The Merits of Meritocracy

Josh Landy
Shouldn’t people be rewarded for their talent and effort?

Ray Briggs
Or should society treat us all the same?

Josh Landy
Is meritocracy just a smokescreen for a system that’s rigged?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin to Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re talking about the merits of meritocracy.

Josh Landy
Meritocracy—isn’t that just a system that rewards the rich and punishes the poor?

Ray Briggs
It’s the exact opposite. If we reward people based on merit, instead of family connections, or wealth, or good looks, then anyone can succeed.

Josh Landy
That’s a pretty story, Ray, but it’s just not true. People who are born poor stay poor, especially in today’s America, so much for the American dream.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so we don’t have a meritocracy now. But wouldn’t it be better if we did?

Josh Landy
No, it’d be massively unfair.

Ray Briggs
Wait, how could it be unfair to reward people for their skill and intelligence and hard work?

Josh Landy
Well, how do you think they got to be skilled, intelligent and hardworking in the first place?

Ray Briggs
Well, by a combination of inborn talent and seizing the opportunities in front of them.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but they didn’t choose their inborn talent, did they? And they didn’t choose their opportunities either. When people start out with advantages they didn’t choose or earn, does it really make sense to give them more?

Ray Briggs
Oh, hold on. So rewarding people for things that have nothing to do with talent is obviously unfair. But now you’re telling me that rewarding people based on talent is also unfair? What exactly is fairness supposed to look like?

Josh Landy
Well, fairness is all about equality, right? I mean, everyone should get the same share of whatever society has to offer, no matter who they are, or what advantages they were born with.

Ray Briggs
Okay, that seems great for distributing basic goods like housing and health care. But there are some things we just can’t hand out to everybody. When you’re looking for a doctor to perform open heart surgery, yu don’t just pick out someone at random. You pick someone who’s good at their job.

Josh Landy
Yeah. Okay. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what people deserve. I mean, if you wanted to pick the most deserving doctor, you probably choose the one who overcame the most hardship or donated the biggest portion of their income to charity. But that’s not what we do.

Ray Briggs
Fine, Josh, what’s your vision of an ideal society? I mean, it sounds like you want us to live in that Kurt Vonnegut story. You know, the one where we level the playing field by injuring the most athletic and damaging the brains of the smartest.

Josh Landy
Oh, no, no, no, I’m not talking about that kind of future. We shouldn’t cut down people who are doing well. We should lift up people who are doing badly.

Ray Briggs
Ha ha, because that’s what they deserve?

Josh Landy
Touché. Well, at least we can give some people a better chance of getting what they deserve. These days, many orchestras are tackling unconscious bias by doing blind auditions, where aspiring musicians perform behind a screen.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, behind the screen to find out more. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Anthony McGill says when he first fell in love with music, he practiced the clarinet like an athlete training for the Olympics.

Anthony McGill
I liked sports. I grew up in Chicago when Michael Jordan was, you know, at the height of the bulls and those championships.

Holly McDede
With classical music came a series of hoops to jump through and tests to pass. But as he got older, he learned more about how those hoops and tests were designed,

Anthony McGill
Those setups are made in a way that perhaps discriminate against certain peoples.

Holly McDede
McGill went on to become the first African American principal player in the New York Philharmonic, an ensemble that’s been around since 1842.

Anthony McGill
As outsized as some of the opportunities that I’ve gotten to perform and to prove my merit, there are many people that have had complete opposite and negative experiences trying to prove their own worth and they’re married within that system, and a lot of those stem from race.

Holly McDede
According to a 2014 study, less than 2% of the players in top ensembles were black, less than 3% were Latino. Blind auditions, where musicians audition behind a screen, are an attempt to level the playing field. The idea took off in the late 60s when two black musicians took the New York Philharmonic to Court arguing they had been discriminated against during the hiring process.

Anthony Tommasini
One of the things that orchestra started doing to correct this situation was to start holding auditions behind screens.

Holly McDede
Anthony Tommasini is a New York Times classical music critic.

Anthony Tommasini
So that the identity of the person would not come into play.

Holly McDede
But now Tommasini wants to get rid of blind auditions because he says there are still too few black and Latino players in major orchestras, and identity should matter. Orchestras, he says, should reflect the community,

Anthony Tommasini
The idea of meritocracy in this case—that the very, very best players measured on some scale are the only ones who should be in an orchestra—I just reject that.

Holly McDede
But others argue blind uditions are too important to abandon. In 1978, less than 6% of orchestra players were women. Now half of the New York Philharmonic is female.

