The idea of meritocracy is born from the belief that it gives everyone a chance at success.
People are chosen based on accomplishments rather than being bestowed with unfair advantages such as social class or inherited wealth.
In modern society, however, meritocracy has become a mechanism for transferring wealth from one generation to the next, far from impartial or fair.
Those who come out successful or wealthy become the ‘elite’.
This is not to say that people always pay their way to get through.
On the surface, we seem to live in something like a meritocracy. People must crack exams to get into top colleges, pass interviews for reputed companies and gain fancy certificates to signal prowess.
Reasonably, people ‘get ahead’ because they show results and genuinely achieve things. However, do we realise the moral faculty behind meritocracy? Does the system give everyone a chance at success?
The Ivy leagues and higher education colleges have a disproportionately high representation of students from the top quantiles of the income distribution. Kids of rich parents tend to perform better on the ‘merits’.
High-income families can spend enormous sums of money on prestigious kindergartens, tuitions and resources that help ace the game’s rules. Meritocracy works in their favour.
Inequality is exacerbated at each step, passing from generation to generation. The advantage of the previous stage empowers them to ‘win’ when it is time to evaluate on merits.
Top schools and tuitions enable good scores that help students gain admission to top universities- these in turn, open doors to high-paying jobs that lead to more wealth.
People who benefit and transition to ‘elite’ status are not undeserving. They did work hard, competed and succeeded.
However, they did so in a system that is favourable at least and rigged at worst.
The system gives a huge advantage to people who are better than others at specific things that are not universal or even worth doing. Competitive exams and speed-based assessments are a case in point – they are efficient evaluation systems that require people to master specific skills to signal competence.
Those who can master the skills stand to get rich and preserve the advantage for posterity.
While this cuts off many people from the game, the competition can be toxic for those who win. Each year it gets more intense, and the points of differentiation are smaller than ever.
Under constant evaluation and testing, people must shape themselves to pass the test. Large industries work to help people ace the game – and emerge meritorious.
The result? A zero-sum game that harms everybody.
The poor can’t access, and the ‘elite’ negotiate stressful circumstances with a diminishing margin of error. The advantages of those who win are closely linked to the exclusion of others.
The democratisation of access through digital means could improve access to tools and knowledge and empower more people to build skills that can help them succeed. But the game remains the same – it only gets more competitive.
Merit that stands true to its moral intuition is not merely a placeholder or a signal for values or skills. It is true selection based on what someone could do or be capable of doing.
While the rules of the current merit game might be the most time efficient and also practical, they can’t necessarily be called meritocratic if they hinge on exclusion. Not everyone gets a shot.
The game allows preference to attributes that selectors can recognise or relate to, or what they might narrowly consider low risk.
We perhaps need to rethink what merit means.