Meritocracy: A Qualified Defense

Meritocracy Defined and Justified

Meritocracy is sometimes understood quite narrowly, as a principle governing the way in which people are appointed to jobs and other positions. However, for reasons I will shortly explain, I believe it is better interpreted more widely, as made up of three connected principles. The first prescribes how advantaged social positions—most notably jobs and scarce educational opportunities—should be allocated. They should go to those who demonstrate that they have the qualities that best equip them to carry out the tasks the position requires. That is the hiring-by-merit principle. The second principle is fair equality of opportunity. This is intended to govern the background conditions under which individuals acquire the skills and qualifications that will count as merit for purposes of the first principle. Everyone is to have an equal chance to acquire these skills and qualifications, so social institutions such as the family and the education system should be shaped such that the opportunities available to each young person are (as far as possible) the same. The third principle applies to the rewards—income and other such benefits—that attach to the positions covered by the first. It requires that these rewards should be commensurate with the social value that the officeholder creates—the more value, in terms of goods and services, that the incumbent produces when carrying out the tasks that the position requires, the higher their remuneration should be (and, a fortiori, all equivalent positions should be paid the same, so long as they are competently discharged).

This is a broader definition of meritocracy than is usually proposed. Even those who accept that hiring by merit and equality of opportunity naturally complement one another may think that the issue of fair reward should be kept separate. However, it seems that from a social justice perspective it is the prospect of people being fairly rewarded for exercising their talents and skills that leads us to demand that everyone should have the equal opportunity to develop those talents and skills and that employers should select candidates who can be expected to earn the rewards attached to the jobs they are offering. Or to put it the other way round, if it were largely an arbitrary matter how people were rewarded for their work, it would matter much less that they were assigned to their positions on arbitrary grounds. Life would simply be one giant lottery in terms of how you got your job and what you were paid for doing it (cynics might say this is more or less how things stand now). Even though each is valuable in its own right, the three components of meritocracy as I am defining it support one another, in the sense that each serves to enhance the value of the others. For instance, hiring by merit becomes more important than it would otherwise be when people are fairly paid for doing the jobs they are hired to do.

The strength of the link may depend, however, on how we value meritocracy itself. I will distinguish a fairness rationale for meritocracy from an efficiency rationale. To justify meritocracy, the fairness rationale appeals to the idea of desert to justify meritocracy. Young people deserve the skills and qualifications they acquire through the education system so long as they had similar opportunities to gain those skills and qualifications—that is, so long as they had access to teaching and other resources of equivalent value to those available to others with similar natural endowments. ⁸ If A gets better exam results than B simply because they were better taught than B, A doesn’t deserve those results relative to B. But if the system is fair up to this point, hiring by merit ensures that those entering the job market get the jobs that they deserve. To deserve a job is to have the qualities and dispositions that will enable their bearer to carry out the requirements of the job as these have been specified. Jobs aren’t deserved as rewards. ⁹ They are deserved as opportunities to earn rewards, which is why, as indicated above, the principle of hiring by merit gains additional weight when the benefit packages attached to jobs are commensurate with the value they create (see D. Miller 1999, ch. 8). If all three principles are fulfilled, the aim of Theresa May and others to bring about a society in which the advantages people receive throughout their lives will depend entirely on their own abilities, together with their efforts and choices, would be realized.

Meritocracy looks different when seen through the glass of efficiency, as economists in particular are wont to do. ¹⁰ There are obvious productive gains to be won by providing people with the opportunity to develop their talents, choosing the best-qualified candidates for jobs, and then paying them according to the value they create for the company or institution. Anything else looks like a waste of potential. But efficiency-based meritocracy will permit practices that fairness-based meritocracy will disallow. Think, for example, of potential employees whose productivity will be lowered by the hostile reactions of their coworkers, who may try covertly to sabotage what those employees are trying to do. ¹¹ Taking the hostility as given, efficiency would recommend not taking on workers who are likely to provoke such responses. From a fairness point of view, in contrast, there is reason to discount reactions when these are directed at personal features that are irrelevant to the job in hand (such as skin color or sexuality). People are not made less deserving merely because their expected performance level is lowered by the prejudiced reactions of others.