Carmen Lemoine
The screen is an improvement over how they used to do it.

Holly McDede
Carmen Lemoine is the principal flutist with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra, and she spent thousands of dollars on flights and hotel rooms to show up for auditions.

Carmen Lemoine
In the flute world, most of the students and players are women. In the top orchestras, most of the principal flute players are men. Like, statistically that doesn’t make sense to me.

Michael Morgan
I’ve been very lucky. I had a series of really great teachers.

Holly McDede
Michael Morgan is the music director of the Oakland symphony, and one of a small percentage of black conductors in the country. He says so much of a person’s classical music career is a combination of determination and happy accidents—and intentional funding for music education in public schools. He’s been conducting since he was 12 years old.

Michael Morgan
My teachers were all so overqualified to be public school teachers that for them, it just made it more interesting to be able to teach things at a level that you would not normally teach in public schools.

Holly McDede
That, he says, is where the quest to diversify orchestras needs to begin. And he says this is necessary for anyone who wants to classical music symphony to survive,

Michael Morgan
You do have to proactively work to diversify programming and artists and composers and—it doesn’t happen accidentally, you have to actually work at it.

Holly McDede
Donato Cabrera, music director for the California Symphony agrees. In 2017, the California Symphony became the first orchestra to issue a public statement committing to diversity.

Donato Cabrera
It’s so easy to get hung up on the three Bs—Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—and of course Mozart, and all the composers that we are also familiar with. But there’s so much other repertoire that should be celebrated.

Holly McDede
Now most orchestras have shut down due to the pandemic, but the movement for black lives has forced people to pay attention and listen.

Afa Dworkin
I truly believe you cannot fix what you do not measure.

Holly McDede
Afa Dworkin is president and artistic director of the Sphinx Organization, a group founded to address underrepresentation in classical music.

Afa Dworkin
I’d love to be here together in a year and say wow, look at our presenting houses, at our orchestras today, and look at how far they’ve come and how far they say they still want to go.

Holly McDede
After the killing of George Floyd, Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet chair for the New York Philharmonic, picked up his instrument. And then he closed his eyes, took two knees, and kneeled in silence. He posted this performance online and urged other musicians to pick up their instruments and play for justice and decency. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks, Holly for that highly meritorious report. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Jo Littler, professor of social analysis and cultural politics at the City University of London, and author of “Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility.” Jo, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Jo Littler
Thanks for inviting me.

Josh Landy
So, Jo, we know you have an academic interest in meritocracy. But is there a personal story there as well?

Jo Littler
Well, I guess I came from what you could call a mixed class background. In that half my extended family was quite comfortably middle class and the other half was extremely poor. So I think I saw firsthand how different types of equality and inequality could affect people’s life chances, health outcomes, their ability to progress.

Ray Briggs
So people today think meritocracy is a good thing, but the ones who originally came up with the word meritocracy thought it was a bad thing. Can you tell us why that is?

Jo Littler
That’s right. So meritocracy, as a idea has very long historical and wide geographical roots. So you might trace it, for example, to the idea of the American dream, you might trace it across to China and the idea of the Imperial civil service. But when it was coined as a word, it was in the 1950s in England, and it was first used by an industrial sociologist Alan Fox, who pretty much used it as a term of abuse. And he said, Why would you hate prodigious economic benefits on the already gifted, it’s just perpetuating inequality. And then it was popularized by Michael Young, in his satirical book, The Rise of the meritocracy, where he foresaw a future in which you had a trade and black market, brainy babies being swapped. So to begin with, it was a slur it was a swear word in for people like Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, it was problematic as well, because it gestured towards inequality, and the kind of educational stratification that was unfair. But then, by the 1970s, when Daniel Bell, the theorist of the Information Society took hold of it, he got kind of gave it a positive spin, and thought, you know, well, why can’t you have meritocracy as an engine of the knowledge economy, he saw it as a unproblematically positive term. And this is the time when neoliberal capitalism in practice is really taking off, it becomes popularized by right wing think tanks, and then by people like Thatcher, and Reagan, and governments to really promote the idea that your life chances new opportunities are down to you as an individual, they’re not up to the wider social structures or safety nets. So today, it’s pretty much I think, I would argue an alibi for extreme inequality.

Ray Briggs
So how much through these changes? Did people view the word meritocracy as a word for something that was already happening? And how much did they view it as a word for something that might happen in the future and be good or bad?

