Merit and Society – Part 1
Merit through history.
In a previous essay series on the science of happiness, we drew on Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey’s book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier. A big part of happiness is what psychologists call “earned success.” As Brooks wrote at the American Enterprise Institute:
Knowing as we do that earning success is the key to happiness, rather than simply getting more money, the goal of our political system should be this: to give all Americans the greatest opportunities possible to succeed based on their hard work and merit … Feeling productive does not mean being protected from competition. It means beating the competition through merit and hard work. It does not come from a collective bargaining agreement and the threat to strike, but from a job well done. And it certainly doesn’t come from a welfare check. All of this explains why our free enterprise system produces happier workers than in most of Europe.
As Brooks says, the concept of merit is essential to earned success, and so it’s important for happiness as well. It’s also important for innovation, and, as we explored in another previous essay series, merit is, unfortunately, being superseded in many universities and elsewhere by the concept of “equity,” in which jobs are distributed not according to merit, but according to skin color. Indeed, the New York Times conducted an investigation of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” program at the University of Michigan, and its replacing of merit with race as a hiring criterion, in which it was reported:
Proposal 2 [made part of the Michigan Constitution] expressly prohibited racial or gender preferences in hiring. But in 2016, [the University of] Michigan began a new program called the Collegiate Fellows, reserved for postdoctoral scholars “in all liberal-arts fields who are committed to diversity in the academy.” … Mindful of Proposal 2, [Tabbye] Chavous and her colleagues did not collect demographic information from applicants. Instead, they were asked to submit statements addressing how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” Departments were invited to nominate candidates from an application pool created by the diversity center, which then oversaw further vetting. In an interview, Chavous stressed that the program was carefully designed to comply with Proposal 2. “We wouldn’t even want to hire people because of their identities,” she said. “It’s about their skills and competencies.” Nevertheless, out of the 49 new faculty members subsequently hired through the program, 80 percent were people of color, according to a university spokeswoman. (In an interview last year, Chavous put the total even higher.) Their research interests included “the epistemic exclusion of diverse practitioners within the academy,” critical food studies and how Indian transgender activists “appropriate normative U.S.-centric conceptions of gender rights as human rights.” Last year, Sellers and Chavous helped create a $79 million equity-hiring program in the health sciences. Similar programs have spread throughout the university. According to the school, about three-quarters of all departments in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts now employ at least one collegiate fellow. Contrary to the school’s disclaimers, it was almost universally understood among professors I spoke with that these programs were intended to generate racial and gender diversity without explicitly using affirmative action. At times, Chavous herself said as much. “One of the misconceptions about Prop 2 is that it inhibited our faculty searches by not allowing us to search based on race and gender or offer financial aid based on race and gender,” she said at a Michigan D.E.I. event last year. “We just had to pivot to be more creative.”
Given the strength of efforts to move away from merit in the evaluation of job candidates in academia and elsewhere, it’s worth exploring the role merit has played in society previously, and to what effect. Adrian Wooldridge has written a book on that subject, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, and it will be the focus on this series of essays.
As Wooldridge writes:
It is now a commonplace that the ideas which have shaped and sustained Western societies for the past 250 years or more are faltering … But there is one idea that still commands widespread enthusiasm: that an individual’s position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort. Meritocracy, a word invented as recently as 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, is the closest thing we have today to a universal ideology. The definition of the word gives us a sense of why meritocracy is so popular. A meritocratic society combines four qualities which are each in themselves admirable. First, it prides itself on the extent to which people can get ahead in life on the basis of their natural talents. Second, it tries to secure equality of opportunity by providing education for all. Third, it forbids discrimination on the basis of race and sex and other irrelevant characteristics. Fourth, it awards jobs through open competition rather than patronage and nepotism.
The concept of merit remains well supported among the generally public, if not among academic and other elites. As Wooldridge notes, “A Pew poll in 2019, for example, found that 73 per cent of Americans, including 62 per cent of African-Americans, say that colleges should refrain from taking race or ethnicity into account when making decisions about student admissions.”
