Meritocracy? What’s that?
Meritocracy has been dying a slow and painful death for many many decades.
It used to be a basic American value. I don’t know when that began to change, but the first thing I noticed along those lines was many many decades ago when the gifted and talented programs that had flourished in schools when I was a child – keeping me merely somewhat bored in school rather than bored to tears – had been canceled. Why? I don’t think it primarily had to do with race at the time; to the best of my recollection it had to do with not making the children in the slower groups feel judged and found wanting. Whatever the reason, I recall thinking it was a turning point, and not a good one.
Now, many decades later, it’s come to this. First a little history, in which the Jews – as is often the case – were the canaries in the mine:
University began administering a standardized test to all applicants in 1905. Its effect was profound and immediate: historically a landing spot for the Protestant upper crust, the school began admitting far more public school kids, Catholics, and Jews.
The increasing number of Jewish students was a major concern for Harvard president and committed progressive A. Lawrence Lowell. He tried to implement a quota on Jews, then pivoted to an admissions process that used intangible factors such as “character” and “manliness.” It worked: Jewish applicants consistently fell short.
Which brings us to today:
In the name of racial equality, the woke now seek to dismantle meritocratic norms and return to the quota systems that practices like standardized testing were designed to relegate to the trash heap of history…
The New York Times’s classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini, is calling for the end of the blind symphony audition, which drove a tripling of women’s representation in the field, so that conductors can make race-based selections. The University of Connecticut School of Medicine, where merit is literally a matter of life or death, recently suspended admissions to its honor society because the GPA-based admissions criterion did not produce an honor society that, as Bill Clinton said, “looked like America.”
The SAT—which measures intellect better and more fairly than do intangible heuristics—is under fire. University of California president and former Obama official Janet Napolitano has joined the chorus of administrators at elite universities who complain that race-blind admissions aren’t producing the desired results.
It’s never enough, so the only solution is strict quotas in order to ensure exact representation according to a formula that produces the desired racial mix. In November the state of California – which had banned explicit affirmative action by way of quotas twenty-four years ago – will be voting on reinstating them:
Senator Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who was the sponsor of the Senate measure, said its passage in November would mean more state contracts for women and minorities and a closing of education gaps for minorities. At state universities, it will lead to “a more diverse atmosphere that enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding,” Mitchell said. She also predicted it would help produce more teachers of color in California’s classrooms.
In contrast, Senator Ling Ling Chang (R-Diamond Bar) recalled the state’s history of anti-Chinese discrimination and said she feared the bill will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.” Getting rid of Proposition 209, she said, would wrongly eliminate a ban on bias that has helped California flourish.
Senator Mitchell’s assertion that diversity “enhances learning and encourages mutual understanding” has become an article of faith, not to be challenged, despite some evidence against it. But there is little question that Ling Ling Chang is correct, and that this practice, if approved, will “fight discrimination with more discrimination.”
To many, that’s a feature, not a bug. And the Asians, who are the new Jews, will suffer.
More on the California proposal, which can be passed by a simple majority vote in November:
Three decades [after affirmative action quotas were banned in California], the changing political tides have drawn the argument over affirmative action back to the forefront: the once powerful Republican Party is now an afterthought as Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers and all eight statewide officer positions, from governor to attorney general.
Along with the UC regents, the authors have amassed a powerful coalition, including groups like American Civil Liberties Union, California Teachers Association, NextGen California and the Anti-Defamation League. Members of the Legislature’s Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, Women’s and Jewish caucuses are also backing ACA 5.
None of the committee members spoke against the bill Wednesday but dozens of people called in opposition. Some said affirmative action amounts to “reverse discrimination” while the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation argued the practice is unconstitutional.
“It will divide California and pit one group of citizens against another simply based on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” wrote the foundation in an opposition letter. “It will minimize the accomplishments of minority groups to a simple result of preferential treatment, a blow to their extraordinary hard work and sacrifice.”
Again – to the current Democratic Party, that’s the goal.
Trofim Lysenko is cackling from a very hot place.
