Log in
After I made some fun of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for putting his two twentysomething sons in charge of financial behemoth Cantor Fitzgerald, Andrew Gelman and Mark Palko reminded me that they have been waging a lonely fight against the whole theoretical concept of “meritocracy” for many years now.
Back in 2007, Gelman noted that James Flynn — the discoverer of the Flynn effect in re IQ scores — had pointed out why the concept is itself practically incoherent:
[Flynn] summarizes some data showing that America has not been getting more meritocratic over time. He then presents the killer theoretical argument:
[quoting Flynn]: The case against meritocracy can be put psychologically: (a) The abolition of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for the abolition of inequality and privilege; (b) the persistence of materialist-elitist values is a prerequisite for class stratification based on wealth and status; (c) therefore, a class-stratified meritocracy is impossible.
Gelman translates this into straightforward practical/political terms:
Basically, “meritocracy” means that individuals with more merit get the goodies. From the American Heritage dictionary: “A system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement.” As Flynn points out, this leads to a contradiction: to the extent that people with merit get higher status, one would expect they would use that status to help their friends, children, etc, giving them a leg up beyond what would be expected based on their merit alone.
In other words, a class-based society in which merit is the defining characteristic of class status is ultimately an oxymoron, practically speaking. Individuals may have to a greater or lesser extent themselves “earned” their power and privilege via their own “merit,” but they inevitably use their power and privilege to favor their families in particular, and their friends and fellow network members more generally, because that’s the whole point of having power and privilege in a hierarchically stratified, aka class-based, society.
Twelve years ago Palko pointed to what I’m going to call “soft” nepotism, which is probably much more prevalent than the crude nepotism of for example Donald Trump’s imbecile sons being rich and famous people:
The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there’s one paragraph I’d like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.
[Quoting TNR] After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.
The soft nepotism here is that there’s no reason to doubt that that this prodigy of successful networking is talented and hard-working, aka Full of Merit:
You’ll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being “ambitious and hard-working,” and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.
Soft nepotism is absolutely endemic to the American version of meritocracy. Basically it works like this: almost everybody who goes to HYPS these days or similar (Williams, Swarthmore etc.) is very smart and very hard working. You do still get occasional instances of crude nepotism, like Charles Kushner straight up bribing the Harvard Corporation to allow Little Jared to attend its college, but for the most part entrance into these places is quite meritocratic, in the sense that the relevant filters are for ability rather than familial status. But the problem is that those filters themselves are reflections of the ability of people from the Right Families to manipulate the system, so that Connor and Maddie can get in, via their individual “merit,” that has been excruciatingly cultivated from birth by their parents. Lauren Rivera’s great bookPedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs is a fascinating ethnography of exactly how this kind of “merit” works, and work it does.
This is all related to what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” The idea that talented and hardworking people are scarce is just facially preposterous if you say it out loud, which is why people generally don’t. An exception that I find particularly amusing is The Atlantic magazine’s EIC, Jeffrey Goldberg, who had this to say a few years ago when he was trying to explain/rationalize why so few Atlantic cover articles were written by women:
It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
Goldberg’s job, as he sees or at least saw it, is to nurture the extraordinarily rare woman journalist who can be transformed into someone who has The Necessities (h/t Al Campanis) to do something like create a unified field theory of physics write an Atlantic cover story. As I commented at the time:
The merit myth exists to justify the maintenance of extremely hierarchical anti-egalitarian social structures. If there are 10 or 100 or 1000 times as many people who have the ability and desire to, say, write cover stories for prestigious magazines, or to attend hyper-elite colleges, or to be captains or at least lieutenants of industry, or to be good Supreme Court justices, or to star in a Hollywood movie, or to write the Great American novel, as there are social slots available for people to fill these roles (and there are), then you’ve got to create sorting mechanisms that give the impression that these slots aren’t being handed out arbitrarily, or worse yet on the basis of pre-existing social privilege.
That’s where Jeffrey Goldberg and his search for ultra-rare gynecological journalistic muscles comes in.
Goldberg’s mission, as he understands it, is to perform the extraordinarily difficult job of finding people who can write good Atlantic cover stories. He thinks this job is hard because there are so few such people. It is a hard job — but for exactly the opposite reason. There are enormous numbers of extremely gifted hard-working creative etc. American journalists out there, many of them working for nothing or close to it, for reasons that are too obvious to belabor.
All this applies equally to actors, writers, aspiring disrupters of the market for whatever, potential HYPS undergraduates, and so forth.
It’s a big country. So what to do? The answer is you come up with a bunch of largely phony metrics for sorting out sheep of supposedly unicorn-like rarity from the vast multitudes of goats.
These include things like whether somebody has a degree or preferably degrees from super-elite educational institutions; whether somebody is related to somebody already in the business; whether somebody seems “polished” enough to make clients comfortable, etc.
The merit myth is critical to the maintenance of our phony meritocracy. Gelman’s and Palko’s related points is that meritocracies must inevitably be phony, at least on their own ideologically self-justifying terms, given the way that social power and privilege actually work.
And the underlying historical irony here is that, before it became a term of approbation, “meritocracy” was coined by academics who were using it derisively for pretty much these very reasons.
The post The varieties of nepotistic experience appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
reply