Another contrast emerges when we ask how salary levels should be determined in a meritocracy. As indicated above, the fairness view recommends focusing on the value that the jobholder creates. An efficiency view, by contrast, will ask what level of incentive is necessary to induce the desired level of performance. Both views will condemn payments that are in effect rent that the officeholder can extract by virtue of some special feature of her person or position (celebrity status, for example), but the efficiency view will go further in this direction by paying less to people who are committed to the job (and therefore willing to work at a lower salary), assuming that their motivation can be detected. These contrasts tell in favor of the fairness view: Certainly, it is this view that appears to underpin popular support for meritocracy. ¹²

Having now outlined the main features of meritocracy as a social ideal, we can ask what its scope of application should be. How far should we go in requiring that our society should conform to the three principles just specified? A narrow scope would restrict meritocracy to the public sector of the economy (i.e., to those employed in local or national government or by other public bodies operating on a nonmarket basis), but given the way in which the private sector is mainly organized (i.e., in companies where people are appointed to formally defined roles), we have good reason to apply the principles there as well. ¹³ However, meritocratic ideas cannot be applied straightforwardly to the self-employed or also perhaps to those working in small partnerships where the personal relationship between the partners is the key to their success. It’s not that desert-based principles of justice cannot be applied in these cases. As I shall suggest later, there is no general reason to think that people cannot deserve the receipts they receive in competitive markets. The problem is that if people are not being appointed to defined positions, the idea of hiring by merit cannot get a grip (there is still room to employ a weaker antidiscrimination principle that prohibits people being selected on specific grounds such as race or gender).

Recognizing that the scope of meritocracy can and should be restricted in this way may help to appease libertarians who see it as inimical to personal freedom. Egalitarians may similarly be mollified by pointing out that meritocracy does not require that all social goods should be allocated on meritocratic grounds. On the contrary, in order to achieve equality of opportunity, it seems essential that there should be a set of basic goods available to everyone regardless of how they (or their parents) have performed in the economic sphere: Education and health care are two obvious examples. What we should be aiming for is what the sociologist Daniel Bell (1972, 68) once called a “well-tempered meritocracy,” in which the meritocratic distribution of jobs and rewards is counterbalanced by social sectors in which other principles of justice—egalitarian or need-based—govern the distribution of goods and services. ¹⁴

Desert, Natural Talent, and the Family

I noted above that, although meritocracy can in part be defended on grounds of efficiency, the strongest arguments in its favor appeal to the idea of desert: Meritocracy is fair because, when it operates as it should, people deserve the advantages they receive for developing and deploying their talents. It is a curious fact that this idea of desert remains very popular with the general public while being largely repudiated by philosophers, at least as concerns issues of social justice. ¹⁵ Critics of meritocracy are likely to challenge it by saying that, even if the system works as it should, it still rewards people for having “morally arbitrary” natural talents. Here, for example is Michael Sandel:

My having this or that talent is not my doing but a matter of good luck, and I do not merit or deserve the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck. Meritocrats acknowledge that I do not deserve the benefits that arise from being born into a wealthy family. So why should other forms of luck—such as having a particular talent—be any different? (Sandel 2020, 122–123)

Sandel is presumably referring here to innate talent (the capacities we are born with) since it would be implausible to deny that the particular abilities we acquire through education and so forth are simply a matter of luck—that the capacity to do university-level mathematics, for example, is something that just descends upon a person at random. But even in the case of innate talent, the normative position is much more contestable than Sandel recognizes. In assuming that luck always preempts desert, he also makes an assumption about desert itself, namely that I can only deserve some outcome when I am personally responsible for all of the factors that enable me to produce that outcome—or at least for all of the factors that aren’t equally available to everyone (like living on a planet with breathable air). But this is an extremely stringent condition that would rule out almost all of the desert judgments we would normally make. Suppose, for example, that I deserve to be selected to play for the school soccer team (I’m good at football). Clearly, I cannot claim credit for the fact that the school has a soccer team in the first place—that was none of my doing. In that sense, it’s good luck that I have the chance to display my footballing skills in a competitive setting. But this does nothing to undermine the claim that I deserve to be selected.