Jo Littler
I think it’s always straddled the line between something that is thought to perhaps exist, but not quite. So it occupies this kind of fantasy space, in which, you know, we know that there’s not a level playing field, it’s very clear, it’s very apparent, and it’s more apparent. Now. For example, it’s more apparent at different times. And at the same time, it gestures towards kind of powerful ideas that we should be able to progress beyond where we are born, we should be able to develop ourselves and in ways that we want to and that utilize our talents. And so I think it’s, it’s, you know, it’s got kind of within its package of meaning, it’s got very powerful components that are useful. But I also think that it’s been used and packaged and sold to us very aggressively as a means to disguise extreme social inequality. And that’s really ratcheted up over the past few decades.

Josh Landy
What do you think is the engine of that ratcheting?

Jo Littler
I think it’s primarily political, but I think it functions as an ideological practice. So you can see it as a as a discourse, you know, as a kind of set of narratives that work through government rhetoric, it’s used, for example, in the speeches of politicians from all shades in the spectrum. So it’s used, for example, by Barack Obama. And it’s also used by Trump in quite different ways. You know, whether authoritarian, populist or socially liberal, so it’s used with different inflections politically, it’s also promoted through our media. So for example, we might think about how, over the past couple of decades reality TV shows that promote the idea of competitive individualism are really entrenched the notion that that are, that life is a competition, you know, that work is a competition that every single aspect of our lives is not about cooperation. It’s about ruthlessness, and about elbowing other people out of the way. So you just have to look at things like—

Josh Landy
I’m not hereto make friends, right? I’m here to win the million dollars. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy with Joe littler from the City University of London.

Ray Briggs
Is there a difference between being talented, just being lucky? Is it fair to reward people for their inborn advantages? Can anyone really know what other people deserve?

Josh Landy
Rags to Riches and rightful rewards—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Beyoncé
Sometimes I go off, I go hard, take what’s mine, I’m a star, cause I slay

Josh Landy
Seems like Beyoncé deserves everything she’s got—is that because of or in spite of our supposed meritocracy? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy with Joe littler from the City University of London, author of “Against Meritocracy.”

Josh Landy
With COVID still in the air we’re pre recording this episode. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments at philosophy talked or G. Or you can comment on our website where you can become a subscriber to gain access to more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Joe, in the opening, Josh was saying that meritocracy is unfair. And I was arguing that it’s better than the alternatives like giving out opportunities based on family connections or social class. So who’s right?

Jo Littler
Well, I think that Ray you aren’t you’re more right. But the problem is with both of those stances that meritocracy does function to perpetuate family contacts and nepotism, you only have to really look at Ivanka Trump to see that is still in evidence. But what it does at the same time is obscures these advantages. It obscures the social structure and inequality that gives more advantages to some people than others and instead promotes the idea that it’s just down to you. All you need to do is work really hard and you can beat the odds. So because of that, I think it’s deeply pernicious, you know, it’s better been ingrained inequality. It’s better than having an elite behind that golden gates a privilege and that how that’s how it gains its power, but it’s by itself it will just work to shore up inequality.

Josh Landy
Wouldn’t couldn’t somebody say that precisely the problem with the current situation with Ivanka Trump getting the jobs that she’s gotten as well is precisely that America isn’t meritocracy? Is isn’t living up to its own ideals right now. So, you know, an advocate, a left wing advocate of meritocracy could say, look at the current government in the United States, it’s plutocratic, it’s kleptocratic. It’s nepotistic. Let’s try to live up to our meritocratic ideal people should get what they deserve a not a position just because they’re somebodies son or daughter. What about that?

Jo Littler
Sure. I mean, it sounds very tempting. But the reality is that the word meritocracy has never existed outside of the social landscape of extreme inequality, economically speaking, that’s the problem with it. The problem is that we’re that the measure of judgment and value that it implies is that when you reach the top, you get economic rewards. And those economic rewards are then given to the person’s children. So there’s some argument you could make there, for example, for, say, a socialist meritocracy. But it’s not usually done, because the word itself has become so toxic, and its association with inequality, and particularly with neoliberalism over the past couple decades.

Ray Briggs
I’m a little bit worried now that so I agree that sort of the concept of meritocracy has arisen in a really unequal society. And that has potential to distort the ideal. But we live in a profoundly unequal society. And so any idea we develop is going to be touched by that. How do we get around that? And is meritocracy somehow really ill placed for getting around that?

