This event took place at the University of York, Thursday 11 January 2024, 6.15pm to 7.45pm
Title: Does meritocracy threaten social equality? How norms and myths shape our view of the good society
The idea that hard work and social contributions should pay off and be rewarded is one that many people share, no matter which other political beliefs they might hold. In fact, surveys repeatedly have shown that most people believe in meritocracy. But what exactly is meant by meritocracy or the idea that hard work should be rewarded? And what does championing meritocracy and related ideas mean for other widely shared values, such as social equality? In this talk, Fabian will carefully question the idea of meritocracy and that its supposed normative appeal, arguing that if we care about social equality we should be very careful what kind of norms of success and merit we endorse.
About the speaker
Fabian Schuppert is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. Fabian’s primary research interests lie in two areas. First, theories of social (in)equality and how the political economy of a just society ought to look like. Second, the ethics of a just climate transition. Prior to coming to Potsdam, Fabian spent seven years at Queen’s University Belfast.
More about the speaker: https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/headlines-and-featured-stories/detail/2020-10-22-politics-and-ethics-go-hand-in-hand-fabian-schuppert-considers-political-theory-a-very-p
Good evening everyone my name is Alan Thomas I’m a professor of philosophy and the department here at York uh it’s my very great pleasure to welcome uh Professor Fabian schupper of potam University a leading author on the topic of political republicanism which some of you may know
Is one of our house Specialties here at York uh but Fabian has chosen a broader topic tonight thank you all for attending a lecture on does meritocracy threaten social equality how norms and myths shape our view of the good Society over to you think thank you very much for the introduction um
Alan it’s a great pleasure to be here thank you very much for coming out um as the first slide shows I’m interested in the phenomenon of meritocracy um what I mean by that I will explain in a second um and I’m in particularly uh in particular interested in how um the idea of
Meritocracy transports certain kinds of ideas and Norms which um do I think that’s better um do make a difference uh to how we think about what is just in a society what is the right kind of way to um distribute rewards esteem recognition um these kind of
Things so when we uh talk about meritocracy it’s interesting because it’s an uh ideal it’s an idea which has really really brought appeal and has really brought appeal across um the political Spectrum if you will here are just a couple of quotes um the first one says we won’t entrench the advantages of
The fortunate few we will do everything we can to help anybody whatever your background to go as far as your talents will take you now there the idea is primarily one of equal opportunity obviously so it should not depend on what family you’re born into what your religious beliefs are whatever what
Which gender um and there’s another point which is actually quite controversial in the philosophical literature namely it talks about talents um and whether talents really are the best uh mark for figuring out whether somebody merits something or not is something I will return to later here’s another quote we are true
To our Creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows she that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else um both of these quotes are from Fairly well-known politicians I will show you in a second who that was but um it’s not just in you know public
Discourse it’s not just in the main of the political that um meritocracy has a wide appeal it’s also in the philosophical um tradition or several philosophical traditions here’s a quote um from an overview uh paper on meritocracy um by pman which says it is interesting to observe How Deeply the
Notion of justice as dessert and desert and Merit I will use interchangeably for now is embedded in human history it seems a pre-reflective basic idea of primordial or Ur Justice one finds it grounded in every known culture and religion now I would be slightly more careful um sentences which say it’s in
Every culture um always make me slightly uncomfortable but let’s just say it’s found in a lot of uh different traditions and cultures that’s good enough uh for my talk tonight and here’s another quote um Robin hannell who cannot be uh accused of being really mainstream he’s one of
The uh leading um academic thinkers on uh Democratic uh economic planning and the Socialist tradition he says um changing marks um that one of the principles for just Society should be to each according to her effort or sacrifice and there the idea is that if I um
Put a lot of effort into something if I sacrifice a lot by working longer spending less time on the beach less time with my family I do something which is good for society which produces some kind of surplus for everybody and that makes me deserving of something what
Exactly we will find out so um I claimed earlier that the idea of meritocracy the idea of desert has a lot to do with what a just distribution is like is an idea that is broadly shared across the political spectrum and I try to prove that somewhat um quickly by just telling
You that the first two quotes are by Teresa may and Barack Obama yeah um both of them so barak’s quote which is the lower one we are true to our cre Creed was uh from his inauguration the quote from Teresa may is in her first week of
Being prime minister right so both of them set out really early in their political Reign saying this is what I stand for this is what we as a society should aspire to and I think if you look at those two they’re similar enough that you could quite
