’ by elite interests.

They break down the process of state capture into 11 different methods deployed by elites, and then look at how many of the 13 cases employed these methods....

For me this final one tips over also into the capture of ideas rather than the capture of the state. The use of resources by elites to change the way people think is perhaps the most powerful tool at their disposal.

We all can see the undue power of elites in everyday life, but this level of analysis of methods and dissection of the levers of influence is rare, and very practical if we want to change things for the better....

Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to Power
Is Meritocracy the new Aristocracy? And the 11 Tricks that Elites use to capture Politics.
Max Lawson, Oxfam GB

William K. Black — Douthat’s Mendacious Meritocracy Myth

The funeral services for President George HW Bush triggered Ross Douthat’s nostalgia for the “aristocratic virtues of the old WASP establishment, and a disappointment with the meritocracy that has risen in its place.” This column ignores his nostalgia and alleged virtues and discusses briefly his bizarre assumption that a “meritocracy” runs America. Given the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and President Trump, I thought that the meritocracy fantasy was dead. We are far closer to anti-meritocracy (a kakistocracy).

 The basis of conservatism is traditionalism, which in the extreme mythologizes the supposed "gold age" of the past and yearns for recapturing it essence through reactionary politics.

New Economic Perspectives
Douthat’s Mendacious Meritocracy Myth
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Extreme Inequality Is Not Driven by the Merit, but by Rent-Seeking and Luck — Sam Pizzigati interviews Didier Jacobs

Jacobs: Because meritocracy rates as the number one argument that defenders of inequality invoke. It is easy to make an ethical case against extreme concentrations of wealth, drawing from the perspectives of Marxism, utilitarianism, or the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls. But going down that road requires people you’re trying to persuade to change their value systems, and that’s difficult.

Debunk the meritocratic argument on its own terms, by contrast, and all the defenders of inequality have left is libertarianism, a value system that has much less appeal among the American public than meritocracy.…

Altogether, my research traces 65 percent of the world’s billionaire wealth to the rents of cronyism, inheritance, and monopoly.

Evonomics
Extreme Inequality Is Not Driven by the Merit, but by Rent-Seeking and Luck
Sam Pizzigati interviews Didier Jacobs

Chris Dillow — Immigration as social mobility

Another provocative post by Chris Dillow and another reason that I continually emphasize that political economy that is not based on the global economy is not only bollox but biased (racist, if you prefer.) For one thing, it ignores and even denies the issues arising from primitive accumulation, which was, contra Locke, principally by force. Liberalism for me but not for you.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Immigration as social mobility
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Chris Dillow — Meritocracy vs freedom

Theresa May said yesterday:

I want Britain to be the world’s great meritocracy – a country where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow.

Of course, we lefties don’t like this: we believe a greater equality of outcome is more feasible and desirable than meritocracy. What’s insufficiently appreciated, however, is that Ms May’s vision should also disquiet the free-market right, because meritocracy is incompatible with freedom.

Just think what a true meritocracy would look like.…

Just deserts and meritocracy are myths of liberal ideology. But May is a conservative, you say. Conservatism is based on economic liberalism as the basis of political liberalism.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Meritocracy vs freedom
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Chris Dillow — Beyond meritocracy

It’s time to ditch the idea of meritocracy.…

This is good and it is also an argument for consensus-based rather than hierarchical control systems, especially as conditions become complicated and even complex, resulting in emergence.

This is actually the argument for market-based economies rather than command economies. But in a modern monetary production economy that is open and in which government plays essential roles, laissez-faire is not an option socially and politically and it would not be feasible economically anyway. So tap the wisdom of crowds politically by broadening and deepening participation.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Beyond meritocracy
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Daniel A. Bell — Democracy's dying days?

A Chinese-speaking Western political theorist living in China analyses the Chinese political system.

While the West regards electoral freedom as foundational, it does not guarantee by any means that someone qualified for the position will be selected. This can be disastrous when the country invested the leader with enormous power and few restrictions on "the decider."

I agree that the power to throw out leaders is an important reason to support electoral democracy. But is it the only, or even the most important, reason? 