Wooldridge explains the historical trajectory of the concept of merit, and its rigorous application in society, with its origins in China leading to its adoption by the leaders of the American Revolution, despite its general rejection by nobility along the way:
The aim of this book is … to explain where the meritocratic idea came from, how it replaced feudal ideas about ‘priority, degree and place’, how it evolved over the centuries and why it eventually became the world’s leading ideology … The American Revolution advanced the idea that people should be allowed to pursue life, liberty and happiness without being held back by feudal restrictions … Removing group-specific legal rights and replacing them with individual rights was at the heart of the Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century … Living nobly meant avoiding all forms of manual work, including trade. Christianity taught that work was a punishment for the Fall -- before the Fall, Adam and Eve had not had to labour to get nature to yield up its fruits -- while aristocratic snobbery taught that engaging in labour was inherently degrading. Some places, such as the Kingdom of Naples, had laws which forbade nobles from engaging in gainful employment; others, such as England, relied on social convention. True aristocrats made it clear not only that they weren’t contaminated by labour but that they couldn’t possibly be: just as Chinese mandarins had long fingernails encased in silver to demonstrate that they could not lift a finger to do anything practical, European aristocrats had clothes that made work impossible– long dresses for women and fine silk breeches for men.
Wooldridge describes how a man named Matteo Ricci introduced the merit-based governing methods of China to the West:
[Matteo] Ricci [1552-1610] was struck by the similarity between China’s mandarin elite and Plato’s guardians. In his History of the Introduction of Christianity to China, published in Latin in 1615, he noted that, while in the rest of the world the ruling class owed its position to inherited wealth and political favour, in China the elite owed its position to brain-power and scholarship. “If it is not possible to say of this realm that the philosophers are kings,” he concluded, “at least one can say with truth that the kings are governed by philosophers.” He helped to bring the word “mandarin” into common usage in Europe, a word that now means a senior civil servant … China’s mandarins were selected by the world’s most sophisticated examination system: a ladder of success that rose from the lowliest village to the Forbidden City itself. The first level of exams -- the xiucai -- was held every two years in every prefecture in the country. The odds of passing the examination were remote: some 2.5 million Chinese, or 10 per cent of the population, took the first level of examinations in 1,350 examination centres. For the fortunate few, though, the rewards were great: the right to call themselves novice scholars (shengyuan), enjoy social privileges reserved for the gentry (special clothes, exemptions from certain taxes and punishments, privileged access to certain officials, and, in some cases, stipends) and put themselves forward for the next level of examinations. The second level was held every three years in seventeen provincial capitals. Candidates passed at a rate of one out of every twenty-five, or one out of every hundred, depending on the quotas that applied at particular times or places. The successful, dubbed “selected men” or juren, were promoted to the upper gentry and deemed eligible for high office, but were nevertheless unlikely to bag a desirable post unless they proceeded to the third level. The third level was held the year after the juren in the imperial palace itself. The successful were allowed to call themselves jinshi (scholars) and their names were inscribed on stone slabs in order of merit. The jinshi were the true national elite who commanded all the great offices of the empire. Ricci described in detail the examination halls that dotted the country: half palaces, half prisons, and wholly “monuments to competition”, they were surrounded by high walls and contained 4,000 cells, designed to prevent the candidates from communicating with each other (or indeed seeing each other). Guards stood in watchtowers at each end of the building. Invigilators forced candidates to loosen their clothing to make sure they were not smuggling in any texts (candidates tried to outsmart the invigilators by concealing miniature books in the palms of their hands or sewing passages from the classics in their clothes in minuscule lettering). Equipped only with the basic tools of their vocation– pens, paper and a pot of ink– the candidates embarked on a scholarly marathon: the first exam began at nine, the second at twelve, the third at three, and so on, for three days in a row; they slept in the cell, defecated in pots and ate the food that they had brought with them. The examiners went to extraordinary lengths to eliminate favouritism. Professional copyists copied the scripts word for word and gave the candidates numbers to prevent examiners from recognizing any particular individual’s handwriting. Candidates with strong personal or regional connections with powerful examiners were forced to sit special examinations. The ladder of success was the very devil to climb. The examinations were confined to classical learning. The lowest levels of exams required the candidates to demonstrate a command of the Confucian classics and an ability to write so-called “eight-legged essays” that discussed moral questions according to various elaborate formal rules. The higher-level exams -- particularly the palace examination -- required them to demonstrate their ability to apply classical knowledge to concrete problems drawn from the country’s past. Ricci was awestruck by the system. Many mandarins were “the sons of farmers and artisans who rise to their status because of their studies of letters,” he wrote. But they were treated regardless of their lowly origins like true masters of the universe -- carried through the streets on litters “like the pope” and worshipped by the common people, who fell to their knees before them.