Easily turn them around um and if that is the case then considering how much we hear about social division how we drift apart politically and um that’s a quite interesting um phenomenon on top of that it’s not just politicians and philosophers who like to talk about meritocracy and dessert It’s
Actually an idea which surprisingly many people find intuitively really really appealing which was also in the poyon quote I um had on the last slide so there are several studies empirical studies in a range of countries um I focused on the UK Germany and the US
Where it is if you ask people about um do you agree with this statement do you think this is morally legitimate or um this is a statement which you think should structure our institutions many people um show support for the idea of meritocracy which of course um is a
Fairly broad church I will say more about that in a second and quite often it’s coupled with a fairly vague appeal to equal opportunity I mentioned that already with the Teresa may quote the idea that no matter who you are no matter which family you’re born into as
Long as you are in the Teresa may quote it was talented in Robin harnell and um the PO and quote a little bit different if you put a lot of effort if you work hard you can make it and you will be rewarded right that’s a really
Um widespread idea and it’s an idea which has a lot of appeal and quite many people think that it has not something to do with being based on particularly controversial moral theories what do I mean by that I mean by that when um in Germany quite a few years ago um a
Federal uh election was coming up and Angela Merkel the sitting Chancellor was uh being challenged by Martin Schulz of the social Democrats Schulz ran on a platform of social justice and made Fairly for a federal election campaign fairly um precise proposals of what he would like to change if the social Democrats came
Into power and um V gang schoer who just uh passed away couple of weeks ago the former right-hand man of Helmut Cole another Christian Democrat um chancellor who was also um minister of the uh economy and Merkel he said we don’t need to talk about Justice what we need in
This country is equal opportunity talking about social justice is divisive equal opportunity just means we look objectively if you will at what people do what they contribute what they deliver and then we reward them for it you don’t need to have any controversial assumptions about what is just what is
Fair now as any good philosopher will tell you the idea of equal opportunity is just as Valu right because it really depends on what is a contribution what kind of opportunities matter what kind of bits of our Behavior come down to our own um decisions and what is just you
Know external and what can’t we do anything about but it works right so sh’s claims regarding equal opportunity were widely picked up in um the national media and uh schz was portrayed as somebody who was going to do class politics you know just for a very particular group of people well ML and
Scher didn’t care about that they just wanted equal opportunity for everybody so that um it’s interesting how that equal opportun commity quite nicely Works in a similar way um so why is the idea of meritocracy that people should get more or something because they are deserving because they Merit um getting particular
Resources um why is that so uh popular why is it so widespread and why do people think that it’s um almost kind of a principle of foundational or justice as pyman put it on the uh last slide now if you wanted to be critical um you could say it just shows that the
Meritocratic ideal is part of what you could call predominant ideology so it is something which is enshrined into our way of thinking because it acts as a very important mechanism to justify certain kinds of social inequalities which we have so we live in a society no matter
Whether it’s the UK or Germany or the US where when it comes to basic foundational values um in similar studies like the ones I mentioned here on the slide people Express uh a lot of support for Fairly vaguely defined values like equality Freedom individual liberty um and if you want to deviate
From that if you want to give some people more than others you need a good reason normally to do that and we don’t want to live in a society where um it’s just based on something which happened 150 years ago or because your grandparents um were deserving now their
Great uh their grandchildren are deserving but rather um because we normally justify lots of existing social inequalities by saying somehow our system tracks our system allows us to track Merit and deservingness desert and I will say more about that later and if you really want to read a
Lot more about that later um you have to wait until um Alan’s new book comes out because um how many pages 650 5 oh you only 5 you it down okay so only 500 so you just need you know a rainy Saturday afternoon four weeks in a row um
Right and the other reason why meritocracy works really well and now you finally understand why have somebody uh driving a car uh as the picture on this slide is that in our society where we um in the Societies in which we live we tend to think of our elv as quite independent
Individuals um we’re quite familiar with thinking in terms of individual responsibility so if um I’m successful in my career um then that’s down to me doing something right it has not just something to do with privileges I inherited or how Society is structured um and in that way meritocracy or the idea of
Merit um is a little bit like the um survey responses when people are asked whether they think they are good drivers I don’t know whether you ever read any of those statistics in the UK um in the last such survey um 67% of people said that they’re better than