It’s important to be clear about the scope of that judgment. When I say I deserve to be selected, what I mean is that the footballing skills and other assets that I possess put me among the 11 best footballers in the school and, by implication, that something will have gone wrong if a biased coach chooses his personal favorite ahead of me. I do not, to repeat, deserve that there should be a football team in my school; had the school chosen to play rugby instead, I might be frustrated, but I would have no desert claim against the school. Nor can I make any comparative desert claim across a wider circle of peers unless there is some practice or institution that puts us in competition with one another (like a national Young Footballer of the Year award). Suppose my identical twin brother goes to another school that has no soccer team (we practice together in the evenings). How, someone might ask, can I deserve to be selected for a football team when he does not, given that our skill set is the same? This question misunderstands the kind of desert claim that is being made here. There is another kind of desert claim that we sometimes make or are tempted to make: an absolute claim about what is fitting for someone to have or be that makes no reference to circumstances or prevailing institutions. But when meritocracy is defended as socially just by appeal to desert, the desert being invoked needn’t and shouldn’t be of the latter kind. The relevant desert claim is about the advantages that people should receive relative to one another as participants in the same socioeconomic system. As we will see, critics who attack meritocracy on the grounds that many of the features of that system are contingent and conclude on that basis that people cannot deserve the advantages it provides are missing the point. They are holding it to a standard that it does not aspire to meet. ¹⁶

So far this is just a general point about the relationship between desert and luck: Certain kinds of contingency (such as going to a school that runs a football team) do not undermine desert claims of the comparative kind used to justify meritocracy. ¹⁷ But what of the more specific kind of luck involved in being born with natural talents that can later be developed into the skills that open up educational and employment opportunities? That being born physically strong, highly intelligent, or with a musical ear is a matter of luck is in one sense incontestable, where what is meant is that the person who has these attributes can’t claim to be responsible for having them. But from another point of view, having these attributes cannot be regarded as merely accidental, since they make their bearer the person that he or she is. Replace those natural talents, and you do not have the same person, although one with fewer opportunities for future development, but simply a different person altogether. So, the question, “What would DM have become if he had not had the capacities he was born with?” is a nonsense question. In contrast, it does at least make some sense to ask what would have become of DM if he had been raised in a less wealthy family than the one he was actually raised in. (I’ll come back in a moment to the question of whether we can treat family membership as simply external to the person in the way that family assets are). So, we have to treat native talents as constitutive of the person, not as adventitious features that a particular person might or might not have possessed. And this is relevant to claims about desert, since such claims are grounded in the actual performances (or sometimes potential performances) of flesh-and-blood agents who require their developed talents in order to perform.

That concludes my brief discussion of the claim that meritocracy cannot be fair because a person’s success will depend in part on their genetically transmitted natural talent. What, next, about the role of the family? Critics of meritocracy often cite the evidence showing that advantaged social positions are largely transmitted from one generation to the next. If family background, independent of genetics, partly determines how someone will later fare in the competition for jobs and other advantaged positions, does that constitute a significant obstacle to meritocracy so long as the family survives in some form?

My response here is that we need to draw a line between those things that families do for children that are constitutive of them as persons and those that are better understood as providing opportunities, or lack thereof, for the persons so constituted, though exactly where to draw that line is not straightforward. ¹⁸ When parents encourage children to becomes readers or to enjoy music, sport, or nature, when they form their personalities through their parenting style or by setting examples of how to behave, when they pass on cultural norms and values (religious beliefs, for example, or more generally beliefs about what is important in life and what isn’t), they are constituting their children as people of a certain kind. On the other hand, when they help children with their homework, provide them with top-quality sports equipment, or take them on foreign holidays so that they can practice their language skills, they are expanding their opportunities in a way that is almost certain to breach the equality-of-opportunity principle if other parents do not or cannot do likewise.