As Wooldridge writes, the Chinese examination system was a remarkable vehicle for social mobility:
Francis Bacon, a sixteenth-century English philosopher, remarked that China was responsible for four of the world’s great inventions: gunpowder, paper, the compass and the printing press. In fact, these inventions were peripheral to Chinese civilization. Gunpowder was mainly used for fireworks. The Ming dynasty squandered the compass by banning foreign exploration in 1425. Paper and the printing press were just variations on technologies already in use in other parts of the world. China’s most important innovation was the mass examination system, the oldest and longest- lived in the world and, until the twentieth century, by far the most ambitious … The Tang dynasty (618-907) mixed examinations with nepotism. The bulk of imperial jobs, particularly the most important ones, were reserved for either landed aristocrats or the relatives of previous office-holders, but about 10 per cent were awarded by competitive examinations. In 655, the Empress Wu, who ruled as the power behind the throne for eighteen years before seizing power directly, becoming China’s only female empress, turned the Court upside down by reserving the top offices for people who passed the examination: towards the end of the Tang dynasty examinations carried such prestige that even people who were eligible for hereditary office tried to pass them. Imagine if Eric Bloodaxe had sat down to take an examination in order to rule over Northumbria rather than relying on gore and pillage and you get a sense of how extraordinary this situation was … The examinations provided people from lowly backgrounds with at least a chance of making it into the elite. As early as the tenth century, one commentator, Wang Li, argued that poor people’s best chances of achieving justice lay in making the examinations as objective as possible. “If examination selection is not strict the powerful will struggle to be foremost and the orphans and poor will have difficulty advancing.” A comprehensive study of Chinese social mobility from 1371 to 1904, conducted by scholars at Hong Kong University, found that a third of jinshi degree holders came from families that had not produced a single degree- holder over the previous three generations, let alone a holder of a high office; 11.7 per cent came from families that had produced a lower-degree-holder but not a higher-degree holder. The system also did its best to cast a wide geographical as well as social net. Lists of degree- holders feature scholars from the most far-flung regions.
As I’ve written previously, today in America the use of standardized tests like the SAT remains vital to the task of objectively determining who among all communities, including minority communities, may have had their talents overlooked:
Standardized test scores are important measures because they correlate with future success in life. In 2020, a task force of the faculty senate at the University of California issued a report that recommends the UC system keep standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as admissions requirements. Based on data from tens of thousands of students in the UC system, the report concludes that “test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average.” Scores are also “about as good at predicting” total college GPA and the likelihood a student will graduate. While the “predictive power of test scores has gone up,” the report adds, “the predictive power of high school grades has gone down.” One reason is grade inflation. The faculty task force found that admissions policies play only “a relatively small role” in the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students at the UC and that instead “the single biggest factor” is “relatively low rates of completion” of required high-school course work among minority students. Test scores enable UC schools “to select those students from underrepresented groups who are more likely to earn higher grades and to graduate on time,” the report notes. “The original intent of the SAT was to identify students who came from outside relatively privileged circles who might have the potential to succeed in university,” the report says.