Surely it also matters what democratically elected leaders do with their power? For the sake of argument let us imagine that voters repeatedly elect corrupt rulers of below average intelligence who enact policies that serve a tiny group of rich people, wreck the economy and the environment for future generations, and poison social relations.…

My point is there are few if any meritocratic checks in the selection process of top decision-makers. Stein claims that even lawmakers in democratic systems are put through long competitive processes that "ideally" filter out those not motivated for public service and those not competent, but even “ideally” it is possible for top decision-makers to be elected even without any previous experience in government, and in practice many first class duds have been elected by the people.

The Chinese system of governance addresses this deficiency of liberalism.

If it’s a matter of comparing ideals, clearly the method of selecting political leaders in meritocracies via examinations and decades long performance evaluations at lower levels of government has advantages compared to democratic systems that elect leaders in regular competitive elections: only those with an excellent record of past performance at lower levels of government are likely to make it to the highest levels of government, meritocratically selected leaders are less likely to make beginner's mistakes, they can engage in long term planning that considers the interests of future generations without worrying about the next election, and they have more time to think about sensible policies rather than wasting time raising funds and giving the same campaign speech over and over again.…

This is important because China has instituted a meritocratic system of governance based on its own longstanding tradition of Mandarinism where governance is considered to be both a science and an art, hence, to be practiced at the highest levels by those most suitable for the task. It is similar to rising up the corporate ladder in the West. This is a far cry from the dictatorial Communist Party apparatus pictured fancifully in the West, which may have been true at one time but no longer is.

But Ringen claims that political meritocracy is nothing more than a "detail" in China's political system. Political meritocracy may be central to China's history and I marshal extensive evidence to show that the system has been (re)established over the last three decades, but Ringen is committed to the view that the Chinese Communist Party seeks to perfect the power of control. But other "details" — including the workings of the powerful organization department of the CCP that decides on the criteria for the selection and promotion of public officials — are precisely what political thinkers who want to make sense of the Chinese political system should be focused on. If all that can be said is that the CCP is no different in essence than in Mao's day and that the Chinese political system is similar in nature to that of other autocratic systems, it's not just "details" that will be missing from China's political story. Of course the CCP is not likely to enact political reform that leads to its demise, but the fact it has decided to (re)establish a political meritocracy distinguishes China from other non-democratic political systems and it is central to its success over the last three decades.

Liberalism is not only strongly committed to perpetuating its mode of government where it exists but also exporting it where it does not, even at the cost of violent aggression or subversion. This is not an undertaking of "the people" either. It is a policy of the liberal ruling elite.

If Chinese-style political meritocracy continues to innovate and reform, while democracies do nothing more than rest on their laurels and cast aspersion on political alternatives, democracies will eventually lose their hold on people's "hearts and minds" and political meritocracy will become the globally dominant political system. Perhaps one hundred years from now, it will seem blindingly obvious that top political leaders should be selected by means of examinations and performance evaluations at lower levels of government, and we will wonder how it is that human beings ever came to think that one person, one vote was the only legitimate way of selecting political leaders.

The view that the "top-heavy" and "dictatorial" Chinese and Russian governments are going to collapse of their own weight or be overturned by a liberal populist revolt are not tuned to the big picture in either China or Russia.

Countries develop systems of government that are suitable for their particular circumstances and challenges based on historical traditions, present conditions and future expectations. Even the neoliberalism of the United States and the United Kingdom are significantly different from the Ordoliberalism of Germany.

Open Democracy
Democracy's dying days?
Daniel A. Bell | Chair Professor of the Schwarzman Scholar Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing and director of the Berggruen Institute of Philosophy and Culture

Chris Dillow — The heritability red herring

Contra the old conservative argument that merit is heritable and therefore a meritocracy is chiefly hereditary.

Stumbling and Mumbling
The heritability red herring
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Yves Smith — The Unattainable Illusion of Meritocracy

The reason that meritocracy is an unattainable illusion is that it is based on an illusory view of human nature and society — methodological individualism grounded in ontological individualism. The reality is, however, that human beings are not atoms, on one hand, and human society is no longer in the state of nature where the rule of law does not apply.

Homo economicus is an illusion; the reality is homo socialis. Homo socialis is embedded in community. In ancient times, banishment as a punishment was tantamount to a death sentence. Human communities are cultural and institutional artifacts, and modern societies function under the rule of law.

