That, I thought, is exactly what critics of meritocracy get wrong!īut then midway through the essay, I come to this part, where she does exactly the thing that I thought she was criticizing: So, I was excited when I recently read a Helen Andrews article arguing “our authors fail as critics of meritocracy because they cannot get their heads outside of it. Something I’ve often found is that arguments that start off promising to offer a critique of meritocracy end up, in fact, simply arguing that today’s existing society fails to live up to meritocratic ideas. Meritocracy is Bad America is good at elevating “the best” people the problem is that’s a bad idea Matthew Yglesias What we need, he notes, is not the brightest but the best. Highly skilled technicians without honor are more effective at exploiting their roles than at performing them. What we need most is leaders with strong core values, people who honor the professional norms of the roles they occupy, as we also learned from observing Trump. We don’t want incompetence at the highest levels, as we learned from the Trump administration, but smarts alone are not sufficient. It’s not that having smarts isn’t useful for leaders. Yglesias flips this narrative on its head by stipulating that meritocracy is overall pretty good at identifying people who are really smart and then assigning them to positions of leadership. Instead, the process of merit-based selection rewards those who are best at gaming the system, whose prime skill is at acquiring the badges of merit without having to demonstrate substantive merit. The ideal of meritocracy is sullied, they say, because it fails to reward the people with the most merit, broadly defined. It’s part of an ongoing series of posts here about the problems of meritocracy (for example, this, this, this, and this.)Īs Yglesias notes, most critiques of meritocracy are focused on the failures of the system to be sufficiently meritocratic.
This post is a recent piece by Matthew Yglesias from his Substack site Slow Boring.
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