Sad. Sad. Sad. I hope we vote this down in California, but I have little hope left for this state. I have many Asian friends in the Bay Area–all middle aged, and professionals-majority schooled in one UC or another. Every one is a liberal/progressive. They are raising kids and all assume their kids will follow their steps. Boy, are they in for a surprise unless they and a large swatch of the population really “wake” up. They are all woke and their families will pay dearly-none of them seem to think it will affect them for the worst. Get woke and go broke as Glen Reynolds says.
I wish we could require all these idiots to use quota surgeons when they need a brain tumor removal. They should have to use a surgeon who spent 2 years of college in remedial reading and got a C- on the med school anatomy course.
“(Harvard President Lowell) tried to implement a quota on Jews, then pivoted to an admissions process that used intangible factors such as “character” and “manliness.””
And today, at least one Ivy League school (Harvard, I think) has been marking down Asian applicants on “courage.” (The idea that a university administrator would know anything about courage is eminently mockable)
This has been going on for a generation. When I was a freshman in college in the 70s we were assigned a book that was intended to be a sort of satirical dystopia depicting a meritocracy run amok (The Rise of the Meritocracy). I was probably the last person in the class to catch on that it was a critique, because what it described seemed pretty reasonable to me.
But the left wants it both ways: They say meritocracy is a myth (there’s a book called The Meritocracy Myth), and that it’s tyrannical (e.g. Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of the Meritocracy. It’s the same trick they use with Trump: He’s idiotic and incompetent, but also maniacal and fiendishly clever in his quest for dominance.
Part of what has happened is that meritocracy has been confused with credentialocracy. The worship of degrees, and especially “elite” degrees, has reached very harmful levels.
Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (himself a highly-educated European) asserted that a major advantage the US had over Europe was that here, there were not a small number of ‘elite’ schools that controlled access to the key positions in society. That has been considerably eroded in the 50 years since Drucker wrote.
Well in 10 years as surgeons routinely kill patients, planes fall out of the sky…oh wait..Boeing 737Max..bridges collapse, our utopia will have arrived! Hopefully I’ll be dead by then, but God help my daughters.
Physicsguy.
Recall that in 2009 Michael Jackson’s physician, Conrad Murray, overdosed Jackson on propofol and anti-anxiety drugs benzodiazepines lorazepam and midazolam and killed him. Fortunately Dr. Murray is not white so there were no riots.
Progressives believe the “merit” in “meritocracy” is a lie. They believe it is a cover for discrimination. Arguments about meritocracy have to address this belief in order to get anywhere.
You got good grades? To progressives, all this means is that you pleased the teacher, who was discriminating in your favor.
You had a 99th percentile score on your SAT? To progressives, the SAT is designed to value what white people value and so it is a cover for discrimination.
The progressive left is inherently credentialist. And credentials are awarded, not earned. To the progressive left, if you have an engineering degree it’s because someone with power stamped you as an engineer because they are discriminating in your favor. They think this stamp MAKES you an engineer. Not anything you may have “learned” or any experience you may have had. All learning and experience does, in their view, is signal that you are someone to discriminate in favor of.
And that’s why their solutions all take the form of quotas and why they use statistical disparity as proof of racism.
Frederick:
The situation you describe is explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Increasingly I know of personal accounts of people being prescribed the wrong medication dose (dangerously so), misdiagnosis of broken limbs, even a wrong surgery performed. When I asked my son what he thought was going on, his response was, “when people stopped being promoted on the basis of merit, this is where we end up.”
Expat, “I wish we could require all these idiots to use quota surgeons when they need a brain tumor removal.”
Yes, or the airline pilot who was given multiple extra training rides to finally qualify so a quota could be met.
“The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Galway should be required reading in all high schools. From the review: “Not just for tennis players, or even just for athletes in general, this handbook works for anybody who wants to improve his or her performance in any activity, from playing music to getting ahead at work.” Not only that, but Galway shows how striving for excellence and competition raises the level of everyone’s performance, thus improving society in general.
When I was flying, there was always a desire to be as competent or more so than the pilots I flew with. Even today, I remember having informal competitions for the best landings, the lowest fuel burns, the smoothest and most precise turns, the coolest demeanor during emergencies, etc. It raised our game.
