Monday, April 25, 2005
Down with the Meritocracy!! posted by Richard Seymour
Meritocracy, which most people equate with 'fairness', 'just desert' and so on, is a remarkable idea in that it is both unattractive in itself, and far too radical for New Labour, which claims to be in the business of replacing class division with meritocracy. Brown's attack on the 'old school ties' at Oxford University amplified and exemplified this tendency: not against inequality as such, just the kind that is unmerited, that doesn't derive from entrepreneurship and 'wealth creation'. This is 'endowment egalitarianism', which seeks to equalise the opportunities that one receives as a result of one's scholastic and vocational achievements.But even to take this ideal seriously is far too radical for New Labour because in order to achieve it, one would have to take measures that would mantle Blair's cheek with a blush of shame. For instance, when Stephen Aldridge of the Cabinet Office's Performance and Innovation Unit produced a report on how meritocracy could be achieved, he wrote that a meritocratic society would involve "high rates of social mobility and the absence of any association between class origins and destinations". This would have to be achieved by, among other things, higher rates of income tax to allow children from poorer income backgrounds access to the highest educational prospects, and also the abolition of inheritance, so that dull middle class children couldn't live off their parents labour and might therefore decline in the social structure. That is, there would have to be the possibility of both upward and downward social mobility. The very day after Aldridge produced his report, the government disowned it.
At the moment, educational outcomes closely correlate to class origins - the children of wealthier children fare better in exams and therefore have better opportunities for advancement in education and employment prospects. This is because their parents are able to secure better schools by moving between catchment areas, typically have more time and money to devote to the education of their children, and don't suffer the emotional problems that poor families are often burdened with. (Fact: the poorer you are, the larger your adrenaline gland is likely to be, since you are likely to suffer more stress in life).
Similarly, one of the main sources of wealth transmission in British society is inheritance - particularly from wealthy parents to their children. The level of social mobility is very low: in 1998, according to the government's Social Trends 28 report, only 2% of people from the top decile moved to the bottom decile - deciles, of course, are very inexact, and don't measure real wealth divisions, since it is likely to be an even smaller number of the top 1% that sinks to the bottom. And, let's face it, you'd have to be pretty stupid with such advantages to end up hitting rock-bottom. To achieve a meritocratic society, enormous redistribution would have to take place, levelling the undeserved advantages of the rich, to give the poor equal opportunity. Yet, the way the current taxation system is structured, the poorest fifth of households pay approximately 41.4 percent of their income in tax, while the richest fifth pay 36.5 percent. This is largely a result of increasing emphasis on forms of indirect taxation like VAT, as well as decreasing taxes on higher income earners under Thatcher and Major, and on corporate profits and inheritance under Blair.
Under New Labour, not only has inequality of income increased , social mobility has actually decreased . This is a direct result of government policies, particularly the acceptance of neoliberal orthodoxy. For instance, in Brown's Mais lecture in 1999, he endorsed the notion of a 'natural rate of unemployment'. That is to say, he endorsed Milton Friedman's notion that full employment cannot be achieved without accelerating the rate of inflation, and therefore it is necessary to maintain people in a state of continued impoverishment. The only way that one can reduce the 'natural rate of unemployment', according to this doctrine, is to increase the profitability of hiring labour. This is achieved either by reducing real wages and taking on the bargaining power of unions, or by improving the productivity of labour - hence, such pettifogging schemes as the New Deal, which has really achieved only a minute fraction of what its proponents claim for it, and has certainly gone no way toward improving social mobility.
But a meritocracy is a fairly repugnant notion on its own terms. It is based on the notion that rewards accrue to talented individuals for their achievements - yet talent has nothing to do with desert. One does not 'merit' one's talent, any more than a disabled person 'merits' not having a pair of working legs. A true meritocracy, implemented wholeheartedly, would leave those of inferior physical and intellectual endowments to perish. Hitler was in some sense a meritocrat. Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, was a satire on the very notion. In it, a meritocratic society is conceived with devastating consequences for the losers. In this winner-takes-all society, the rich are even more than usually smug, more than usually certain in their sense that they are fully entitled to their gains. The society ends up being so hateful that few really want to live in it, and so there is a revolution.
That, at least, would be a highly welcome outcome.