Average drivers or very good drivers now um that’s low in Germany it was 85% right uh and obviously I think of myself that I’m a good driver right I so but how does that work and similarly when you ask people whether they um think they’re performing better than some of their
Colleagues or whether they are more deserving than some of colleagues or more uh doing more for uh common pool resources so things like in the academic context you work in a department and um most people don’t like to do a lot of atmin work but somebody has to do it and
You walk up to an academic and you ask so do you think you do your fair share of the atmin burden most academics will tell yes of course I am but you know my colleagues that’s that you know and then we have to do more so most of us think
That we’re um fairly good at what we do and we’re good people and decent people and that explains also why it’s um more attractive to think of a system which actually tracks that because if I’m um somebody who behaves well who’s virtuous then I’m the one who’s deserving and
Ideally I would benefit from such a system so if we really had meritocracy in our society then people like myself and people like yourselves would benefit right that’s the thought normally that happens so now I spent 14 minutes and 35 seconds talking about meritocracy without telling you
What I um mean by meritocracy um I will deliberately I use a very broad definition because I think that’s how it functions as um the kind of normative idea the ideal how it functions in society now if you wanted to um make it slightly more complicated you would
Probably write something down like I did um on top of the slide namely meritocracy refers to the idea that in a particular sphere um somebody an agent or a group of Agents gets um particular Goods G in virtue of the fact F or because they have a certain property P
Or displayed a certain Behavior something like that if you want to put it a little bit more simply Merit is has at least three parts there needs to be somebody that’s a who is deserving or who merits something um Merit relates to some good something which is what one gets if one is
Deserving and there needs to be a reason for that there needs to be a basis for how we determine whether somebody Merit something and that’s P now the interesting thing is when you look at different definitions of meritocracy different um ex people talking about what they mean it becomes
Really um quickly clear that we talk about uh quite different things so meritocracy can be just um used as an ideal for instance to distribute jobs so we should hire the most qualified applicants would be one um way of putting that very simple idea into uh
Practice what do I mean by that quite easy so of all the applicants the applicant a merits to get G which is actually the job in light of their qualification right so here we have jobs SG and qualification s p but actually there are lots of other things lots of
Other Goods which sometimes people think get distributed in that way or should be distributed in that way things like income so if I’m particularly deserving I should get um a higher wage or earn more money if I’m particularly virtuous a particularly um productive friendly whatever it is human
Being I should get a particular amount of esteem people should say hey yeah that’s great that what you did there or in the political sphere in terms of power and influence okay um can of course also be in the economic sphere power and influence so what we see here is that
It’s fairly Broad um principle which can be applied to very different kinds of contexts and when we just talk about the idea of a meritocracy like for instance the studies uh did which I mentioned earlier when people are asked do you agree with that statement it’s of course much easier to
Agree with that statement if you can fill into the blanks or into the G and the P whatever you want right well you can’t quite fill in whatever you want but you can fill in a fairly um many things so in as um the title of my talk suggested I’m interested in the
Relationship between meritocracy and equality and um I in particular mentioned social equality why do I call it social equality again I draw on a particular philosophical tradition but um what that tradition refers to is that equality is not just about distributing some kind of material Goods so we don’t
Just care about everybody has the same amount of money or um people who are halfway deserving get a small car people who are more deserving get a bigger car or bicycle or whatever but actually that social equality really picks up on the on the social relations in which we
Stand how we relate to each other whe whether we see each other as equals whether um we are able to really be fully participating co-members of society so um and that’s important for a very clear and particular reason namely that the difficulty which we observe in many existing um applications of so-called meritocracy
Is that doing well in one regard so for instance earning a lot of money is interpreted as being a sign of also being praiseworthy wonderful powerful in other regards right which is one big critique of existing social inequalities in particular inequalities in terms of wealth and income um that wealth and
Income is not just that those people who have more money can buy more things or go on nicer holidays maybe that’s not a problem because it’s just what they deserve considering that the wealth and income is deserved which obviously is a big if and I’m not saying it is just if
We assume that for a second but in our society it also allows other things so um in a country like or in a place like the UK where you have tuition fees uh where you have health care expenses um it allows you to access other Goods um which are problematic
Because they can have quite a huge knock on effects if you think about better education access to lots of opportunities these kind of things so rather than talk about these kind of existing applications of the principle of meritocracy um I want to talk about something else why because there are
