Whither Meritocracy? Editors’ Introduction to Part One

Meritocracy, while commanding wide public assent, constitutes a focal point of policy and scholarly controversies. In the United States, meritocratic principles are often invoked in debates on policies concerning hiring rules for firms, admissions and financial aid procedures for colleges, and classroom tracking and honors classes in middle and high schools. Advocates regard the meritocratic ideal as both just, in that it gives individuals what they deserve, and efficient, in that it matches opportunities with those who will make the most of them. Meritocratic hiring, for instance, is argued to maximize a firm’s productivity by giving jobs to the people in the applicant pool who have been assessed as the most skilled. In the context of higher education, supporters maintain that matching the most productive researchers with the most quantifiably able students will maximize the growth of knowledge and thereby best fulfill the purpose of a university.

In contrast, critics of meritocracy contend that the ideal of meritocracy rationalizes injustices and entails various social harms. College admissions based on past academic performance reward enrichment opportunities for the most affluent students, reinforcing educational inequalities. Requiring college degrees for certain professional jobs may simply create an arbitrary barrier for otherwise qualified applicants rather than ensuring that only the most productive are hired. Others move beyond the question of the reasons for inequalities in merit, arguing instead that meritocracy stigmatizes those who are less successful. Still others have maintained that the vagueness of the concept and of the way it is applied to workers and learners invalidates its utility in assessing and improving social outcomes. Underlying these disagreements about the practicalities and justness of meritocracy are different views of its very meaning; indeed, any positive or normative evaluation calls for exploration of the meaning of meritocracy.

Positive and normative evaluations of meritocracy, in turn, require multidisciplinary perspectives. Philosophers and political theorists naturally focus on ethical considerations, but the measurement and assessment of the extent to which a context is meritocratic is a problem for social science to sort out. And yet, sociologists and economists have very different views of the mechanisms and forces by which schools and markets determine outcomes.

While debates on meritocracy are frequently headlined in the United States, advocates and critics alike often fail to engage with how the idea is perceived and practiced in different societies and cultures. In Africa, for example, a person’s success is rarely attributed to their own efforts but rather is understood to involve the help of the community; individual achievement in the Western sense is often seen as antisocial and threatening to the order of the community. If the notion of meritocracy applies in this context, it must be understood to be collective. For China and much of East Asia, contemporary defenses of meritocracy derive from Confucian ideas that those with high moral and intellectual quality are most deserving of positions of prominence. In Latin America, political and social nepotism each represent a challenge to merit-based systems. Meanwhile, in parts of South Asia, merit is connected to behavior in past lives and the cycle of rebirth. A global vision of the meritocratic ideal enriches the understanding of meritocracy from any given cultural and political perspective.

Whither Meritocracy? is a two-volume collection that represents an effort to synthesize the state of knowledge about meritocracy across a range of contexts and societies and to explore different perspectives on the viability of meritocracy as a social ideal. This first volume, Part One: Conceptual Issues of Meritocracy, addresses the complexities involved in defining merit and meritocracy; considers the normative defenses and criticisms of meritocracy as an ideal; and explores the concept in the history of political and social thought. Our second volume, Part Two: Meritocracy Across the Globe, considers meritocracy in different contexts across the world. While much of the discussion in this volume focuses on institutions and contexts in the United States, the articles of Part Two will explore aspects of meritocracy in Africa, Europe, and Asia, providing empirical evidence that complements the theoretical approaches presented here. Part Two will provide a range of evaluations of the extent to which different institutions produce meritocratic outcomes, with particular attention to education. Further, articles in Part Two will consider how individuals in different societies think about meritocracy.

Taken as a whole, articles in both volumes demonstrate that to understand the normative and positive dimensions of any given society, it is vital to understand its conception of meritocracy. The articles speak to current policy and culture debates both by providing ways to understand underlying philosophical issues and by offering evidence of how economic and social institutions produce meritocratic outcomes. For scholars, this collection both demonstrates the state of current knowledge and provides insights into directions where new research is most needed. For policymakers, it demonstrates the challenges involved in evaluating the ways that policies do or do not promote meritocracy. For citizens, it describes how meritocracy is linked to notions of inequality and desert and provides empirical foundations for assessing how societies meet meritocratic ideals.

Part One begins with four articles that take various positions on meritocracy as a social objective. David Miller, in “Meritocracy: A Qualified Defense,” argues that meritocracy is a component of justice. His broad conception of meritocracy includes equality of opportunity since access to the possibility of achievement is needed to justify differential positions and rewards. Daniel Markovits, in “How Meritocracy Became Self-Defeating,” contends that meritocratic systems undermine themselves over time. He acknowledges that meritocracy can create substantial social efficiencies but argues that, as those who succeed set out to ensure their children’s success, those efficiencies break down. Steven Durlauf, in “Retrospective and Prospective Meritocracy,” evaluates intrinsic versus instrumental justifications of meritocracy. Using several formal economic models, his article explores the extent to which different justifications for meritocracy provide distinct ways of measuring the extent of meritocracy and, by implication, provides a way to link meritocracy and efficiency. Glenn Loury, in “The Limits of Meritocracy in a Racially Divided Society,” addresses the conflict between the ideal of meritocracy and the reality of the United States, where Black–white inequalities are large and enduring and stem from profound historical injustices. The next two articles place meritocracy in a historical setting. In “Meritocracy in Historical Perspective,” Guido Alfani traces ideas of meritocracy from the ancient world to the Renaissance, with a focus on how pockets of meritocracy began to emerge in the early modern era. David Williams, in “The Meritocracy Debate of the Eighteenth Century,” explores how meritocracy was debated as the Enlightenment emerged, with particular attention to Immanuel Kant.