Jo Littler
Well, I think we do two things. Firstly, we disaggregate the different strands of meaning in the concept. And secondly, we use our creativity to identify progressive elements that have already existed. So to take the first bit to disaggregate the meanings, could we have a society where people have equal access to develop and extend their skills? And to be recognized for them? Yes, that’s completely possible. Can we have a meritocratic system structured around economic inequality? No, I don’t think we can. So if we think about it, the the kind of ideal element of that were to look for progressive alternatives. There are plenty that are in existence, we just have to look, for example, at the kind of programs that were developed through the New Deal. And through the welfare state in Europe. Things like public access to health care in Europe, and free libraries, free education systems. Those are the kind of progressive alternatives that I think we can identify. And also, there’s a whole realm of other interesting smaller idiosyncratic examples around for example, workers, co ops, where people develop an idea and share their wealth and share the project together, as well as the really large scale cooperatives that exist in places like Spain.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I’m seeing a an equality of opportunity aspect to the concept of meritocracy and a like, reward people for doing a good job. aspect. And it sounds like you’re questioning the reward people for doing a good job. So which, which makes a lot of sense like I, I don’t want to reward people with adequate food and housing for doing a good job because I just think everybody should get adequate food, food and housing, regardless of whether they get a good job. Is there a value to like, marginally rewarding people a little bit for doing a good job? Should we just scrap that all together?

Jo Littler
Hmm. That’s tricky. I think perhaps you could think about it in terms of progressing with skill. I, yeah, it’s possible, but it should be relatively negligible, I think. And he had to take into account people’s situations the way, you know, people’s dependents, for example, the cost of living in their area. So there was some really interesting kind of progressive workers co ops, where they take those things into account when they’re paying out the salary of people.

Josh Landy
I think it’s this is a really interesting, I mean, I like that example, because I really interested in different questions like that. The objection that’s usually raised is if you had a complete Lee equal system in the sense that everyone made exactly the same amount of money and got exactly the same other kinds of non financial rewards, then how are you going to motivate people to work and to work harder, and so on and so on? I mean, that’s one way to phrase the objection. Another is, when it starts to feel unfair, right? We’re worried about the unfairness of meritocracy that we’re in the other side is with a system of not just equal opportunity, but equal outcome, everyone gets paid exactly the same and gets gets the same housing the same other kinds of rewards. Wouldn’t someone feel Hey, you know, that person over there is a bit of a freeloader. I’m doing all the work. It’s like, you know, a high school project where one person is actually doing all the work in a collective project. And hey, wait, we all got the same grade, but I did the experiment. So if we’re worried about fairness, why not just say we’ll keep a little bit of income disparity, but reduce it massively. Right now, a CEO at an s&p 500 company makes like 300 times the median salary of employees, let’s reduce that to twice, or one and a half times. So there’s still a little bit of disparity, but not this glaring inequality. What about that? What about that is a possible vision?

Jo Littler
Well, I think I think you’re right, and the the argument against it often tends to get made on the basis of nitpicking, you know, and it’s so far removed from the reality, you know, think about the difference in divergence in income between Elon Musk and a nurse, it’s just off the scale, it’s off the chart. So what we need to do is to radically reduce that extreme inequality, that is the priority. But I think we also need to think about what people are motivated by and they’re, they’re not necessarily motivated by vast wealth at all. You know, that they are when they’re people were living in situations of extreme precarity. And money becomes extremely important. Because you haven’t got it, you haven’t got enough. But otherwise, we’re motivated by other things. You know, we’re motivated by looking after people, we’re motivated by extending our ability and be able to progress and do new things, you know, acquire new skills, it’s kind of its own reward. So I was of the generation in the UK, for example, that had free university education. That’s good, right? Yes, yes. And now we have this extreme inequality, this extreme intergenerational inequality between my generation and those that came after me. And what’s interesting is that a lot of them, some some students find it hard to understand, you know, how they would necessarily work hard. If you didn’t pay for it, is though paying for it somehow. Is is in itself, that the reason why you do it, the reason why you would have to work, but we, you know, we worked, we were interested in the subject, because the subject itself was inherently interesting, you know, because we wanted to learn, learning itself became its own reward. So I think we need to open up our imaginations and uncouple them from the idea that monetary reward itself is all encompassing.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy with Joe littler from the City University of London. And we have an email from G Mangal who says, I think the purpose of meritocracy as an ideology is not only to give elites a way to feel like they earned their prosperity, perhaps of equal importance as G mangle is that it blames and shames those who are trapped in poverty, by mechanisms of racial and class based oppression, the implicit and explicit shaming of the disadvantaged for their situation helps keep them from recognizing the systemic obstacles that function to keep them on the edge. So what do you think about that? Joe?