Lots of really good books you can pick up um from any bookstore if you’re interested in a critique of the existing application of the principle of meritocracy or just the use in everyday discussions as kind kind of a cover up for how not meritocratic our existing Society is okay
So um any of these books I can recommend to you um none of them obviously is perfect that’s how books are but um they really really nicely show you that even though when we ask people whether they have the feeling that they live in a society where hard work might be
Rewarded and there the answers are not as overwhelmingly positive as when you ask them whether you think whether they think they’re are good drivers but still people don’t necessarily have the feeling that they live in a society in which meritocracy plays no role at all
So if you ask people in the UK do you think the UK is a meritocratic system um it doesn’t score 10 out of 10 in most people’s minds but people do have the feeling that the principle of meritocracy applies and the same in Germany the same in the US and after
You’ve read those books you might be slightly more hesitant okay um why because uh when we look at the most standard definitions of any of the um PS I mentioned earlier so in terms of contribution Talent effort hard work whatever it was um the and whether that tracks how people do in
Life whether in terms of income health life expectancy happiness we see that it doesn’t track it okay um and if you want to know more about that read those books I’m interested in the idea or the question of whether meritocracy assuming that it is an ideal which is really appealing to lots of
People very intuitively is a attractive if we’re also at the same time committed to the idea of social equality which is also an idea which quite many people find deeply attractive that we should live in a society in which we’re equals in which of course sometimes like during uh work
Hours there’s somebody who has more expertise than you and you have to listen to them they’re your boss or line manager but when you meet afterwards in a cafe or a pub you meet each other as equals right you don’t have these in enshrined status differences which
Translate from one sphere to the rest of your life in society so if we take social equality seriously and if we’re also um paying attention to the fact that meritocracy is a really widely um accepted principle do those two actually go together and if
Yes uh how and in which way and if no why not and where not um and as always the answer is probably slightly more complicated than just yes or no um that’s just how social reality works right so meritocracy without the ideological baggage which we have in society and without um always thinking
About how meritocracy can be used to excuse or to give an excuse for existing social inequalities I hope that’s possible just try to blank your mind only focus on the idea of the principle um I want to talk about two different ways of thinking about meritocracy one is valuing people’s Merit in a
Non-comparative way so that means we only look at whether a person is deserving marit something in absolute terms we don’t care how everybody else in society is doing and obviously talking about it in a comparative way which which is how we quite often standardly more think about
It right I did better than you or I work harder than you so I should get more benefits or higher salary or whatever and at the very end I will talk about some issues which no matter which of these two um possibilities in the beginning we pursue
Um we still need need to address right and one is that no matter what we use as P so what matter no matter what we use as the basis for justifying that somebody is deserving or meriting something it’s not going to be something which is done in a vacuum and without
Any kind of social or political or economic um Power structures in the background and it’s not something we can do in a perfectly objective way that is the point which I tried to make earlier with the anecdote about uh SCH during the German federal election campaign the
Idea that one can measure something like contribution to social well-being or hard work or whether I’m talented or not in a clearcut way across a hugely diverse Society without um having certain values which inform how I Define what counts as Merit what counts as Talent what counts as contribution is
Just um not it doesn’t make a lot of sense so there will Social reality will creep back in values will creep back in and that means it’s also a question of power who gets to decide what counts as what um secondly uh we need to deal with
The um fact that at least at the moment when we ask people whether they believe that meritocracy is a good thing because they also believe that they are deserving in one way or another if meritocracy is not supposed to be like um one of those award ceremonies in Kinder Garden where
Everybody gets an award everybody is great but it’s supposed to do what we actually think um the uh um principle or the ideal of meritocracy makes attractive namely that attracts what people are doing right if you work hard you should be uh rewarded if you are a virtuous person if you nice
Are a nice person you should be rewarded then um it breeds frustration what do I mean by that well if everybody thinks they’re particularly deserving um and we actually apply the principle they will quite quickly find out that they’re not not everybody is in that way deserving
So I might think that I’m a great colleague and once we really start talking about it I might find out I’m actually not doing more atmin work than the others and I’m also worse at replying to student emails and all of a sudden my picture of myself starts to
Crumble um and I might be fairly frustrated because I will be measured against a particular set of social norms and that can be a daunting exercise okay um when people actually tell you hey you’re not quite as great as you think you are um and lastly because one of the