As a result, "a self-made man" is an oxymoron in an interdependent world. Merit and just deserts are of limited significance in the overall picture of human life in community in that the context is much more complex and interdependent than these concepts ordinarily imply, and any theory of human action based on methodological individualism is simplistic.

Naked Capitalism
The Unattainable Illusion of Meritocracy
Yves Smith

Matt Bruenig — “Force” arguments continue to be the rhetorical backwater of idiots

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has a post about Erick Erickson saying what conservatives in general believe about low-income workers. Here is Erickson, version one: 

“What’s going on here — by the way, more than 90% of Americans make more than minimum wage. The minimum wage is mostly people who have failed at life, and high school kids. I don’t mean to be ugly with you people, but…If you’re a thirty-something-year-old person, and you’re making minimum wage, you’ve probably failed at life. It is not that life has dealt you a bad hand. Life does not deal you cards. It is that you’ve failed at life.”

In respectable circles, conservatives can usually keep their discipline together and ensure that they only heap disdain on the lazy, non-working poor. But sometimes they slip up and tell you what they really think. It’s not idleness that they think makes you a garbage failure of a person. Working a hard job preparing food for people to eat, a rather important social function, does not save you from their scorn. All low-income people, whether they are working or not, are regarded as inferior trash people.

It turns out that saying food service workers who are trying to pull down some of that sacred market income are categorical failures at life is generally regarded as quite heinous. So Erickson, version two, was forced to pretend that this is not what he meant:

“If you are working your tail off and doing the best you can and, perhaps you have to rely on family, friends, charity, or government to get by, as I said on Rush’s show, that’s not failing. That’s working. And work is rewarding. But if you are in your thirties, making minimum wage in a career, and standing on the street demanding the government do something about it, yes, yes you have failed at life…In fact, the people most upset with me missed the part about me specifically saying more than once that I was referring to 30 year old minimum wage workers who are blocking traffic demanding the government force their employers to pay them more. Those people have failed at life.”

For starters, surely nobody believes Erickson had any such distinction in his mind initially. The first quote is unmistakably clear. By the time people are 30, they should have gotten into a better job than food service. If they haven’t, that means they are failures. They are not failures because they are protesting. They are failures because they are not doing as well economically as they should be.…

Matt Bruenig — Politics
“Force” arguments continue to be the rhetorical backwater of idiots
Matt Bruenig

Andrew Gelman — Meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the ‘ocracy’

In a meritocracy, the whole point of having “merit” is that you can run things (“ocracy”), and one of the points of running things is that you can get nice things for your family and friends. 

So I think Reich’s argument would be stronger if he would go directly to the social, economic, and political consequences of inherited wealth and skip the bit where he idealizes meritocracy.

The Washington Post
Meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the ‘ocracy’
Andrew Gelman | Professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University

(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

James Surowiecki — Moaning Moguls

Schwarzman isn’t alone. In the past year, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, both compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews. All three eventually apologized, but the basic sentiment is surprisingly common. Although the Obama years have been boom times for America’s super-rich—recent work by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty showed that ninety-five per cent of income gains in the first three years of the recovery went to the top one per cent—a lot of them believe that they’re a persecuted minority. As Mark Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author of a book called “The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite,” told me, “These guys think, We’re the job creators, we keep the markets running, and yet the public doesn’t like us. How can that be?” Business leaders were upset at the criticism that followed the financial crisis and, for many of them, it’s an article of faith that people succeed or fail because that’s what they deserve. Schwarzman recently said that Americans “always like to blame somebody other than themselves for a failure.” If you believe that net worth is a reflection of merit, then any attempt to curb inequality looks unfair.…

If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.

The New Yorker
Moaning Moguls

James Surowiecki

(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

Brad DeLong — Unjust Deserts

We would have a much clearer discussion of issues of inequality and distribution if we would simply stick to considerations of human wellbeing and useful incentives. The rest is meritocratic ideology; and, as the reception of Piketty’s book suggests, that ideology may now have run its course.

Project Syndicate
Unjust Deserts
J. Bradford DeLong | Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

Chris Dillow — Meritocracy, Mobility & Fairness

There's one point Greg Clark makes in The Son Also Rises which strikes me as plain wrong. It's this:

The world is a much fairer place than we intuit. Innate talent, not inherited privilege, is the main source of economic success (p14).