Jo Littler
I think it’s absolutely true. It’s, it’s completely and utterly true. So, it is the case that people are encouraged to blame themselves when they don’t succeed. And it’s often people who are the furthest removed from the bottom rungs of the ladder of social progress, who are most intensely incited to climate and who are most intensely blamed when they you know, most of them fail to. And instead you have these small examples of people moving upwards and and progressing in stereotypical teams, but are picked out by the media, which are made, what are called parables of progress are made luminous is examples that are spotlighted while the rest are shamed.

Ray Briggs
So this is a kind of a part of the idea of meritocracy that I don’t think is either about equality of opportunity, or about rewarding people for, for doing good work. Which is the idea that if you get a reward, you are somehow a more worthy person, which I think like both you and this email by Jim angle picked up on? Where does that come from? So I don’t want to ask if there’s anything to that, because I don’t think that there’s much to it. But where does it come from? And how do we get rid of it? That’s not a too prejudicial way to put the question.

Jo Littler
Well, again, I think it comes back to the way in which the ideology of meritocracy has been pegged around different economic rewards and economic inequality. So it’s very comforting for the rich to believe that they deserve their wealth, and that they they worked hard to gain what they got. So it’s very common when you look at the biographies of billionaires, the autobiographies of billionaires, or media interviews, for people to say, you know, Ivanka Trump, for example, to say, well, you know, it’s not just that I got given everything, I also worked hard, my parents made sure that I, I burnt it, I deserved it. And it’s it offers comfort, doesn’t it? Because it means that you don’t have to think about the inequality that exists. And you know, whether you’re the rewards themselves are structurally problematic.

Ray Briggs
We’ve got another email, which is is relevant to this from Henry Rutkoski? Who says, what level of wealth and privilege does a particular merit class deserve? And how can the distribution of rewards yield an optimal society instead of generating large wealth differentials?

Jo Littler
Well, I think we have to think about leveling the playing field for real, you know, we have to think about, for example, should billionaires exist? Why can’t we ban billionaires and, you know, surely a millionaire is enough? Universal Basic Services that mean that people aren’t, you know, struggling to achieve a million miles away from any notion of the ladder. And I think we need to kind of reinstate the idea in popular narratives, that it’s not all about individual competition. It’s about social cooperation. And you can see the value of that right now, in these times of the pandemic.

Josh Landy
I totally agree with that. I guess what I was wondering is whether there’s a danger of extrapolating from our own local situation. So obviously, Ray and I are living in 20. America, enough said, you’re living in Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom. But what if we what if we look to the Scandinavian model, for example, where, you know, there’s free health care, free education, great access to daycare? Isn’t there room to think that there could be a model of meritocracy that is actually progressive, and maybe not perfect, but but decent?

Jo Littler
I think the Scandinavian model is great, in many ways. It’s got lots going for it. And it’s you know, it’s been a fantastic example that people all over the world point to, it’s also one that is under threat, from the forces of neoliberalism. And it really goes to show how politics of one nation state can’t just be made better on their own, how we’re all interconnected. And it also shows I think, some of the difficulties of the kind of compromises of mid century social democracy, strong and important as they were. So I think we need to, you know, think, for example, about who was excluded from those welfare models. They were welfare models that were built around. White White men in particular, particular kinds of social structures that didn’t necessarily advantage, people of color and women to the same extent. And we also need to think about how to make organizations, but our capitalist organization stronger. So how would you kind of increase the power of cooperatives in a libertarian and not an authoritarian way? So I think there’s plenty of historical examples that are good, but we also need to think about their problems. In order to think about what libertarian socialism perhaps might look like.

Ray Briggs
I want to read an email by one more listener, Edward AEV. Francisco, who asks, no meritocratic system can be completely attainable or fair, if being fair is meant to preclude unearned differences not being fully attainable and not being completely fair, or not prima facie reasons to reject a meritocratic system since those standards are unreasonably high for any defensible social system. So I guess that was more of a comment than a question. But do you have a response for Edward’s email?