Responses to or one of the things we might end up with when we look at non-comparative uh Merit and comparative Merit is that maybe meritocracy is problematic because of what we normally try to distribute based on meritocratic principles namely for instance income wealth power influence
And maybe one way around that is to say no actually Merit rcy is primarily a principle which explains to us which allows us to identify correctly when I owe somebody social recognition so that I know exactly after whose talk do I applaud when do I need to shake my head
When do I say hey you’re a really good friend um when do I say you are great or whatever it is and that might be an easy way some people think of saving meritocracy because then it has not a lot to do with big material inequalities and because I um did a lot
Of work on recognition Theory um was played an important part in my PhD many many years ago I just want to highlight that esteem recognition is not as um unpr problematic as some people think it’s not clear that Distributing esteem on the basis of Merit um has any
Better effects or not as negative effects as Distributing money it very much depends on how exactly we apply the principle I will return to that in a minute right so let’s talk about non-comparative Merit in the first instance why do I start with non-comparative Merit because some
People are worried of the books the four books I had thrown on the um wall earlier at least three of them say look one of the problems with meritocracy with the ideal of meritocracy is that people constantly compare themselves to each other because that’s what it’s all
About I want to find out whether I’m more deserving than my neighbor I’m more whether I’m better at doing atmin work than my colleague one way around that is to say well that that’s the totally wrong question we can ask whether people are deserving in an absolute kind of way in
Terms of absolute terms so if you contribute a certain amount then you are deserving no matter whether other people do more or other people do less so it’s about your very own deservingness function if you will you could um have a nice graph and say if I am I’m so good in
Doing this amount of work then I should get this amount of recognition money whatever and it doesn’t matter what the other people are doing and why do some people think that’s attractive well precisely because it still tracks my contribution so I should say something about this slide um because I didn’t
Always want to write every single um basis for being deserving or meriting on every slide with lots of slashes like you know whether it’s contribution hard work effort Talent whatever I only use contribution here okay but you can fill in whatever you want if you think contri
Contribution is not the right basis then that’s fine I’m I’m obviously not a native speaker but uh I thought from my rudimentary understanding of the English language the contribution at least is fairly wide so you know we can um we can fit quite a lot into
That so and even people who are inspired by the history of ideas um where people have written about deservingness and in particular distrib itive Justice and Punishment needing to be proportional to what one has done um even those people can be accommodated here because it’s
It’s just about me I can still say well there needs to be a direct proportional relationship between whether I did this much or that much or that much okay now that’s one way of being non-comparative about Merit the other option to to be non-comparative about Merit is to say it’s about a threshold
All I need to do is be above a certain threshold if I am a good enough colleague a good enough uh worker or hard enough worker then I’m above a certain threshold a sufficiency level and then I get a predetermined amount of um money recognition whatever it is okay
Um and but above the threshold that amount doesn’t change anymore right once I’m above the threshold I get whatever the good is which um is supposed to be distributed so those are two ways of being non-comparative about Merit what are possible problems with being non-comparative about Merit um one
Is if everybody only looks at what they’ve done and they only think about okay I’ve done this and now I deserve this it might quite quickly that’s at least the worry of some people turn into a theory of entitlement you constantly walk around and say I’ve done this I’m
Entitled to this where is my where’s my piece of cake come on I already worked 5 minutes I’ve worked 20 20 minutes where’s my reward Um also if you take the second option where if you have the threshold and the threshold is low enough we might come back to what I called the kindergarten award ceremony it’s just leads to everybody is a winner you know so everybody gets some kind of reward
But it’s not really doing what we wanted it to do or at least many people want it to do and the first instance namely tell us who is deserving of particular recognition who um is a particularly productive worker or particularly good person or whatever it is that we want to
Track with our meritocratic principle um so in terms of the worry about entitlement which is mainly a worry about the first uh way of doing non-comparative Merit some people um have pointed out that it’s uh maybe really a problem because it changes the idea of thinking right you
Don’t it’s it’s actually important not to just uh think of the entitlement I have it’s kind of like a social provision of different Goods just because I managed to do something but actually really reflect on how I do in comparison to others right it does matter how others are behaving because
Um if somebody does really really poorly that person is not going to change their perception of entitlement they still feel all the time entitled so the argument put for forth there is well look we rather do that threshold version that makes more sense for non-comparative merit the obvious response to that is