As Wooldridge reminds us, members of the much-discriminated-against Jewish community have been particular champions of objective tests for measuring intellectual talent as a means of breaking through discriminatory barriers:
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews won 14 per cent of Nobel prizes in literature, chemistry, physics and medicine/ physiology, despite pervasive discrimination culminating in the Holocaust. In the second half, the proportion rose to 29 per cent. 1 Fifty- one per cent of the Wolf Foundation prizes in physics, 28 per cent of Max Planck medals, 38 per cent of Dirac medals for theoretical physics, 37 per cent of Dannie Heineman prizes for mathematical physics and 53 per cent of Enrico Fermi awards have gone to people of Jewish origin. Jews are over-represented in the knowledge professions in vastly different societies. In 2010, 53 per cent of American Jews held professional jobs, compared with 20 per cent of white non-Jewish men. In the same year, a group that represents 2 per cent of the American population won 21 per cent of places at Ivy League universities and 51 per cent of Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction … Antisemitism was rooted in fear of Jewish success rather than, as with most racism, contempt for the vilified group’s perceived failure … [Jewish people] embraced objective measures of intellectual success -- particularly examinations -- as ways of establishing their credentials and combating anti- Jewish prejudice. Jews played a prominent role in both developing IQ tests and opposing affirmative action …
Today in America a poor education system has led the administrators of that same system to reject standardized tests in an effort to mask shortcomings in the education system. Indeed, Massachusetts, whose standardized test requirements improved academic performance there for many decades, scrapped the requirement in 2024. As Frederick Hess writes:
Massachusetts residents voted Tuesday to scrap the requirement that high schoolers pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests in math, science, and English in order to receive a high school diploma. Instead, the new law will allow students to demonstrate proficiency in these core subjects by “complet[ing] coursework certified by the student’s district.” The measure passed 59 percent to 41 percent after the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent $10 million to support the initiative, double the amount spent by its opponents. In ditching the MCAS requirement, voters abandoned the cornerstone of the bipartisan 1993 Education Reform Act that fueled three decades of education gains in Massachusetts. Dating from 2001 through 2018 (the MCAS graduation requirement took effect in 2003), the share of students proficient in math grew by 33 percent and in English Language Arts by 40 percent. In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to have its students lead the nation in all four major categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress: fourth-grade reading and math as well as eighth-grade reading and math. The state has dominated the leaderboard ever since. In 2007 and 2011, international exams found that Massachusetts students were performing neck-and-neck with peers in high-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Despite this track record, the Massachusetts Teachers Association has long pushed to eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement, claiming that it causes stress for students and that the MCAS has enabled “white supremacy to flourish in public schools.” Massachusetts is following the example set by Oregon, where former Governor Kate Brown signed a law in 2021 suspending reading, writing, and math proficiency requirements for a high school degree. Meanwhile, New York is set to abandon the requirement that its high school graduates pass the state’s Regents Exam, with students instead asked to demonstrate their knowledge and skills via a mishmash of school district alternatives.
Compare that to Chinese history, in which a standardized test system encouraged more rigorous public education:
Examinations persuaded the Chinese collectively to make a substantial investment in education. The millions of people who failed the exams put their learning to good use as schoolteachers, lawyers, notaries and such. The examinations promoted socially conservative virtues such as filial piety and social cohesion, in part because the examinations were focused on Confucian texts that celebrated family loyalty and in part because examinations gave families an incentive to invest in the education of their children, who could then, if successful, return the favour by looking after their parents in old age … Above all, the examination system put a rich and rigorous philosophy of life at the heart of China’s education system for almost 2,500 years, a philosophy that taught the ruling class the most important lesson that any ruling class can learn: self-restraint via self-cultivation. Nobody could claim to be educated or civilized unless they engaged in an intense study of Chinese classical literature and history as defined by Confucius and his followers. And nobody could be considered for a job in the government unless they could prove that they were educated and civilized. Chinese people of all sorts -- poor as well as rich, provincial as well as metropolitan, and, crucially, military as well as civilian -- recognized classical learning as the proper measure of people’s moral and social worth. Those who had absorbed the classics were properly equipped to represent the interests of the Chinese state. Those who hadn’t weren’t suitable. It was as simple as that … These Confucian texts contained a sophisticated theory of meritocracy. As well as explaining why society needed an educated elite to provide it with guidance, they also explained how that educated elite should conduct itself. The examinations thus served a double function: they provided tests that only the talented could possibly pass and they provided those talented people with an education in how to conduct themselves if they were among the chosen … Voltaire saw China as a model of enlightened absolutism. “The human mind certainly cannot imagine a government better than this one where everything is to be decided by the large tribunals, subordinated to each other, of which the members are received only after several severe examinations.” Rousseau, who didn’t agree with Voltaire on much, praised China’s “honorable literati” for leading to “the highest dignity of the state”. François Quesnay, a medical doctor turned economist, argued that “this vast and magnificent empire, preserved for forty centuries against all the efforts of civilized or barbarous passions, by the sheer power of the philosophic spirit, demonstrates the power and efficacy of moral and political knowledge” … Enthusiasm for China, like enthusiasm for ancient Greece, reached its climax in the Victorian era as reformers subjected antiquated institutions to the principle of open competition. Charles Gutzlaff, the first Lutheran missionary to the Far East, summarized a common view of China in his China Opened (1838): “In China, only talent, without the least respect to persons, is promoted … The principle is noble, and well worth the adoption of other countries; the application depends upon the state of the country where the experiment is made.”