Jo Littler
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s there are elements of meritocracy which are really positive. I would always say that, I think that we need to think about how we can progress and develop ourselves. We need to think about how we can move beyond systems of elitism and ingrained privilege. Those are all really important and powerful ideals to hold on to. But at the moment, meritocracy has come to function as a smokescreen for the vested interests of the hyper privileged, and it doesn’t work. It’s structurally impossible. It’s an obscure Katori. A mantra, if you like that is designed to make future plans look like their norm call and every day but aren’t. And as such, it works to extend the kinds of inequalities that we have and reproduce them rather than tackle them. So I think we really need to think about inventive creative ways in which we can create a level playing field that is also no think about the field itself. So think about how we can connect to ideas like the green new deals and cooperation and care to look after each other rather than just ourselves.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy with Joe Littler, author of “Against Meritocracy.”

Ray Briggs
Don’t we all deserve to be happy? Or do we just deserve the right to pursue happiness? How can we have equal opportunities when we’re starting from such different places?

Josh Landy
Getting what we deserve—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Joe Esposito
You’re the best around / Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down

Josh Landy
What do you deserve for being the best around? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Joe Littler from the City University of London. And we’re thinking about the merits of meritocracy

Josh Landy
So Jo, with the power vested in us by American Public Radio, we’re going to appoint you czar of opportunities that so what’s the first thing you do as tsar to make sure everyone gets a genuinely equal shot at success regardless of their starting position?

Jo Littler
How exciting, what power. Well, I guess I would, I would fuse to I would ban billionaires and redistribute their wealth. And with some of that money I would fund free education for throughout everyone’s lifetime.

Ray Briggs
This brings us to another email actually about universities. So Andrew Davis asks, I want to question the assumption that the best universities should be reserved for the best students, especially since determining who are the best students is impossible. He says I’d love to hear this hashed out.

Jo Littler
Yeah, well, I mean, universities are a fascinating topic in relation to meritocracy. And there’s been some wonderful work done particularly in the states on this subject. So Lonnie Guney his work on the tyranny of the meritocracy kind of picks apart the history of Harvard admissions, and looks at how it’s worked to serve different racist agendas basically. And you can just look to the kind of scandals that have erupted in recent years. Whether it’s schools like TM, Landry, I think it was where underprivileged black students were basically subjected to a regime a regime of abuse. And they falsified narratives in order to get into Ivy League schools that the people that ran it was kind of taking loads of money off them all the way up to the kind of transcripts, scandals of recent years. So yeah, universities are deeply problematic, and in that sense, but precisely because they’re pegged around a system of extreme inequality, which doesn’t help people progress and it doesn’t give everyone an equal shot.

Ray Briggs
So I also wonder about how you can make universities fairer without making pre secondary education more fair. So in the US, sort of school funding is attached to local property taxes, which means that the rich areas get much better school funding than the poor is and then you have sort of parents pulling their kids out of public schools to send them to private, private schools and being very competitive. How do you sort of equalize higher education without equalizing sort of earlier education first?

Jo Littler
Well, there’s different ways that you can think about this, aren’t they? Because they’re the kind of ideal scenarios and then they’re the tweaks to the system. You know, I I’m, I don’t live in this state. So I wouldn’t want to comment too much on it. But in Britain, where I am, we are kind of fast hurtling towards a system of extreme segregation that replicates the states in many ways, at all levels. So the the idea of charter schools are kind of replicated in secondaries, here with Academy schools. So the kind of systems of privatization and marketization kind of removing the vestiges of the welfare, state education provision are increasing every year. And I think to tackle the problems, we need to reverse that process. And you need to think about what it would look like to have good educational provision in local communities, from cradle to grave, you know, including adult education.

Josh Landy
Yeah, look east to Scandinavia, not west to the United States. But we have another email, which is a really interesting suggestion. So this is from David Milgrom. When a company develops a set of job requirements and invites applications based on them, would it not be effective and ultimately fairer to select randomly? Among all those applicants that satisfy the job requirements? Assuming the job requirements themselves are fair? What do you think about that, you know, assuming you meet the minimum threshold, then it’s a lottery.

Jo Littler
Well, you know, it, you have to look at how it worked in practice. I think suggestions like that, though, they kind of get at the problem in a quite a partial way. So actually reminds me of the issue of blind auditions that you that you started with earlier on the program. And if you have blind auditions for orchestras, it screens for ability, performance without discrimination, but it doesn’t really show you who has access to say, a clarinet to learning and practicing and playing that musical instrument through time. So I think, you know, we kind of need we need clear job criteria, we need clear anti discrimination policies. And we also need to think about who is being able to apply for these jobs and, and, and why.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point, right? If you think about who’s going to get in the door for that audition, it’s not just who has talent, or has worked hard. It’s also who had access to a clarinet when they were a kid who, whose parents had time to practice with them, or teach them or care about them and all that stuff. Right. And, and so it’s a much broader systemic question. But I guess the question I had for you, Joe, is, when you think about meritocracy, I wonder whether our intuitions don’t vary, depending on which way we think about it. Because if you think about it as rewarding an individual, then it starts to seem very suspicious, why should not reward this individual who probably got a lot of their advantages in ways that had nothing to do with them? But if you think about it as filling a job, then right, who should be, you know, the chief surgeon at this hospital? Probably whoever’s best, you know, who should we hire into this orchestra? Well, probably whoever’s the best clarinetist. So do you think our intuitions diverged depending on whether we’re thinking about a set of positions to be filled, and then picking the person or whether we’re thinking about a set of people, and then what those people deserve?