Well it doesn’t seem to be particularly good for tracking the responsibility tracking our contribution because it’s just about getting above the threshold and then we don’t need to talk anymore obviously there’s a lot more one could say about that but um since I promised um our hosts that I leave EMP
Time for discussion I’m not going to um say more about that maybe we can talk more about that in during question and answer and the debate another way is more being valuing comparative Merit right and obviously it can be in a not so nice way um that’s
Why you have the e card there right it’s not that my child is better than yours it’s just that I’m a much better parent than you are um if you uh spend if you have kids and you spend enough time bringing your kids to different social activities and pick them up you notice
That quite many people really do track whether you’re the right kind of parent is are there kids particularly talented and yours are just average or what um and that’s obviously the main worry that quite many people have it’s fairly clear that if we want to um compare people
With each other um it’s a comparative logic and if we have a comparative logic some people um are quick to point out that it looks like we’re actually it’s an ideal that is built on competition um it’s not about it’s not what do I mean by it’s built on competition competition obviously can
Take different forms it can be kind of a fun way um when you try to trick your children into cleaning their room and you say hey who can fold more pieces of clothing in the next 5 minutes um maybe that’s not the worst that can happen to
Them apart from you tricking them into cleaning their room um but obviously if you’re constantly um in in a situation where you feel like you’re competing with everybody else and where many of us won’t be constantly winners and not even close to winning but actually just
Somewhere it um also puts a lot of psychological stress on people it also and that’s what the card tries to exemplify it um obviously pushes an idea of me over you so um it’s a it’s it’s a good thing if I can show that I’m better at something than you
Um so obviously a lot of what you make of that of that comparative nature of Merit which obviously is in the title right valuing comparative Merit um and whether you’re worried about competition depends a lot on how you view competition in general right whether you just think well it’s perfectly normal
That humans compare themselves to each other and it’s another question where you think the principle of meritocracy is being applied if the principle of meritocracy is being applied going back to the critique of meritocracy as the ideology trying to mask existing social in unfair social inequalities from our
Eyes then um you probably are quite concerned about the application of the principle of meritocracy well if you think well this is just you know um the way we do uh kind of sorting exercises and ranking exercises in all sorts of um different kinds of environments whether it’s uh physical
Education so we still want to find out who runs faster than somebody else um who is better at math um in terms of being able to compute complex problems more quickly than somebody else and arrive at the correct solution then maybe what is really the big BG concern for us is what
Kind of feelings and Norms that kind of competitive logic ignites right what that leads to and in the existing literature on meritocracy quite many people say well it’s really really difficult that it doesn’t sooner or later lead to something like resentment or looking down on people or um leading
To some kind of social division because the problem with um most ways of tracking and rewarding um let’s call it again contribution so that somebody is meriting or deserving of something is that how we reward that is something which does not just stay in that domain but we can translated into doing other
Things right so one of the big criticisms of rewarding people in financial terms is that yes maybe we pay you more because you were able to run 100 yards faster than and everybody else but after that you can use that money in all sorts of other spheres and it allow
Allows you to exert influence or power in spheres which have nothing to do with running 100 meters faster and that brings me to the point um which I mentioned earlier namely some people say well but then the issue is just that we hand out the wrong kind of
Reward money is just a really bad reward because money is so easily applied guide in different spheres right that’s the problem with money it translates nicely from one place to the other maybe we should just um distribute social esteem I mean what’s wrong with saying hey you
Are the fastest runner come on stand on the podium you get a medal everybody claps the medal is not worth a lot it’s just gold colored not real gold um and then everybody goes home and everybody’s happy right um the problem is that don’t Works in very particular circumstances right so
If you’re worried about um people for instance in the labor market not being as productive as they otherwise would be if you don’t give them certain incentives it’s not clear that it’s enough to uh give them a pat on the back and say hey you know what today you
Worked much harder than everybody else well done try to do tomorrow the same again right there are certain kinds of social esteem um handouts if you will which are not going to satisfy people in the longer run maybe it’s great initially you know it’s I stay to um
Stick with the trivial example I gave earlier maybe it’s great if your colleagues say to you hey it’s so nice that you did that atmin task and but sooner or later you find out that it costs you time and that reward of social esteem is not you know weighing or like