But, someone might ask, doesn’t the family’s role in constituting the person also breach equality of opportunity, since some families do a better job than others of equipping their offspring with the capacities and cultural attributes that lead to later success? This is not a straightforward matter, since it depends on how equality of opportunity is defined. If, following Rawls (2001, 44), we say that it requires that “those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of their social class of origin,” ¹⁹ then its implications will depend on how we identify someone’s level of talent and motivation: Is the relevant bearer of these attributes the person as constituted by the family she was raised in as well as by her genes, or do we try to strip away the family’s influence and counterfactually determine what talent and motivation she would have had in its absence?

The question, however, is whether that counterfactual can be meaningfully constructed. It is of course possible to speculate about how a particular person might have turned out if he or she had been raised in another family, and researchers who study identical twins adopted by different families are able to put some flesh on these bones by estimating, in general terms, the relative significance of genetic endowment and family membership for a child’s personality and capacities (Rowe 1994; Harris 1998). But since there is an wide array of family types, whether understood in terms of the amount of time that the parent(s) devote to their children, the values they try to instill, and so forth, there is no clear baseline that could be used to judge whether a person has been relatively advantaged or disadvantaged by being raised in the family he was actually raised in (remembering that we are not here considering the material advantages or external opportunities that may flow from the family relationship, but the impact of the relationship itself on the child’s future capacities). There is, in other words, no “average family” that we can use as a benchmark to assess whether a child has been unfairly benefited by being raised in a better-than-average one. ²⁰ In that case, the only intelligible way to understand equality of opportunity is to treat the character-forming role of the family as constitutive of the person and take the person whose opportunities are to be equalized in the outside world as the person formed in part through being raised in a particular family.

So, when assessing the intergenerational transmission of advantage through the family from a meritocratic perspective, we need to distinguish between different mechanisms of transmission: material transmission (inherited wealth, etc.), which meritocracy condemns; genetic transmission, which it accepts; and what we might call personality transmission, which covers the many ways in which interactions within the family shape the child’s development. The third is the difficult case precisely because of its many dimensions: We have somehow to separate what the family does for its offspring that counts as constitutive—it forms their identity, values, and aspirations—from what the family does for its offspring that counts as providing (better or worse) opportunities for their latent abilities to develop. It is only in the latter case that state or civil society agencies have reason to pursue remedial policies in the name of promoting equality of opportunity. There is no doubt that the continuing existence of the family is a challenge for meritocracy, but we shouldn’t exaggerate its size by conflating the different ways in which the identity of a child’s parents will affect their life prospects.

The Alleged Artificiality of Merit

I now turn to consider the second main charge against meritocracy in the recent literature, one that targets the conception of “merit” that is supposed to govern access to jobs and so forth and the rewards attached to them. The claim is that this is socially constructed so as to benefit an elite class of “meritocrats,” while also enabling them to pass on their advantages to their children by ensuring, via privileged access to the education system, that they too will pass as “meritorious.”

To substantiate this charge, the first move made by the critics of meritocracy is to point out that there are no transhistorical standards of merit. The personal attributes that would count as merit in a hunter-gatherer society, for example, are entirely different from the attributes that we regard as meritorious today. Merit criteria reflect not just the general level of technological development, but the specific institutions that we have created. To use one of Markovits’s examples, the skills that define an outstanding pitcher in baseball are entirely dependent on the rules and techniques of the game (Markovits 2019, 264). If baseball had never been invented and other sports had taken its place, then the ability to throw a curve ball would be like the ability to skim stones, possibly something to impress your friends with, but not the kind of merit that brings with it high status and million-dollar salaries.

This claim about the contingency of merit is well worn, but by itself it has little critical force. What counts as merit in a particular society will depend on what people in that society choose to value, but so what? The person who is now a top-class pitcher grew up knowing that millions of people are baseball fans and will pay to watch top-quality games, so he trained hard to develop his skills in that direction. Imagine his twin brother made the eccentric choice to school himself in long-range spear-throwing and now complains that it is only an unfortunate contingency that he doesn’t live in a hunter-gatherer society where his ability would be highly valued: How much attention would we (or should we) pay to his complaint?