Jo Littler
I think it’s you have to disaggregate it again, and think about the job and the function and the way in which people can learn on the job. So for example, you know, thinking about employing a secretary to work with a team, you can think you could there you can think about how positive discrimination is relatively easy, easy way to increase the diversity of a team without too many problems. Yeah. If you’re thinking about appointing a neurosurgeon, you obviously need someone that’s really well qualified. But that doesn’t mean you can therefore throw out all issues of diversity. You just have to look back further and see, you know, who has had the ability to train as a neurosurgeon, and why? So it’s a different involves tackling the problem at a different scale, a different place in the system. More obviously

Ray Briggs
So it occurs to me that the rewarding sort of skill and effort aspect of meritocracy and the Equal Opportunity aspect of meritocracy actually come apart and sort of not only not only are they distinct, but they seem like they’re in tension with each other. Because if you give somebody the reward of like extra money or extra extra leisure time, they will do things like spend those resources on their children and giving their children better opportunities than the children around them. So you think that that’s a an aspect of human beings that can be managed or change? Like if we give differential rewards for anything? How do we stop them from building up?

Jo Littler
Well, you just have to look at different ways in which societies have organized themselves through history to know that we can organize ourselves in very different ways. And their kind of potential now for people to build up vast reservoirs of money if they’re a billionaire, for example, and hand that on to their kids. It’s very different from how it was, say 60 years ago. So it’s, it’s completely possible to think about disaggregating economic reward from people’s potential and to think more capacious Lee about different types of social reward, including extending our abilities, working together to produce the kind of society that we want to see that seems healthy and is more democratic and well functioning.

Josh Landy
I mean, I take all these points, you know, and I, we’re definitely worried too, about meritocracy functioning as a smokescreen, right. People will vote against their own economic interests. They’ll vote for tax cuts on the super rich because they think one day, I’m going to be that billionaire. And that seems exactly right to me. But I guess I’ve also seen phenomena like Barack Obama, you mentioned Obama earlier as somebody who spoke in favor of America kradic vision of America, but he’s someone who the Council of Economic Advisers said, oversaw the largest increase in federal investment to reduce inequality since the Great Society through things like the Affordable Care Act. Obviously, things are still far from perfect. It’s, you know, very much a work in progress. But there isn’t there a left wing version of meritocracy that every now and again, looks it looks a little bit of a difference. Well,

Jo Littler
I wouldn’t call it meritocracy necessarily, I think Obama’s gains. It’s it’s a more socially liberal version of meritocracy, which is obviously a million miles better than Trump’s racist authoritarian populism. But at this, but at the same time, it works to endorse neoliberal inequality at an extreme level and so that the problem isn’t it wasn’t tackled. So I think there are there are elements of, of that that we can take forward. But we have to really do the work of decoupling work of decoupling economic reward from social progress. social progress isn’t elbowing other people out of the way up the ladder to get to the top. And social progress is creating a functioning democratic society where everyone can flourish.

Josh Landy
So Jo, on that note, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a really inspiring and enlightening conversation.

Jo Littler
Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
Our guest is being Joe Littler, professor of social analysis and cultural politics at the City University of London, and author of “Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility.” So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So, it’s very clear that we don’t live in a meritocracy right now. And I’m persuaded by by Jo’s skepticism about meritocracy. Being a good enough ideal, it seems to run too many things together, including this idea of competitiveness and only rewarding some people. Um, I think I still I want to know more about like, what my alternatives are, among other ideals.

Josh Landy
Yeah, right. Exactly. Because we all want fairness, right? And I guess at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to what does that actually look like? We want the best people in the in the jobs that we need done. And we want people to get sort of what they deserve. But how to get that to actually pan out.

Ray Briggs
And we want equality, but then equality of what?