Compensating you for what you are actually putting into that and you have the feeling that other people are free riding on you and you want a different kind of reward um or different kind of social esteem maybe your colleagues should get on their knees and say ah
S thank you master of the atmin world for gracing you with our presence uh or something like that gracing us was your presence um and there obviously we see right away where it becomes more um difficult uh because people uh bo to other people um that’s a
Very slippery slope I think we can agree on that now one reason why many people seem to think that meritocracy is a really important ideal and it’s just kind of insane to even question it it’s not that people are so worried about um tracking contribution but really really worried
About people who would free ride or not do anything right so that idea is well you know if we don’t have a principle of meritocracy some people just would do nothing they would just free ride now it’s not clear that that is the same matter in fact it actually seems to be a
Different matter because I can still come up with certain Norms certain laws certain ways of social behavior that sanctions so negatively um imposes costs or gives disesteem to very particular Behavior because I can explain that it’s not behavior that is good according to a particular value so like you’re not
Contributing anything to our joint Enterprise of having a nice camping trip I don’t need our camping trip to be a meritocratic Enterprise right where in the end the person who did the most work pi ing the tent uh chopping the wood making I don’t know cooking food gets
More money than anybody else I mean at least luckily in my family that’s not how camping trips work but if you were to come on a camping trip and you do nothing you would find out that that’s not okay right so sanctioning that kind of behavior is not the same as
Subscribing to the ideal of um rewarding people for particular things they’ve done in terms of contribution right so what can we take away from that we can take away from that that one significant worry about the comparative Merit is the kind of logic and the kind of norms it might
Enshrine and how these Norms even though they’re intended to stay and the rewards how they intend to stay in a very confined area in a very confined sphere travel outside of that sphere especially if it’s the kind of things the kind of rewards which you can easily transfer
From A to B right so one big criticism going back to Russo is um that we at some point got totally confused in terms of how we understand social recognition and we think that people who are wealthy or um in other ways well off and esteemed are because of that also
Morally better people or extremely competent in all sorts of areas right so my favorite example is always when um you turn open a newspaper or turn on the TV and there’s a discussion over Economic Policy which is a really complex field and they ask somebody who’s a successful businessman or woman
In a very particular kind of business the fact that I’m successful businessman or woman doesn’t mean that I know a lot about Economic Policy right so they’re related some now and maybe it’s interesting to find out what businessmen and women think is important for their particular success right
Totally but it’s a totally different thing to ascribe to them authority to be knowledgeable in economic policy or again a um example closer to home it’s interesting um when uh people who work at a university and happen to have a title like Professor are asked about something which they
Don’t really seem to have any qualification for and you assume just because they’re a professor they must have something to say about that now if we were in Germany you all would know exactly which famous public intellectual I’m thinking of but because we’re not you don’t so great um other
Issues as I promised you there are some other issues which we need to talk about no matter which of these um conceptions we want to uh subscribe to or not at all and namely one really big problem really is um to figure out what is the correct
Basis at all for any application of the meritocratic principle um for esteeming somebody for um rewarding somebody for dishing out whatever good it is now I said earlier that this is just an exercise that we can’t just take out of the difficult social cont context the messy kind of
Social context in which these kind of decisions will be made um of course if it’s in a very very small um uh sphere so again I like to always stick with the same examples if you take my family’s camping trip maybe that’s not a problem right so uh we’re a
Family of five so unfortunately the children obviously don’t have the same uh Power in our family as the adults so it’s basically two people having to agree um and we are also subject to these Norms so you could say there’s some kind of democratic control that is maybe not
The biggest problem it gets much more problematic when you have biggest fears and also the rewards are not particularly great um somebody says thanks for chopping the wood um that’s positive esteem maybe um but uh or just courtesy I don’t know the second issue uh which is really
Important I shouldn’t uh look down then the mic gets too loud is um the fact that if meritocracy is particularly um attractive to many people because they also have some maybe ill deceived uh picture of themselves as being the net beneficiaries of a wide application of meritocratic principles
That that might be quite problematic in terms of how they actually uh respond to the application of that principle in broader ways related to that but not exactly the same is that um obviously there very particular sets of norms which we then would measure people against and if we
Take meritocracy seriously so we don’t want it to operate just as a hand waving kind of principle which justifies all sorts of inequalities but we really want to make sure that we track what people have done and give them the reward which they deserve then it might also be