To cast doubt on the idea of merit, the critic must do more than point to contingency of that straightforward kind. She needs to show that merit criteria have been constructed in such a way that they correspond to nothing of real social value. Two main lines of criticism emerge in the recent literature. The first points out that, in market contexts, the merit displayed by the supplier of goods or services is judged by the willingness of people to pay for them, but there is no reason to assume that willingness to pay tracks the real social value of these goods and services. People may choose to buy things that are, in an objective sense, worthless or even harmful. Nonetheless, by a kind of back projection, the merit of the people who produce them appears to be confirmed by the magnitude of their receipts.

This line of criticism, which is especially prominent in the work of Sandel, fastens on to a long-standing critique of market economies in general, going back at least as far as the work of Frank Knight (1923). Several things are worth saying in response (see also D. Miller 1999, ch. 9). First, it misses the target in the case of all those employed in the public sector of the economy. In that sector, public authorities decide how many refuse collectors or teachers need to be employed and what pay rates are needed to attract suitably qualified staff. These judgments are not infallible, but they are certainly collective judgments about the social value of different kinds of work. Second, this critique of the market presupposes that we are able to make ethical judgments about different forms of consumption—that satisfying A’s desire to read trashy airport novels is less valuable than satisfying B’s desire to read challenging works of philosophy. Any liberal who believes that public policy should be neutral as between personal conceptions of the good will resist allowing judgments of that kind to drive it. Third, and building on the second response, the possibility of consumers misvaluing goods and services does not pose a problem for the idea of meritocracy itself. Consider a society in which such misvaluing is widespread but which, using its (allegedly) defective conception of merit, still adheres to the principles laid out above—hiring by merit, and so forth. This society qualifies as a meritocracy and should be valued for the way it treats its individual members, even though we may fault it on other grounds. Meritocracy isn’t a comprehensive social ideal: It is a (partial) theory of social justice, and it’s therefore consistent to praise a society for being meritocratic while criticizing it for valuing the wrong kind of achievements (think, for instance, of a militaristic society that nevertheless goes to great lengths to ensure that people have equal opportunities to reach the top ranks of its armed services).

The second line of criticism argues that in, contemporary societies, merit has increasingly been given a “technocratic” definition. Critics such as Markovits and Sandel present a narrative that runs as follows: First, merit becomes associated with the possession of academic credentials. Young people acquire specific skills—skills in data analysis, for example—through attending school and university, and especially elite universities (the longer they remain there the more “meritorious” they typically become). Released on to the labor market and hired by top firms in fields such as law, finance, and management consulting, they are able to shape the way these firms operate so as to render indispensable the skills that they themselves possess. For example, the technologies that the firms adopt require super-skilled people to operate them. Since they can command high salaries, these highly skilled alumni of elite universities are able to ensure that their offspring attend the right schools and colleges, such that they too become “meritorious” in due course. As Markovits puts it:

The value of the meritocratic virtues depends on context not just generally but in fact on a very specific context. Both the educations that now create elite skills and the forms of production that make these skills so valuable on the contemporary labor market can exist only at the end of a long cycle of feedback loops in which elite training and the skill fetish reciprocally encourage each other. Elite skills can exist and can command elite incomes only by sitting atop massive antecedent economic inequality. The meritocratic virtues, that is, are artifacts of economic inequality in just the fashion in which the pitching virtues are artifacts of baseball. (Markovits 2019, 264)

As we have seen, the fact that the skills of the baseball pitcher are an artifact of the rules of baseball in no way diminishes the merit of an excellent pitcher. So, it must be the interconnection with economic inequality that devalues technocratic merit. Markovits’s claim is not that the specialized elite skills he describes create no socially valuable output; it is rather that much the same output could be produced through a flatter organizational structure. To illustrate, consider his analysis of fundamental changes in the way that the mortgage market for domestic housing works (Markovits 2019, 164–169). Once upon a time, he says, decisions about mortgages were made by middle-level managers who knew their clients well and could make individual judgments about how much could be safely lent to each person. This has disappeared in favor of a system in which clients submit impersonal application forms, and the loans they are granted according to some algorithm are bundled up with many others and turned into securities that can be bought and sold, thereby spreading the risk and avoiding the need for personal assessments. The middle-level managers have been replaced by low-grade clerical workers who handle the forms and skilled elites who create the financial instruments that enable the system to work. The product itself hasn’t changed, in the sense that people who qualify for them are still being granted mortgages, but the pattern of employment has changed radically, with the middle ranks largely hollowed out, while the top and bottom grades have pulled far apart in prestige and salary. Markovits provides similar examples from the fields of manufacturing and retail.