Josh Landy
Equality of what and how and what what all do we need to change in our society to get there. But this conversation continues at Philosophers Corner, at our online community of thinkers, where our motto with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blago. I think, therefore, I blog. And you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog. Now, did he get so fast by effort or was he just born that way? It’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second pPhilosopher.

Ian Shoales
enIan Shoales… Our national sadness over the dwindling of a perceived meritocracy is misplaced. Have we ever been good at what we do? We’re not that good at thinking ahead. Thanks to the genius of Henry Ford, and the brilliant assembly line, I guess, we all own cars, making a huge industry, freeways, vast parking garages and lots, insurance, smog, seat belt laws, Exploding Pintos, Ralph Nader, the fall of Detroit, global warming, so how smart was Henry Ford really? Tear down the statues of Henry Ford, rename the schools, the street. Walk home. We also look at President Trump, or some do, as proof that boneheaded incompetence now knows no measure. Nah, he’s part of a proud tradition. And the new trend is actively against meritocracy, making it hard to vote, so we won’t have qualified people running, making it hard to get an education, and a crappy one if we do. So America becomes greedy blind mice leading a land of nervous blind mice, trying to talk us all into cat ownership. What could go wrong? Also, our leaders seem to want us not to wear a mask in the presence of airborne fatal diseases, because um wait it’ll come to me. Freedom! That’s right. Because of freedom. We’re supposed to be educated through a common culture, but that’s been whittled away. We don’t have anything in common any more except a vast reservoir of stupidity. Conservatives like to blame liberals for the decline in education. It’s post modernism putting the kibosh on common sense. Jefferson was racist and Robert E Lee were racist! Tear down the statues and don’t read about them. You’ll get infected. There’s that, but also conservatives made us hate our own history by clinging to outmoded information delivery systems, writing cursive with a pencil, memorizing rhyming poems about Abraham Lincoln. Have we learned nothing from capitalism? Well, in fact there is only one thing to learn from capitalism. Buy, or get out of the way. So sitting in rows in a class room. Gone. History books and magazines. Gone. And while it’s true that we are toppling the statues of all kinds of formerly revered figures, what do you expect when you keep denying the evil elements of your own heritage? Other nations don’t have this trouble. Richard the Third, for example, as Shakespeare depicts him, was kind of a ruthless guy who killed his way to the top. Yet England did not expunge him from its list of kings. We hate science now, because it will force us to clean up the planet, costing money. Also, science made atom bombs which scare us, and we have computers now, why do we even need science? To make apps I guess, but we’re kind of scraping the barrel there. My phone can tell me how to get to Burlingame in a voice like Meryl Streep. I can use it to pay for parking so I don’t have to lug quarters around. Wow! Boring! The only science we all like is forensics. That’s because true crime is the only television we like. Where would justice be without luminol! Blood free, and knee deep in murder my friends. The only place I see any evidence of learning is Q Anon, the extreme conspiracy theory cult. They believe Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks are part of a global cannibalistic pedophile cult. I think. President Trump is secretly in charge of bringing it all down, which I don’t quite get. If he’s the most powerful man in the world why doesn’t he just executive order their behinds into prison? The point is Q Anonners follow the posts of Q, a top secret mole in the great swampy workings of the U.S. Government. These posts are numbered and called “drops.” There are thousands. Drop 577. Drop 4789. Gather them up, put them in a Bible. It’s the only book you will ever need. For verily as Q said in Drop 3,898, or Drop 3, “Now think about the timing of POTUS traveling to China. I’ve said too much. God bless, Patriots.” Bring it on says Q Anon! Let’s go to war with China, Antifa, and each other. The letter Q is supposedly a top top top secret clearance the anonymous poster has, but there’s no way for us to know, because, its top secret. He could have just given this clearance to himself, because without a clearance would we believe him? So believe him. QED. Create your own truth and let us lie in it. We’ll decipher the secret messages, like Ralphie in Christmas Story, and await the day. Wake up sheeple! Your real world expertise is for naught. On the other hand I knew a guy in college whose only skill was, though perpetually stoned, he could recite all of Elvis Presley’s movies, in order and year released. I imagine even he found a future for himself once the drugs wore off. In other words, it’s all good, it’s all wisdom, all directions work. Every East is eventually west, just keep stumbling along. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners that our online community of thinkers.

Ray Briggs
the views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you to become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs, thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking,

A YouTube Carol
The freedom of it, the fairness—hits, likes comments. These were the things that made YouTube great and pushed the best people to the top. It was a meritocracy.