And China’s example was adopted elsewhere. As Wooldridge writes:
[T]he East India Company played a central role in importing this “noble principle” to Britain, not only because it was in constant touch with the Far East but also because it was forever struggling with the problem of selecting able servants to administer a far-flung commercial empire. The company introduced examinations to select and classify its young recruits in feeder colleges such as the East India College in Haileybury, England (now Haileybury School), and the College of Fort William, India … [T]he West embraced meritocracy at the same time that it embraced science, capitalism and individualism.
Christianity, with its emphasis on the worth of all people regardless of status, also played a role in allowing the spread of methods that helped individuals distinguish themselves in terms of talent:
The Church played an ambivalent role in the old society of “priority, degree and place” as both a cement and a solvent. On the one hand, it preached unquestioning obedience to the powers that be. On the other hand, it taught revolution. Jesus preached the equality of souls under God – “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” as Paul put it in Galatians (3:28) … Christianity carried within it the seeds of the liberal belief that all people are equal under the eyes of God but also free to make of their lives what they can. The Puritans put a further emphasis on hard work and self-definition. Lawyers talked of the king being “under the law” while parliaments, particularly in England, put restraints on royal power. Cities limited the powers of monarchs and nurtured a new commercial class. City charters laid the foundations of social contract theory by defining the rights of citizens, and political theorists such as Hobbes and Locke took this idea further by arguing that a sovereign’s power lay in his ability to advance the interests of the citizens -- interests being security in Hobbes’s case and “life, liberty and property” in Locke’s.
And soon Western Europe came to surpass China in terms of material well-being for the masses, as it adopted many of China’s merit-based principles just as China itself was cutting itself off from the rest of world:
The commercial and scientific revolutions were institutionalized by powerful organizations as well as new patterns of thought. New trading organizations such as the British and Dutch East India Companies explored the world at a time when China banned foreign travel. And Royal Societies sprang up across Europe to advance science and the arts at a time when China remained fatally attached to the Confucian classics. Europe -- particularly Northern Europe -- thus produced two things that were friendly to the new meritocratic future: an expanding commercial society and an attitude of mind that embraced individual self- assertion as well as obeisance to tradition.
Interestingly, one of the most famous opponents of merit in Western Europe also became known as one of its most bloodthirsty authoritarians during the ill-fated French Revolution:
Maximilien Robespierre and his fellow sans-culottes wanted to take an axe to hierarchy in all its dimensions, including superior knowledge. The Constituent Assembly, which sat from 1789 to 1791, rejected the idea of using examinations to determine selection into the officer corps on the grounds that it would create a “new aristocracy”.