Let us grant that the social polarization that occurs when top managers and professionals begin to earn salaries several hundred times the median is noxious. The question is whether the blame for this lies with meritocracy. What causes the structural change that Markovits describes? Different explanations are suggested. Sometimes technological change is singled out as the reason firms need to recruit specialized, high-skilled workers: The new technology enables the firm to produce its outputs in a more efficient way, with heightened inequality the unintended result (see Frank [2016, ch. 3] for a diagnosis of this kind). But in that case meritocracy itself forms no part of the explanation. The divergence would occur even if the elite schools that train the super-productive elite were to recruit their students on the basis of class or race, as once was the case.

But Markovits sometimes suggests a different diagnosis: It is the existence of people with highly developed skills that causes firms to adopt the technologies that can make use of those skills. For example, “the appearance of super-skilled finance workers induced the innovations that then favored their elite skills. A rising supply of meritocrats stimulates its own demand” (Markovits 2019, 239).

I confess I find the suggestion here more than a little mysterious. We are asked to imagine firms hiring employees with, for example, advanced programming skills and then coming under pressure to adopt the technologies that allow their new recruits to deploy those skills. But why would they start down this path unless their CEOs already anticipated that there would be efficiency gains from making the transition? And even if we could resolve this conundrum, we have still not been given a reason to think that meritocracy plays a key role in the story. If super-skills are indeed able to create a demand for their own employment, this will be true no matter how those skills are acquired.

A better diagnosis of meritocracy’s role in the story of increasing economic inequality is that it throws a justificatory blanket over the whole process. If elite workers are able to claim that they have acquired their skills under conditions of equal opportunity, that they were hired for positions on the basis of merit alone, and that their very high productivity makes the incomes they earn proportionate, then they are deserving by meritocratic standards. It may then be considered a weakness of the meritocratic ideal that, faced with the two different ways of organizing the household mortgage market that Markovits describes, it doesn’t give us a direct reason to prefer the earlier version to the later. ²¹ In principle, either could be meritocratic, depending on how the firm’s employees are hired and how they are paid for their services. But this shows, once again, that we should not treat meritocracy as a comprehensive social ideal. There could be meritocracies that were quite egalitarian, in terms of their organizational structure and pattern of reward, and others that were more hierarchical. ²² The reasons to prefer the former to the latter would come from elsewhere, not from meritocracy itself.

Does Meritocracy Humiliate the Low-Skilled?

The final charge against meritocracy to be considered here concerns its alleged psychological effects on both the system’s losers and its winners. The losers—those who are judged to lack meritorious qualities and who hold low-status positions as a result—are said to find their situation humiliating. There is nothing or no one to blame for their predicament apart from their own inadequacies. As Young pointed out in his satire, once meritocracy had been established, the low-grade worker could no longer console himself by thinking, “Had I had a proper chance I would have shown the world. A doctor? A brewer? A minister? I could have done anything,” as he could have in earlier times when opportunities were unequal (Young 1961, 106).

For those who win out under meritocracy, the effects are said to be very different. They are confident that they deserve their privileges through talent and hard work, and they are therefore inclined to disparage those who lack these attributes. As a result, they will seek to block redistributive policies that provide benefits, whether in cash or kind, for those lower down on the meritocratic ladder. Committed to an idea of personal desert, they will resist the tempering of meritocracy that might make it compatible with humane values.

For reasons of space, I will focus here on the psychological impact of meritocracy on those who find themselves near the bottom of the ladder. The claim that they are humiliated as a result of occupying that position is plainly an empirical one that needs therefore to be supported by evidence. It is by no means obvious that people will find it shameful to be less (economically) deserving than others, since this will depend in part on their choice of reference group; the person who finishes last when Usain Bolt wins the 100-meter sprint is unlikely to find this humiliating, since he can compare himself with the thousands of athletes who never even made it to the final.

