Meritocracy’s Death Spiral
For structural change, we do not need another war. This is where politics is its most crucial.
Considering its length and dry academic style, I’m surprised it only took me four years to get to French Economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century. In Capital, Piketty examines the trends of capital and wealth from the “Belle Epoch” of the immediate post World War II era into the modern day. According to his findings, one of the greatest drivers of the growth of inequality is the rise of the “super-manager”, the specialized and extremely skill person who’s incomes have skyrocketed beyond anyone of a similar ilk in recorded history. What caused the rise of this new class of citizen? There are many prevailing theories raised in Piketty, from the over financialization of the market to the slow motion capture of the regulatory state by corporate interests.
Meritocracy is one of the greatest social inventions of liberalism. Like much of liberalism, it is not rooted in radical change; it is reform to make the current system more just. Theoretically, in a meritocracy those who are the best at what they do and work the hardest are the most deserving. In the platonic ideal of capitalist meritocracy, the avatar of success is blind. Your worth and ranking in society is based off of your ability to maximize profit or score well on a test.
This construction, however, raises a serious question: Who writes the test questions or sets the prices for goods and services in each given field? It is a cliche of post-industrial society that teachers are underpaid for the role they have in society, yet your average hedge fund manager make hundreds of times as much as your average public school teacher.
These contradictions within meritocracy are undeniable. Yet, the myth of our meritocratic society continue, subliminally and explicitly, throughout our society. One of the most common reasons why people trusted Donald Trump’s judgement during the 2016 presidential run was “he’s a billionaire.” Implicit in this statement is the idea that those who are richer know better and deserve it. We have entered the reality where the Mr Show sketch “Human Worth” is not a comedy bit, but a core pillar of capitalist ideology. In the sketch, David Cross plays a shmucky Steve Forbes type hawking the idea that those who make the most money are inherently the best, comparing those supposed great men of history who were not financially successful as nothing but losers. “Einstein was no Einstein!”
Yet, this construction of worth is the logical end of capitalist meritocracy. The top 1% within our historically unequal society are not all deserving figures with millions of times worth to society to your average worker. Even the paragon of this ideology, Bill Gates, acknowledges the luck in his birth (much less the ways in which Microsoft built their massive fortune on a practical software Monopoly in the personal computer boom of the 1990s.) In this way, our modern meritocracy is a secular rendition of the Divine right of kings: those anointed to have power and rule. It is the founding myth, not the actual reason for their power.
Rooted within all meritocratic ideology is a moral argument for hierarchy. In 2017, this is a dangerous language for left and center left political actors. While the egalitarian coating of capitalist meritocracy feels right at home with a broad left analysis, it can easily be co-opted by the privileged owners of capital that, if left unchecked, can make for a monstrously unjust diffusion of power. This monopoly power will continue to take control over different segments of society, and without an understanding of the myths that created it, we cannot do anything substantive to stop its propagation.
For the past 40 years, we have been leading towards a consolidation of powers. The period of post war consensus and growth of economic equality from 1945–1975 was, as explained in Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, a limited era of time. The great equalizer in this time period was not particular policy as liberals would proclaim or particular cultural attitudes as conservatives would attest. According to Piketty, the agent of change in this epoch of growth and a burgeoning middle class was less arcane than most politicians and activist give credit for: war.
World War II decimated the value of capital across the world. Entire global economic systems were redesigned to fuel the war effort. Lands were bombed and occupied, restricting much of the capital flows that allow capital to grow and propagate. Similarly to the dawning of the European Renaissance in 14th century Florence after the devastation of the period of the Black Death, the effects of World War II materially restructured societies across the world, giving them a chance to rebuild society with the lessons of history in mind.
For structural change, we do not need another war. This is where politics is its most crucial. The phrase “war is politics by other means,” a famed quote by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, can be inverted to understand the current trends in much of western society. We have lived in a period of fractious peace and uncertain prosperity, and we need politics and society to be the change agents in people’s material conditions. Instead of a war of guns and bombs, we need a push for egalitarian economic programs, to take the lessons of the past century and prevent the transformation of the super-manager into the new landed gentry of the 21st century.