The problem here isn't merely that, as Rawls said, talent is arbitrary from a moral point of view and so should not be the basis for unequal incomes. (In fairness, Clark endorses this view). Instead, it's that a strong correlation between talent - innate or not - and economic success is no indicator of a just society....

Stumbling and Mumbling
Meritocracy, Mobility & Fairness
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Josh Hendrickson — What is Fair?

Josh Hendrickson weighs in on Piketty.

Notice how his argument assumes methodological individualism based on ontological individualism that ignores that human being are situated in society, culture, and institutions, so that individual action is entirely free of social influence. Which is absurd from the point of view of the life sciences, social sciences, history, and psychology.

I am not picking on Professor Hendrickson here, since he does not put this forward as his own view personally. Rather, he presents it as how economists think about these things.

These economists whom he mentions appear to be without a clue about how life actually works in the real world outside their heads. I remember the day when this was said about philosophers, but now economists have taken it over.


The Everyday Economist
What is Fair?

Josh Hendrickson | Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Mississippi

Thomas Frank — There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged

The game is rigged: We elected Obama to hold the 1 percent accountable. So why are they still running everything?

Salon
There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged
Thomas Frank

Blistering indictment of President Obama, who ran to address inequality and immediately switched to opportunity, as the poster boy of "meritocracy" run by and for the Establishment.

The conclusion is pretty much that the ballot box isn't working anymore, and that candidates will say one thing to get elected and then immediately switch into campaign fundraising mode for the next election by soliciting from the large donors from whom most contributions come.

Interesting shout out to Bill Black, too:

It is even more infuriating to realize that the correct answers to the test have been available to Professor Obama all along. Back in September of 2008, when the financial crisis was gathering speed, I was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal; in my efforts to comprehend the disaster, I learned that the nation’s foremost authority on the type of fraud that had wrecked the economy was a former S&L regulator named Bill Black. I went on to ask Bill Black’s opinion probably dozens of times; as the years passed and the crisis deepened, Bill Black went on to be quoted by just about everyone and to become probably the most famous former S&L regulator in the world. His doctrine of “control fraud” is today familiar to anyone trying to understand what went wrong in 2008.

Another group that sought out my friend Bill Black during the crisis year was the Obama campaign. For them he narrated a twelve-minute campaign video, describing at length the involvement of Republican candidate John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, and faulting McCain for choosing a zealous deregulator as his chief economic adviser—“he’s picked the worst possible source of advice.” (You can watch the video here.)

When Obama won the presidency, I assumed that Bill Black would soon be moving to Washington to usher prominent bankers through their perp walks. That’s what opportunity and meritocracy meant, after all. You bring in the guy who understands the problem.
Of course it never happened. His phone never rang. There was no ladder of opportunity for him or anyone like him, precisely because they represented accountability. And Barack Obama, champion of meritocracy, went on instead to pick the second-worst-possible source of advice.

When I ask Bill Black now what these last few years tell us about fairness and meritocracy, he refers me to Gresham’s law. “If you gain a competitive advantage by cheating,” he says, “then you won’t get a meritocracy, you’ll get a system where cheaters prosper and bad ethics drive good ethics out of the market.” Is that what kept him out of Washington, I ask? Yes, in part. It’s “the international race to the bottom, which the administration has largely adopted. ‘We can’t crack down [on the banks, the administration thinks,] they’ll all move to the City of London. We need to have the JOBS bill,’ a godsend to fraudsters, ‘because too many IPOs are being done in China instead of the United States.’ ”

“People like me were moved out long ago,” Black concludes. To a government “trying to signal continuity and friendliness to the banks,” his presence would have been, he supposes, more than a little discordant.

The trifecta of social mobility, equality of opportunity and meritocracy

...if social positions were allocated at random we'd have social mobility and equality of opportunity but not meritocracy. If there were different chances of success, we'd have social mobility but not equality of opportunity and maybe meritocracy or not depending upon how jobs were allocated. And if jobs were allocated by merit, and merit were 100% heritable, we'd have meritocracy but not social mobility.

Read it at Stumbling and Mumbling
Is Equal Opportunity Feasible?

by Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)