To assess how the belief that they are living in a meritocracy will affect the system’s losers, it is important not to conflate lack of relative merit with being in poverty. Poverty can be defined in different ways, but a commonly recognized feature is that a poor person is one who cannot participate in a range of activities that those around her take for granted as a normal part of daily life. There is no question that people find being in poverty humiliating. Research, both within national borders and cross-nationally, reveals that people who are poor find their situation shameful and may go to great lengths to disguise the fact that they cannot afford to buy necessities or may be unwilling to invite friends and relatives to visit them at home (Beresford et al. 1999, ch. 5; Walker 2014, chs. 7–8). But although a meritocratic society might leave some people in poverty—either because unskilled jobs are paid at too low a rate or because some people cannot find work and there is no adequate safety net that can support them—this is an entirely contingent matter. It shows once again that any normative assessment of meritocracy has to consider both how it functions internally—in terms of the range of incomes it generates—and the wider social structure in which it is embedded, including the presence or absence of an effective welfare state.

So, our focus must be on less-skilled people who are not in poverty but may earn relatively much less than the highly skilled. What effect does contemplating this level of inequality have on their sense of self-esteem and moral worth? A detailed study of working-class and lower-middle-class men in America and France, using in-depth interviews, revealed that when comparing themselves to managers and professionals, they applied different moral standards to the two groups (Lamont 2000). That is, although they did not deny that those holding upper-middle-class jobs were generally more intelligent and/or better educated, they denied that they were morally superior. On the contrary, they were viewed negatively as money-obsessed, snobbish, insincere, and so forth. Meanwhile, those holding working-class jobs were valued for their hard work, sense of responsibility, and involvement in family and other social relationships. In this way, an alternative moral hierarchy was created that dissociated moral worth from social status. As Lamont puts it:

Workers assert their conviction that high social status does not necessarily go hand in hand with worth when they emphasize the poverty of the interpersonal relations of the upper half, and their lack of straightforwardness, their competitiveness, and their excessive ambition. By subordinating social status to what they perceive to be the “real” value of a person, workers create the possibility of locating themselves at the top of the hierarchy. (Lamont 2000, 111)

Without reading too much into the findings of a single study, the key point to take away is that even workers who believe that they are living in a meritocracy won’t feel humiliated by their relative lack of economic success insofar as their self-esteem has a different source: What matters is that they have succeeded in doing what they take to be really valuable in life (see also here Rawls [1971, §§ 80–81] on “the problem of envy”).

Conclusion

I have offered a defense of meritocracy, while emphasizing at several points that it cannot provide a complete template for the good society: It must be combined with other values, including equality and needs-based justice, which can temper its potential harshness. Our societies are not yet meritocratic and perhaps can never become fully so, but that is no reason not to push in that direction. It is noteworthy that none of the critics of meritocracy cited at the outset (Littler, Markovits, McNamee/R. Miller, and Sandel) wish to repudiate it entirely. Sandel, for example, has this to say:

If meritocracy is the problem, what is the solution? Should we hire people based on nepotism or prejudice of various kinds, rather than their ability to do the job? Should we go back to the days when Ivy League colleges admitted the privileged sons of white, Protestant, upper-class families with little regard for their academic promise? No. Overcoming the tyranny of merit does not mean that merit should play no role in the allocation of jobs and social roles. (Sandel 2020, 155)

The problem with this selective appropriation of meritocratic principles, however, is that it overlooks the way in which they hang together, such that each lends the others justificatory support, as I argued above. The critics make a powerful case that contemporary capitalist societies cannot be justified in meritocratic terms. They are also right to insist that meritocratic principles alone cannot serve as a full-fledged theory of social justice. But they are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when they present themselves as rejecting the ideal outright. In so doing, they overlook the way in which meritocracy, rightly understood, can itself serve as a powerful critique of the unjust inequalities that they are at pains to highlight.