Relatively invasive so in particular when you think about something like um people are so here’s a um fairly well-known um definition of what it means to be deserving or meriting something um it’s your talent plus your effort plus the net contribution of what you’ve done so
Um apart from the fact that many people are not sure that Talent should have anything to do with it because most of us didn’t um you know decide when they were born which kind of talents they wanted to have there was no Talent auction nobody asked me hey do you want
To have that Talent OR that Talent or do you are you going to be not talented and just stay at University and I was like yeah I do that that’s great um so Talent is a bit difficult right because it doesn’t seem to be something which we
Have done anything for it seems to be more like Good Fortune John WS um famously wrote about that and uh compared it more to um kind of a natural Lottery right so if Talent falls out that may might be a good thing because to establish how talented somebody is
Might be quite invasive how do I find that out how do I know whether you’re really not talented for that maybe you should try harder um maybe you need to develop that Talent first right so we can construct if you have enough time on your hand you have you can construct all
Sort of weird um Talent evaluation procedures where we really try to find out whether people are talented then the second issue is um your effort now as we all know just because somebody tries very hard doesn’t always seem to for be a reason for us that we think they deserve particularly much so
Somebody might be just really really bad at something and they tried really hard and we want to say hey it’s great that you tried very hard but we don’t think that for instance they should receive huge income for it because they tried so hard right because maybe they should
Just give up it’s like um the person who uh really is not particularly good at um either identifying any kind of musical note which is played to them and then sing accordingly which is one of the reasons why I only sing Under the shower um because certain things you can’t
Unhear they stuck in your ears um and I don’t want to do that to people it would be weird if I tried to become an opera singer and I put a lot of effort into it and just because I put a lot of effort into it I receive a lot of
Money that doesn’t seem to be clear that effort always is the thing we want to track sometimes it seems to be really um part of what we assess so we can think of other examples where effort seems to make a difference but it’s not a clear category across the board um and
The same of course also with the productive outcome of something so it’s of course really nice to think that I’m Solly responsible for my uh um uh planned producing more units of X or again uh an example close uh to my everyday experience that I I don’t know
Published more in um respected academic journals but actually a lot of it has to do with having good conversations with colleagues um having good students with whom you exchange ideas and it becomes really difficult to know what was my contribution what was everybody else’s contribution so in order to find that out
And obviously there are some people who would say you can’t find that out but I’m trying to make the ideal as strong as possible even if you think you can find that out it’s not going to be particularly easy it might be actually quite difficult and we you know um maybe
I you constantly need to be tracked and then oh but you spend earlier an hour in your colleague’s office and you talked about that so that hour that needs that’s at least only 50% your work right 50% the other person work and um I end uh last thing I’m going to
Say the Dark Side of esteem recognition so even if you think well we can solve all these problems and look I anyway don’t want to distribute money or power or influence I just think it’s important that we um have a way of figuring out when is it
Okay to esteem somebody and to say you’re great or you’re fast or you’re intelligent or whatever um and that is not going to hurt anybody obviously we know that esteem recognition makes a huge difference to people’s sense of self and also if you get repeatedly always negative um
Feedback that can be quite frustrating um that can be quite easily lead to um all sorts of um psychological trauma it if you have lots of different kinds of esteem on top of each other it’s not clear that it works that differently from Material differences right if we
Say Oh look The Family living over there those are the the Smart Ones and the Tidy ones and the um the influential ones so you know um you should really try to hang out with their kids because they’re better friends than here the Joneses then um that seems to be not
That easy not that clear that esteem recognition allows us to really circumvent these problems right we might have very similar problems um and as nice as it is to become employee of the month it might also not do the same for the person right actually there’s an entire literature out there where um
Seems to be one of the um pernicious ways in which certain companies are quite good at um not giving their employees certain benefits like better wages better access to health care but um at least give them the feeling that they’re esteemed hey you know you you’re employee of the week or month um
Congratulations or you have done this or you have done that that’s great but it’s not clear that um esteem recognition always gives us exactly what we want us um what we want to get out of the application of meritocracy so um if you’re interested in anything I said um
That’s great and here are some philosophical um and social science literature on meritocracy which I used in um drafting the talk and I hope it was not a waste of your time thank [Applause] you