Whatever our jobs or stations in life we should try to do our best. I recall our high school janitor, Mr. Bruce. A low level job, but he did it with such care and pride. The floors glistened, the desks were always clean, the windows spotless, chalk and erasers in good supply, and
he was always cheerful with a smile and pleasant word for all. In a seemingly unimportant job, he made a difference. In turn, society should recognize and acknowledge that no matter where a person falls on the spectrum of ability, if they do their best at all times they are important contributors to society. On the other hand, promoting people beyond their abilities or rewarding slackers who don’t want todo their best because they belong to a certain favored group has a retrograde effect on society. The progs don’t believe it, though.
J.J.
Whatever our jobs or stations in life we should try to do our best. I recall our high school janitor, Mr. Bruce. A low level job, but he did it with such care and pride. The floors glistened, the desks were always clean, the windows spotless, chalk and erasers in good supply, and he was always cheerful with a smile and pleasant word for all. In a seemingly unimportant job, he made a difference.
Your comment about a janitor reminds me of this book: The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation’s Most Ordinary Citizen. From the Amazon Review:
After an exhaustive search for the average city/town, author Kevin O’Keefe concluded that the average city/town was not far from the town he grew up in. He did an exhaustive search through Census data, so I assume that his search was unbiased. He then did a search through the town residents, to find the average person in the average town- Mr. Average American. It turned out that Mr. Average American was a janitor at a nearby high school. Not only that, it turned out that the author already knew Mr. Average American. When Kevin O’Keefe was in high school, the school’s janitor had been Mr. Average American- a school about ten miles from the high school where Mr. Average American currently performed his janitorial duties.
Turned out that O’Keefe and some of his high school peers had made a point of praising Mr. Average American’s janitorial work.
That is supposed to be coincidence.
“Part of what has happened is that meritocracy has been confused with credentialocracy.”
This. This. A thousand times this. An actual meritocracy, by its very nature, admits and absorbs a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds with a wide variety of skills and abilities.
It’s not always pretty. Though he came from a privileged background, Donald Trump is a product of meritocracy in a way that no President has been since probably Eisenhower. But the conflict inherent in a meritocracy is supposed to prevent exactly the sort of public policy disasters we’ve seen over the last 30 years. But when the ruling elite become a club to which everyone gains access in the same way, massive moral and practical blind spots develop.
Mike
Insofar as our intrepid blogger was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the gifted programs she referenced were probably a result of the Cold War. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957 led to anxiety that we were “falling behind” the Soviets in the sciences. Numerous books and magazine articles questioning the US educational system were published, and new interest was shown in the recently published (1955) book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” The period from 1945 through 1949 had seen the number of Communist governments expand from 1 (Soviet Russia) to all of Eastern Europe, North Korea, China, and Tibet. A meritocracy which promoted the brightest students was seen as part of the answer. See the relevant part of the Wikipedia entry for gifted education below:
The Cold War
One unforeseen result of the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union was the immediate emphasis on education for bright students in the United States, and this settled the question whether the federal government should get involved in public education at all.The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed by Congress in 1958 with $1 billion US to bolster science, math, and technology in public education. Educators immediately pushed to identify gifted students and serve them in schools. Students chosen for gifted services were given intelligence tests with a strict cutoff, usually at 130, which meant that students who scored below the 130 were not identified.
The average American (adult) lives in a tract suburb around Rochester, Louisville, Omaha, Nashville, Memphis, Birmingham, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Tucson, or Fresno, but, in any case, in the state in which [s]he was born. [S]he is employed as a light truck driver or a billing and posting clerk. [S]he is 42 years old, has at least one child, is married or has been married. [S]he has an associate’s degree in a vocational subject. [S]he’s a wage earner, is paid about $20 an hour, and has company medical insurance. [S]he works f/t, about 2,000 a year. [S]he’s had brief periods of her life when [s]he collected unemployment compensation (about 7 months over the last 20-odd years). [S]he had a run of years during h[er][is] 20s when she was enrolled in Medicaid and a briefer (overlapping) run when [s]he was enrolled in SNAP. [S]he owns h[is][er] home, but rented up until a couple of years ago. H[is][er] household has a positive net worth, but under $50,000. In h[is][er] garage, there is a vehicle for each person in the home over 21, each about 2-3 years old when purchased.