But around the same time, in America, a revolution of thought was occurring that embraced merit and its fruits:
In 1818, John Adams asked himself what his fellow countrymen meant when they talked about “the American Revolution”. They meant a lot more than just the War of Independence, he argued. “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced.” They meant a revolution in the minds and hearts of the people – “a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations … This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” The real revolution began long before a single shot was fired at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. Little by little, Americans had produced a new theory of society. They rejected the old doctrine of “degree, priority and place” and embraced instead a society based on individual merit. This revolution did not touch everybody equally: many Americans, including John Adams himself, clung to vestiges of the old order, the South clung to slavery and, even outside the South, blacks were regarded as inferior. But it touched enough people to turn America into a very different sort of place from Europe. [As Myron Magnet has written,] Americans “continually sounded the alarm bell of aristocracy” whenever it looked as if people were getting above themselves. And they instinctively praised people who made their own fortunes and proved their own mettle … America’s status as a nation of immigrants predisposed it to believe in self- invention. The settlers who arrived in the new world from the sixteenth century onwards were refugees from Europe’s ancien régimes: Puritans who wanted to escape from the grip of established Churches; younger sons who wanted to escape from the consequences of primogeniture; sundry adventurers who wanted to escape from a closed society. “The rich stay in Europe,” wrote the French immigrant J. Hector St John de Crèvecœur, “it is only the middling and the poor that emigrate.” And America’s vast size encouraged mobility. British observers were astonished to see that the colonists were always moving about “as their avidity and restlessness incite them”. “They acquire no attachment to place,” said one Briton, “but wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness incident to it that they should forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.” … British visitors were struck by America’s absence of deference. One noted that “a spirit of Levellism seems to go through the Country”. A second observed that “an idea of equality seems generally to prevail, and the inferior order of people pay little but external respect to those who occupy superior stations”. A third, commenting on the Quaker city of Philadelphia, noted that “there is less distinction between the citizens … than among those of any civilized city in the world. Riches give none. For every man expects one day to be on a footing with his wealthiest neighbour.” Benjamin Franklin, America’s leading example of a self-made man, proclaimed that “a man who makes boast of his ancestors doth but advertise his own insignificance,” and observed, “Let our fathers and grandfathers be valued for their goodness, ourselves for our own.”
As explored in a previous essay, the Protestant work ethic reinforced this American merit-based norm. As Wooldridge writes:
This owed much to the spirit of Puritanism, which did more to shape America than any other country -- indeed, America wouldn’t exist if it were not for the Reformation. Americans exemplified both the Protestant work ethic -- you couldn’t conquer a vast continent without being perpetually busy -- and the Protestant faith in self-reliance. Edmund Burke contrasted the fear and awe that Englishmen felt towards authority with the “fierce spirit of liberty” among Americans. Americans, he argued, are Protestants of the kind “which is the most averse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent,” he went on. “But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
The author Ibram X. Kendi, in his book Stamped from the Beginning writes that “We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” Of course, the statement that “racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country” is false, as there are many other, well-studied reasons for such disparities. And one of those many other reasons is hard work itself. As economist Tyler Cower writes:
Economists from Princeton, Vanderbilt and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have estimated just how much hard work contributes to inequality in lifetime earnings. While the answer depends on context, they arrived at an average for the US workforce: About 20% of the variance in lifetime earnings can be explained by differences in hours worked … The decision to work harder operates on at least two levels. First, you put in more total time, which leads to higher lifetime earnings. Second, you invest more in your human capital, which makes you more productive. Between one-third and one-half of the higher income for the harder workers stems from this human capital channel. One lesson is that if you are going to work hard, you should do so relatively early in your life, so as to reap the human capital benefits for future years. Another crucial point is that those who work harder do so because they want to. There can be different kinds of heterogeneity in ability, including in learning capability or initial human capital. But in the researchers’ model, 90% of the variation in earnings due to hard work comes from a simple desire to work harder.
The Wall Street Journal commented on the same study, stating:
Going a step further, the paper finds that those who work more earn more because they accumulate more skills during the extra time they work. The overlapping effects of different preferences for work and different levels of skills acquisition account for a hefty share of overall differences in lifetime earnings, and operate independent of other factors such as the level of education or skills an individual gains before entering the labor force. In other words, income inequality is in part a matter of choice rather than intractable economic or social forces.