Rodney Jean:
The programs I’m referring to most definitely predated Sputnik.
What I don’t get is why the Fortune 500 CEOs all buy into this entire line of crap. Where is their merit?
Take Aunt Jemima off the syrup label, for Pete’s sake?! Doing away with the image of a dignified black woman will increase sales?
Has anyone else noticed how often (disproportionately) nice-looking pseudo-Obama blacks, often as nuclear families, appear in TV commercials? My guess is about 40% of the time, though blacks number only 15% and are not known to be universally prosperous.
Woke CEOs without merit? Makes for a grey future.
“Members of the Legislature’s Black, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander, Women’s and Jewish caucuses are also backing ACA 5.”
I wonder if there is a White caucus, Christian caucus, or White Christian Men’s caucus…NOT!
It used to be a basic American value. I don’t know when that began to change, but the first thing I noticed along those lines was many many decades ago when the gifted and talented programs that had flourished in schools when I was a child – keeping me merely somewhat bored in school rather than bored to tears – had been canceled. Why?
It died because without killing it how far would feminism get?
The Meritocracy Myth and the Illusion of Equal Employment Opportunity – Michigan State University College of Law
Where would affirmative action be if meritocracy was the way?
the attack goes way back
see:
The Meritocracy’s Caste System: What’s Good and Bad about the SAT
James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University and one of the most influential men of his day, wanted to replace this aristocracy of birth and wealth with what Thomas Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy” of the intellectually gifted from every walk of life, who would be educated to high standards and then be given the responsibility of governing society. The creation of what Conant called “Jefferson’s ideal,” a new intellectual elite selected strictly on the basis of talent, and dedicated to public service, would, he believed, make America a more democratic country.
This led to the SAT test..
but then… later… when the distributions of outcome were not aligned evenly among groups and among men vs women… (the old point that the bell curve for women is thinner and taller and for men is wider, meaning more idiots and crazies on one side, and more meritocratic spawn on the other… )…
what was a boon that allowed those who came from poor families to go to places like bronx science, as i did, have to be attacked as it did not allow for equality of homogeneity..
Conant’ vision of a governing elite selected through a new, education-based system and devoted to public service in a largely classless society was hopelessly naive. Not surprisingly, the new educated aristocracy has embraced the trappings of its new-found social superiority. Today’s educated elite are disproportionately lawyers, bankers, and doctors, not the dedicated, European-style civil servants that Conant had hoped for. As Lemann says, the American meritocracy has become largely “a means of handing out economic rewards to a fortunate few.”
at least how socialists see it… like Blasio..
Lemann reveals that as early as 1934 Brigham repudiated the basic premise that the tests measured solely native intelligence.
[snip]
ETS and the College Board, the organization of schools and colleges that sponsors the exam, acknowledged as much in 1994, when they finally changed the exam’s name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Assessment Test.
there is more, a lot more… but i dont waste my time any more
my point is neither witty, short, well wanted, or understood in the absence of tons of other pieces of history and knowledge that have long been flushed down the memory hole.. and ignored if dredged up from the septic tank it leads to…
Frederick and David Foster are right to focus on the bait-and-switch tactic of swapping in credentials for merit. Part of that is the need to justify one’s personnel decisions without incurring reprimand or even lawsuit.
I think on the conservative side, focusing on the injustice, we lose sight of what the underlying problem is that we would all have to face. If we rely on meritocracy, there is a major area where African-Americans – on average (on average, on average) – will be underrepresented: anything which requires fluid intelligence, and the more, the worse. Anything that screens for violent crime will also capture a larger number of African-Americans. In other characteristics they may be average or above average, and certainly those who have not been screened out for violence should not be treated as if they are “really,” “probably” more dangerous. Which is a very real possibility, given history.
But the numbers aren’t going away, and moving to meritocracy will highlight that. I think many liberals know this and don’t want it acknowledged, and so pretend that it’s all racism and just isn’t so. BTW, there is no evidence that family breakdown is causal, only associated, because lots of bad behaviors go together in this life.