The false statements of the book Stamped from the Beginning aside, America’s merit-based norms defined its army and its founding documents. As Wooldridge writes:
The American Revolution strongly reinforced this meritocratic mindset. This began with the fighting itself: British officers were all wealthy gentlemen, whereas in the colonial forces rank meant almost nothing. It then extended to constitution-making. New Hampshire’s constitution declared that “no office or place whatsoever in government shall be hereditary”. Towns stopped assigning pews in churches by age and status and, as befits a commercial republic, began auctioning them off to the highest bidder. The allergy to inheritance was so strong that even the God-like George Washington was not immune: when, in 1783, he agreed to join the Society of Cincinnati, a private society of former army officers with hereditary membership, the outcry was so fierce, with Samuel Adams calling the order “as rapid a Stride towards an hereditary Military Nobility as was ever made in so short a time”, that he quickly withdrew … America was a beacon to the world because it was engaged in a bold experiment: replacing artificial distinctions with natural distinctions. The great pronouncement at the heart of the Declaration of Independence -- that “all men are created equal” -- did not mean that all men are created alike and interchangeable, with the same abilities and virtues. It meant that no artificial differences of class and caste should be piled on top of the natural differences of ability and energy. The aim of the Founding Fathers was to create a republic in which a commercial people could enjoy the fruits of the free exercise of their unique talents. The constitution was designed to leave men with the maximum freedom to exercise their talents while at the same time preventing interest groups from plundering minorities. Individual rights were adumbrated. Interest groups were balanced against interest groups in a “harmonious system of mutual frustration”. “They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way,” [Alexis] de Tocqueville noted in 1840, “but they have opened the door to universal competition.”
As Wooldridge points out, the development of partisan political parties in America, and the tribalism that went with it, tended to erode the country’s merit-based norms:
The rise of political parties in the early nineteenth century [introduced] the question of party loyalty. The new party machines quickly became patronage machines: willingness to grovel to party bosses replaced willingness to grovel to kings and queens as the road to riches. In his 1835 biography of Martin Van Buren, William Holland urged his readers to forget about the inconvenient fact that the “men of splendid talents” were all on the Whig side. The only thing that mattered these days was that Van Buren was a Democrat! The spoils system ensured that many civil service jobs were given to party hacks rather than brilliant mandarins. It also put a question mark over every new government appointee: was the new man being given his job because he really deserved it or because the president had cut a deal with him during his election campaign?
But the American merit-based norms persevered, even through its battle with slavery:
The man who presided over the destruction of slavery, Abraham Lincoln, was a quintessential Yankee: a product of the “Valley of Democracy”, the fresh territory north and west of the Ohio River; a self-made man who liked to play up his obscure origins (“I don’t know who my grandfather was,” he once said, “and I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be”); an inveterate inventor and tinkerer who lodged a model for a submarine in the US Patent Office [note: Lincoln remains the only President to have been issued a patent for invention, but it was for a device to lift boats over shoals, not a submarine]; a firm believer in a mobile, opportunity society. Lincoln saw America as a country in which “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labours for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labours on his own account another while and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” “There is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life in the condition of a hired labourer,” he insisted; and in order to give substance to his vision he supported a range of active government policies such as establishing land-grant universities, giving plots of land to settlers, encouraging railroads to build speculative branches in the west, investing in agricultural research. He believed with every fibre of his being that the constitution was a colour-blind as well as a sacred document. To Stephen Douglas’s declaration, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, that “this government was made by our fathers on the white basis. It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever,” he delivered an emphatic rebuttal: “There is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
As Wooldridge writes, “slavery and Jim Crow helped to destroy African-Americans’ sense of agency,” but “The self-help movement tried to restore that sense of agency both on an individual and a collective level. The central figure in this was W. E. B. Du Bois (1886-1963), one of the founding members of the NAACP.”
Sadly, as explored in previous essays, the modern concepts of “antiracism” and “equity,” where they hold sway, are reversing that progress and further weakening people’s vital sense of agency.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore more past and present examples in which political ideology has trumped the concept of merit.